‘As long as there are no dramas,’ Ben said, and peered into the bottom drawer of his desk. ‘Damn it, I had a bottle of sherry here, I know I did. It tastes like French polish but it’d be better than nothing.’
‘I found it,’ Jessie said. ‘It’s over here, but I thought you might like this better on the nights you work late,’ and she opened the stationery cupboard in the corner with the key from her ring, and took out a bottle of gin and cans of tonic water.
‘You’re bad news, Jessie, you know that? You’ll make life much too comfortable here and then I’ll never get home.’
‘No dramas, please,’ Jessie said, and after a moment he laughed, but the pause was an appreciable one and she was frightened. Stop it, you idiot, she told herself, stop it. Work, that’s all it is. Work. ‘There’s some ice in the mortuary. Do you want some?’
‘No thank you. Not mortuary ice. I’ll do without it if there’s nothing else.’
‘It’s only in the fridge,’ Jessie said. ‘Not in among the corpses, though I suppose ….’
‘I know that.’ He took the glass from her, and sniffed it appreciatively. ‘Good girl. This’ll pickle my gut nicely. Of course I know that, but I’ve never been able to fancy eating or drinking anything that’s been around the mortuary. Ever since my first student days. They used to send into the hospital all the harvest festival stuff from the churches, for the poor impoverished nurses, you know? Trouble was the girls never saw it because the admin. staff used to snaffle the lot. They’d have it put in the mortuary till they had a chance to take it home when no one was looking, because that was the only place big enough and cool enough to keep it, there was so much – and the nurses used to get us out of the medical school to go and liberate the apples and pears and so forth. It put me off fruit for years. It’s the same with ice.’
‘I’d feel the same if that had happened to me,’ she said, and twisted her own glass between her hands, watching the bubbles of tonic move lazily against the sides. ‘I don’t go there unless I have to. It does worry me a bit – that’s why I try to be off-hand and use the fridge there as though it were the one in my kitchen at home. Silly, really, though.’
‘Not silly at all. Death scares everyone. It’s only idiots and liars who deny it. We spend most of our time trying to pretend it never happens, and you can’t do that in a mortuary. Keep out, if you want to, Jessie. Let old Tomsett have it to himself. He likes to be melancholy and contemplate mortality.’
‘That child this morning – that upset me.’
‘Untimely death,’ Ben said. ‘Yes, it’s upset me too. It always does, but children are the worst.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Don’t know. I mean, I know what happened, but not why. Heart failure, and nothing to say why. Bit of oedema at the lung bases – tissue sponginess and so forth – but she seemed a fit enough specimen. Unknown causes, I imagine the coroner will have to say.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Twelve.’ He looked at her briefly, and then away. ‘Today, as it happens. It was her birthday.’
Jessie’s face creased. ‘Oh, those poor parents!’
Ben smiled a little crookedly. ‘How like you to be more bothered about her family than about her!’
‘But she doesn’t know, does she? She’s dead. But her mother … you always remember what it was like producing a child, when a birthday happens. I remember about Mark being born every January. And when I smell mimosa. My room was full of it. And the one who died. I remember her too, every Easter and when there are daffodils – she was stillborn but I still remember. So, poor mother. It’ll be hell for her.’
He was looking at her curiously. ‘You needn’t worry about her. She died last year according to Dan Stewart. I was concerned about the relatives too so I asked him – I didn’t know you’d had a stillborn child.’
‘Why should you? It’s … there’s no connection with my work, after all.’
‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I’m sorry.’
‘You weren’t intruding. Just probing. Oh, damn, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It sounded nasty. Did it? I hope not. I just mean … don’t feel bad because you didn’t know, because I didn’t tell you. Anyway, it’s all right now. I don’t mind any more. It was fourteen years ago – a long time.’
‘But you haven’t forgotten.’
There was a little silence and then she said, ‘No, I haven’t forgotten. Um … what do you want me to deal with first, Ben? The batch of Contravert or the control animals, or perhaps the ….’
‘Oh. Yes. Look, are you sure it’s going to be all right to stay? I don’t want to start the injections, you see, if we can’t finish them. And that could take us well up to, I don’t know, eleven or so, maybe later.’
‘I told you, no hassle. I’ll send a message to Peter, and that’ll be that. What about you? Can you stay that late? Or do you want me to deal with the first bit on my own? I could, once you’d told me what you want.’
‘I know you could.’ He smiled, a wide glittering smile at which she could have warmed her hands. ‘You’re the best woman I’ve ever had here for doing as she’s asked, but also for using a bit of intelligence to modify instructions when she has to. Bloody marvellous lady, that’s you. But you aren’t going to be on your own. I wouldn’t miss out on this for the world. I can stay. I’ve talked to June, and she’s baby-sitting for her sister tonight. So that’s all right.’
‘She’ll feel better tomorrow, then.’
