Paddington Green, page 15
He was still kneeling there in front of her, sitting back on his heels with his hands resting on each knee and looking up at her with an expression of such warmth and kindness on his face that she felt her already hot cheeks respond, and she wanted to look away, but felt somehow it was necessary that she hold her gaze, that not to do so would be in some way even more shameful than the tears she had shed; so she sat there looking steadfastly at him.
And he looked back at her, at the reddened nose and the slightly swollen eyes and the blotchiness that still filled her cheeks, and thought he had never seen her look more desirable and charming and altogether everything he most admired in a woman. That woebegone face between the neat, even severe, style of her hair above a gown so unadorned and practical, made an almost ridiculous contrast. She looked both mature and interesting, yet so vulnerable and so very young, that he wanted, yet again, to hold her close and croon soothing sounds into her ear, to make her safe and happy and free her of the need ever to weep again. So, kneeling there looking up at her, Gideon had to face the truth that he had been trying to deny for so many months, the reality of a situation that he had tried so hard to convince himself was within his own control, yet he now had to admit had him totally in its grip.
‘Dear Abby,’ he said very simply. ‘Dear, dear Abby, I do love you so very much. More than you can possibly imagine.’
13
Abel had chosen to walk from Gower Street to the hospital, refusing the blandishments of the cab drivers, even though it would be the third time that day he had covered the mile or so that lay between them, swiftly traversing the windy grey streets in that long loping stride of his.
He had first walked through the dawn-dark streets to the hospital from his home just after six in the morning, following a hasty breakfast of bread and butter and bitter coffee provided by a neat and alert Miss Ingoldsby (and it never entered his head to wonder why it was that she was always up and waiting for him in the breakfast room, whatever time he chose to leave his bed, merely accepting her presence as being as natural and as unneedful of explanation as the rising of the sun each morning) and had worked there operating and dealing with street patients until eleven o’clock.
Then, more black coffee, this time provided by Nancy, yet another woman whose eternal presence and automatic care of him he took for granted, and the return walk to Gower Street, He had dealt with private patients there until three in the afternoon, and had hated it as much as he ever did.
Oh, to be sure, sometimes the private patients would come to him with real ills that warranted his time and effort, and for them he could show gentleness, concern, all the attributes that his hospital patients took for granted. But too many of them were frippery women, attracted by his dark good looks and heavy brooding air which they were stupid enough to consider romantic; and they he despised so heartily that he could hardly bear to speak to them civilly, for few of them had really interesting symptoms, and those complaints they did have could usually be traced to over-indulgence in food and wine and laziness.
He would tell them so, most brusquely, and charge them twice his usual fees, and they would meekly tolerate his animadversions on their behaviour and personal habits and pay all he asked to quiet Miss Ingoldsby, who kept his accounts with the same meticulous care she gave his household, and go away swooning with the experience to tell their friends he was as coarse and cruel as any footpad, but made them feel so much better; and then would come back again and again, and bring their friends.
So Abel would grit his teeth, and go on treating them with scant patience and downright rudeness, just as his old friend John Abernethy, who had taught medicine at St Bartholomew’s twenty years ago, had advised him.
‘They pay the rent and the butcher and the other damned duns, these wretched people,’ Abernethy had growled at the young Abel setting himself up in his first private practice. ‘And the worse you speak to ’em, the better off they are.’
And he had been right. It was close on ten years since Abernethy had died, Abel thought now, making his way back again towards Endell Street, but nothing changes. Private patients are as stupid as ever, and still must be tolerated because of the need to make a living, God damn it! If only it were possible to work only in the hospital, where there was real illness, real need of him. If only he did not have to pay the way of so many who depended on him, both at home and at Endell Street. If only!
He tucked his chin deeper into the beaver collar of his coat as he went hurrying along Gower Street with the wind whipping mischievously at his ankles and making his coat flap heavily about his knees, past the heavy new buildings of University College and on through the budding greenness of Bedford Square.
Ahead of him Oxford Street teemed and roared with traffic, its cursing drivers and plunging sweating horses and the great crush of clattering swaying carriages and cabs and carts pushing against each other through the mud of the crossings. That hasn’t changed, he thought sourly, as he plunged into it to make his way across the greasy cobbles through the hooves and sparking iron-ringed wheels with all the eel-like swiftness of a street arab, for the skills he had learned long ago in his gutter childhood were something else that remained unaltered.
Moving onwards through the stinking narrow alleys and past the filthy hovels that flanked each side—and which were held together by little more than the accreted dirt of decades of human misery and degradation, and so thrust together in painful tightness that no inch of habitable space was wasted by the rapacious landlords who owned the properties—he felt the old depression creeping up on him.
He had been born—so far as he knew—in just such a hovel as one of these; had somehow survived the dead weight of the poverty of these slums, had grown strong and clever and impudent enough to actually gain pleasure and knowledge from them. But then he had escaped; and fortunate though that escape had been it was not complete, for his painful childhood had left a canker behind. As long as he could remember he had been eaten with the urgent desire to do something about this hateful network of decayed and miserable dwellings where hundreds of thousands of people eked out their miserable existences. Every day he walked through this way; every day he suffered a little more at the sight of it all. It was foul, it was evil and he hated it with a hate that bit deeply into his mind, making him ever more sour, more morose and more angry. He could see no redeeming aspects anywhere he looked in these tumbling stinking acres in the heart of prosperous London.
