The Virus Man

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Gone to see Mrs Porteous,’ the junior said ominously and Peter felt sick; Porteous was the most militant shop-steward the darnned secretaries’ union had ever had. All he needed now was to trigger a typists’ strike, and he’d really be in trouble. All he could do was swallow the reprimand he’d had from Chanter, swallow Wilmington’s patent delight in his discomfort, and above all, swallow his natural instinct to be political and pass the buck on to Price. He clearly wasn’t going to get away with that; might even have to apologize for his error. ‘Christ all bloody mighty!’ he shouted at his empty office as he slammed the door behind him, and didn’t care who heard him.

  The file was waiting on his desk, and he sat down and started to read it from cover to cover. He hadn’t bothered last time, there had seemed little point, but now every single document was to be studied, and even the number of names on the petition counted (there were just over five hundred), so that if either that bloody Wilmington or even bloodier Chanter started to make a fuss again, he’d have every fact at his tongue’s end.

  He sent out for a sandwich for lunch, and that didn’t help: the junior, despite being told he wanted mature cheddar cheese on wholemeal bread, chose to bring him processed rubbish on soggy white bread, and he didn’t dare to complain, not with the union already alerted to him, and he chewed his way dispiritedly through it as he read page after page of AFB waffle.

  It wasn’t until he was halfway through the file that he found the real information, and his eyebrows lifted as he read the details of the local establishment they wanted to close down. He’d never thought it would be at Minster Hospital. A hospital’s a hospital, surely, he told himself, frowning now. They don’t do original research using animals in hospitals, do they? I never heard they did. Unless it’s for special tests? He had a vague notion that sometimes pregnancy tests involved rabbits or toads, but the documents he was reading said nothing about pregnancy tests. These people were talking about cruel operations and lethal infectious diseases, about animals being wired to electrical machines and heaven knew what other atrocities – all the usual stuff these people churned out. Surely they’d got it wrong? They must mean another place entirely, but he checked and it was quite clear. ‘Within the Minster General Hospital complex,’ the rather round childish handwriting ran. ‘And therefore part of NHS premises. The DHSS deny any responsibility for this use and maintain that the local authority through its department of Environmental Planning should be approached,’ and so on and on and on.

  Minster General Hospital, he thought, and then remembered, suddenly, about Jessie. The morning had been such hell that she’d been pushed right out of his mind, and that made him suddenly doubly furious. As if he didn’t have enough to put up with without Jessie being stupid; all the pent-up anger of the morning came bubbling up, and his fingers were actually shaking with it as he rifled through the pages of the local telephone directory and then dialled the hospital’s number.

  Only to discover she couldn’t be found. ‘Mrs Hurst?’ the switchboard operator was clearly deeply bored by his demand to talk to her. ‘Never heard of her – what department is she?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Peter almost snarled it. ‘Works in some bloody laboratory or other ….’

  ‘If you’re going to swear at me then I shan’t deal with you,’ the operator said promptly, for the first time showing some animation, and disconnected him, and by the time he had rechecked the phone number – having of course forgotten it and closed the damned directory – and redialled and demanded to speak to the switchboard supervisor and had an argument with her, finally managing to get the information that his wife worked in the pathological laboratories, it was too late. The man who answered the phone at the laboratories in a rather thick Jamaican accent told him cheerfully that everyone except himself was gone to lunch, man, and anyway Jessie, she wasn’t goin’ to be back today, not she, she had to go someplace this afternoon, so they told him, so don’t you bother to call again, man, and hung up, leaving Peter with the phone buzzing in his hand and his throat so tight with his rage he could hardly swallow – and he needed to for the taste in his mouth, faintly sweet and disgusting, was making him feel sick.

  He tried his home number, then, trying to convince himself she would be there, but of course she wasn’t, and then even phoned his son at his job at the record shop, but that was a waste of time too. Mark had been at his girlfriend’s house every night this week, didn’t know where Mum was, hadn’t even remembered his father was away, and Peter slammed the phone down on him too.

