The Virus Man

by Claire Rayner

  The story didn’t reach Hugh Worsley until just before he left home to go to the chapter meeting. He’d had a busy day, an enthralling day, first writing the draft report of how Plan B had gone, as though they’d already carried it out, so that it would be all ready to send to the papers with a few alterations depending on how it all actually went, and then checking the actual plan step by step so that he could be sure at tonight’s meeting that everyone had it really clear. If only he could do without Dora and Freda; the Reah sisters, they ought to be called, he’d once told Graham privately, expecting him to laugh, Pya and Dya, but Graham had given him a pudding-faced look and not been at all amused – he’d have to remember that he’d never been a student, had no idea what a joke was, poor devil, but how could he have, after all? Working in a bank all your life and then retiring even though you didn’t want to doesn’t exactly sharpen a man’s sense of humour. Poor old Graham, Hugh thought magnanimously as he sat over his plan, not much use for anything really. Still, he was a supporter, and he did have a car and that helped a lot.

  It was the woman from the ground-floor back room who told him, as he was standing in the ill-lit hall, wrapping his scarf round his neck. She peered out at him, alert as always for the sound of any human contact near her and said brightly, ‘That’s right. You wrap up proper. Don’t want you falling down paralysed, do we?’

  ‘What?’ He stared at her, amazed as always at the incredible things she managed to say whenever he met her; she had an enviable ability to animate the most mundane of matters with her comments, and this one promised to be a classic.

  ‘Epidemic there is, a new one, haven’t you heard?’ She came out of her room to stand leaning on the door jamb, propping the door open so that he could see the clutter inside: piles of newspapers and magazines, chairs toppling over with them, the floor littered. ‘Up at that school at Petts’ Hill, the posh one, all the girls there keep catching flu and getting paralysed. Dozen’s of ’em died too, so they say, terrible it is. Only affects young people though, not old ones. Only young ones like you. So you wrap up warm.’ And she grinned at him, pleased at the effect she was having.

  ‘Dozens dead? Who said so?’

  ‘Everyone said so. Milkman, everyone.’

  ‘Ah, the milkman.’ Hugh nodded sapiently, and buttoned his bomber jacket over his scarf, not caring at all that it made him look like a pouter pigeon. He picked up his precious folder and pushed that inside his jacket too; it would be safer there, and it kept the wind off him and that mattered a lot to a cyclist. ‘Well, of course if he said so I’d better be careful, hadn’t I? Goodnight Mrs Scarman,’ and he went, enjoying the joke. He’d have that one nicely put together to tell the others when he got to the chapter meeting; they’d enjoy it, especially Gail. She liked a joke, did Gail. Maybe tonight he’d ask her back to his room. She’d come, of course. They always did. Other people at the poly might make cracks about his love-life, looking pointedly at his acne and so forth, but it never seemed to matter to girls. Personality counted, that was the thing, Hugh told himself as he climbed onto his bike and began the ten-minute journey to Graham’s house in South Preston Road, just as it says in all the women’s magazines. It’s personality that’s where it’s at, and I’ve got lots of that. It’ll be that that carries Plan B through, that and efficiency and single-mindedness of purpose and … falling down paralysed if you don’t wrap up warm! A real Scarmanism, that one. He’d start the meeting by telling them, but then they’d settle down to making sure Plan B was ready for implementation and that would be marvellous. The evening should be as enjoyable as the day had been, he told himself as he cycled hard, head down, into the dark of the November night.

  8

  Tonight, Jessie thought, I’ll leave the animal room to last. Usually she made sure she went in and fed them and checked the cages were clean at around six, but tonight, she told herself, they’ll be able to hold on a little longer and come to no harm.

  She would have been hard put to it to explain why she was unwilling to go in there while there were still other people around; there were no secrets about the research, after all. Harry Gentle knew about it, and so did Annie who did the bloods, and even young Errol who washed the glassware and generally cleaned up and couldn’t care less about anything apart from his music. He spent all day with his earphones clamped to his head under his towering woolly hat, emitting faintly tinny noises and jigging as he worked, and she could have hung both the monkeys around his neck and he’d have paid no attention. Yet for all that, she felt uneasy, almost embarrassed, about it.

