The Good Doctor

by Paul Butler

  What could it mean? The obvious answer would send him plummeting. But he isn’t ready for it, not yet. There was something else, something in the hint of a smile in the corner of her lips at her accusation, the way she called him “Doctor,” not as she had called Grenfell “Doctor,” but sarcastic, accusing, teasing. The young doctor knows well the danger he is leading himself into. Optimism and hope, his old enemies again. Faith is a drug, and one to which he has long been addicted. But this time it has something to work on. Was there not, after all, something wifely in the confident way she challenged him, delving into his privacy, passing judgment and tormenting? If she had been polite with him, if she had asked him about his day, if she had chatted about inconsequential details, and if it had emerged naturally that she and Grenfell were to meet, then he should be discouraged. But her very surliness is a kind of claim. The way she had judged him brazenly, comparing him to his rival, daring him to improve himself; the way she made sure he knew she was meeting Grenfell; these things should give him hope. Like a fever at its height, a crisis had indeed arrived. But fevers pass. The very torment and pain burn away the disease and leave the patient exhausted but well. All was not lost just yet.

  — Chapter Four —

  London is in constant motion—people, carriages, reins, the sinews of horses. It’s easy enough to stay hidden in the crowds. The young doctor is just another shadow weaving between omnibus and cab, making his way through the multitudes. They dropped off the boy Malcolm, as he both feared and suspected they might, with his mother. Unchaperoned, chattering and oblivious of their surroundings, they wafted to the music hall in Drury Lane.

  For a young woman of Nurse Mills’s quality, such an arrangement means one of two things. Either they are already betrothed, or there is something about their relationship that puts their propinquity quite beyond suspicion. Although he knows they are not brother and sister and can plainly see there is no great age difference, he still longs to believe there might be some other, as yet unforeseen, clause rendering their intimacy harmless.

  When they take to the streets once more after the music hall, following them becomes more of a challenge. The streets are thinning and their meandering course seems designed to frustrate the spy. Following the vaguely west-to-east course that would see both of them back in their respective lodgings, they deviate through Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  He knows what Grenfell is doing. He wants to delight his conquest with his experience and daring. He wants her to know he could take her through some of the most perilous and poorly lit regions of the city with the confidence of a knight. Danger is an aphrodisiac. Man invokes darkness so that woman may cling all the closer to him. While squealing in mock terror, she delights that he is laying himself between her and the dragon, real or imagined. It is his offering. If she accepts his protection, she is accepting him.

  For the young doctor, the tall oaks and night shadows provide some protection from discovery. Grenfell jokes and she laughs, swaying away from him at the hip like a sylph in coy retreat. Now and again they suddenly join together in a chorus from the music hall:

  Who were you with last night?

  Out in the pale moonlight

  Its patent vulgarity lends a mask of parody; they can bump together at the elbow, give voice to sentiments through the safe gauze of imitation, which might be peeled away at any moment. Removal is so much easier than creation, and it is all too close for comfort.

  Through all of this the young doctor’s heart bangs ferocious timpani, dreading the moment of silence when he might creep around the trunk of a shielding tree to find them locked together in a carnal embrace. But the moment doesn’t come in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Instead they step from the turf of the park onto a concrete lane and saunter together down an alleyway, both sets of shoes echoing into the night.

  Gaslights hanging above give sudden clarity to objects below. The young doctor can’t risk a sudden and shameful discovery of his presence. So he follows, guarding his tread and keeping his distance, easing along the wall, touching the cold brick, hiding behind drainpipes. Suddenly, the footsteps cease, swallowed by an eerie, languid silence. His own breath shrinks into a pebble lodged inside his throat. He seems to catch a whisper from her, a velvety, lascivious sound, and a low, gravelly moan from Grenfell.

