An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“She is only suffering from thrush at the moment, the poor mite,” said McConnell.

They were beside the bed of a small girl, who was in the throes of what looked like a terrible fever. Lenox and Graham stood a few respectful strides back from the bed. It was the fifth patient they had visited with McConnell.

“Are you sure?” asked the nurse.

“Quite sure. We must give her a bolus of laudanum.” With great tenderness, McConnell tilted back the child’s head, its face swollen and red, and tipped a liquid taken from his coat pocket between her chapped, cracked lips. She coughed it down without leaving her state of febrile semiconsciousness. The doctor patted her hand and, as they walked away, murmured to Lenox, “I very much fear that she will not live out the month.”

“You said it was only thrush.”

“Yes, but a growth in her belly is what has made her susceptible to infection. No surgeon will touch it, if I’m not wrong. Still, we may hope.”

Thus far Lenox and McConnell had not exchanged any words beyond a polite greeting, but now, as the nurse pointed out the artworks along the wall to Graham, Lenox said in a quiet voice, “Thomas, why didn’t you tell me you were working here?”

McConnell consulted his pocket watch. It had been a present from Toto and was beribboned with rubies and emeralds, a garish, rather beautiful thing. “I’m free in twenty minutes,” he said, “and I’m ravenous. Will you sit with me to my luncheon?”

“We passed a chophouse on Rugby Street when we came here.”

“Mr. Porter’s house? I know it intimately. Yes, let’s meet there. Call it half an hour.”

They shook hands, and Lenox saw with his own eyes, for the first time, what Toto had been telling them: McConnell really did look happier than perhaps he ever had before, his eyes light and free of burdens. Was it work? Was it love?

Lenox spent the next half hour introducing himself to the staff at the hospital. With every corridor he traversed and every person he met he grew more impressed — with the people in particular, for all of them bore the same brisk, efficient, no-nonsense variety of good cheer, which in Lenox’s experience approached much more nearly to sainthood than the breed of self-regarding softheartedness that one found in Mayfair. Better to clean one patient’s bedding than to pour vague pity upon a thousand homeless urchins.

He made an appointment to return and meet the director of the hospital and then, telling Graham he had agreed to meet McConnell, made for Rugby Street.

Mr. Porter’s was a rude chophouse, with sawdust on the floor and a matronly woman hustling tall pewter jugs of ale here and there. Lenox took a table near the door. Evidently many of the physicians from the Royal College nearby took their sustenance here; the walls were covered in scrawled prescriptions, some now decades old, some belonging to doctors who had become famous on Harley Street. “Advised: one night in the Rugby: four glasses sherry: four glasses ale: four glasses port: sleep till noon,” read a sheet near Lenox’s right arm, upon the prescription paper of a man who was now the royal family’s own surgeon. Perhaps that was why it was the only prescription in a frame.

McConnell came into the room not long after Lenox had sat down. “There you are,” he said. “I hope I am not late. Yes, I’ll sit, there we are. Are you hungry? They do a capital game pie, with half-burnt mashed potatoes over it. That’s what I mean to have.”

Lenox had already ordered coffee, which arrived as McConnell was sitting. He peered into the pot. “There are white bits floating in it,” he said unhappily.

“Eggshells — it takes the bitterness away. Old doctor’s trick, you know. Could I have a cup of that?”

“You can have all of it.”

“No, come, you must try it. There, half a cup each.”

Lenox took a sip and was compelled to admit the efficacy of the eggshells. “Not bad.”

They ordered, and for a while McConnell spoke about the patients Lenox had seen, giving him more detail on each one — a small boy with a teratoma, an older girl with the hundred-day cough, and a newborn, seemingly in perfect health, whose breathing was strained. “We shall pull him through, however,” said the doctor. “I’m sure of that.”

“Then I am, too.”

McConnell paused now. “Tell me,” he said, “did you come to the hospital because you knew I would be there?”

“No. Did you not observe the surprise in my face?”

“I thought I did,” McConnell murmured. “I had kept it quiet. Still, it was a jolt seeing you there.”

“You have a taken a job of work, then, Thomas?”

“You don’t need to say it that way,” said McConnell irritably, “as if you were Toto’s father, the old bugger, and I had decided to shift vocations and become a chimney sweep late in life.”

