“I’m very grateful to you, John. You were absolutely right to call me back as you did, and it was bloody good of you to stay the night and help me like this. I didn’t even ask you to, did I? Just took it for granted.”
“Oh, it’s a pleasure, I’m sure. Anytime …” he said, and ducked his head awkwardly, and smiled and then looked suddenly solemn. “Not that I mean that exactly, do I? I mean, I’m sorry it was necessary. I’ll see you then, at two o’clock, shall I? Mind you sleep well, now. Then we’ll be able to think about where we go from here, won’t we? Right now, I couldn’t think about a thing.”
She slept only for a few hours, waking sharply at eleven o’clock when a cleaner, singing loudly, came clattering into the staff spare bedroom. The woman had apologized profusely before escaping from the room with exaggerated quietness, turning the handle of the door to close it with agonizing slowness, but by then Harriet was fully awake with no hope or desire to sleep again.
She showered and dressed, putting on the black silk dress with distaste, for it smelled musty and stuffy with overtones not only of cigar smoke and cooking from the restaurant (which was one much given to the use of exaggerated flambé dishes that impregnated the air with the smell of hot oil) but with her own sweat. It was very clear evidence that she had worked flat out the night before—not that she needed it, for her shoulders were stiff and she knew that came from too many hours bent over a lab bench.
Catherine was in the unit when she got there, her head down over her microscope, the racks of blood bottles beside her.
“I found your note, and I’ve done the first batch,” she said brusquely. “What’s the rest of the news? I haven’t had a chance to go to the animal pens to check. Recurrences?”
“Recurrences,” Harriet said heavily. “One dead, three definite, seven possibles. All in the first series. Then there’s the batch you’ve got there. I’m not sure about them. There was a three-month lapse between each series, of course, so they may be—the most recent series are fine. The animals are lively, no clinical evidence at all of any disease.”
She yawned suddenly, and then said apologetically, “I worked till gone six this morning. I feel positively hammered. But—”
Catherine looked at her over her shoulder and said dourly, “You’ll feel better if you get out of that dress, I imagine. There’s a skirt and blouse of mine in the locker room you can borrow if you like. Nothing fancy, but better than that—”
“Thank you. I’d be glad of a change. I need some breakfast too. It seems a long time since I ate last night—which is silly. It wasn’t all that long ago.”
“Well, go and change,” Catherine grunted. “And get yourself a meal in the canteen. I’ll have finished these by the time you get back. Oh, and there’s a message for you. On the desk.” She bent her head again to the microscope.
“My dear, do please, contact me as soon as you surface today,” Theo had written. “I’ll do all I can to help, but obviously I say not a word to anyone until I hear from you. Don’t be too depressed; I’ve no doubt at all that this is a temporary setback of the ordinary kind, and you’ll sort it all out with your usual dispatch. As ever, Theo.”
She should have felt warmed by his solicitude, encouraged by his staunch assurances, but all she found in herself as she crumpled the note and dropped it into the waste bin was a mild irritation. He was mothering her again, and today she found it annoying rather than comforting. She was too busy to be bothered by his concern, was too preoccupied with other matters to worry about him worrying about her; and she was talking as much to him as to Catherine when she spoke.
“I’ve got to do the necropsy on the one that died. Not that I’ll do much of a job until I get my head a bit clearer. I’ll go straight over to the pens when I’m ready and start. Come over as soon as you’re ready, will you? And if John arrives, he can come too. I want him to start the second round of checks. Christ, there’s so much to do—”
But a change of clothes, to Catherine’s businesslike black skirt and blue gingham blouse (which smelled faintly of coal-tar soap, a fact that amused her out of all proportion to its intrinsic humor), and coffee and hot toast did a great deal to restore her and to further banish Theo to the back of her mind, and she went over to the animal rooms in an almost buoyant mood; there was a piece of important work to be done, and what mattered was the work itself, not its possible outcome.
She had opened the little body and removed most of the major organs to tagged jars by the time Catherine and John came to join her. Catherine began at once the work of preparing histology slides from the lymph node specimens Harriet had set ready, while John stopped on his way to the cages to stand beside her for a moment peering into the small cadaver with his hand held over his nose.
“Smells a bit more than usual, doesn’t it?” he said, and Harriet nodded, absorbed in her delicate dissection of the pancreas.
“Widespread disease,” she said. “Miliary. See? The pancreas–absolutely riddled. Most interesting. Catherine, come and look at this—”
They slid into a familiar working pattern, and in some ways it was to Harriet as though time had turned itself backward. This could have been any time in the past two years with the three of them working together almost cozily, dovetailing information, plotting it on charts, and watching the facts fall into focus. Only when she caught sight of the policeman still sitting doggedly in the little office was she reminded of the events that had led to his stolid blue presence being there, and then the memory came only to be immediately dismissed.
It was surprising how little time it took them to organize the facts they had. They came, all three of them, back to the unit with their charts and graphs, to sit and eat the ham sandwiches and drink the coffee that John provided, talking and contradicting, comparing and criticizing, and as ever, Harriet found a great deal of help in Catherine’s decisiveness. She was trained only as a laboratory technician, but she knew her job inside out, and had a considerable gift for cutting through unnecessary trimmings to the real heart of a piece of work.