‘I hope so,’ he said after a moment, and then turned back to his desk. He hadn’t meant to tell Jessie about June and her problems; he’d always believed very firmly in keeping work and home as two totally separate matters, but Jessie, after all, was Jessie. A sensible, listening lady, someone who was a mature and intelligent person in her own right, easy to talk to, and he’d told her months ago about June’s obsessive pregnancy hunger and the way she used her nephew to comfort herself for her lack of babies of her own. He had told her not because she’d been curious or prying but because he’d been so desperately tired after a particularly bad night with June that he had had to tell someone, and Jessie had been there and a willing listener, and blessedly silent. She’d made no banal comments about one-day-it’ll-just happen, nor offered silly advice about adoption. She’d just listened and nodded and said simply that she was sorry, and that had helped him enormously.
She was the only person he had ever told about his feelings, or about June’s feelings; he had always rather scorned the clich¨d idea that a trouble shared was a trouble eased – he had seen that as self-indulgence, a mean desire to load one’s own misery on to someone else’s shoulders – but he knew better now. Talking to Jessie had indeed helped him feel better about June, and tonight, discovering that Jessie too had had troubles having children had made her seem an even more trusted confidante. But they didn’t have to talk about June and her behaviour any more for him to gain comfort from her; they had reached the stage of companionable shorthand speech, and that was most comforting of all.
‘So!’ Jessie set down her glass and folded her arms and looked at him. ‘The others’ll be in here soon to report before they go for the night. Is there time to tell me what you want me to do first? Or do we wait till they’ve all gone? It’s … let me see. It’s almost half past five. Another half hour, and that’ll be that.’
‘We’ll wait,’ he said, and reached for the top folder of a pile on the corner of the cluttered desk. ‘But you can read this while you wait. It’ll give you some more background. I’ll go and do the checking rounds. Use my chair – I won’t be long.’ And he left her there, touching her shoulder companionably as he went past her. She managed to pretend he hadn’t, but it wasn’t easy. Being touched by Ben was becoming a rather agreeable experience, and as such, not to be dwelt upon when it happened.
She read the contents of the folder carefully; she knew a certain amount about what he was trying to do and felt she understood it pretty well, in broad pri
nciples if not in great detail. The years of training before she married had left her with a mind that was geared to understand biological theory, albeit a bit rusty from long disuse. But now, reading, she felt her thinking slip easily into the right grooves.
In essence, his theory was a simple one: ever since interferon, the natural disease-fighter every living body has, had first been discovered, he had argued that it should be possible to stimulate its production in a predictable and reliable manner in order to give protection against all viral infections.
‘Interferon,’ he had explained to her, when she had first come to work with him. ‘It is not one substance, you see. It’s a group of proteins that body cells produce in response to invasion by a virus. They stop the virus replicating, and so prevent the illness it causes. Each type of cell produces its own type of interferon protein, so even if we could synthesize the stuff – which we can’t at present – you’d need so many different types it would be impossible to use them therapeutically. And it’s a treatment I’m after, Jessie, that’s the long and short of it. A treatment.’
So, he’d gone on, he’d decided the answer had to be finding a substance that behaved as though it were an infective agent, but wasn’t and therefore could do no harm to body cells, but which would trigger them into producing large amounts of the different proteins in interferon when it was needed. ‘If I can do that, Jessie,’ he’d said, ‘then I’ve got the equivalent of antibiotics, only more so, because bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics, of course, and you have to keep creating new ones to deal with new strains of bug. But my idea is to find something that doesn’t respond to specific bacteria, or more particularly viruses, but to each cell’s own needs. Do you see?’
She did, almost, though it was a struggle, but he seemed not to notice she was floundering just a bit.
‘But if interferon’s made by the body’s own cells when viruses infect, why do you need to trigger production?’ She had asked hesitantly, uncomfortable about displaying her ignorance, but wanting to understand. ‘Don’t the viruses do that anyway?’
‘Absolutely!’ he’d said, delighted by the question. ‘Absolutely, but it seems to be a bit haphazard. Well, not really, of course: biological processes are never haphazard, but we do know it isn’t always adequate. The most that seems to happen in nature is that a body attacked by one kind of virus won’t be attacked by another at the same time because of the interferon production started off by the first virus to get to the scene. People don’t get … oh, chicken pox and flu together, do they? And that’s why: the chicken pox, if they get it first, stops them going down with the flu virus. What I want to do is produce something that’ll be so powerful it’ll repel the first invading virus as well as any subsequent ones. Do you see?’
She did, hazily, and she’d left the laboratory that day to go through to the library before going home, to collect all she could read on the subject of immunity, interferon and viruses in general, and for weeks after that her head had buzzed with information about polynucleotydes, phytohaemagglutinin, ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid, lysozyme and heaven knows what else – but she had emerged with some grasp of what it was he was trying to do. To find a substance which would act as though it were a disease-causing virus and yet be harmless, and which would on introduction to a human body produce enough interferon to prevent potentially lethal viruses from having an effect – that was his search.
And it was a marvellously exciting search, she had decided, breathtaking in its possibilities; a cure-all for infections, no less, that was what he was seeking in his ramshackle animal room and ill-equipped laboratory, and she was to be part of it. Her spirits had boiled up into a froth of excitement that had made her go rushing into the laboratory one morning almost ablaze with it, to find him asleep with his head on his desk because he’d worked so late the night before, and hadn’t got round to going home at all. And been deflated by his reaction, because he’d woken bad-tempered and very depressed. He’d realized during that long night’s work that all he’d done for the past year had been useless.