  Maybe it was because she had been so occupied with the animals all week and therefore some of her usual work had to be shared out between the others? They hadn’t complained unduly; they’d all been hectically busy anyway, too busy to notice who did what, perhaps, as this wretched epidemic took hold and more and more requests came in for swabs and blood counts and ESRs and even Paul Bunnell’s. (One of the local GPs was totally convinced that the disease was just a rogue variant of mononucleosis and was telling all his patients soothingly that they only had glandular fever and clogging up the path, lab with the resulting blood-test demands.) But still it was important not to let anyone realize that she was putting so much time into the project, of that she was certain. It was nothing Ben had actually said, but she knew enough about the history of his work to know what worried him now. The long years of thinking about what he wanted to do, the struggle to squeeze minute grants of research money from wherever he could get them, the constant beavering away around the edges of busy working days to keep up the standard of his investigations – it had made him edgy and nervous, afraid that someone, somewhere, would see what he was doing and try to stop him on the grounds of economy. Cuts were the order of the day throughout the hospital; let anyone in charge of money once notice what Ben was doing, and who knew what might happen? It was no wonder to Jessie that Ben wanted to keep his head well below the parapet, and what he wanted, of course, she wanted.

  She looked at her watch when she heard the outer door bang as Annie went defiantly to keep her date with the latest of her long line of housemen. (Her remarkable physical resemblance to Joan Collins ensured that lots of men found her entrancing to meet, while her total lack of interest in anything but her own appearance combined with a high degree of sexual prudery ensured that none of them took her out more than twice.) Harry still had his head down over his microscope as he finished the day’s batch of urgent requests from the hospital itself. They’d managed, somehow, to clear the work that had come in from the GPs, having managed to offload some of it to Doxford Hospital, and now all that was left was perhaps another two or three hours of grinding labour to get the place clear for the flood that would arrive tomorrow morning.

  ‘How’s it going, Harry?’ she asked. ‘Can I take over some of it for you?’

  Harry didn’t look up, his right hand busily making entries on the paper beside him as he kept his eyes glued to the microscope.

  ‘Can you? I wouldn’t mind, I must say. I’m nearly on my uppers, one way and another. Where’s our lord and master?’

  ‘Still in histology. He’s got to do the slides himself for both today’s PMs and he’s still got to dictate his reports. Here, Harry, you go. I can stay late tonight, no hassle. Better you go now and come in fresh in the morning than finish up with this damned flu yourself.’

  ‘But I won’t will I?’ Harry straightened up and finished the report beside him before pulling the slide he’d been studying out of the microscope. ‘It’s only kids who get this one, not old bocks like me.’

  ‘Yes …’ Jessie took a sharp little breath in through her nose.

  ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it? Have you ever come across anything like it before?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Heard tales of course. There’ve been scares like this before, starting in schools; the literature’s full of ’em. But I’ve never had to deal with one myself. I’ll tell you this much, it’s not that bloody man Winters
’s mononucleosis, that’s for sure. If he sends in any more Paul Bunnells I’ll go round to his bloody surgery and personally shove the blood right down his stupid throat.’

  ‘I know,’ Jessie slid into his chair as Harry stood up and stretched. ‘I believe Ben’s going to tell him. He said he would.’

  ‘Ben,’ Harry said in a considering voice, looking down at her as she unclipped the request from the next waiting specimen. ‘You two having an affair?’

  ‘Harry!’ She stared up at him, scandalized. ‘Harry, that’s an awful thing to say!’

