Doctor at Large (8 page)

After some minutes of patting her on the back and murmuring consolation I said, ‘Don’t you think you ought to go home and lie down? If you like I’ll give you a prescription for a sedative. Have a good sleep – you’ll feel ever so much better.’

She blew her nose miserably. ‘I’ll stay here until Razzy comes back.’

‘But Dr Potter-Phipps may be away all night. I mean, he might have to go to a case somewhere after his golf,’ I said quickly. ‘I’d go home now if I were you.’

Still clutching me, she asked pathetically, ‘Take me home. Please take me. I couldn’t face it. Not alone.’

‘Really, that’s asking rather a lot, you know.’

‘Please! It’s not far.’

I hesitated. ‘Oh, all right, then.’ I had to get rid of her somehow. ‘If you promise to behave yourself on the way.’

She nodded her head. ‘I promise,’ she said, like a penitent schoolgirl.

I left the flat, and helped her down the stairs to the street. I called a taxi and we got in together.

‘Who is there to look after you?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘Haven’t you any relatives or friends you could get hold of?’

‘I hate them all.’

I turned and stared at the beautiful blue and gold afternoon outside and wished I had been Dr Potter-Phipps’ caddie.

The girl lived at the far end of Curzon Street, and we drove along in silence. Suddenly she announced more cheerfully. ‘You know, I’ve been a bloody fool.’

I swung round, and found her carefully doing her make-up.

‘I must say you’ve been acting a little oddly, even for this part of the world.’

She smiled for the first time. ‘I
am
a silly thing, aren’t I? Fancy getting all worked up like that. I suppose I did have rather a lot to drink at lunch time. That always sends me off the rails a bit, Didn’t you think I was crazy?’

‘It did cross my mind to send for the strong-arm squad, I admit.’

‘I’m so glad you didn’t. And such a heavenly day, too!’ She closed her compact with a snap. ‘Here we are. Won’t you come in for a minute and have a drink? I should think you need one.’

‘I really don’t think I should–’

‘Come on! I’ll ring the exchange and have your calls put through to my number. Razzy often does.’

I wavered. Being alone with female patients was bad enough; going to their flats afterwards for drinks would certainly raise every eyebrow on the General Medical Council. Still, it was spring…

‘Just a quick one, then,’ I said.

‘My name’s Kitty,’ she told me, opening the door. ‘I’ve only got a very tiny flat, but make yourself at home. Razzy does.’

The flat would have taken my Bayswater room a dozen times, and was furnished with an amiable extravagance that must have taken Razzy’s fancy. Kitty immediately threw open the window, took a deep breath, and trilled, ‘Spring, spring, spring! Isn’t it lovely? Don’t you adore the spring? With the primroses and the cowslips and the bluebells and things? I swore I’d have a window-box this year. What’ll you have to drink, darling?’

‘I’ve started on brandy this afternoon already, I’m afraid. So I suppose I’d better go on, if you’ve got any.’

‘Sure, my pet. Brandy it is. The place is stiff with it.’

She brought from the cupboard two tumblers, and a bottle with a plain label bearing only a crown and the date 1904.

‘Here, steady on,’ I called, as she half-filled both glasses. ‘I’m sure that stuff’s supposed to be drunk by the thimbleful.’

‘Here’s to life,’ she said, taking a large drink. ‘That’s better!’ Then she sat on the sofa beside me. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

‘There’s not much to tell.’ I licked my lips, savouring the brandy. ‘I’m Dr Potter-Phipps’ temporary assistant, that’s all.’

‘You’re very young to be a doctor.’

‘As a matter of fact – and it must prove something, because I would tell it to everybody – I haven’t been a doctor very long.’

‘I could tell you hadn’t much practical experience the moment I fell into your arms in your flat.’

‘Oh, dear! And I thought I was being such a commanding figure.’

She laughed.

‘By the way,’ I said modestly. ‘I’m sorry I clocked you one.’

‘And I’m sorry I clocked you one too, Doctor darling.’ We both laughed and had some more brandy. After a while, everything seemed to become very cosy.

‘It must be wonderful being a doctor,’ she said dreamily. ‘Curing people who are stricken.’

‘There isn’t all that much curing in it. And fortunately most of the people arriving on our doormat aren’t very stricken.’

‘But it’s lovely to have someone to sympathize with you and hold your hand and tell you you’re wonderful, even if you’re not really ill. That’s where Razzy’s so marvellous. Have you noticed his eyes?’ She threw back her head. ‘Hypnotic! Cruelly hypnotic.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t reach those heights, but I can certainly sympathize with you and–’ I held her hand. ‘Tell you you’re wonderful.’

‘You’re sweet,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’m going to change.’

