by Paul Butler
Only on a second reading do the final lines, more lost in creases than the others, really catch her attention: “Find a devoted and compliant wife like the poor creature sitting so patiently next to Moody (not English—English women far too assertive e.g. Nurse Mills).”
“He wrote this,” she says, more statement than question.
“Yes,” replies the young doctor, a dithering, distracted presence now.
The office door opens suddenly. Red-faced, but smug, Willy emerges, alone. He pulls at the collar of his lab coat as Florence has seen proud men tug at their suit lapels. He strides toward the workbench and picks up a cloth and polishes a glass beaker—a confusing action as Willy has been seeing patients this morning and the young doctor has been sorting through prescriptions and formulas.
Before there is time to consider the implications, Dr. Bleaker’s face, like a frightened owl’s, appears around his office door. “Nurse, Doctor, could you two come here for a moment, please?” Florence returns Willy’s note to the young doctor and feels an ache as he folds it away in his lab pocket. They exchange a brief look of despair.
— Chapter Ten —
One day, Florence will muse that decisions, particularly momentous ones, are made far more passively than most of us are prepared to admit. One road is eliminated, not by meticulously weighed logic that lends preference to another option, but rather by one’s sheer inability to move along it. It’s the stomach, not the mind, or even the heart, that decides. So it is for her that morning in late September in the London clinic with Dr. Bleaker. All roads are blocked, save one. She takes the road available to her.
“What have you to say for yourself?” Dr. Bleaker asks the young doctor. The supervising physician skews himself sideways at his small desk. He looks up uncomfortably, his eyes blinking behind his glasses. Florence feels sorry for him; she guesses he’s in as much torment as the young doctor. Dr. Bleaker is a man who likes the ready cover of urgent work and sarcasm. The sudden need for direct communication has him in a featureless desert, no dispensing jars into which he can peer, no acid quips under which he can dart.
Florence looks again at the note which trembles slightly in Dr. Bleaker’s hand. “Florence, meet me tonight without fail outside Dr. Johnson’s house, seven o’clock. Willy. X” She marvels for the first time at how well the young doctor forged Willy’s hand. She would never have been able to tell the difference between this and Willy’s note from the revival meeting.
The young doctor’s lips are white, his whole form trembling like a sapling in the wind. He’s clearly struggling to say anything at all.
“Nurse Mills,” Dr. Bleaker says, “you may return to the clinic and prepare the next patient.”
The permission to leave is long past due, she thinks. Anyone with a sense of etiquette would never have asked the object of so much unseemly desire to be present even for a moment. Dr. Bleaker’s office is so tiny, the three of them are inches from touching. The discomfort must have showed on her face and made him realize his blunder. Doctors, she has come to learn, lack social graces. And Dr. Bleaker is in a panic, a panic, she senses, that could well be an opportunity.
“Thank you, Doctor, but as Dr. Grenfell’s note is addressed to me, I’d rather not leave it in another’s possession. I will return it to Dr. Grenfell and he may destroy it if he wishes.”
Dr. Bleaker looks down at the paper, confused. “I’m sorry, Nurse Mills, but this is a forgery.” His small eyes blink from the other side of the lenses.
“No, Doctor. It’s Dr. Grenfell’s hand. You must recognize it.”
Again, he gives a bewildered look at the note.
What was it Nurse Armstrong said? One abrasion at a time. “I did not meet him, you see, and he has taken it all very hard. You cannot believe what he has told you about it.”
“I don’t understand.” Dr. Bleaker’s voice rises in pitch. “Grenfell’s complaint is about you, Doctor.” He points at her companion and almost yells. But the tone is embarrassment, not anger. It’s a physician’s fear—fear of being wrong. She’s seen it before in the medical profession: all those years of diagnosing; a career of prescriptions piling up on his shoulders. If he could misjudge human relationships so fundamentally, if he could fail to know who was telling the truth and who was deluded, what else might he have misjudged? This is the essential drawback of power, she thinks. Doctors never made minor mistakes. “He said you copied his hand in order to entrap Nurse Mills.” His face colours with indignation, but his shoulders slope in defeat.
