Doctor in the House (4 page)

‘Well done,’ said Grimsdyke, as I was changing. ‘You and that Benskin fellow shaped pretty well. You must both be horribly healthy. With any luck you might make the third fifteen before the season’s out.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Now get a move on. It’s after five and we don’t want to waste time.’

‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked.

Grimsdyke looked at me with amazement.

‘Why, they open at five-thirty! We’ll just make the King George, if we step on it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But I think I ought to go back to my digs…’

‘On Saturday night! Good Lord, old boy, that’s not done at all! Hurry up and put your trousers on.’

Afraid of social errors in this new way of living, I obeyed. We arrived outside the King George as the Padre was opening the doors. Both teams pushed into the small saloon bar while a line of glass tankards clinked temptingly on the counter. Everyone was in a good humour, pleasantly tired and bathed. We were laughing and joking and clapping each other on the shoulder.

‘Here you are,’ Grimsdyke said, pushing a pint into my hand. ‘There’ll be a five-bob kitty.’

I handed over two half-crowns, thinking it was a great deal to spend on beer in one evening.

‘Drink up!’ Grimsdyke said a few minutes later. ‘I’m just getting another round.’

Not wishing to appear unusual, I emptied the glass. A fresh one was immediately put into my fingers, but I timidly held it untouched for a while.

‘You’re slow,’ said Benskin jovially, bumping into me. ‘There’s bags more left in the kitty.’

I took a quick gulp. I suddenly made the discovery that beer tasted most agreeable. The men round me were downing it with impunity, so why shouldn’t I? I swallowed a large draught with a flourish.

With the third pint a strange sensation swept over me. I felt terribly pleased with myself. Damn it! I thought. I can drink with the best of them! Someone started on the piano and Benskin began to sing. I didn’t know any of the words, but I joined in the choruses with the rest.

‘Your drink, Mr Gordon,’ said the Padre, handing me another tankard.

I downed the fourth glass eagerly. But I felt the party had become confused. The faces and lights blurred into one another and the voices inexplicably came sometimes from far away, sometimes right in my ear. Snatches of song floated into my brain like weed on a sluggish sea.

‘
Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon
,’ Benskin chanted.

‘
Virgin sturgeon
,
very fine fish
.

’
Virgin sturgeon needs no urgin’

’
That’s why caviar’s a very rare dish.’

I wedged myself against the bar for support. Someone next to me was telling a funny story to two men and their laughter sounded far off and eerie, like the three witches’.

‘
That pair of red plush breeches

’
That pair of red plush breeches,’

came from the piano corner.

‘
That pair of red plush bre-e-e-eches

’
That kept John Thomas warm.’

‘Are you feeling all right?’ a voice said in my ear.

I mumbled something.

‘What’s that, old man?’

‘Bit sick,’ I confessed briefly.

‘Hold on a moment. I’ll take you back to your digs. Where’s he live, Benskin? Help me to get him in the car someone. Oh, and bring something along in case he vomits.’

The next morning Grimsdyke came round to my lodgings.

‘How is it?’ he asked cheerily.

‘I feel awfully ill.’

‘Simply a case of hangover vulgaris, old boy. I assure you the prognosis is excellent. Here’s half a grain of codeine.’

‘What happened to me?’ I asked.

Grimsdyke grinned.

‘Let’s say you’ve been blooded,’ he said.

Even medical students must have somewhere to live. The problem of finding suitable accommodation is difficult because they are always disinclined to spend on mere food and shelter money that would do equally well for beer and tobacco. And they are not, as a rule, popular lodgers. They always sit up late, they come in drunk on Saturdays, and they have queer things in bottles in their bedrooms. On the other hand, there are a small number of landladies who think it a privilege to entertain a prospective doctor under their roof. The connection with the profession raises their social standing in the street, and the young gentlemen can always be consulted over the dinner table on the strictly private illnesses to which landladies seem distressingly liable.

I started off in lodgings in Finchley, which were clean, fairly cheap, and comfortable. The landlady had a daughter, a tall, blank-faced brunette of nineteen, an usherette at the local Odeon. One evening after I had been there about six weeks she tapped at my bedroom door.

‘Are you in bed?’ she asked anxiously.

‘No,’ I called through the door. ‘I’m studying. What is it?’

‘It’s me foot,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve sprained it or something. Will you have a look at it for me?’

‘In the kitchen,’ I replied guardedly. ‘Take your stocking off and I’ll be down in a minute.’

The following week she developed a pain in the calf, and the one after stiffness of the knee. When she knocked on the door and complained of a bad hip I gave notice.

I moved into a top-floor room of a lodging-house near Paddington Station. Its residents represented so many nationalities the directions for working its tricky and uncertain lavatories had to be set up in four different languages, as in the Continental expresses. There was another medical student there, a man from St Mary’s who kept tropical fish in a tank in his bedroom and practised Yoga.

