The Citadel (31 page)

It took them some time to reach Doctor Bigsby. They had to sit with their hats in two ante-rooms before gaining admission to the final chamber. But there was Doctor Bigsby, at last, thick-set and cordial, with a dark grey suit and darker grey spats, double-breasted waistcoat and a bustling efficiency.

‘Sit down, gentlemen. This report of yours, Manson. I’ve seen the draft and though it’s early to speak I must say I like the look of it. Highly scientific. Excellent graphing. That’s what we want in this department. Now as we’re out to standardise equipment in factories and mines you ought to know my views. First of all I see you recommend a three inch bandage as the major bandage of the specification. Now, I prefer the two and a half inch. You’ll agree there, won’t you?’

Andrew was irritated: it may have been the spats.

‘Personally, so far as the mines are concerned, I think the bigger the bandage the better. But I don’t think it makes a hell of a lot of difference!’

‘Eh? – what?’ Reddening behind the ears. ‘ No
difference
?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘But don’t you see – don’t you realise the whole principle of standardisation is involved. If we suggest two and a half inch and you recommend three inch there may be enormous difficulty.’

‘Then I’ll recommend three inch,’ Andrew said coolly.

Doctor Bigsby’s hackles rose, it was possible to see them rising.

‘Your attitude is difficult to understand. We’ve been working for years towards the two and a half inch bandage. Why – Don’t you know how much this
matters
…’

‘Yes, I know!’ Andrew equally lost his temper. ‘Have you ever been underground? I have. I’ve done a bloody operation, lying on my guts in a puddle of water, with one safety lamp and no head room. And I tell you straight any finicky half-inch difference in your bandage doesn’t matter a tinker’s curse.’

He passed out of the building more swiftly than he had entered, followed by Gill who wrung his hands, and lamented all the way to the Embankment.

When he got back Andrew stood in his room, sternly regarding the traffic on the river, and bustling streets, the buses running, trams clanging over bridges, the movement of human people, all the pulsing, vivid flow of life. ‘I don’t belong to this outfit in here,’ he thought with a surge of impatience. ‘I should be out there – out there!’

Abbey had given up attending the Board meetings. And Challis had disheartened him, even to the point of panic, by taking him to lunch the week before and warning him that Whinney was lobbying hard, would try to put him on to his muscular fatigue investigation before the silicosis question was touched. Andrew reflected, with a despairing pretence at humour: ‘If
that
happens, on top of the bandages, I might as well take a reader’s ticket for the British Museum.’

Walking home from the Embankment he found himself peering enviously at the brass plates bolted on area railings outside the houses of doctors. He would stop, watch a patient mount to the door, ring the bell, be admitted – then, walking moodily on, he would visualise the ensuing scene, the interrogations, the swift production of stethoscope, the whole thrilling science of diagnosis. He was a doctor, too, wasn’t he? At least, once upon a time …

Towards the end of May, in this frame of mind, he was walking up Oakley Street about five in the evening when he suddenly saw a crowd of people gathered round a man lying on the pavement. In the gutter alongside was a shattered bicycle and, almost on top of it, a drunkenly arrested motor lorry.

Five seconds later Andrew was in the middle of the crowd, observing the injured man who, attended by a kneeling policeman, was bleeding from a deep wound in the groin.

‘Here! Let me through. I’m a doctor.’

The policeman, striving unsuccessfully to fix a tourniquet, turned a flustered face.

‘I can’t stop the bleeding, doctor. It’s too high up.’

Andrew saw that it was impossible to tourniquet. The wound was too high up in the iliac vessel and the man was bleeding to death.

‘Get up,’ he said to the policeman. ‘ Put him flat on his back.’ Then making his right arm rigid, he leant over and thrust his fist hard into the man’s belly over the descending aorta. The whole weight of his body, thus transmitted to the great vessel, immediately arrested the haemorrhage. The policeman removed his helmet and wiped his forehead. Five minutes later the ambulance arrived. Andrew went with it.

Next morning Andrew rang up the hospital. The house surgeon answered brusquely after the fashion of his kind:

‘Yes, yes, he’s comfortable. Doing well. Who wants to know?’

‘Oh,’ mumbled Andrew from the public phone box. ‘Nobody.’

And that, he thought bitterly, was exactly what he was: nobody, doing nothing, getting nowhere. He endured it till the end of the week then quietly, without fuss, he handed in his resignation to Gill for transmission to the Board.

