The Good Doctor (3 page)

— Chapter Two —

1883: London

I
n a moment, the faintest
of smiles will bring the young doctor's world to an end. He has been pounding down the dim hospital corridor, lab coat flapping, stars of bright daylight still dazzling his eyes. Although he is late and frightened of reproof, he is excited, too, intoxicated by the certainty that Nurse Mills's pale hands will soon be creating that odd, silent ballet with his own, taking his scissors, handing him gauze. He can smell her starched apron already and can see the sunlight playing upon that white armour. He can hear the quiet phrases they will soon exchange—
here, thank you, hold this, Nurse
—words both commonplace and necessary but spoken, as their respective vocations demand, in hushed tones which imply a kind of intimacy.

He pauses at the clinic entrance, leans on the door frame, slows his breathing, then he enters. Bars of yellow sunlight stripe the clinic walls. The high blinds always make the place feel like a cage when it's sunny outside. He is only three or four minutes late, no more, but Dr. Bleaker, the supervising physician, is in his own quiet way an intimidating man. Hunched over the workbench sitting on the stool, Dr. Bleaker has betrayed no sign as yet that he has noticed his arrival. Only when the young doctor moves toward the supervisor, preparing his excuses, does he think to sneak a glance at Nurse Mills. Then he catches sight of them together—Nurse Mills,
his
Nurse Mills, and the vigorous young intern from the north who arrived only yesterday. The young doctor had forgotten about Grenfell.

Even though a bleary-eyed sailor with tattoos and a greying beard sits between Grenfell and Nurse Mills, there is something in the slow, synchronized movements of intern and nurse—she passing him the scissors, he accepting—that sends his heart plummeting. And he sees the smile. Oblivious of the patient, Nurse Mills leans toward Grenfell. Her posture suggests that the wonders buried deep beneath the white armour of her apron might be a heavily parcelled offering. Not for the young doctor, though; an offering only for Grenfell.

Breathless and aching, the young doctor watches as with hooded, narrow eyes his rival cuts the fabric, and then, tongue upon lip, settles the gauze upon the sailor's yellow-fringed gash, wrapping it around the thick, hairy forearm. Nurse Mills's smile is little more than a flicker of eyelash, a touch of light upon the surface of her irises, but there is warmth and trust and something else he hardly dares to name.

For three weeks Nurse Mills and the young doctor have been engaged together in similar tasks, and he has been happy to assume that the stench of surgical spirit, the clink of metal on dish, and the murmur of “hold this, Nurse, please,” had incorporated the constituent ingredients of love. Nature would take its course, he thought. He was the doctor-in-training—the only one in this clinic until yesterday. Her role was to assist him. Anyone who has ever been close to a hospital knows where such arrangements lead. What did he have to do other than wait?

But now as he fastens the final button of his lab coat and steadies himself against the workbench corner, he knows he is on the outside looking in, as alien to the world of lovers as the aquarium visitor is to the delight and beauty on the other side of the glass.

He takes another step and Dr. Bleaker, still hunched on a workbench stool, tips his head like a dog hearing a faraway bark. Slipping the watch chain from his lab coat's inner pocket, he looks at the face and frowns. “You'd better help me with some preparations this morning. Grenfell and Nurse Mills can handle the patients.”

T
he rest of the morning
speeds by like a train. Lost in a daze, he pretends to study ingredients and measurements listed in Dr. Bleaker's cramped, untidy handwriting. Opening and closing heavy glass stoppers, he pours liquids into jars, grinds salts with pestle and mortar, makes—he will later imagine—a hundred mistakes, some without serious consequence, others potentially fatal, all the while listening to the efficient scuttle of Nurse Mills's heels upon the tile floor, all the while trying to gauge how close she stood to Grenfell, how often their eyes met over bandage and stitch. Those few times he turns to catch her eye she makes no sign at all that she is even aware of his presence. With a slow, aching realization he comes to see he has no reason at all to be surprised by this. Nothing has ever passed between them in sign, look, or word, which has not been made necessary by the immediate requirements of work. Now that he is witnessing first-hand what attraction
should
look like, he fears that the warmth he used to sense between Nurse Mills and himself was a delusion, that the physical pulsations he thought he sensed from Nurse Mills were merely echoes, beginning and ending with his own desires.

