By the age of fifteen he was getting all the local school-girls into trouble, he was repeatedly hauled up before the magistrates’ court for petty, and not so petty, pilfering and he was obstinately incapable of holding down any of the jobs his decent and despairing foster-parents had found for him. He ended on the gallows, needless to say.
So, you see, no matter how careful you are, you can never, never be sure what kind of child you’re adopting. Breeding will out – as a doctor, no one knows better than I that that is one of the most inflexible of all biological laws. And considering how far down the road to self-destruction our marriage had already travelled, Madge and I simply couldn’t take the risk.
Then something happened which seemed heaven-sent to help us patch up our relationship. I had an aunt, a maiden lady who’d been living out her last years in Farnborough. She’d been Lady-in-Waiting to the exiled Empress Eugénie, who, on her death, left her a legacy of five thousand pounds, a legacy that was virtually intact when she herself passed on. I was her only living relative and, even though Madge and I had never what you might call cultivated her – to our eternal shame, we’d never once bothered ourselves to visit her and her little court of decrepit royal hangers-on – it was into our laps that the windfall, um, fell.
Five thousand pounds was a tidy sum in those days and while we were pondering what to do with it, I received the offer of a post as resident surgeon at the Cedars of Babylon Hospital in Ottawa, Canada. It was, so we both imagined, the miracle we’d been praying for and I accepted without hesitation.
Alas! As Thomas Carlyle, I believe, eloquently expressed it, ‘Here or Nowhere, and Now or Never, Immigrant, is thy America.’ Our roots were here, and uprooting ourselves ultimately changed nothing. I had my work to occupy me, of course, but poor Madge found the Canadians almost as chilly as their climate.
My colleagues, for instance. They’d invite us to dinner – just the once – then drop us. Not, I venture to suggest, because they didn’t care for us, or anything of that sort, only because they believed that, having once had us over, they’d done their duty by us. It was as though, you know, we were nothing more than acquaintances in transit, friends of friends, merely passing through. They’d established their own little social circles and our invasive presence must have skewed the symmetry. It would be wrong to say they treated us as interlopers. It was just that there was no room, no vacant space in their lives, left for us.
The effect on our marriage was devastating. Night after night, we’d have nothing to do but scream at one another – sometimes silently, if you know what I mean, sometimes in a whisper and sometimes, too, at the tops of our voices. And that’s when I started drinking.
Not that I was ever an alcoholic. I really wasn’t. But every evening, as I prepared to go home, I realised I was going to need a dose of Dutch courage in order to face my own wife. No, no, that’s unfair, what I’ve just said. Madge wasn’t at all to blame. It wasn’t my wife I couldn’t face, it was our marriage – or what remained of it.
Anyway, I began drinking and, worse, I went on drinking. If the city of Ottawa had nothing else to offer, it did boast a generous selection of friendly bars and I was soon propping up most of them.
Till, one day, the inevitable happened. I had to perform a Caesarean. To start with, it all looked quite unproblematic, no trickier than any other. But it turned out to require rather more drastic abdominal surgery than anyone could have foreseen and – well, to cut a long story short, I was obliged to sacrifice the baby in order to save the mother’s life.
Again I swear I made no mistake. Every paediatric surgeon in the world would have found himself in the same predicament I did, would have been faced with the same dilemma and would unquestionably – I repeat, unquestionably – have arrived at the same decision. These things happen. And they can happen to the most eminent of medical men.
The father, a Mountie, was naturally distraught at losing his son, though he was also deeply grateful to me for having returned his wife to him more or less in one piece. But then, you know, most ordinary people hold a doctor, any doctor, in such awe it goes against their instincts ever to query whether so heroic a personage, as they perceive him, could possibly have been negligent.
So it could all have passed off without any adverse reflection on me had not some nosy nurse gone straight to the Dean of the hospital to complain that, when tying on my mask, she’d smelt Scotch whisky on my breath.
Naturally, I was called into the Dean’s office where I made the point, quite calmly, that there’d been no imprudence on my part. The anaesthetist, I said, would assuredly support me in my contention that nothing more could have been done to save the child. And he did just that, except that, under the Dean’s unexpectedly pugnacious questioning, he also confessed that he, too, had had the impression, apparently from some alleged slurring of my voice, that I’d been drinking. And not, he added, for the first time.
And not for the first time. Those were the words that did for me. The Dean went off the deep end. He ordered me there and then never to darken the hospital’s door again. Initially, I fought back. I protested that I couldn’t be, that I shouldn’t be, dismissed on an anaesthetist’s word, but he refused to hear me out and, frankly, my heart was no longer in it. If I’d decided to pursue the case, it would have provoked a scandal not only for the hospital but also for me personally and I didn’t know whether a marriage already as rocky as ours could have survived all the ensuing publicity.
That, you might think, was the end of it. But no – it was neither the end nor, in a way, the worst. I have no idea who blabbed – the nurse, I daresay – but, well, there are secrets which are impossible to keep, in spite of the Hippocratic oath, and it eventually came to the ears of the Mountie and his wife that I’d been ‘dead drunk’, can you believe, in the operating-theatre.
They wrote letter after letter to the hospital’s Board of Trustees. They started to plague us with threatening telephone calls. And even though they didn’t know our home address, his being a policeman meant of course that he would have had no problem digging it out. You’ll understand, then, why Madge and I chose not to hang around.
We immediately packed our bags, fled to New York – ‘fled’, I’m afraid, is the mot juste – and booked passage on the first ship, the Zenobia, bound for Europe. Six days later we disembarked in Le Havre, that very evening found us in Paris and the following day we were Southward bound on the Blue Train.
From which point (he concluded in the same clipped and concise tone as he’d delivered his whole speech) the story becomes more Madge’s than mine. So, if I may, I’ll pass the baton to her.
Throughout her husband’s confessional, Madge Rolfe’s eyes had been so intently trained upon him you had the sense she was not just watching him, watching his face, but actually watching his lips, watching them formulate those words and phrases which might damn them for ever in the eyes of the only ‘set’ to which the two of them could any longer aspire to belong. Now at last she turned away from him towards those who had been watching and listening to him almost as intently as she had.
She cleared her throat. Then she lit a cigarette – an actress through and through, albeit an actress who’d never trodden the boards, she was using both lighter and cigarette precisely as a professional would, as Cora Rutherford herself would have done. For her they were, supremely, a couple of handy theatrical props, ones that would permit her to stall for a moment or two while she mentally rehearsed her lines and re-gathered her forces.