Doctor in Clover (8 page)

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Miles.

‘Don’t you indeed?’ I replied, and produced a couple of identical gold cigarette cases from my pockets.

‘The only snag is knowing what to do with the things, my life never being organized to meet such a situation. I think I’ll reserve one for the hock shop, and have the other engraved “With Gratitude From a Successful Patient.” Then I can offer people cigarettes from it, and do my professional standing no end of good. Though I suppose I might as well have “With Gratitude from Her Royal Highness” while I’m about it, don’t you think?’

I’d left Long Wotton that morning to the touching distress of everybody, particularly the sub-postmistress, who burst into tears and gummed up all the threepenny stamps. Even the old uncle had congratulated me on handling the Nutbeams, and not only written a comfortable cheque as promised but given me a straw hat from Jamaica. Percy Nutbeam himself had smartly disappeared from the district, it was rumoured to sell cars in a Piccadilly showroom, and I’d half a mind to go along later and make faces through the plate-glass window.

It was a beautiful afternoon in the middle of Ascot week as I arrived in London, when even the chaps with placards announcing Doom is Nigh at the bottom of the Edgware Road looked as though the world wasn’t such a bad old place after all. I was sorry to find the only drab patch on the whole cheerful canvas of life was poor old Miles himself.

‘They’ve postponed the appointment at St Swithin’s for six months,’ he announced, not seeming really interested in cigarette cases. ‘The committee have invited Professor Kaiser from Kentucky to fill the gap with a clinical visit.’

‘Gloved hands across the sea, and all that?’

He snorted. ‘Not a bit of it! It’s nothing but a transparent ruse for everyone to organize their forces. My only encouragement is that Mr Longfellow from the Neurosurgical Department is now supporting me. Though, of course, he always opposes Sir Lancelot in everything.’

‘Because Sir Lancelot gave him out, umpiring the last Staff and Students cricket match.’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised at that.’ Miles stared gloomily at the print of Luke Fildes’
The Doctor
. ‘If only the patients knew what went on behind their backs!’

‘Why don’t you and Connie get away from it all and take a holiday?’ I suggested. ‘The yearly change of scene is essential for mental and bodily health – lesson one, social medicine.’

‘Nothing depresses me quite so much as packing.’

‘But the sunny shores of the Mediterranean–’

‘Only seem to give me the gut-rot.’

I’d thought of passing on Sir Lancelot’s advice. but the poor fellow looked so hopelessly miserable I said instead, ‘Don’t worry about me, old lad. I’ll do my bit by staying out of sight and out of trouble. At least for the next six months.’

‘You know, Gaston, you’re… you’re being rather decent about all this.’

‘Not at all. One of the family, good cause, and all that.’

‘I’m sincerely grateful to you. If can be any help in finding a new position–’

‘Not necessary, old lad. I have a scheme which will take me right out of everybody’s hair for a bit.’

‘You’re not emigrating?’ I thought his voice sounded a little too hopeful. ‘Apart from the oil company, I know the Secretary of the Commonwealth Resettlement Board pretty well at the club. He could easily fix you up somewhere like Australia or Canada.’

I shook my head. ‘Worthy places all, but I shall remain based on this blessed plot. What was it old Sir Lancelot used to tell us? “I know one-half of this country thinks it’s underpaid and the other half that it’s over-taxed, but believe me, gentlemen, it’s cheap at the price.” Anyway, my immediate future is taken care of in the homeland.’

‘Respectably, I trust?’

‘Very. But I must maintain strict professional secrecy about it at the moment.’

Miles looked surprised, but asked no more questions. We parted on such excellent terms I wished afterwards I’d thought of asking him for another ten quid.

I didn’t enlighten Miles that I was planning to write a book, because he would have told me it was a stupid notion, and I should have agreed with him. Though a good many other doctors seem to have had the same idea – Oliver Goldsmith, Smollett, Rabelais, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and so on. The thought had come to me in the uncle’s study at Long Wotton, where I’d been browsing to keep up with Lord Nutbeam’s conversation. Half-way through
The World’s Ten Great Novels
it struck me that a chap who could write the obituaries for the
Medical Observer
ought to be pretty good at producing convincing fiction.

