“I’m not surprised he’s getting depressed. No other patients to talk to—only Mr. Cooper’s obesity patients, and they’re all women, and not of much interest to him. Of course, there’s the heart patients, but they’re mostly in no condition to sit up and chat. Your father-in-law’s getting a good deal chirpier, mind—”
“My dear Sister Hornett, unless you want to plunge poor old Ferris right into a slough of despond, you’ll keep him well out of reach of old George. I know him, and believe me, he’s like a plague looking for somewhere to decimate.”
“Theo, dear, did you say you were hungry? Because if you’re going to sit here boring Sister out of her mind with your chatter for much longer—”
“All right, all right! I’m coming.” He stood up and patted Sister Hornett affectionately on her rump, and went to the door.
“I’ll meet you in the car park, Theo,” Harriet said. “I’m going to say good night to George before I go. Sister—?”
The old man was asleep, and she was grateful for that, and after telling Sister Hornett that he would be transferred to Whyborne as soon as he was fit enough for the journey, she made a last visit to the unit to say good night to Catherine, who was still busily working on her graphs.
She looked up as Harriet came in, and said gruffly, “You look tired out. Going home?”
“Yes. I am a bit past it. You too—how much more have you to do before you can leave?”
“Just these chromatography strips. Then I’ll be off. Half an hour or so, no more.”
She looked down at her cluttered desk again, and then looked up at Harriet, smiling. “It’s good to be busy again, isn’t it? I missed it all—the pushing, you know. The importance of it all. It was all so … flat. Boring. Once we’d got there.” She looked anxious for a moment, “Not that I’m not as furious as anyone that this has happened. I wouldn’t have wanted such a thing for the world. But—”
“I know what you mean.” Harriet was putting on her coat, and digging into her pockets for her car keys. “I’m enjoying it too”–she stopped suddenly and stood there with her hands in her coat pockets, looking somberly at Catherine hunched in the pool of light over her desk—“until Ferris looks at me, and I know it isn’t just an intellectual exercise but more important than anything has any right to be. It was so easy before, when he was so ill. Now he isn’t, and I hate him for it.” She grimaced. “Does that sound sick? It does to me. But it’s true, all the same.”
“It is going to be all right, though,” Catherine said. “You know that, don’t you? It may take a few months yet, to get it right, but you’re on the right lines, and it’s as inevitable as—as tomorrow that you’ve got the answer. Breakthrough, isn’t that what they call it, the cheap papers and the commentators on TV? Breakthrough. Well, you have. It’s perfectly clear—you’ve just got to iron out the details.”
“I know. I—that’s the trouble, with Ferris I mean. His details are so personal to him, and I mightn’t get them ironed out in time. And he sits and looks at me and—Catherine, it’s time I went home. I’m getting maudlin. Good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He was sitting hunched into his coat collar in the passenger seat of her car when she got in.
“I’ll spend the night at the cottage, if that’s not going to discommode you too much. I can have George’s room, I imagine.”
“By all means. Why? You don’t usually—”
“I know. I usually prefer my own company in the dark watches. But—” He shrugged in the darkness. “I’m feeling lonely, Hattie. Very lonely. I want to be—oh, I don’t know. I must be getting old.”
She had switched on the ignition, but now she stopped the engine, and turned awkwardly in her seat to look at him, sitting there staring ahead into the night, at the misshapen Establishment buildings bulking grayly against the heavier flat darkness of the sky.
“Theo, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve upset you. Haven’t I? And it’s unfair of me. I run to you when it suits me, and then hold my counsel out of sheer bitchery—”
“Yes.” He looked at her now. “You have been bitchy this afternoon. You’ve been walking about wrapped in your own private thoughts, obviously highly pleased with yourself, and yet—”
“Pleased with myself? No—no, I’m not! Why should you—”
“Well, maybe not pleased. But something happened with Sefton this afternoon, something made you feel … different. You’ve certainly been behaving differently. Why? What happened? When you shut me out, you—” He settled himself more deeply in his seat. “I feel so bloody inadequate. A worn-out old queer—there’s a thought! The only use I’ve been for—oh, years—is as your crutch. And this afternoon you chucked the crutch away. Not very enjoyable, dear heart.”
“Only for the afternoon. Just to see how I got on without it,” she said. “But I knew before I started I’d have to pick it up again.”
He peered closely at her in the dimness. “You’ve definitely made up your mind, then. You know what you’re going to do. You are going to Whyborne?”
She smiled. “That’s what Sir Daniel thinks. Oscar, however, thinks he’s withdrawn the invitation. Oscar told Sir Daniel yesterday that my research had failed. Was dead-end.”
“He did what?”
“Yes, you heard me properly. But poor Oscar—Sir Daniel saw what he was up to, and came here hotfoot to repeat the offer.” She laughed softly. “He started by agreeing to take George into Whyborne. I agreed to that, too. Whatever I do, George’s treatment is assured.”
“And he’ll get better and you’ll go on looking after him as he gets more and more senile. I suppose you had thought of that?”
“Of course I have. But what else could I do? You know how it—”
“I know the sort of woman you are. So I know how it has to be for you.”