I’ve got him, she thinks. But then the young doctor makes a sound—part squeak, part sigh—and she knows she has to press on quickly before he ruins her work. She gropes sideways, catches his moist hand, and gives it a warning squeeze.
“Since our engagement,” she tells Dr. Bleaker, keeping hold of her companion’s hand, and glancing with affection at his stunned face. “I’m sorry, dear, I have to tell Dr. Bleaker.” Turning back to the supervising physician, she says, “We weren’t going to announce it, you see, until we’d had consent from everyone. Anyway, it was our intention, and I believe Dr. Grenfell must have overheard us. He has been following us, you see.”
“Grenfell has been following you?”
“Perhaps it’s overwork, or some of the things we have to deal with here in the clinic. He’s a long way from home, isn’t he?”
“The northwest,” Dr. Bleaker confirms in a gasp. “Cheshire, I think.”
“London can be overwhelming to newcomers.”
Dr. Bleaker’s mouth hangs open, and he looks from Florence to the young doctor whose hand has become heavy in hers. She fears he has expired from sheer astonishment, life departing so swiftly his legs have not yet had time to buckle and deposit him on the floor. Dr. Bleaker stares one more time at the note in his hand. Shaking his head, he passes the paper to Florence. “It’s beyond comprehension,” he says. She sees in his eyes an awaking to a new world of possibilities regarding the human mind, its blind spots and subterfuges. “You had better go back,” he sighs, leaning on his desk and stroking the sides of his mouth. “I’ll be out in a few moments.” He catches a hesitation as he looks up. “Say nothing to him. I’ll deal with the matter myself.”
The rest of the morning and the afternoon pass in a strange, almost silent, dance. While Florence avoids the hostile, frustrated glances thrown at her by Willy, relegated to the workbench, and notices his puzzled glances toward Dr. Bleaker, who is buried deeper in his prescriptions than usual, she keeps trying, and failing, to secure the returning gaze of the young doctor she has saved. He’s even more distracted, nervy, and furtive than usual. When he wants Florence to hold the end of a bandage, his voice—which until this day has infused such commonplace phrases as “Hold this, Nurse,” with such weight and significance she used to believe he must have taken it from the last line of a Shakespeare sonnet—now deserts him completely. He just gives a twitchy gesture toward the fabric while avoiding her eye.
As the day rolls on, he becomes increasingly timid and more aware of the clock. It’s as though the hour of six possesses some kind of reckoning from which he needs urgent escape. For Florence this jumpiness has an effect she could not have predicted. His fear sparks her anger, anger that a man should have declared all the constituent parts of romantic love—the ardour, the plea for mercy, the jealousy—only to disown the emotion once it has yielded the desired response.
She’s so caught up in resentment she can barely tell if her impatience is caused by a theoretical disappointment or a real one. She imagines his hands, not Willy’s, gliding over her dress in the darkness; she feels his breath on her neck, and sees his eyes, not Willy’s, narrowing with boyish distrust at their first disagreement. He is a doctor, too, and Miss Armstrong’s warning applies to him as well as to Willy. He, too, will have wants. He, too, will need to control.
With the last patient seen and the
work table cleared enough for those who will soon take over for the evening shift, Dr. Bleaker disappears into his office, lab coat flapping, and closes the door behind him. With angry, sudden movements, one swift infuriated look in Florence’s direction, Willy strides in the opposite direction, out of sight into the clinic annex. The door slams. Florence half expects the young doctor to do the same, but he waits, calf-eyed, by the workbench as though expecting an explanation.
“Come,” she says, and they walk together into the annex and put on their coats. His movements are slow and watchful like those of a dog expecting punishment.