Gill was upset, yet admitted that a premonition of this sad event had troubled him. He made a neat little speech which concluded:

‘After all, my dear fellow, I have realised that your place is – well, if I may borrow a wartime comparison – not at the base but – er in the front line with the – er – troops.’

Hope said:

‘Don’t listen to the rose-cultivating penguin fancier! You’re lucky. And I’ll be after you if I keep my reason – as soon as my three years are up!’

Andrew heard nothing about the Board’s activities on the question of dust inhalation until months later when Lord Ungar raised the question dramatically in the House, quoting freely from medical evidence afforded him by Doctor Maurice Gadsby.

Gadsby was acclaimed by the Press as a Humanitarian and a Great Physician. And Silicosis was, in that year, scheduled as an industrial disease.

They began their search for a practice. It was a jagged business – wild peaks of expectation followed by wilder plunges of despair. Stung by a consciousness of three successive failures – at least so he construed his departures from Drineffy, Aberalaw and the MFB – Andrew longed to vindicate himself at last. But their total capital, increased by stringent saving during the last months of salaried security, was no more than six hundred pounds. Though they haunted the medical agencies and reached for every opportunity offered in the columns of the
Lancet
it appeared that this sum was scarcely adequate as purchase money for a London practice.

They never forgot their first interview. Doctor Brent, of Cadogan Gardens, was retiring, and he offered a nice nucleus suitable for a well-qualified gentleman. It seemed, on the face of it, an admirable chance. An extravagant taxi, for fear that someone speedier might snatch the plum, rushed them to Doctor Brent whom they found to be a white haired, pleasant, almost demure little man.

‘Yes,’ Doctor Brent said modestly. ‘It’s a pretty good pitch. Nice house too. I want only seven thousand pounds for the lease. There’s forty years to run and the ground rent’s only three hundred a year. As to the practice – I thought the usual – two years’ premium for cash, eh, Doctor Manson?’

‘Quite!’ Andrew nodded gravely. ‘You’d give a long introduction, too? Thank you, Doctor Brent. We’ll consider it.’

They considered it over threepenny cups of tea in the Brompton Road Lyons.

‘Seven thousand – for the lease!’ Andrew gave a short laugh. He thrust his hat back from his corrugated brow, stuck his elbows on the marble table. ‘ It’s pretty damnable, Chris! The way these old fellows hang on with their back teeth. And you can’t prise them loose unless you’ve got money. Isn’t that an indictment of our system! But rotten as it is, I’ll accept it. You wait! I’m going to attend to this money question from now on.’

‘I hope not,’ she smiled. ‘ We’ve been moderately happy without it.’

He grunted. ‘ You won’t say that when we start to sing in the street. Check, miss, please.’

Because of his MD, MRCP, he wanted a non-panel, non-dispensing practice. He wanted to be free of the tyranny of the card system. But as the weeks went on he wanted anything, anything that offered him a chance. He inspected practices in Tulse Hill, Islington and Brixton and one – the surgery had a hole in the roof – in Camden Town. He got the length of debating with Hope – who assured him that on his capital it was suicide – the plan of taking a house and setting out his plate on chance.

And then, after two months, when they had reached the point of desperation, all at once Heaven relented and allowed old Doctor Foy to die, painlessly, in Paddington. Doctor Foy’s obituary notice, four lines in the
Medical Journal
, caught Andrew’s eye. They went, their enthusiasm all spent, to No 9 Chesborough Terrace. They saw the house, a tall, leaden hued sepulchre with a surgery at the side and a brick garage behind. They saw the books which indicated that Doctor Foy had made perhaps £500 a year, mainly from consultations, with medicine, at the rate of 3s 6d. They saw the widow, who assured them timidly that Doctor Foy’s practice was sound and had once been excellent with many ‘good patients’ coming to the ‘front door’. They thanked her and left without enthusiasm.

‘And yet I don’t know,’ Andrew worried. ‘It’s full of disadvantages. I hate the dispensing. It’s a baddish locality. D’you notice all these moth-eaten boarding-houses next door. But it’s on the
fringe
of a decent neighbourhood. And a corner situation. And a main street. And near enough our price. One and a half years’ purchase – and it was decent of her to say she’d flung in the old man’s consulting-room and surgery furniture as well – and all ready to step into – that’s the advantage of a death vacancy. What do you say, Chris? It’s now or never. Shall we chance it?’

