The Citadel (7 page)

He could not see her face. Nor did he wait for her answer. He swung round and walked down the road. For the first time in many days he felt happy.

The half-yearly return of the practice had come in from the Company’s offices, giving Miss Page matter for serious reflection and another topic to discuss with Aneurin Rees, the bank manager. For the first time in eighteen months the figures showed an upward jump. There were over seventy more men on ‘Doctor Page’s list’ than there had been before Manson’s arrival.

Pleased with the increase in the cheque Blodwen nevertheless nursed a most disturbing thought. At mealtimes Andrew caught her unguardedly fixing him with a queer inquiring stare. On the Wednesday following Mrs Bramwell’s social evening Blodwen came into lunch with unusual vivacity.

‘I declare!’ she remarked. ‘I’ve just been thinking. It’s nearly four months since you been here, doctor. And you haven’t done too badly, either. I’m not complaining. Mind you, it isn’t like Doctor Page himself. Oh, dear, no! Mr Watkins was only saying the other day how they were all looking forward to Doctor Page coming back. Doctor Page is so clever. Mr Watkins told me they would never dream of having anybody in his place.’

She laid herself out to describe, in picturesque detail, the extraordinary skill and ability of her brother. ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ she exclaimed, nodding her head. ‘There’s nothing he can’t do or hasn’t done. Operations! You ought to have seen them. Let me tell you this, doctor, he’s the cleverest man that’s ever been in this valley.’

Andrew made no reply. Her purpose was plain to him and he thought it, in its tenacious loyalty, both tragic and kind.

Meanwhile she sat back in her chair and gazed at him, trying to read the effect of her words. Then she smiled confidently.

‘There’ll be great rejoicings in Drineffy when Doctor Page gets back to work. And it’ll be soon too. In the summer, I said to Mr Watkins, in the summer Doctor Page will be back.’

Returning from his afternoon round towards the end of the same week Andrew was shocked to find Edward seated in a chair by the front porch, fully dressed, a rug over his knees and a cap stuck upon his head. A sharp wind was blowing and the gleam of April sunshine which bathed the tragic figure was pale and cold.

‘There now,’ cried Miss Page, coming triumphantly towards Manson from the porch. ‘You see, don’t you. Doctor’s
up
! I’ve just telephoned Mr Watkins to tell him doctor’s better. He’ll soon be back at work, won’t you, dear?’

Andrew felt the blood rush to his brow.

‘Who got him down here?’

‘I did,’ said Blodwen quickly. ‘And why not? He’s my brother. And he’s better.’

‘He’s not fit to be up. Far from it.’ Andrew threw the words at her in a low tone. ‘Do as I tell you. Help me get him back to bed at once.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Edward said feebly. ‘Get me back to bed. I’m cold. I’m not right. I – I don’t feel well.’ And to Manson’s distress the sick man began to whimper.

Instantly Blodwen was in remorseful tears beside him. Down on her knees she dropped, her arms around him, contrite, exclaiming:

‘There now, dearest. You shall go back to bed, poor lamb. Blodwen made a mistake. Blodwen’ll take care of you. Blodwen loves you, Edward dear.’

She kissed his stiff cheek.

Half an hour later, with Edward upstairs and comfortable again, Andrew came to the kitchen, upset.

Annie was now a genuine friend, many a confidence they had exchanged in this same kitchen and many an apple and currant griddle cake the middle-aged woman had slipped out of the larder for him when he came in hungry. Sometimes, indeed, as a last resort she would run down to the town for a double fish supper and they would banquet sumptuously by candle-light at the scullery table. Annie had been at Page’s for nearly twenty years. She had many relations in Drineffy, all tidy folk, and her only reason for remaining so long in service was her devotion to Doctor Page.

‘Give me my tea in here, Annie,’ Andrew now declared. ‘Blodwen and I are out of tune at the moment.’

He was in the kitchen before he realised that Annie had visitors – her sister Olwen and Olwen’s husband, Emlyn Hughes. He had met them several times before. Emlyn was a shotfirer in the Drineffy High Levels, a solid good-natured man with pale, thickened features.

As Manson, seeing them, hesitated, Olwen, a spry dark-eyed young woman, took an impulsive breath.

