The Virus Man

by Claire Rayner

  Half an hour later the phone on Ben’s desk shrilled, and she dropped the last handful of food in the group B pen and made a cheerful clucking sound at the rabbits, who looked as perky and as bright-eyed as they ever had, and went to answer it.

  ‘Jessie? Is Errol there yet? I want him to bring something over to Seven B for me ….’

  ‘I sent him to the pharmacy with the requisition, Ben. I told him to come straight back but you know what a villain he is. He could be ages yet. What is it you want?’

  ‘I left some of the reports I wrote on the bloods I did last night for this child – Barnett. They’re on Harry’s bench. Is he there yet?’

  She laughed. ‘Bit early for him! Moscrop’s in though ….’

  There was a little silence at the end of the phone. ‘I hate asking him to do anything out of the way. He’s such a supercilious bastard.’ And she grinned.

  ‘I know what you mean. He’s already complaining because there was a huge book of requests in from the GPs this morning. Look, I’ll bring it over. I’ve fed the animals, and the rest of my work can hang on for the few minutes it’ll take me. Seven B, you said? I won’t be long.’

  When she got to the ward she stood at the door for a moment looking down its polished length, and felt an odd little tug of anxiety at the sight of the glassed-in cubicles with their quartets of beds and the few patients moving slowly and clumsily around in their thick quilted dressing-gowns and floor-slapping slippers. It was an adult female medical ward, and several of the patients were elderly women with the yellowish parchment faces of terminal illness, and despite the brisk smell of disinfectant and fresh flowers in the air there was an under-smell, too, of disease and death, and she breathed through her mouth instead of her nose, not wanting to admit to the fear the smell brought with it.

  There was a screened bed in the far corner cubicle and after a moment she walked over towards it, seeing a nurse standing there, and said, ‘Dr Pitman?’

  ‘In here,’ the nurse said and went away, leaving her standing there. The other three beds in the cubicle were empty, and for a moment she thought there was no one there behind the curtains either, but then she heard the murmur of voices and heard a faint bubbling sound and again the little surge of anxiety rose in her, and irritated at her own foolishness, she moved forwards as briskly as she could and slipped behind the curtains.

  The child on the bed had a gently humming cuirass respirator round her chest, and a tube running in via her nose. There was another tube beside the bed that disappeared under the covers in the region of her hips, and she could see also that there was a tracheotomy tube in position in her throat. As she watched, the sister who was standing on the other side of the bed, with Ben and another older man behind her, reached over and disconnected it, and began to apply a suction nozzle. The machine bubbled revoltingly, and then at last hissed clear and the sister removed the nozzle and said decisively, ‘I don’t give her above another few hours. Not at this rate.’ And she turned and looked over her shoulder at the old man standing behind her. ‘I’ve called the school, told the headmistress, and she’s notifying the parents. But it’ll be too late by the time they get here, if they come at all. It’s a long flight from Hong Kong.’

  ‘You’re so pessimistic, Sister, I sometimes wonder why you bother to get up in the morning,’ the old man grunted, and pushed her aside to lean over the child. Looking at her face, with its deeply shadowed temples and the hectic flush over the cheekbones, Jessie felt her belly contract with pity; she was a pretty child, meant to be round-faced and ebullient, but now she looked as helpless as a fish on a marble slab, a travesty of a young human, and Jessie wanted to lean over her, to touch her, hug her, force her to wake up instead of lying there with her eyelids only half-closed so that a rim of white showed beneath them.

  She made herself look away and said quietly, ‘Dr Pitman, I brought the reports you wanted.’

  ‘Ah, thank you, Jessie. Look, sir, here you can see what I mean. Read this one … and this one … it’s more than just the ESR, isn’t it? It’s every one of the readings. And it seems to be increasing.’

  ‘I told you she should be in intensive care somewhere else,’ the sister snapped, and went rustling away. ‘I’ll send the staff nurse to special her. I’ve got other patients here to look after.’ And the old man looked after her with such an expression of dislike on his face that even in these circumstances and with the dying child between them, Jessie wanted to laugh.

