The Cold North Sea Read online

  ‘It’s nothin’ like that, sir.’

  His accent was rural, Finch noted. Not of these parts. East Anglia. Not the twang of Suffolk, but the full-on, near impenetrable sing-song of Norfolk. It took concentration.

  ‘I see.’

  Finch whispered the next bit, trying to affect some tact.

  ‘…In which case, if you’d like to send along the young lady in question…’

  ‘No, sir. No. No, no, no.’

  Flustered, he cast an eye behind him, then looked to the street again.

  Asked Finch: ‘Then, Mr…?’

  ‘Sorry… Pickersgill.’

  He said it like ‘Pick’sgill’.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘Pick-ers-gill. Sidney Pickersgill.’

  ‘Then, Mr Pickersgill, you’d best have a seat.’

  Finch gestured to a chair. Pickersgill scraped it back. He sat, hunched forward, eyes darting still.

  ‘Drink?’ asked Finch.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want a drink?’

  ‘Oh… No thank you, sir. I don’t.’

  Finch sipped his ale. The froth clung to his moustache.

  ‘Good for you. Bugger on the liver… In which case, I don’t suppose…’

  He offered him a Navy Cut.

  ‘No, sir. Thank you.’

  Finch struck a lucifer and lit another.

  ‘So what ails you, Mr Pickersgill?’

  ‘Nothin’, sir.’

  Finch shook out the match.

  ‘Let me rephrase. What vexes you?’

  ‘Vexes?’

  ‘Please… Your demeanour. It doesn’t take a student of behavioural psychology to deduce that something is troubling you.’

  ‘Behaviour-what, sir?’

  ‘Never mind. I mean… You asked to see me. Here I am.’

  Finch nodded to Ralph. Ralph brought over a glass of water. Pickersgill thanked him.

  He was an outdoorsman, Finch supposed. The weathered face and grey hair probably added ten years to his appearance, making him, what, fifty, fifty-five? His hands were cleanish but the palms like leather, the cracks deep and lined; no end of scrubbing could erase the etched-in dirt. It was the same with the blunted nails.

  ‘You don’t rec’nise me, sir. I dint expect you to,’ he went on. ‘But I come a long way t’find you. Endthorpe. Norfolk coast.’

  Finch stuck a mental feather in his own imaginary cap.

  ‘Been several days I spend movin’ around the eastern counties. Had to sleep rough…’

  ‘Rough?’

  ‘Not through choice, sir.’

  Finch glanced at his wristwatch – Zeiss, German.

  ‘Look… I haven’t got all day. I think you’d better begin at the beginning…’

  The man composed himself.

  ‘South Africa, Dr Finch. Like you, I was in South Africa.’

  ‘There were quite a lot of us down there. Half a million.’

  ‘The push on Pretoria. You tended to me, God bless you, sir. Took a bullet to the wrist…’

  He pivoted his left hand back and forth, as if to demonstrate that Finch’s battlefield ministrations had done their trick. Finch concluded he must be younger than he thought.

  ‘The war ended two and a half years ago, Mr Pickersgill…’

  Finch raised his glass.

  ‘…I’ve been doing everything in my power to erase it from memory.’

  He took another demonstrative sip.

  ‘Still a way to go.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘Look, if I assisted you in anyway, I’m glad to see you in fine fettle. If you spent any time in the Cape, you’ll have seen some hellish things and I pity us both the memory, but I hope you don’t think it rude when I tell you I treated literally thousands of men. Some days… the Modder River… Magersfontein… Kimberley… the Medical Corps field stations, we were tending to up to three hundred men a night. Later, God forbid, women and children…’

  Finch set his pint glass down again.

  ‘You were fortunate you copped a bullet. Our biggest killer was typhoid.’

  ‘The good Lord, he sent some things t’try us, make no mistake. I was with the Norfolks, sir, 2nd Battalion. First dose of action at Paardburg. Then… with General Roberts… all the way through the Transvaal. Stayed on for the surrender and annexation. Then the guerrilla—’

  ‘Mr Pickersgill, I feel you must get to your point.’

  Pickersgill’s eyes flitted to the window again and back to the door. His hands started shaking.

