The Virus Man

by Claire Rayner

  ‘That’s right. At the hospital – domestic supervisor I am, for the patha-whatsit laboratories. Very important job that, all those test-tubes and nasty things in bottles lying about.’

  His brows lifted. ‘The hospital? I didn’t know you worked there.’

  ‘Oh, yes, been there ages, I have. Seven months, it must be. Ever such a long time.’

  ‘But I thought you worked at Bluegates School.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She seemed to flatten and stared at him with suspicion again. ‘Well, yes, I did agree to help ’em out a bit, just for a while … you know ….’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘Oh, about three months it was, I suppose, till that rotten bloody woman … well, ’nuff said. No names, no pack drill.’

  ‘What woman? It’s not for publication, like your court case isn’t at present. So you can tell me.’

  ‘Mrs McGrath,’ she said unwillingly. ‘And nothing she told you is true, and I swear it. It was her took those things, and not much they were at that, a few leftovers, nothing else, but it was her that took it.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about leftovers.’ Joe was enjoying himself hugely; this was better than a play, ‘I’m interested in the epidemic they’ve got there. I need to know what it’s like, how many girls have it, what they’re doing about it; there seems to be some attempt to hush it up, you see.’

  ‘The epidemic?’ Her face cleared at once. ‘Oh, that! Well, I must say it was really bad. One of the girls got sent home in no end of a hurry – Miranda her name was, I remember. I thought it was a real pretty name, Miranda, and she was took ill and Miss Spain told me when I was collecting the dirty dishes from the sickroom, she told me the girl had got sent home because she was poorly. And then there was the others and the one that went to the hospital and died, and all the girls talking all the time about it. Not that they talked to me, stuck-up little madams that lot is, but I got ears in my head and I use ’em. They all said they was poorly the same way, got sore throats and snotty noses and headaches and that, and their legs gone all weak and paralysed and feeling terrible, and then they really got upset. It was the night they had their fireworks party. I remember I’d worked my fingers to the bone, I had, cooking their suppers and not one of them ate a thing as far as I could tell, not that it stopped that bitch McGrath saying as I hadn’t cooked ’em right. Anyway, that was the worst time. All of them carrying on alarming. They’ve all gone home now, mostly. I stopped last week, and I know that since I left it’s been no better. Girls getting ill and being took to hospital – it’s probably the way they feed those poor children. Awful food they give ’em. All those raw vegetables and that, and only decent meat twice a week, rest of the time, it’s fish, and that only grilled, never a nice piece fried with chips like all children like best. Not them, they eat all this muesli rubbish and bread like shoe leather ….’

  ‘Yes,’ Joe said, needing now to stem the flood he had unleashed. ‘Let me get this down in a little more detail now. Give me dates and numbers as best you can, will you?’

  For the next half hour he took her painstakingly through her story, noting each detail as he managed to get it, and the picture emerged of a healthy group of children being cared-for very well indeed and well fed and exercised, falling in increasing numbers into a flu-like illness that made them feel violently ill. They were feverish, they complained first of sore throats and headaches and later of leg pains. Then they said they couldn’t move their legs and some of them seemed to have breathing difficulties. There had been one child with that – the one who, Mrs Laughton said, had been sent home, but which, Joe told himself, was almost certainly the first one to die – followed by three more, then eleven, then another fifteen, until virtually every person in the school had it, except the senior staff. It was the children and only the children who seemed to be at risk and he couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement as he contemplated that fact, seeing the headline already: ‘Child Killer Plague Sweeps South Coast School’. Lovely.

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me about the school then, Mrs Laughton?’ He got to his feet, needing to unstick himself from the mock leather which had lost its chill rapidly, replacing it with a disagreeable sweatiness. ‘No complaints from the girls as far as you ever heard? Got to be accurate about this, you know. Can’t have people accusing us of bearing false witness and all that!’ And he gave a jovial little laugh which made Mrs Laughton purse her lips and stop to think.