“Hold this, Nurse,” Grenfell says.

The stripes of sunlight fade with a passing cloud. Those are
his
words, not Grenfell's. The rival intern has no right to use them. He feels stripped and discarded like one of the sweat-stained bandages lying in the bin by the examining stool.

“Yes, Doctor,” she replies.

Only three syllables, but more than he has ever received from her, and in tones laced with such respect, such esteem, and even tenderness, he feels as though he has been punched in the solar plexus. All interns are entitled to be called doctor, but only now and with the bitterest of realizations does it occur to the young doctor that Nurse Mills has never granted him this courtesy. The bands of sunlight return and intensify like rings of fire.

There is a movement behind him. Grenfell has sidled up to Dr. Bleaker, who stands scribbling on his notepad and humming tunelessly.

“It's the alcohol that retards healing, Dr. Bleaker.” Grenfell has the confidence of a hospital director as he confers with the supervisor, and the young doctor hates him all the more for it. “Only a change in lifestyle will be of any help.”

“Such is the task of the physician, Grenfell.” The words rise from Dr. Bleaker's humming like unexpected highlights in the melody. “We patch, mend, and prescribe, but the patient's life is his own.”

“I'd like to give the man a good talking-to,” Grenfell says.

“Very noble of you, I'm sure, Grenfell,” says Dr. Bleaker, still scribbling. “Be my guest.”

Grenfell's footsteps retreat again. The young doctor replaces a stopper as quietly as he can. He wants to hear the promised exchange.

“How much did you drink last night?” Grenfell asks matter-of-factly. His voice is calm and preoccupied as he works on the man's dressings.

“I can't rightly remember, sir,” the patient replies. The young doctor caught sight of him—a wizened, red-eyed man in his forties—as he entered. He can easily imagine, without turning to see, the amused, glassy-eyed expression as he answers the young upstart.

“I suggest you try.”

“Well now. There would be five in the Bull and Thistle, another five in the Ten Bells, a flask of gin, and then things begin to get hazy.”

“You're drinking far too much.” Grenfell's voice seems petulant and immature now, an unflattering contrast to the cavernous tones of the man he upbraids.

“So they tell me, sir, so they tell me,” comes the reply, once more wise and unruffled, “but I'll soon be on board and out of harm's way.”

Silence. It seems for a moment that Grenfell has given up.

“If you continue to drink as you do,” he resumes, the pitch of his voice rising, “your liver will give out completely and you will be quite unable to work.”

“Ah, then I will find a good woman to care for me,” says the sailor. The eavesdropping doctor imagines a winking eye toward Nurse Mills. The vision momentarily shakes his automatic allegiance to Grenfell's opponent.

“I'm afraid it's more serious than that. Cirrhosis of the liver is likely quite advanced already, but the body's natural defences are also being threatened. The infections I am treating should have healed long ago.” The ruffling sound of a bandage being tied. “I have seen this before.” A slight cough. “If you continue as you do now, you will not live beyond a year.”

The spirit-laced air of the clinic seems to grow hotter. The young doctor looks hard at a prescription formula, waiting, hoping for Dr. Bleaker's reproof, for the pleasing
crash
of a fall from grace. In the hazy corner of his vision he sees the supervising physician turn upon his stool and pull his spectacles an inch down his nose.

“A sad thing, for sure, Doctor,” says the sailor, quite unmoved, “but have you not found that life can be a mixed blessing?”

The slow, almost ponderous nature of the response, the complete lack of aggression or excitement in the voice, shows clearly that the man is in earnest. He knows the likely cost of his habit, and Grenfell's attempt to shock him is as redundant as it is cruel.

“Nice try, Grenfell,” Dr. Bleaker murmurs, replacing his spectacles and turning back to his workbench. Not the reproof the young doctor was hoping for, but still he feels hope stirring. Nurse Mills can't be impressed now. Grenfell has proven himself to be callow and presumptuous.

