Strong Medicine by Arthur Hailey Page A

records. In both places I've met the doctors in charge and
    would be glad to contact them."
    When Celia had finished there was an uncertain silence. Eli Camperdown
    broke it. The Felding-Roth president sounded surprised.
    "I don't know what the rest of you think, but what Mrs. Jordan has just
    suggested sounds to me like very good sense."
    Having been shown the way, others added their agreement, though Dr. Lord
    remained silent. Celia immediately sensed an antagonism between herself
    and the director of research which would persist into the future.
    Soon after, a decision was made that Celia would telephone her
    institutional acquaintances next day and, if they seemed cooperative, the
    Research Department would take it from there.
    As the meeting broke up, Celia left first, amid smiles and friendly
    handshakes.
    A week or so later, having done what was asked, Celia learned through Sam
    Hawthorne that trials of Thalidomide at both of the old people's homes
    would soon be under way.
    At the time, it seemed the end of a minor incident.
    Amid the pressures of their professional lives Andrew and Celia found
    time to look at houses for sale. One, which Celia found and liked, was
    at Convent Station, a residential suburb in Morris township, where homes
    were spaced widely apart and lawns and trees proliferated. As she pointed
    out when she called Andrew, the house was only two miles from his office
    and even closer to St. Bede's Hospital. "That's important," Celia
    declared, "because I don't want you to have to drive a long way,
    especially when you have night calls and may be tired."
    The location would mean a ten-mile commute for Celia on the days she went
    to Felding-Roth at Boonton, but since most of her sales calls were in
    other parts of New Jersey, the distance was not important.
    But the house, which was a large, unoccupied, neglected, whiteframe
    colonial, shocked Andrew when he saw it. He protested, "Celia, this
    broken-down old barn isn't for us! Even if we patched it up, which looks
    impossible, what would we do with five bedrooms?"
    "There'd be. one for us," his wife explained patiently, "then one each
    for the children, and after they're born we'll want live-in help, so
    that's one more." The fifth bedroom, she added, would be for
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guests. "My mother will be coming to us occasionally, and maybe yours."
    Celia also envisaged "a downstairs study-den which the two of us can
    share, and be together when we bring work home."
    Though he had no intention of agreeing to such a wildly impractical idea,
    Andrew laughed. "You certainly look ahead."
    "What neither of us will want," Celia argued, "is the interruption and
    nuisance of changing homes every few years just because we need more
    space and didn't plan for it." She looked around her, surveying the
    cobwebbed, dirt-encrusted lower floor of the house through which they had
    walked on a Sunday afternoon in January, with pale sunshine glinting
    through grimy windows. "This place needs scouring, painting, organizing,
    but it can be beautiful-tbe kind of home we won't want to leave unless
    we have to."
    "I'm leaving right now," Andrew said, "because what this place needs most
    is a bulldozer." He added, with rare impatience, "You've been right about
    a lot of things, but not this time."
    Celia seemed undeterred. Putting her arms around Andrew, she stood on
    tiptoes to kiss him. "I still think I'm right. Let's go home and talk
    about it."
    Later that night, reluctantly, Andrew gave in and next day Celia
    negotiated the purchase at a bargain price and arranged a mortgage. The
    down payment created no difficulty. Both she and Andrew had saved money
    from their earnings over the preceding few years and their combined
    current incomes were strong.
    They moved in near the end of April, and almost at once Andrew conceded
    he had been wrong about the house. "I already like it," he said on their
    finst day; "I may even get to love it." The renovation had cost less than
    he