The Citadel (41 page)

‘But why?’

‘Why not? We can afford it. We’re getting on, you know, Chris. Yes!’ He lit a cigarette and turned to her with every sign of satisfaction. ‘In case you may not be aware of the fact, my dear little schoolmarm from Drineffy, we are rapidly getting rich.’

She did not answer his smile. She felt her body, peaceful and warm in the sunshine, chill suddenly. She began to pick at a tuft of grass, to twine it foolishly with a tassel of the rug. She said slowly:

‘Dear, do we really want to be rich? I know I don’t! Why all this talk about money? When we had scarcely any we were – oh! we were deliriously happy. We never talked of it then. But now we never talk of anything else.’

He smiled again, in a superior manner.

‘After years of tramping about in slush, eating sausage and soused herrings, taking dog’s abuse from pigheaded committees, and attending miners’ wives in dirty back bedrooms, I propose, for a change, to ameliorate our lot. Any objections?’

‘Don’t make a joke of it, darling. You usen’t to talk that way. Oh! Don’t you see, don’t you see, you’re falling a victim to the very system you used to run down, the thing you used to hate.’ Her face was pitiful in its agitation. ‘Don’t you remember how you used to speak of life, that it was an attack on the unknown, an assault uphill – as though you had to take some castle that you knew was there, but couldn’t see, on the top –’

He muttered uncomfortably.

‘Oh! I was young then – foolish. That was just romantic talk. You look round, you’ll see that everybody’s doing the same thing – getting together as much as they can! It’s the only thing to do.’

She took a shaky breath. She knew that she must speak now or not at all.

‘Darling! It isn’t the only thing. Please listen to me. Please! I’ve been so unhappy at this – the change in you. Denny saw it too. It’s dragging us away from one another. You’re not the Andrew Manson I married. Oh! If only you’d be as you used to be.’

‘What have I done?’ he protested irritably. ‘Do I beat you, do I get drunk, do I commit murder? Give me one example of my
crimes.’

Desperately, she replied:

‘It isn’t the obvious things, it’s your whole attitude, darling. Take that cheque Ivory sent you, for instance. It’s a small matter on the surface perhaps, but underneath – oh, if you take it underneath it’s cheap and grasping and dishonest.’

She felt him stiffen, then he sat up, offended, glaring at her!

‘For God’s sake! Why bring that up again. What’s wrong with my taking it?’

‘Can’t you see?’ All the accumulated emotion of the past months overwhelmed her, stifling her arguments, causing her suddenly to burst into tears. She cried hysterically, ‘For God’s sake, darling. Don’t, don’t sell yourself!’

He ground his teeth, furious with her. He spoke slowly, with cutting deliberation.

‘For the last time! I warn you to stop making a neurotic fool of yourself. Can’t you try to be a help to me, instead of a hindrance, nagging me every minute of the day!’

‘I haven’t nagged you.’ She sobbed. ‘I’ve wanted to speak before, but I haven’t.’

‘Then don’t.’ He lost his temper and suddenly shouted. ‘ Do you hear me.
Don’t.
It’s some complex you’ve got. You talk as if I was some kind of dirty crook. I only want to get on. And if I want money it’s only a means to an end. People judge you by what you are, what you have. If you’re one of the have nots you get ordered about. Well, I’ve had enough of that in my time. In future I’m going to do the ordering. Now do you understand. Don’t even mention this damned nonsense to me again.’

‘All right, all right,’ she wept. ‘ I won’t. But I tell you – some day you’ll be sorry.’

The excursion was ruined for them, and most of all for her. Though she dried her eyes and gathered a large bunch of primroses, though they spent another hour on the sunny slope and stopped on the way down at the Lavender Lady for tea, though they spoke, in apparent amity, of ordinary things, all the rapture of the day was dead. Her face, as they drove through the early darkness, was pale and stiff.

His anger turned gradually to indignation. Why should Chris of all people set upon him! Other women, and charming women too, were enthusiastic at his rapid rise.

A few days later Frances Lawrence rang him up. She had been away, spending the winter in Jamaica – he had several times in the past two months had letters from the Myrtle Bank Hotel – but now she was back, eager to see her friends, radiating the sunshine she had absorbed. She told him gaily she wanted him to see her before she lost her sunburn.

