The Virus Man

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Have the parents shown any signs of being difficult? I don’t want you going putting ideas into their heads, now.’

  Sister looked at him witheringly. ‘The fact I speak my mind to you, as a colleague, doesn’t mean I’d say anything out of place to any parents, and well you know it, sir. You’ve no right to suggest I ever would. But I’ve every right to speak out when I see a situation I’m not happy about, and I’m not happy about Andrea, not a bit – and I have to worry the more on account of her parents are abroad. They can’t come and see her, not from Hong Kong, can they? There’s only that schoolteacher comes near her, and she doesn’t do that often, the way things are at the school. There’s barely three or four of the children not down with this whatever it is, and she’s got her hands more than full. So have I. And I tell you, I’m not prepared to keep this child on my ward any longer. She ought to be in intensive care at Doxford or at Farborough and unless you do something positive about that, I shall go to the administrator and I shall … well, I shall say so to him.’

  Lyall Davies scowled at her and then through the glass wall that looked out on the ward proper. He could see the screened corner where Andrea Barnett lay, could hear the restless hiss of the old respirator, and it was an oddly comforting sound. He’d heard it so often in the past, dealing with children very like this one, and again he scowled and turned back to Sister.

  ‘I tell you frankly, Sister, I don’t know what nursing’s coming to, and that’s a fact. There was a time when any ward sister who spoke to a consultant as you have would be immediately dismissed.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since the Stone Age,’ Sister muttered, but he elected not to hear that.

  ‘But I’m a fair man, and I want to help you feel better about your work for my patient. Now, I’ll arrange for another round of cultures to be done – urgently, all right? And a repeat of all the blood work – then we can see if there are any changes needed in the antibiotic umbrella ….’

  ‘Antibiotics,’ she snorted. ‘It’s a virus! She’s been on Septrin Forte right from the start – it hasn’t touched her. Nor will it.’

  ‘And I’ll call the laboratory myself, immediately. I can’t be fairer than that. But I’m not sending patients to Doxford or anywhere else without very good cause. And as far as I’m concerned there isn’t enough cause.’

  Sister looked at him, her mouth downturned with scorn. She knew perfectly well why he was so unwilling to transfer a patient, even one as obviously ill as this child. There had been that episode last year when one of the consultants at Doxford, a man half Lyall Davies’s age, had been very scathing about a patient the old man had sent there, pointing out in acid terms that the diagnosis was totally wrong, and that even if it had been right, the treatment he had instituted would have been a disaster. That patient had survived and only been prevented from suing Lyall Davies by much soothing from the younger consultant. It would take a long time before Lyall Davies would risk exposing himself to anything like that again; even the threat of litigation here at his own hospital wasn’t enough to budge him.

  Not that Sister actually expected anyone to sue over Andrea, whether she lived or died. She’d only mentioned the possibility to rile the old man, to get him off his blasted backside and to get the child away, but it hadn’t worked. And now she had to go through another round of blood collections and swabbings to get repeats of all the cultures and blood work that had already been done ad nauseam. And she went swishing out of her office and into the ward in a rustle of starched fury, leaving the old man to phone the laboratory.

  When she came back she could hear him fussing and chuntering on the phone, complaining bitterly to whoever was unfortunate enough to be at the other end.

  ‘Well, I’ll not settle for any technicians on this work. No, I want Dr Pitman … need a fully qualified man and … I know you’re a qualified technician, but that isn’t the same, not at all the same. Might as well leave it to a nurse as leave it to you.’ He’d caught sight of Sister coming back and enjoyed his moment of malice. ‘So you tell me where he is, and I’ll get him, if you’re so scared of him. Right, right … yes, the number, man, I want the number.’

  ‘What do you want Dr Pitman for?’ she asked pugnaciously as he dialled another number.

