The Citadel (17 page)

‘Certificate,’ he said, without minding his manners.

‘What for?’ Andrew asked.

‘’Stagmus.’ He held out his hand. ‘The name’s Chenkin. Ben Chenkin.’

The tone alone caused Andrew to look at Chenkin with quick resentment. Even from a cursory inspection he felt convinced that Chenkin had no nystagmus. He was well aware, apart from Gadge’s hint, that some of these old pitmen ‘swung the lead on ‘stagmus’, drawing compensation money to which they were not entitled for years on end. However, he had brought his ophthalmoscope with him this evening. He would soon make sure. He rose from his seat.

‘Take your things off.’

This time it was Chenkin who asked: ‘What for?’

‘I’m going to examine you.’

Ben Chenkin’s jaw dropped. He had not been examined, so far as he could remember, in the whole of Doctor Leslie’s seven years of office. Unwillingly, sulkily, he pulled off his jacket, his muffler, his red and blue striped shirt, revealing a hairy torso swathed in adiposity.

Andrew made a long and thorough examination, particularly of the eyes, searching both retinae carefully with his tiny electric bulb. Then, sharply, he said:

‘Dress up, Chenkin.’ He sat down and, taking his pen, he began to write out a certificate.

‘Ha!’ sneered old Ben. ‘I thought you’d let us ’ave it.’

‘Next please,’ Andrew called out.

Chenkin almost snatched the pink slip from Andrew’s hand. Then he strode triumphantly from the surgery.

Five minutes later he was back, his face livid, bellowing like a bull, thrusting his way between the men seated waiting on the benches.

‘Look what he’s done on us! Let us in, will ye! Hey! What’s the meanin’ of this?’ He flourished the certificate in Andrew’s face.

Andrew affected to read the slip. It said, in his own handwriting:
This is to certify that Ben Chenkin is suffering from the effects of over indulgence in malt liquors but is perfectly fit to work. Signed A. Manson, MB.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘’Stagmus,’ shouted Chenkin. ‘Certificate for ’stagmus. You can’t play the bloody fool on us. Fifteen year us got ’stagmus!’

‘You haven’t got it now,’ Andrew said. A crowd had gathered round the open door. He was conscious of Urquhart’s head popping out curiously from the other room, of Gadge inspecting the tumult with relish through his hatch.

‘For the last time – are ye going to give us ’stagmus certificate?’ Chenkin bawled.

Andrew lost his temper.

‘No, I’m not,’ he shouted back. ‘And get out of here before I put you out.’

Ben’s stomach heaved. He looked as if he might wipe the floor with Andrew. Then his eyes dropped, he turned and, muttering profane threats, he walked out of the surgery.

The minute he was gone Gadge came out of the dispensary and shuffled across to Andrew. He rubbed his hands with melancholy delight.

‘You know who that was you just knocked off? Ben Chenkin. His son’s a big man on the Committee.’

The sensation of the Chenkin case was enormous, it hummed round Manson’s district in a flash. Some people said it was ‘a good job’ – a few went so far as ‘a damned good job’ – that Ben had been pulled up in his swindling and signed fit for work. But the majority were on Ben’s side. All the ‘compo cases’ – those drawing compensation money for disabilities – were especially bitter against the new doctor. As he went on his rounds Andrew was conscious of black looks directed towards him. And at night, in the surgery, he had to face an even worse manifestation of unpopularity.

Although nominally every assistant was allotted a district, the workmen in that district had still the right of free choice of doctor. Each man had a card and by demanding that card and handing it to another doctor he could effect a change. It was this ignominy which now began for Andrew. Every night that week men whom he had never seen dropped into his surgery – some who were disinclined for the personal encounter even sent their wives – to say, without looking at him: ‘If you don’t mind, doctor, I’ll ’ ave my card.’

The wretchedness, the humiliation of rising to extract these cards from the box on his desk, was intolerable. And every card he gave away meant ten shillings subtracted from his salary.

On Saturday night Urquhart invited him into his house. The old man, who had gone about all week with an air of self-justification on his choleric features, began by exhibiting the treasures of his forty years of practice. He had perhaps a score of yellow violins, all made by himself, hung up on his walls, but these were as nothing compared with the choice perfection of his collection of old English china.