I helped myself to another half-tumbler of her brandy, which had the effect of producing a pleasant conscious detachment from the world, like addiction to morphia. I recognized cheerfully that I was getting myself into a dangerous situation. My conduct was certainly becoming infamous in a professional respect, for Kitty’s entering our waiting-room and smashing the furniture on my head had placed us henceforward in a professional relationship. What should I do about it? I felt in my wallet for the BMA booklet on
Ethics
, and turning over the pages found a great deal of sound advice on the size of doctor’s door-plates, fee-splitting, and association with the clergy, but nothing on the tantalizing frontier between professional and social obligations where I was now dancing. A faint, fresh breeze rustled the curtains and a bird started singing on the window ledge. And what the hell! I thought. It’s spring. I put the book away and drank some more brandy.

Kitty came back wearing a négligé.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked cheerfully.

‘I’m responding to treatment. Have some more of your brandy. Liquor should be quaffed, not sipped.’

‘Here’s to life, Doctor darling.’

‘Here’s to you, patient pet.’

We drank with linked arms. With a sigh, she stretched herself on the sofa. She held out her arms and smiled.

‘Doctor darling,’ she murmured invitingly.

I licked my lips. There was a terrible risk making love to a patient… But, damn it! Alone with this beautiful woman. Wasn’t it worth it? Was I a man or a mouse? Anyway, I couldn’t possibly disappoint her…

‘Come to me,’ she breathed.

How lovely she looked! But how much more lovely she would look lying there without any clothes on at all…

I jumped up. ‘Get me a taxi!’ I shouted. ‘Quick!’ And what, I wondered, would I now say to the Minister of Inland Development?

When I dashed into the flat I found a note neatly pinned to the examination couch:

Dear Doctor,

I fear that some dire emergency has called you away. I fully realize the trials of a doctor’s life, and that some poor soul is in a worse state than me. However, lying on your couch seems to have relieved the discomfort, and as I am so anxious to get away this afternoon I will go round the corner to an osteopath recommended by the Minister of Works. With thanks for your attention,

Yrs.,

George Beecham

I had lost Razzy a patient, but my personal honour, and probably my professional life, were saved by the politician. I hoped he would become Prime Minister, and since that afternoon I have always read his speeches in the newspapers.

I did not tell Razzy the full story until the day that I was leaving the practice.

‘Really?’ he said mildly. ‘Poor Kitty! I wonder what on earth you did to her psychology, bolting like that. I really must go round and see her soon.’

‘And another thing,’ I said gazing at the carpet, ‘there aren’t any Himalayas. As far as I’m concerned, I mean, I wasn’t going to let on about it, but – well, you’ve been so good to me, Razzy, I hadn’t the heart not to confess I’ve worked here under false pretences.’

‘But I’m glad, dear boy. Terribly glad. Frightfully uncomfortable it must be, in all that snow and ice. So what other plans have you?’

‘I thought I’d stay on in London for a bit and work for my Fellowship. Thanks to you, I’ve got a few quid in the bank to pay the rent, and I might be able to make a little by standing in for doctors at weekends. You see,’ I told him solemnly, ‘I’m still determined to become a surgeon.’

‘And good luck to you, dear boy,’ he added indulgently, as though I were a schoolboy saying I wanted to be an engine driver. ‘I’ve always found surgery fascinating. Completely fascinating. Let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you. Would you like a bonus? The secretary will fix it up – you know I loathe discussing money.’

We shook hands, and I stepped from out of the glossy picture of fashionable medicine for ever.

I now had saved enough to pay off my hundred-pound debt to Willoughby, Willowick, and Wellbeloved, and to maintain a modest medical student standard of living until the Primary Fellowship examination of the Royal College of Surgeons in six weeks’ time. I kept my room in Bayswater, took copies of Gray’s
Anatomy
and Starling’s 
Physiology
from Lewis’ medical lending library, borrowed a box of bones from a friend at St Swithin’s, and continued my surgical career.

The Fellowship, like all British postgraduate examinations, is run on the Grand National principle, except that the highest fence is placed immediately in front of the tapes. Before you can enter for the Final exam you have first to pass the Primary in anatomy and physiology, subjects which are learnt in the second year of medical school and forgotten in the fourth. I had now to reopen the pages I had sweated over on coffee-drenched nights five years ago, unpleasantly aware that such traditional
aides-memoires
for the student as:

The lingual nerve

Took a swerve

Around the Hyoglossus –

‘Well I’m mucked!’

Said Wharton’s duct,

‘The blighter’s double-crossed us!’

were inadequate for the Fellowship examiners, who wanted to know the exact seventy-four relations of the lingual nerve and what it did in the monkey, dog, and rabbit as well.