  ‘Bloody woman,’ he muttered, and then looked back at the reports Ben was holding. ‘Listen, Pitman, you’re the pathologist. Not a clinical man, I know, but you know a lot about disease processes. Do you think this child needs intensive care? She’s all right in that respirator – it’s an old one, but it works – and she’s holding her own ….’

  ‘Barely. Sister’s right, you know. It’s a matter of hours, if that,’ Ben said, and then added, ‘She looks very like the children I had to PM. It worries me that I could find no obvious cause of death in them.’

  ‘What’s that?’ The old man frowned.

  ‘Two other children I did post-mortems on recently came from the same school. It’s a nasty business, nothing to see but evidence of a highly malignant virus infection, lots of kids down with it and one or two – well, three, counting this one – knocked out altogether. And no way of knowing what the virus is.’

  Jessie was never to know what prompted what she did then, was never able to decide whether she had been wrong or right to do it. All she knew was that suddenly she was listening to her own voice, while Ben and the other doctor stared at her, Ben with his face blank with astonishment, and the old man looking almost foxy in his mounting interest in what she was saying.

  ‘Contravert,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Ben, if she’s as ill as you say, and as ill as sister says – and nurses are usually right about things like this, aren’t they? – well, why not try Contravert? I know we’re still doing animal trials but if the poor little scrap’s dying anyway – remember what we were saying before? About the way they tried out the anti-cancer drugs? Well, why not your Controvert? I … it’s marvellous stuff, Ben, and it’d be wrong, surely, to have something that could help this child and not use it?’

  ‘What’s she talking about, Pitman?’ The old man turned and stared at Ben. ‘Hey?’

  ‘I ….’ Ben took a deep breath and threw Jessie a look that was composed of dismay and undoubted anger, but also something else she couldn’t quite identify; excitement, perhaps, she thought. Yes, that’s what it is; he’s excited by the idea of using Contravert now, wants to do it. He’s angry with me for suggesting it, but he wants to do it.

  ‘I’ve been working on an antiviral agent,’ he said gruffly. ‘It’s been something I’ve been interested in for years, and now – well, I have something that might just possibly be effective. We’ve had one very small-scale animal trial that was successful.’ Again he threw that sharp glance at Jessie. ‘But it was only a small trial, and it has to be replicated several times before it could safely be used for a human trial. I have to get the ethical committee on it and ….’

  ‘Ethical committee my foot,’ the old man said strongly. ‘Listen, m’boy, I knew Fleming, you know. Old man at the time, and I was just a student at Mary’s, but I knew him, and I’m here to tell you that if he’d waited for any blasted ethical committees nothing useful would ever have happened at St Mary’s. He tried his stuff out on a chap with septicaemia, dying chap, moribund, he was, and everyone knew it, gave him his stuff, went away, next morning chap’s sitting up gobbling up his breakfast. Now, what is this you’ve got? What did she say it was called? Contra something?’

  ‘Contravert. It’s a neologism of my own. It’s … I based the work on interferon theory. That’s produced in a cascade when cells are triggered by viruses and ….’

  ‘Don’t give me the science, m’boy. Not my field. I’m a clinical chap. All I want to know is have you got an active antiviral drug that’s as activ
e as the antibiotics?’

  ‘I think so,’ Ben said. ‘I hope so,’ and though he seemed unwilling to have the admission dragged from him the excitement was unmistakably there in his voice now, and Jessie looked at him and lifted her eyebrows, grimacing her apology at him, but knowing he wasn’t as annoyed as she had thought he was at first.

  ‘Then for God’s sake, man, let me have some for this child!

  What are you waiting for? If you’ve got an answer, it’s got to be used.’