  ‘Not at all.’ Harry seemed in no hurry to go, leaning against the bench beside her and grinning down at her. ‘You’re a passable wench, Jessie, nothing wrong with you. Got a nice little arse there. I’ve seen him watch it as you go bustling about. And a nice face too, and a pleasant way with you as well as a head on your shoulders. A man needs a girl he can talk to after a little pokery. Gets boring with dunderheads, if you’ll permit a bad pun. And he seems a nice enough sort of bloke. Me, I wouldn’t know what turns women on.’ He yawned suddenly, so that his jaw made audible clicking sounds. ‘Christ, I’m knackered. I will go, ducks, if it’s all the same to you. Have fun, you and your Ben.’

  ‘Harry, don’t you ever say such a thing again!’ Jessie’s face was crimson and she knew it and her distress about it made her even hotter; ‘It’s an awful thing to suggest. We just work together, and I like my job, that’s all. I’m married and so’s B … Dr Pitman and ….’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the price of bloody eggs?’ Harry said. ‘I’m married too and so’s Sally, and there we are making lovely music together. It wouldn’t be half as lovely if we were married to each other, I’m damn sure of that. Goodnight, Jessie. No, don’t look like that. Not another word will pass the old lips if it makes you feel that bad. So you’re virtuous, you’d never have an affair, and I’m sorry I ever said anything. Thanks for taking on that stuff for me. Goodnight, and I’ll see you in the morning.’ And he went, letting the door slam behind him as she sat there and stared after him, willing the tide of heat in her face to recede.

  I’ll have to leave, she thought, panicking, and felt her throat tighten at the very idea. I’ll have to leave if they’re saying things like that about me. Who’s saying things? Harry? Who cares about Harry Gentle? He just likes to talk, that’s all. Everyone in this damned hospital likes to talk. Gossip’s more important to them than their pay packets. And seeing Ben every working day is more important to you than your pay packet, isn’t it?

  It’s not, it’s not! She almost said it aloud, she was so furious with herself, but she just sat there silently, staring at the door Harry had slammed behind him, trying to calm herself. It would be absurd to go off half-cocked just because of something one man had said, and a man notorious for his own casual sex-life at that. Everyone knew that Harry Gentle was working his way through the nursing staff, and that he’d already had affairs with most of the physios, so why pay any attention to him?

  Will they start talking about me the way they talk about Harry? she thought bleakly. I will have to leave, won’t I, if that happens? Why? It’s not true, so no one can say anything. Why get agitated about something that just isn’t true? Because you’d like it to be true, whispered a wicked little voice inside her head. You’d like it to be true; and she pushed back the chair on which she was sitting so sharply that it banged against the table and sent a row of test-tubes flying.

  By the time she’d salvaged them and cleared up the mess, it was gone seven, and she could hear the distant chattering of Castor and Pollux; whatever work was waiting here to be done, they’d have to be attended to first, and she went round the lab, switching off the main overhead lights and leaving only the bench light burning over Harry’s place. Saving every penny in the way of costs was becoming second nature now, and she went doggedly through the office and on into the animal room, thinking only of work, anything that would keep Harry Gentle’s dreadful voice out of her ears. How dare he say it, how dare he? she thought, and heard that wicked inner voice whisper back – because even though it’s not true, you’d like it to be, you’d like it to be.

  The room was dim and warm and damp and she stood in the doorway for a moment absorbing its atmosphere, waiting for her thudding pulse to slow down. It was stupid to get so agitated over something so unimportant; think about the animals, just about the animals.

  In the corner cage Castor and Pollux, aware of her presence, were leaping and swinging, demanding food furiously, and she went over to the fridge in the corner to collect their fruit and the excitement and chatter increased, almost drowning out the sound of the rain drumming on the roof. It was a ramshackle room, little more than a lean-to that had been built on to the side of the main block long ago for some sort of extra storage purpose, and ill-suited to the use to which Ben now put it, but she had made it snug enough since coming to join him, using strips of roofing felt to caulk the draughty corners and regularly cleaning the overhead skylight to improve the quality of daylight. But she hadn’t been able to make it quiet, too, and now the rain pounded like machine-guns and made the animals stir restlessly in their straw, rustling and clicking uneasily.