‘Don’t mind us, doctor, if you want your tea. As a matter of fact we were just talkin’ about you when you came in.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, indeed!’ Olwen darted a glance at her sister. ‘It’s no use your lookin’ at me that way, Annie, I’ll speak what’s in my mind. All the men are talkin’, Doctor Manson, about how they haven’t had such a good young doctor as you for years, about how you take trouble to examine them, and all. You can ask Emlyn if you don’t believe me. And they’re bothered about how Miss Page is runnin’ things. They say you ought to ’ave the practice by rights. Mind you, she fair worships the old boy. She actually believes he’ll get better too. Somebody ought to tell her he won’t!’

When he had finished his tea Andrew withdrew. Olwen’s downright speech made him feel ill at ease. Yet it was flattering to be told that the people of Drineffy liked him. And he took it as an especial tribute when, a few days later, Joe Morgan, a foreman driller at the hematite mine, came to see him with his wife.

The Morgans were a middle-aged couple, not well off, but highly thought of in the district, who had been married for nearly twenty years. Andrew had heard that they were leaving shortly for South Africa where Morgan had the promise of work in the Johannesburg mines. It was not unusual for good drillers to be tempted out to the gold mines on the Rand where the drill work was similar and the pay much better. Yet no one was more surprised than Andrew when Morgan, seated in the little surgery with his wife, self-consciously explained the purpose of their visit.

‘Well, sir, we have done it, at last, it seems. The missus here is goin’ to have a baby. After nineteen year, mark you. We are plain delighted, man. And we’ve decided to put off our leavin’ till after the event. For we’ve been thinkin’ about doctors like, and we come to the conclusion that you’re the one we must have to handle the case. It means a lot to us, doctor. It’ll be a hard job, too, I fancy. Missus here is forty-three. Yes, indeed. But here, now, we know you’ll give us every satisfaction.’

Andrew entered up the case with a warm sense of having been honoured. It was a strange emotion, clear and without material origin, which in his present state was doubly comforting. Lately he had felt lost, completely desolate. Extraordinary currents were moving within him, disturbing and painful. There were times when his heart held a strange dull ache which, as a mature Bachelor of Medicine, he had hitherto believed impossible.

He had never before thought seriously of love. At the university he had been too poor, too badly dressed and far too intent on getting through his examinations to come much in contact with the other sex. At St Andrews, one had to be a blood, like his friend and classmate Freddie Hamson, to move in that circle which danced and held parties and exhibited the social graces. All this had been denied him. He had really belonged – his friendship with Hamson apart – to that crowd of outsiders who turned up their coat collars, swotted, smoked and took occasional recreation not at the Union but in a down-town billiard saloon.

It is true that the inevitable romantic images had presented themselves to him. Because of his poverty these were usually projected against a lavishly wealthy background. But now, in Drineffy, he stared through the window of the ramshackle surgery, his clouded eyes fastened upon the dirty slag heap of the ore works, longing with all his heart for the skimpy junior mistress of a Council school. The bathos of it made him want to laugh.

He had always prided himself on being practical, upon his strong infusion of native caution, and he attempted, violently and with determined self-interest, to argue himself out of his emotion. He tried, coldly and logically, to examine her defects. She was not beautiful, her figure was too small and thin. She had that mole upon her cheek and a slight crinkling, visible when she smiled, in her upper lip. In addition she probably detested him.

He told himself angrily that he was utterly ill advised to give way to his feelings in this weak fashion. He had dedicated himself to his work. He was still only an assistant. What kind of doctor was he, to form, at the very outset of his career, an attachment which must hamper her future and was even now seriously interfering with his work?

In the effort to take himself in hand, he created loopholes of distraction. Deluding himself that he was missing the old associations of St Andrews, he wrote a long letter to Freddie Hamson, who had lately gone down to a hospital appointment in London. He fell back a great deal upon Denny. But Philip, though sometimes friendly, was more often cold, suspicious, with the bitterness of a man whom life has hurt.

Try as he would Andrew could not get Christine out of his mind, nor that tormenting yearning for her from his heart. He had not seen her since his outburst at the front gate of The Retreat. What did she think of him? Did she ever think of him? It was so long since he had seen her, despite an eager scanning of Bank Street when he passed it, that he despaired of seeing her at all.