“I’ve got ESR readings and blood chromatography here—I saw no point in doing any further work on the chemistry on those blood specimens. They were too sparse, anyway. But added to what you’ve got from the necropsy, and the first of the histology slides, I’d say—well, perhaps I shouldn’t. Once is enough.”
“Well, I’m going to say it,” Harriet said firmly. “Because it’s obvious to me, at any rate, it isn’t as bad as it looked last night. Not nearly as bad. I won’t know for certain for another week at least, but on present showing, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to reverse it again. Damn it, I said long ago—you remember? I said then when we got the first clear series, that we’d have to watch for recurrences that needed a new course of treatment. The one thing I didn’t expect was that the disease would be quite so virulent when it did recur.”
“The one that died—it had a primary of lymph tissue, remember? Could that have anything to do with the rapid spread of it?”
“Mmm. Maybe. But whether it is or not, one thing’s sure. We’ve got to be prepared to reestablish treatment fast once we have evidence that a recurrence is possible. Obviously we can’t start too soon—we’d be in danger of setting up exaggerated autoimmune reactions which in themselves could—Catherine, have you graphed the EW series, and the FX’s? Because it seems to me logical to suppose we could plot a graph which would show the critical time area quite clearly. We’d know exactly when to start the next series of treatments to make sure not only that we get no recurrences but also that we get no prematures. Are you with me? Then, we’d—”
“Yes, I see—but I couldn’t—look, I’ll go over to Norwich tomorrow and see if I can use the university terminal to the big computer at Rothwell. Could I, do you suppose?”
“I’ll have to ask Professor Bell’s permission for that, of course, but I don’t imagine—”
She stopped quite suddenly. In the rush of work, the almost exhilarating
absorption in the problems presented to her, she had almost totally forgotten the situation she was in. Not Theo’s note nor even the policeman sitting in the animal rooms had really reminded her, had made her fully aware of the complications she would now have to cope with. Oscar would have to be told. And if she were intending to go to Whyborne, they would have to be told there too.
She closed her eyes, trying to think logically, and through the mist of concentration Catherine’s voice said insistently, “And as well as getting permission to use the Rothwell computer, won’t Professor Bell have to be asked about Mr. Ferris? We are going to have to bring him back, aren’t we?”
Oscar sat hunched over her pile of graphs, and she sat there in the armchair on the other side of his desk, her hands quietly folded on her lap and feeling rather more composed than she would have thought possible. This was the first time she had been alone with him since the night he had presented her with his ultimatum, and she had frankly expected to feel some confusion when she faced him. She had remained standing outside his office door this morning for several moments before she could comfortably walk in and face Miss Manton and then Oscar himself.
But he had said nothing whatsoever that could be construed as remotely personal, not even after Miss Manton had closed the door on them both and gone away with Oscar’s instructions that he was not on any account to be disturbed.
“Well, Harriet? What can I do for you? Sorry I’ve not been around much to talk about Establishment problems these past few days—I’ve had to spend a lot of time in London. You said on the phone you wanted to discuss problems. Nothing too complicated, I hope?” And he had looked at her with a bland gaze that told her nothing of his thoughts or feelings.
“Rather complicated,” she said crisply. “You’ll find it all here,” and she had put in front of him the graphs and charts and her carefully prepared report, which John Caister had typed at almost midnight not without some complaining, and sat back to wait.
Quite what he would say she couldn’t imagine. As she sat there in the large shabby office, staring out at the grayness of the December morning, she wondered, vaguely, whether he would share her disappointment, or display anger, or show a triumphant if childish pleasure in her failure, and couldn’t decide which was most likely. With Oscar, it was impossible to guess.
“I see,” he said after a long silence broken only by the rustle of turning pages. “As you say, a rather complicated set of problems. But not so complicated that they can’t be unraveled.”
He smiled at her, a small wintry smile, and stood up to begin his characteristic pacing about the room, and she sat and watched him as she always did, and listened to him talking.
“As I understand it—and since I have had so little part in this piece of work, my understanding is of necessity a little limited—as I understand it, the first series of animals you treated successfully have shown severe recurrence of their original disease, in a particularly virulent and fulminating form. One animal is dead and—”
“Two are dead. Another died this morning,” she said flatly.
“Two are dead and—ah—two very ill. And seven show definite disease but aren’t yet too toxic. Of the next series, there are blood changes, some biochemical evidence of pre-disease processes, but no frank disease. Later series are still perfectly fit and well.”
He paused, and looked at her expectantly. “Have I got the picture clear?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s precisely the situation. But there is a little more to it than that—”
“I’m coming to that. Now you say, on the basis of your previous work, that if you can start a new preparation of your autovaccines on each of these animals, and start it on your second series at the right time, you can prevent recurrence. And if you can start new courses of treatment at once on your first series, you should, given sufficient resources, be able to have the same success with your treatment again. Have I got it right?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“Hmm. And above all, the human series—Mr. Ferris, in other words—needs to be brought back here to have a new batch of vaccine prepared and a course of treatment recommenced.”
