The Stone That Never Came Down (3 page)

IV

“Lay him down there, nurse,” Dr Hector Campbell instructed as he led the way into the white-walled casualty examination room adjacent to his office at the North-West London General Clinic. He had to speak loudly. Not only was it blood-transfusion day–which meant that the pride of the haematological department was in operation, the continuous-throughput plasma centrifuge–but the friend who had brought in this Jewish-looking man with the cut head was keeping pp a nonstop flow of excuses.

“I had no shoes on, you see, and there was snow on the road, so by the time I’d gone back for my slippers they’d …”

But Hector forgot about him the instant he opened the office door. He froze, muttering an oath.

“Is something wrong?” demanded the girl who was helping the casualty onto the examination couch: “Nurse Diana Rouse” according to the name-badge pinned on her stiff apron.

“Yes! This is wrong!” Furious, Hector advanced into the office. Books had been pulled down from every shelf and lay randomly on the floor, while an attempt had been made to start a fire in a metal wastebin. Griming his fingers with charred paper, he retrieved some of the less completely burned sheets and discovered just what he might have expected: pictures of the genital organs, descriptions of the sexual act.

“Oh, no!” the nurse exclaimed from the doorway. “Who could have done such a dreadful thing?”

“I could make a few guesses,” Hector grunted. “What kind of people set themselves up as arbiters of what shall and what shall not appear in print? Now I’ll have to send for the police, I suppose … Oh, get on with cleaning up that man’s head. And tell his friend to wait outside!”

On the point of reaching for the phone, he hesitated before deciding that the intruders were unlikely to have touched it and hence he would not be spoiling any prints, and during his hesitation it rang. He snatched it up.

“Dr Campbell? This is Professor Kneller at the Gull-Grant Research Institute. I believe Maurice Post is a patient of yours, and we’re very anxious to get in touch with him–”

“Professor, I haven’t seen Maurice .since a week ago!” Hector broke in. “And I don’t have time to talk now. I just came into my office, and it’s been vandalised. Looks like godhead work.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Well, I won’t keep you, then, but if you do hear anything from Maurice–”

“Yes, of course! Goodbye!”

The magazines provided in the waiting-area for patients and their friends were approved and donated, according to a rubber stamp on each, by the Campaign Against Moral Pollution, and hence predictably were dull as ditchwater. Malcolm recalled that at about the same time as he had lost his job there had been a rash of letters to the press, master-minded no doubt by Lady Washgrave, saying how horrified parents had been to find
Playboy
or
Penthouse
when taking their children to see a doctor.

–The devils. When you think of how
they
pervert kids …!

In response to pressure from an influential group of parents the headmaster of the school at which Malcolm had been a popular and respected teacher had invited a speaker from the Campaign to address the morning assembly. The man had declared, with some justification, that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and then gone on to claim that the only solution lay in returning to the Good Old Moral Values of the glorious past.

Unable to stand any more, Malcolm had demanded why, if those values were so marvellous, the people who paid lip-service to them had involved mankind in two world wars with all their accoutrements from poison gas to atom-bombs. Taking their cue from him, his class had burst out laughing, and the laughter spread, and the visitor was prevented from completing his talk.

Whereupon, the next day, the headlines, bold and black: teacher “corrupting children”, parents claim. And, after the lapse of a week: “atheist teacher” sacked after row.

There had been a petition raised by his pupils for his reinstatement, and even now, a year later, some of them occasionally called on him. But if they were found out their parents created hell, so the visits were growing fewer.

–And what do those smug clerks at the Employment Exchange have to say to me through their glass screens? Armour-glass, naturally, because now and then somebody loses his temper at the way they sneer from the security of their Civil Service posts. Why, that I’d make twice as much at a factory bench in Germany! But I don’t want that. I want the job I’m trained for, the one I’m good at. Besides, the Germans have started to send their
Gastarbeiter
home to Yugoslavia and Greece and Spain, and some of them are being forced to go.

