Chapter 17 The Water and the Walls

Pelham Druce had been secretary to the board for sixteen years when the surveyor's report came back, and he read it in the office that Fenmore had built at the head of the stairs, in the room with the desk and the chair and the window that looked down over Craddon, and he read it the way he read everything, twice, and made a list of the figures and added them up. The report said what the building had been saying for years in the only language it had. The water main that had been laid to the wrong side of the house in the year it opened froze again that winter, in the same trench, at the same low spot where it had frozen the winter the war began, and the same method of running the water backward through the laundry connection thawed it, and Hesketh, who was fifty-eight now and had a young man under him, did it at three in the morning exactly as his old master had done it, because the trick had never been written down anywhere except in the chalk on the boiler-room wall and in the memory of a man who was now the last person alive who had seen it done. The roof over the Lornwick Wing had begun to let in the weather, and the plaster in the theatre with the glass roof was stained in the shape of the leak, and the electric lamp that had been state-of-the-art in 1921 was now an antique that no one in the city stocked parts for. The Quillock, which had been a modern out-patient block forty years before, had been condemned at the front and shored at the back. The laundry, the hottest room in Vessock, had a lintel that had cracked where the fire had been, and the fire had been in 1926, and the lintel had been promised a repair in 1926. The surveyor's estimate to make the Marrowden fit for the next forty years was one hundred and ninety thousand pounds. The estimate to build a district hospital on the open ground at Staddleford, with four hundred beds and a maternity department and a modern theatre and a staff that could be recruited from a city instead of a hill, was two hundred and forty thousand, and it would not leak, and it would not freeze, and it would not need to be shored, and it would serve the whole valley instead of the north end of one city. Druce took the two figures and sat with them, and he did the thing he was paid to do, which was to see that they were not comparable and to make them comparable, and when he had made them comparable the distance between them did not close but it changed. A hundred and ninety thousand pounds would not stop at a hundred and ninety thousand. The building was a hundred and ten years old in its oldest part, and it had been patched every decade since it was built, and each patch had held and had pulled the next patch after it, and a house that has been kept alive that long is kept alive one repair behind the truth, and the truth arrives, in the end, all at once, in a surveyor's report on a Tuesday morning. The new hospital at Staddleford would be more beds, better beds, and a debt, and the debt would be paid over thirty years, and at the end of thirty years it would still be a hospital, whereas at the end of thirty years the Marrowden would be the same hundred and ten years older. That was the arithmetic. Druce was honest enough to sit with the arithmetic and not dress it, and he was honest enough to know that the arithmetic was not the whole of the question, and that the rest of the question could not be put in a report. The rest of the question was a man from Craddon who would not go to Staddleford because it was three miles from where he lived and on a hill he did not know, and a mother who had put two children in one bed in an emergency ward, and a chalk wall in a boiler room, and a box of lost things on a shelf, and a woman in a factory who would walk up the slope she had walked up since she was a girl and would not walk three miles along a road to a place with no gate she remembered. He went down the stairs at the end of the day and out through the front door, and Errol Wexcombe, the works foreman, was in the yard with a ladder and a pot of paint, painting the frame of a window that would have to be taken out with the wall in a few years anyway. "You'll not get another winter out of that lintel," the foreman said. "I know," Druce said. "Then you know why I am painting the window," Wexcombe said. "A man has to keep the water out of the house he is standing in, whether or not somebody has decided the house is finished. When you decide, tell me before you tell the newspapers, and I will keep the water out until you do." Druce went home down the slope and did not sleep, because he was the man who would do it, and he had understood that night that the work of a secretary to a hospital was not to save the hospital and not to close it, and that his work was to be the wrong that was made at the top of the slope and to stand at the foot of it and take the weight as it came down, which was the job that Dr. Fenmore had once described, in a private note that Druce had found in the back of an old diary, as the only honest work in the building. He lay in the dark and thought that he had not asked for the job and could not put it down, and in the morning he began to write the paper that would recommend the new hospital at Staddleford, and to write it in such a way that the men and women from Craddon would have something in the city to walk to, and he did not yet know whether the something he could get them would be enough, and neither did the building, which went on leaking and thawing and being shored and being painted, one repair behind the truth. ---