  He has rarely known really murderous thoughts before, but his blood races now with an aching desire he knows should be feared. Above his head, glistening under the light of gas jet, the wrought-iron teeth guarding a high window curl into little spikes. He feels suddenly justified in his need to destroy. He’s clearly not alone. The architects and designers of civilized London would rather see the death or mutilation of an intruder than risk unlawful entry. If only one of the bars could be unhooked from its mooring and wielded in his hand, Grenfell, too, might feel its power. Grenfell, also, is an intruder. He has trespassed upon the young doctor’s dream.

  “What are you looking at?” The question seems to emerge from the young doctor’s own thoughts, though the voice belongs to Nurse Mills. They must be closer to him than he imagined, although they are around the next corner and safely out of sight. The tone carries no whisper, no hint of the passion he has been dreading. With a sense of relief, he pictures them standing apart.

  “Dr. Johnson’s house.” Grenfell’s reply is detached, almost rude. “England’s foremost man of letters.”

  She laughs. He is silent. When he does speak, it seems as though he’s talking to himself. “This is where he lived.”

  Nurse Mills makes another sound, part laugh, part sigh, and edged with impatience. “Why don’t you forget you’re a tourist, Willy?” Her words are laced with an odd singsong quality that seems restless and untamed.

  “You’re from London. You couldn’t understand,” Grenfell says quietly. “History is scattered around you, but like all Londoners, you can’t see it. You’re like beasts milling blindly, unaware of the diamonds at their feet.”

  “Milling beasts? So that’s how you see me!” Her voice rises in mock anger, and from her footfalls the young doctor senses she is circling Grenfell, trying to regain his attention. She seems a different kind of woman in the dark.

  “I’m afraid so,” he says without passion.

  ”Well then, dear doctor,” she replies, “do educate me.” He would have assumed her to be drunk were it not for the fact that he has followed them so closely all evening he knows this can’t be possible. He wonders whether her heady, excited tone is an impersonation of one of the characters of the music hall. He had scarcely been aware of the performers at the time, so busy had he been craning his neck to glimpse the faces of Nurse Mills and Grenfell through the bobbing heads and raised fists sitting up in “the gods.” The string of actors and singers were united only in their lurid theatricality, their tendency to bellow and overplay. Every line of song and skit was yelled as if to a bunch of idiot children. The eyes of the players bulged under the footlights and a steady stream of spittle arced from their lips and fell like rain showers onto the heads in the front row. Even if Nurse Mills was caught up with the dubious charms of the theatre sufficiently to ape its style, this is a far cry indeed from the serious young woman who upbraided him on the ethics of medicine.

  “Don’t you think it a great thing to leave behind a permanent monument of yourself?”

  “Of course I do, Willy, but really, sometimes I just want to be silly and trivial.” A kind of sullen pleading has crept into her voice.

  “You can dream away your life on trivialities, that’s the problem. I’m tired of unimportant things.”

  A pigeon lands on the windowsill above the young doctor’s head and coos so loudly he thinks it will give him away.

  “What’s so unbearably unimportant in your life?” The question is sullen, resentful.

  “You should go to Parkgate, where I was brought up.”

  There’s a silence, a
faint scrape of shoe against stone.

  “I would go if you asked me,” she says quietly.

  “Not on your life!” he snaps.

  “Why?”

  “It’s the most poisonous, ignorant backwater you could possibly imagine. There are no famous homes there, no examples to follow.”

  “Examples, Willy? Don’t tell me you want to be a man of letters like Dr. Johnson.”

  “I don’t want to live and die an unknown. That’s not an option.”

  There’s a dry, warning tone in his voice, but it’s obvious to the young doctor that Nurse Mills is determined to ignore it. “You’re like everyone who comes to the big city, Willy. You’re impressed that so many famous people have lived here. You think that means ordinary people must have a greater chance of being famous in London. But you’re wrong. There are just more people, that’s all. More famous people, yes, but thousands and thousands more obscure people, too.”