“So, that’s how it is. But for the rest …”
“Well? You will go? You’ll tell Oscar once and for all that—”
“That I’m staying with him, Theo. I’m not leaving Brookbank.”
There was a silence, and then he said furiously, “Christ all bloody mighty! You make me puke! How much longer are you going to let that bloody ram use you as—”
“You’re jealous,” she said, almost wonderingly.
“Stupid bloody word! What does jealous mean? That I want what he’s got? The drives of some lousy farmyard animal that makes him use a woman like a—like a—Christ, the man doesn’t know what love is, what caring about people is all about, and you think I’m jealous? If you can’t—”
“I know what I mean. And so do you.” She almost shouted it.
He drew a heavy uneven breath, and then there was silence in the stuffy little car. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yes. You’re right. Of course you’re right.”
They sat side by side in the darkness for a long time, not talking, and then he stirred and turned his head to look at her.
“Why, Hattie? You haven’t said why.”
“Because I’m—oh, I don’t know. Yes I do. I’m tired of decisions, and problems and wheeling and dealing, and people jumping up and down and making great polemical statements about me and my work. I’m more than tired of it. I’m frightened of it.”
She frowned a little, screwing up her eyes against the dimness outside, and then her face smoothed out and she laughed softly. “I think I’ve discovered something new about myself, Theo. I’m frightened—I’ve always known that, but I don’t think I knew what I was frightened of. I do now.”
“You’re frightened of change,” he said heavily.
“What?” she turned and looked at him. “You know that? Then why did you—?”
“Try to persuade you to go away?”
“Yes.”
“Because as long as you didn’t know what it was you were so desperately trying to avoid, there was a possibility of getting you out of here, and away from Oscar, who’s going to destroy you if he can, and somewhere that you could really develop yourself—us
e your brain the way it’s supposed to be used. But now you know—”
“Now I know. So I’m staying here.”
“You’re a bloody fool, Hattie. A brilliant scientist, a charming woman, a dear friend and the biggest bloody fool I’ve ever known. Can’t you see that it just isn’t possible? You’ll never do what you’re trying to do. You can’t just dig yourself in here and stop change from happening just because you don’t want to look at it! Every moment of your working day is devoted to changing things. You’re changing the whole bloody world with what you’re doing, can’t you see that? When people stop dying because of the work you’ve done, you’ll have made one of the profoundest alterations in human life that’s ever been made! Yet you won’t face up to it for yourself. You won’t go out and make the changes—the inevitable changes—work for you instead of against you. You’ll sit here, clinging to the comfort of things known while they quietly change and change and change under your stupid blind eyes, and then the whole thing’ll explode in your face, and what will you do then?”
“I don’t know, Theo! Stop nagging me, for Christ’s sake stop nagging me! I just don’t know.”
“You must know. You must! In a few months, a year—I don’t know how long, but it’s measurable time!—you’ll know that your treatment really works. You’ll have a dozen Ferrises to prove it for good and all. And by then, the Ben Shoemans and the Daniel Seftons will have had time to really get ready for you. They’ll have a system all set up to make use of you and what you’ve done, and Oscar—your precious bloody Oscar—he’ll be there too, all ready to join in and batten on you, and what will you do? Sit there in that cottage with that senile old man with your eyes closed and cowering away from change as though it were going to kill you?”
“I don’t know and I don’t caret” she cried at him. “Can’t you understand that? I don’t caret There’s now, there’s this minute, there’s all the minutes I have to go on living with myself, as I am, with all the hatefulnesses that are part of me. The things I need, and want, and have to have—peace, and security, and people to care about, and Oscar—yes, Oscar. Without all those I couldn’t go on, can’t you see that? it’s like you—you’re part of me and my life that I can’t bear to live without. I—this afternoon, I walked by myself, I didn’t talk to you, I didn’t share with you, I didn’t use you, and look at the way you felt! Inadequate? Old? How do you suppose I would be if I shed almost everything I know and care about, except for work? What sort of work would I be able to do? Don’t you know me at all, Theo? God Almighty, don’t you have any understanding?”
Once again there was a heavy silence in the car, but it was underlined by the sound of their uneven breathing, as the car windows misted and shimmered, and the darkness pressed in on them.
“Yes. I understand, Hattie,” he said at length and turned his head to look at her. “Dear Hattie. I understand all too well. That’s why I get so angry. One always is most angered by the inevitable. I’m like Mr. Ferris, enraged at the disease that’s waiting to come back and destroy him. I know it’s pointless, but I can’t help feeling it. All right, my love. You hide away here from hateful change, but when tomorrow comes and change sits gibbering at you, promise me something. Make sure I’m around, will you? You’ll need me then almost as much as I’ll need to be there.”
“Tomorrow?” she said, switching on the engine, and putting the car into gear. “Tomorrow—there’s work to do. That’s all I’m interested in. I’ve got work to do. We’ll deal with the rest of it if it happens.”
The car moved forward, its lights cutting a narrow swathe into the darkness, and as she swung out into the driveway she said it again, contentedly, “Tomorrow, I’ve got work to do.”
A Time to Heal Page 30