  ‘Can’t say as I ever heard of any,’ she said regretfully. ‘They seemed to like the place well enough, though it’s unnatural I call it, taking little kids away from their loving mothers and putting them in boarding schools. Never did that with my three, you can be sure.’ And she nodded with self-satisfied motherhood.

  ‘Then they’re not so bad, after all, your daughters?’ Joe couldn’t resist the dig and she looked put out for a moment and then said defiantly. ‘They’re like all young people nowadays. Got no respect for their elders. If I’d talked to my Mum, God rest her soul, the way they talk to me, and dressed the way they dress – well, I’d have been black and blue, and no error!’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Joe began to move to the door. The place was depressing him, not least because of the heavy smell of scented room deodorant coming from a plastic container set on a table near his chair. ‘Well, thanks for your help. I hope I won’t need to bother you again.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s no bother, any time. Now, about that other matter ….’

  ‘The little argument with Barney’s and what the court said? Now, I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you, Mrs Laughton. No need to make trouble, really, is there? You don’t need to worry about the Advertiser, and that’s a promise. Mind you, if something similar should happen I’d be hard put to it to ….’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, there won’t be nothing similar,’ she said fervently, and scuttled after him to the door, her feet silent on the explosively patterned red, blue and yellow carpet. ‘You can be sure of that. And if I can ever tell you anything else you want to know about the places where I has my little jobs, just say the word. I could be one of your … well, reporters, eh? I dare say you pay a bit for news, eh? And there’s me with a lot of debts, one way and another – losing me job at Bluegates and that, and all this catalogue stuff still to pay off, and the old man on the dole, and my girls not giving me a penny, greedy cows.’

  ‘Well, I can’t promise that,’ Joe said hastily, and put his notebook firmly in his pocket. ‘We have our regular reporters who deal with the hospital and all that – but I’ll keep it in mind.’

  ‘Regular reporters!’ she said and sniffed, as he pulled open the front door, an action which set a series of bird mobiles hanging above it rattling and ringing. ‘They don’t know half what goes on there. What about the time that there monkey escaped, and they caught it down in the boiler house? I bet your reporter never knew about that!’

  ‘Monkey?’ Joe, who had been standing poised on the step to go, looked back at her sharply. ‘What monkey?’

  ‘One of those they keeps in the lab where I clean – where I’m domestic supervisor,’ she said, sensing his interest and showing her triumph at it. ‘Got all sorts there they have, monkeys and rabbits, all sorts.’

  ‘What are they there for?’

  ‘They do this here research oh ’em, don’t they? Gives ’em the flu and then gives ’em nasty injections to get rid of it. Ought to be put a stop to.’ She smirked virtuously and held the door welcomingly wide. ‘I’ve heard ’em talking about it, I have, early in the morning when there’s just the two of them there. That there Dr Pitman and Mrs Hurst ….’

  ‘And you worked there as well as at the kitchens at Bluegates? Where the animals are?’ Joe said, and now all his instincts for a story were sitting up and begging for attention.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? In the patha-whatsit laboratories, that’s where I work. Where they test all these animals.’

  ‘And you saw them? The animals?
And you work there?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘A woman’s got to make a living, after all – no harm in that, is there?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t like to say,’ Joe said savagely, and pulled his hat over his eyes and went marching down the path of the small council house, leaving the woman staring after him.

  14

  It had been quite dark for a long time when at last she drove into Purbeck Avenue. She was driving slowly, worried by the unfamiliarity of the controls: her own old Volvo had had a floor gearstick, but Harry Gentle’s car had a steering-wheel change, and that took some getting used to, as did the size of the car. It was smaller than hers and oddly, that made her feel less sure about the sort of space she could get into and less sure about the distance needed to overtake another vehicle. And in addition to all that was the state she was in. No longer sleepy, that was for sure, but feeling as though she had been taken by head and heels and pulled out into a thread of tension: her eyes were hot and gritty, and her belly seemed to consist of a hard knot that trembled all the time. She felt faintly sick and on the edge of tears, which was an extraordinary way to feel, because she had never been a woman who wept easily.

