A Time to Heal Page 5

  “You’d think we had smallpox or something,” Harriet said bitterly to Theo, at lunch. “The way he’s avoiding all of us. No one’s seen him since conference. He really is being very juvenile.”

  “He’s ashamed of himself,” Theo said sapiently. “He knows he behaved like a peevish baby, and he wants us all to forget it before he comes amongst us again in his Senior Seer’s garb. He’ll be around next week, I promise you. You’ll see. How are you getting on with your paper for the journals? You are, of course, publishing? Hmm?”

  “I am not,” Harriet said sharply. “Not till I’ve talked to Oscar. So stop asking me about it. I’ve made my decision, so that’s all there is to it—”

  But it wasn’t. The decision was taken from her hands.

  She went back to her unit after lunch, humming a little below her breath as she always did when she was thinking about new work, to find Catherine sitting grimly on the edge of her desk, her arms folded as she stared at a man sitting neatly in Harriet’s chair, his legs crossed and his hands folded on a briefcase on his lap.

  “This is a Mr. Monks. J. D. Monks. Says he’s got to see you, and won’t say why. But he’s been asking some odd questions. About Mr. Ferris.”

  Harriet frowned sharply. “Oh? What about Mr. Ferris? Is he a relation of yours, Mr. Monks?”

  “Ah, no. No, not at all.” Mr. Monks stood up, and held out his hand. “How do you do, Dr. Berry. I would of course have known you even if this very … er … helpful lady hadn’t indicated who you were. Mr. Ferris described you very accurately, I must say! A most delightful man, isn’t he?”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Monks? I am rather busy this afternoon, so if you could—”

  “Ah, well. This is a somewhat private matter, Dr. Berry. Perhaps we could find somewhere to talk?” He slid his eyes sideways at Catherine who sat firm and stared at him challengingly.

  “Until I know why, I don’t see much point in—”

  “I am from the Echo, Dr. Berry,” he cut in smoothly. “I’ve been asked to see you on a private matter by Sir Daniel Sefton, our proprietor. I really think you would prefer we discussed this quietly at this stage.”

  She frowned again, and then said, “I see. I suppose—oh, well. Would you mind, Catherine? It’ll obviously be quicker if I agree. You were going to do the ward checks for me, anyway, this afternoon, so perhaps you could do them now rather than later. Thanks ….”

  “Well, Mr. Monks?” she said, when Catherine had gone, snapping the door closed behind her. “What is all this?”

  “It really is very simple, Dr. Berry,” Mr. Monks said, leaning back in his chair and recrossing his legs. “I’ll be as brief as I can, since obviously your time is exceedingly precious. Simply, then, we received a call from a Mr. James Ferris a couple of days ago, and he told us a remarkable story: about how desperately ill he had been, how he had been undoubtedly dying of widespread cancer until you started a new treatment on him. He described the treatment in some detail, and it was fascinating—quite fascinating. We—Sir Daniel, you know—were sufficiently impressed by him to investigate further. We’ve talked to his G.P., and to his relations and neighbors, and there is no doubt in our minds that he was a cancer patient. Yet he looks so remarkably well now! So Sir Daniel arranged for him to be examined by his own Harley Street man, Lord Broster—you know his name, of course—who confirms that Mr. Ferris is totally free of disease. So, of course, we find ourselves in a dilemma! Mr. Ferris—or to be absolutely accurate, Mrs. Ferris—is offering us his story at a fairly stiff fee. But we are ethical people on the Echo, Dr. Berry. We would hesitate to rush into print with so incredible and wonderful a story without first ascertaining not only its truth but the facts about the treatment. We know you have not yet published anything about it in the usual journals. Our researchers have been very busy these past days, I promise you! So, we’d like to know about the treatment, why it is being kept a secret when it is clearly so effective, why other poor sufferers are not being offered it—you must understand our interest, I’m sure! When promises of cancer cures appear, they ought to be made known. Widely known. Often, of course, we find a degree of … what shall I say? Doubt. You will, I’m sure, recall what happened when there was news from that German doctor about his treatment. Of the doubts people expressed? We would … hesitate … to publish information about your treatment if we thought for one moment that there was any such medical uncertainty about its validity, as there was in that case.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it!” Harriet said vigorously. “Uninformed public comment about unproven treatments is always disastrous–always! The last thing anyone wants is to wake unjustified hopes in very ill people. Of course you can’t use this information Mr. Ferris has given you! I should have warned him, damn it. I—”

  “Why?” Monks raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t what he says true? Didn’t you treat him and cure him?”

