Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

The door of the Clinique Laлnnec's waiting-room opened without a knock. A tall, handsome young man with a thick moustache strode in. He wore a pair of khaki drill trousers, like a British officer in India, a Norfolk jacket of grey tweed, a soft turned-down collar and a floppy, crimson bow tie as favoured by minor poets. Under his arm was a cardboard box-file.

'Miss Janet Grange?' he said to Baby. 'And you must be the sister who's accompanying her across the face of the earth?' he added to Nancy. 'I'm Dr Eliot Beckett. I'm English. _Monsieur le directeur_ will be along once he's finished in the operating theatre.'

The sisters sat straight on the sofa, still in their hats. They had enjoyed the tea. Eliot lazily sat in an armchair opposite, long legs crossed, file on his knee, 'I had a letter from Dr Hull in New York. You coughed blood, Miss Grange. When did the blow fall?'

'A Tuesday morning in the middle of March.' Baby was practised in her story. 'I was going to a final fitting at my dressmaker's. You see, it was to be my twenty-first birthday, we were having a wonderful ball, absolutely everyone in New York was invited.'

She saw the doctor smile. 'I mean, not actually everyone in New York, that would be four million people, wouldn't it? But everyone who mattered in New York. Oh, it was to be a heavenly evening.' Baby's eyes shone, it could have been held tomorrow. 'They'd already started decorating the ballroom, there were to be two orchestras, Viennese and a negro band-_how_ I had to persuade father! The chef from Delmonico's was taking charge of our kitchens…' She stopped. 'The invitations had all gone out,' she ended quietly. 'You can imagine, it was very embarrassing.'

'I congratulate you on your sense of social obligation, Miss Grange. Giving thought to the effect of their illness upon others is an unusual quality among invalids. But why trail to Switzerland? The air is just as pure in the Appalachians as in the Alps.'

Nancy replied, 'My father knew the fame of Switzerland in curing the disease.'

'No expense spared? You father's very rich? I could never ask an English lady that without risking a snubbing like an express hitting the buffers. In America, you're rightly proud to achieve the world's heart's desire. What's your father's business?'

'He is a banker.' Nancy was irritated. The doctor talked as though on their social level.

Eliot uncapped his fountain-pen. For ten minutes he questioned Baby about her health-her weight, her sleep, the life she led, the friends she made. Did she sweat at night? Was she afflicted by catarrhs? Had any of her family suffered from phthisis? It was the first time he had named the disease. 'I heard my grandmother died of a cough.'

'Can you remember what the doctor called it?'

'She had no doctor,' Nancy interrupted. 'She died in a slum on the East Side. She'd been in the United States less than a year.'

'So? All has been amassed by your father's single-minded efforts? That's something deserving of congratulations, quite as much as writing _Huckleberry Finn._ I doubt if your grandmother suffered from consumption. She had recently arrived, and the vigilance of your immigration officers is feared across Europe.'

The door reopened, admitting a tall thin man with scanty fair hair brushed from a domed brow above a pale face of hollows and furrows. He wore a long white coat, buttoned from his wing-collar to the ends of striped trousers above brightly polished black shoes and lavender spats. He bowed, introducing himself as Dr Pasquier, director of the clinic, speaking briskly with a strong French accent.

He led them through a second door, into an identical white room with fearsome furniture-flat leather couch half hidden by a white curtain on a brass rail, a white table with large bottles of coloured fluids and heavy china pots, an enamelled basin on a tripod, a tray with a white cloth bearing small shiny instruments of menacingly probing shape. A nurse was waiting, ugly and fat, in white dress, stockings and shoes, her flowing white cap with a red cross on the forehead. Nancy noticed another lidded cup on its shelf.

Eliot wordlessly offered Nancy a hard wooden chair. Removing her hat, Baby was placed in the centre on a padded leather seat with no arms, its straight narrow back reaching above her head. The nurse inserted a thermometer under her tongue. They waited three minutes. Dr Pasquier pulled a pince-nez dangling from his lapel, its black ribbon hissing from spring-loaded drum.

'Mademoiselle has a fever of thirty-eight degrees,' he announced, as politely as paying a compliment.

'A hundred point four Farenheit,' Eliot translated. 'Even figures speak a different language here in the mountains.'

'What was it this morning, mademoiselle?'

'I didn't take it.' Baby looked guiltily at Nancy.

'Mademoiselle will please remove her upper garments.'

Repetition had made Baby a deft and stylish undresser. Nancy suspected that she revelled in performing the forbidden with impunity, as though an artist's model rather than a doctor's specimen. The embroidered, lace-trimmed white silk camisole slipped from her shoulders, she unlaced and discarded the heavy cotton brassiиre criss-crossed with ribbons, bought with her divided stays from Bloomingdale's. Dr. Pasquier was saying, 'Everyone is liable to be seeded with the bacillus. If the soil is fertile, a tubercule will sprout. Many are lucky, and it falls upon stony ground. Has mademoiselle been obliged to mix with many others, in a school or college? '

Nancy replied, 'Our mother died at my sister's birth. We were schooled at home, and my father thought further education unnecessary.'

'Has your sister performed charity work among the poor?'

'Never.' She glanced at Eliot. She had taken a dislike to this abrasive English doctor. He was writing busily on his box-file.

Hands loose on her lap, thick blonde hair piled high, Baby sat with self-conscious submissiveness. Her skin was white to the wrists, her breasts smooth as lard were decorated with large nipples the colour of fresh salmon. Under the fair hairs of her armpits lay a glistening patch, the tears of her fever.

Dr Pasquier surprised her by taking both hands. 'Ungues adunci,' he murmured. 'Clubbed fingers. You see, mademoiselle? The nails are unusually convex from base to tip, they curve over the finger's end like a parrot's beak. No one noticed it?' Baby shook her head. 'Well, up here we have sharper eyes' for such things than doctors who must treat an assembly of diseases.''

'Will they get better?' asked Baby in alarm. 'Or shall I be deformed for life?'

'They progress with the state of mademoiselle's health,' he answered vaguely. He felt her neck. 'No enlarged glands,' he announced in his complimentary voice.

Eliot stood close beside him. Both gazed solemnly at Baby's chest, the bony bird-cage of whispering lungs and ticking heart, from life to death unnoticed by its possessors as the whirling of the earth's globe beneath their feet, upon which the attention of the Clinique Laлnnec was obsessively fixed and from which its income was drawn.

'The right apex,' said Eliot. 'Diminished movement.'

Baby licked her lips several times. Head cocked, Dr Pasquier lay a finger flat under her collar-bone and percussed. Nancy suddenly saw the elderly Italian in the carefully-kept old suit who came every month to tune their pianos. Dr Pasquier produced an ebonite stethoscope, like a vase for a single rose, listening to Baby's chest with eyebrows raised and lips pursed, as if savouring some excellent wine. Baby could think only of her nails turning into parrots' beaks.

'Thank you.' Dr Pasquier bowed from the hips, as though Baby had just afforded him a dance.

'There is diminished breathing.' He looked rapidly from one sister to the other. 'With rвles-abnormal sounds-not found by your American doctors. But as I mentioned, we have sharper eyes and ears because we hunt but one animal in the jungle of sickness. There is…shall I say, a suspicion…? of a moist patch at the very top of the right lung. We may be wrong. We must examine the sputum she coughs up, to see if the tubercule bacillus lurks therein. We shall look inside with Rцntgen rays-we have every modern convenience here, you see. Meanwhile, mademoiselle is advised to enjoy our hospitality for a while.'