  The pigeon scuttles along the brick ledge, loosening pebbles along the way. Some land in the young doctor’s hair. Involuntarily his head shakes them off. One pings against a drainpipe. He thinks he hears Nurse Mills gasp. Then she giggles, and the young doctor knows he’s safe.

  “My family wasn’t always nonentities. My grandfather was a colonel in India. His brother distinguished himself in the siege of Lucknow.”

  “Well, there you are, then.”

  “Yes, here I am, a fourth child of a Church of England minister from the provinces. My family has snatched obscurity from the jaws of fame. Coming to London is a start for me, no matter what you say.”

  “Well, I don’t have a famous grandfather or uncle or whoever it is, and I’m a woman, so I’m even more obscure than you can claim to be.”

  “And happy to remain so, by the sounds of things.”

  “Happy enough, yes. In any case, I thought you wanted to be a doctor, a good, conscientious doctor who does his work well and cares for his patients.” Her voice has softened, and it’s with a double pang—of longing and of envy—that the young doctor feels the return of the Nurse Mills he recognizes, the safe and reliable nurse who wishes to devote herself with sober attention to a worthy object.

  “Who ever becomes celebrated for doing a job well? Look at that other fellow who works in the clinic, what’s his name?”

  “He doesn’t do his job well. Yesterday he came in late smelling of gin. You’re worth a hundred of him.”

  The young doctor’s heart falls like a stone. His arms become heavy with an ache which spreads to his fingers.

  “Exactly,” says Grenfell. “But who would know the difference between us? Same lab coats, same duties? Who assigns oblivion to one and distinction for another?”

  “You do that for yourselves, Willy.”

  “How?”

  “The quality of your work singles you out.”

  “Don’t you believe it!” His bitterness is palpable.

  “I don’t understand.” Nurse Mills’s voice takes on a pleading tone again. “You are so good in the clinic. Dr. Bleaker is impressed, I can tell. Are you saying you don’t want to be a physician?”

  Grenfell sighs, and the young doctor hears the gravel under his feet as he turns and tramps away. “I’m saying it’s not enough. Not for me.”

  Her footsteps scuttle after, and the young doctor is alone. The dull ache of yesterday’s hangover returns to his temples, strengthening with each heartbeat. You’re worth a hundred of him. The words dismissed him with as little thought as one might cast aside a stale crust of bread. Up until this moment he has been on a slow and steady ascent toward goals which were modest enough in themselves yet everything and more to him: a practice somewhere quiet and suburban where people had healthy lungs, minor complaints, and steady salaries; a young wife won in delicious slender increments through weeks and months and years of “hold this, Nurse,” “thank you,” and “the bandage, please.” He imagines a home, a three-storey house with cheerful fireplaces, and a small household with housekeeper and maid, and no unnecessary frills. Nurse Mills would like to crochet and darn herself and would be the very epitome of a quiet doctor’s wife, steady and reliable, keeping tabs on household spending, entertaining when necessary.

  But Grenfell, the vicar’s son from the north, has galloped through this dream, sword ablaze, tearing and slashing, sweeping aside the matchstick illusion of happiness and building upon the very same ground something a thousand times broader and more boastful. The young doctor curses the vicar—the pompous, prating, upright man who no doubt dressed in black and held his holy book in hand as he walked, who no doubt is responsible for filling his son with entitlement to all he saw, who no doubt failed to instill in him the most important of all unwritten commandments between men: do not covet that which is already coveted by another. But the worst aspect of this most casual of thefts for the young doctor is that the criminal has taken from him what he hardly seems to want.

  The young doctor looks up at the iron teeth and curling spikes guarding the high window. How truthful the image seems now. This is the way the world is. If he had more successfully defended his own corner, if he had lain his heart at Nurse Mills’s feet before the conceited young vicar’s son had come from the north with his grandiose ideas, he wouldn’t have been following them tonight like a starving rat. He’s the outsider to be spurned at the door for no other reason than his own hesitancy.