He opens the door for Florence and they step into a light evening rain. He stands some yards off, wondering, it seems, how to take his leave. “You don’t seem exactly overjoyed at this new turn of events, Doctor,” Florence ventures.
“I don’t understand,” a reedy voice replies. He holds a half-cupped hand over one brow as though shielding his eyes from the sun, which makes little sense to Florence as they are under cloud cover and rain continues to fall.
“It seems we have just declared our intention to marry, Doctor. Perhaps we should get to know each other a little.”
She’s aware, even as the words leave her, that if he had reacted earlier as she expected—with unbridled happiness—she might have spoken quite differently. She would have made sure he understood that the lie was merely to save his career. The punishment was too heavy, she would have told him. Let this close call be a lesson to you.
But his reticence has sparked something. She is annoyed that he has backed away from the possibility of success. And there is something else, something more difficult to understand and justify in her mind. In truth, she likes some quality in his rashness. Recklessness is generous. It creates situations and stirs people up. In a mysterious, distorted way, the young man has been mimicking the life in those gospel verses. He has returned her to the schoolroom, when her senses first dived beyond the musty pages inhaling the smell of the sand, feeling the heat of the desert sun. Once more she thunders through the temple with Jesus as he overturns the tables of the merchants. Once more she feels the odd tingle of disobedience, the pleasure of dislodging expectations. There is holiness in risk, spontaneity, absence of self-regard. He has awakened this counterpart in rashness and daring in herself, and she has remembered its power and its freedom. Under this influence she has saved him with a few words and possibly altered the course of her own life. She wants to see this side of him again, becomes almost desperate for it now as they stand in the rain.
“You’re playing with me,” he says, unsmiling.
“No.” She takes a step forward.
“Why would you talk of marrying me?” His lips turn down at the words like those of an embarrassed child.
“Why not? You wanted to marry me.”
“That was different.” His eyes remain wounded and wary, but his hand lowers from his brow at last. They are both getting wet.
“No, it wasn’t. You found me. You reached inside and here I am. Don’t tell me you’re afraid.”
He seems to loosen up and gather movement around his shoulders. His eyes search hers for confirmation.
“You’ve got what you wanted, Doctor,” she says. “I’ll put it in writing if you want.”
“What about . . . ?” His eyes wander to the clinic door and his mouth forms a G.
“Gone. Forgotten.”
At last it comes: a smile, tentative and uncertain. Rainwater slides freely over her face now and darkens his hair.
“Come on, Doctor,” she says, “let’s get in out of the rain.”
— Chapter Eleven —
1940: Springfield, Massachusetts
***
The clock ticks louder. A glance shows Judy it’s just past midday.
“So,” she says, “it was pity.”
An expression of amused irony skips across Florence’s face. Judy knows what it means. It was Judy—the vulgar hack reducing every experience to an easily digestible platitude—who should be pitied. The old woman doesn’t even respect her enough to be offended.
“Do you ever plan to marry, Miss Agar?” she asks.
“I haven’t been asked recently, why?” The ticking becomes harsher.
“When you do, you might do well to consider one thing.”
Judy holds her pencil suspended over the pad.
“It isn’t admiration, physical appearance, or background that determines the degree of compatibility.”
“Yes?”
“It’s what’s inside you, the substance of your thoughts. It’s beyond contrivance and runs far deeper than desire. Willy was dashing, he was upright. He wanted to deliver help, advice, and medicine to the deserving. I, too, believed in using the energy I had to cure the sick.”
“But?”
“I wasn’t like Willy. I didn’t want to gather the reins of moral authority in my own hands. In truth, I distrusted anyone who did.”
Judy frowns, remembering the conversation outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“I wanted to be like Willy, yes,” she says with a frown. “At least I thought I did. But you can’t fake who you are, and in the end you don’t really want to. That day in the clinic, and perhaps before, I recognized myself not in Willy but in the other young doctor who came in so frequently dishevelled and wild-eyed.”
