A Burnt Out Case (27 page)

‘You can hardly say it was a happy ending for Querry.’

‘Wasn’t it? Surely he always wanted to go a bit further.’ The Superior added shyly, ‘Do you think there was anything between him and Mme Rycker?’

‘No.’

‘I wondered. Judging from Parkinson’s second article he would seem to have been a man with a great capacity – well – for what they call love.’

‘I’m not so sure of that. Nor was he. He told me once that all his life he had only made use of women, but I think he saw himself always in the hardest possible light. I even wondered sometimes whether he suffered from a kind of frigidity. Like a woman who changes partners constantly in the hope that one day she will experience the true orgasm. He said that he always went through the motions of love efficiently, even towards God in the days when he believed, but then he found that the love wasn’t really there for anything except his work, so in the end he gave up the motions. And afterwards, when he couldn’t even pretend that what he felt was love, the motives for work failed him. That was like the crisis of a sickness – when the patient has no more interest in life at all. It is then that some people sometimes kill themselves, but he was tough, very tough.’

‘You spoke just now as though he had been cured.’

‘I really think he was. He’d learned to serve other people, you see, and to laugh. An odd laugh, but it was a laugh all the same. I’m frightened of people who don’t laugh.’

The Superior said shyly, ‘I thought perhaps you meant that he was beginning to find his faith again.’

‘Oh no, not that. Only a reason for living. You try too hard to make a pattern, father.’

‘But if the pattern’s there . . . you haven’t a cheroot have you?’

‘No.’

The Superior said, ‘We all analyse motives too much. I said that once to Father Thomas. You remember what Pascal said, that a man who starts looking for God has already found him. The same may be true of love – when we look for it, perhaps we’ve already found it.’

‘He was inclined – I only know what he told me himself – to confine his search to a woman’s bed.’

‘It’s not so bad a place to look for it. There are a lot of people who only find hate there.’

‘Like Rycker?’

‘We don’t know enough about Rycker to condemn him.’

‘How persistent you are, father. You never let anyone go, do you? You’d like to claim even Querry for your own.’

‘I haven’t noticed that you relax much before a patient dies.’

They had reached the dispensary. The lepers sat on the hot cement steps waiting for something to happen. At the new hospital the ladders leant against the roof, and the last work was in progress. The roof-tree had been battered and bent by the storm, but it was held in place still by its strong palm-fibre thongs.

‘I see from the accounts,’ the Superior said, ‘that you’ve given up using vitamin tablets. Is that a wise economy?’

‘I don’t believe the anaemia comes from the D.D.S. treatment. It comes from hookworm. It’s cheaper to build lavatories than to buy vitamin tablets. That’s our next project. I mean it was to have been. How many patients have turned up today?’ he asked the dispenser.

‘About sixty.’

‘Your god must feel a bit disappointed,’ Doctor Colin said, ‘when he looks at this world of his.’

‘When you were a boy they can’t have taught you theology very well. God cannot feel disappointment or pain.’

‘Perhaps that’s why I don’t care to believe in him.’

The doctor sat down at the table and drew forward a blank chart. ‘Number one,’ he called.

It was a child of three, quite naked, with a little pot-belly and a dangling tassel and a finger stuck in the corner of his mouth. The doctor ran his fingers over the skin on the back while the child’s mother waited.

‘I know that little fellow,’ the Superior said. ‘He always came to me for sweets.’

‘He’s infected all right,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘Feel the patches here and here. But you needn’t worry,’ he added in a tone of suppressed rage, ‘we shall be able to cure him in a year or two, and I can promise you that there will be no mutilations.’

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