It was a superb collection – Spode, Wedgwood, Crown Derby, and, best of all, old Swansea – they were all there. His plates and mugs, his bowls, cups and jugs, they filled every room in the house and overflowed into the bathroom where it was possible for Urquhart, when making his toilet, to survey with pride an original willow pattern tea service.

China was, in fact, the passion of Urquhart’s life, and he was an old and cunning master in the gentle art of acquiring it. Whenever he saw a ‘nice bit’ – his own phrase – in a patient’s house he would call with unwearying attention, meanwhile fixing his eye, with a kind of wistful persistence upon the coveted piece, until at last in desperation the good woman of the house would exclaim:

‘Doctor, you seem awful struck on that bit. I can’t see but what I’m goin’ to let you ’ave it!’

Thereupon Urquhart would make a virtuous protest, then bearing his trophy, wrapped up in newspaper, he would dance home in triumph and place it tenderly on to his shelves.

The old man passed, in the town, as a character. He gave his age as sixty but was probably over seventy and possibly near to eighty. Tough as whalebone, his sole vehicle shoe leather, he covered incredible distances, swore murderously at his patients, and could yet be tender as a woman, lived by himself – since the death of his wife eleven years before – and existed almost entirely upon tinned soup.

This evening, having proudly displayed his collection, he suddenly remarked to Andrew with an injured air:

‘Dammit, man! I don’t want any of your patients. I’ve got enough of my own. But what can I do if they come pestering me. They can’t all go to the East Surgery, it’s too far away.’

Andrew reddened. There was nothing he could say.

‘You want to be more careful, man.’ Urquhart went on in an altered tone. ‘ Oh, I know, I know. You want to tear down the wall of Babylon – I was young myself once. But all the same, go slow, go easy, look before you leap! Good night. My compliments to your wife!’

With Urquhart’s words sounding in his ear, Andrew made every effort to steer a cautious course. But, even so, a greater disaster immediately overtook him.

On the Monday following he went to the house of Thomas Evans in Cefan Row. Evans, a hewer at the Aberalaw colliery, had upset a bottle of boiling water over his left arm. It was a serious scald, covering a large area and particularly bad in the region of the elbow. When Andrew arrived he found that the district nurse, who had been in the Row at the time of the accident, had dressed the scald with carron oil and had then continued on her round.

Andrew examined the arm, carefully suppressing his horror of the filthy dressing. Out of the corner of his eye he observed the carron oil bottle, corked with a plug of newspaper, holding a dirty whitish liquid, in which he could almost see bacteria seething in shoals.

‘Nurse Lloyd done it pretty good, eh, doctor?’ said Evans nervously. He was a dark-eyed, highly strung youngster, and his wife, who stood near, closely observing Andrew, was nervous too and not unlike him in appearance.

‘A beautiful dressing,’ Andrew said with a great show of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve rarely seen a neater one. Only a first dressing of course. Now I think we’ll try some picric.’

He knew that if he did not quickly use the antiseptic the arm would almost certainly become infected. And then, he thought, heaven help that elbow joint!

They watched him dubiously while, with scrupulous gentleness, he cleansed the arm and slipped on a moist picric dressing.

‘There now,’ he exclaimed. ‘Doesn’t that feel easier?’

‘I don’t know as how it does,’ Evans said. ‘Are you sure it’s goin’ to be all right, doctor?’

‘Positive!’ Andrew smiled reassuringly. ‘You must leave this to nurse and me.’

Before he left the house he wrote a short note to the district nurse, taking extra pains to be tactful, considerate of her feelings, wise. He thanked her for her splendid emergency treatment and asked her, as a measure against possible sepsis, if she would mind continuing with the picric dressings. He sealed the envelope carefully.

Next morning when he arrived at the house, his picric dressings had been thrown in the fire and the arm was redressed with carron oil. Waiting upon him, prepared for battle, was the district nurse.

‘What’s all this about, I’d like to know. Isn’t my word good enough for you, Doctor Manson?’ She was a broad, middle-aged woman with untidy iron-grey hair and a harassed, overwrought face. She could barely speak for the heaving of her bosom.

Andrew’s heart sank. But he took a rigid grip upon himself. He forced a smile. ‘Come now, Nurse Lloyd, don’t misunderstand me. Suppose we talk this over together in the front room.’

The nurse bridled, swept her eyes to where Evans and his wife, who clutched a little girl of three to her skirts, were listening wide-eyed and alarmed.

