The Citadel (3 page)

Manson’s nature was extraordinarily intense. Probably he derived this from his mother, a Highland woman who, in her childhood, had watched the Northern lights leap through the frosted sky from her home in Ullapool. His father, John Manson, a small Fifeshire farmer, had been solid, painstaking and steady. He had never made a success of the land and when he was killed in the Yeomanry in the last year of the War, he had left the affairs of the little steading in a sad muddle. For twelve months Jessie Manson had struggled to run the farm as a dairy, even driving the float upon the milk-round herself when she felt Andrew was too busy with his books to do so. Then the cough which she had unsuspectedly endured for a period of years turned worse and suddenly she surrendered to the lung complaint which ravages that soft skinned, dark haired type.

At eighteen Andrew found himself alone, a first year student at St Andrews University, carrying a scholarship worth £40 a year, but otherwise penniless. His salvation had been the Glen Endowment, that typically Scottish foundation which in the naïve terminology of the late Sir Andrew Olen ‘invites deserving and necessitous students of the baptismal name of Andrew to apply for loans not exceeding £50 a year for five years provided they are conscientiously prepared to reimburse such loans whenever they have qualified.’

The Glen Endowment, coupled with some gay starvation, had sent Andrew through the remainder of his course at St Andrews, then on to the Medical Schools in the city of Dundee. And gratitude to the Endowment, allied to an inconvenient honesty, had sent him hurrying down to South Wales – where newly qualified assistants could command the highest remuneration – to a salary of £250 a year, when in his heart he would have preferred a clinical appointment at the Edinburgh Royal and an honorarium of one tenth that sum.

And now he was in Drineffy, rising, shaving, dressing, all in a haze of worry over his first patient. He ate his breakfast quickly, then ran up to his room again. There he opened his bag and took out a small blue leather case. He opened the case and gazed earnestly at the medal inside, the Hunter Gold Medal, awarded annually at St Andrews to the best student in clinical medicine. He, Andrew Manson, had won it. He prized it beyond everything, had come to regard it as his talisman, his inspiration for the future. But this morning he viewed it less with pride than with a queer, secret entreaty, as though trying to restore his confidence in himself. Then he hurried out for the morning surgery.

Dai Jenkins was already in the wooden shanty when Andrew reached it, running water from the tap into a large earthenware pipkin. He was a quick little whippet of a man with purple veined, hollow cheeks, eyes that went everywhere at once and the tightest pair of trousers on his thin legs that Andrew had ever seen. He greeted Manson ingratiatingly:

‘You don’t have to be so early, doctor. I can do the repeat mixtures and the certificates before you come in. Miss Page had a rubber stamp made with doctor’s signature when he was taken bad.’

‘Thanks,’ Andrew answered. ‘I’d rather see the cases myself.’ He paused, shaken momentarily from his anxiety by the dispenser’s procedure. ‘What’s the idea?’

Jenkins winked. ‘ Tastes better out of here. We know what good old aqua means, eh, doctor,
bach.
But the patients don’t. I’d look a proper fool too, wouldn’t I, them standin’ there watchin’ me fillin’ up their bottles out the tap.’

Plainly the little dispenser wished to be communicative, but here a voice rang out from the back door of the house forty yards away.

‘Jenkins!
Jenkins!
I want you – right away.’

Jenkins jumped, his nerves were apparently in a very poor state. He muttered: ‘Excuse me, doctor. There’s Miss Page callin’ me. I’ll… I’ll have to run.’

Fortunately there were few people at the morning surgery, which was over at half past ten and Andrew, presented with a list of visits by Jenkins, set out at once with Thomas in the gig. With an almost painful expectancy he told the old groom to drive direct to 7 Glydar Place.

Twenty minutes later he came out of No 7, pale, with his lips tightly compressed and an odd expression on his face. He went two doors down, into No 11, which was also on his list. From No 11 he crossed the street to No 18. From No 18 he went round the corner to Radnor Place where two further visits were marked by Jenkins as having been seen the day before. Altogether, within the space of an hour, he made seven such calls in the immediate vicinity. Five of them, including No 7 Glydar Place, which was now showing a typical rash, were clear cases of enteric. For the last ten days Jenkins had been treating them with chalk and opium. Now, whatever his own bungling efforts of the previous night had been, Andrew realised with a shiver of apprehension that he had an outbreak of typhoid fever on his hands.