  That boy; he’d washed his hands of him more times than he could remember, with his stupid passion for his gramophone records and his half-witted girlfriend, but he still had the power to infuriate him. Time he left home anyway. He was nineteen, and, as he was so fond of reminding his father, a legal adult; no one had any right to tell him how to run his life, he said – and that meant, Peter told himself savagely, that he had no right to expect his father to provide him with board and lodging when it happened to suit him. Time he went.

  But none of this helped the way he was feeling about Jessie. There was still a huge anger in him at her absence from home, but now it had an undertow that he found very difficult to handle. He was frightened about her, and he’d never had cause to feel anything so unpleasant in connection with Jessie. To be frightened because of his own wife – it was crazy. And as soon as he got home he’d tell her so, because surely, surely she’d be there by then?

  12

  ‘Well, I say it again – I think she should be transferred to Farborough,’ Sister said loudly, ‘I’m not equipped here, sir, for fevers and I’m not happy about the way ….’

  ‘Now, Sister, you’re beginning to sound like one of these modern whiners we have to put up with in the office upstairs. All they worry about is newfangled notions like … what is it they call it? Nursing process? Bah … they just talk, but they need people like you and me to do the real work. Now, you can’t tell me I have to send a patient of mine to another hospital just because you can’t set up the right sort of barrier nursing! You learned that, now, surely, when you were at Great Ormond Street?’ Lyall Davies set his head on one side and looked at her with a heavy flirtatiousness to which she rose like a trout to a feather.

  ‘Of course I can manage the nursing, sir. It’s not that I’m worried about it, just that we simply don’t have the equipment here that we need. Ever since we were downgraded it’s been like pulling teeth to get the most basic equipment, let alone the sort of ICU apparatus we need. We’ve got a resuscitation trolley, of course, but that’s all.’

  ‘We’ve still got the respirator the League of Friends bought for us. I remember that campaign well – I was chairman of the committee and by Jove we did well, raised enough for the old iron lung as we used to call it, you know, and a very good name for it it was, and still had a bit over for this and that, nice curtains for the nurses’ home, as I recall. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with it, d’you see. It mayn’t be as fancy as some of the stuff they spend all that money on up at Farborough, but it works, that’s the thing. And this child can have it if she needs it. I don’t think she will – I still say there’s a lot of hysteria in this illness. Watch her when she doesn’t know she’s being watched and she breathes perfectly normally. I’d put her in that respirator a day or two just to see how she likes it. That’d soon stop her fussing the way she does.’

  ‘All the same, sir,’ Sister said, and stopped and looked at Dan Stewart and Dorothy Cooper, who were sitting on the other side of her desk.

  ‘I have to agree with Dr Lyall Davies,’ Dorothy said. ‘Andrea Barnett’s one of those children who fuss all the time. Suggestible’s not the word for it. She gets period pains every other week – anything to get out of doing games – and she can make herself vomit just by thinking about it. She’s always complaining of something. If Miss Spain … if I’d had the right sort of nursing back-up at the school still I’d never have brought her in, but the damne
d staff are panicking as much as the children and it was better to get Andrea away – she was getting the others all stirred up. It’s perfectly ridiculous – I’d really rather she wasn’t transferred, I must say. Her father’s in Hong Kong, works with Jardine’s there, and I don’t want to alarm him more than I need, and sending the girl to a communicable diseases hospital will make no end of a drama. And drama’s the last thing we want.’

  ‘I just wish I could get some hard evidence that this really is a new bug.’ Dan got to his feet and went over to the chart trolley to pull out the folder with Andrea’s name in it. ‘Look at this – you’ve had all this blood work done, ESR, cultures, the lot, and not a thing to show for it. Just a generalized influenza-type illness is what it looks like, and I can’t take up beds at Farborough for that – not unless I’m really sure there’s a genuine need for it. They’re full of salmonella there from the prison, and from that psychogeriatric unit at Wentdown Regis, and we’ve been warned not to put too much pressure on them. Why do these bloody things always have to happen at the same time? With the sort of evidence I’ve got so far on this bug, normally I would try to isolate patients, but the way things are … I don’t know.’