As I had to take all my meals out I saw little of the other lodgers except when they passed on the stairs and said ‘Excuse me’ in bad English. In the room next to mine was a stout young blonde, but she lived very quietly and never disturbed anyone. One morning she was found strangled in Hyde Park, and after that I thought I ought to move again.

For the following twelve months I lived in a succession of boarding houses. They were all the same. They had a curly hat-stand in the hall, a red stair-carpet worn grey in the middle, and a suspicious landlady. By the time I reached the end of the anatomy course I was tired of the smell of floor-polish, damp umbrellas, and frying; when I was offered a share in a flat in Bayswater I was so delighted I packed up and moved without even waiting to work out the week’s rent.

The share was awarded to me through the good offices of Tony Benskin, who lived there with four other students. There was John Bottle, the man who liked dancing and dogs; Mike Kelly, now Captain of the first fifteen; and a youth known about the hospital as Moronic Maurice, who had surprised the teaching staff and himself by finally passing his qualifying exams, and had gone off to practise the art, to the publicly expressed horror of the Dean, as house-surgeon to a small hospital in the country.

These four were really sub-tenants. The flat was leased by a final-year student, a pleasant fellow called Archie Broome, who had lived there during most of his time at St Swithin’s and took his friends as lodgers to help out with the rent.

‘We’re pretty free and easy there,’ he explained to me in the King George. ‘I hope you’re not terribly particular about the time you have your meals or go to bed and that sort of thing?’

As I had found unpunctuality for meals was taken by landladies as a personal outrage and sitting up to midnight regarded as sinful, I told my prospective landlord warmly I didn’t give a damn for such formalities.

‘That’s good,’ Archie said. ‘We usually kick in together for the groceries and beer and so forth, if that’s all right with you. Here’s the key, and you can move in when you like.’

I shifted the following afternoon. The flat was in a large, old, grimy block just by the Park, up a dark flight of stairs. I dropped my suitcases on the landing outside the door and fumbled for the key. While I was doing so the door opened.

Standing in the hallway was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was a tall blonde with a figure like a model in a dress-shop window. She wore slacks and a sweater, which sharply defined her slight curves. Taking her cigarette out with a long graceful hand, she said with great friendliness, ‘Hello, Richard. Come on in and make yourself at home.’

‘I’m afraid…’ I began. ‘I mean, I was looking for a fellow called Broome, you know…’

‘That’s right,’ she said. She had a slight, attractive, and unplaceable accent. ‘The boys are all at the hospital at the moment, but just come in anyway. Would you like a cup of tea? My name’s Vera.’

‘How do you do,’ I said politely. I picked up my cases and entered hesitantly. After conditioning myself to living with four coarse men being greeted by a delicate girl was puzzling.

‘This is the sitting-room,’ Vera continued. ‘How about the tea?’

‘No thanks. Very kind of you, but I’ve had some.’

‘That’s good, because I’ve got to go and change anyway. If you do want anything the kitchen’s through there. Just look round as you please.’

The girl slipped through a door leading off the hall, leaving me in the centre of the sitting-room feeling like a participant in the opening scene of a bedroom farce. I had learnt since being at St Swithin’s that the best way to treat anything unusual was to ignore it, so I directed attention towards my new home.

The furniture in the sitting-room had an original touch which reflected the profession of the occupants. Like Axel Munthe’s room in the Hôtel de l’Avenir, there were books everywhere. A row of them stood along the mantelpiece, from which the names of distinguished consultants could stare at the students in gold lettering from red and black bindings, rebuking their loose activities like a row of church elders. In the window an uneven line of thick volumes ran along the ledge like battlements. There were books on the floor, dropped carelessly behind chairs or lost between pieces of furniture and the wall. They were scattered over the table like litter on a beach, mixed up with jam-pots, pieces of bread, tobacco, newspapers, and beer bottles. There was Price’s famous
Medicine
, four inches thick, with two thousand pages that told you about everything from measles to leprosy, from sore throat to heart failure (it was also useful for propping open windows in summer and supporting a reading lamp); there were books on diabetes, appendicitis, bacteria, and bones; books full of photographs of skin diseases, rashes, or broken limbs; heavy dull books on pathology from Scotland, with no more than a bare picture or two of a growth or an ulcer to interrupt their closely-packed print; books on obstetrics with line drawings of nonchalant babies being recovered from disquieting predicaments; and scattered among them all like their young were the thin little brown volumes of the Students Aid series – an invaluable collection of synopses that students fall back on, like compressed emergency rations, when faced with imminent defeat by the examiners. All this knowledge – all this work, experience and advice from so many experts – all the medical instruction in the world was concentrated into a few square feet. It was ours for the taking, if only we had ever sat down and started reading.

