After a long pause she said: “What will you understand?”
A few days later, when M. appeared in my surgery, I turned upon him furiously. I refused to treat him. I had not meant to behave like this. But at the sight of his helpless face something exploded inside me. It was no longer a case of professional annoyance. I felt I must be free of him as one feels sometimes one must break off a harmful relationship, sever a tie one should never have begun. “Out!” I said, “I’ve had enough! Out!” He looked at me with a kind of ingenuous disbelief. This made me all the more severe. “Out! I don’t want to see you again!” I could feel my face was flushed and I was losing control. “But — my pain is real, Doctor,” he reiterated his old cry. “No, your pain is not real,” I said emphatically. “If it were real, you would not be concerned whether it were real or not.” This made me feel more in command. One of my hands was on M.’s shoulder pressing him towards the door. I opened it and all but pushed him out. “Go, will you? I don’t want to see you again!”
It was a dark evening in mid-winter. A light over my surgery door lit up the gravel path. He walked away, but paused momentarily, after three or four steps, to look back at me over his shoulder. And as he did so I suddenly had a strange, intense memory from when I was a boy. I was no more than eleven. It was one warm summer Sunday when all the family was in the garden. I had gone indoors into the kitchen for some reason and found our old tom cat Gus dead on the floor. It was lying on the tiles with its legs straight out beside it. I knew it was dead, but I had never encountered death in such a tangible form before. I was frightened. But what frightened me was not so much the dead cat itself but the fact that I was the first to discover it, so that in some way its death was tied up with me, I had responsibilities towards it. I did not know what to do. I simply retreated into the garden, pretending to have seen nothing and trying to hide my state of mind, till someone else made the discovery. But, as I crept out of the kitchen door and down the side path, I had looked back, involuntarily, as if in some way the dead cat might rise up to expose my guilt and cowardice, like the ghost of a murdered corpse.
This memory flashed through my mind as M. departed, but not in the usual way of such memories, as if you see everything again, through your own eyes. I seemed to be looking at myself, from the outside, as a young boy, just as in reality I was now looking at M.
I returned to my desk and sat down. “What on earth was all that about?” said my receptionist, coming in from the little office adjoining my surgery. The shouting must have penetrated almost to the waiting room. “It’s all right Susan. It’s okay. Give me a moment or so, would you, before you send the next one in.” She went out again. I sat at my desk for several minutes with my head in my hands. My surgery is built projecting back from the side of the house so that the rear windows of the house are visible, obliquely, from it. Similarly, by looking from the house one can see the windows of the surgery. I drew back the blinds above my desk and looked at the lit ground floor windows where I knew Barbara would be. I wanted her to appear. Then I drew a breath and pressed the buzzer on my desk which was a signal to call the next patient from the waiting room.
When surgery was over that evening I locked up at once and went straight through to my wife. I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her protectively. But somehow she forestalled me. “What’s the matter?” she said. She was standing in the hallway drying her hands with a kitchen towel. Perhaps I still looked agitated from my outburst with M. She came towards me. She guided me through to the living room. “Here, you sit down for a while, you don’t look so good.” I was so surprised by this that I let myself be led. During the early years of our marriage when it became clear that the difference in our ages would have its effect, my wife had sought a new interpretation of her role. She had seen herself, at some time in the future, as the younger, stronger partner, keeping a watchful, soothing eye over a busy, older husband, guarding him against the strains of over-work. I had resolved that she would never have the opportunity to do this. She motioned me towards a chair. I thought: This is ridiculous, it is some kind of trick. I am the doctor: She is saying I look unwell. It is I who was about to comfort her; it is she who needs rest. As she pressed me to sit down I suddenly thrust her hands off me. “I’m okay, for God’s sake.” She looked at me piercingly. “All right then,” she said, and her expression went grim and hollow.
Later that evening it struck me why it seemed I sometimes recognized M.’s face. His face was like the face of one of the corpses we had dissected in anatomy classes when I was a student. I remembered it because nearly all the corpses used by medical schools are of old people. I did not suffer myself from the attacks of squeamishness which afflict most medical students in the dissecting room. But this corpse, of a young, slim-built man, made me pause. The anatomy lecturer had joked about it. “Your age, eh Collins?”
It’s the same face, I thought. But I dismissed the notion from my mind.
Two or three days after that I received a telephone call which made my heart sink. It was from a young woman who said she was speaking on behalf of M. She said she had a room in the house in which M. lived. M. was ill. He had attracted the attention of other people in the building and given them my number. I thought: Of course, the inevitable ploy. Now he is forbidden my surgery. It was impossible to explain my position over the telephone, impossible, too, to say outright that I had no intention of visiting M. I said that I would try to fit in a call later that afternoon. It was then about eleven in the morning. In my anger I did not even go through the usual practice of asking for a description of symptoms.
“He seems bad, Doctor, don’t you think you should come at once?”
I was tempted to say, “It’s all an act, you stupid girl, don’t let him fool you,” but I didn’t. Her voice seemed genuinely imploring. I said, briskly, instead: “Look, I’m a busy man, I can’t come before four — all right?” And slammed the receiver down.
I had in fact several calls to make that day. Some were of a quite serious nature, none were, strictly, urgent. I knew I had a duty to deal with an emergency first. Some emergency! My only difficulty lay in deciding whether I should go to M.’s at all. I did not make up my mind until I had finished my other calls. Usually I like to complete my rounds by four so that I can have a moment’s peace before evening surgery at five. It was nearly a quarter past four when I turned the car round and headed in the direction of M.’s. I knew there could be unpleasant consquences for a doctor who refuses a call, even a false alarm, where third parties are concerned. I arrived at M.’s address — one of a row of large, ugly Victorian houses with basements — at about half-past. It was almost dark. More than one person seemed to be waiting for me as the door was opened: a girl with frizzed hair and glasses whom I took to be the telephone caller, a tall, laconic West Indian, a middle-aged man in a blue cardigan who appeared from a room at the rear, another woman, on the stairs, leaning over the banisters. I knew at once they were hostile. The woman on the stairs, who was furthest from view, spoke first:
“You’re too bloody late mate!”
The girl in glasses explained: “We called an ambulance.”
“You did what?”
“It left half an hour ago — we were really worried.”
“Well what was wrong for God’s sake?”
“Now he asks,” said the West Indian, looking me up and down. “Five hours,” he added, “five fuckin’ hours for the doctor to come.”