It had been in the news a few days ago, not prominent.

–Come to think of it, this hospital reminds me of the Employment Exchange. All these people sitting in rows with hopeless looks on their faces … But that’s wrong. It’s a place of healing. It should be a happy place. It should be as splendid as a great cathedral, built of the most magnificent materials and lavish with the master-work of fine artists. Instead, look at it. Barely ten years old, and falling apart already. Thrown up as cheaply as possible, and you can tell just by looking at the staff they don’t enjoy working here. Christ, I’m glad I’m only visiting!

He wondered in passing whether anybody had explained to these people waiting that the delay was due to the police being called to the doctor’s vandalised office. Probably not.

–I hope I’m not heading for another bout of suicidal depression like yesterday’s. If I hadn’t run across that guy Morris …

He had been to a private school a few miles north of London to be interviewed for a job he had seen advertised, and had known the moment he got there that he was having his time wasted, perhaps deliberately, for the place was plastered with Moral Pollution stickers. On the way home he had felt he must have a drink, despite the prohibitive price of liquor, so he had wandered at random into a pub, and …

–Fantastic fellow, that Morris. Must have an amazing memory for faces. I mean, to have recognised me from those lousy pictures that appeared in the papers. But it was so reassuring when he asked how I was getting on. The mere fact that someone I’d never met should care about me …!

The conversation had taken off like a rocket, and lasted long past the point at which he should have gone home to meet Ruth, with whom he had a date.

–But it was such fun talking to him!

For more than three hours they had chatted away–and gone on drinking, mostly at Morris’s expense because as usual Malcolm was broke. They had reviewed the state of the world, the government’s incompetence, the hypocrisy of the Moral Polluters, all the subjects Malcolm felt most strongly about … plus one other, new to him, which Morris had reverted to several times.

–Can it really be on the cards that we’ll see a military coup in Italy, like the Greek one? And that a junta of generals would try to pull them out of the Common Market?

Morris had predicted that, and he’d talked about a certain Marshal Dalessandro whom Malcolm had never heard of, and one way and another he had painted a dreadfully gloomy picture of the immediate future. He had said in so many words, “Like the First and the Second, the Third World War is going to start right here in Europe.”

–And I said, “Do you really think there’s no hope for us at all?” And he looked at me for a bit, with that odd quizzical expression, and then he produced that little phial of capsules, tiny little yellow things no bigger than rice-grains, and said, “This may be the answer. I hope it is.” And I said … God, I must have been drunk by then! I said, “If that’s the case, I’d like some.” And he said, “Okay, here you are. You deserve it more than most people.” And like a crazy fool I took it!

In the rush to bring Billy, bleeding rivers, to the clinic (by taxi, and was he going to refund the fare? It had swallowed three pounds from Malcolm’s scanty weekly budget), he had had no time to reflect on that capsule and its possible side-effects. But there was that strange point Ruth had raised: how had he known that
four
godheads were crossing the street when deep snow muffled their tread?

Briefly, however, he was distracted from worrying about that. The door of the casualty-examination room was fractionally ajar, and through it drifted a snatch of conversation: Nurse Rouse and Dr Campbell. He listened, hoping to catch some clue as to what had become of Billy.

“Thank goodness they’ve gone!” From the nurse. “We’ll never get through the morning schedule at this rate.”

“Don’t I know it! Jesus, if only … Why, what’s wrong?”

Stiffly: “I don’t like to hear the Name taken in vain.”

“Oh, no. Not you too! Since when have you been on the side of the book-burners, the self-appointed censors, the petty street-corner dictators?”

“You have no proof!”

“Proof? I’ve proved that a gang of them invaded the wards yesterday evening at what should have been the patients’ bedtime and marched around singing and begging. Everybody was furious, but there wasn’t anything they dared do. You know how they hit back if you cross them.”

“Godheads aren’t like that! They’re ordinary decent people trying to put some proper standards back into our lives.”

