A Passionate Man Read Free

feelings than those of amused affection, and therefore kept herself aloof from him and was rigorously courteous when they spoke. When Archie and his rush of apology had disappeared through the double doors at the far end of the waiting room, the senior nurse on duty went off after him with quiet officiousness, to check that the slats of his venetian blind were discreetly pulled vertical and that the examining couch was suitably shrouded in a clean, disposable paper sheet.
    â€˜There we are, Doctor. Everything all right?’
    He was hastily riffling through the buff packs of patients’ notes on his desk.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said absently. ‘Thank you.’
    â€˜I’ve put out a clean roll of towel by the basin. And fresh soap. And I moved the disposable gloves nearer the bin. Seemed more logical.’
    â€˜Don’t move things,’ Archie pleaded. He looked up at her. She was a suburban little woman who was determined to reform the muddle and mess of this country practice into something altogether more trim.
    â€˜I only thought—’
    â€˜I know.’ He flapped some notes at her. ‘Not your fault. But I can only work in chaos. Ask my wife.’
    Nurse Dillon allowed herself a little smile to show that she was not in the least disappointed that she had failed to please him. He had mud on his shoes, she noted. She looked at it penetratingly for a second and then went away to summon the first patient.
    Archie liked taking surgeries. Long ago, long before Liza, he had had a raven-haired girlfriend who had demanded to know if he was going to be a doctor because he liked bodies. Yes, he said, he did like bodies, and, after a pause, he had added that he particularly liked women’s bodies. This had given the raven-haired girlfriend the perfect opening for a great deal of predictable abuse which he came to see was an attempt to make him admit that he liked her body better than any other. He did, for a week or two – or perhaps it was really her lustrous waterfall of black hair that was so weirdly erotic – but then he became repelled by the rapacity of her character and her body ceased to interest him. But the bodies of the sick were another matter, a matter of extraordinary interest: how and why this delicate, complex and individual human machine should develop strains and faults, and how those, in turn, were dependent upon the fuel of personality. He wasn’t like his father, who preferred the seclusion of laboratory and operating theatre, and he grew impatient with manuals and books. What he liked was the listening and the touching, the sense of exploration and sometimes discovery that made even the prospect of old Fred Durfield, hobbling in now in a perfect gale of grievance against the arthritis that was gradually doubling him up like a series of human paper clips, an absorbing one.
    â€˜You’re no use,’ Fred said. ‘Them damn tablets i’n’t no use. I’m goin’ to die as crippled as my father before me.’
    He thumped a transparent brown plastic bottle down on Archie’s desk. It was almost full.
    â€˜How many of these have you taken, Fred?’
    â€˜No more’n a couple. Didn’t do no good.’
    Archie began to explain patiently the mechanics of a course of medicine, knowing that Fred would neither listen to nor heed him. Fred’s mother, seventy years before, had fed him her own rural fatalism along with his childhood porridge, a fatalism that ran in a black stream through so many of Archie’s villager patients. He wasn’t sure, however, that he did not prefer it to the helpless rag-doll surrender to ill health and state medicine of another section of his patients, an almost greedy abandonment of self-sufficiency to an endless cycle of pills and self-neglect. A permanent state of not being quite well became as natural and necessary to them as breathing. Children, on the other hand, could only be what they were,