  ‘Take the bloods,’ he grunted, not looking at her. ‘Take the bloods. Child so collapsed it’s impossible to get into a vein. Better leave it to one of these pathology johnnies. They do it better than any of us.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ she said with heavy emphasis, and this time he did look at her, full of loathing. Why did it have to be her who’d been there when he’d last tried to get blood out of a patient’s arm and finished leaving it with a haemotoma five inches across? The sooner this bloody woman was got rid of the better, he thought furiously, as he heard the telephone ringing at the other end. She’s the cause of all my problems here, every damned one of them. That was a comforting thought, and went a long way to blocking out the one that was pushing hardest against his mind: that he was too old for medicine now, that he’d lost his drive, his diagnostic acumen, his basic skills. That didn’t bear thinking about, not at only sixty odd ….

  ‘Yes?’ the voice which answered the phone was husky, and sounded bored, and Lyall Davies snapped, ‘Pitman?’

  ‘Yes. Who’s that?’

  ‘Lyall Davies. I’m on Ward Seven B and I need some urgent blood work and cultures. Told me in your department you’d gone home, but this is urgent. Be glad if you could pop back and take the blood ….’

  ‘Take the blood?’ Ben said and now his voice sharpened. ‘Come back and take blood? Dr Lyall Davies, I’ve been working flat out for over thirty-six hours, had no sleep at all yesterday – surely you don’t have to drag me back at this hour of the evening just to take some blood? What about your houseman?’

  ‘Sanjib’s off sick,’ Lyall Davies said. ‘Bloody man. Got no stamina at all – and even if he were here this wouldn’t be one for him. Child’s almost moribund, very collapsed vessels, may need a cutdown to get the blood. I’m a physician, can’t be doing with these knife and fork jobs. Better you do it.’

  There was a little silence and then Ben said, ‘All right. I’ll be there. Ward Seven B, you say?’

  ‘That’s it. Child, name of Barnett. You’ve already done several cultures and the like on her. We’ve got the results here – Sister should be able to find them, I hope.’ Again he shot a malevolent glance at Sister, now sitting at her desk and pretending to ignore him. ‘I’ll tell her you’re on your way here then ….’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said, and the phone went dead, and Lyall Davies cradled it with a satisfied expression on his face.

  ‘Well, now, Sister, hope this doesn’t keep you on duty too late – though I forgot – you people go off dead on time these days, don’t you? Not like the old days when a ward sister stayed at her post until everything was just so – ah well, we’ve lost all that’s best in nursing, just the way we have with everything else all over this country. Vandals and thugs and so forth.’ And he stared at her for a moment and then said abruptly. ‘Now, I have to go. I’m speaking at the Sydenham Society Dinner on diseases of the kidney, can’t let ’em down. Booked it months ago, months. Got to get into my soup and fish and be there by eight, can’t hang about. Pitman’s on his way, he’ll see to it that the child’s blood is dealt with tonight. Tell him I want results by morning, no matter what. If there’s anything urgent about the child you can reach me by phone. Here’s the number – that’s where the dinner is. Goodnight, Sister. Thank you for all your help.’ And he went stumping out of the ward, leaving her looking after him with her face stiff with dislike and scorn, before she turned back to go up the ward to look once more at Andrea Barnett.

  ‘If that child lasts the night,’ she said to the staff nurse who was sitting beside her watching the respirator, ‘I’ll eat that bloody man’s hat. And him too.’

  16

  Ben frowned as he put his key into the main laborat
ory door; it was already unlocked and he pushed it open cautiously. There had been problems a few months ago when some young people from the town had broken into the pharmacy in search of drugs; could the same thing have happened here tonight? But the place was silent, though all the lights except the one over Harry Gentle’s bench were off, and everything appeared to be much the same as it usually was: the clutter of equipment on crowded benches, the hum of the refrigerators and incubators and the heavy smell of formalin and spirit. Obviously the last person to leave the laboratory that afternoon had just not bothered to lock up, and he frowned at that. Jessie was usually the last to go; she had a set of keys, because she needed to come in at weekends sometimes, to feed the animals, and for that reason she was the one who usually made sure the labs were secure at the end of the working day if he wasn’t there late himself. What had happened to her today?