The sunlight fades and returns, not as rings of fire this time but as something more benign—the stripes on a fairground balloon. He knows he feels suddenly optimistic—and knows such optimism is a fault of his—but can't quite place the source for his sudden hope. Laying aside his prescription and picking up a pestle and mortar, the young doctor wonders if he has misread Nurse Mills's reaction to Grenfell. Does a smile so easily won denote romantic attraction, or a more sisterly sentiment?
Of course
, he thinks. Romantic love is guarded and shy; it protects itself with fervour until it finds a safe place to land. It doesn't smile and gaze and lean toward the object of its devotion.

Hope tips into something like belief as he sets about crushing salt crystals in the mortar bowl. If Nurse Mills is stiffer and more formal with himself than with Grenfell, this is a good thing. A woman only stands aloof when there are powerful emotions to guard. He wonders now if there might have been a studied aspect in her manner when she seemed to avoid his eyes.

Hairs prickle on the back of his neck as the patient scuffs off the chair and lopes out of the clinic. The idea of Nurse Mills trying to make him jealous is intoxicating. It opens up a whole world of deliciously lurid and dramatic scenes: Nurse Mills trotting haughtily by him in the street, he grabbing her wrist, forcing her into an embrace to which she succumbs at first only with resistance then with a gasp of gratitude and a breathless “at last!”; the young doctor restored to his position with the patients in the afternoon, being cold and indifferent as he takes from her the scissors, bandages, and stitches, then as the shift changes and they prepare to leave, her coming trembling and white-faced to him, asking what she has done to cause offence.

No end of permutations tingle through his blood, and he can't resist a backward glance at Grenfell and Nurse Mills. Grenfell's face is blotched and pink. He busies himself with a notebook, his thick hair tufted like that of a boy who has been roughhousing. In the corner, wrapping unused bandage, Nurse Mills works quietly, face hidden, sunlight striping her uniform. The scene presents itself as a picture of disillusionment. The young doctor's elation is almost complete.

— Chapter Three —

A
ring of sunshine just
beyond the shadow of the great Cathedral dome bathes Nurse Mills and her young nephew. The blood pounds in the young doctor's ears. She is merely seconds away from him now. The first autumn leaves tumble in the breeze, skittering around the ankles of the lady with a white parasol and the fork-bearded gentleman. The couple walks arm in arm a short distance ahead of the young doctor. The nephew, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, stands on one leg and holds his penny farthing bicycle by the saddle. The other knee resting upon the bench upon which his aunt sits, he seems ready to demonstrate his skills to passersby. The bearded gentleman nods at Nurse Mills and her nephew as he and his partner pass. The young doctor is next. He can't escape her notice now, even if he tried.

“I promised young Malcolm a walk by St. Paul's on Sunday afternoon,” Nurse Mills said on Friday to the short, unsmiling Nurse Armstrong. The young doctor had been ghosting behind them in the dim corridor that joined the hospital clinic to the wards. It had been easy to remain unnoticed. A group of whispering nurses, all starched white linen and hard shoes, had drawn all the light from the high windows. A delegation of doctors approached from the opposite end, their coughs and mutterings echoing along the walls. Even if there had been danger, it wouldn't have mattered. Buoyed by his new sense of faith that beneath Nurse Mills's placid surface swirled emotions involving him directly, he had dared himself; he had followed and eavesdropped just as the medieval warrior-knight spies upon enemy battalions in the forest. He was determined, duty-bound in fact, to dig deep into the dust of the forbidding and mundane and reach for the sparkling jewel he sensed must lie beyond. He had kissed his sword and sent up his prayers, and his mission seemed to give even the utilitarian spaces of the medical establishment the atmosphere of a Cathedral cloister. This sense of magic became tangible when the conversation he overheard gave him the day, the place, and hence the opportunity to “discover” Nurse Mills by accident. She must have known this. Women are aware, by some strange extra sense, whose ears lie within hearing.