The remainder of his round he accomplished as quickly as possible in a state dithering towards panic. At lunch, during which Miss Page dealt out a dish of boiled fish, which she explained frowningly, ‘I ordered it for Doctor Page but he don’t seem to fancy it somehow,’ he brooded upon the problem in frozen silence. He saw that he could get little information and no help from Miss Page. He decided he must speak to Doctor Page himself.

But when he went up to the doctor’s room the curtains were drawn and Edward lay prostrate with a pressure headache, his forehead deeply flushed and furrowed by pain. Though he motioned his visitor to sit with him a little, Andrew felt it would be cruelty to thrust this trouble upon him at present. As he rose to go, after remaining seated by the bedside for a few minutes, he had to confine himself to asking:

‘Doctor Page, if we get an infectious case, what’s the best thing to do?’

There was a pause. Page replied with closed eyes, not moving, as though the mere act of speech were enough to aggravate his migraine. ‘ It’s always been difficult. We’ve no hospital, let alone an isolation ward. If you should run into anything very nasty ring up Griffiths at Toniglan. That’s fifteen miles down the valley. He’s the district medical officer.’ Another pause, longer than before. ‘But I’m afraid he’s not very helpful.’

Reinforced by this information, Andrew hastened down to the hall and rang up Toniglan. While he stood with the receiver to his ear he saw Annie, the servant, looking at him through the kitchen door.

‘Hello! Hello! Is that Doctor Griffiths of Toniglan.’ He got through at last.

A man’s voice answered very guardedly. ‘Who wants him?’

‘This is Manson of Drineffy. Doctor Page’s assistant.’ Andrew’s tone was overpitched. ‘I’ve got five cases of typhoid up here. I want Doctor Griffiths to come up immediately.’

There was the barest pause, then with a rush the reply came back in a sing-song intonation, very Welsh and apologetic. ‘ I’m powerful sorry, doctor, indeed I am, but Doctor Griffiths has gone to Swansea. Important official business.’

‘When will he be back?’ shouted Manson. This line was bad.

‘Indeed, doctor, I couldn’t say for certain.’

‘But listen …’

There was a click at the far end. Very quietly the other had rung off. Manson swore out loud with nervous violence. ‘Damn it, I believe that was Griffiths himself.’

He rang the number again, failed to get a connection. Yet, persisting doggedly, he was about to ring again when turning, he found that Annie had advanced into the hall, her hands folded upon her apron, her eyes contemplating him soberly. She was a woman of perhaps forty-five, very clean and tidy, with a grave, enduring placidity of expression.

‘I couldn’t help but hear, doctor,’ she said. ‘You’ll never find Doctor Griffiths in Toniglan this hour of day. He do go to the golf at Swansea afternoons mostly.’

He answered angrily, swallowing a lump that hung in his throat.

‘But I think that was him I spoke to.’

‘Maybe.’ She smiled faintly. ‘When he don’t go to Swansea I’ve’eard tell he do say ’e
’ave
gone.’ She considered him with tranquil friendliness before turning away. ‘I wouldn’t waste my time on him if I was you.’

Andrew replaced the receiver with a deepening sense of indignation and distress. Cursing, he went out and visited his cases once more. When he got back it was time for evening surgery. For an hour and a half he sat in the little back-shop cubicle which was the consulting-room, wrestling with a packed surgery until the walls sweated and the place was choked with the steam of damp bodies. Miners with beat knee, cut fingers, nystagmus, chronic arthritis. Their wives, too, and their children with coughs, colds, sprains – all the minor ailments of humanity. Normally he would have enjoyed it, welcomed the quiet appraising scrutiny of these dark, sallow-skinned people with whom he felt he was on probation. But now, obsessed by the major issue, his head reeled with the impact of these trifling complaints. Yet all the time he was reaching his decision, thinking, as he wrote prescriptions, sounded chests and offered words of advice, ‘It was he who put me on to the thing. I hate him. Yes, I loathe him – superior devil – like hell. But I can’t help that, I’ll have to go to him.’

At half past nine when the last patient had left the surgery he came out of his den with resolution in his eyes.

‘Jenkins, where does Doctor Denny live?’

The little dispenser, hastily bolting the outer door for fear another straggler might come in, turned with a look of horror on his face that was almost comic.

‘You aren’t goin’ to have anything to do with that fellow, doctor? Miss Page – she don’t like him.’

Andrew asked grimly:

‘Why doesn’t Miss Page like him?’