I worked at my books fairly happily, for three months in Razzy’s practice had given me the feeling of being a man of the world who could deal with dukes, manage cabinet ministers, and chum along with beautiful women, and could therefore confidently approach such prosaic individuals as the Fellowship examiners. This was my first mistake.

My second mistake was arriving for the examination in my black jacket and striped trousers. I had learnt in my first year as a medical student that the correct wear for facing examiners was a well-pressed, neatly darned, threadbare old suit, which invited them to take a kindly attitude of superiority; appearing in a Savile Row outfit was like arriving at the Bankruptcy Court in a Rolls. But this did not occur to me as I made my way through the crowd of candidates in Queen Square.

Before the war the Fellowship was a private affair, in which a few dozen young men were treated to an afternoon’s intellectual chat with the examiners and the proceedings were said to be interrupted for tea. Since the National Health Service the examination has been run on mass-production lines, but the traditional politeness of the examiners is steadfastly maintained. They politely made no comment on my Harley Street appearance, beyond smiling a little more heartily than usual in greeting; they brushed aside my ignorance of the precise location of the middle meningeal artery as unimportant among friends; they accepted my inability to identify the pathological specimens in glass jars as understandable between surgical gentlemen. The last examiner politely handed me a pickled brain and said, ‘That, sir, was removed post-mortem from a man of seventy. What do you find of interest in it?’

After a while I admitted, ‘I see only the usual senile changes, sir.’

‘They are not unusual, these changes, you mean, sir?’

‘Oh, no, sir! After all, the patient
was
senile.’

‘Alas,’ he said gently. ‘And I shall be seventy-six myself next birthday. Thank you, sir, for reminding me that I am rapidly getting past it all. Good day to you, sir.’

Politely, they thanked me; politely they bowed me out; just as politely they failed me.

Because I had been over-confident this depressed me more deeply than ploughing any of my student examinations. Once more I began opening my
British Medical Journal
from the back, but I was so dispirited that all I could bring myself to read in the rest of the pages was the obituaries. These are prepared on the first-, second-, or third-class funeral principle, overworked GPs succumbing in early life getting small print at the end, consultants larger type well-spaced out, and leaders of the profession whom everyone has thought dead long ago appearing with a photograph taken when they were twenty-four. All that could be said about the majority of dead doctors seemed to be that they were kind to their patients, popular with their colleagues, and liked walking in Ireland; at the most they had a disease named after them. I began to get deeply miserable about the futility of my profession, and wondered if I should have gone into the Church instead.

I found a part-time job helping a doctor in Brixton, and decided that if I gave up smoking I could afford to work for the next Primary Fellowship examination three months later. After a week I began to suspect he was doing abortions on the side, and I thought I’d better leave. My money was running out again, and I saw my Muswell Hill days returning: it was a moment of gathering depression. Then late one evening I had a telephone call from Grimsdyke.

‘Where the devil have you got to, old lad?’ he said crossly, as I leant on the coin box in the hall and heard every door on the landing creak ajar. ‘I’ve been trying to get you all over the place. Have you become a ruddy hermit, or something?’

‘I’ve been working for my Primary.’

‘Bit of a perversion this lovely weather, isn’t it? I take it that now you’ve left Park Lane and you’re not in paid employment? Good. Then perhaps you could help me out. I’ve got an uncle who practises in the depths of the country – you know, simple rural GP, beloved by all, full of homespun philosophy and never washes his hands – whose partner’s off for his month’s holiday. When I qualified I said I’d help him out, but unfortunately I have a pressing professional engagement elsewhere. Would you fill the breach?’

‘I thought you
were
a country GP.’

‘On a different sort of level. Can’t explain now. How about it?’

I hesitated. I wondered if it was wholly fair to judge Grimsdyke’s relations by himself.

‘Say you will, old lad,’ he pressed. ‘You can take your books and whistle through the work. It’s as peaceful as a museum down there, but there’s a nice pub next door and a pretty little bit in the post office if you feel like relaxation as well.’

‘Tell me – is this uncle of yours married?’

Grimsdyke laughed. ‘A widower. One daughter, permanently settled in Australia. How about it?’

I glanced round the dirty, stuffy hall of my lodgings, with the greasy green-baize board that would grow a crop of bills by next Friday morning.

‘Well–’

‘That’s the spirit! I’ll send you directions and a map. Can you start on Monday? The old boy’s name is Farquharson. He’s a funny old stick, but he thinks absolutely the world of me.’