  “We never use the word cure,” Harriet said sharply. “And certainly not at this stage. When a patient has survived therapy for five years or more, and there are other patients on whom the treatment has been used who also show long survival periods, we may be prepared to talk very cautiously about the possibility of cure, but no more than that. If you knew anything at all about the subject, Mr. Monks, you’d know that! You really can’t—”

  “Please, Dr. Berry! Let’s not say can’t. Newspapers can, if they feel it right to do so, publish what they believe should be published, however much individuals may object. That is our ethical duty …. Oh, please don’t look so skeptical at the word ethical! We do have an ethic, I assure you! That’s why I’m here. The thing that so interests us and makes us believe you may in fact have a real answer to this scourge of our times is the fact that you are displaying such very ethical behavior. You have made no money from your method. You treated Mr. Ferris for nothing, and in a Government Establishment. One not noted, if you’ll forgive my saying so, for such remarkable work as yours appears to be. As I say, our researchers have been very busy! But this brings up another point. In a Government Establishment, maintained by public funds, i.e., by our readers, there is hardly a place for undue secrecy! You take my point, I’m sure.”

  “There isn’t any undue secrecy!” Harriet said angrily. “That is a most unjustified accusation! I’m trying to behave in the recognized scientific manner. I can’t rush into popular print with a single case, for God’s sake! And an unproven one at that! Come back in five years and I may be able to—”

  “Oh, come, Dr. Berry!” Mr. Monks laughed gently. “You must see that is out of the question. We have been fortunate enough to be the newspaper Mr. Ferris approached! We must use our good fortune intelligently, after all! People will want to know about this now, not in five years’ time—”

  He stopped and then smiled slowly.

  “I find it significant that you haven’t at any point denied that your treatment, as far as Mr. Ferris is concerned, has been most effective. Putting aside the scientific caution you so admirably display—of course!—you do agree he is now free of disease?”

  There was a short silence, then Harriet said unwillingly, “Well, I can’t deny a fact, I suppose. At the moment—and only at this moment—Mr. Ferris appears to be free of disease, yes. But you must understand that time is part of the measure of effectiveness. If Mr. Ferris survives another five years …”

  “Indeed, your point is taken, Dr. Berry. But he is at the moment a healthy man. That is what interests me. What interests us. What interests Mr. Ferris! And what will undoubtedly interest our many millions of readers.” He stood up, and hitched his jacket more neatly across his shoulders before holding out his hand toward her.

  “Thank you, Dr. Berry. I am indeed most grateful to you. I will now return to Sir Daniel and advise him that in my estimation we should buy Mr. Ferris’s story and—”

  “But you can’t! It would be quite wrong to—”

  “Dr. Berry! You are not suggesting, surely, that Mr. Ferris has no right to tel
l us his own story in his own way! His life, whether he owes it to you or not, is his own property! He has an inalienable right to sell the story and we have an inalienable right to buy it! You wouldn’t dispute that?”

  “Well, no. Of course I can’t say that he isn’t free to do as he chooses. But when it involves a matter so important—”

  “Precisely. So important, to so many people! Believe me, Dr. Berry, I respect and admire your scruples. They do you immense credit. I hope you will agree, despite them, however, to talk to our scientific reporter in due course. We would hate to have to publish only Mr. Ferris’s account of the method. We might make mistakes, and that would never do, would it? We must get the facts straight, and we can only get them from you, after all! We’ll be in touch, Dr. Berry, and I hope you will see how worthwhile it will be to talk to us honestly and fearlessly. Indeed, you have nothing to fear at our hands. As long as there is no hint that you are seeking personal gain from your treatment, no one will ever doubt your scientific integrity—as long as you talk to us and make sure we report only accurate material. Good morning, Dr. Berry. Talking with you has indeed been a rare privilege, believe me.”