  ‘What is it? Spit it out, man. For God’s sake.’

  He had greenish, intense eyes. Around them his face creased with pain.

  ‘Sir, I’m so sorry t’burden you, but I’m in trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Tent no other way t’describe it, sir.’

  ‘Then if it’s not a medical matter…?’

  The man cleared his throat.

  ‘The reason I had to see you, sir, was because… with the army and everything… I heard you were involved with, you know…’

  He whispered it with urgency.

  ‘…military intelligence…’

  Finch said nothing for a moment. Then he stood emphatically, drained his glass in one go and slammed it down.

  ‘Mr Pickersgill. Good day to you, sir.’

  The drunk at the bar stirred again.

  ‘Bloody Tsar… Kaiser too…’

  ‘Cold steel…’ added someone else. ‘One for the Crimea.’

  Finch turned to the room as he left – the sad gaggle of cockcrow drinkers and their purpled faces who gargled cheap booze for breakfast and from whom he kidded himself to be a man apart…

  ‘And you!… All of you! Every bloody day! Will you cease talking about war as if it were some damned bloody football match!’

  Called out Ralph: ‘I say, steady on, Dr Finch.’

  Another horse brass fell as Finch slammed the door.

  Chapter Three

  There was something deeply erotic about watching Maude get dressed, a sort of reverse re-enactment of what had passed the night before – not that Finch’s recollection of it extended beyond the hazy. He enjoyed the fussiness of the underwear, the studious threading of the high bootlaces and the pernickety smoothing down of the dress. Then came the re-pinning of the hair and the frustration with the dangling strands of auburn that refused to be tamed.

  Here was a woman, so confident most of the time, but who now oozed an emotion that ran counter to the norm: guilt.

  She exited with an unsmiling ‘See you’, trying not to bang her head on a low beam. He heard the flush of the indoor water closet and a sloshing in the basin. The ritual was well-worn – park the bicycle out of sight, leave at dawn, home via a back route and a mumbled excuse to her landlady – or curious neighbour – that she hadn’t been able to sleep (‘No, really’) and had got up early to take a pre-breakfast constitutional.

  The bike seemed the perfect instrument of her shame. Maude had told him of one elderly lady who had berated her in public for riding such a contraption – the unladylike manner of its mounting, the vulgarity of the saddle.

  The stairs creaked and he heard mumblings. Maude had bumped into his own housekeeper, though this was not a problem. Mrs Pereira-Armitage was a diminutive woman – Portuguese he had thought, but Brazilian he soon discovered – who had come to England via a naval marriage. She was long widowed and took vicarious pleasure in the romance of others. For her there was no such thing as shame. Love – ‘amor’ – was something to be cherished, celebrated… practised.

  There were two things she disliked about England, she once told Finch, in a rare moment when he had plied her with sherry: the damp cold of winter and the fact that love – ‘amor’ – was denigrated, suppressed, treated as a sign of moral weakness.

  This house was once hers but, when her husband died, she had lost it to her brother-in-law in a contested will. The man put the house on the market. Whe
n Finch bought the place, after South Africa, he had seen no reason to kick Mrs Pereira-Armitage out. Save for a reallocation of the rooms, she – ‘Mrs P-A’ – had stayed on as a sort of default housekeeper, an arrangement that suited both of them just fine.

  He heard the back door close and the creak of the bike on the garden path.

  Finch lay in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling. When he rose, the accursed ‘dagger’ made its presence felt. He gulped water from the jug on the nightstand, stretched his aching body, opened the window, and stood naked in the chill morning air, the sill high enough to cover his modesty. He leaned out, looked back and forth up the road, and let nature birth him into a brand new day.

  There was a fine mist that clung, the smell of damp, fetid autumn and the seasonal ache in his knee to go with it. Woodsmoke began to waft. The languid, familiar clip-clop echoed down the lane. Soon he would hear the scrape and clank of milk churns. And he thought for a moment of the scrape and clank of the drayman.

  The milk cart was accompanied by a plaintive warbled whistle. The milkman, a sour-faced man whom Finch knew personally to loathe his job, could quaver a melody with the tenderness of a Viennese choirboy. Everywhere, it seemed, the two selves were in conflict – the public versus the private. And Finch was no different.

