Only on the wards did the images recede. When I changed the dressings on an old man’s ulcerated wound or carefully cut open the newspapers in which some East End mother had stitched her sick baby, I could be present, in London, with people whose needs I could meet. When five of my classmates were on medical leave that winter I’d stepped up my work pace to pick up the slack. The teaching staff didn’t like me: I was too serious, too intense. But they recognized my skill with patients, even in my second year.
I think that was why Claire had come looking for me. She’d shown up at the Royal Free for a conference—actually on the new drugs that were starting to come in for tuberculosis. Afterward, some professor probably suggested that a word from her might carry weight with me: get Miss Herschel to relax, take part in some of her year’s sports or dramatics. It will make her a better-rounded person and ultimately a better doctor.
In the normal round of life our paths no longer crossed. Claire still lived with her mother, but since I’d left Cousin Minna’s I never ran into her. Claire was doing her senior houseman’s year at St. Anne’s in Wembley, which meant long days covering casualty as well as the post-op and disease wards—women, even women like Claire Tallmadge, got the dregs of the housemen’s jobs in those days. When I looked up and saw her across the room, I collapsed.
Carl often accused me of being in love with Claire. Oh, I was, but not in the way he imagined: not erotically, but with the infatuation a child has for an adulated adult. I suppose the flattery of my mimicry, even to the point of following her to the Royal Free, kept Claire paying a kind of attention to me. That was why it was so painful later, when she cut me off. But at that particular moment, it was more our different schedules, our different homes, that kept us apart.
Still, I was startled when she wrote me the following week, the week after I’d collapsed in front of her, to offer me the cottage. When I crossed London by train and bus to meet her for tea, she told me Ted Marmaduke and his brother Wallace had bought the cottage to use when they went sailing. After Wallace was killed at El Alamein, Ted didn’t sail much. Vanessa hated boats; the country, real country, bored her. But Ted wouldn’t sell the place; he even paid a local farm couple to keep the yard and premises in some kind of order. Claire said he imagined using it again when he and Vanessa had children—he pictured five or six children who would grow up to share his love of sports. Since they’d been married a decade now without even one robust blond child, I had a feeling that Vanessa’s will would prevail here as in other matters, but it wasn’t my business. I didn’t care much about Ted and Vanessa’s lives.
“Ted never liked me,” I said, when Claire explained that her brother-in-law was offering me the place so that I could get the fresh air and food I needed. “Why would he let me have his country house? Isn’t that the kind of encroachment he always warned you against?”
I used to hear Ted criticizing Claire for her involvement with me. Crouching behind the garden wall, I’d hear him say she should be careful, my kind would only take advantage, Claire replying that I was a funny little monkey without a mother, and what possible advantage could I take? Ted’s brother Wallace, another tall blond man with a hearty laugh, putting in that she’d be surprised, people like me were always encroaching: You’re young, Claire, inclined to think you know better than the rest of us. I assure you when you’ve seen the world a bit you’ll think differently.
Should I be embarrassed at how much I heard from the other side of the garden wall? I suppose, I suppose—it was only my childish infatuation with Claire that made me creep down there when I saw them all in the garden on Sunday afternoons.
Now Claire flushed slightly. “War matured Ted. That, and losing Wallace. You haven’t seen him, have you, since he got back? I expect he’ll be quite a power in the city one of these days, but at home he’s much gentler than he used to be. Anyway, when he and Vanessa were over for dinner on Sunday and I explained how ill you were, how you needed rest and fresh air, they both immediately thought of Axmouth.
“A local farmer named Jessup will probably sell you food cheaply; there’s a decent doctor in Axmouth, you should be able to manage on your own. I’ll come in December when my tour at St. Anne’s ends, but if you feel desperate before that you can send me a telegram; I could probably get away for a day in an emergency.”
Just as she’d got me to school, to the scholarships I’d needed, she now organized all the details of my life. She even validated my request for medical leave due to tuberculosis. And persuaded the registrar that I would recover faster in the country, with fresh food, than at a sanitorium. I felt powerless to resist her, powerless to say I’d rather take my chances in London.