‘For the same reason everybody don’t. ’E’s been so damn rude to her.’ Jenkins paused, then, reading Manson’s look, he added, reluctantly, ‘ Oh, well, if you ’ave to know, it’s with Mrs Seager he stops, Number Forty-nine Chapel Street.’

Out again. He had been going the whole day long yet any tiredness he might have felt was lost in a sense of responsibility, the burden of those cases, pressing, pressing, urgently upon his shoulders. His main feeling was one of relief when, on reaching Chapel Street, he found that Denny was at his lodgings. The landlady showed him in.

If Denny was surprised to see him he concealed it. He merely asked, after a prolonged and aggravating stare, ‘Well! Killed anybody yet?’

Still standing in the doorway of the warm untidy sitting-room Andrew reddened. But, making a great effort, he conquered his temper and his pride. He said abruptly:

‘You were right. It was enteric. I ought to be shot for not recognising it. I’ve got five cases. I’m not exactly overjoyed at having to come here. But I don’t know the ropes. I rang the MO and couldn’t get a word out of him. I’ve come to ask your advice.’

Denny, half slewed round in his chair by the fire, listening, pipe in mouth, at last made a grudging gesture. ‘ You’d better come in.’ With sudden irritation, ‘Oh! and for God’s sake take a chair. Don’t stand there like a Presbyterian parson about to forbid the banns. Have a drink? No! I thought you wouldn’t.’

Though Andrew stiffly complied with the request, seating himself and even, defensively, lighting a cigarette, Denny seemed in no hurry. He sat prodding the dog Hawkins with the toe of his burst slipper. But at length, when Manson had finished his cigarette, he said with a jerk of his head:

‘Take a look at that, if you like!’

On the table indicated a microscope stood, a fine Zeiss, and some slides. Andrew focused a slide then slid round the oil immersion and immediately picked up the rod-shaped clusters of the bacteria.

‘It’s very clumsily done, of course,’ Denny said quickly and cynically, as though forestalling criticism. ‘Practically botched, in fact. I’m no lab. merchant, thank God! If anything I’m a surgeon. But you’ve got to be jack-of-all-trades under our bloody system. There’s no mistake, though, even to the naked eye. I cooked them on agar in my oven.’

‘You’ve got cases too?’ Andrew asked with tense interest.

‘Four! All in the same area as yours.’ He paused. ‘And these bugs come from the well in Glydar Place.’

Andrew gazed at him, alert, burning to ask a dozen questions, realising something of the genuineness of the other man’s work, and beyond everything, overjoyed that he had been shown the focus of the epidemic.

‘You see,’ Denny resumed with that same cold and bitter irony. ‘Paratyphoid is more or less endemic here. But one day soon, very soon, we’re going to have a pretty little blaze up. It’s the main sewer that’s to blame. It leaks like the devil and seeps into half the low wells at the bottom of the town. I’ve hammered at Griffiths about it till I’m tired. He’s a lazy, evasive, incompetent, pious swine. Last time I rang him I said I’d knock his block off next time I met him. Probably that’s why he welshed on you to-day.’

‘It’s a damned shame,’ Andrew burst out, forgetting himself in a sudden rush of indignation.

Denny shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s afraid to ask the Council for anything in case they dock his wretched salary to pay for it.’

There was a silence. Andrew had a warm desire that the conversation might continue. Despite his hostility towards Denny, he found a strange stimulus in the other’s pessimism, in his scepticism, his cold and measured cynicism. Yet now he had no pretext on which to prolong his stay. He got up from his seat at the table and moved towards the door, concealing his feelings, striving to express a formal gratitude, to give some indication of his relief.

‘I’m much obliged for the information. You’ve let me see how I stand. I was worried about the origin, thought I might be dealing with a carrier, but since you’ve localised it to the well it’s a lot simpler. From now on every drop of water in Glydar Place is going to be boiled.’

Denny rose also. He growled. ‘It’s Griffiths who ought to be boiled.’ Then with a return of his satiric humour, ‘ Now, no touching thanks, doctor, if you please. We shall probably have to endure a little more of each other before this thing is finished. Come and see me any time you can bear it. We don’t have much social life in this neighbourhood.’ He glanced at the dog and concluded rudely, ‘Even a Scots doctor would be welcome. Isn’t that so, Sir John?’

Sir John Hawkins flogged the rug with his tail, his pink tongue lolling derisively at Manson.