Doctors Wear Scarlet

by Raven, Simon

  “And secondly,” he said, “to speak in more general terms, I should expect him at this present time to be suffering from guilt consequent on Major Longbow’s death and, more particularly, from resentment and wounded pride. He has once again been proved impotent; he has been used, humiliated and defiled by a woman he thought he loved; he has failed in his revolt against Doctor Goodrich. Two things follow. As one would expect and as you have already seen, he is trying, from pride, to disguise from himself the true nature of the Greek fiasco. He is ‘forgetting’ the details, pretending the girl who so humiliated him is still alive, trying to convince himself that the whole business is not yet concluded and so may yet turn out well – to his pleasure, that is, and to his honour. And secondly, since inside himself he knows all the time what has in fact happened, he is matching his self-deceit by fostering in himself a condition of vicious and revengeful malice – against Chriseis for so wounding him, against you for preventing her, against everything and everybody that has had part in these events. Does any of this seem plausible in the light of what you have observed of him?”

  “Tolerably so,” I said grudgingly, “though I have yet to see active malice.”

  “You’ll forgive my professional conscience,” interrupted Tyrrel; “but that is just what must concern me. Is he really dangerous and if so to whom?”

  “At the moment,” said Holmstrom with some self-satisfaction, “he is merely brooding on an intolerable situation. He is too overwhelmed to do anything other than be led – led home from Greece, led off to Canterbury to watch cricket, led back to devouring Doctor Goodrich. But the time will come, as it has before in the pattern of his life, when he will see the need to assert himself. When he does so, he may well be violent: it would not be the first time in his life. And if he makes use of any of the tricks he has learned in Greece, the resulting spectacle will not be seemly.”

  “And this is inevitable?” asked Tyrrel.

  “Not quite, John,” said Holmstrom. He pushed his cup away from him and lit yet another cheroot. “Not quite,” he said. “If you look into Fountain’s past, as described by Seymour here, you will notice that most of his acts of violence have followed on some very definite provocation. The behaviour of a loutish bully at school, for example, or the unwelcome and insulting suggestion that he should come and live in Doctor Goodrich’s house. Now, if he is not provoked; if he feels that he is disinterestedly loved, so much so that he need have no occasion for aggressive sexual assertion; if he feels successful, well integrated, that he is welcome back in Lancaster College on his own terms, that he will not be chivied or exploited: if attention is paid to all this, then he may well settle down quite calmly, come to accept what has passed in Greece with a shrug of the shoulders, and address himself to his not unpromising career. But if, on the other hand, he is to be got at; if he is given any sort of shock…then I myself would sooner not be around. Do I make myself plain?”

  “Admirably so,” I said. “But supposing something should go wrong. What then?”

  “As I say,” said Holmstrom, “I would just prefer not to be present. I cannot take any responsibility; you know that. I’ve told you what I can and related it to the case of Richard Fountain as best I can. And that must be that.”

  “I know,” I said. “But we are discussing a valuable man who must, if possible, be helped. I know you cannot be responsible for what may happen. But if the need arises, can you and will you come and be of assistance?”

  I did not like Holmstrom. I disliked his manner and his self-assurance, his appearance and his chuckle and his eyes. But John Tyrrel had vouched for him; clearly he was an able man; and help, let alone informed help, was going to be hard to come by. If Holmstrom would agree to help, then he must be suffered, manner and all.

  “You know yourself,” I went on, “that if we take him to a psychiatrist or even bring him here to you, then he will instantly feel that he is, in your own words, being got at. All we can do is help him after our own light. It is a very dim light. If we could feel that you would help us…if circumstances become extreme…”

  Holmstrom looked at me maliciously. He was insufferably pleased that he was in a position to grant or withhold a favour, that his authority was being recognised and courted. His eyes glinted, he ground his cheroot between his teeth, he emitted his ghastly chuckle.

  “Nihil humani alienum,” he said at last in his beautiful, deep voice: “I’ll try and come if called.”

  Tyrrel and I sat down in a pub and despondently drank draught beer.

  “Well?” said Tyrrel.

  “I don’t much care for your chum Holmstrom,” I said. “How do you come to know him?”