‘No, indeed, we’ll talk it over here. I got nothing to hide. My conscience is clear. Born and brought up in Aberalaw I was, went to school here, married here, ’ad children here, lost my ’ usband here, and worked here twenty year as district nurse. And nobody ever told me not to use carron oil on a burn or scald.’

‘Now listen, nurse,’ Andrew pleaded. ‘Carron oil is all right in its way perhaps. But there’s a great danger of contracture here.’ He stiffened up her elbow by way of illustration. ‘ That’s why I want you to try my dressing.’

‘Never ’eard of the stuff. Old Doctor Urquhart don’t use it. And that’s what I told Mrs Evans. I don’t hold with new-fangled ideas of somebody that’s been here no more nor a week!’

Andrew’s lips were dry. He felt shaky and ill at the thought of further trouble, of all the repercussions of this scene, for the nurse, going from house to house, and talking her mind in all of them, was a person with whom it was dangerous to quarrel. But he could not, he dared not, risk his patient with that antiquated treatment. He said in a low voice:

‘If you won’t do the dressing, nurse, I’ll come in morning and evening and do it myself.’

‘You can then, for all I care,’ Nurse Lloyd declared, moisture flashing to her eyes. ‘And I ’ope Tom Evans lives through it.’

The next minute she flounced out of the house.

In dead silence Andrew removed the dressing once again. He spent nearly half an hour patiently bathing and attending to the damaged arm. When he left the house he promised to return at nine o’clock that night.

That same evening as he entered his consulting-room the first person to enter was Mrs Evans, her face white, her dark frightened eyes avoiding his.

‘I’m sure, doctor,’ she stammered, ‘I do hate to trouble you, but can I have Tom’s card?’

A wave of hopelessness passed over Andrew. He rose without a word, searched for Tom Evans’s card, handed it to her.

‘You understand, doctor, you – you won’t be callin’ any more.’

He said unsteadily: ‘I understand, Mrs Evans.’ Then as she made for the door he asked – he had to ask – the question: ‘Is the carron oil on again?’

She gulped, nodded and was gone.

After surgery, Andrew, who usually tore home at top speed, made the passage to Vale View wearily. A triumph, he thought bitterly, for the scientific method! And again, am I honest or am I simply clumsy? – clumsy and stupid, stupid and clumsy!

He was very silent during supper. But afterwards, in the sitting-room, now comfortably furnished, while they sat together on the couch before the cheerful fire, he laid his head close to her soft young breasts.

‘Oh darling,’ he groaned. ‘ I’ve made an awful muddle of our start!’

As she soothed him, gently stroking his brow, he felt tears smarting behind his eyes.

Winter set in early and unexpectedly with a heavy fall of snow. Though it was only mid-October, Aberalaw lay so high that hard and bitter frosts gripped the town almost before the leaves had fallen from the trees. The snow came silently through the night, soft drifting flakes, and Christine and Andrew woke to a great glittering whiteness. A herd of mountain ponies had come through a gap in the broken wooden palings at the side of the house and were gathered round the back door. Upon the wide uplands, stretches of rough grass land, all round Aberalaw, these dark wild little creatures roamed in large numbers, starting away at the approach of man. But in snowy weather, hunger drove them down to the outskirts of the town.

All winter Christine fed the ponies. At first they backed from her, shy and stumbling, but in the end they came to eat from her hand. One especially became her friend, the smallest of them all, a black tangle-maned, roguish eyed creature, no larger than a Shetland, whom they named Darkie.

The ponies would eat any kind of food, scraps of loaf, potato and apple rinds, even orange peel. Once, in fun, Andrew offered Darkie an empty match-box. Darkie munched it down, then licked his lips, like a gourmet eating pâté.

Though they were so poor, though they had to bear many things, Christine and Andrew knew happiness. Andrew had only pence to jingle in his pockets, but the Endowment debt was almost settled and the furniture instalments were being paid. Christine, for all her fragility and look of inexperience, had the attribute of the Yorkshire woman, she was a housewife. With the help only of a young girl named Jenny, a miner’s daughter from the row behind, who came daily for a few shillings each week, she kept the house shining. Although four of its rooms remained unfurnished, and discreetly locked, she made Vale View a home. When Andrew came in tired, almost defeated by a long day, she would have a hot meal on the table which quickly restored him.