  ‘Dr Lyall Davies, I can’t,’ Ben said, and he put one hand on the old man’s arm and shook it slightly to emphasize his words. ‘I’ve done just one animal trial. It was a good one, I admit. The two sets of animals were exposed to the same infection, and the control group all died of the bug, and the treated group all survived. But that’s only one test. I’ve got to do more, lots more, before I can possibly try it on people ….’

  ‘Even a dying child?’ Jessie heard her own voice again with the same sense of surprise, and then stopped caring about whether she had any right to be joining in on the discussion at all. ‘Her parents aren’t here so they can’t say what they want to happen. But I’ve got a child – well, he’s not a child now – but if that had been Mike like that when he was small, I’d have wanted something done for him. Anything. If he died anyway then that would be my tragedy – but at least I’d know that everything possible had been done. It’s what doesn’t happen that hurts most. And if this child dies just because you want to wait for ethical committees and more trials ….’ She didn’t attempt to finish the sentence and her words hung in the air between them as the respirator behind them hissed and hummed, and the child lay still within it.

  ‘Where is the stuff?’ Lyall Davies said, and poked his face into Ben’s. ‘Hey? Where is it?’ He turned on Jessie. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jessie said, and didn’t move.

  ‘Then go and get it for me. I’ll use it if he won’t. Then I’ll get the blame if anything goes wrong,’ the old man said.

  Jessie shook her head. ‘No. It’s Ben’s and Ben has to use it. It’d be wrong to just hand it over to you, as bad, almost, as not using it at all. Ben has to decide freely. Otherwise ….’ She shook her head, confused. ‘I don’t know why. I just know it would be wrong. I’ll get it if Ben says he wants me to. Ben?’

  He looked at her, his face smooth and expressionless as he thought, and then he turned back to the bedside and looked down on the child. The half-closed eyes seemed to peer slyly up at him and he reached forwards and pulled the lids down gently, to close them fully, and it was that action that seemed to make him reach his decision. Watching him, Jessie thought – that’s what they do to dead bodies, and she knew the same thought had come into Ben’s mind because he turned and looked at her and said harshly, ‘All right. It can’t do any harm, I suppose. And it might help – go and get it. The bottle marked A5 on the third shelf of the small fridge ….’

  She looked at him almost indignantly. ‘As if I’d forget!’ and turned and went, running through the ward, leaving the ward sister staring after her in disapproval, along the corridor and down the stairs, not stopping until she was so out of breath she could run no more. Ben was going to use Contravert on a sick child, and it was all her fault. If the child dies, she thought, as she reached the laboratory and hurried to the small refrigerator to get the A5 bottle, if she dies, what then? Will I be able to live with myself after that? And will Ben? And for a moment she stood there with the bottle in her hand, staring down at it, trying to find the strength to put it back in the fridge, to go back to Ben and tell him she was wrong to have suggested it. She was sorry, she hadn’t brought it after all, forget all about it, please ….

  And then she wrapped the bottle in a dressing towel, very carefully, and carried it back to Ward Seven B.

  18

  Peter took the piece of crumpled paper out of the waste-paper bin and smoothed it on his desk, bending over to see it more easily in the light thrown by his desk anglepoise. What was the good of being stupid and emotional over this? If she wanted to be absurd, it didn’t help matters to be equally absurd himself. To have crushed it in both hands and thrown it away had been childish. Start again, he told himself, be strong and sensible and don’t bring yourself down to her level.

  It started without preamble. ‘I’ve thought a good deal today about what happened last night, but I need more time to think. I just can’t make any decisions yet about what I’m going to do, but I also can’t just go on living at Purbeck Avenue as though nothing has happened. It did happen, and it has to be dealt with. I’m staying away for a few days, but I’ll be in touch when I feel able to. We’ll see where we go from there.’ And she had signed it with just her initials, J.H.