Even if he was mistaken about this detail, the valour of the spy has still reaped rewards. He is within a whisker of meeting her for the very first time outside the confines of the hospital complex. He is mere breaths away from striking up a conversation that must undoubtedly go beyond “Hold this, Nurse.” He turns as nonchalantly as he can toward the high spire and the flapping pigeons. Wait, he tells himself; wait until the moment when it will look natural to glance left and find a familiar face. He does this now, his wink acknowledging the rather sullen-looking boy with the bicycle. Then he allows his eyes to fall upon the boy's aunt, whose eyes are shadowed by the rim of her hat. He gives a start and raises his arms—a touch too theatrically, he fears. A thin smile reveals she has seen him coming and is not greatly surprised.

“It's Nurse Mills!” he says and immediately wonders why, after taking the trouble to find out her location, after racing down from the dome three stone steps at a time, catching his breath at the bottom, then timing his “accidental” meeting, he has failed to think of anything more natural and interesting to say than this.

“Good afternoon,” he says and takes a step closer.

The nephew squints at him from under the visor of his hand. He pushes his penny farthing forwards and backwards in a motion that suggests he is getting ready to hurl the huge bicycle at his enemy.

“How pleasant to catch you away from the hospital.”

It seems rather more formal than he hoped, and he tries to see her expression through the shadow covering her eyes.

She doesn't make any reply.

There can be something brazen about silence, he will think later, something both threatening and provocative. It can force a man into battle before he is ready. He takes another step forward. “And who is this young man?” he asks, arm twitching in the nephew's direction.

Using the bench as a ladder, the boy leaps upon his saddle and begins wheeling down the path away from them.

“Malcolm, come back at once!” calls Nurse Mills.

He ignores her, and the young doctor gives what he hopes is a jovial laugh, slapping his hat against his palm and coming close enough to suggest he means to sit beside her. She looks up at him. The rim of shadow lifts from her eyes and he can see that her expression, while not exactly welcoming, is at least direct and inquiring. He motions toward the bench and she tilts her head in a kind of defeat. He sits. Malcolm, high in the saddle and wheeling great ungainly circles around a shimmering oak, has never quite left the scene. Technically they are chaperoned. Silence engulfs them—unexpected, awkward silence. The young doctor finds the thumbs of his clasped hands doing a nervous dance around each other.

“So,” he says, pushed by some unnameable urgency, “our doctor friend, Grenfell . . . what do you make of him?”

Instantly his face burns and he knows this was a mistake.

“Your
colleague
, Dr. Grenfell?” Her emphasis is studied. He feels like an officer in wartime caught defaming a comrade.

“I'm sure he'll find his feet soon,” he says quickly.

“Find his feet?”

He turns to find her face intense, questioning. He follows the ragged flight of a crow around the Cathedral dome which rises into the blue like a great, ghostly egg.

“All residents make mistakes early on.”

Though he's impressed by his subterfuge, pretending to defend the very man he would attack, his fingers are still an agitation of movement. He can hear the dangerous slap of loose rope in the passage of the breeze.

“Even you, for instance?”

But for the tone—steady and humourless—he might have believed she meant to flirt.

“Yes, I certainly made my share, Nurse Mills.”

“In the
distant
past, perhaps?”

He turns to her once more and attempts a smile, but a twitch of his lips distorts it into something else.

“What mistake, in your esteemed judgment, do you suppose Dr. Grenfell has made, by the way?”

Under her steady gaze, his head drops. He watches an ant disappear into a crack in a stone. Then he rallies. “The mistake of trying to preach to a patient twice his age.” He's surprised at the strength of his reply. He meets her eyes with the warmth of defiance.

“He was trying to save the man's life.”

He gives a short laugh.

“Why would a young man, or woman for that matter, enter the healing profession if not to heal?”

The anger—so open, so sudden—takes him quite unawares. All his delicately interlaid hopes and faiths—that she has been trying to make him jealous through her intimacy with Grenfell; that she has deliberately let him overhear her plans to visit St. Paul's—vanish in the breeze. But her hostility has restored his tongue and his energies, too. He is ready for a different kind of battle now.

