A Love Like Blood Read Online Free Page B

friend, almost an uncle to me, and Donald, who’d become a clinical psych-ologist, because, as he told me, it would mean he wouldn’t have to see blood any more.
    I, on the other hand, both in the department and in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, saw lots of it, though mostly it was unrecognisable as such, mere smears of stained erythrocytes between two glass slides, under a microscope.
    I became a consultant by the age of thirty-one, and was immediately disliked by my older colleagues at the hospital for making them feel stupid, though to a man they were all distinguished doctors. I made some efforts to break down their hostility but whatever I tried failed and so I withdrew into my work. There at least I made good progress; so much so that in the early part of 1951 I was invited to speak at a conference on leukaemia in Paris.
    I was sitting in my office in Trumpington Street when I opened the letter of invitation. As I looked at it, I stood up, slowly, and then looked out at the cold Cambridge morning.
    Students on bicycles hurried by, striped college scarves wound tightly around their necks; the bare spikes of trees stuck their fingers into the sky; the steps of the Fitzwilliam were still damp with melting snow. My mind was far away, on the edge of a piece of parkland by the chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
    I tried to work out how I felt, and then realised that that in itself meant I felt nothing. But it was a strange kind of nothing.
    I sat down and wrote a letter to the organising committee, telling them I would be delighted to accept, querying what expenses would be covered, and outlining what I would like to speak about.
     
    At the back of my mind, of course, the memory of Saint-Germain lingered, but it did not bother me seriously. By the time the war had ended I had seen my share of horror, more than my share perhaps, as the fighting grew more intense as we made it further east into Germany. I saw worse things than I’d seen in that hole, if one can possibly compare one horror to another, and I’d seen enough to make me realise that what I’d seen was not unique; that war makes men do monstrous things, and that those things were not my fault.
    Anyway, I was excited. I had achieved the rank of consultant almost embarrassingly early; I’d been invited to an international conference; and Paris was, I reminded myself, a beautiful place. I had never flown; even that excited me.
    If anything, I saw the trip as a chance to make things better. I know now that I believed that if I could go back to Paris and feel normal, it would lessen the meaning of what I’d witnessed in 1944 . Just one more awful thing among the many that had happened during the war.

Chapter 5
     
    Paris was more or less as I’d remembered it, but cold and wet. It was a miserable March morning when my plane touched down at Le Bourget.
    A car had been sent for me, with a driver and an aide, a young Frenchman. Lucien was polite, had excellent English and explained that he was a medical student and had volunteered to look after me during my five-day trip. He was quiet, spoke only when spoken to, but answered my many questions about the city graciously.
    I was asking him about how things had changed since the war, but there was a look in his eye that made me think he would perhaps rather not speak about it.
    I could see for myself that there was more life in the streets, a few more cars on the road. Clothes were a little more colourful, food was better, and in short, Paris was Paris. But over the course of my first couple of days there, I began to sense in my conversations a certain malaise in the people.
    I knew immediately what it was, because it was the same back home, especially in London. It’s hard to imagine now, now that war is far behind us, but back then, on a trip to town, something had become clear to me.
    I’d been to the theatre in London to see a rather bad play at the Criterion, and stopped over for the night in an even worse little hotel