A River Town (39 page)

“Wait here, Winnie. Sit still till I fetch Erson.”

“How did you know Erson’s our physician?” asked Winnie.

“I’m a prophet, Mrs. Malcolm.”

She shook her head at this silly claim.

He chose to rush out by the corridor, the dining room, pantry, back verandah. Hustling through the side garden with its rose trellises, he inspected his shirt inside his coat, fearful of some sudden infestation. He did not have time for a proper survey. He removed Pee Dee’s feed bag, climbed aboard, took the brake off and screamed, “Yoa!” at the horse while desperately shaking the reins. Pee Dee broke out into a grudging canter.

“You are an utter uncooperative bastard!” Tim screamed at him.

The horse began to trot all at once. “Good fellow,” sang Tim. “Good fellow!”

The downhill slope helped. So, reaching Dr. Erson’s surgery. Leaving the horse and jogging in panic-stricken, Mrs. Malcolm’s mad spittle-ridden kiss sitting in his mouth. There were women and children waiting on chairs. He jiggled a little bell on a table in the centre of the room and Mrs. Erson came in from the hallway. He muttered a request to see the doctor on a pressing matter. She frowned but was unwilling to disturb her husband. Yet Tim did not want to utter the word in the room where people waited with daily twinges to see the doctor. How could
plague
safely be spoken? Later he would not be sure how he managed to speak and achieve these things. He remembered being taken to the surgery and telling Erson of the series of signs he’d had in Ernie’s house. And
Erson frowning away, a cloud crossing his face. Tim was after all the man who’d ridden to the plague camp, the man too foolish to shoot an unruly horse. He should be the subject of reports from other people, you could see Erson thinking. He should not be reporting on others.

Even as he spoke, Tim was very taken with this question too—how would Ernie Malcolm let him off the hooks of credit and repute if he recklessly called doctors to the house? If Primrose had flu, the cat distemper, Winnie merely gin?

Tim thanked the doctor for hearing him out and said he would continue with the day’s work. There were many to be seen about yesterday’s tragedy.

“No,” said Erson. “Tim, listen, you must return to Malcolms’ for now.”

“I have a day’s work,” Tim protested. “And a letter to post.”

“No, I beg you, Tim. Go back to the Malcolms’ for the moment, until we see. I can’t imagine you’ll be kept long. But you are what is called a contact now.”

Tim flinched at this idea. That house in West on Showground Hill. It seemed a possible sepulchre to him.

“So go back there for now,” Erson said. “Just until we are sure. This is likely just a fever. But if it were not, you could kill your wife and children and other citizens with a mere visit.”

“I understand,” Tim insisted, flinching. Did Erson believe what others said and expect anarchy of him? “I am as reasonable as the next fellow.”

“I am pleased to hear that, since the police have extraordinary power in this matter.”

In all bloody matters. Yet how dismal he felt, how lost.

Erson began writing. Then offering Tim a note. “One thing you can do, Tim. I must go
quam primum
to the Malcolms’. But you could take this to Ernie. Don’t be tempted to stop on the way, and don’t stand too close to people. I trust you in this. If, as we hope, it’s nothing, you’ll be home by night.”

So Dr. Erson to the Malcolm house, Tim to Ernie’s office in Smith Street. By Clyde Street to avoid a sight of the store, to avoid being tempted to call to Kitty, or to be delayed by a palavering Offhand
or Habash. Into Smith Street by the back route, far from the Post Office. He abandoned Pee Dee and the cart, ran up the stairs at the side of Ernie’s office block and so presented himself at a non-infective distance from the desk of flash, robust Miss Pollack of East, Ernie’s secretary. Perhaps Miss Pollack was the trouble between Ernie and Winnie.

A matter of great urgency, he told her. Bugger the mistrust on her face. “Dr. Erson wants to see Mr. Ernie Malcolm immediately at home.” Just watch her now abandon haughtiness for dismay.

She went inside, and then Ernie himself appeared in the door of his office, his brow lowered, lips pushed forward, ready to ward off Fenian ambushes and pleas.

“You needn’t put on any sort of face, Ernie,” Tim told him. “There’s sickness in your house.”

“Winnie?” he asked as if he already expected it and was half-pleased it had come.

“Primrose at the moment.”

“A sickness, Mr. Shea?”

“Erson’s gone up there to put a name to it. You and I have to go too.”

“You? Why so?”