  “He has been helpful to us before in cases of a recondite nature.”

  “Why is he so pleased with himself?”

  “Because he knows a lot of things that we don’t.”

  “I suppose so… And now?”

  John Tyrrel took a long pull at his beer mug. He then wiped his mouth very deliberately with the back of his hand and said: “You heard what Erik said about Richard Fountain not being got at…not being got at or shocked. And who, Mr Seymour, is going to get at him?”

  “Walter.”

  “It’s what I was saying yesterday. When everything is added up, Richard Fountain is going to blame Doctor Goodrich for what has happened; and if Doctor Goodrich is now to greet him in Cambridge with a sheaf of disagreeable plans, mouthing out unwelcome instructions…then, as Erik might put it, the resulting spectacle could be unsightly. So tell me this, sir: just how reliable is this information of your Marc Honeydew’s likely to be? When he says that Walter Goodrich is getting ready to bind Mr Fountain down for good?”

  “Marc is as shrewd as he is inventive. There is normally an important element of truth in what he says. And in this case his thesis is only too plausible… Tell me,” I said on an impulse, “how would you like to come down to Cambridge and meet him? Cambridge is pleasant in September: empty and melancholy; dreaming, undisturbed by conceited young men, of its own past. And I know Marc is there now. We could go into this question of Walter and I dare say have quite an amusing evening into the bargain. Marc will find us rooms in College for the night.”

  “‘Come down to Cambridge’,” said Tyrrel wistfully: “I thought you always spoke of ‘going up’.”

  “Not after one has ceased to be an undergraduate. After all, even Cambridge itself is in the provinces. Undergraduates talk of ‘going up’ because Cambridge is the centre of their existence. It is dangerous so to think of it as one grows older.”

  “A perpetual undergraduate being as bad as a perpetual schoolboy?” murmured Tyrrel.

  “Not quite.”

  “And does Richard Fountain still…‘go up’?”

  “I suppose so. But he is still part of it.”

  “And therefore still an undergraduate…in some ways at least?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And Marc Honeydew?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “In any case,” said John Tyrrel, his face suddenly lighting up with pleasure, “I have often wanted to meet this Honeydew. And to go to Cambridge with you, up to it or down to it, will be a pleasure. There is a train, on which we can have lunch, at one twenty-five from Liverpool Street.”

  “What useful things policemen know.”

  “We have our compensations,” said Tyrrel quietly.

  Tyrrel and I walked along the river Cam in the late afternoon. We were to meet Marc for dinner at half past seven. Meanwhile, Tyrrel wanted to renew his scant acquaintance with the colleges; and Cambridge was certainly putting on a good autumnal show for him. Already the leaves were turning gold, were being scattered over the rich, green lawns which would not now be mown again until the spring. In King’s the pigeons swirled and cooed, shedding their moulting feathers to flutter down over the empty court. In Trinity the fountain whispered of the departing summer, with none to hear it save ourselves and the ghost of Master Bentley. On Jesus cricket
ground, which had been loaned to the County Club, the white figures enacted the season’s closing ritual. And then, as we walked slowly back beside the river, Tyrrel said: “I nearly came here, you know. I had a Scholarship – in Mathematics.”

  “What kept you away?”

  “I’m not as young as people sometimes think. This was just before the war. Before the days of county grants and so on. My Scholarship was only worth sixty pounds a year. My parents were very poor… And then the war came anyway. No time for mathematics, I thought, even if we could have found the money.”

  “They’d have kept the scholarship for you till after the war. And by that time you’d have got a Government grant.”

  “By that time I was well set elsewhere, sir. I was in the Cavalry, you see, and after a time that meant Tanks. But then I was badly wounded and little by little I made my way into a special branch of the Military Police. Not asking people for their leave passes, but investigations of a more interesting kind. So when the war ended, they fixed me up very well with Scotland Yard… It was too good to refuse. Though I’m often sorry,” he said sadly, “that I had to miss all this.”

  We walked on in silence for a while. Overhead some birds in formation were flying south. The sun was sinking now towards the hidden fields to the West, and a light breeze stirred the leaves at our feet.