  The headlights cut a slit in the darkness in front of her, to show the pillar box, the landmark telling her she was just two doors from her own house. All the houses in Purbeck Avenue looked so alike that it was impossible to tell which was which until you were on top of them and could distinguish details like curtains and carriage lamps beside the front doors, but now she knew where she was, and gingerly she steered the car into the turn that would bring it into her own short driveway.

  And stepped on the brakes just in time. The rear of Peter’s car loomed up in the glare of her headlights and she sat there, both hands gripping the wheel until she caught her breath again. And then she switched off the engine and stared dully at the car in front, trying to understand why it was there.

  He was coming back from London – when? He’d told her, of course he had, but suddenly she couldn’t remember. Tomorrow, surely? Monday night he’d said. What day was it today? And she felt tears slide out of her hot eyes and slither greasily down her cheeks because she couldn’t remember what day of the week it was.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Peter’s voice was so loud, even through the car windows, that she jumped. ‘This is a private driveway, damn you, and you’ve no right … Jessie? Jessie! What the hell are you doing in that thing? Where did you get it? Where’s your Volvo? And where the bloody hell have you been?’

  ‘Podgate,’ she said stupidly, peering out at him, for he had now opened the door and was bending over staring at her. ‘I had to go to Podgate for some rabbits – when did you get back? I didn’t expect you yet ….’

  ‘Didn’t expect … Jesus Christ! I told you I’d be back last night! Last night! And you didn’t expect me, now, twenty-four hours later? What the hell’s the matter with you?’

  She got out of the car, moving stiffly and slowly the way she sometimes dreamed she did, and stood with her back to the little car so that she could lean on it, looking up at Peter in the sickly yellow light thrown by the street lamp just outside their front gate.

  ‘I’m sorry, Peter, but I … I didn’t get much sleep last night. Didn’t get any, actually. And then I had to drive to Podgate and on the way back I had an accident. Car’s a write-off, I think. The police seemed to think so.’

  ‘The car’s a ….’ He put one hand on her shoulder roughly and almost shook her. ‘What do you mean, a write-off?’

  ‘I hit a lamp post,’ she said wearily. She’d already told the story over and over again: to the police who came to the scene, to the one who took her and her boxes of rabbits back to the hospital, to Harry Gentle who had been in charge of the laboratory in Ben’s absence – and she still wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t been there when she’d returned, for he had said he would be, when she brought back the animals – and to yet another policeman who came to check on the event. Now, telling Peter about it seemed too much effort altogether, and she shook her head and only repeated, ‘I hit a lamp post.’

  ‘You damned idiot!’ Peter’s voice lifted half an octave higher, and now she could hear the emotion in it, something more than just the irritation he had shown so far. ‘You stupid woman! You don’t deserve to have a car – to go driving into lamp posts and write it off, just like that – d’you think I’m made of money? Do you know how much my no-claim bonus is worth? And now you’ve gone and written it off!’

  She stood very still, not looking at his face but straight ahead. She could see his tie, uncharacteristically unknotted and dangling its ends over the lapels of his jacket, and the light glinting off his shirt buttons. It was like looking at a carving, a part of her mind thought absurdly, not a person. A carving in coloured stone. And then his words really sank into her awareness and she took a deep breath and did look at him. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said you’re a damned idiot ….’

  ‘No. Not that. About … you were talking about your no-claim bonus? About money?’

  ‘Well, of course I bloody was! What do you expect? Never an accident with either car for over five years – it’s a substantial sum – are you all right? Were you hurt at all?’

  But it was too late for that. She had pushed past him, pulling her bag from her shoulder as she went, rummaging in it for the back-door key, and he followed her.

  ‘Jessie, are you all right? I was so angry when I got home and you weren’t here – it was bad enough this morning, but not to find you here tonight – I’ve been sitting in the bloody car for over an hour waiting for you, do you know that? You put the chain on the front door, took the back-door key with you when you know I don’t carry a spare – how was I supposed to get in? I had to break open the side door this morning as it was – did you want me to bash in the back door too? It’d cost a fortune to ….’ And he stopped.