“Here’s a note from Dr. Erson. I am what he calls a contact, Ernie. You would be too. Better not to argue but to go.”

Ernie read the page Erson had written and at once briskly fetched his coat and hat, as if he had no unfinished business at all. He did not speak to Miss Pollack as he left.

Tim and Ernie joined now in a mutual rush for the Showground Hill. Urging Pee Dee, Tim arrived in sight of Ernie, who had drawn up beside the doctor’s neat pony cart. Saying nothing at all in farewell to his horse, Tim walked freely through the central gate and so entered the house by the front door. He could see and hear Mrs. Malcolm sneezing hectically, jolting the dazed cat she cradled.

Tim and Ernie stood separate by the drawing room door and watched the kneeling Dr. Erson attend to Primrose. As the doctor raised his head, Tim saw with alarm that he wore a white linen mask and white gloves, and this highly serious combination was
somehow more shocking than if it had been spotted in one of the town’s other two more sombre, less musical physicians.

“You must lay down that cat, Mrs. Malcolm,” Dr. Erson told Winnie through his mask. Tim thought he sounded a little dismayed, as if a sick cat and a fevered black woman were for the moment beyond his powers of containment.

“Tim, fetch me another cushion from the sofa,” he called. As Tim took the cushion and approached Primrose, Erson reached his arm for it in an exaggerated way.

“Thank you, Tim,” called cracked tragic Winnie, stifling another sneeze, and clumsily winking. A reference perhaps to the letter. “It’s just as well you’re here.”

It was fortunate therefore Erson had other tasks for Ernie, sent him off to call over the garden fence, asking his neighbour loudly to send his two boys, the Woodbury twins, for the police and the district ambulance. With the physician’s eyes tracking him, Tim followed Ernie as far as the back door, and watched from there. Contemplating whether to flee. And so carry plague to Kitty.

Tim returned to the living room. Erson got up from Primrose’s side, and murmured to him. “Cannot pretend it isn’t serious, Tim. No reason you should develop the disease though. You have not had close contact. Nothing to do other than wait out quarantine. Seven to perhaps ten days I fear.”

“Dear God,” Tim said. Seven days would ruin him. But he was appalled too that Winnie Malcolm had kissed him so moistly for so long. Did that make him a close contact? Closer than Ernie who perhaps hadn’t been kissed for some time? How would a man confess that sort of distinction to Erson?

Caught so deep in this poisonous house, he covered his mouth with his hand for a time. That could not however be kept up.

Ernie was waiting outside in the front garden now. Tim could see him pacing, pausing by bushes he seemed to find unfamiliar. Someone else’s garden. Winnie’s.

“Are you making any headway with Primrose, Dr. Erson?” said Winnie, her nose snuffling.

Erson looked at Tim. Primrose’s gasping, you would have thought, was evidence enough. “She is very ill,” he told Winnie.
“We’ll leave her here on the floor for the moment. For her comfort.”

Winnie intoned:

“That’s Alfred Lord Tennyson, isn’t it?” asked Erson.

“My dearest mother died of an extreme fever,” said Winnie. “Far away, you know. Melbourne. Do you remember that? The typhus outbreak of the Eighties? You may have heard of it. Doctors told my father it was remarkable for striking down some of the better types of people.”

“I’ve read of it,” said Erson, frowning down at Primrose. But you knew straight away he hadn’t really read of it.

Winnie said, “My mother was out shopping with her maid in Melbourne when caught by one of those quite terrible summer storms which bring the temperature falling. The maid insisted on running into some hovel in the city and coming out with an aunt’s coat. My mother was grateful for it even though the garment wasn’t of the cleanest. We surmised it was then she suffered the fatal lice bite.”

Still nursing the cat, Winnie began to shed gentle tears, no frenzy in them. An orphan modestly requiring of God the causes of extreme events.

“The fatal bite,” she reflected. “You know, I didn’t like Primrose. Ernie’s choice. I wish her no harm but do not like her. Do you think God is mocking me now, Dr. Erson?”

She seemed at that moment just about ready to fall. Erson seized on this helplessness of hers. “Sit down now in that tall-backed chair, dear lady. That’s exactly right. I would like you to place that cat of yours on the floor at your feet.”

In both respects—to Tim’s surprise—she obeyed him. Erson rose and walked towards her then, making hushing sounds until her tears ceased. He did not approach too closely though. Looking down, he surveyed from his full height the cat and its patchy coat.

