Chapter 13 The Empty Chair

In the spring of 1937 Ardle Fenmore had been medical superintendent of the Marrowden Infirmary for twenty-nine years, and he had begun to think of the building the way an old shepherd thinks of a hill he has walked every day of his working life, which is to say as a thing that is his and is not his and will outlast him and does not care. He was sixty-three. He had a cough that had come the winter before and had not gone, and he had lost weight, and he had examined himself and knew what he was carrying, and he had told no one. He had spent his life telling the truth to other people about their bodies and had decided, without much drama, that he would keep his own to himself and work until the work stopped him. That spring the chairman of the governors died. Tredgold had chaired the board for thirty-one years and had opposed Fenmore in almost everything and had never once been unkind, and the two of them had made the infirmary between them the way two men make a road, each of them laying the surface the other would otherwise have made impassable. The board met to elect a successor and chose a man named Tilney, who owned two warehouses on the canal and had a reputation for knowing the price of everything and had been heard to say that a hospital was a business that happened to have beds in it. The first meeting under the new chairman was about the Quillock Block, which had cost more than it had been estimated to cost, and whether the out-patient department should be closed two days a week to save the salary of a clerk. Fenmore went to the meeting and gave his evidence, and said that the Quillock was treating four hundred patients a week who would otherwise be in the wards within the month, and that closing it two days a week would fill the wards and cost more in the end than the clerk. Tilney listened and thanked him and put the question to the vote, and the board voted to close the Quillock on Wednesdays. Fenmore walked back up the slope in the rain and did not say anything to anyone, because he had learned at forty that a superintendent who argues with his board is a superintendent who will shortly be replaced by one who does not. In June he collapsed in Letham Ward. He had been standing at the foot of a bed talking to the woman with the cancer's successor, a mill girl with a leg that would not heal, and he put his hand on the bed rail and sat down on the floor as though sitting were a thing he had chosen, and Coline Marchen was there in a moment and had him carried to a room on the ground floor, and he was put to bed in his own hospital with his own nurses round him, which he had said more than once was the one thing he hoped to avoid. That evening the building did what it had always done when one of its own was carried down and put in a bed: it went on. The night nurse made the round at ten and the boiler was banked at eleven and the gate was locked and the lamp left burning over it, and in Dunmarch an old man called out once in his sleep and was quieted, and in Wrenmoor a child was born at midnight to a woman from Brammoor who had never heard of Dr. Fenmore and never would, and in the office at the head of the stairs the chair stood empty at the desk with the day's letters stacked under the pen, and no one went in to move the pen, because the staff of a hospital will leave a room alone for a while for the sake of the man who is not in it, and will not say that this is what they are doing, and will not know it. He lived eleven days. Coline sat with him, and the girl Effa Ivaline brought his meals and took them away again, and the matron, Hespera Selvine, who was sixty-nine and due to retire that autumn, came down every evening and sat on the other side of the bed, and the two of them, who had run the building between them for a quarter of a century and had never once been friends, sat with the man who had been the third of them and did not talk much, and did not need to. He was clear until the end and gave instructions about the ward notes and the beds and the girl's leg, and on the last night he asked Coline to bring him his diary, and she brought it, and he turned to the back, where the private account was, and gave her the book. "Nobody will read that," he said, "but I would like it to exist." He died at half past two in the morning with the window open, and Coline closed his eyes and went up to the ward and finished the round, because the round was there, and the patients were there, and the building did not stop for its superintendent, which was the thing he had always said it must not do and was the thing that, for once, was easy to grant him. Through those eleven days the building went on doing what it had always done, and Coline saw, as she had not seen in twenty-four years, how little of it required a superintendent at all. The coppers in the laundry below the wards came up to heat at six; the porter's log took in coal and visitors and two coffins and a woman's name from Thornby; the dispensary hatch opened at seven and the queue formed in the yard in the rain. Fenmore lay on the ground floor with the window open and heard the cart wheels in the lane and the children of Bellcairn calling through the floor, and he said once, when the girl Effa Ivaline brought his tray, that a hospital was a thing that happened to a building and not the other way round, and that he had spent half his life mistaking which of the two he was in charge of. Effa did not understand him then. She understood him in another decade, when the thing that happened to the building was the city. The board met and passed a vote of condolence and appointed a successor, a man from a hospital in the south named Sedley, and named no part of the building after Fenmore, because the building had no ward that was not already named, and it was decided that the new wing, when it came, would be named for a donor. Coline Marchen kept the diary in the drawer of the office of Letham Ward. She read the last pages once, and found in the back of it the three hundred and forty names in the first column and the eleven in the second, and she read them the way one reads a list of the dead in a country church, and then she put the diary back in the drawer and did not show it to anyone, because it was the only part of Fenmore the building had left, and the building was not owed even that. ---