The only snag was paying the rent while writing it, and I suppose the same problem worried Goldsmith and Smollett as well. But now I had the uncle’s cheque I could afford to take a small houseboat in Chelsea, if I managed to live largely on baked beans and benzedrine.

The next afternoon I’d an appointment with some publishers called Carboy and Plover in Bloomsbury, a district with high-class literary associations but now consisting of small hotels for drunk Scotsmen missing the night trains from King’s Cross.

‘A hospital story, eh? They’re generally sellers, at any rate,’ said Mr Carboy.

He was a fat chap in a tweed suit, whom I’d found sitting among photographs of his best-selling authors and prize-winning cattle reading the
Farmer and Stockbreeder
. But he was very civil, and gave me a cup of tea.

‘The drama of the operating theatre,’ murmured Plover, a thin, pale fellow on whom nothing seemed to grow very well – hair, moustache, bow-tie, all drooped like a sensitive plant after a thunderstorm,

‘I’ll have a go, then,’ I said. I felt the interview was more encouraging than the one you got on entering St Swithin’s, when they just told you the number of chaps they chucked out for slacking.

‘Have a go by all means, Doctor,’ agreed Carboy. ‘Just send us the manuscript when it’s finished. Can’t promise anything definite, of course. But we’ll certainly read it.’

‘Er – one small point–’

I didn’t want to raise sordid questions among such literary gents, but I went on, ‘I met an author chap once, who said publishers often made a small advance–’

‘We should be delighted, Doctor,’ said Carboy. ‘Absolutely delighted,’ agreed Plover. ‘Nothing gives a publisher greater pleasure than encouraging the young artist. Eh, Plover? But alas! The state of the book trade,’

‘Simply terrible just now,’ affirmed Plover, drooping further.

‘Quite indescribable.’

‘Bankruptcies weekly.’

‘Poor Hargreaves. Shot himself only yesterday.’

‘I’m not at all certain,’ ended Plover, ‘that I didn’t hear the crack of a pistol shot on my way to lunch.’

I left, wondering whether I should offer to pay for the tea.

In the absence of patronage from Carboy and Plover, I put one cigarette case up the spout, bought a second-hand typewriter and Roget’s
Thesaurus
, and settled down to work.

Being a medical student is jolly good training for becoming an author. In both occupations you have to sit at a desk for hours on end when you’d rather be out in the pubs, and to live on practically nothing. Though I must admit it was only late in the course that I developed this knack for the studious life. The old uncle had become even stickier with the money after a surprise visit to my new digs one evening, when the landlady answered his question, ‘Is this where Mr Grimsdyke lives?’ with, ‘That’s right, sir, bring ’im in and mind ’is poor ’ead on the doorstep.’

I also found that writing a book, like taking out an appendix, looks rather easier from the appearance of the finished product than it is. The snag in writing a book about hospitals is that everyone imagines the atmosphere inside resembles the closing stages of a six-day bicycle race, while the operating theatre is really a relaxed and friendly place, like a well-run garage. Also, the public thinks all surgeons are high-principled and handsome, though most of them are little fat men with old pyjamas under their operating gowns, mainly worried about getting the next hernia done in time to have a decent lunch. My hero, one Clifford Standforth,
FRCS
, was a brilliant, upright, serious young surgeon, and somehow he didn’t seem the sort of chap who’d last half an hour at St Swithin’s without getting his leg pulled by everyone down to the first-year students.

After a few weeks, with foolscap on the floor as thick as the snow on a Christmas card, I found myself like any other hermit in pressing need of a decent meal and some conversation, and I invited myself round to Miles’ flat for dinner. I thought I could finally pass on Sir Lancelot’s remarks about slapping chaps on the back a bit more, but I found the fellow in an even deeper condition of acute melancholia.

‘What’s up now?’ I asked. ‘Sir Lancelot still creating about that car park?’

‘Barefoot,’ Miles replied.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘He’s putting up for the job, too.’

‘Unfortunate,’ I agreed.

‘Everything’s against me,’ muttered Miles. ‘I thought the fellow had settled down for life as Reader in Surgery at West Riding.’

‘He’s your only serious rival, I suppose?’

‘As ever,’ agreed Miles bitterly. ‘You’ve never said a word, I suppose. Gaston? Not about the true story?’

I shook my head. ‘Not evens to Connie.’

