‘The floor, Your Honour,’ he said, reaching awkwardly for his cap. ‘You said it would be convenient?’
Hadfield let them pass, then retreated to his bedroom to finish ministering to collar and tie. Gruff instructions and the squeak of furniture on the move reached him through the door and when, a moment later, he stepped back into the drawing room, it was to find the women gliding across his parquet like patineurs in an ice waltz. By the time he returned from the hospital the floor in every room would be polished to glassy perfection.
A little after eight o’clock the cab rattled to a halt before the main entrance to the Nikolaevsky. Hadfield was so caught up in his thoughts that the driver was obliged to jump from his seat and stand at the front wheel with his dirty palm open for the fare. What was there to decide? Hadfield asked himself as he counted out the kopeks. That he should go to the police was quite unthinkable. A few careless words and he would condemn not only Goldenberg to years in a Siberian camp but Anna and Evgenia too.
‘Very generous, Your Honour.’
The broad smile on the cabby’s face suggested Hadfield should have concentrated harder on the fare. He knew it would be wiser to have nothing to do with the clinic in Peski. Inevitably, he would be drawn into further contact with Goldenberg or men very like him. Resolve to have no more dealings with her while it is in your power to do so, he thought. Resolve now, here in this hospital on this bright morning.
‘Good morning, Your Honour.’ It was the old porter who kept order at the main door, cap in hand like a peasant on rent day. The long benches in the entrance hall were already crowded with soldiers and their families waiting to see a doctor. Nurses in stiff white pinafores and scarves bustled about them taking names and regiments and the symptoms of their complaints. The Nikolaevsky had opened as a military hospital in the reign of the tsar’s father and grown steadily ever since, its imposing yellow and white frontage creeping year by year down Slonovaya Street. In the few months Hadfield had spent there he had formed the impression that it was well run, clean and surprisingly progressive. Most of his patients were on the general wards, but his departmental superior was familiar with a paper he had written on public health and the pathology of diseases, and he had been asked to carry out a discreet review of general practices in parts of the hospital. It was his duty that day to visit the department for the treatment of mental diseases for the first time. The Nikolaevsky was an unforgiving place and although he asked for directions more than once he was still wandering its maze of broad white corridors half an hour later. Finally losing patience, he pressganged a porter into service as a guide. From the main buildings, he was led along a path through a rough garden to the hospital’s boiler house. Two low workmen’s huts had been built against its high wall, their roofs of rusty iron, their rough timber walls weathered and bare but for a few sloughs of green paint, their windows partly boarded.
The porter pointed to the door of the first hut.
‘That’s Department 10? Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
Hadfield knew a little of its reputation from a Russian colleague who had threatened him in jest with exile to Siberia or worse — Department 10. Knocking at the first hut, he was greeted by an oath then the scraping of a key in the lock. The door was opened by a ruddy-faced man in his early sixties with the broken veins and bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker. He was wearing a faded green army uniform, the jacket stained with food and unbuttoned to the waist. He took Hadfield in at a glance.
‘Ryabovsky, Your Honour. Fyodor Ivanovich.’ He made a low insincere bow. ‘Warder, porter, nurse and general dogsbody.’
There was an insolence in his manner that made Hadfield’s hackles rise. ‘Where are the patients?’ he snapped.
Ryabovsky turned to the inner door behind him and unlocked it with a key that was hanging from the chain on his belt. Even before it was fully open, Hadfield was revolted by the overpowering smell of stale urine. Reaching for his handkerchief, he stood in the doorway, his eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom. By the light of a single oil lamp he could see the hut was laid out as a ward, but in place of beds the floor was strewn with rough straw mattresses. And it was heaving with bodies, young men for the most part, military coats fastened over dirty hospital gowns. The plank walls were caked in soot and smoke hung thick about the hut, although the two primitive stoves that were the only source of heat were unlit.
‘Who are these men?’ he asked, turning again to Ryabovksy.
‘The war with Turkey. They’re sick in the head.’
‘Why don’t these men have proper beds?’ It was a sordid unsanitary scene that brought to his mind an engraving of the hospital at Scutari twenty-five years before.
Ryabovsky gave a careless shrug: ‘Perhaps no one knows what to do with them, Your Honour.’
Frightened faces, empty faces, hollow faces, half-dressed, bare chilblained feet, some with dirty bandages or undressed bed sores, some curled tightly into whimpering balls like children, others defiant. Hadfield stepped among them, stopping to examine those with symptoms of a condition he was qualified to treat, but most were beyond his help. Perhaps they were lucky not to have been shot. He had read enough of these strange war injuries to know there was precious little sympathy in the army for casualties like these. He knew what Anna and Evgenia would say: ‘Fool! See how the tsar treats his most loyal servants.’
‘And is it the same in the other hut?’
‘A few less, Your Honour.’
‘This is a disgrace!’ Hadfield spat the words at Ryabovsky. But the old man merely shrugged again.
Hadfield was still shaking with rage five minutes later as he stood among the brambles in the boiler-house garden, the June sun warming his back. Cross with the army for neglecting the men, and with the hospital authorities, but cross most of all with his medical colleagues for making a joke of such a place. But he knew too that if he confronted them they would give him a very Russian shrug of resignation. ‘How can you be surprised?’ they would ask. ‘Such places exist in Russia. What would you have us do?’
The superintendent’s suite was on a bright first-floor corridor above the main entrance. It was the one place in the hospital that did not smell of ammonia or boiled cabbage but of floor polish and gentleman’s cologne. Military clerks in immaculate green uniforms glided from panelled room to panelled room through perfectly weighted mahogany doors that swung silently to behind them. It was as remote from the day to day business of the hospital as his uncle’s ministry.
‘Have you an appointment?’ the superintendent’s secretary asked. ‘As you can see, Doctor, there are others waiting.’ He turned to indicate two uniformed public servants and an elderly man in a frock coat whom Hadfield had seen in the corridors of the hospital and knew to be a surgeon.
‘It is a matter of great urgency,’ Hadfield replied calmly. ‘One that affects the reputation of the hospital.’
The secretary frowned. ‘May I suggest you go through the usual channels, Doctor, and speak to your head of department?’ This was clearly meant to be his final word on the matter. Turning to the surgeon, he opened his leather-bound file and was on the point of handing him an official-looking letter when Hadfield gripped him firmly by his upper arm.
‘I really think you should speak to him,’ he said, tugging him to one side. ‘Believe me, you’ll regret it if you don’t.’
‘Why will I regret it, Doctor?’
‘You know, of course, that my uncle, General Glen, is a good friend of the superintendent’s?’
He had promised himself he would never use his uncle’s name for advantage but he had to admit to a quiet satisfaction as the supercilious expression on the secretary’s face changed in the blink of an eye.
‘Of course, of course. I understand.’ The secretary’s words pattered like gentle rain.
‘And did reason prevail?’ Dobson asked.
Exhausted, Hadfield had collapsed into one of the leather smoking chairs in the correspondent’s office at a little after six o’clock that evening. He was still angry, but satisfied too that a day of frantic activity, of threats, flattery and cajoling, promised to make a difference to the lives of seventy very sick men.
‘Not reason. Nepotism and naked self-interest. And you know, George,’ he said, as Dobson pressed a glass into his hand, ‘I was surprised by my own mendacity.’
Dobson laughed. ‘You’re an educated man, Hadfield. You used the weapons available to you for the benefit of those men. Besides, there is nothing you can teach a public servant in Russia about lying he doesn’t already know. ’