  And then he remembered. She’d gone to Podgate to get some more rabbits, and he shook his head at himself; it seemed like a week since this morning when they’d made that arrangement and he’d promised to be here when she got back to take the animals from her. But June had phoned and that had been that.

  He pushed the memory of what had happened at home this afternoon to the back of his mind, forcing himself to concentrate on the task in hand, on the culture dishes to be prepared, and the bloods to be started. It had been a hell of a job getting the specimens from the child, in the state the poor kid was in; there was a very real risk that unless he got the work in hand fast she’d be dead before any useful information the tests might reveal would be available, and he’d never forgive himself if that happened. Lyall Davies had been right to insist he came and took the bloods himself, right to insist on getting results as soon as possible. I’m glad he called me ….

  And at that thought the memory of the afternoon couldn’t be held back; it flooded over him in a great wash, and he closed his eyes for a moment, standing there at the bench with a petri dish in one hand and a throat swab in the other. He’d been ashamed, that was the thing. He should have been relaxed, gratified that, after all, he had managed to please his wife. It had been a mechanical enough affair, a joyless forcing of arousal and a frantic thrusting and grunting that had paid scant attention to the object of its attention, but it had worked. He’d managed to give her what she wanted, which was not himself, not his tenderness or his concern or even his friendship; just a spoonful of cells that were all of him she seemed to value. Certainly she had shown in the most obvious way possible that that was all that mattered: she’d been obviously unaroused in any real sense when he started his dogged attempts, had been tight and dry, pale rather than flushed, dry-skinned rather than moistly excited, but the moment he had arched his back, almost painfully, as he reached his peak she had taken a great gasping breath and immediately gone into climax herself. And then had lain there with no sign of any remaining pleasure in her, her head turned to one side and making no attempt to kiss him, to fondle him, to do anything that showed she felt anything for him at all.

  He had rolled off her, and at once she had reached for one of the sofa cushions and thrust it under her hips to raise them a few inches from the floor, and he had felt sick then. To be as calculating as that, to be thinking only of her need to give his secretions every help in reaching her bloody uterus – was that all he was to her? Just a prick on legs? Was that all she was to herself? A womb with a few attachments added?

  That thought had made him angry, very angry, but not ashamed, not at that moment; the shame had come later, after he had dragged himself wearily upstairs to bed and fallen into a deep sleep to be woken again by a telephone call, this time from Lyall Davies. Then, after he had showered and driven himself, very carefully, back to the hospital, the shame had washed over him like a cold douche.

  He had let her use him, had let her make him a sex object, a thing to be employed for her own purposes and with no reference to him as a person. He had, in effect, been raped. This must be how women felt when they were attacked and overcome by brute strength; he may have been defeated by the dreadful power of June’s feebleness, rather than by muscle power, may have been coerced by fear of her reactions rather than by fear of physical pain into behaviour that was repugnant to him, but it was the same thing in the end. He had been appallingly used. What he should feel was anger, but what he did feel was guilt. It was his own fault that he had allowed himself to be so abused; he should have resisted, should have said no; but how could anyone resist June’s pain, her hunger, her need? He’d have felt even more guilty now if he hadn’t done what he had, surely?

  ‘Painted into a corner,’ he had murmured aloud as he parked the car in the almost empty car park. ‘I was painted into a corner, on a hiding to nothing. Catch twenty-two … Christ, I’m tired. Thinking rubbish, behaving like a walking clich¨. I need more sleep.’

  He’d gone straight up to Ward Seven B and Night Sister had been waiting there for him with a tray ready to take the blood and the swabs, and he’d gone to work, and that had helped a lot. Having something concrete to do, a real physical action that showed tangible results in the shape of tubes of blood and used swabs, had taken his mind away from himself and back to where it belonged: being involved with outside matters, important matters, real matters.

  He’d even managed to be concerned about the child – a thirteen-year-old who looked pale and for all her basic chubbiness had an attenuated air, as though her body was falling in on itself – and he said to Sister, ‘This child should be on a drip, shouldn’t she? Her veins are as collapsed as any I’ve had to get into. Why isn’t she?’