  “You know,” said Tyrrel suddenly, “my duty is really quite plain.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. My duty is to insist that Richard Fountain be taken away somewhere for observation. Whatever he did or didn’t do in Greece, there is something badly wrong. You know that. So the book says he should be sent away somewhere…until the doctors tell us he’s fit to move in the world again. It is all very clear.”

  “There is such a thing as Habeas Corpus. You can’t just take someone away because you feel like it.”

  “True. But if we have good ground for wanting to investigate people – as we have here – then there are ways and means. Magistrates and judges can be very co-operative. I promise you, we should have no difficulty in detaining Richard Fountain for a while. All those reports from Greece…”

  “You’ve not come to Cambridge with me to tell me that?”

  “No. No, I haven’t. You see, it’s a duty I can’t do…won’t do. I’m willing to cover up and trust to luck we can see this through for ourselves. You know why?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You do know, Anthony. It’s because…for some reason… I regard myself, not only as your friend, but also as Richard Fountain’s. Odd, isn’t it? I’ve never met him, never even seen him. But there it is. And so I cannot send him away, as if he were just anybody, to be ‘observed’. To be confined and questioned and nagged at and pitied and ‘therapised’. I’ve always dreaded this – the time when all my intelligence and all my instincts would run clean contrary to what was my most clear and official duty. Now it’s happened, and I’m glad. I’m proud to have a friend who is worth putting before my duty. It’s something you nearly learn to do in the Army; but you never quite learn it there, because in the Army there’s always so many helpless people, people whom you actually know, depending on you to do your duty, and the sight of all those stupid trusting faces – your men – gives you pause, even if it means someone you love must go to the wall. But now I’m the guardian, not of a finite number of men whose faces are familiar to me, but only of the great British public at large. The great British public is too big, Anthony: it’s too big and too futile and too anonymous. Let it make shift for itself or let it rot in its sweaty Welfare bed. I don’t care. I only care for my friends and the sort of men whom I covet for my friends, men like Richard Fountain, brave, intelligent and rare. And that’s what you learnt here in Cambridge, isn’t it, Anthony? Your friends before your country? Before the world?”

  “Something of the kind,” I said: “though one always hopes that interests can be reconciled.”

  “In this case they can’t. The official solution to all this admits of no compromise. Mr Fountain, it says, must be given, if necessary through police action, into responsible medical care. It might just as well say ‘Mr Fountain must hang by the neck’. I can’t do it and I won’t. All those bloody, slimy psychiatrists, preaching away about ‘adjustment’ and ‘normality’… You don’t get anything worth having that way. All you get is people sniggering after a man for the rest of his life – ‘He had to be put away, you know’ – and a poor left over body, making the conventional movements and the conventional noises. A few verses, perhaps, contrived as a ‘therapeutic exercise’, just about fit to go on a child’s birthday card. I’ll have no part in it.”

  “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  “Because before we came here I had all but decided to do my duty. I was getting all ready to make the arrangements. I listened to Erik, and I thought, ‘There’s going to be trouble and I shall be held responsible. Best get this Richard Fountain out of the way and done with it.’ But now, now that I’m here, I’ve remembered something I was in danger of forgetting. I’ve remembered that it’s not people that matter but only certain kinds of people – brave, handsome, clever people, or those that you yourself just happen to love – and be damned to all the rest of them with their Government subsidies and their running noses and their dreary, whining voices. So it’s not the People you’ve got to protect – there are far too many of them anyway – but individual persons against the People: special, talented persons, or else those who, if only because they are your friends, mean something special to you. There’s no time for the rest, Anthony. Life’s too short. I’m glad you brought me here, because I was in danger of forgetting that. But not now. I’m your man now and Fountain’s. I’ll not forget again.”

  It was almost dark now. An occasional light betokened the occasional September scholar. It had been a valuable impulse that made me bring Tyrrel to Cambridge. And now for dinner with Marc Honeydew.

  “So you’re a policeman, my dear,” said Marc blinking coyly at John Tyrrel. He poured us handsome glasses of dry sherry, and then went to his telephone, through which he instructed the kitchen to send up the dinner he had ordered in a quarter of an hour’s time.

