In the Teeth of Adversity

by Marian Babson

  “She’s right, you know, m’boy.” The gaunt grey figure, like the ghost of another era, followed Morgana Fane into the office. “Can’t treat patients that way. Upsets ’em.”

  “Father!” Zayle turned his harassed eyes to the elderly man. “What are you doing here? You ought to – I mean, you have your own surgery. Upstairs. Your own patients. Shouldn’t you be up there with them?”

  “Found this poor little thing wandering around the top floor in distress,” Sir Malcolm said indignantly. “Couldn’t leave her roaming around on her own, could I? You were nowhere about. Took her in – I was between patients – and we’ve been playing chess. Clever little puss. Not a bad brain – for a woman. Might be something in giving them the vote, after all.”

  “I was looking for you,” Morgana Fane said to Zayle. “You went off and left me all alone.

  “It was absolutely frightful,” she appealed to me. “There I was, lying back, unable to move, and he suddenly looked down at me with a frightening expression and bolted from the room. I thought something must have gone wrong and that I was dying.

  “But it was like being underwater – I couldn’t speak – I couldn’t move – and I kept waiting for you to come back and help me. But you didn’t.” She faced Zayle accusingly. “I don’t know what that stuff you had me inhaling was, but it was the most awful experience of my life.”

  “Always told you, m’boy, no good comes of mollycoddling patients. Anaesthetics – pah!” Sir Malcolm snorted. “We never had time for mollycoddling at the front. Plain and simple – that was the ticket. You put your knee on the fella’s chest, gave a few short, sharp yanks and there you were. Neat as a pin. Then your orderly brought ’im round and sent in the next patient.”

  “Please, Father,” Zayle said weakly, “why don’t you go back upstairs? It must be time for your next patient.”

  “More than time,” I put in helpfully, “he’s downstairs. Sir Geoffrey, getting impatient. He thinks you’ve forgotten about him.”

  I was all in favour of getting General Sir Malcolm out of the way. We had enough trouble on our hands. It wasn’t the PR problem I’d been called in to take care of, but it might be just as serious. If Morgana Fane decided to sue for malpractice, or something of the sort, she’d have quite a case. Experimenting with a new anaesthetic – with Morgana Fane as your guinea pig. I shuddered quietly. The idea alone was good for a long term at the Scrubs. And when she turned those luminous green eyes on the judge and jury, there’d be a fresh outcry to bring back hanging. When I looked into those eyes myself, I had understood for the first time why men joined the Foreign Legion.

  “Forget?” Sir Malcolm roared indignantly. “I never forget anything! Damn it, my memory’s better than yours.” He was raging at his son. He seemed to have forgotten – or perhaps, not noticed – that I was the one who had brought up the subject. “I’ve never gone off and left a patient unattended in the chair, sirrah! Nor have I –”

  “There you are, Malcolm.” Sir Geoffrey entered briskly. “Could hear you five miles off with the wind blowing in the opposite direction. I knew you wouldn’t forget me. Might have known” – he favoured Morgana Fane with a fine Edwardian leer – “you’d found something better to occupy your time than an old warhorse like me.”

  “Heh, heh, heh,” Sir Malcolm said, suddenly becoming putty in his friend’s competent hands. “Neat little filly, eh?”

  “The best.” Sir Geoffrey twirled his moustache. “Put my last shilling on her, any day.”

  Morgana blossomed, if I may use the expression. She wasn’t sure who the newcomer was, but the aura of money and power was unmistakable. “You might introduce me, Malcolm,” she said sweetly.

  “See here.” I drew Endicott Zayle to one side while these quaint Victorian rites were in progress. “We’ve got to have a conference. Don’t say anything more until I can –”

  “Eh? What?” Zayle stared at me with a glazed look. I couldn’t really blame him. Sir Malcolm was enough to daze any beholder, even one who knew him so well as – presumably – his own son did.

  “And who” – Morgana Fane was suddenly beside me again, looking up with a coquettishness obviously left over from the last introduction – “are you?”

