Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

Eliot took a pinch of the slimy green bread. 'They put this on septic wounds and boils, centuries before anyone had ever heard of germs. There's something in the mould which kills bacteria, I'm sure of it. Perhaps I can extract the chemical, and invent a wonderful machine to blow it into the cavities? Meanwhile, we must do with fresh air. I'm afraid that I'm keeping you from your sister,' he dismissed her. 'And I have a morning's work to do.'

Before the mirror in her hotel room that evening, Nancy vindicated herself mentally while Maria-Thйrиse silently dressed her hair. In New York, she knew sufficient young men for the companionship of a different one every week. All those Bobbies, Ollies, Charlies, Clarries-everyone's name that season seemed to end with 'ie'-with their automobiles and long fur coats, their games and their hunting, their private jokes and private language composed of the latest slang from the track, the ring, even the underworld. Everyone she knew talked intently about one another, and never of anything else.

Some were vastly rich, some almost penniless. It was impossible to say in New York, when a young man would spend a thousand dollars equally carelessly if it was his last. Most of them were pleasing, or tried hard to please. Any of them would have married her, some had asked. It never crossed Nancy's mind to accept them. Her friends whispered their terror of marriage, of placing themselves overnight in ultimate intimacy with a man who was largely unknown. Nancy was more scared of being bored.

Dr Beckett had an overpowering attraction. He was the sort of man she had always imagined herself attracted to. Indulging seriously in this fancy meant forcing herself through social railings, which kept common people from a life which nobody doubted as the most delightful and fulfilling a young woman might enjoy. Or was she caged, an animal artificially kept alive in a zoo? She concluded she was right to snub Eliot. Her father was already distraught over Baby. It would be too much, coming home engaged to a penniless doctor of no family and few graces, a foreigner who wore atrocious clothes. Then she admitted that Eliot differed from the men she knew as red meat from water-ice.

Her introspection was broken by cries through the tall open windows. She looked across the hotel garden with its neatly-raked gravel and string of red and blue fairylights between the cherry and plum trees. Two men were running towards the path climbing the cliff, waiters in their shirt sleeves, an unthinkably irregular sight in the well-ordered Grand Hotel.

_'C'est un accident, mademoiselle,'_ exclaimed Maria-Thйrиse. Nancy immediately thought of Eliot, which annoyed her again. Taking her wrap, she went down to the garden. Through the back gate came half-a-dozen men with the hotel proprietor, followed by a blue-uniformed gendarme shouting at others to keep their distance. They bore one of the hotel's green shutters, on which lay Lady Sarah Pledge.

Nancy stopped, horrified. The party hurried past. The face was smashed and glistening with blood. The skull was crushed, pale brain exuding over her ear. One arm was twisted like a half-snapped twig. She wore the morning's white dress, she had lost her shoes, the skirt rose above her right knee to show her pink garter, until one of the bearers with sensitive delicacy smoothed it down to her feet.

'Of course it wasn't an accident,' Eliot said. 'You couldn't fall from that point without putting your mind seriously to it. Dr Pasquier's influence in Champette being even stronger than an English nobleman's, the Swiss authorities must say what they're told. It was all a matter of being buried in consecrated ground. Though to the _raison d'кtre_ of any funeral, it doesn't matter if they're buried in a rubbish-heap.'

'She must have known more of her condition than she let on,' said Nancy.

'Most of them do.'

'Yet she used to complain only that it stopped her hunting.'

'Suicide's unusual in phthisical cases,' Eliot remarked thoughtfully. 'They're a tough army, who won't surrender. Remember, _spes phthisica.'_

It was ten days later, a hot August morning, the red cross flag flapping languidly when a breeze could stir itself, the sunlight brilliant on the blue and white striped awnings of the balconies. They were alone in the laboratory. Eliot was dropping into a square enamel dish of carbolic the reddish-smeared glass slides he had been examining under the microscope. Nancy stood with hands clasped, parasol dangling. She met him there most days, when he had finished the Rцntograms.

'Have the Earl and Countess gone back to England?' he asked.

'They left the hotel early this morning.'

Monsieur Mittot had embalmed the body with pride. The undertaker had studied in Paris. He was a boon bestowed on Champette by the sanatorium, like trade for the shops. Sallow, fat, dark, heavily moustached, in crumpled sad black serge, he had hung about the Grand Hotel once the Earl and Countess arrived by overnight express to Basle, with their valet, lady's maid, frock-coated secretary and the British consul acquired at Lausanne. Not even the valet took notice of him. Monsieur Mittot expected the aristocratic corpse to be shipped in a splendid coffin, most rich families paying the fare home of their dead. But he was ignorant of a tradition in the Earl's family, since Wellington's Peninsular War, of being buried where they fell. The Earl thought the shuttling of corpses by railway vulgar.

Lady Sarah was buried in the English cemetery at Lausanne, among Indian Civil Servants and City men's widows. The consul murmured to the Earl in compensation that the chaplain had been to Eton. The small, bleak church was filled with patients from the Clinic Laлnnec fit enough to take the special train, weeping and coughing into their blue-glass bottles. Such emotion had startled Eliot. They shrugged at death, when it pushed past them in the corridors. A suicide-nobody believed the accident excuse-was different, real death. Dying from phthisis was the penalty of losing the game everyone played.

'When are you leaving Switzerland?' Nancy asked Eliot, as he dropped the last slide into the disinfectant.

He began washing his hands under the swan-necked tap. 'Wednesday of next week.'

'Taking a vacation before starting your politicizing?'

'This has been my vacation. Overpaid and overfed, the work demanding the abilities only of an earnest medical student. On my heels arrives Dr Hamish McCorquodale of Aberdeen University. A bachelor, the son of the manse-a cleric's offspring-he has sent in advance a packing-case weighty with medical books. He'll entertain you as adequately as me. Perhaps he'll bring his bagpipes.'

'Can't I do any work in the clinic? You know how I've longed to help the patients, instead of walking among them like some smug neutral in a war.'

'Why not come with me to London? Together we'll mount the quest for Crippen.'

'Together? Imagine the gossip!'

'Oh, everyone gossips all day about the pair of us.'

Nancy looked alarmed. 'How can I leave Baby? She was awfully upset over Lady Sarah. Her temperature's up a whole degree.'

'It'll be down in a month. She'd hardly notice you'd gone. I've never known a more dutiful relative than you, Nancy. If you don't take a holiday, you'll develop melancholia. Why not?' He was standing close to her. 'Perhaps you'll return with Dr Crippen's magic, to put the clinic out of business and bring upon Monsieur Mittot richly deserved ruin.'

'I cannot leave Baby,' she repeated firmly.

He clasped her. 'Self-sacrifice is so common in women, men take it for granted. It's not often combined with intelligence and determination. You're a woman with all the qualities I admire. Particularly when you've no more need to exercise them than to practice frugality.'