He went round to tea. As she had inferred, she was beautifully tanned, her hands and slender wrists, her spare interrogative face stained as a faun’s. The pleasure of seeing her again was intensified extraordinarily by the welcome in her eyes, those eyes which were indifferent to so many persons and which were, with their high points of light, so friendly to him.

Yes, they talked as old friends. She told him of her trip, of the coral gardens, the fishes seen through the glass-bottomed boats, of the heavenly climate. He gave her, in return, an account of his progress. Perhaps some indication of his thoughts crept into his words for she answered lightly:

‘You’re frightfully solemn and disgracefully prosy. That’s what happens to you when I’m away. No! Frankly I think it’s because you’re doing too much.
Must
you keep on with all this surgery work? For my part I should have thought it time for you to take a room up West – Wimpole Street or Welbeck Street for instance – and do your consulting there.’

At this point her husband entered, tall, lounging, mannered. He nodded to Andrew, whom he now knew fairly well – they had once or twice played bridge at the Sackville Club – and gracefully accepted a cup of tea.

Though he protested cheerfully that he would not for anything disturb them, Lawrence’s entrance interrupted the serious turn of the conversation. They began to discuss, with considerable amusement, the latest junketing of Rumbold-Blane.

But half an hour later, as Andrew drove back to Chesborough Terrace, Mrs Lawrence’s suggestion firmly occupied his mind. Why shouldn’t he take a consulting-room in Welbeck Street? The time was clearly ripe for it. He wouldn’t give up anything of his Paddington practice – the surgery was far too profitable a concern to abandon lightly. But he could easily combine it with a room up West, use the better address for his correspondence, have the heading on his notepaper, his bills.

The thought sparkled within him, nerved him to greater conquest. What a good sort Frances was, just as helpful as Miss Everett and infinitely more charming, more exciting! Yet he was on excellent terms with her husband. He could meet his eye steadily. He needn’t come skulking out of the house like some low boudoir hound. Oh! friendship was a great thing!

Without saying anything to Christine he began to look for a convenient consulting-room up West. And when he found one, about a month later, it gave him great satisfaction to declare in assumed indifference, over the morning paper:

‘By the way – you might care to know – I’ve taken a place in Welbeek Street now. I shall use it for my better-class consultations.’

The room at 57a Welbeck Street gave Andrew a new surge of triumph – I’m there, he secretly exulted, I’m there at last! Though not large, the room was well lit by a bay window and situated on the ground floor, a distinct advantage, since most patients hated to climb stairs. Moreover, although he shared the waiting-room with several other consultants whose neat plates shone beside his own on the front door, this consulting-room was exclusively his own.

On the 19th of April when the lease was signed, Hamson accompanied him as he went round to take possession. Freddie had proved extraordinarily helpful in all the preliminaries and had found him a useful nurse, a friend of the woman whom he employed at Queen Anne Street. Nurse Sharp was not beautiful. She was middle-aged, with a sour, vaguely ill-used, yet capable expression. Freddie explained Nurse Sharp concisely:

‘The last thing a fellow wants is a pretty nurse. You know what I mean, old man. Fun is fun. But business is business. And you can’t combine the two. We none of us are in this for our health. As a damned hard-headed fellow you’ll appreciate that. As a matter of fact I’ve got a notion you and I are going to come pretty close together now you’ve moved alongside me.’

While Freddie and he stood discussing the arrangement of the room, Mrs Lawrence unexpectedly appeared. She had been passing and came in, gaily, to investigate his choice. She had an attractive way of turning up casually, of never appearing to obtrude herself. Today she was especially charming in a black coat and skirt with a necklet of rich brown fur about her throat. She did not stay long but she had ideas, suggestions for decoration, for the window hangings and the curtains behind his desk, far more tasteful than the crude plannings of Freddie and himself.

Bereft of her vivacious presence the room was suddenly empty. Freddie gushed:

‘You’re a lucky devil, if ever I met one. She’s a nice thing.’ He grinned enviously. ‘What did Gladstone say in eighteen-ninety about the surest way to advance a man’s career.’

‘I don’t know what you’re driving at.’

Nevertheless when his room was finished he had to agree with Freddie and with Frances, who arrived to view her completed scheme, that it struck exactly the right note – advanced yet professionally correct. Consultations in these surroundings made three guineas seem a right and reasonable fee.