  It was that which had frightened him most, that which had made him crumple up the note and hurl it into the bin. If she’d signed it ‘Jessie’ or used the old familiar ‘Jess’ that he’d always called her when they were first married and now used when he was feeling particularly affectionate, it would have been all right. He’d have known this was just one of those stupid states women got themselves into, especially middle-aged women (at thirty-nine Jessie must surely be getting to that difficult stage?), but the chill remoteness of those initials took it all well beyond that. She was really angry, coldly and bitterly angry in a way she had never shown before, and he couldn’t understand why.

  He leaned back in his chair and stared at the piece of paper glowing under his desk light. So, all right, he’d hit her. No decent man should ever hit a woman, everyone knew that, but surely there’s a point at which provocation justifies an overflow of anger? He’d been driven as far as any man could be driven, he told himself, feeling his throat tighten with the sadness of his situation: away for a week, not getting any of the comforts a married man is entitled to expect, and clearly so far out of mind as well as out of sight that she didn’t even remember what day he was due back. How could any man not be driven to a state of fury by that? And then on top of it driving like a lunatic and destroying his car – what did she expect him to do? Say, ‘There, there, ducky’, and kiss her better?

  At that thought he felt his face go a dull hot red. Kiss her – Christ, but he was feeling the need of that! He’d always been the most faithful of men; all his married life he’d kept himself solely and wholly for her. None of the bits on the side other men went in for, not for Peter Hurst, and this was all the thanks he got! It would serve her right if he started an affair, and he sat and brooded about that possibility, reviewing the women he knew who could be considered for the role of mistress, and felt worse than ever. Miss Price? Heavens no – and she was one of the least unpleasant and ugly of the women around the office; and it wasn’t much better at the photographic club. Though there was that new woman who had come with Dave Lettner last week – he sat up straight again and picked up the piece of paper and this time crumpled it very deliberately and threw it back into the bin. She’d let him know when she was ready to talk to him? Sod the bitch! He had better things to do than sit around and mope, waiting for her to come crawling back. Next time she sent her bloody jigging black messenger with one of her insolent notes he wouldn’t be around to read it so quickly. She’d soon change her damned tune.

  And he took his coat and hat and went out of the office, ignoring Miss Price’s sardonic goodnight and glance at the clock – because it was still not quite five thirty – and went to get a drink at the George Hotel before going to the committee meeting of the photographic club. Maybe Dave and his friend would be in the mood to go out for dinner.

  The best thing to do, Hugh told himself, is to cover every possibility. It wasn’t enough just to tell them he’d got a rotten cold; he’d act it out, with all the trimmings, and then he’d be that much more convincing. There was always the risk that that bastard Graham wouldn’t believe him and would make an excuse to come round and see for himself; well, if he does, Hugh thought gleefully, he’ll find out.

  He bought a
can of chicken noodle soup and a packet of cream crackers from the supermarket, and an inhalant, a bottle of cough medicine and a highly aromatic chest rub at the chemist’s, and wrapping his scarf firmly around his neck, even though it was a mild evening for all it was the middle of November, went trudging along the road back to his flat, breathing through his mouth as though his nose was blocked up and telling himself how awful he felt. And it seemed to work, because as he let himself into the house and Mrs Scarman popped out of her room like a doll in a Swiss weather house, as she usually did, the first thing she said as she peered at him was, ‘What’s the matter with you then? Got this nasty flu, have you? I told you it was going around, didn’t I tell you, warn you to wrap up warm? Won’t be told, you young people, won’t be told.’

  He looked at her lugubriously over the edge of his scarf and sighed deeply, enjoying himself. ‘You’re right, Mrs Scarman,’ he said, making his voice as thick and nasal as he could. ‘You’re absolutely right, of course. I’m feeling awful. What I’d like to do is go to bed and sleep it off with some aspirin and that ….’

  ‘You do it – the best thing you could do, that is, sweat it out; I always say, feed a cold and sweat a fever.’

  ‘Trouble is I’ve got an urgent appointment for tonight. I really ought to go out. I’ll be letting people down if I don’t and that worries me. Maybe I ought to go anyway, though it’ll keep me out till well after two or even later ….’