“You can say that, after seeing what they did to Mr Cohen?”

“You heard what his friend said–he picked a quarrel deliberately!”

“So what became of the injunction to turn the other cheek?”

–Good question!

In the privacy of his head, Malcolm applauded the doctor’s argument.

But, a moment later, Campbell wearily changed the subject. “Speaking of Cohen, what did you do with him?”

“Oh … Told him to lie down until we’ve seen the X rays. But I don’t think he’s seriously hurt. More shocked than anything.”

“Yes, if there’s nothing on the plates tell him to go home, not to go to work until tomorrow, dome back if he feels at all giddy or unwell. Is his friend still here?”

“I think so. Perhaps if he can wait until the X rays are ready he can see Mr Cohen safely home. I don’t think we could possibly spare an ambulance.”

Rising fretfully, in need of a toilet, Malcolm heard what he had already heard when Nurse Rouse repeated it, and asked directions to a men’s room. She sent him down a long echoing corridor where there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing of staff and patients.

–Poor woman! Shoulders uneven like that … Must have broken a collarbone when she was a kid, and it was neglected or badly set. And him, too, the man in the shabby jacket: the way he holds his arms over his belly … Ulcer. Yes, an ulcer.

And came close to stopping dead in his tracks as he realised:

–I don’t know these people. I never had any training in medicine. So how the hell…? Of course. I’ve seen the same before, haven’t I? Carter-Craig, who had to retire early from the first school I taught at: he used to hold his arms that way when his ulcer was plaguing him. And that boy I was at school with myself, Freddie Grice. His shoulders were uneven and when he grfew up he must have come to look pretty much like that woman. Funny I should think of him, though. Must be the first time in–what?–fifteen years.

And, as he discovered he was able to make similar rational guesses about the other patients he passed, waiting for medicine to be issued over a dispensary counter, he was momentarily disturbed.

–Could this have something to do with the VC Morris gave me? I mean, I don’t usually think like this, don’t usually pay so much attention to everybody I see … Still, if the main result of taking VC is to increase your empathy, that can definitely not be bad. The world’s terribly short of it. Morris and I were agreeing on that last night.

Then his puzzlement was chased away by something else as he drew level with the main entrance foyer of the building. On arriving with Billy he had spotted a separate casualty entrance, so he had not come in this way. Here now was a fat cheerful woman handing to a nurse seated at a table a little blue chit bearing the symbol of the National Blood Transfusion Service, and saying as she did so, “Haven’t done this for years, you know! If I’d realised, I’d have come along sooner. Makes a bit extra for Christmas like, don’t it?”

And the girl was exchanging the blue voucher for a five-pound note.

He had known there was a blood-donation session in progress; a sign at the casualty entrance informed would-be donors that they had come to the wrong door. But …

Catching sight of him, the seated nurse looked a question.

“Since when have they been paying for blood in this country?” he demanded.

“Oh, it’s a new idea,” the nurse answered. “Seems not enough people will give blood if they don’t. We were having to buy plasma from abroad. So they said to start paying.” She pulled a face. “Can’t say I fancy the look of some of the people it pulls in, I must admit!”

“Good grief,” Malcolm said inadequately. “Ah … how much?”

“Oh, five pounds a pint. I mean half-litre.”

The idea haunted him all the time he was in the toilet, and finally he gave in.

After all, there was something so horribly appropriate about it.

“Fry, Malcolm Colin … Do you happen to know your group, Mr Fry? No? You should, you know. Everybody should. But testing for that will only take a moment … Ah, you’re O positive, the commonest group. So that will probably go straight to the plasma centrifuge. But don’t worry, we’ll pay you anyhow! There’s always a great demand for plasma over Christmas: road accidents, kids cutting themselves on knives they’ve just been given, drunken housewives getting burned as they take the turkey out of the oven … Sit over there, please, and wait until the nurse says she’s ready.”