Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'How long?' Baby still sat half-naked. 'I've just got to be back in New York by the middle of summer.'

'I assure mademoiselle that we are equally eager to lose her company.' Dr Pasquier bowed again. 'That day will be expedited by her not fretting about it. You will please excuse me. Dr Beckett will see you comfortably installed.'

'What a pretty little room.' Baby clasped her hands, eyes shining, 'Nancy, it's like the one we used to share at Oyster Bay when we were kids'.

It was a nasty little room.

It was a white cube, smaller than Nancy's bathroom on Fifth Avenue. The wardrobe was narrow, the white dressing-table had a plain oval mirror, the square washbasin in one corner had stout brass taps and a white slop-pail under it. The bed was in the middle, white-painted iron with a white coverlet, on large wheels with brakes. From the ceiling hung an electric bulb in a shade like a saucer, the floor was covered with more coconut matting. On the bedside commode was a nightlight with a squat candle, and another of the lidded cups. On the capacious balcony stood a long chair with folded blankets, as aboard transatlantic liners. It was one of the sanatorium's best rooms, on the ground floor, looking across the gravel forecourt with the flapping flag. It cost 25 Swiss francs a week.

'But it's freezing,' complained Baby. The shadows of the conifers opposite were pointing long fingers towards the creeping dusk. Nancy laid her hand on the cold radiator.

_'Bitte? Die Zentralheizung ist zu warm.'_ The fat nurse who had accompanied them shook her finger severely. 'Dr Pasquier want good hygiene.'

'What's that smell?' Baby's nose wrinkled.

_'Rдuchern Ameisensдure.' _The nurse waved her hand. 'Formalin.'

They were interrupted by another white-clad nurse, young, sandy, fresh-faced, bustling, chattering cheerfully, 'So here's the new arrivals? I'm Nurse Dove. I'm from London. Thank you, Frдulein,' she dismissed her companion, sweeping up Baby's travelling-coat and hanging it in the wardrobe. 'We'll soon get you settled in comfy. These are my rooms, along this bit of the corridor, but the Frдulein's in charge of everybody. You're from America, aren't you?' She started busily turning down the bed. 'Fancy that. Mind, we've quite a few Americans here. It's a long way to come, but it's wonderful these days with the steamships, isn't it? As I always say, there's no place like Switzerland for getting you back in the pink if you've a touched lung.' She closed the windows and drew the curtains. 'You don't want to get into bed as though in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, do you?'

'Whose is this?' Baby picked from the dressing table a silver-backed brush, long fair hairs choking the bristles, inscribed on the back, _To Louisa from Mummy and Daddy on Her Twenty-first Birthday._

'Oh, dear me, that belonged to the young English lady. I must have missed clearing it out yesterday with the rest of her things.'

'She's gone home to England?' Baby sounded excited.

'I wish I could say as much.' Nurse Dove pounded and smoothed the pillows. 'No, the poor lady died. She was a bad case, right from the start. Dr Beckett couldn't do a thing for her, she just went steadily downhill. Still, that's exceptional, the san does most people the world of good. The room's been thoroughly fumigated with formic acid,' she added consolingly.

'She died?' Baby gasped. 'Here? Yesterday?'

'Folk are born and folk die, that's the way of the world.' Nurse Dove checked the candle in the night-light. 'They're the only two things every soul must go through, and I don't suppose we realise that either has happened to us. What's the point, making your whole life miserable by thinking about your departure from it?'

'Don't leave me here, don't leave me.' Baby started crying, clutching Nancy fiercely.

'You'll be all right, darling, you'll be fine, you're hardly ill at all, are you?'

'There's a lot that has a good cry when they first come in,' said Nurse Dove sympathetically. 'But believe me, in a day or two everything will seem so natural, you'll look upon it as your home from home. After all, there's all of us with nothing else to do except make you better. Put your sister to bed,' she said to Nancy. 'I'll see the porter about the luggage, and order her supper. There's always something nice.'

They sat on the bed, Baby shaking in Nancy's arms, continually muttering, 'Don't leave me, don't leave me…I'm so frightened, so frightened.'

'I know you are, darling.' Nancy stroked her hair. 'You've been so brave, right from the start. Putting on a show, as though it was all some awful inconvenience, like pouring rain when we'd planned a tennis party.'

Baby tried not to think of the golden-haired pale English miss, eaten by disease to a skin-bag of bones. 'You are wonderful, being so strict darling, saving me from myself. Now a pack of strangers have suddenly become the most important persons in my life. Don't you see? The doctors, the nurses, they're above you. Even above father.'

'Screw up your courage, darling.'

'It's flattering to know I have some. That's the mood everyone gets married in, isn't it?' she said, a trace of usual gaiety. 'They live happily ever after, only because they don't care losing their own good opinion of their bravery.'

Nurse Dove entered with the alligator dressing case.

'Not getting undressed yet?' She spoke as to a wayward child. 'You have brought a lot of luggage, but everybody does. It'll have to go in the storeroom, I'm afraid. What pretty things you've got.' She held up Baby's nightdress with the air of an experienced shopgirl at the counter.

'Go now, Nancy,' Baby commanded. 'I'm feeling stronger. I might not in a little while.'

The corridor outside was empty. Electric bulbs in dish-like shades supplemented the fading light. Nancy felt relieved and guilty. As the door of the white room shut, the sisters' lives were divided. She had abandoned to professionals the responsibility and irksomeness of controlling a capricious patient on a tiresome journey. Now she faced an indefinite stay in a remote Swiss hotel with no company except an ill-tempered lady's maid, an existence to which she had afforded neither planning nor even speculation.

Nancy stopped. Behind another white door, somebody barely two yards away started coughing. It was a cough she had never heard before. Repeated but not paroxysmal, long and rumbling, a wet, sticky uncomplaining cough, which made her imagine a sack emptied of squashed and rotten potatoes. It lasted near a quarter of a minute before ending in a sigh, a hissing intake of breath, then the sharp noise of a metal closing on metal, which puzzled her. Nancy shivered. Gripping her skirt, she hurried along the corridor.

A slim woman in a long black serge skirt and white blouse was leaving the examination room. Her face was a crimson scaly mask, the tip of her nose blunted like a boxer's, her eyelids drawn down to show their gleaming pink lining, tightly stretched skin tugging her lips and revealing her gums in a smile as gruesome as a skeleton's.

Eliot was seeing the patient out. 'Miss Grange, is your sister comfortable? You're leaving for your hotel? I'll order the carriage.'

He sat Nancy on the hard chair, took the ebonite-handled telephone from its cradle, whirred the handle of the wooden box beneath, and spoke briefly in French.

'Unhappily, all three of the clinic's carriages are at the station or the village, so you must wait a while.' Eliot leant with his back to the radiator, hands clasped over beige shirt-front. He seemed slightly more affable.

'That poor woman has the disease in her face?' Nancy asked.

'Yes, you are right. The disease. It's the only one existing up here. The guests all have it, the servants have all shaken it off. Did you notice the scar on the receptionist's neck? The cunning tubercule bacillus has as many manifestations as the Devil. It can swell the neck glands like a string of blind boils. It can inflame the joints like rheumatism and gout, or hoarsen the voice like an everlasting cold. She had _lupus vulgarus.'_ He nodded towards the door. 'Though some still dispute it, I reckon it a _tuberculosis cutis.'_