After my first disastrous foray into general practice the prospect of playing the country GP for a month was alarming; also, I was a true Londoner who always felt uneasy beyond the friendly grin of the LPTB bus stops, or in the company of cows, sheep, carthorses, goats, pigs, and other animals unknown in Leicester Square. But my confidence increased the next Monday afternoon as I drove Haemorrhagic Hilda deeper into the countryside, which wore a look of ripe and gentle peacefulness rarely captured outside brewers’ advertisements. The village itself lay far from the main road, at the end of a winding lane in which a herd of cows, responding to the cow-attracting substance with which all cars are seemingly secretly coated by the manufacturers, licked Hilda over at their leisure. My new home consisted of a few houses, a couple of shops, the church, the vicarage, and the Four Horseshoes. In the middle was a triangular green on which a horse stared at me in offended surprise; across the green was Dr Farquharson’s house, shaggy with creeper, its brass plate shining like a new penny in the sun, its front garden brilliant with flowers among which bees and wasps buzzed as contentedly as the people lunching off expenses in the Savoy Grill.

As Dr Farquharson was still on his rounds I was shown into the empty consulting-room by his housekeeper. This was a small, dark apartment tucked into the back of the house, containing a dirty sink, an old-fashioned sterilizer heated with a spirit lamp like a coffee machine, and an examination couch covered with white American cloth that looked as uninviting to lie upon naked as a fishmonger’s slab. In one corner was a bookcase untidily filled with medical textbooks, mostly by Scottish authors and all out of date; in another stood a dusty pile of old copies of the
BMJ
and
Lancet
. I shook my head sadly. Looking round, I could see no haemoglobinometer, no erythrocyte-sedimentation-rate apparatus, no sphygomanometer, no microscope, no ophthalmoscope, no centrifuge, no auroscope, no patella hammer, no spatulae, no speculae, no proteinometer, no pipettes… It seemed to me impossible for anyone to practise medicine in the room at all.

Dr Farquharson turned out to be a tall, bony Scot with thick white hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and big nobbly hands. He was dressed in a pair of patched tweed trousers, a black alpaca jacket, a striped shirt, a wing collar, and a spotted bow tie.

‘Afternoon, Gordon,’ he said dryly, as though we had parted just an hour ago. ‘So you’ve come to help out an old fogy in the depths of the country, have you? How’s that rascal of a nephew of mine?’

‘He seems very well, sir.’

‘How the Good Lord ever let him qualify I don’t know. He hasn’t half a brain in his head, and the rest of his cerebral space is filled up with a mixture of laziness and lubricity. Let’s have a cup of tea.’

Tea was served under a mulberry tree in the garden by the housekeeper, whom Farquharson introduced as ‘Mrs Bloxage, who’s painstakingly kept my feet dry and my socks darned since my poor wife succumbed to
phthisis desperata
eighteen years ago.’ We had raspberries and cream, tomato and cress sandwiches, brown bread and honey, buttered toast and home made strawberry jam, scones and shortbread, and three kinds of cake. ‘One of the few advantages for an out-of-date old man like me practising medicine in the back of beyond,’ Farquharson continued, helping himself to more cream, ‘is that the patients still bring you a little something out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re simple souls, and haven’t tumbled to it that the doctor’s now a Civil Servant, like the Sanitary Engineer. What do you think of these raspberries?’

‘Delicious, sir.’

‘Aren’t they? Old Mrs Crockett’s varicose ulcer produces them year after year.’

When he had finished eating, Farquharson lit his pipe, pressed down the burning tobacco with a metal tongue spatula from his top pocket, and went on, ‘The work’s pretty easy round here, I suppose. There’s hardly enough for two, especially this time of the year. But I’m glad enough to have someone to yarn to – I’m a bit of an old bore, you know. I was out in West Africa a good deal of my life. I settled down here because I totted up the ages on the gravestones across the way, and averaged out that this village has the lowest death rate in the country. I find plenty to interest myself in the natural history of the countryside – which includes the inhabitants. And in a couple of years the Government’s going to chuck me out as too old and incompetent for anything except sitting on my backside and drawing my pension. God knows what I’ll do then. But I’m rusty all right. Can’t understand half the words in the
Lancet
these days.’ He slapped me on the knee. ‘You can put me right on all that, my lad. I suppose you know about these drugs they’re bringing out like editions of the evening papers? You must give me a lecture on ’em some time. I’m just an old fogy of a country GP.’ He pulled a large gold watch from his pocket. ‘I’m off to see a couple of patients before surgery. Settle in, and I’ll see you for supper.’

Supper was cold salmon (the squire’s gallstones), cream cheese (the postmistress’ backache), and to celebrate my arrival a glass of port (the vicar’s hernia). Farquharson chatted entertainingly enough about West Africa, neatly comparing his native and his present patients, but I realized that he was as out of place in modern medicine as a jar of leeches. There were clearly several points on which I should be putting him right.