“Not until we know that he’s in need of it. We can’t give the vaccine as a prophylactic. Only when we know he’s showing precancerous cells. And to know that, we have to run daily investigations. I wouldn’t feel justified in making the time lag any less.”
“No need to be so belligerent, Harriet! I take your point, indeed I do, very precisely. You’re asking me for a great deal of Brookbank’s resources, a considerable sum of money, and additional technician and laboratory staff so that you can go ahead with dealing with—ah—the situation. Especially Mr. Ferris.”
He was standing by the window now, and staring out into the dripping dismal garden that backed onto the main administrative building. He stood there for a long while, it seemed to Harriet, sitting as still as ever in her chair but feeling less true composure than she was displaying. She realized now that she had actually expected him to send her away with a flat refusal to spend more money on her project; had really thought he would be pleased by the setback and would regard it as sufficient evidence of failure to warrant ending the work altogether. Yet clearly he was not going to react in any such way; and she began to feel tension rising in her, spreading through her shoulders to link her hands in a tight grip.
He turned sharply and came back to his desk to sit down. “Well, if that’s what you need, that’s what you need. Certainly there can be no question—Mr. Ferris must be brought back, as soon as possible. Can you arrange that?”
The tension began to ebb, leaving her shaking slightly, and she moved awkwardly, crossing her legs and forcing herself to relax before answering him.
“I imagine so. I’m afraid the last time we met, it was all a little … unfortunate …”
He raised his eyebrows in interrogation.
“The ‘Probe’ program.”
“Oh. Yes, I’d forgotten that. Still, on such a matter as this—it won’t be easy to persuade him to return, if he’s feeling fit. Not without frightening him rather a lot.”
She grimaced. “I know. But one way or another, he’s got to come back. As long as you’re sure I can have the resources.”
“I’ve said so, haven’t I? I won’t back down, I promise you. I never back down on anything,” and for the first time he let his glance slide across her, reminding her, repeating.
“I didn’t think you would,” she said dryly. “I was just making sure.”
“Now you’re sure. Right. I’ll speak to Personnel and see you get some extra lab staff right away. I imagine Caister and Mrs.—what is it, Mrs.—Warne—could do with some rest. Not to speak of you. You look a little fatigued. Would you regard the offer of—ah—assistance from other personnel as an—um, as an attempt to remove from you some of your control over your own work?”
“I’m not sure I understand you,” she said sharply, and he smiled.
“Oh, I’m not offering to work with you—far from it. It would never do, would it? Even though providing such assistance is part of my function here. However—no, I was wondering about young Ackermann. He’d be useful, I imagine, and he’s not precisely overworked at the moment.”
“No thank you,” she said immediately. “I’ve worked alone for too many years now to be happy with another researcher cluttering up my unit. I like my independence.” She smiled then, a little wickedly. “Though I’d like to be able to ask Theo to help with some of the biopsies and so on. If there’s no objection. He’s a very good surgeon indeed, of course, and he’s in total sympathy with my work.”
“Oh, Fowler—by all means. I don’t think of him as precisely one of the Establishment’s researchers, I must confess. More in the nature of a superior—very superior—technician. After all, surgery …” he dismissed surgery with a flick of one eyebrow. “Now, if you would care to let me have a clear account of your needs, I’ll put things in train. You’ll have the add
itional equipment as soon as ever we can get it.”
She stopped at the door, and turned back, and said a little awkwardly, “Oscar—” and he looked up and smiled at her.
“No, Harriet. Work, just work. Another time we can discuss other matters, hmm? Your most immediate concern is to go and find your Mr. Ferris. But just one word of warning. Be discreet in your approach to him. Do remember that your—er—that Sir Daniel Sefton has in effect bought him. You may not want Sir Daniel to know, just yet, that it’s necessary for Ferris to return here. I’d keep that in mind if I were you.”
19
“WHEN I GOT your letter, I said to the old woman, There, you see? I told you she wasn’t the sort to bear no grudge.’ She was sure you’d never want to have nothing to do with us again, after the way you told me where I got off that night.” Mr. Ferris’s eyes gleamed with memory. “That was a turn up for the book, that was. There was I thinking you’d be glad, and—but there—” He shook his head. “Old news, all that, old news. Anyway, here I am, large as life and twice as natural, and at your service. I told ’em at work–no matter if you sack me, I said, off I’m going because I know I’m needed. Not that they’ll sack me, never fear. One of the sights, I am. They brings these delegations round the factory, from all over—Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, you name it, they come—and they point me out like Nelson’s column! Oh, no, they’ll keep my job open for me, while I’m ‘ere, cooperating in your research. I told ’em that was what it was all about, cooperating in your research.”
“Still talking the hind leg off that poor old donkey, Mr. Ferris? Give the old thing a rest and do yourself a favor,” John Caister said, and Ferris grinned at him, and threw a droll glance at Harriet before rolling his eyes up and smoothing one eyebrow with a carefully licked little finger in an exaggerated sketch of camp behavior.
“I appreciate your generosity, Mr. Ferris, very much,” Harriet said. “It’s good of you to come so far from home and for—er—possibly for quite some time.”
A Time to Heal Page 27