  She sat still for a long time after he had gone, and then, as she so often did in a dilemma, went to look for Theo.

  But he was operating that afternoon, and she had to wait until after six o’clock to tell him. She went into the operating theater changing room as soon as he had showered and was half-dressed, and he listened carefully as she told him of the conversation with Monks.

  “To put it at its mildest, this is bloody,” he said, knotting his tie, and reaching for his jacket. “We’d better try and reach Oscar at once. Where is he, do you know?”

  “In London. Discussing,” Harriet said bitterly. “But that blasted Manton woman won’t say where, not if I beg her—”

  “She’ll tell me,” Theo said shortly. “Wait for me in my car, will you, Hattie? I’ll get the number from her, and we’ll call him from your place.”

  But by the time Theo had convinced Miss Manton that it was her bounden duty to part with the telephone number of Oscar’s hotel, and they reached the cottage, it was past seven thirty, and a call to the hotel produced the information that Professor Bell had gone out for the evening to dine with friends, and no, they didn’t know where, and yes, they would leave a message for him, though he was not expected in for some hours.

  “Which means that unless we’re very fortunate and he does get the message tonight that we’ve been trying to reach him, the first he’ll know about it all will be tomorrow’s headlines. Hell and damnation!” Theo said, as he hung up.

  “They surely won’t publish anything tomorrow, Theo? They won’t have time, will they?”

  “Oh, don’t be naive, Hattie! Of course they will! You don’t believe what that man told you this afternoon? They’ve already bought Ferris, believe me. They’d never have sent a man down here to see you if they hadn’t. No, they’ll publish something tomorrow, come hell or high water, and—God damn it, I wish we could have got hold of Oscar tonight. He’s going to be put in the bloodiest of spots by this.”

  “And you were trying to persuade me to publish in spite of him, and at once.” Harriet said furiously. “This is one hell of a reversal!”

  “Oh, be your age, Hattie! Publishing a straightforward paper in Nature or whatever is one thing. It’d be months before the thing came out, what with all their checks and the rest of it. Oscar would have had fair warning. But this! All sorts of emotional dramatic stuff plastered all over the tabloids—hell have a hell of a job explaining that away in Whitehall! Really, Harriet, I am angry with you! You must have been out of your mind to say as much as you did. This Monks man is going to use all sorts of quotes, you realize that? You should have stonewalled with the old ‘No comment’ business. Surely—”

  “Theo, shut up! I’ve had as much as I can stand. Of course I know, now. But anyone would have been manipulated into talking by that man. He was as smooth as—oh, it’s easy to be as wise as you are after an event.”

  “I suppose so. I’m sorry, Hattie.” He smiled at her then. “But it’s you I’m thinking of, and that’s what made me angry. You really aren’t going to enjoy what all this will lead to any more than poor old Oscar will, I promise you. Oh well, we’ll cope somehow. But looking after you can be a very wearing business. Come on. Make me some dinner, and we’ll try to phone Oscar again later.”

  4

  “BUT, HARRUT, what possessed you? Surely you realized what would happen if you admitted that you had treated Ferris? And why the hell you didn’t warn Ferris to keep quiet.—”

  “Oscar, we’ve already been over that. I know, now, just what I should have done. But I didn’t think at the time, so I didn’t do it, so what’s the point of going on? Mea Culpa. What more can I say or do? Wear sackcloth and ashes? The important question now is what do we do about it all?”

