The Invisible Victory

I thought he was procrastinating only from blind loyalty to Wright and to Wright's hate of chemical remedies and chemists. 'I can have the "Prontosil" here in half an hour,' I counter-attacked. 'Or are you going to let my wife die?'

'Please, Elgar! You should not put things like that. You are a scientist, you surely realize that emotion is a dangerous ingredient in the making of clinical decisions.'

'But why not try it, in God's name?' I pursued arguing, through rising anger against Wright and his self-satisfied bigotism. 'Surely, it can't do any harm.'

'How can you claim that?'

'There was nothing to suggest ill-effects in any single one of those German papers.'

'The cases reported were few. And the enthusiastic research worker forgets his fatalities.'

'Isn't it worth taking the risk, just for once, that the Germans should not be bigger liars than we are?'

'Do please try and contain your language, Elgar.' Colebrook was embarrassed, annoyed and impatient with me all at once. 'I don't believe any German scientist would be deliberately misleading, even in these days of Dr Goebbels. But supposing I did give "Prontosil" to your wife? And supposing she did die? You might well blame me. Or you might well blame yourself for insisting on it. Which would be the worse for you.'

'I do insist on it. I'll sign a paper, indemnifying you.'

Colebrook said nothing for some moments. 'Very well,' he announced resignedly. 'Fetch the drug. The paper won't be necessary.'

But Rosie died. At ten o'clock on the night of Monday, March 11, 1935. Colebrook gave her the 'Prontosil', a tablet every four hours. But her blood and her body were already overwhelmed by the infection before he started.

Rosie's death was a shock to the Harley Street house. I had told no one that she was so ill. I had the impression that above and below stairs I was held to blame for it. I felt penitent, but it was penitence only through my suffering no true feeling of grief. I am not heartless, and the bell which tolls for all mankind can never make pleasant music. But I did not know her very well. I had been strongly attracted to Rosie through 'the hot, spicy smell of dirty petticoats'. I had married her because my upbringing left me with a raw sensitivity to the opinions of the world, to be driven rather than pushing. In short, not through honour but through cowardice.

Only my parents and myself went with her to Kensal Green. But poor Rosie had one valuable legacy. On the Saturday before her death her temperature steadied, she sat up with her face suffused pink from the dye and said she felt much better. She lived long enough for Colebrook to set aside his doubts and even Sir Almroth Wright's principles. He searched Germany and France for sulphonamide, dosed his own mice, and issued his own paper on the sulphonamide treatment of puerperal fever in the _Lancet _in June, 1936. A year after that, the mortality at Queen Charlotte's for the disease which killed my wife had dropped from thirty-three in a hundred to under five.

There was still Clare.

I put my problem to Colebrook. The evening of the funeral I went to his home in Chiswick Mall, which was bright with daffodils from his week-end house at Farnham in Surrey-which he had characteristically bought near Sir Almroth Wright's.

'Puerperal fever is a triple tragedy,' he told me solemnly. 'Though I've no children of my own, I do my best to sort out the domestic problems of bereaved husbands. They've sometimes two or three small ones to manage somehow or other, and often enough financial troubles into the bargain. Do you want to keep the child?'

'No.'

'Adoption may not be easy.' he remarked doubtfully. 'A lot of people these days can't run to the luxury.'

'She'll have to be put in a home, like her mother.' As he said nothing, I asked, 'Am I abnormal? I don't feel particularly attached to the child.'

'I have seen too much of the relationships between husbands and wives and their newborn babies to find any variation whatever abnormal. Do you know of anyone who might take her?'

'Not a soul.'

The Lady Almoner at Charlotte's is of course an expert on this subject. Though I'm afraid she can't perform miracles any more than I can in the wards.'

Mrs Packer saved her. She called the next morning at Arundel College. 'Jim, I have something terribly important to say,' she began earnestly as I went down from my lab to the hall. 'Can we sit down?'

I took her across to the refreshment room at Euston Station, where Clare's fate was decided.

'My husband's a solicitor, you know, and doing as well as anyone can these times,' she explained. 'As I expect you noticed at your wedding, he's…well, he's older than I am. I mean, Jim, we'd love to have her, and we can afford to look after her, and we've a new house at Hendon which is really very nice, and of course whenever you want to come and see her-'

'There's one condition.'

She swallowed, her Adam's apple bouncing in her thin neck like a ping-pong ball. 'Anything you say, Jim.'

'Clare must never have the faintest idea who her father and mother were.'

She looked flustered. 'Of course, we'd try if you really want us to. But these things do tend to slip out, and everyone in Sir Edward's house knows-'

'You must give me your promise. Your solemn promise.'

'I promise. At least, I promise I'll do my best.'

She did very well. Clare today-and Mrs Packer's is the only false name I have used in this narrative-became a bright young MP in the 1960s, but left politics to become Professor of Sociology at a university situated…shall we say, between St Louis and Oklahoma City. She is married for a second time, to an American professor who smokes a pipe, wears tweeds and goes fishing. Perhaps he wanted her to complete his English milieu. She has had three children, without even running a temperature. I was once about to be introduced to her at a party in the House of Commons, but I left in tears.

That summer of 1935 was King George the Fifth's Silver Jubilee. There were flags and tea-parties in working-class streets, royal processions, military reviews, vibrantly choral services of thanksgiving. In London, St Paul's was floodlit, at Spithead the Fleet was beflagged. Clever fellows who saw it all as a carnival to boost the National Government were quickly lost in the morass of emotion. On June 7, MacDonald departed from No 10 Downing Street, Baldwin returned. On June 27, two and a half million Britons voting in Lord Cecil's Peace Ballot stood against any military measures whatever to repel foreign aggression.

The following January had Sir Edward Tiplady on the front pages again. The King was suffering a recurrence of his old chest infection. Like Leonard Colebrook with Rosie, the doctors were against ransoming a King's life with an unknown German drug. At half past nine on the night of Monday, January 20, Lord Dawson's medical bulletin said only, The King's life is moving peacefully to its close.' The BBC fell silent, but for the ticking of a clock. The nation dropped its head. At five minutes to midnight the King died. Nobody was sure if his last words were, 'How is the Empire?' or 'Bugger Bognor'.

19

'Tonight Hitler sleeps in the Hrad?any Palace in Prague. It is time to redefine our attitudes.'

Archie said this without a shred of self-consciousness. All men become caricatures of themselves, but he achieved it younger than most. It was three years later, the evening of March 15, 1939, and the four of us were eating dinner in his Belgrave Square home. Since his father's death, he had combined the huge dining-room with the sitting-room in the modern flat-dwelling fashion, redecorating and refurnishing the rest of the place with pleasing, extravagant plainness.

'The Ides of March are come,' said David Mellors, unusually gloomily.