Then, on the afternoon of Saturday, the 25th of May, when he had almost given up hope, he received a note which ran as follows:

Dear Doctor Manson,

Mr and Mrs Watkins are coming to supper with me tomorrow, Sunday evening. If you have nothing better to do would you care to come too. Half past seven.

Sincerely, Christine Barlow.

He gave a cry which brought Annie hurrying from the scullery.

‘Eh, doctor,
bach,’
reprovingly. ‘ Sometimes you do act silly.’

‘I have, Annie,’ he answered, still overcome. ‘But I – I seem to have got off with it. Listen, Annie, dear. Will you press my trousers for me before tomorrow? I’ll sling them outside my door tonight when I go to bed.’

On the following evening which, being Sunday, left him free of the evening surgery, he presented himself in tremulous expectation at the house of Mrs Herbert, with whom Christine lodged, near the Institute. He was early and he knew it, but he could not wait a moment longer.

It was Christine herself who opened the door for him, her face welcoming, smiling towards him.

Yes, she was smiling actually smiling. And he had felt that she disliked him! He was so overwhelmed he could barely speak.

‘It’s been a lovely day, hasn’t it?’ he mumbled as he followed her into her sitting-room.

‘Lovely,’ she agreed. ‘And I had such a grand walk this afternoon. Right out beyond Pandy. I actually found some celandines.’

They sat down. It was on his tongue to inquire nervously if she enjoyed walking but he nipped the gauche futility in time.

‘Mrs Watkins has just sent word,’ she remarked. ‘She and her husband will be a little late. He’s had to go down to the office. You don’t mind waiting a few minutes on them?’

Mind! A few minutes! He could have laughed out of sheer happiness. If only she knew how he had waited all those days, how wonderful it was to be here with her. Surreptitiously he looked about him. Her sitting-room, furnished with her own things, was different from any room he had entered in Drineffy. It held neither plush nor horsehair not axminster, nor any of those shiny satin cushions which conspicuously adorned Mrs Bramwell’s drawing-room. The floor-boards were stained and polished, with a plain brown rug before the open fireplace. The furniture was so unobtrusive he scarcely noticed it. In the centre of the table, set for supper, was a plain white dish in which floated, like masses of tiny water-lilies, the celandines she had gathered. The effect was simple and beautiful. On the window-sill stood a wooden confectionery box, now filled with earth, from which thin green seedlings were sprouting. Above the mantelpiece was a most peculiar picture, which showed nothing more than a child’s small wooden chair, painted red and, he thought, extremely badly drawn.

She must have noticed the surprise with which he viewed it. She smiled with infectious amusement.

‘I hope you don’t think it’s the original.’

Embarrassed, he did not know what to say. The expression of her personality through the room, the conviction that she knew things which were beyond him, confounded him. Yet his interest was so awakened he forgot his awkwardness, escaped from the stupid banalities of remarks about the weather. He began to ask her about herself.

She answered him simply. She was from Yorkshire. Her mother had died when she was fifteen. Her father had then been under-manager at one of the big Bramwell Main Collieries. Her only brother John had been trained in the same colliery as a mining engineer. Five years later when she was nineteen and her Normal course completed, her father had been appointed manager of the Porth Pit, twenty miles down the valley. She and her brother had come to South Wales with him, she to keep the house, John to assist his father. Six months after their arrival there had been an explosion in the Porth Pit. John had been underground, killed instantly. Her father, hearing of the disaster, had immediately gone down, only to be met by a rush of black damp. A week later his body and John’s were brought out together.

When she concluded there was a silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ Andrew said in a sympathetic voice.

‘People were kind to me,’ she said soberly. ‘Mr and Mrs Watkins especially. I got this job at school here.’ She paused, her face lighting up again. ‘ I’m like you, though. I’m still strange here. It takes a long time to get used to the valleys.’

He looked at her, searching for something which would even faintly express his feeling for her, a remark which might tactfully dispose of the past and hopefully open out the future.

‘It’s easy to feel cut off down here, lonely. I know. I do often. I often feel I want someone to talk to.’