‘Thank you, Gaston. I appreciate that deeply.’

I felt so unhappy for him I had to help myself to some of his whisky and soda. The Barefoot incident was the only shady part of old Miles’ rather sad salad days. Everyone at St Swithin’s thought it pretty mysterious at the time, the general rumour being that the poor chap had suffered a nervous breakdown following years of chronic overwork, which was highly gratifying to students like myself who believed in long periods of recuperation between exams.

It all happened just before Miles went up for his finals before either of us had yet run into Connie. Charlie Barefoot was a small, untidy pink chap who resembled a cherub in glasses, and the pair of them had met their first week in St Swithin’s, over that beastly dogfish.

‘I say, isn’t that Hume’s
Treatise on Human Nature
you have there?’ asked Miles, waiting for the class to start one morning.

Barefoot nodded. ‘I like to keep my mind occupied while I’m hanging about for anything – trains, haircuts, scholarship exams, and so on. But isn’t that Darwin’s
Origin of Species
?’

Miles said it was. ‘I thought it a useful start to one’s medical education.’

‘But I’ve been waiting for months to discuss Darwin’s views on natural selection!’

‘And I’ve been waiting for months to discuss Hume’s views on subjective idealism!’

After that they were great pals.

Medical students in the first year have hardly shaken the schoolroom chalk from their shoulders, but they soon learn to crowd the rear benches of the lecture-room so that unobtrusive exits might be made should the subject start to pall. Miles and Barefoot were always left with the front row to themselves, where they answered all the questions, took notes by the armful, and generally gave the impression intellectually of a pair of young Mozarts. At the end of the first year Miles won the Dean’s Prize in Biology, with Charlie Barefoot
proxime accessit
.

That got rid of the dogfish, by promotion from the medical kindergarden to the anatomy rooms. They shared the same leg.

‘Miles, I’ve got some capital news,’ Barefoot announced, as my cousin arrived one morning. ‘There’s a vacancy in my digs. Tony Benskin doesn’t want to stay any longer. I don’t know why, but he got quite shirty the other day, just because I wanted to discuss the popliteal fossa over breakfast. If you were thinking of making a change–’

‘I’ll give my landlady notice tonight,’ Miles replied at once. ‘My lodgings are really very difficult for studying in the evenings. Quite apart from the noise of Paddington Station, there are a couple of ladies on my landing who seem to have a tremendous succession of visitors.’

‘You’ll find it much more agreeable at Muswell Hill. Mrs Capper provides use of the parlour and lets us make cocoa as late as we like in the evening.’

Miles moved his books and bones across London, and from Monday to Friday every night afterwards the pair of them swotted at Mrs Capper’s parlour table. On Saturdays they went for a long walk in the country and took supper at Lyons’. In time, Miles won the Gold Medal in Anatomy, with Barefoot again runner-up.

By the time I’d shaken off the blasted dogfish myself, Miles and Barefoot were already at work in the St Swithin’s wards. Despite the standing impression of hospital inmates, medical students are let loose on live patients only after a couple of years of cutting up dead ones, and a pretty testing transition it is, too. A good many bright young anatomists I’ve seen floundering about among the dirty dressings and vomit bowls, and they say all the best surgeons were as hopeless at anatomy as all the best judges were at law. But even Sir Lancelot Spratt agreed it was simply a matter of time before Miles won the University Prize in Surgery, with Barefoot as usual panting a few marks behind.

Then a most unusual dislocation nobbled this pair of academic steeplechasers.

When I started in the hospital myself, I found that once you’d sorted out the odd sounds that come rumbling up a stethoscope the greatest difficulty in a medical ward is not making a diagnosis but making a bed. Hospital sisters regard the students as farmers regard their own unavoidable pests, and insist on all blankets being replaced complete with official hospital corners, which was totally beyond old Miles. He couldn’t examine a patient without leaving him like a finisher in a sack-race.

After inspecting a particularly tricky case of splenomegaly one evening, Miles was struggling to tuck back the foot of the bed without repeatedly folding his tie into it, when a voice behind him said softly, ‘If you let me do it, perhaps it would be easiest for both of us in the end?’

My cousin found a small, blonde junior nurse smiling at him.

‘Awfully decent of you,’ he stammered.