He had not many patients at the start. But by dint of writing politely to every doctor who sent him cases to the Chest Hospital – letters relating, naturally, to these hospital cases and their symptoms – he soon had a network of filaments reaching out all over London which began to bring private patients to his door. He was a busy man these days, dashing in his new Vitesse saloon between Chesborough Terrace and the Victoria, between the Victoria and Welbeck Street, with a full round of visits in addition and always his packed surgery, often running as late as ten o’clock at night.

The tonic of success braced him for everything, tingled through his veins like a gorgeous elixir. He found time to run round to Rogers to order another three suits, then to a shirtmaker in Jermyn Street Hamson had recommended. His popularity at the hospital was increasing. True, he had less time to devote to his work in the outpatient department, but he told himself that what he sacrificed in time he made up in expertness. Even to his friends he developed a speedy brusqueness, rather taking, with his ready smile: ‘I must go, old fellow, simply rushed off my legs.’

One Friday afternoon five weeks after his installation at Welbeck Street an elderly woman came to consult him about her throat. Her condition was no more than a simple laryngitis but she was a querulous little person and she seemed anxious for a second opinion. Mildly injured in his pride, Andrew reflected to whom he should send her. It was ridiculous to think of her wasting the time of a man like Sir Robert Abbey. Suddenly his face cleared as he thought of Hamson round the corner. Freddie had been extremely kind to him lately. He might as well ‘ pick up’ the three guineas as some ungrateful stranger. Andrew sent her along with a note to Freddie.

Three quarters of an hour later she came back, in quite a different humour, soothed and apologetic, satisfied with herself, with Freddie and – most of all – with him.

‘Excuse me for coming back, doctor. I only wanted to thank you for the trouble you’ve taken with me. I saw Doctor Hamson and he confirmed everything you said. And he – he told me the prescriptions you gave me simply couldn’t be improved on.’

In June Sybil Thornton’s tonsils came out. They were to a certain extent enlarged, and lately, in the
Journal
, suspicion had been thrown upon tonsillar absorption in its bearing upon the etiology of rheumatism. Ivory did the enucleation with tedious care.

‘I prefer to go slow with these lymphoid tissues,’ he said to Andrew as they washed up. ‘I daresay you’ve seen people whip them out.
I
don’t work that way.’

When Andrew received his cheque from Ivory – again it came by post – Freddie was with him. They were frequently in and out of each other’s consulting-rooms. Hamson had promptly returned the ball by sending Andrew a nice gastritis in return for the laryngitis case. By this time, in fact, several patients had found their way, with notes, between Welbeck and Queen Anne Streets.

‘You know, Manson,’ Freddie now remarked. ‘ I’m glad you’ve chucked your old dog-in-the-manger, holy-willy attitude. Even now, you know,’ he squinted across Andrew’s shoulder at the cheque, ‘you’re not getting all the juice out of the orange. You hang in with me, my lad, and you’ll find your fruit more succulent.’

Andrew had to laugh.

That evening, as he drove home, he was in an unusually light-hearted mood. Finding himself without cigarettes he drew up and dashed into a tobacconist’s in Oxford Street. Here, as he came through the door he suddenly observed a woman loitering at an adjacent window. It was Blodwen Page.

Though he recognised her at once, she was sadly altered from the bustling mistress of Bryngower. No longer erect, her figure had a listless droop, and the eye which she turned upon him when he addressed her was apathetic, indifferent.

‘It is Miss Page,’ he went up to her. ‘ I ought to say Mrs Rees now, I suppose. Don’t you remember me? Doctor Manson.’

She took him in, his well-dressed and prosperous air. She sighed:

‘I remember you, doctor. I hope you’re very well.’ Then, as though afraid to linger, she turned to where a few yards along the pavement a long bald-headed man impatiently awaited her. She concluded apprehensively, ‘I’ll have to go now, doctor. My husband’s waiting.’

Andrew observed her hurry off, saw Rees’s thin lips shape themselves to the rebuke: ‘What d’you mean – keeping me waiting!’ while she submissively bent her head. For an instant he was conscious of the bank manager’s cold eye directed blankly upon himself. Then the pair moved off and were lost in the crowd.

Andrew could not get the picture out of his head. When he reached Chesborough Terrace and entered the front room he found Christine knitting there, with his tea – which she had rung for at the sound of his car – set out upon a tray. He glanced at her quickly, sounding her. He wanted to tell her of the incident, longed suddenly to end their period of strife. But when he had accepted a cup of tea, and before he could speak, she said quietly: