The Meddlers (3 page)

“Wasn’t it enough? And I’ve accepted your apology. I’ve had to.”

“Not completely. And it isn’t only last night I’m talking about. You’ve been edgy for months.”

“Have I? I hadn’t noticed particularly. Of course, I’ve been worried about Ian, and the way you and he—”

“Please, not that. Not now.”

“—and I’ve not been well. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Of course I have! And it’s worried me. But I suspected you were—well, feeling the way you did because of the way I’ve been wrapped up in work, rather than because of any change in your condition.”

She produced a smile of pure triumph. “I knew you hadn’t noticed. How all occasions do inform against you, George! Sir Peter says he wants to do another pyelogram soon. He’s been talking again about the possibility of dialysis.”

“What?” George stared at her. “But I saw him only yesterday! He said nothing to me!”

She smiled sweetly. “I told him not to. Insisted that he respect my confidence as a patient. He knows how busy you are, of course, and quite understood.”

“Marjorie! Why do you do this to me? You say I shut you out of
my work, but you shut me out… If you’re ill again, I’ve got to know!”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as that,” she said, clearly enjoying herself. “Not really. You know what an old woman Apthorp can be. Forget it. There’s nothing really new. I’ve got a bit puffed up again, had a few headaches. Nothing very much. And I suppose you could be right.”

“How do you mean?”

She sat down opposite him and propped her chin on her hands and gave him the look of limpid honesty at which she was particularly gifted.

“I have been—well, a little more resentful of this project than any others. Two years now, isn’t it? And you’ve retreated further and further into it, and I’ve been jealous. I can’t deny it.”

She’s done it again. She’s made me angry with her anger, and then turned it around so that I’m eaten up with guilt because she’s been ill and I haven’t noticed, and now she’s taking the blame on herself and making me feel worse than ever. Oh, God, how convoluted can a woman’s mind be?

George stared at her and suddenly ached to get away, to take his coat and his briefcase and get into the car and escape to the haven of the Unit and work and the baby and… which brought him back to the reason for his starting to probe her feelings about the project. Complication on complication, Pelion on Ossa!

And then he said it aloud: “Pelion on Ossa.”

“What?”

“I should join your drama group. I’m thinking in quotations.”

“Why Pelion on Ossa? What’s piling on what?”

I’ll have to plunge now, he thought. I’ll have to, and risk it.

“Complications. I’m going to need your help with the project.”

She stared at him, her mouth slightly open so that her rather small even teeth gleamed in the thin October sunshine that was now filling the kitchen. “My help?” she said slowly.
“Mine?”

“Yes. Well, perhaps cooperation would be a better word.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them he was puzzled by the blankness in them.

“Oh. For one mad moment I thought—well, never mind. What
sort of cooperation? Do you want to move into the hospital altogether, and get me to put up with losing the little of your company I do get? Or are you going to start getting even less money than you do now, and want me to take a cut in the housekeeping? Which is it?”

“It’s just a matter of giving your token consent to something that—”

The telephone buzzed sharply, and he turned his head quickly. “What’s the time? Nine? Who the hell can… the infant…” And he moved rapidly toward the door, anxiety welling up in him.

When he came back his face was grim, and she looked at him with surprise. “What’s happened? Is there something wrong?”

“It’s a bloody nuisance! Are the papers here?”

“Ian took the
Echo
. There’s just the
Times
. Why?”

“It’s in the
Echo
. Nowhere else apparently. They’ve found out about the baby.”

“Is that bad? You’ll be publishing anyway, won’t you?”

“But not yet. Oh, God, this is a nuisance. Kegan says they’re driving him mad already and he wants me there right away to talk to some bloody newspaper people. And I won’t. But I’ll have to go.”

He looked at her appealingly. “Marjorie, I’ve got to talk to you about this business, but I can’t do it now. Not properly. Please. Am I forgiven for last night?”

Her eyes filled with tears suddenly and she nodded.

“Thank you. I really am sorry, you know. And this other thing—look, what are you doing today?”

“I promised to help make costumes for the next production. Why?”

“Somehow, I’ll have to get away in time. I’ll have to. We’ll go out for dinner.”

“I can’t do that. Ian’s got some friends tonight. I promised I’d cook for them.”

“Oh.” The chill that had gone for these brief seconds settled again. “Yes. Of course. Then it’ll have to wait, I suppose. But it’s important, Marjorie. Try not to brood about last night, so that you’re angry again by the time I can talk to you.”

“I’m not that petty,” she said and turned away from him. “I should have known it was only because of something to do with work that you were so anxious to be with me. I’ll never learn, will I? Oh, go, will you? I’ll be here when you get back, the way I always am, and I’ll
cooperate
with whatever it is that’s so important to you. I suppose it’s something to be grateful for that I can do anything useful for you, so stop worrying. It might interfere with your work if you worry, and that would never do.”

Which leaves us just where we started, he thought drearily as he turned and went. If Kegan had waited another few minutes I could have got it settled. Now I’ll have to start all over again.

And as he climbed into the car and started the chilled engine, he had to make a very strong effort indeed to close the door on the compartment of his mind where Marjorie belonged and open wide the door to careful logical thinking about the project and this newest complication.

But before he could banish the memory of the expression on Marjorie’s face as she stood in the thinly sunlit kitchen, one thought slid through to settle painfully into his consciousness. I wish I could love her as little as I like her.

“And suppose I refuse?” Briant said. “What then? They’ll give up and leave us to get on with some work, I imagine. So I refuse. End of problem.”

“Not quite,” Kegan said. “In fact, far from it.” He was trying to keep his voice as dry as Briant’s, to be as coldly objective, but it was difficult. Remarkable how emotionally involved one became with a situation like this — on the one hand wanting to keep the hospital’s backwater unrippled, on the other finding the stir and the fuss and the questioning exciting, even rather agreeably so.

He walked over to the window and looked out at the courtyard below, busy with ambulances and patients clutching appointment cards as they peered hesitatingly at signs pointing the way to Casualty and X-ray and Outpatients, with the birdlike figures of caped nurses changing shifts, and the white coats of housemen hustling importantly from ward block to ward block.

Behind him, Briant sat calmly, legs outstretched, his hands thrust into the pockets of his near-white coat, his eyes fixed on the toes of his highly polished shoes as he rocked his crossed ankles in a slow rhythm.

Matron, sitting tidily in the chair on the far side of him, allowed herself a barely audible sigh of impatience and looked pointedly at her watch, and Briant slid his eyes sideways at her and smiled slightly, raising his eyebrows at Kegan’s back view. Matron preferred not to accept his invitation to join in a professional contemptuousness of a fusspot hospital secretary and looked blankly back.

“Look here, Dr. Briant,” Kegan said, “there are—what?—fifty, sixty people down there? And I can promise you that more than one of them has no right to be there. Newspaper people—they don’t take no for an answer, you know. If they don’t get cooperation from us, they’ll do without it. And God knows what sort of a mishmash they’ll make of it. I can assure you, from some very solid experience, it’s asking for trouble to be obstructive.”

“Who’s being obstructive? If anyone is, they are. Obstructing me in the course of my work. Obstructing you and everyone else in the place, come to that. You’re behaving as though they have a right to come nosing where they aren’t wanted.”

Kegan came back to his desk and sat down again, looking across at Briant with an attempt to appear as calmly reasonable as he did. But he felt irritation rising in him. Bloody man! Bloody arrogant dried-up man. Really, doctors were, by and large, a hateful species.