In that sentence was encapsulated the change in Lenox’s friend — a new self-confidence, a new indifference to the opinion of others. “You seem happy.”

“I have never been happier in all my life. I have been at the hospital for six weeks, and it has passed like six hours.”

“But Toto doesn’t know,” said Lenox.

A defiant look came into McConnell’s eyes. “I asked her if I should take the job — Dr. West was my professor, many years ago — and she pitched a fit, if you must know. Fortunately I am not tied to her apron strings.”

“She thinks you’re having an affair with Polly Buchanan,” said Lenox. He had decided upon directness. “In fact, half of London thinks as much.”

McConnell’s eyes widened in surprise, and then he burst into a long and rolling laugh. After a few moments, catching sight of his friend’s stern face, he laughed harder still. “Oh, dear,” he said, wiping his eyes.

“I cannot see what is so funny,” said Lenox, vexed.

“Only the idea — but I suppose that is why Toto has been so cold? What a relief!” McConnell emitted a final sigh of laughter and then, realizing perhaps that he had conveyed too much information about his marriage in that spontaneous exclamation, hurried along his next words. “No, no, Charles, I have no amorous affection for Miss Buchanan. I look forward to telling Toto as much this evening. I suppose I had better tell her about the hospital, too — yes, I will, and she can take it just as she pleases, for I don’t mean to stop.”

“You are friends, you and Polly Buchanan? She is a great rake.”

“Just a minor friendship — no, I would not even call us friends, though I cannot dislike her. Still, I must keep my word, and not tell you why she and I have met in Hyde Park. For I assume our meetings there have given rise to these rumors.”

“Yes.”

“Trust me, Charles, in the fullness of time I shall explain it all to you. Polly Buchanan! You must admit that it’s amusing.”

Lenox, who conceived himself bound to admit no such thing, merely frowned. Their food arrived, and McConnell dropped into it ravenously, ordering a pint of ale to accompany it. For many years he had been too heavy a drinker, but even to Lenox, now, his thirst seemed healthy.

What happiness he saw in his friend’s face! In spite of his misgivings, Lenox felt a growing warmth of corresponding happiness, and blended into it an overpowering degree of relief. Toto would understand about the hospital. She was not a cruel-minded woman, not at all. The only shame was that it had taken so long for him to return to medicine.

Thomas had the same feeling, describing, as they ate, the sense of waste, of talent squandered, that the decade since his marriage seemed to represent.

“I don’t blame Toto in the slightest. It was my own fault,” he said, “and when her mind is at ease over Polly Buchanan, how much happier she shall be, knowing that I am happy. Do you not think so, Charles?”

It was an unusually intimate question, and an unusually intimate conversation, but something about the hominess of the food and the sawdust on the floor and the rising drunken voices toward the back of the room made it seem appropriate. They were friends of very long standing, after all. So Lenox replied that yes, he did imagine that Toto would be happier. “Perhaps your only error has been secrecy, Thomas,” he said.

“One is bred to it.”

“That is true.” Lenox took a sip of coffee, sitting back from his half-eaten luncheon. He checked his watch. It was nearly three. “I must go soon. Tell me first, though, what I am to say to Jane?”

“You must tell her what you please,” said McConnell lightly. “You speak as if it all must be such very heavy weather.”

“I don’t think you can understand how Toto has suffered, Thomas, and as a consequence how much Jane and I have suffered on her behalf. Your happiness has blinded you. If I still seem somber, that is the reason — not because I am not pleased that you have come to work at the hospital, which has already earned my full-hearted esteem. I give you joy of your new venture. Only you must recall the old ventures, too.”

McConnell hesitated for a moment, thinking, and then nodded. “Yes.”

“I hope you are not offended that I am candid.”

“Never in life. I think you are right, Charles. I have been selfish — but it may be that I was overdue some selfishness, and now I can accord myself the proper prescription of it again. All those years I spent in a lab, such a wan imitation of life! You’ve no idea what it is to lose yourself for so long.”

Lenox briefly alighted upon the feeling of avid anticipation he had of the meeting at four, then thought of the thousands of hours he had spent at his office in the Commons. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

“It is like coming back to the red-blooded rush of living, after being a ghost. I am certain that Toto will understand — Polly Buchanan, indeed.”