  She had reached the back door by now and he was immediately behind her, and she opened it and reached in for the secondary switch that put on the light over the doorstep, and he stood waiting for her to make way for him. But she just slammed the door behind her and went out of the kitchen into the hallway, not even bothering to put on the overhead light as she went.

  He followed her, cursing under his breath. Bloody woman, putting him in the wrong like this. He’d been frantic about her, positively frantic with worry. To have come home at six – and after such a pig of a day – and find she still wasn’t there, to go over to Mark’s girlfriend’s house to check with his son whether he knew where she was to be found, and then to have come back to sit like an idiot in a cold car waiting for her – it was enough to make any man livid. And when you’re angry you don’t always say the things you mean, he told himself, tremulous with self-pity. Of course I should have asked her first if she was all right, of course I should, but I could see she was, she got out of the car didn’t she, stood there? Obviously she was all right. I was entitled to complain about the damage she’d done.

  He went into the hall and unchained the front door, and then went and switched on the lights in the living room. Normally he didn’t like lights burning in unused rooms, because it was wasteful, but now he needed to see his home as bright and welcoming and safe, a place a man was happy to come back to after a bad day, and he stood in the doorway looking round for a moment before following Jessie, who had gone upstairs. He could hear her moving about up there.

  The room, still and tidy, glowed at him in the lamplight, cream-coloured furniture on a beige carpet, bright cushions, well-polished tables, the whole smelling faintly of lemon-scented furniture polish and the big bronze chrysanthemums that she had set in a brass bowl on the coffee table. She had taste, Jessie, he told himself. It was a beautiful room, and he liked to look at it.

  He heard a door slam above his head, and he took a deep breath and turned to the stairs. This had to be sorted out, and the sooner the better. He’d been an idiot to talk
about money when she’d told him she’d been in an accident, an absolute idiot, and he’d say so handsomely. Get it all sorted out ….

  She was in the bathroom, and he opened the door and went in, not bothering to knock, to find her picking up her bottles of bath salts and her cans of talcum powder.

  ‘Listen, Jess, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about the no-claim bonus. I should have asked you first how you were. But I could see you were okay, so … and I was pretty angry, you know. I had every right to be, didn’t I? I was supposed to be back last night, and had to come back this morning instead, and you weren’t here and ….’

  ‘I got the days mixed up,’ she said dully, not looking at him, and pushed past him to go back to the bedroom, carrying the bath salts and talcum and also her soap dish and toothbrush with her. ‘I’ve been working all hours, so I got the days mixed. Not that it matters, does it? If you were supposed to come back last night, why didn’t you let me know you were going to be late? If you’d phoned I would have known you were due back, known to leave the front door unchained. But you didn’t call me, so ….’ She shrugged. ‘It’s not worth talking about,’ and she went over to the bed and dropped her things on it.

  He stood in the doorway, staring at the bed. Her big blue suitcase was on it, and it was already half full. He could recognize her green check suit and the red trousers she always wore with the thick yellow sweater which made her look – he often thought but never told her – about sixteen.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m packing. Just a few things. I’ll collect the rest another time.’

  ‘Packing? What the hell are you talking about? Don’t be stupid, what do you mean, packing?’ Fear rose in him and made his voice rise, so that he was shouting. ‘You’re not going anywhere ….’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said, and went on putting her things neatly into the suitcase. ‘I’m going. I don’t know why I stayed this long. I’m so tired I can’t think straight, and that’s why I’m going. When you can’t think straight you start to feel straight – you let the real feelings come out and that’s why I’m going. I should have gone years ago, but I used to think too much. Now I haven’t slept for thirty-six hours and it’s made me high, you know that? High as a kite and flying just on feelings, and it’s great. I’m going – I’ll take Harry Gentle’s car back to him and I’ll get myself into a hotel in town and then you needn’t bother about claiming on your bloody insurance for my car because I won’t be here to need it. You can forget any of the money you spend on me, because you won’t be doing it any more. You’ll have it all to yourself, together with this horrible house.’ And she snapped the case shut and hefted it off the bed and turned to stare at him with her head up, daring him to say anything.