A Time to Heal

by Claire Rayner

  He looked at her sharply, the little black eyes snapping with intelligence under the crest of dark hair, and said, “A long time? How long?”

  “It’s hard to say at this stage,” Harriet said carefully. “It depends a good deal on how the research goes. I may be able to tell you more in a few days.”

  “You would tell me if it was more than just research?”

  “How do you mean, more than just research?”

  “Now, come on, Dr. Berry! You know what I mean, as well as I know what you mean a lot of the time. I’m not so green as I’m cabbage looking, let me tell you. I may be just one of your common or garden working class, and proud of it, but that doesn’t mean I’m daft, does it? And the way you’re talking—” he shook his head. “You sounded funny.”

  “Well, charming!” John Caister said. “You’d sound funny too if you’d been working as hard as Dr. Berry has this past couple of days. Forgotten what her bed looks like, poor lady.”

  “John, be quiet. Mr. Ferris, I’m not—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” She was finding it difficult to meet his eyes, for he was looking at her with a directness that made her feel as though he were holding her by the arm.

  “Why have you been working so hard?” He twisted about in his chair and looked round at them all, at Catherine sitting arm-crossed at her desk, at Theo standing leaning against the oxygen chamber door, at John Caister, his head bent over work he wasn’t doing in an attempt to hide his pink embarrassed face, for he clearly knew he’d said too much. And turned back to Harriet again looking quite different. His eyes had lost their sharpness, and his face had settled into deeper lines that seemed to drag the flesh downward from the fine bones.

  “It isn’t just research, then. It’s something to do with me, personal.”

  There was a silence, and then Theo said quietly, “Yes. You’re quite right, Mr. Ferris. It is research, but something more than that, and it is very much to do with you.”

  The little man looked over his shoulder at him, and grinned a little, but with none of his usual perkiness.

  “Ta, squire. Nice to ’ave someone doesn’t think I need wet nursin’.”

  He turned back to Harriet. “Well, Dr. Berry? Seeing as how the game’s been given away good and proper by loverboy ’ere”—he jerked his head toward John—“and Mr. Fowler’s treated me like a grown man and been honest with me, ’ow about you coming clean, too? It’s your game, after all, and it’s you as ought to explain properly. If you don’t mind, that is.”

  “I don’t mind,” Harriet said. “In some ways it will be easier for me if you’re completely in the picture. I just wanted to protect you from—however. Briefly, Mr. Ferris, some of the animals on which I originally tested the treatment have become ill again. We’re working hard to discover the reason why they should have become ill again, and we’re checking on all the other animals we used to make sure we can spot any further onset of disease before it actually happens. On the series that followed the one that has shown signs of illness we have managed to spot it, and we’re preparing new vaccines for them now, and for succeeding series. But—”

  “It could ’appen to me too, is that it? I could start gettin’ ill again.”

  “Yes. It could happen to you too. And we want you here so that—”

  “Yes. So’s you can spot it in time. Well.”

  He put his hands on his lap, and began twisting his fingers, turning them from side to side, closely watching each movement he made.

  “It’s a funny thought, ’n’ it? You get to thinking about what it’d be like to be dead, and then you get better, and you reckon it’ll never ’appen again, which is bloody stupid when you know it’s going to eventual, one way or the other, and you said as how—five years—you know? And then when it does ’appen again—it’s a funny thought.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said gently, and he looked at her and laughed very loudly.

  “Sorry! Oh, I go for that! That’s rich, that is! Sorry! What d’you suppose I am? Tickled? Oh, gawd, I didn’t mean that, but—well, you know! Here I am, feeling twice as nice, and you tell me as I’m goin’ to get cancer again, and then you says you’re sorry. Well, I ask you! How’d you be?”

  “As angry as you are, Mr. Ferris. And not, perhaps, quite so well controlled,” Theo said in the same quiet voice, and Mr. Ferris looked at him, and after a moment managed to grin again.