A microscope stood in the corner, conveniently tilted to take the eye, with an open wooden box of glass slides beside it. The articulated bones of a hand lay on the table, mixed up with everything else. From the top of a cupboard in one corner a skull grinned down and provided a stand for a green hat with white cord round it that Benskin was sometimes moved to wear.

As well as this academic litter the room contained pieces of sports kit – rugger boots, woollen socks, a couple of cricket bats, and a dartboard on splintered plywood backing. The occupants’ leisure activities were also represented by a collection of signs, notices, and minor pieces of civic decoration that had from time to time been immorally carried off as trophies. It was a bad habit of St Swithin’s rugby team when playing away from home to pick up souvenirs of their visit before leaving, and in the course of seasons these had grown to a sizeable collection. There was a thirty-miles-limit sign in the corner and an orange beacon next to the skull on the cupboard. From a hook in the wall hung a policeman’s helmet with the badge of the Cornwall Constabulary that had been carried off in a burst of vandalism at the end of a successful tour of the West Country. Below it a framed notice declared that the passing of betting slips was illegal, and on the opposite wall a board announcing the opening and closing times of the park. I discovered a little later that the bathroom door bore a metal notice saying ‘Nurses Only,’ and inside, at the appropriate place, was a small printed request not to use the adjacent apparatus while the train was standing at a station.

My inspection was interrupted by the reappearance of Vera. She was in her stockinged feet and wore only a skirt and a brassière which she was holding on with her hands.

‘Richard, please do my bra up for me,’ she asked. ‘This damn fastener’s gone wrong.’

She turned her slender shoulders.

‘Thanks so much,’ she said casually. She strolled back into her room and shut the door. I shrugged my shoulders and decided the only thing was to wait until the male members of the household arrived and guardedly discover Vera’s precise function.

Vera, it turned out, was Archie’s mistress. She was an Austrian girl, with an ensnaring personality and the ability to conduct herself towards her four sub-tenants with such graceful, impartial sisterliness that none of us would have thought of making advances towards her more than we could have contemplated committing incest. Besides, she did all the cooking and most of the little feminine odd jobs about the flat. This was appreciated as highly as her decorative qualities, for our own abilities in the kitchen did not go beyond baked beans and we were able to mend socks only by running a surgical purse-string suture round the hole and pulling it tight. Floor-scrubbing, fire-making, and the coarser domestic tasks were done by the men on a rough rota; but it was Vera who thought of buying a new shade for the lamp, ordering the coal, or telling one of us it was time to change his collar or have his hair cut.

Vera unfortunately had a bad habit of periodically upsetting the smooth running of the place by having sudden fierce quarrels with Archie which always ended by her packing up and leaving. Where she went to in these absences none of us knew. She had no relatives and no money, and Archie was so horrified at his own suspicion of how she maintained herself while she was away that he never dared to ask her outright. The flat would become untidy and unscrubbed. The boiler would go out for lack of coal, and the five of us would nightly sit down to a progressively repellent supper of orange-coloured beans. In a week or so she would reappear, as beautiful, as graceful, as sisterly as ever, throw herself into an orgy of reconciliation with Archie, and continue her household duties as if nothing had happened.

I floated contentedly into the drift of life in the flat. My companions treated the timetable of domestic life with contempt. They took meals when they were hungry, and if they felt like it sat up all night. Archie lived with Vera in a bed-sitting-room, and as they were an uninhibited couple this afforded them sufficient privacy. His guests had the run of the rest of the place. We all shared the bathroom and, as we had to put shillings in the geyser, quite often the bath water as well. It was in connection with the bathroom that Vera became her most sisterly. She would walk in and start cleaning her teeth unruffled by a hairy male in the bath attempting to retain his modesty with the loofah. Although we were all far too gentlemanly knowingly to intrude while she was in the bath herself she was never worried by anyone bursting in. ‘After all,’ she would say flatteringly, ‘you are all doctors.’

I felt I was living the true liberal life and developing my intellect, which were excuses for not settling down to the more concrete problems set by my text-books. The thought of the anatomy exam nevertheless hung over me uncomfortably, like the prospect of the eventual bill to a guest enjoying himself at a good hotel. One evening we discovered with a shock that the contest was only a month away, which gave Benskin and myself no alternative than cramming. We opened our text-books and drew a deep breath of knowledge, which we hoped we could hold until the examination was over. It was the worst time we could have chosen to start work. Mike Kelly had decided to learn the clarinet. Archie’s landlord was trying to raise the rent, and Vera had disappeared again. On this occasion she never returned, and by the time the exam was held I was as miserable as her lover.