“Does Ernie know?”
“She had nothing more than a cough at teatime yesterday.”
The Argus and the Chronicle were unanimous in the matter of sudden onset.
“I must fetch Dr. Erson.”
“Oh, you arrange my affairs? Yet want me to speak for you!”
“Let me find a rug for Primrose.”
“Yes. Make free of my house, Mr. Shea. Go on. Do whatever you like.”
Out through a wide door and across the lobby, he found a bedroom but kept custody of his eyes as if he were being observed by Ernie and would need to justify himself. If it were simple influenza, what a fool he would be! People could rave from a mixture of influenza and laudanum. People could see fire about the heads of others.
When he came back with the rug from the base of the Malcolm bed, he was pleased to see Winnie Malcolm seated. She had lain the cat, purring and gagging by turns, on the ground.
“Look,” said Tim. “It is shedding.” There was a trail of black hairs where the thing writhed.
Winnie laughed awfully. She drew herself up in a theatrical posture. “Then you must do something, Shea! Men of action and decision. ‘Bury the Great Duke, With an Empire’s Lamentation!’ Holy God in Heaven, what a laughable crew!”
“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.