  “Like I said, Ta, squire. No flies on you, is there? Yeah, I’m mad—bloody flamin’ mad. ’Oo wouldn’t be? I’d like to …” he closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’d like to do.”

  Theo moved then and came across the room to put a hand on the little man’s arm.

  “Think about what you’ll do when you get through this, Mr. Ferris,” he said. “Because I’ll tell you something. I believe you will. I have a great deal of faith in Dr. Berry’s techniques, and I truly believe you’ll get through this and out the other side feeling”—he smiled—“three times as nice.”

  Ferris looked up at him, his face very still, but his eyes were bright again, and he stared at Theo for a long time, and then nodded.

  “Right, mate. If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. When do we start? On the research?”

  It was as though the whole room had relaxed a little, as though the very fabric of the place had softened and spread and taken away with it some of the tension that had been pressing on all of them. Catherine bent her head to start work on her eternal charts, and John stood up and smiled hopefully at Mr. Ferris, and Harriet too stood up and moved across to the door.

  “Right now, Mr. Ferris. We want to examine you very thoroughly—Mr. Fowler as well as myself and then start a great battery of blood tests. Boring for you, I’m afraid, but—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. Got as many ’oles in me as a colander already. Will there be any operations? That I would like to know.”

  “Yes,” Theo said. “I want to take some biopsies—remember? Little samples of tissue from different organs. I’ll use a local anesthetic for today’s, but after that, you can have generals and we’ll do as many at a time as we can. That’ll be less tedious for you.”

  “Well, que sera, as they say. Lead on, Macduff!”

  He stood up and bent to pick up his suitcase from beside his chair, and John immediately hurried across the room to take it for him, but with a sharp upward look that was so filled with scorn that John stepped back in confusion, Ferris took it himself and followed Harriet and Theo out of the room.

  He lay there staring up at the ceiling as they examined him, and it was as though he had gone away somewhere, leaving his body behind on the red-blanketed couch for them to play with. She looked at his face once or twice as she worked, but he was quite expressionless, and gratefully she returned to what she was doing.

  Ever since she had sent the express delivery letter she had been worried about how she would tell him, what she would tell him. The experience of grief was one she knew too well to gladly expose herself to a further onslaught. But he had taken the news remarkably well, she thought, as she stepped back from the couch to make way for Theo, and began to enter her notes in the chart.

  Theo moved swiftly and easily, his hands exploring the belly inch by inch, moving under each arm, probing the groin, and Mr. Ferris let him move his arms and legs as though they were no part of him, was as relaxed and flaccid as though he were anesthetized. But when Theo had finished and pulled the blanket up over his nakedness, he turned his head to look at them both, and his eyes were wide and darker than ever, the pupils greatly dilated.

  “I know what I’ll do,” Ferris said, and his voice was almost dreamy. “When it’s all finished. I’ll go back to Majorca, that’s what I’ll do.” He smiled at Harriet. “Have you ever been there? After that business with the papers and all, we went there for two weeks, me and my old woman. They said, I’d been a cancer patient too, so why not ’ave something for meself out of it—anyway, we
went there. To Camp de Mar. It’s a lovely place.”

  “I’ve been there,” Theo said. “It’s a pretty island.”

  “It smells so different. Sort of dusty and hot, even in the winter, when we went. And there’s the hotels and all that marble and the stuff they eat in the bare—all ’orrible when you think of it, octopus and that—but it’s all right to eat as long as you don’t know till after what it was. And the sun and those courtyards inside the ’ouses, and wood shops and the sitting on the pavements drinking that coffee, and all the people from all over the world walking about and talking, and the sun sort of licks your skin and makes your eyes go all lazy. It’s a lovely place. I’d like to live there. I really would like to live there. I said to my old woman, ‘How about it? Open a little caff, sell tea and that to the English—there’s plenty of them goes.’ But, there, she didn’t fancy leavin’ the neighbors, you know ’ow it is. But I’ll tell you this much. If I gets through again, I don’t take no for an answer. You don’t get a second chance all that often.”

  He looked at Harriet very directly, his eyes still very dark but sharper now above the bright red of the blanket pulled under his chin. “And you’ll see to it, will you? I’ll have that caff in Majorca, will I?”

  “If I have anything to do with it you will,” she said, and managed to smile at him. “That’s a promise.”

  He nodded, apparently content, and she looked at Theo, seeking his reassurance just as Ferris had sought hers. But he didn’t look at her.

  In a curious way, she enjoyed the next few days. There was the pall of anxiety that hung over Mr. Ferris to be negotiated every time she went into the treatment room for the daily tedious run of tests, but that apart, there was the excitement of the work, the sheer comfort of the patterns that each day’s efforts created, the sense of power that filled her as she planned and organized, to give her satisfaction.

  It was a cushion too, protecting her from the anxieties that had seemed to fill her so pressingly during the doldrum period when there had been no real work to do, and no urgency about the little there was. She managed to find time to slip into Sam Lemesurier’s ward to see George each morning before starting the day’s work, and though she cared still, very much indeed, about his progress, the edge had gone from her caring; and when on the third day he was released from the monitoring equipment and accused her of arranging it deliberately—“I’ll have an attack and die of it and no one will know, and then you’ll be glad”—she had simply laughed and reassured him as best she could without feeling any of the dull anger such comments usually aroused in her.

  Another considerable source of comfort was the way the power station strike seemed to peter out. Sydenham’s judgment, rather than Ben’s, had been right after all, for the pickets disappeared from the gates of Brookbank. They just weren’t there one morning when she arrived, and she was intensely grateful for that. For her it was enough that the trouble seemed to have stopped, that there were no further fears about the power supply and the efficiency of the emergency generator. She could get on with her work in peace.

  But Theo told her she was far too sanguine when she said as much to him.

  “My dear, just because the local characters have got bored with the situation without Ben to put firecrackers behind them, it doesn’t mean that the situation doesn’t exist any more. It certainly doesn’t mean that other agitators aren’t still beavering away in their usual fashion.”

  There was a silence, while he concentrated on the delicate tying of a couple of veins deep in the abdomen of the monkey he was operating on, and then he said, “Give a little more muscle relaxant, please, Harriet. It’s getting a bit tight.”

  She gave the injection, and checked the anesthetic apparatus again, and Theo, his big square fingers seeming larger than ever against the small body on which they were working, began to stitch the muscles in layers.

  “There’s your specimen, John,” he said. “One mesenteric node, and I don’t much like the look of it. Don’t start to section it till I’m through. I want to take a look first—what was I saying, Harriet?”

  He looked at her sideways over the top of his mask, while his fingers continued the busy and elegant tying of knots in the catgut.

  “Ah, yes. I don’t suppose Sydenham offered you any more information in exchange for—er—the help you gave him over Ben?”

  “Certainly not,” she said, stiffly. “I haven’t exactly been in close contact with him apart from that one interview I told you about I’m going to stop the anesthetic now.”

  “Fine. Just skin ties to do. Now why are you so edgy with me? Because I mentioned Sydenham? Or because I mentioned Ben and, by implication, Patty? I would have thought that after the years I’ve known you and your children I could talk about such matters without irritating you?”

  “Oh, do stop nagging me, Theo!” She pushed the anesthetic trolley away and began to undo the restrainers on the monkey’s wrists, as Theo finished tying the last stitch and reached for the spray of mastic to cover the neatly puckered wound. “I’m not in the mood for family chatter.”

  “But you surely haven’t broken off contact with Patty, have you? That doesn’t sound like—” he persisted.

  “No, of course not! But …” she shrugged. “Damn you! If you must talk about it then, she has to work out her own relationships. I think she knows what I know. That Ben won’t last. He’ll be away one day, discarding her the way he—well, he’ll move on and leave her behind. And she’ll come back to England and we’ll pick up where we left off, she and I. We’re civilized people, and she isn’t a child, after all. I can’t do more, even if I wanted to.”

  “Oh, you want to. You’d like to scoop her up and bring her back to the cottage and look after her as though she were six years old again. Poor Hattie—”

  “Stop being so damned patronizing, Theo! It’s none of—”

  “You’re absolutely right. It isn’t. John!”

  Caister came hurrying from the far side of the room.

  “Take this one, will you? It’ll be around in about ten minutes, I’d say.” He picked up the monkey, holding its head delicately in one hand so that it didn’t loll, and John took it from him carefully. “And watch it doesn’t pick at the wound too much. It’s one of the most active ones, isn’t it, as I recall? Yes—watch him. Lunch, Harriet?”

  “If you’ll stop nagging me, perhaps. But if all you’re going to do is natter at me, then I’ll lunch alone.”

  “Such acidity! Of course I’m going to natter at you, and of course you’ll have lunch with me. And well you know it. Do come on—I’m extremely hungry.”

  He talked only of work, however, as they ate, since young Rodney Ackermann and Geoffrey Cooper shared their table in the canteen, but afterward, he insisted that they take a walk about the grounds before going back to the animal rooms.

  “We’ve got a grueling afternoon ahead of us—there’s nine of those animals to work on—and I need air and exercise to fit me for it if you don’t.”

  And she had to admit she needed the air, hoary and wintry though it was, and she thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her coat and stepped out beside him, along the damp gray paths between the odd patches of garden and untidy sprawls of buildings.

  “Seriously, Harriet, I do want to persuade you to give a little more thought to matters other than work,” he said after a while. “I know there’s a lot for you to do, with extra staff to control and the experiments to plan and set up, quite apart from monitoring Ferris. But all the same, you can’t just put things into abeyance as you have.”

  “What things?”

  “Stop being deliberately evasive! You know damned well what I mean! Are you still going to leave Brookbank? Are you going to Whyborne? And if so, when?”

  “Theo, please. I won’t be bullied about this! You know perfectly well that I can’t make any definite plans at the moment. George isn’t fit to be moved for a few days anyway and—for heaven’s sake, how could I? Do I take mys
elf and three hundred monkeys and Mr. Ferris careering across country to Whyborne? Do be your age!”

  “It could be arranged, I imagine. It wouldn’t be easy, but those animals aren’t any use to Brookbank without you, so if you go, they’ll sell them to your new employer without too much—”

  She stood still, and he stopped too, and turned to look at her, his head sunk into his coat collar so that he looked like a bad-tempered penguin.

  “Theo, I won’t discuss this or anything else any further. I’m going back to the unit right now. I want to see Mr. Ferris’s results before I do anything else this afternoon. I’ll be over to start the lists with you by two o’clock. I’ll see you then.”

  And she turned on her heel and went marching back along the path, knowing full well that she had probably sounded and looked like a petulant child, and that Theo was standing there behind her, almost certainly amused.

  She was still angrily simmering a little as she walked into the main administrative building to collect her afternoon mail before going over to the unit. She was walking with her head down, staring at the ground as she went, so that it wasn’t until she was so close to him that she could have touched him that she realized he was there, and his quiet, “Good afternoon, Dr. Berry,” made her actually jump.

  “I’m sorry! Did I startle you? I didn’t intend to, but you were so sunk in thought, it was unavoidable. Quite the absent-minded professor pose, though it looks a little incongruous on a woman as handsome as yourself.”

  “Good afternoon, Sir Daniel,” she said warily, and she knew her consternation showed, and could do nothing about it. Had he heard about what had happened, somehow, and come to tell her he no longer wanted her at Whyborne, as Oscar had warned her he might?

  “I do hope you don’t mind my coming so unexpectedly.” He stood there in his neat dark-gray overcoat, holding his hat and gloves in one hand, she thought with a moment’s amusement, like an advertisement for a dress hire firm. “But I felt it necessary to waste no time. Is there somewhere we could talk? I promise you I won’t take up too much of your time, but I know you’ll agree that what I have to say is important, once you hear it.”