  When in doubt, stick to your story. “I’m an emergency,” I said. “An emergency case, that is.” A bright idea hit me, although I couldn’t bring it off with Sir Geoffrey still there. But later, perhaps, when the timing had had a chance to fade and get confused, we might be able to plead that I was the reason Endicott Zayle had left his post. Another’s need had been greater than Morgana’s. I tucked the idea away for future reference.

  “Good God, yes, lad!” Meanwhile, Sir Geoffrey backed me with vigour. “You were in a bad way. Has he seen to you yet?”

  “Emergency?” Endicott Zayle’s eyes brightened and began to focus properly for the first time that afternoon. “You? Yes, yes, of course.” He gripped my arm firmly and began pulling me toward the chair. “Just come over here and let me look at you. We’ll take care of it immediately.”

  “Hold it, hold it,” I muttered to him, drawing back. “Don’t get carried away. That was just the cover story – remember?”

  “Cover story?” he said blankly. “What are you talking about? If you aren’t an emergency, what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been asking myself the same question,” I said, trying to hang on to what little equilibrium I had left. I didn’t know what game Zayle was playing now, but it wasn’t the one we’d started out with, and I was getting dizzier by the minute. It wouldn’t take long before I was as dizzy as Zayle himself. I hoped it wouldn’t affect me the same way – I had enough problems without imagining corpses.

  “Oh, by the way.” Reminded, I freed myself from Zayle’s grip and turned to the healthiest corpse I’d ever seen. “I came up with a message for you, Miss Fane. Your business manager is getting anxious – something about being due at Vogue.”

  “Overdue is more like it.” She glanced at her watch with a coo of dismay. “We’re shooting a feature on my honeymoon. All the clothes I’ve chosen for my trousseau, out of all the fashion garments I’ve modelled recently.”

  I nodded admiringly. For the past several years she had been constantly in the company of the Title she was about to sweep in triumph to the Registrar’s Office. And now she was going to cash in on honeymoon features. It was a masterpiece of the public relations art that any interest could be drummed up in such a fait accompli.

  “Well, that does it,” she said. “I can’t waste time here any longer. If” – she gave Zayle a dismissive frown – “you find the time, you might make another appointment for me.”

  “Anytime at all, Miss Fane,” he babbled. “I’m terribly sorry about this. Just come when you can – I’ll fit you in. It’s the least –”

  I jabbed him sharply in the ribs and he had the sense to shut up.

  We all watched her leave, but the others couldn’t have appreciated her exit as much as I did. I was never so relieved in my life to see someone going out on their own two feet, instead of being carried out. Now all I had to worry about was ridding Zayle of this new idea that I needed instant and immediate dental treatment. If necessary, I was prepared to discourage it with a straight left to the jaw.

  While the others were staring after Morgana Fane, still bemused, the intercom buzzed. Since no one else seemed inclined to answer it, I picked up the phone myself and listened to the receptionist’s urgent question.

  “No,” I said. “Both Zayles are here, but Meredith isn’t.”

  “He’ll be in his own surgery,” Endicott Zayle said. “The stupid girl has been here long enough to know that.”

  “She says he isn’t,” I told him. “She says she’s been ringing and there’s no answer. His next patient has just arrived, and he hasn’t taken the previous one yet. She thought he might have been in conference with you.”

  More likely, she’d thought he must have been drawn in by the raised voices
. They must have been audible downstairs, let alone in the next-door surgery. I began to feel a faint disquiet. Why hadn’t Tyler Meredith come in to see what all the commotion was about? It was his new anaesthetic that was being tested, after all.

  “His line may be out of order,” Sir Geoffrey suggested. “Why not just pop in and sound the alert?”

  En bloc, we moved toward the interconnecting door below the level of the small intersecting X-ray room. Endicott Zayle, I noticed, seemed unworried, but faintly distracted, as though recent events had been slightly beyond his grasp. Not that he was alone; it was all beyond my grasp, too.

  It was the senior Zayle who took the doorknob with the same no-nonsense grip he might have used on a pair of forceps and swung the door open. “Wakey, wakey in there,” he roared.

  There was no response from the figure stretched out in the dental chair. As we advanced farther into the room, we could see the mask – like an oxygen mask – strapped over his face; hear the hissing of the tank hooked into the wheeled stand. I didn’t need to see the faint glitter of the partially open eyes to know that Tyler Meredith wasn’t going to wake again.