“Did you want to try and reform him?”
“No!” Her eyes flash. “No, Miss Agar, I didn’t. I wanted to reform the world for him.”
“By marrying him, then helping him imitate Dr. Grenfell?”
Florence sighs and leans back as far as the kitchen chair will allow. “I wonder, Miss Agar, what quality does a woman or man need be a good reporter?”
Journalist, the correction almost comes to Judy’s lips, but she thinks better of it.
“Would it be curiosity?”
“I would say so.”
“I ask, Miss Agar, merely because you appear to have none.”
Judy meets Florence’s steady gaze, expecting to see an anger to match her words. But there is only mild puzzlement.
“One question screams above all others. Yet you have asked it neither of my husband, nor of me.”
Judy shifts in her seat like an errant schoolchild. Several possible answers juggle inside her mind, but resentment takes hold of her before she can choose one. It’s the privilege of age only that allows the doctor’s wife to keep her squirming; there’s no other indication of greater penetration or wisdom. “I’m merely trying to find the reason your husband set about posing as Sir Wilfred Grenfell.” For the first time her tone betrays her impatience, but the old lady merely smiles.
“Are you, Miss Agar?” she replies. “I wouldn’t have known it. Every one of your questions is leading. And you haven’t once used that simple but extremely useful word, ‘why.’”
Her certainty infuriates Judy, but she looks down and scribbles the question. “All right, then,” she says with a tight smile, “I’d like to know why.”
— Chapter Twelve —
Every living person who has experienced the sharing of romantic love has dwelt in the blessed and glowing state in which for a time—and if they are lucky, for life—they feel they are a source of light and the centre of the universe. This is how it is in those first years during which Florence really gets to know her future husband. She comes to understand the relentless struggle of a wheel misaligned on the track of life. And she comes to appreciate the valour. Nothing is insignificant to a man like Florence’s fiancé. No slight can leave his soul undamaged. Every risk is life or death. And happiness, when it comes, is a tidal wave of joy.
They marry as soon as the young doctor graduates and settle away from London. Without friends or influence, his practice is small. With all that has been said about his habitual lateness in training, hi
s weakness for drink, he is rather a good doctor, sympathetic, alert, and thorough. He gathers new patients, and for a while it seems as though this will be enough to sustain their happiness. But there is always the taint of dissatisfaction. Something always turns up to remind him he is a star without an orbit. Every social event he attends by virtue of his profession carries some sense of peril. Conversation—about brothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins—seeks to place a man somewhere in the fabric of English life. England is about belonging. If a handshake seems too reluctant, if eyes leave him before he has finished speaking, he departs the function early and in a sullen mood that does not easily lift.
Florence doesn’t realize its importance at first. It seems no more than a series of gnat bites, sore and lingering, this sense of being outside of the circle. It’s something to get used to, nothing more. But it gets worse. Restless and still young, without children to distract them, they begin to roam. America, or perhaps their own imagined version of it, seems to open its arms to them. They do not follow Grenfell. To Florence he is a warning of false virtue, the man whose solicitude turned to anger when his will was thwarted. They hardly talk about him. They merely leave the gloom of England for the expanse of a new continent.
They move to a small town in Maine where the local doctor, a man named Abbott, is due to retire. Florence’s husband has few patients, so very little income, but they brace themselves for the influx that will surely come. When old Dr. Abbott sees that competition has arrived, however, he changes his mind and remains in practice. He cites “duty to ensure proper treatment for his patients” as the reason. The implied slight to Florence’s husband sends his mood into a deep trough. He is seen drunk in the town more than once.
Dr. Abbott brings a young nephew, newly graduated, to work in his practice. At least among the well-to-do and middle class, Florence’s husband cannot compete with the sterling recommendation of a young practitioner with the same blood and the same name as his long familiar uncle. It seems that America is about belonging, too.