  After a hearty repast of bacon and fresh farm eggs, served up by Mrs P-A, Finch drank a whole pot of rooibos tea, threw on his overcoat, grabbed his Homburg and set out on the walk through town, the dagger still throwing him random, mischievous stabs.

  The willows hung bare over the river where it forded the road by the watermill. The great abbey stood silent. Though a rural town – a ‘city’ by ecclesiastical design – St Albans’ proximity to London, and the presence of the railway line, had made it a growing attraction. New homes were being built, developments spreading across the farmland. The rash of Ladysmith and Kimberley and Mafeking Roads proliferating across the country bothered Finch. Did the dead deserve nothing better than a nameplate bolted to a street-corner wall?

  As Finch’s gait deteriorated to its usual limp, he was passed by bowler-hatted gentlemen striding purposefully to the station. He had heard them referred to as ‘commuters’, a word that conjured the conversion of a death sentence – maybe it was the same thing.

  Outside the town hall there were people handing out flyers, excoriating the Russians and demanding that justice be done on behalf of the Hull fishermen – ‘our boys’. There was a march this weekend in Trafalgar Square. Finch kept his hands in his pockets and pushed on.

  He entered his practice at just after half past eight, the ground floor of a newish semi-detached domestic building that had been subdivided for businesses. He bid good morning to his secretary, Daphne, who expressed her frustration that Finch was both late and hadn’t warned her of the advent of a patient who had been here since eight… and that the system would be much more efficient if he could just inform her of any privately arranged appointments.

  He apologised, but in truth had completely forgotten.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Ashby,’ he said, affecting cheer, as he swung open the door, pulled off his hat and coat and hung them on the back of it.

  ‘Doctor… I’m so pleased to see you… You know, my…’

  ‘A fine morning,’ he cut across.

  ‘Dreadfully gloomy.’

  The dagger prodded. It was being particularly sadistic.

  ‘Did Daphne… Miss Wilson… get you some tea, Mrs Ashby?’

  ‘She did, Dr Finch…’

  Mrs Ashby pointed to a cup. Daphne had used the fine bone china.

  ‘As I was just saying…’

  Finch put his palm up politely. He went around and sat down. His sprung chair squeaked. Mrs Ashby was in her seventies with an evident fondness for jewels and fur. A no-doubt expensive pelt of some pale tundra weasel was draped across her shoulders, its beady eyes staring at nothing in particular.

  ‘I’m sorry. Please go on, Mrs Ashby…’

  ‘It’s this cough, Doctor.’

  ‘A-ha.’

  ‘And a pain in my elbow. Both my elbows actually.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And my knees.’

  ‘Your knees?’

  The knees were new.

  ‘Last week it was your stomach…’ said Finch.

  He flipped through the file Daphne had placed on his blotter.

  ‘The week before that, your ears…’

  ‘You mean my eyes.’

  ‘No, I mean your ears, Mrs Ashby. The time before that was your eyes.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Well then, that’s good, I mean… If you can see…’

  She raised her spectacles, the lorgnette kind mounted on a gold stick, and examined him, not quite sure if he were ridiculing her.

  Finch came out from behind his desk and went through the charade of placing a spatula in her mouth and making her say ‘Aaaaaah’. She smelled of rose water. She wore too much powder. It clung to the hairs on her chin. He flipped with feigned purpose through his medical compendium.

  ‘My dear Mrs Ashby,’ he said. ‘I believe, with this combination of symptoms, there is only one drug which will do. It is with good fortune that I anticipated your condition and had it delivered forthwith all the way from the famous Bayer factory in Leverkusen.’

  She cooed at his attentiveness. He scribbled furiously on a chit, then handed it to her. He rubbed his throbbing forehead.

  ‘Take two drops of this, four times a day. Have Daphne… Miss Wilson… check this for you. We’ll have an errand boy run it over to the chemist.’

  Mrs Ashby read it out, slowly and studiously.

  ‘Acetyl chloride combined with sodium sali—’

  ‘Sodium salicylate.’

  ‘…producing acetylsal—’

  ‘Acetylsalicylic acid… The very thing, Mrs Ashby. The very thing.’