  “By God.” General Sir Malcolm Zayle turned to his son and slapped him on the back. “You’ve done it, at last! I’m proud of you, m’boy!”

  “Father, please!” Endicott Zayle seemed to shrivel. His head swivelled unbelievingly between the sight in the chair and the triumphant elder Zayle.

  “Don’t worry, Son, I’ll stand by you! We’ll get old Harry Stacey for the defence – very good on the Unwritten Law, old Harry.” He turned to Sir Geoffrey for agreement. “Hasn’t lost a case since Hector was a pup.”

  “Lord Stacey’s dead, Malcolm,” Sir Geoffrey said.

  “What? Dead? What? Why wasn’t I told?” Sir Malcolm demanded. “What happened, eh? Shot by a jealous husband, was that it?”

  “Hardening of the arteries, Malcolm,” Sir Geoffrey said sadly. “Life catches up with us all.”

  “Egad!” Sir Malcolm said. “I knew he was living too fast – but that! Why wasn’t I told?” he demanded again.

  “You were away, Father,” Endicott said, a placating note I had never had occasion to hear before in his voice. “On active service. We sent word. Possibly, the post ...”

  “Damned post,” Sir Malcolm said. “A man slogging his guts out on the field of honour, and not one letter in five ever reaching him with news of home. No wonder they say war is hell!”

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Endicott said. Beads of sweat were gathering along his receding hairline. “I – we – had no idea messages weren’t reaching you.”

  I began to get a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. Sir Malcolm was talking as though war were a contemporary event. For him. As though he were home on leave from some battlefield and expected to return to it at any moment. As for the others, I could see that Sir Malcolm was quite a formidable character, but need they humour him to this extent? I began to wonder whose hand actually controlled the purse strings at Zayle, Zayle & Meredith.

  “Never mind.” Sir Malcolm brushed trivialities aside. “We’ll find the best man living to handle the defence. Then, I think, a spell in the service for you, m’boy. Enlist, that’s the ticket. Everybody loves a soldier. Volunteer for the front line. Get wounded, if you can. A medal or two will put a lot of things right in civilian life.”

  “But, Father –” Endicott wailed. “It was suicide – it must have been.”

  “Be a man, m’boy,” his father encouraged. “And don’t worry – it will all be over by Christmas.”

  I’d stopped worrying about Sir Malcolm – he was Endicott’s problem – and had started worrying about my own. I could understand how Tyler Meredith had come to commit suicide: if he’d glanced into the adjoining surgery to see how the experiment with his new anaesthetic was going and found Morgana Fane, to all intents and purposes, a corpse in the chair, the failure of his formula and the resultant publicity might have seemed too much to bear.

  But how could I phrase a press release to that effect in such a way that Morgana Fane didn’t discover the worst about those paralysed moments she had described so graphically in the dental chair? If she were to realize that her own dentist had believed her dead, had abandoned her after using her as a guinea pig for a new anaesthetic, she would have grounds for the biggest, most sensational lawsuit to hit the Old Bailey in decades.

  “Father –” Endicott Zayle bleated again. “Tyler could only have committed suicide. Look at the way he has the mask – it’s strapped on. You know very well that we’re taught never to test a gas anaesthetic by strapping on the mask. And never to sit in the chair, either. We’re supposed to stand on our feet and hold the mask lightly to our faces. Then, if we’re overcome, we’ll drop the mask as we fall. We’d never, never –”

  “Anaesthetics – never held with ’em!” Sir Malcolm snarled. “Waste of time. Only reason they’re so popular today” – he turned to Sir Geoffrey – “is because the younger generation is weak and flabby. Can’t pull a tooth the way we could. Have to have the patient in a helpless position – unresisting.”

  “That’s right, Malcolm,” Sir Geoffrey agreed. “I’ve noticed it myself. Personally, I wouldn’t be too hard on the young ones. I think it’s due to a progressive muscular degeneration. You don’t see a right arm like yours these days. No village smithys, either.”

  “Too many horseless carriages, as well. They’ll be losing the use of their legs next,” Sir Malcolm said. They seemed to be settling down to a jolly little session about what was wrong with the younger generation, but before they convened the meeting, there was something they seemed to be losing sight of.

