Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“You are an utter uncooperative bastard!” Tim screamed at him.

The horse began to trot all at once. “Good fellow,” sang Tim. “Good fellow!”

The downhill slope helped. So, reaching Dr. Erson’s surgery. Leaving the horse and jogging in panic-stricken, Mrs. Malcolm’s mad spittle-ridden kiss sitting in his mouth. There were women and children waiting on chairs. He jiggled a little bell on a table in the centre of the room and Mrs. Erson came in from the hallway. He muttered a request to see the doctor on a pressing matter. She frowned but was unwilling to disturb her husband. Yet Tim did not want to utter the word in the room where people waited with daily twinges to see the doctor. How could plague safely be spoken? Later he would not be sure how he managed to speak and achieve these things. He remembered being taken to the surgery and telling Erson of the series of signs he’d had in Ernie’s house. And Erson frowning away, a cloud crossing his face. Tim was after all the man who’d ridden to the plague camp, the man too foolish to shoot an unruly horse. He should be the subject of reports from other people, you could see Erson thinking. He should not be reporting on others.

Even as he spoke, Tim was very taken with this question too—how would Ernie Malcolm let him off the hooks of credit and repute if he recklessly called doctors to the house? If Primrose had flu, the cat distemper, Winnie merely gin?

Tim thanked the doctor for hearing him out and said he would continue with the day’s work. There were many to be seen about yesterday’s tragedy.

“No,” said Erson. “Tim, listen, you must return to Malcolms’ for now.”

“I have a day’s work,” Tim protested. “And a letter to post.”

“No, I beg you, Tim. Go back to the Malcolms’ for the moment, until we see. I can’t imagine you’ll be kept long. But you are what is called a contact now.”

Tim flinched at this idea. That house in West on Showground Hill. It seemed a possible sepulchre to him.

“So go back there for now,” Erson said. “Just until we are sure. This is likely just a fever. But if it were not, you could kill your wife and children and other citizens with a mere visit.”

“I understand,” Tim insisted, flinching. Did Erson believe what others said and expect anarchy of him? “I am as reasonable as the next fellow.”

“I am pleased to hear that, since the police have extraordinary power in this matter.”

In all bloody matters. Yet how dismal he felt, how lost.

Erson began writing. Then offering Tim a note. “One thing you can do, Tim. I must go quam primum to the Malcolms’. But you could take this to Ernie. Don’t be tempted to stop on the way, and don’t stand too close to people. I trust you in this. If, as we hope, it’s nothing, you’ll be home by night.”

So Dr. Erson to the Malcolm house, Tim to Ernie’s office in Smith Street. By Clyde Street to avoid a sight of the store, to avoid being tempted to call to Kitty, or to be delayed by a palavering Offhand or Habash. Into Smith Street by the back route, far from the Post Office. He abandoned Pee Dee and the cart, ran up the stairs at the side of Ernie’s office block and so presented himself at a non-infective distance from the desk of flash, robust Miss Pollack of East, Ernie’s secretary. Perhaps Miss Pollack was the trouble between Ernie and Winnie.

A matter of great urgency, he told her. Bugger the mistrust on her face. “Dr. Erson wants to see Mr. Ernie Malcolm immediately at home.” Just watch her now abandon haughtiness for dismay.

She went inside, and then Ernie himself appeared in the door of his office, his brow lowered, lips pushed forward, ready to ward off Fenian ambushes and pleas.

“You needn’t put on any sort of face, Ernie,” Tim told him. “There’s sickness in your house.”

“Winnie?” he asked as if he already expected it and was half-pleased it had come.

“Primrose at the moment.”

“A sickness, Mr. Shea?”

“Erson’s gone up there to put a name to it. You and I have to go too.”

“You? Why so?”

“Here’s a note from Dr. Erson. I am what he calls a contact, Ernie. You would be too. Better not to argue but to go.”

Ernie read the page Erson had written and at once briskly fetched his coat and hat, as if he had no unfinished business at all. He did not speak to Miss Pollack as he left.

Tim and Ernie joined now in a mutual rush for the Showground Hill. Urging Pee Dee, Tim arrived in sight of Ernie, who had drawn up beside the doctor’s neat pony cart. Saying nothing at all in farewell to his horse, Tim walked freely through the central gate and so entered the house by the front door. He could see and hear Mrs. Malcolm sneezing hectically, jolting the dazed cat she cradled.

Tim and Ernie stood separate by the drawing room door and watched the kneeling Dr. Erson attend to Primrose. As the doctor raised his head, Tim saw with alarm that he wore a white linen mask and white gloves, and this highly serious combination was somehow more shocking than if it had been spotted in one of the town’s other two more sombre, less musical physicians.

“You must lay down that cat, Mrs. Malcolm,” Dr. Erson told Winnie through his mask. Tim thought he sounded a little dismayed, as if a sick cat and a fevered black woman were for the moment beyond his powers of containment.

“Tim, fetch me another cushion from the sofa,” he called. As Tim took the cushion and approached Primrose, Erson reached his arm for it in an exaggerated way.

“Thank you, Tim,” called cracked tragic Winnie, stifling another sneeze, and clumsily winking. A reference perhaps to the letter. “It’s just as well you’re here.”

It was fortunate therefore Erson had other tasks for Ernie, sent him off to call over the garden fence, asking his neighbour loudly to send his two boys, the Woodbury twins, for the police and the district ambulance. With the physician’s eyes tracking him, Tim followed Ernie as far as the back door, and watched from there. Contemplating whether to flee. And so carry plague to Kitty.

Tim returned to the living room. Erson got up from Primrose’s side, and murmured to him. “Cannot pretend it isn’t serious, Tim. No reason you should develop the disease though. You have not had close contact. Nothing to do other than wait out quarantine. Seven to perhaps ten days I fear.”

“Dear God,” Tim said. Seven days would ruin him. But he was appalled too that Winnie Malcolm had kissed him so moistly for so long. Did that make him a close contact? Closer than Ernie who perhaps hadn’t been kissed for some time? How would a man confess that sort of distinction to Erson?

Caught so deep in this poisonous house, he covered his mouth with his hand for a time. That could not however be kept up.

Ernie was waiting outside in the front garden now. Tim could see him pacing, pausing by bushes he seemed to find unfamiliar. Someone else’s garden. Winnie’s.

“Are you making any headway with Primrose, Dr. Erson?” said Winnie, her nose snuffling.

Erson looked at Tim. Primrose’s gasping, you would have thought, was evidence enough. “She is very ill,” he told Winnie. “We’ll leave her here on the floor for the moment. For her comfort.”

Winnie intoned:

“That’s Alfred Lord Tennyson, isn’t it?” asked Erson.

“My dearest mother died of an extreme fever,” said Winnie. “Far away, you know. Melbourne. Do you remember that? The typhus outbreak of the Eighties? You may have heard of it. Doctors told my father it was remarkable for striking down some of the better types of people.”