“I suppose I must be more distrustful than you. How many years of back-breaking work has the sailor in question undertaken for the lowest of pay? Surely such danger and hardship at least gives him the right to his own philosophy.”

“And the right also to know about the dangers into which his choices might lead,” she says.

The young doctor coughs and shifts a little on the bench. “When a young man takes such moral authority upon himself, I find it suspicious and unseemly.”

“Why is that,
Doctor
? Are you perhaps so far from having moral authority yourself?”

A burning sensation now creeps upon his skin, together with a trembling that seems not so much trepidation as incipient rage.

“I believe myself to be a modest man, it's true, not prone to playing the judge or imposing my values in surgery.”

“What would you have us do, then, Doctor? Lance boils, dress wounds, and ignore the overall health and well-being—moral as well as physical—of our patients? When I decided to go into nursing, it was to help those who have been brought low. Dr. Grenfell feels the same way. It is a sacred mission.”

So they are in it together, he thinks, a sanctimonious little cluster. The city is full of their kind. Booth's Salvation Army parades down the Whitechapel Road, crying war against the twin vices of sin and poverty.

“I am a doctor, Nurse Mills, not a priest. A good doctor knows the difference.”

“And does a good doctor stumble in late every Saturday, smelling of last night's gin?”

A pigeon flaps its wings close to the young doctor's head, then turns in silhouette against the sun before heading for the dome. A muffled, dizzy feeling descends upon him, together with an odd daydream that Nurse Mills has opened up his skull and is rifling with invisible hands through the contents of his brain. He should have been more careful. He should have remembered to wash away all traces of alcohol before coming in to work. Still, he was no more than four or five minutes late, a tad dishevelled, perhaps, but hardly stumbling. Yet her tone is so hard, her eyes so unforgiving. And here lies the knot of his confusion. Given the views she has just expressed, isn't it her duty to have compassion, rather than scorn, for the wayward? If he isn't one of the admirable ones like herself, like Grenfell, who saves others, then he surely must be one of the pitiful creatures to be salvaged. Yet he sees no helping hand, no soft and beckoning gaze. How did he fall between the cracks?

“You think I was drunk?”

She merely stares back at him.

“Come on, Auntie,” calls the boy, stationary in his saddle, holding himself up against a tree trunk.

“I was experimenting with surgical spirit before I came to work. Some spilt on me and I hadn't time to wash it all away. That's why I was late.”

“You don't drink, then?”

“Most certainly not.”

The hint of a smile creeps into the corner of her lips, and hope—beaten, bruised, and more than half buried—begins to stir afresh. “It was a Friday evening,” he sighs. “What kind of young man of any spirit would not wish to celebrate the near end of the week?”

“The kind of young man,” she says with a tilt of her head, “who is serious about his work, perhaps.”

“Come on, Auntie,” calls Malcolm, “we've got to meet your doctor friend, Glenfield, and his cousin.”

“
Dr. Grenfell
is his name, Malcolm,” she says, rather too deliberately. She picks up the parasol by her side and stands, smoothing down her dress in a manner that draws attention to its Sunday frills.

“Good day,
Doctor
,” she says with barely a backward glance as she walks off into the sun, boy and bicycle by her side. He watches them as they merge into a line of pleasure seekers and tourists on the other side of the road. Nurse Mills's parasol becomes one of many; some of them spin in one direction, some in the other, but none of them are still—together they twirl, like the many wheels inside the young doctor, churning the simultaneous emotions of hope and despair, a baffling, disorienting series of movements.

Should he simply feel crushed, or is he right to feel the odd, nudging sense of encouragement? The answer has never been less clear. She's going to meet Grenfell and he's astonished at the speed. Two days' acquaintanceship and they are already meeting beyond the confines of the hospital. Their respective families—her nephew and his cousin—are already mingling. They didn't know each other before he arrived at the surgery on Friday. He is certain of that.

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.