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?” I suggested.

  “Who is this?” Sir Malcolm demanded. “What is he doing in my home at a time like this? Why isn’t he in uniform?”

  “It’s all right, Malcolm,” Sir Geoffrey said quickly. “He’s my adjutant. His uniform hasn’t come through yet. Shortages, you know.”

  “Damned government!” Sir Malcolm snorted. “Hell of a way to run a war!”

  “The police –” I felt like someone in the trenches who had heard the “Charge” and was game, even though I knew someone had blundered.

  “The police,” I repeated, fixing Endicott with a glare that was intended to convey better late than never.

  “The police,” Endicott repeated weakly. “Do you think that’s really necessary?”

  “The fellow is dead,” Sir Geoffrey said judiciously. There was no arguing with that diagnosis.

  “Suddenly, and without a registered physician in attendance – if not under suspicious circumstances.” I nudged Endicott severely. “There are laws about such things. The police will have to be notified.”

  “Quite right, quite right,” Sir Malcolm said. “Quite proper. The police are reasonable chaps. Don’t worry, we’ll get you off.”

  “Father,” Endicott all but wailed, “stop saying that! I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill him.”

  “You didn’t?” Sir Malcolm drew back, offended. “You’re sure you didn’t?”

  “Father, I swear to you –” For one horrified moment, I thought Endicott was actually going to sink to his knees, but he contented himself with raising his right hand solemnly. “I swear to you I didn’t do it!”

  “Damn it all,” Sir Malcolm said, “why not? The damned fella’s been playing fast and loose with your wife for the past eighteen months!”

  “Father!” Endicott reeled backward and I had to revise yet one more opinion. Sir Malcolm might not be sure exactly what decade he was in, but he was fully aware of what was happening in his immediate surroundings.

  “Eh?” Something in Endicott’s voice seemed to get through to Sir Malcolm. While Sir Geoffrey quietly went to the phone and dialled for an outside line, Sir Malcolm regarded his son with dissatisfaction. “You didn’t?”

  “I didn’t,” Endicott said firmly.

  In the silence, I was conscious of the r
hythmic clicking of the dial as the digits spun smoothly back to their places: nine, nine, nine.

  I was also conscious of the body in the chair, long motionless beneath the deadly mask over its nose and mouth. Conscious, as well, of the back of that silent head. Of the noticeable lump at the base of the skull. It was what we laymen knew, in our nonmedical parlance, as a “goose egg.” It suggested strongly that Tyler Meredith had been coshed before he had been lain in that chair and the mask strapped tightly over his face.

  “You didn’t,” Sir Malcolm said. He seemed to be staring absently at the faintly purplish lump on Tyler Meredith’s head. “Then,” he asked, quite reasonably, “if you didn’t, who did?”

  Chapter 4

  I got back to the office feeling like something the cat had dragged in.

  The cat, however, sniffed and disowned me. Obviously still catching whiffs of antiseptic, she went to ground behind Gerry’s ankles, muttering to herself.

  I didn’t really blame her. At the best of times, a dentist’s surgery has never been redolent to me of fun and games. And this certainly hadn’t been the best of times. After this afternoon, all I wanted was to get the clinging, lingering odours of antiseptic, anaesthetic, and death out of my nostrils.

  Tugging my tie off, I headed straight for the bathroom and began running a bath. While it filled, I stripped off my clothes, dropping them in a heap on the floor.

  Gerry followed me in. He began picking up my things and folding them neatly. I realized it was the measure of his concern – usually, he was the untidy one. I realized, too, that he had been talking to me since I came in. It wasn’t that I’d been ignoring him, it was just that I’d had too much on my mind even to notice. I took a deep breath. Sooner or later, I was going to have to start explaining to him.

  “That’s it,” Gerry said. “Get in the tub, lie back, soak for a while. Shall I get you a drink? Was it very bad? He didn’t – he didn’t extract, did he?”

  It dawned on me that the whole episode had been so recent it wasn’t even a “stop press” item yet. Gerry had found my rather ambiguous note and still assumed that I had visited the dentist for the usual legitimate reason.