‘I’ve painted myself into a bloody corner, Jessie,’ he’d said, staring at her from red-rimmed eyes. ‘The last batch of the lousy stuff was contaminated. A year’s work up the spout, would you believe? An entire bloody year. I’m giving up – it’s a waste of time and money and effort and … I wish I’d never bloody well started it.’
It had taken her the best part of a week to coax him out of that crisis and by that time all her own blazing excitement had settled to a dull glow. She was still excited, but she no longer imagined the answer would come any minute, or even any year. The search and the work would go on for heaven knew how long – and, she realized then, that pleased her. Because the longer the work went on, the longer he would need her to work with him and the happier she would remain – but that was something not to be thought about, and she hadn’t, settling instead to the steady day in day out grind of keeping the normal work of the laboratory going, and the research ticking over alongside it. It was no wonder that they worked till half way through the night on so many evenings each week. There was no other time available to do what was necessary, for his research was very much a side-line, not his main responsibility. But she was happy, and so, as far as she could tell, was he. And that was all she asked of life now.
Now, reading through the folder he’d given her while he moved around in the laboratory outside – she could hear his voice and Harry Gentle’s, and Peter Moscrop’s and their occasional laughter, and it was a good sound – she got her thoughts organized about the work that lay ahead. The animals were to be divided into three groups: the control, called X group, to be given nothing; the A group to be given the virus strain they were currently using, and the B group to be given that and also doses of the new batch of Contravert. It was an interesting new batch, based on prostaglandins (Ben had decided that was a useful line of enquiry, because of the role of prostaglandins in the inflammatory process), and they had plenty of it; there had always been problems in the past about finding an adequate source of supply, but now he was using material derived from placentae he was collecting from the maternity wards. There had been a time when they were collected to be sold to a pharmaceutical company for use in preparing a range of pills for hormone therapy, but that deal had ended when the company had found it cheaper to use a product imported from Holland. Ben had found out almost by accident that this valuable resource was being incinerated, in his own department’s special disposal units, and had seized on it with enormous satisfaction, arranging to have the material he needed extracted by a small drug firm on the other side of the county which did the work for a remarkably low rate. This batch of his Contravert – and Jessie thought, surprised it had never occurred to her before, I must ask him why he named it that – was the first to use his new supply of the basic material. Altogether, it was going to be a fascinating stage of the research: a newer, much purer and therefore stronger drug, a selection of animals that really were at the peak of health – Jessie took great pride in that, for they were her special care – and plenty of time to do the necessary work.
She closed the folder with a sigh of sheer contentment as she heard the far door to the main laboratory slam shut behind Harry Gentle’s shouted goodnight and Ben’s footsteps clattering over the terrazzo floor back to the office. The evening ahead promised to be precisely the sort of evening she most enjoyed. Let Peter fiddle with his photographs and his committee meetings; let Mark spend all his time wrapped in his girlfriend’s arms and legs; she had much better things to do than sit at home and wait for them.
6
Edna put the last spike of potatoes in the oven, turned the heat to 450 degrees and prayed no one would notice how late she’d put them on. As long as none of the teachers ate the horrible things – and they were always on diets, the stupid madams – maybe no one would notice they weren’t cooked properly, and with no one ever paying any attention to anything the children said about thei
r food, maybe she’d get away with it. But the way her luck was running she probably wouldn’t; she got away with nothing these days, nothing at all.
Across the big cluttered kitchen Nancy McGrath was whipping up egg whites furiously, trying to get the froth to stand before the milk boiled; she was one of those people who never got things wrong, never had to get away with anything. She planned every detail of her work, never wasting a second, and Edna hated her for that. No one should ever be so well organized; it made everyone else, particularly herself, look stupid. And as Nancy looked up and caught her watching her she ducked her head and went back to the vegetable sink to start cleaning it. Once she’d done that, maybe they’d let her go, and she wouldn’t be here when they came for the potatoes for their party, and then no one could say anything to her.
‘Have you got the second batch of sausages ready to go in?’ Nancy asked sharply.
‘Sausages?’ Edna said blankly. ‘Was I supposed to do them an’ all?’
‘Oh, for Gawd’s sake!’ Nancy’s movements never faltered even while she launched herself into one of her usual naggings at Edna. ‘Have I got to do everything around here? Of course you were! I’ve got all these invalid diets to do and I can’t do the party suppers as well, and it’s not that hard to do, now is it? Baked potatoes with grated cheese, hot sausages, cups of broth. I suppose you’ve not grated the cheese either? I might have known it! Oh, get on with the sink, for heaven’s sake. I’ll take these up and then come and do your work as well as my own. I usually do – and I’m not putting up with it much longer. You come late and you do nothing – I’ll be telling Miss Cooper, that I will …’ and she stacked her tray with the glasses of egg nog and sprinkled nutmeg over each one with a deft twist of her wrist and swept out, leaving Edna mulishly washing up at the sink, and not doing it very well.
The Virus Man Page 5