Yet they were there. The flaring windows of the gin palaces might offer no real escape from the misery of life in Seven Dials, might in truth add a greater burden of starvation and cruelty and agonizing pain to the people they filled with raw cheap spirit and then threw into the alleys to die in sodden misery; but while they lit the dripping gutters and sour dirt-encrusted walls with their cheerful light, they gave a little warmth to the view, a glimpse of laughter and joy and human pleasure.
And there were some people who looked less grey and dejected and swollen with hunger than others. Girls whose young prettiness could be seen beneath their dirt, who had decked themselves with cheap beads and gewgaws they bought from the street vendors and from the market in Leather Lane, over towards Holborn, whenever they could steal or cadge a penny for them; children who danced, barefoot and ragged but with vast enjoyment and shrill giggles and shouts to the tinny music of the hurdy-gurdy man; whistling boys who bought—or stole—for themselves hot mutton pies from the many reeking steaming cookshops along the alleys, and then went skipping across the mud filled with satisfaction at their feasts; even the thin and hungry women in their threadbare shawls, standing gossiping in the corners as he went by, showed in their loitering their sense of pleasure in the imminence of spring, for windy though the March afternoon was, there was some hint of warmth in the fetid air, a promise of faint blueness in the slivers of sky that showed above the crooked broken chimneys and the sway-backed rooftops above their heads.
He had needed this walk this afternoon, more than a little; not for the value of its physical effects but because he was still most exercised in his mind about the matter of William and the manufactory. He was puzzled too, for Conran had told him that morning, when he had gone to see him about the matter of taking in two more students whose fees would go towards employing the extra nurse of when Nancy stood sorely in need, that ‘the Trustees had said he was on no account to make no changes in the establishment without it first came before them.’
Abel’s brows had snapped down at that. ‘Oh? And when did the Trustees give such instructions?’ he had asked. ‘For there has been no meeting since—’
And Conran had smiled and said innocently, ‘Oh, sir, did you not know? Why, there was a special meeting here yesterday. Just a short one, do you see, but a meeting none the less, and after, Sir Daniel himself did me the honour to come here to my little sanctum and give me my instructions. Mind you, sir, I was not told anything about changing anything I’d already done—only about future changes, do you see. So I said naught about the matter of you agreeing I should see at what sort of prices we could buy medicines elsewhere—’
The Trustees meeting at the hospital without his knowledge? That had been most strange! Abel had mulled that thought over as Conran had gone prosing on.
‘A young man of whom I have great hopes,’ he was saying. ‘Bright, you know, sir, and most respectful—most respectful. An unusual quality in young men these days. Some young men—’ and he had looked sideways at Abel to see if he had recognized the dig at William. ‘And more than willing to let us have samples and prices to the best of our needs and his supplying. He says as he can save up to full twenty-five per cent on our present outgoings, and you said yourself, sir, as if Wapping proved too costly for us to use, why you would close it and let us buy elsewhere and Mr Sydenham is a young man as I think will give us excellent service—’
‘Yes, no doubt,’ Abel had said absently. ‘No doubt. I leave the matter with you. As long as you keep your tongue between your teeth, and get on with what’s to be done, I’m content enough.’ He turned as though to leave the little office and then came back and said abruptly, ‘Who called this Trustees’ meeting?’
‘Why, as to that, sir, I’m sure I couldn’t say—’ Conran looked sharply at him, his head on one side. ‘To be sure, sir, I assumed as you was absent for your own reasons. Knowing as I do the way you feel plagued by the waste of time in the boardroom, I made sure as the reason you was not there was—well, sir, shall we say your own deliberate forgetfulness. But if they go meeting without telling you at all, why, sir, then I would say there was matters afoot that—’
Abel had pulled his thoughts together at that point and looked sharply at the old man who was staring at him with a most knowing and penetrating gaze, and said quickly, ‘You presume too much, Conran, as ever! The meeting indeed was one that escaped my memory. I have better things to do than sit prosing like foolish old women nodding over a dish of tea.’
But all the same he had sent a messenger with a note to Sir Daniel, demanding to know why he had not been apprised of yesterday’s meeting in time to attend it, and seeking to know what had been decided, for how else could he run the affairs of Nellie’s? The answer, he hoped, would be waiting his return to Endell Street. Until he received it there was no point in considering the matter further.
Instead, as he picked his way past a costermonger’s stall where onions and carrots and bunches of earth-encrusted turnips were being sold by a shrill child in a torn gown and wearing a man’s flat cap on her tumbled hair, over the slippery mess beside a neighbouring itinerant seller who was plucking and gutting scrawny chickens and throwing the offal on the stones at his feet, he thought about William.