Christine’s eyes rested upon him doubtfully. For her the novelty of London had worn off. She loved the country and now, in these drab surroundings, she longed for it with all her heart. Yet he was so set upon a London practice she could not bring herself to try, even, to persuade him from it. She nodded slowly.

‘If you want to, Andrew.’

The next day he offered Mrs Foy’s solicitors £600 in place of the £750 demanded. The offer was accepted, the cheque written. On Saturday the 10th of October they moved their furniture from storage and entered into possession of their new home.

It was Sunday before they collected themselves from the frantic eruption of straw and sacking and wondered shakily how they stood. Andrew took advantage of the moment to launch one of those lectures, rare yet odious, which made him sound like a deacon of a nonconformist chapel.

‘We are properly up against it here, Chris. We’ve paid out every stiver we’ve got. We’ve got to live on what we earn. Heaven only knows what that’ll be. But we’ve got to do it. You’ve got to spruce things up, Chris, economise –’

To his dismay she burst into tears, standing palely there in the large, gloomy, dirty-ceilinged, and as yet uncarpeted, front room.

‘For mercy’s sake!’ she sobbed. ‘Leave me alone. Economise. Don’t I always economise for you? Do I cost you
anything
?’

‘Chris!’ he exclaimed aghast.

She flung herself frantically against him. ‘It’s this house! I didn’t realise. That basement, the stairs, the
dirt
–’

‘But hang it all, it’s the practice that really matters!’

‘We might have had a little country practice, somewhere.’

‘Yes! With roses round the cottage door. Damn it all –’

In the end he apologised for his sermon. Then they went, his arm still round her waist, to fry eggs in the condemned basement. There he tried to cheer her by pretending that it was not a basement but a section of the Paddington Tunnel through which trains would at any minute pass. She smiled wanly at his attempted humour, but she was in reality looking at the broken scullery sink.

Next morning, at nine o’clock sharp – he decided he must not be early or they would think him too eager! – he opened his surgery. His heart was beating with excitement and a greater, far greater expectation than on that almost forgotten morning when he took the first surgery of all at Drineffy.

Half past nine came. He waited anxiously. Since the little surgery, which had its own door to the side street, was attached by a short passage to the house, he could equally control his consulting-room – the main room on the ground floor, not badly equipped with Doctor Foy’s desk, a couch, and a cabinet – to which the ‘good’ patients, by Mrs Foy’s account, were admitted through the front door of the house. He had, in fact, a double net cast out. Tense as any fisherman he waited for what that double cast might bring.

Yet it brought nothing, nothing! It was nearly eleven o’clock now and still no patient had arrived. The group of taxi drivers standing by their cabs at the rank opposite talked equably together. His plate shone on the door, beneath Doctor Foy’s old battered one.

Suddenly, when he had almost abandoned hope, the bell on the surgery door tinkled sharply and an old woman in a shawl came in. Chronic bronchitis – he saw it, before she spoke, in every rheumy wheeze. Tenderly, tenderly he seated and sounded her. She was an old patient of Doctor Foy’s. He talked to her. In the tiny cubby-hole of a dispensary, a mere lair halfway down the passage between surgery and consulting-room, he made up her physic. He returned with it. And then, without question, as he prepared, tremblingly, to ask her for it, she handed him the fee, three and six.

The thrill of that moment, the joy, the sheer relief of these silver coins, there, in the palm of his hand was unbelievable. It felt like the first money he had ever earned in his life. He closed the surgery, ran to Christine, thrust the coins upon her.

‘First patient, Chris. It mightn’t be a bad old practice after all. Anyhow, this buys us our lunch!’

He had no visits to make, for the old doctor had been dead nearly three weeks now, and no locum had kept the practice going in the interval. He must wait till the calls came in. Meanwhile, aware from her mood that Christine wished to wrestle with her domestic worries in solitude, he occupied the forenoon by walking round the district, prospecting, viewing the peeling houses, the long succession of drab, private hotels, the sooted, grimly arborescent squares, the narrow mews converted into garages, then, at a sudden turn of North Street, a squalid patch of slum – pawnshops, hawkers’ barrows, pubs, shop windows showing patent medicines, devices in gaudy rubber.