  Castor reached his hand out as she came to his cage and she looked at the tiny elegant fingers and the dun-coloured nails and wrinkled little knuckles, and set one finger in the palm the way she had been used to set a finger in Mark’s hand when he was a baby, and at once the warm dry grip tightened and tugged and she had to laugh, looking up at the wide-eyed little face with its absurd tufts of hair.

  The eyes, deeply brown, stared back at her solemnly and she thought – what’s he thinking? Does he think? What happens behind those eyes when we’re not here? Does he remember the jungle and the high trees and the reek of the dead undergrowth as the sun steams it? And then shook her head at her own silliness. That was sentimentalizing of the worst kind; these rhesus monkeys had been bred in captivity from a long line of captive primates reared specially for laboratory work. To assume that they thought and felt and yearned for home was – and she reached into her mind for the word, remembering Ben using it, and managed to retrieve it. Anthropomorphic. It was as bad to wonder what Castor was thinking as to believe that Rupert Bear actually existed and wore plaid trousers and a little yellow scarf.

  And yet, as Castor let go her finger and reached eagerly for the bananas and apples she was carrying in her other hand, she still felt the melancholy of his situation. Would I like it, she wondered, even though I was warm and fed and clean and had a companion I cared about? Would I like to live in a cage? And Pollux came swinging across the cage from the back and began to shriek furiously at her mate as she tried to steal his food from him and Jessie grimaced at herself. She really was being very stupid tonight. As if we didn’t all live in cages anyway, of one sort or another, and behave like monkeys ourselves, she thought; and remembered Peter shouting his way out of the house on the way to his conference last Sunday morning, and felt the dull heaviness that came as she remembered he was coming back tomorrow night.

  But that was tomorrow’s problem; now she had work to do and when she had fed the monkeys, and they had settled to picking the food over with their fastidious and busy little fingers, tucking the morsels they chose into their mouths with an air of daintiness, she began the rounds of the other cages.

  First the group B rabbits, a breed of small albinos of the sort that Ben found easier to handle than the bigger ones (though dealing with the dissections on them was a little more complex because of their size), because they had the virtue of great fecundity. Litters of eight were not all that unusual from this breed.

  These were the group that had been given the infective strain 737 together with the new batch of Contravert, and she looked down at them moving in jerky hops through their piled straw and noted that they’d eaten all their food from their midday feeding, and were as interested as they usually were in the cabbage stalk she had left for them to chew all afternoon. Their e
ars were not unduly floppy, their eyes clear and their fur lively, and she wrote that in the chart that hung on their pen before dragging out the soiled straw in the front and replacing it with a handful of clean. The main clean-out of the pens was done in the mornings, when daylight made it easier to get rid of the rubbish, because it was a long walk over to the incinerator, but she hated leaving them overnight without fresh straw, even though that made more work for her. She filled their dishes then with handfuls of pellets, and at once the five of them were scrabbling eagerly, pushing each other away, scattering their meal around the floor, and she chattered softly at them between her teeth as she fastened the pen door and crossed the room to the group A pens.

  Here there were rabbits again, exactly the same breed as the other five and from the same litter, too. Ben had insisted on that, because, although it wasn’t essential that a control group should match an experimental group genetically, it made the study more elegant; to be able to show that you had taken the trouble to rear your experimental subjects so specifically would bespeak a particular attention to detail, he’d told Jessie, when he explained to her why in his animal room he liked, where possible, to breed some of his own creatures.

  ‘It’s not just to save money buying them,’ he’d told her. ‘Though it is a bit cheaper to breed and I have to save every penny I can; it’s just that it pleases me to do it. This way I get really standard groups for each trial – and there’s also the fact that I’m forever having to collect new stock from the breeders. That’s a fifty-mile round trip and it can be a wretched nuisance, so, if you work here, you’ll have to be an animal midwife to an extent, Jessie.’