  In animal pain he lurches eastwards, hardly noticing when the silence of Fleet Street and the City give way to the vicious, glass-shattering slums of Whitechapel. The moon rises high, its coldness claiming him. When the tent comes into view, its yellow canvas Arabesque with spires and dune-like dips, he thinks he has slipped into some faraway Persian dream.

  He has no idea why he enters other than because he wants away from himself; he knows that voices and clamour might stir up his soul, and he needs that obliterating dust of confusion. The moment he goes between the tent’s open flaps, though, he breathes an air of desperation as tangible as his own. Immediately the helpless phrases—“clinging to the rock of salvation,” the “wild and turbulent sea”—spiral tunelessly in the dank air like seagulls trapped under the canvas. The tinny jangle of tambourines and frequent coughs of worshippers scare up the general cacophony. With a great bang of a drum and a murmur of voices, the singing ceases. Though no one adjusts the hanging lamps, the lighting under the canvas seems to alter, and attention hones upon the facing row of rickety seats upon the podium. Between a thin man with spectacles and a notebook, and a lady with black collar, bonnet, and lace trimmings, a large bull-like figure perches improbably upon his frail chair. He seems unnaturally still for a moment, a waxwork with wet eyes. Then he rises without sound, a grey funnel of breath appearing from slightly parted lips and vanishing just as quickly.

  The young doctor holds onto a tent pole and sways himself steady—he stopped for a few and the sting of cheap whisky now dances on his tongue. Although hundreds of eyes fix on the podium, the preacher singles out the young doctor like an osprey catching the shimmer of a tail fin far below. A special kind of challenge glistens in his dark eyes. Both preacher and doctor know the interloper has been spotted.

  “Once I was a young man,” he says in a twanging, Midwest American accent. The doctor wonders whether the phrase “young man” is aimed at him. “Church seemed boring to me then; boring and irrelevant!”

  Whispers ripple through the tent and fizzle into hush. “But,” he continues, holding up a finger, “it was a condition of my employ, and so I went.” The crowd murmurs in anticipation.

  The preacher’s broad shoulders raise themselves into a shrug as his voice softens. “I went . . . and one day, perhaps sensing my reluctance to be present at all, my Bible teacher came into my place of work.” He turns from the crowd and casts his eyes for a moment at the canvas ceiling. “This place of work, you understand, was a sho
e store, so there I was, bent over my workbench, wrapping shoes.” He crouches, miming the action with more energy than it seems to require. “And quietly, slowly, there amidst the smell of new leather he said, ‘Dwight, Christ loves you.’”

  The crowd gives a soft, communal gasp. As though caught in the slow pull of an outgoing wave, the young doctor feels more unanchored than usual, and follows the current of emotion.

  Still crouching, the preacher turns and gazes over the faces like a man scanning the ocean for a ship. “I fell to my knees,” he whispers, and then without warning or any visible intake of breath, he thunders, “I fell to my knees!” and points at the grass at his feet. The crowd gives a communal yell of approbation, which scatters into “Praise the Lord!” and a “Glory be!”

  The young doctor doesn’t feel the tears until they dampen his collar and slide down his chest. He doesn’t know he is sinking to the ground until his knees feel the wet turf through his trousers. It’s an odd and liberating sensation. Suddenly he has permission to admit it; he is no one, a mere voice crying in the wilderness. The “I” of his life is an illusion. Like everyone else, whether they were aware of it or not, the soul housed within his flesh and bones belongs not to him but to a greater power.

  As he hangs his head and continues to listen, he feels the energy under the canvas seeping into him. He knows his life has been forever changed.

  — Chapter Five —

  The young doctor lays the pen on his desk and feels his heart race. This, he decides, is the version he will deliver.

  “Meet me tonight without fail outside Dr. Johnson’s house, seven o’clock. Willy. X”

  Morning now looms through the curtainless pane. A thin breeze hisses through the V-shaped crack in the glass, lifting the corner of the letter. Even the wind seems impatient to see the message in the hands of Nurse Mills.