  “Let’s take another look at what they actually wrote, Oscar,” Theo said. “Perhaps it isn’t as bad as it appears at first sight—”

  “If it were only half as bad as it looked when I saw the paper this morning, it’d still be pretty horrible,” Oscar grunted, and pushed the newspaper across his desk. Theo pulled his chair closer to Harriet’s, and together they looked bleakly at the front page.

  It was dominated by a picture of James Ferris, grinning cockily out at them, two fingers raised in the old-fashioned victory sign over a great black caption that read “THE LIVING PROOF OF A GREAT BRITISH BREAKTHROUGH.” Below that, the story splashed itself right across the page, and Theo began to read it aloud:

  “James Ferris—Polly to his friends—is a miracle man. A bare few weeks ago, his family and friends were waiting hourly for news of his death from the cancer that had invaded almost every part of his body. He weighed a meager five and a half stone, then, and as he says himself, ‘I could hear the angels singing.’ But today, he is back at work, fit and healthy and free of his disease, a sturdy eight stone, eating well, and wondering if he might get fat enough to go on a diet. Why? Because of a miraculous treatment developed in a remote Government Research Establishment in East Anglia. Yesterday, we talked to the remarkable scientist who discovered the treatment, still beautiful forty-eight-year-old widowed Dr. Harriet Berry”—Harriet grimaced—“although she was very unwilling to talk about her lifesaving work. Unwilling because she has not yet tried the treatment on other sufferers, and as a good scientist, she will not make claims of success until she is absolutely sure. But we feel Mr. Ferris is enough of a miracle for her success to be obvious. Especially when we know, from other sources, that no less than three hundred laboratory monkeys have also had the Berry treatment with outstanding success. Every animal treated has been cured of the cancer it had undoubtedly been suffering from.”

  “And I’d like to know who the hell the ‘other sources’ are,” Oscar said.

  “So would I,” Harriet said bitterly. “I suppose I ought to feel a little better knowing it wasn’t just my fault it all got out—but I don’t.”

  The newspaper story continued:

  “Just what is the treatment? We will be bringing you, every day next week, a detailed account written by Echo ace science reporter James McClarrie. Order Monday’s Echo now, for the demand for copies will be enormous, so that you can discover for yourselves what British science has done and is still doing to restore the hope of life to the many millions of people dying of cancer today. Tomorrow, we will give you James ‘Polly’ Ferris’s own thrilling account of his experiences …”

  Theo put the paper down distastefully. “Was it McClarrie who tried to talk to you this morning, Hattie?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t stop to find out. He was sitting there at the front lodge waiting for me, and as soon as I saw him I bolted for the unit. He didn’t particularly look like a newspaperman–whatever it is newspapermen look like—I’m not sure I know. But he obviously wanted me, and I wasn’t taking any more risks, after yesterday.”
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br />   “Let’s think about this intelligently.” Oscar stood up and began to prowl about the room in his characteristic fashion. “Obviously you can’t keep them off forever. They won’t give up that easily. And now it is out, the only thing to do is to handle it property. The question is, how is that? I’ve had Blumer on already from Whitehall this morning. And I must say that though he isn’t particularly impressed with the fact that I didn’t mention anything about this work to him when I saw him yesterday—which I would, of course, have done had I known publication was so imminent–yes, Harriet—I know how you feel about that—still, I detected a certain degree of warmth in him. Not precisely approbation, mark you, but at least a cautious something. They need some results to justify expenditure, of course, and God knows we do too.”

  He stopped his pacing, and looked across the room at Harriet. “Harriet, let me clear the air a little at this point. Forgive us, Theo, if we talk a little in front of you—but you know us both well enough. Harriet, I owe you an apology. I was unnecessarily brusque with you at conference, and I can only plead surprise as an excuse. You threw something at me I was not prepared for, and what with everything else, I found it difficult to react … well, as I would hope I normally do in such circumstances. But of course I am, I really am, immensely pleased with your work, and appreciate perfectly well what sort of effect this news is going to have on Brookbank. All right?”

  She looked at him, and felt relief filling her with warmth; here at least was one complication cleared up.