I stood in the hallway in my overcoat, holding my doctor’s bag. I couldn’t help thinking that all this — even the ambulance — was still some pretence, a hoax, an elaborate conspiracy to continue M.’s fraud. I didn’t want to commit the error of finding it real. The hallway was dimly lit and unheated.
Scraps of tattered lino covered the floor and stairs. Smells of cooking mingled in the air. The people in front of me were like characters in some stage thriller in which I took the role of prime suspect. Everything was strange.
I managed to hold on to myself sufficiently to say: “Look, M.’s been coming to see me for some time — I’m quite aware of his condition. Now”—I turned to the girl in glasses—“I gather it was this young lady who phoned me this morning. I’d like to talk to her — alone. I’d be grateful if you others allowed me to do so.”
They looked at me for a while as if they had no intention of moving, then, slowly, they slunk away. The West Indian said over his shoulder to the girclass="underline" “You tell him, Janie!”
We went to the girl’s room on the first floor. It was a gloomy, cluttered room, relieved by coloured rugs over the chairs and potted plants on the mantel-piece. She lit a cigarette and spoke readily but with suspicion in her voice. She described a collection of varied, incoherent symptoms — like the ones M. described to me in my surgery — which added up to nothing precise in my mind. I listened impassively. When she saw that I appeared unimpressed it became plain that she disliked me. I thought: If I could tell her.
“Any vomiting, fever — flushes, rashes?” I asked.
She shrugged as if it were my business to observe such things.
“Doctor, he was crying out in pain — he was in agony.”
“I see.”
I said that I would like to see M.’s room. I don’t know why this was important to me. She said hesitantly, “All right. It’s the one next door. I took the key when the ambulance left.”
As we moved along the passageway I asked, “Do you know him? Has he been here long?”
“Keeps to himself. Quiet. We thought he was foreign at first. We’d like to see him more but we don’t push.”
“Lonely?”
“Perhaps.”
The woman who had spoken first when I arrived appeared again on the stairs. “Poor boy, never no trouble to anyone.”
“Yes,” I said.
M.’s room was a complete contrast to what I had seen of the rest of the house. Everything smacked of neatness, cleanliness, order. The bed, along the wall, was dishevelled, but apart from this the furniture — an armchair, a coffee table, a table with two wooden chairs, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe — seemed fixed in prescribed positions and unused, as if in a room unoccupied and waiting for guests. There were no clothes or newspapers left lying about, no odds and ends on the mantel-piece. In one corner, in an alcove, there was a sink and draining board, a work-surface with two gas rings and a kettle, and cupboards above and below. All this was old, chipped and corroded, but there were no dirty plates left in the sink, no uncleared food, and the draining board was wiped clean. There was nothing in the room to indicate the life that used it — save perhaps the books, in a double row of shelves, over the bed: a small, varied collection thinly covering a wide range of topics, like the books of a schoolboy who has many subjects to learn. Amongst them I noticed, with sour satisfaction, the faded spine of an old Black’s Medical Dictionary. All this depressed me and made me uneasy. I looked around M.’s bed and opened a small bedside cupboard. I don’t know what I hoped to find — a cache of empty chemist’s bottles, the disordered notes of some amateur self-diagnosis. There was nothing. “He’s not ‘on’ anything, if that’s what you think,” said the girl, now quite open in her reproaches. We moved towards the door. Before we went out into the passage I took a last look round and I knew what made me feel uneasy, even threatened. It was the room of an innocent, a child, waiting for life to upset it.
Before I left I said to the girclass="underline" “Thank you. I’ll get in touch with the hospital. I am sorry I wasn’t here earlier but, if you’ll believe me, I don’t think there’s any real cause for alarm.”
She nodded coldly.
I drove back. I felt calm, as far as M. was concerned. But I had this forboding inside, as though for myself. I got back late to open surgery. I did not phone St. Leonard’s until six. I knew who should be the senior duty doctor in Casualty.
“Tony? It’s Alan Collins here. Have you got a patient of mine there? Name’s M.”
“Yes — we have”—the voice seemed to modify itself rapidly—“I’m afraid we have. He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
For several seconds I was unable to say anything else. I wanted to know why Tony should trick me.
“About an hour ago. Nearly a DOA case. You’re his GP?”
“But what the hell from, for Christ’s sake?”
“Well — we were rather hoping you might be able to tell us that.”
I did not tell my wife about M.’s death. For ten days or so I had to assimilate the fact of it myself, to face the autopsy reports and inquest (which could reach no certain conclusions about the causes of M.’s death, other than the immediate ones of sudden coma and respiratory failure) and the possibility of an inquiry, which was waived, into my own professional conduct. Throughout all this I had to overcome a feeling that something had cracked inside me, that some firm footing on which I had previously relied had given under me. I suppose I was suffering from shock and mental stress of a quite clinical order. I said to myself: Look at this as you would the case of some patient of yours. I became incommunicative and withdrawn. I stayed in my surgery long after evening surgery had finished. Susan noticed the change in me, so did my surgery patients, and so, of course, did Barbara. If I had told her everything and sought her comfort I dare say it would have helped. But I had already refused her attention once when she’d said I looked ill; and, besides, it was I who had said so heatedly to her, weeks ago, that there was nothing wrong with M. In any case I had become — how shall I put this? — suddenly afraid of my wife, of the fact of her pregnancy. I don’t know why. It was as if her fullness matched a void I felt in myself.
She must have seen all this only as coldness and indifference. It was February. She was nearly seven months pregnant. One night, as she lay in bed, she began to sob — long, heavy, breathless sobs, as if she had been quite abandoned. When I put my arm round her she moaned: “It’s his child, it’s his child. I know it.” Then for a long while she said nothing but only continued sobbing, the sobs growing louder into helpless groans, her face in her hands, her body shuddering. I tried not to hear the sobs. I said to myself: In a crisis you must try to ignore the pain, the cries. I sat by my wife in my pyjamas, holding her sides as if to repress her sobs. I did not know if I believed her. I said at length: “I understand.” And then, after another intervaclass="underline" “I wish it had been my child.” She raised herself up and turned to me — her tears made her look like something alien, like a monster: “It would have been worse if it was your child.” And she held her face, taut, in front of mine until I looked away.
In the surgery the next morning I avoided the eyes of my patients. I wrote out prescriptions rapidly and tore them off the pad. Perhaps they saw that something was wrong. I wanted surgery to be over; but it was the dead, worn-out end of winter — endless “chests,” coughs and rheumatic pains. After perhaps fifteen visitors had left I pressed my buzzer yet again. I had got up to return something to my filing cabinet. When the door was opened my head was lowered. I said, “One moment,” then turned towards the person who had entered. I said, “What?” and stepped forward. And it must have been then that I collapsed, for I remember nothing else, save being helped off the floor and into my chair, my patients in the waiting room being sent away, Susan bending over me, and, later, Barbara.