“I am not sure they haven’t,” he said carefully. “News is news, and newspaper people would argue that they have every right to report it. The point is, they’ll report it one way or the other. I am simply trying to suggest that we do our best to ensure they report it accurately. If we—you—cooperate, then they’ll be satisfied and, as you say, leave you to get on with your work. I can assure you, I hold no brief for these wretched people, but as I said, I have had some experience—”

“Yes, I know.” Briant for the first time allowed some of his own irritation to show. “When James Torquay died here, and everyone
carried on as though he were God incarnate instead of the superannuated useless politician he was. I’ve heard you on the subject before.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Kegan said, nettled. “We were besieged here for weeks, and life was very complicated for everyone. I don’t want it to happen again.”

“Nor I, Dr. Briant,” Matron said unexpectedly. “I really don’t think we could cope with another such situation. And this would be worse. Already, Sister Field is almost at her wits’ end. The Maternity phone never stops. Reporters have been ringing there since eight this morning. And three times since breakfast she found unauthorized people prowling around—one of them in the labor room, no less! I must say I agree with Mr. Kegan—”

“I’d like to know how the hell they got onto it,” Briant said with a sudden cold fury. “I’ve been working on this project for two years—two full years with God knows how many people involved. And not a hint got out, not one damned hint. Yet the minute we have to use a hospital ward, newspapers start buzzing. I would have thought you could control your staff’s tongues rather more efficiently, Matron.”

“My staff have nothing whatsoever to do with this, Dr. Briant!” Matron stood up, thrusting her head forward so that the starched bows under her chin disappeared into folds of flesh. “For one thing, not one of my nurses knew anything about the project; you’ve kept them almost completely in the dark! Of course, there may well have been conjecture when so many people invaded Maternity when the infant was delivered, but that was something
you
permitted.”

“I understand from the
Echo
man that it was your paper in
Nature
that put him onto the track,” Kegan said maliciously. “He’s a specialist journalist, you know—B. Sc. and all that. He seems to have a considerable amount of information about what your work implies.”

“That paper was merely a preliminary one and was published months ago!” Briant snapped. “And no journalist, B.Sc. or not, could have picked up anything from it. This is an internal leak, and that’s all about it. So whoever is responsible for the leak can clean
up the mess it’s made. I’m damned if I will. I’ve wasted quite enough time this morning already.
You
deal with it, Kegan. Or you, Matron. I told you, I refuse.” And he stood up and stretched his neck with his characteristic tortoiselike movement and turned toward the door.

“There is another point, Dr. Briant,” Kegan said hastily, regretting the self-indulgence that had allowed him the dig at Briant. “Money.”

“What about money?” Briant stood still, his hand on the doorknob.

“You’ll need a considerable sum yet to complete this project. Your application for a further grant from our endowment funds comes to committee next month, as you know, and as I told you when you first mooted it, the chances are—well, chancy.” He looked at Briant under his lashes and, pleased with the expression on the other man’s face, went on smoothly. “I’ll do my best of course, as I promised—canvassing a few people—but if the hospital’s in an unnecessary turmoil over this, it won’t be easy.”

“That’s blackmail,” Briant said after a moment. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Blackmail me?” He let go of the doorknob and thrust his hands back into his pockets. “Christ, isn’t it bad enough that I have to scrape for every bloody penny to do a piece of vital research, without being forced to turn my project into a circus for a lot of gawping idiots who won’t have the least comprehension of what I’m trying to do? Have I got to jump through hoops, ride bareback in spangles, before I’m allowed to do my job?”

With Briant really showing some emotion at last, Kegan felt much better, much more in control. “Not at all, Dr. Briant,” he said kindly. “Not at all. I’m just pointing out cold facts. And as for the gawping idiots—haven’t you thought how useful a little judicious publicity could be? Get public sympathy and you’ll be in a much stronger position altogether—outside the hospital more than in. Even if the committee agree to a grant, it can’t be more than a couple of thousand—not enough to keep you going for a few months. But with public interest high, you can go to the big foundations in a far from cap-in-hand way. And they’ve got hundreds of thousands in their gift, remember.”