  She immediately perked up.

  ‘Oh thank you, Doctor. Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘It’s so exciting, isn’t it? I mean, what with this… and the war.’

  She pulled a town hall flyer from her handbag and waved it.

  ‘The Russians, Dr Finch. The Russians.’

  She gurgled with joy.

  ‘Good day to you, Mrs Ashby.’

  He plastered on a fake grin and showed her out.

  Door shut, he sat down again, reached into his desk and wrestled out a half-drunk bottle of single malt – Talisker. He pulled the cork quietly and took a swig… then another. The dagger was gently withdrawn. He heard the newly enlivened Mrs Ashby chat with Daphne, then the front door close. Sure that she had gone, he took a third sip for luck and went back out to reception. Daphne held the prescription.

  ‘Acetyl chloride combined with sodium salicylate?’ she read off.

  ‘Aspirin, Daphne. Aspirin.’

  She gave a strained chuckle. But her eyes were red. She had been crying. Had Mrs Ashby seen?

  ‘Why, Daphne…’

  She dabbed at them with a linen handkerchief.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s no use.’

  ‘No use. What’s of no use?’

  She was silent for a moment, awkward about saying it.

  ‘I can’t work here any more, sir.’

  ‘But Daphne…’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir… Dr Finch… I mean, I love this place…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But every day…’

  She hesitated. He sighed. They might as well hand him a blindfold and cigarette.

  ‘Please, go on…’

  ‘It’s just that you’re late, you go missing after lunch, sometimes you don’t show up at all… We’re losing patients hand over fist… and all the while I’m sitting here, having to cover, having to make up stories, get you out of trouble, lie for you…’

  ‘Anything else?’

  She shook her head.

  He perched on the edge of her desk, affecting casual ease. There was nothing she s
aid with which he didn’t agree. Absolutely nothing. She just hadn’t added ‘drunk’.

  ‘Daphne, I’m so sorry. I appreciate everything that you do, believe me. I realise I can be somewhat… mercurial. If there’s anything I—’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve already found another job…’

  ‘Oh.’

  She looked down, embarrassed.

  ‘Is it the money? Then a small raise, maybe. I’m sure we can—’

  ‘…One of the hotels in town. I’ll stay on, work my notice, obviously…’

  * * *

  With Wednesday a half-day and no more patients, Finch shut up shop before noon, let Daphne off early, and walked down to the elementary school, trying hard not to get too despondent. Kids were already pouring out of the red-brick schoolhouse into the tight little playground. Two boys whizzed past firing imaginary guns, arguing about whose turn it was to be ‘the Russians’, which neither wanted to be.

  There were small, excitable girls hanging off Maude’s skirts. Finch stood back but they had already seen him… and the bunch of gladioli. They teased their mistress about her ‘gentleman sweetheart’. She blushed. Dispatched to their mothers outside the railings, Maude made her way over.

  ‘Miss Carter,’ he said.

  ‘Why, Dr Finch,’ she smirked and took his arm.

  They walked off up the street. People nodded ‘Good afternoon’.

  ‘You know if someday I were to marry, I would have to resign my position,’ Maude said.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning nothing, Ingo. Meaning nothing.’

  Finch steered a course past the pub, doing his darnedest to avoid its pull. He could see Ralph through the window, wiping glasses.

  It was a glorious day, Maude declared, and quoted Keats. He felt her romanticising of the season touching but erroneous. This greying autumn already had one foot in winter. But he appeased her desire for rural air and, half an hour later, they were on their pushbikes, bundled up, pedalling hard through the great country estate along a handsome avenue lined with poplars. They passed a farm with its prize Aberdeen herd mooing around the cattle shed, a farmhand thrusting a pitchfork into a mound of straw. Other than that, they were the only ones around.

  Finch made heavy work of the steep hill up to the old Elizabethan ruin, once the home of Sir Francis Bacon, labouring on the heavy black cast-iron contraption he had purchased on the strength of it being a gentleman’s sporting accessory. Maude got there first. Only the front wall, the porch and a window frame remained of what was once a stately home, its banqueting hall the envy of Tudor England, Finch had read. Maude sat on the front step, the stone worn concave from ancient visitors.