Even after seeing that operation the wretched boy had been unable to understand what it was his father was trying to explain to him, but had stood there in the drawing room at Gower Street, his hands in his trouser pockets, his legs straddling the hearth in his favourite pose of easy devil-may-care man-of-the-town and stared sullenly back at Abel as he had talked, and talked and talked. And all he would say in response was that ‘there had been no dirty dealings, if that was what his father suspected’, which had infuriated Abel even further, for he had made no such accusations; he was concerned only with efficiency, and so he said in very round terms. And William had simply stood and stared at him with eyes as round and hard as pebbles and shrugged his shoulders.
Thinking of that now, as he walked on along St George’s Street towards the pump at Broad Street, thence to bear eastwards through the slightly more respectable alleys and narrow lanes to Endell Street and the hospital, the decision moved full fledged into his mind. He had thought about it, been angered by it, and now he knew what was to be done. He would not go to Wapping to check on stocks as William had tried to goad him into doing. The amount of time that would waste was absurd, and he suspected William knew he would feel this, and that this was why he had suggested it. No, he would waste no more time at all. He would close Wapping altogether. If Conran indeed could supply them with such savings through this man he knew why suffer this wretched problem any longer? The time had long since gone when he had felt any real interest in either the manufactory, or the spice warehouse and business of which it was a part. Jesse Constam had cared about it in his time, had left it with its valuable revenues to Dorothea, and thus it had become a part of the founding of the hospital. But its time had passed, and to own it any longer was more than a waste of time—it was foolish. He would sell it, just as he had sold the shop in Piccadilly, after Abby—
Again, he refused to allow himself to think of Abby, and instead set himself to thinking about William again. Something would have to be done to set him to work, in such a way that he could be watched and chivvied and generally taught the importance of his business. He might not be a surgeon, but he had been taught to be an apothecary, after all, and could be trained further under his father’s eye to become some sort of a physician, no doubt, if not a particularly gifted one. Abel thought suddenly of John Snow, so very mature and developed a man as he was, yet still young enough to be his son, and wondered bleakly why none of his own sons had turned out as capable as that taciturn Northerner, as willing to listen and learn and yet to think for themselves.
He stopped on the corner of Broad Street and St George’s Street, unwilling though he usually was to waste time, to collect his thoughts even further.
Such a sale could bring in considerable moneys; enough to purchase another house in Endell Street to add to the hospital? Now, there was an attractive thought!
Ten years ago Gandy Deering, buying up old property in Tavistock Street to clear the way for his elegant Exeter Hall (and much as Abel had sneered at it at the time, he had to admit now that it was a handsome edifice, and much improved the Strand frontage) had fallen into his hand like a ripe plum. He had gained the three houses that had become the first Queen Eleanor’s almost by default, and great his satisfaction had been at the time, except for what had happened in the buying of the third house. But that was something else that must not— could not—be thought about. And then, the sale of the Piccadilly shop had brought enough money to add the fourth house that made up the present structure. Would the sale of Wapping bring enough to buy even more property, to extend the hospital along virtually half of one side of the street, facing the old Wren church?
He pondered hard on that, trying to judge the possibilities, and then sighed softly, for on one side of the hospital lived a corn chandler, and his business, using the big backyard and stables that lay behind it, was far too profitable for the man to sell at any but a high price; and on the other, Abel recalled, lay what purported to be a lodging house, but was known throughout the district as a most successful and popular bagnio. Whoever owned that would not sell in a hurry, either.
Of course, he could go again to talk to his old friend Lucy in her even more successful house of ease at Panton Street, for she was always glad to see him, and would, he knew, do anything to please her Abel with her far from inconsiderable fortune. Gone seventy she might be, vast and wheezing and helpless in her great bed because of her ulcerated legs which were no longer able to hold up her swollen bulk, and blue about the lips and over-red about the face as she had become, yet beneath her unprepossessing exterior lay a mind as sharp as ever it had been, as ready to see a good business deal as anyone with twice her mobility. But because she was so willing, and still loved him so dearly, he could not go to her, unless, of course, he was in desperation.
And he had to smile a little wryly then, for he was not in desperation and well he knew it. There had been a time, of course, when he had been bursting at the seams of his old dispensary, when finding better accommodation had been a matter of urgent need, but that was no longer the case. Now he had twelve wards and a big operating room, space to see a goodly number of street patients each day, and if he grew the place to ten times its size it still could not accommodate the whole of the sick and poor who needed it. Only a hospital that covered the whole of Seven Dials would hope to be big enough for that and to try to make that happen would be lunacy, not honest ambition.
His thoughts would have gone wheeling even more furiously through his head, had he not suddenly become aware of a soft mewing sound behind him, as though a small and frightened animal was shut up somewhere, and he realized it had been going on all through his thinking, a counterpoint to his mental effort. He turned his head with some irritation, for small and pathetic though the sound was it had a penetrating quality that was beginning to grate on the nerves.
He was standing near the open door of one of the little houses, not a hovel this one, where none cared for comfort or warmth or decency or anything but the mere existence of a roof, but a carefully tended home. He could see through the door that there was a scrap of drugget on the floor, so thin and worn that its colour could hardly be seen, but it was there, and well washed besides, and beyond it hung a piece of flapping thin material, vaguely blue and very faded and heavily patched, but a clear attempt at a curtain.