  “We don’t see many policemen in here,” said Marc, seating himself on the revolving chair by his desk. “Very few.” He treated himself to one complete twirl in the chair. “So why have you brought him?” he said to me, as sharp as a slap in the face.

  I told him. We wanted Marc’s help, and first he must have proper information in exchange. So I told him everything, I swore him to silence, and we were nearly done with his excellent dinner before I had reached the precise object of our visit.

  “Quite a story,” said Marc thoughtfully. “Who would have thought it? This isn’t, my dear, just an elaborate hoax? Silly season joke at poor Honeydew’s expense?” He looked at Tyrrel and myself with care. “No.” he said. “I’m sorry… It’s a little difficult at first, that’s all.”

  He went to the sideboard and fetched a decanter of port.

  “Cockburn ’27,” he said. “Drink hearty, boys. You’ll not see much more of it.”

  He gave Tyrrel a back-hander, filled his own glass, and pushed the decanter on to me.

  “So,” he said. “That little rotter Holmstrom, who, you will all be interested to know, was an undergraduate with me, says that our Dickie’s now a dangerous proposition. And he has a way of being so very right, that Holmstrom. And you two cunning sleuths have deduced that all we need to trigger Dickie off is a few annoying gestures on the part of organising and possessive Walter. Right?”

  “Right,” said Tyrrel, lifting his glass with care and appreciation.

  “And so you’ve come to Mother Honeydew to enquire just how difficult Walter is going to be?”

  “Right,” said Tyrrel again.

  “Well, my dear,” said Marc to Tyrrel: “you’ve seen the letter I sent to Anthony Seymour in Greece?”

  “I’ve been told exactly what was in it.”

&
nbsp; “Dear, accurate, editorial Anthony,” murmured Marc. Then, briskly straightening himself in his chair like a governess who has briefly forgotten her “manners” – “The position,” he said, “is as follows. When I wrote that letter, Walter was perplexed and angry, no one would tell him what was going on, so he simply resolved to clear up whatever mess there was and to shut Dickie tightly up in a cupboard as soon as he got home so that there should never be any messes again. Then Anthony Seymour’s version began to trickle through. Richard, it seemed, was just nervous and overworked, and was, bar the undesirable presence of wicked Piers, in excellent hands. So far – splendid. No trouble: no mopping up for Walter to do: Walter happy for a day or so. But then little question marks begin to appear on that distinguished brow. Why, if Richard was just overworked, all this insistence on bringing him home – against Walter’s express wishes, you remember? Or rather, it wasn’t so much insistence on bringing Dickie home, but just that the matter wasn’t even mentioned: Dickie was being brought home, it seemed, and that was that. At this stage, my dears, renewed Walterian annoyance. Next question: why Anthony’s deliberate evasion of further correspondence? True, they would all be moving about a bit, but surely they could have given one poste restante address which lay on their way home? So Walter deduces – that people are deliberately keeping him out of things, and the pressure rises still higher.

  “Then came the final blow. Walter reckons to latch on to Dickie the minute he gets back (which he calculates will be about now) and either turn him round and push him straight back to Greece or, if he won’t go, to get off to a flying start with the new Walterian scheme for Dickie-repression by taking him, with Penelope, on a severely regulated tour of the Scandinavian lakes. (‘An extra fillip for the dear boy’s health.’) This, it is thought, will put Dickie finally in his place. Those cold lakes and those hygienic Swedes – and Dickie coming home with a date fixed for the wedding and a twenty page schedule, compiled by Walter with Dickie’s nominal assistance, for the writing up of his research. But at this stage Penelope, who, I gather, was more or less unbriefed but has an intuitive idea of the probable state of play, tells Walter that she wants to go on holiday now, that it’s no good hanging about for Dickie, and that the last thing Dickie will want, after two months of driving across Europe, is to go traipsing off to the fjords. In short, Penelope tells Walter to mind his own business for once. And Walter, who loves the girl and thinks she’s looking a bit pasty (she’s more delicate than you might think from that Amazonian exterior – something she inherited from her mother, I think) – Walter, my dears, actually does as he’s told. Allows himself to be carried off straight away; but not without some bitterness and a parting resolve that when he does catch up with Richard Fountain, MA, he’ll really get his money’s worth.