  He shook his head, still staring at the chart in his hands.

  ‘Whatever I do I’m on a hiding to nothing. If I use my authority to send the child to Farborough and it’s just a flu, they’ll raise hell, and where’s the sense of exposing her to salmonella, anyway? Careful as they are there, it could happen. And if I don’t send her and it turns out to be a true bill – a really virulent whatever – then I’m up shit creek again. Sorry, Sister, I was just thinking aloud.’

  ‘Look, Stewart, you’re making too much of this altogether.

  You heard the child’s teacher – she’s a bit of a malingerer, and now she’s got a genuine flu and making the best of it. Those other two children who died were quite different – they probably had some sort of congenital heart anomaly that made them react so badly – after all, it used to be something we all expected, didn’t we? Bad go of flu, well known, always knocked off the feeble, the young and the old.’

  ‘Young babies, maybe, sir,’ Dan said. ‘Not hefty schoolgirls of twelve or so.’

  ‘The young and the old,’ Lyall Davies said firmly. ‘But you’ll notice that it’s only children that are getting this particular flu. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dan said, still looking down at Andrea’s temperature chart with its wild spiky pattern.

  ‘Then it’s obviously nothing to get agitated about,’ the old man said triumphantly. ‘Obviously older people have an immunity. Must have been exposed before, so it’s just a recurrence of an old flu strain. This business of paralysis and not breathing – this child’s learned it – she’s just going in for hysterical over-breathing. Putting it on, I’ll lay you all Lom bard Street to a China orange.’

  Dan looked up at him sharply. ‘You could be right, at that,’ he said. ‘We haven’t had a single report in from the GPs of any cases over fifteen or so. When was the last major Asian flu?’

  ‘There was one in 1979 – I remember I was knocked out with that one,’ Sister said. ‘Quite ill, I was.’

  ‘And another in the winter of ’69/’70.’ Lyall Davies looked triumphantly round at them all. ‘That one really was appalling. Remember, Stewart? Fifteen years ago, that one, we had seven deaths from it in one of the geriatric wards, seven! Fifteen years ago … that’d make sense, now, wouldn’t it? Anyone under fifteen, no immunity. Anyone over it, no problems.’

  ‘I don’t remember that one,’ Dan said. ‘All before my time.’

  ‘Well, I remember it,’ Lyall Davies said. ‘Like yesterday. You mark my words, that’s all this is! It’ll soon fizzle out.’

  He got to his feet and leaned over and patted Sister on her shoulder in a very avuncular manner. ‘Just you set up that respirator beside that child’s bed, Sister, and see how soon she’ll get over her fusses! And you go back to your school, Miss Cooper, and knock some sense into those silly little girls of yours. There’s no epidemic here – just a lot of people who haven’t the experience to know what they’re looking at. Trust me, and stop all this worrying. I’ve got the experience, and I know. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  In spite of his obvious fatigue, and in spite of the fact that she said very little in response, Ben talked all through breakfast about the work. They had found a quiet table in the canteen, well away from listening ears, though Jessie was very aware of the sharp glances some of the night nurses threw in their direction; but it was only a few who showed any awareness of them. Lots of the people who came trailing in were too tired to be interested in anything but themselves. She wasn’t the only person looking white and pinched with lack of sleep.

  ‘The thing is, I need to speed up the tests. I’ve got a good deal of 737 and I’d hate to waste any of it. If only I had some more subjects to work on we could use not only the new batch of Contravert, but the next one they’re making up for me – oh, Jessie, there’s so much work to do! And the lab busier than we’ve been for months. Why does it all happen at the same time?’