  ‘Dr Lyall Davies prefers the rectal route,’ Sister said, her face expressionless. ‘We’re giving her a good deal of dextrose that way. I’d prefer a drip too, but he says ….’ She shrugged. ‘He prefers his own methods. It’s not for me to say what the child should have, is it?’

  He had sat at her desk after he’d got his specimens, reading the case-notes, and his brows had contracted. An odd history, with a somewhat surprising link with the two children whose post-mortems he had done – the school – and he had stared at the notes and then gone back to the child’s bedside and looked down at her and thought, fulminating virus infection. The sort of patient who’d need Contravert, once I get it right. If I get it right. And he’d gone back to the laboratory thinking only about his research, and had felt good as a result; still tired, of course, but not sick at himself the way he’d been since this afternoon.

  Until now. Now, as he forced himself to move again, setting his culture dishes in the incubator, racking the blood tubes, he tried to divorce his mind once again from the wash of memory that had tainted it; concentrating on the movements of his hands, watching his own actions as though he were at a cinema observing a strange person about his business, and that helped, just as dealing with the child on the ward had helped.

  The refrigerator coughed and then went silent, as it so often did, and in the resulting quietness he could hear the distant chatter of Castor and Pollux and he thought – must go and see what Jessie did with the new animals. See what she’s got – and after a last look at the bench to make sure he’d completed the work, apart from the writing of the report, he went into his office and through it to the animal room.

  He saw at once why Castor and Pollux were chattering: usually they were quiet once it got dark, but now because all the overhead lights were burning they were swinging in their cage, sparring with each other, clearly tired and irritable, and he grinned at them, amused by the flash of fellow feeling that had come over him; poor buggers, he thought, poor tired buggers, we three ….

  And then he saw her and it was so absurd, so unlikely, that he did something he thought people did only in fairy tales; he rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing clearly and stared again, but there she still was.

  She had set a pile of the straw that was used for the animals’ bedding against the far wall, and spread a car rug over it, and, covered by her coat, was lying on it fast alseep,
and he moved closer, to peer down at her, to make sure she was asleep, and that there was nothing more sinister about her stillness.

  As though she felt his nearness she stirred and turned over, leaving the skimpy covering of her coat to one side, and with one hand fumbled for it, to pull it over herself again, and he said uncertainly, ‘Jessie? Jessie, what are you doing here?’

  She opened her eyes at once, but didn’t move, just lying staring with dilated pupils at the cage of guinea pigs that was in her line of vision, and he said again, ‘Jessie?’

  Now she did move, pulling herself upright to sit and stare at him, her face blank and her hair rumpled, and suddenly he laughed.

  ‘You look like something out of a pantomime,’ he said. ‘Look at you.’ And he reached forwards and pulled out the wisps of straw that were tangled over her temples, tugging none too gently, and she yelped and put her hand up to rub her scalp.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and crouched down to look at her. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. Jessie, what in the name of good sense are you doing here? I know you care about the work, my dear, but you don’t have to sleep with the damned animals!’

  She blinked and shook her head and put one hand up to her face gingerly and he looked closer, better able to see now, and said sharply, ‘You’ve hurt yourself. Your face is bruised … what happened?’

  ‘Bruised?’ Her voice was husky. ‘I didn’t think he’d bruised … it does hurt, though ….’ And she ran one finger down the line of her jaw, just where the bluish tinge that he had noticed was at its darkest.

  ‘Who bruised you? What are you doing here instead of being at home? What happened?’ He was getting agitated now, and put out a hand to help her to her feet, and they both stood there, she brushing down her crumpled clothes with her head bent, and he trying to see her face more clearly.

  ‘I … it was nothing. Just a silly … it was nothing. I got the rabbits, Ben. I put them in separate pens, the two litters. They’re a healthy lot … you’ll be pleased, I think … they weren’t hurt at all in the accident ….’