“Make her some tea, Tim,” asked the physician through his mask. “Could you do that?”

Tim moved to do it. Wishing to prove his promptness to the doctor who thought him suspect for visiting the plague camp and failing to send Pee Dee to the knackers. But before going, Tim stepped up close to the doctor. “I was hugged and much breathed on by Mrs. Malcolm,” he confided. “Not her fault of course—you see how she is.”

Erson shook his head. “God, Tim, you’re quite a lad,” he said softly.

Tim feared he’d betrayed Winnie somehow. “No, I was kissed when she was upset. I didn’t choose it, and she didn’t either in this awful distress. Something disordered in her, you see.”

Erson looked at Tim with something far too much like pleading. “Come with me then. I’ll have you gargle. It might be of some use.”

Leaving drowsing Winnie and Primrose, they went out the back and found the fire in the cookhouse was out. And so no tea. For who had the spare intent to get a fire going in the stove on such a morning. The doctor took what seemed to be carbolic from his bag and mixed some with cold water from the tank. Wrigglers in it just like the last water he’d drunk at the Malcolms’, but the carbolic made them frantic.

Erson watched Tim gargle and spit by the cookhouse door. He seemed still to be weighing Tim. To hell with that!

“I haven’t caused this, you know,” Tim told the doctor. “And I was kissed and held firmly. All against my will.”

But he remembered what some could describe as earlier desire, and his face burned.

Erson said, “I don’t so much want to be here, deciding on you one way or another. But you were the one who came to me. You could have gone to Dr. Casement or Dr. Gabriel, but came to me!”

“But now we need to be quarantined. Not you though?”

Erson’s eyes above the mask considered him in sorrow. That was worse than anger. “I will not go home again from the hospital until your quarantine period is done with. The other Macleay doctors will look after my normal patients. I will be on call for you
alone. I shall need to be bathed and my clothes fumigated just as with you, Tim.”

Nothing to be said then. Nothing to be hoped for. Except Tim did say, “I didn’t understand. You’ll find me a good patient.”

They returned to the living room where Winnie drowsed and Primrose raved. Fragments of words came out. Or perhaps the other, half-remembered language.

Outside in the garden, Ernie had stopped pacing. Through the windows it could be seen that Hanney had arrived on a police mount. He was dressed not as Tim had seen him emerge from the Armidale Road an age past—not in cavalryman’s breeches, but in the usual dusty navy blue. Erson rushed across the room and lowered his mask with his white glove to call orders through an opened pane.

“Please, Ernie. Come inside now. Constable, don’t you come in but wait there.”

Hanney paused on the garden path and saw Tim behind Erson. Tim didn’t doubt he’d been spotted. It was clear in the slow triumph of the constable, the way he shook his head. Not surprised to see Shea his humiliator in the matter of plague camps. Now at the plague’s centre. He stepped a few paces closer, took his hat off and watched hard.

“That’s Shea the grocer in there?” he called. The presumption of guilt. Suspicion confirmed. And so on.

Erson cried, “Exactly,” before adjusting his mask. Hanney stared a little longer. Looking on Tim as familiar and instigator to all the tragedies—Albert, Missy, Lucy, and now perhaps, the worst of all.

“Thank you, constable,” cried Dr. Erson. “You could wait by the gate for the district ambulance!”

Meanwhile Ernie stepped listlessly up onto the verandah. The far-off river could be seen violet behind him. He paused on the verandah and came in then, opening and closing the door, and appeared in the living room. Self-imprisoned on his hearth.

Watching him now, Tim felt an enlarged sense of damnation, of the separation of Hanney’s normal dusty police blue from his own grey cloth coat.

All the unmade and unmakeable calls—Kitty, Mrs. Sutter, Hector,
customers—in turn itching in him. Ernie called to his wife. “Are you feeling not too badly, dear?”

But Winnie did not answer, though you could hear her shifting in her chair. Dr. Erson had crossed the living room to approach the corner table. He picked up one of the china plates and inspected it.

“Winnie’s new set,” cried Ernie, and when Erson did nothing more than nod, Ernie turned to Tim. “What were you doing here anyhow? Drumming up business or pouring the bloody gin into a man’s wife?”

“I asked your wife to intercede for me. Tell you that I’d asked for nothing more than to be paid. Three months’ credit is enough, Ernie. And while we are bloody at it, I have written a statement I wanted to deliver to you.”