  ‘Epidemics are like that,’ she said, almost mumbling it into her coffee cup. ‘Always happen at awkward times. There was that flu thing six years ago – I went down with it while Peter was doing his last set of post-qualifying exams – it was awful. No one to do anything at home but me ….’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben frowned. ‘Yes, there was one then, wasn’t there? June was ill.’ He sat silently for a while then, also staring into his coffee cup. He hadn’t thought about June all night, and had forgotten to phone her the way he usually did at seven o’clock. She’d be worried. He’d better call her now; and he got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said. ‘Just have to make a phone call. Try and think of a way we can increase the experiments – maybe you’ll think of an answer. I can’t.’

  She did; as he came back to the table ten minutes later, his eyes looking huge in the shadows under them, she said, ‘More animals,’ even before he could sit down.

  ‘What?’ He was abstracted now; June had been tearful on the phone because she’d been so worried. His phone call was an hour late, fully an hour, she was sure something awful had happened to him, and though he’d managed to soothe her eventually, the irritation her dependence always created in him had broken through his words, and she’d known he was annoyed, and that made her worse than ever. Damn it, he thought as he saw Jessie sitting there at the table waiting for him. Why can’t June be like her, calm and sensible and interested in my work?

  ‘I said more animals,’ Jessie repeated. ‘Couldn’t you afford some new stock? I could drive over for them this afternoon, if you don’t mind doing the extra bloods with Harry, and get you some more from the breeders. Then we could start again tomorrow with four or even six groups. We’ve got the pens. Or you could, I suppose, use Castor and Pollux.’

  He shook his head. ‘They’re too expensive. I ought to sell them really. I can’t afford to use them, though I thought I could when I bought them. They’re turning into damned pets, that’s the trouble – no, it’s got to be rabbits. Unless we’ve got enough of the guinea pigs?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, not yet. I’ve got several litters coming on nicely, but they’re rather young. We used guinea pigs all last month, remember. It has to be the rabbits now. Anyway, you want to replicate the experiments and that means using the same type of subject.’

  He rubbed his hand over his face and yawned. ‘You’re right, of course. I’m being stupid. Christ, I’m tired! I’ll have to get some sleep, somehow, if I’m to be any use. You too. If you’re going to drive over to Podgate this afternoon.’

  ‘Glad to,’ she said, pleased at his acceptance of her advice, happy to be given another useful job to do. ‘I’ll go and sleep at home, then. If I go now, I could sleep till about twelve and then start. Three hours or so should get me over the worst – what will you do? Go home
too?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’d better not. I’ll get a shakedown in the senior medical common room. Moscrop’s back from his holiday today, thank God, so they should manage well enough till this afternoon – as long as I’m on call for anything urgent we’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’ll go back and feed the animals then, and settle them for the day,’ Jessie said. ‘And I’ll get back tonight as soon as I can with the new ones.’

  ‘And we’ll start again tomorrow. I’ll have the cultures done by then, too, of last night’s lot. Oh, Jessie, Jessie, so much happening, so much to do.’

  ‘So you’ve already said,’ she said a little tartly. ‘Talking about it won’t get it done, will it?’ And she went, making her way out of the hospital and across the courtyard again, to feed and clean out the animals before driving, very carefully, back to Purbeck Avenue.

  When she got there and found the side door lock had been broken she considered calling the police; there had been several break-ins in this road recently, and her belly lurched as she saw the splintered panels and the gouged edge of the door jamb. But nothing else had been disturbed; the back door was as firmly locked as she had left it, and the front door still had its chain in place. So she didn’t call the police. Leave it till tonight, she thought muzzily as she went upstairs and undressed. After I get back from the breeders. Then I’ll call the police – or get Peter to do it. He’ll be back tonight – and she rubbed her face wearily at that thought and pushed it to the back of her mind. Worry about Peter tonight, when he got home. That would be soon enough.

  She slept remarkably heavily, after a hot shower, and woke with her pulses thumping with terror when the alarm clock went off at a quarter to twelve. For a moment she lay there, staring at the bright square of the window, too confused to know where she was or why she was there; one part of her mind knew it was midday, while another denied it, and she thought crazily, am I ill? and then, at last, remembered and lay still for another moment or two to let the rush of adrenalin subside before she got out of bed.