Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'Did you take your temperature this morning?'

Baby gasped, hand to mouth. 'I forgot.'

'Oh, darling! It's the first thing they'll ask.'

'Does it matter?' Baby asked frivolously. 'They'll probably want to make a fresh start. And I've been so good at taking it. Well, quite good, I guess. It's not the nicest part of your toilet.'

'How do you feel now?'

'Fine! I could swim the lake.'

'You sweated last night.'

'It was hot last night in Geneva. Don't say it like that, darling. You sound as if you are accusing me of being naughty.'

'I'm sorry. I don't want you to do anything foolhardy, that's all.'

They changed at Lausanne. Nancy and Baby lunched at the station buffet, which they heard were the best places to eat in Switzerland. Maria-Thйrиse arranged transfer of their dozen pieces of baggage, and was given a franc for a casse-croыte. _

The next train was short, without corridors, the first-class compartments lined with shiny black leather. The stubby engine with a conical smokestack, like American ones, panted out billows of black as they climbed among fields with more cows, stopping at every station, some no more than a white hut and a signboard, the waiting passengers a man or two in blue blouse and beret smoking a long, thin, crooked cigar, a woman in a shawl with a milk churn or a crate of live geese.

Pasture turned to rocky grass, the cows were replaced by goats. Baby complained she was cold and had Maria-Thйrиse unwrap the tartan rug. They went through tunnels, quickly pulling the windows tight against the acrid smoke. They looked down the valleys at bright torrents, trickles in summer, now fed by the melting snow and fierce enough to shift the boulders. The train circled the waist of a mountain, its piercing whistle echoing off the rock, and they unexpectedly found themselves in the terminus of Champette.

The station was a sturdily-roofed shed. Across the cobbled square, a four-storey stone building bore in gold letters, _Hotel Grand Palais de Champette._ Nancy decided the grandeur was relative to the village-half the size of Oyster Bay, the setting of their Long Island house. Nancy sent Maria-Thйrиse with the hotel concierge and luggage-cart. She must accompany Baby to her journey's end. A closed carriage with a pair of horses was waiting. A man in gold-braided grey uniform supervised stowing the luggage, settled the sisters on the leather upholstery, and solemnly tucking a rug round them climbed with the driver on the box.

Baby was flushed and tired, but grew livelier as they jogged up a narrow, paved road that twisted through a steep, dark pine forest. 'It's like fairyland,' she exclaimed. 'In fairyland there's always a forest like this, with a turretted castle in the middle containing a beautiful princess.'

Their castle was on a broad ledge of the mountain, a long, thin building facing south. Each of its seven storeys had a dozen tall, shutterless windows looking on deep balconies edged with white-painted iron railings. A broad gravel forecourt ran to a wooden fence guarding the drop to the village below. From the flagpole in the middle, the red cross on a white ground snapped loudly in the mountain breeze.

They stopped under a glass canopy, covering a flight of steps. Sweeping off his cap, the man in uniform opened the plate-glass double-doors which protected from draughts a square, white lobby transfixed by four slender pillars. Electric bulbs hung in clusters of curly brass, the floor was covered with coconut matting. A tall, stooping man in a brown suit broke his conversation with a woman in a yellow pullover, both inspecting the newcomers with solemn curiosity. The lobby smelt of carbolic, with eau de Cologne which disguised it no more successfully than it generally succeeded with human sweat.

From a desk to their left, a young man in a frock coat approached with eager servility.

'Miss Grange?' Nancy noticed a wide, deep scar running from the angle of his jaw and disappearing into his wing collar. 'Welcome to the Clinique Laлnnec.'

He left them in a white-painted room with an expensive tapestry sofa and so many chairs that they indicated its use for waiting. It was dark, looking north over a small garden at the mountainside. A maid in black bombasine with lace apron and starched cap brought a large silver tray with teapot, kettle on spirit-lamp, buttered toast on a dish warmed with hot water, cream gateaux and the delicate spicy biscuits which Voltaire called _pets de nonne,_ nun's farts.

'They must think we're English,' said Nancy.

'What do you suppose this is?' Baby had been looking around inquisitively. She picked from a ledge in the corner a white-enamelled metal cup with a lid like a German tankard. She opened it with her thumb, wrinkling her nose. 'It's got carbolic slopping about. Do you suppose it's to fumigate the atmosphere?'

She lost interest in it, and stared in silence through the window at the Alps, Europe's last savage land, barely scratched by the roads and houses of the busily civilizing Swiss, and which killed with equal contempt intruders seeking amusement, excitement, health, or life.

The disease had struck Baby like a bullet-wound. She was hurrying from her bedroom in their father's house on Fifth Avenue and 68th Street when something warm and salty gushed in her mouth. She spat into her wash-basin a demi-tasse of bright blood, and instantly she knew that she was seriously ill. When the shock and confusion, the family alarm, the urgent traffic of doctors had subsided, Baby treated her sickness with the persevering frivolity which she applied to the world. It was an affectation which she discovered in childhood won her easy attraction, and which she preserved as her defiance against a life which often frightened her. High-spirited friends at her bedside were divided in thinking her extremely brave or extremely stupid.

They left New York in April, in brass and mahogany comfort aboard the French Line's Bretagne, for Le Havre. Their father had impatiently wanted them aboard the brand-new four-funnelled Lusitania, with prototype steam-turbines, which could cross the Atlantic in four and a half days. Even John Grange could not bribe Cunard to divert the liner from her passage to Liverpool-which she continued to ply until torpedoed off Ireland by the U-20 six years later.

The sisters had violent quarrels. Why shouldn't she stay up to dance, play tombola, join in the ship's concert? Baby demanded. When she would spend weeks, perhaps months, in a gloomy Swiss clinic? Baby gave in, but the row sent up her temperature, which crushed Nancy with guilt. They had another quarrel in Paris. They were staying a night at the Crillon, but Baby spat more blood. Nancy summoned the hotel doctor, who called a professor with a Legion d'Honeur rosette in his buttonhole. Baby demanded to return home. 'As you wish, mademoiselle.' The professor shrugged. 'But your family will welcome you as a corpse.'

Baby sulked in bed for three weeks, propped with pillows, gazing through the long windows at the fiacres, motor taxis, touring cars and limousines, the carts, drays and bicycles, the motor-buses which were ousting the three-horse omnibuses, all swirling round the Obelisk from Luxor in the middle of the Place de la Concorde.

A luxury hotel is a better place to be ill than a hospital. The service is to be commanded, not begged. The outside world intrudes instead of being regarded as irrelevant, and the day's hours remain in the possession of the patient. Baby declared the food disgusting, she wanted Quaker Oats, scrambled eggs, tomato ketchup. She had nothing to read, no _Life, McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal._ Nancy had before carried no responsibility weightier than arranging her father's dinner-parties. She now never flinched from managing her sister, however unsisterly it made her feel. The relationship between the sick and those who minister to them is often more complex and infuriating than marriage.