Doctor in Love (12 page)

“Wonderful thing, modern surgery,” Dr Farquarson told me, as I found him sitting up in excellent shape, cleaning his pipe with one of the hospital’s throat-swabs. “When they took my appendix out somewhere in the Highlands they stifled me with chloroform and handed me a bucket automatically when I came round. Here a charming young feller came in and pricked me with a needle, and the next thing I knew I was back in bed asking the lass where my teeth were. Now they say I can think about starting work again in a couple of weeks.”

“A couple of weeks!” I said, aghast.

“Yes, and that’s not soon enough for me. They don’t take long to get you on your feet after surgery these days. It’s all the vogue, I hear, to get the patient to push his own trolley back to the ward.”

“But a fortnight!” I exclaimed. “That’s hardly any time at all. After a serious operation –”

“Oh, in Bobbie Cufford’s hands it isn’t at all serious.”

“I mean…well, you never know what complications might ensue – fractured vertebrae, meningitis, all kinds of things. I really think you ought to have a rest, Farquy. How about a long sea voyage in the sunshine?”

I became aware that he, too, was looking at me strangely.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said. “How’s this young lady locum getting on?”

“Oh, her? Very well, I think. I don’t see much of her outside surgery hours, of course. She seems very competent.”

“Well, Richard my lad, I’ll stay an invalid as long as possible. Though even for you I’m not going to stand more than a couple of weeks with my married sister in Swanage.”

Until then I had somehow overlooked that Dr Farquarson was coming back to the practice at all. Perhaps it was the prospect of his return which made me propose to Nikki that evening. Or perhaps it just happened spontaneously. Few amorous young men sit down and think out a speech and look round for a likely spot to lay their bended knee. Most of them happen to be sitting with a girl in the back of a cinema or the top of a bus, and in a couple of seconds somehow find themselves bound to her for life.

I found Nikki alone in the surgery, repacking our midwifery bag from the sterilizer. She was surprised to see me.

“You
are
back early, Richard. But everything’s very quiet. Mrs Horrocks popped at lunchtime, without any trouble. Another boy, but she doesn’t seem to mind.”

“Nikki,” I said. “Nikki, I…that is, you see, I…”

“Are you all right, Richard?” She suddenly looked concerned. “You seem rather flushed. Are you sure you haven’t got a temperature?”

“I’m in wonderful shape, Nikki. Never felt better in my life. Absolutely terrific form. Nikki, you see, I –”

“Ah, I know.” She smiled. “I’d forgotten you were meeting your old friend. I should have spotted the symptoms.”

“Honestly, Nikki, I’ve hardly touched a drop,” I protested. “I may be drunk, but not with alcohol. You see, Nikki, I really must –”

“Oh, these X-rays arrived from the hospital this morning. They’re Mrs Tadwich’s oesophagus.”

“Nikki!” I said firmly, grabbing the brown-paper packet.

She looked startled. My nerve failed me.

“Yes, Richard?”

“I love you,” I said, as though mentioning that it was raining outside.

There was a silence. Nikki suddenly looked very solemn. We both dropped our eyes and stared at the floor.

“Do you…do you mind?” I asked timidly.

She shook her head. “I’m terribly, terribly touched,” she whispered.

“Would you…would you think of marrying me?” For a few seconds there was another silence, broken only by the sound of the surgery refrigerator going through one of its periodical attacks of ague.

She looked up. ‘That’s really a very serious question, Richard.”

“I know it’s serious, Nikki. Terribly serious. But…well…”

I began to have the same unpleasant feelings I experienced at the end of my viva in the Primary: things weren’t going quite as swimmingly as I expected.

“You see, there’s a lot of things,” she went on.

“What sort of things?”

“Well…there’s my Fellowship, for instance.”

“Your Fellowship?”

“You may think me stupid, Richard, or heartless, or both. But I swore I’d never marry…or even fall in love…until I’d passed it. I’m a bit obsessional, I suppose. But you know what you hear – women wasting everyone’s time, going in for medicine and then going off and getting married. I was determined no one could say that about me. But I’m terribly, terribly fond of you, Richard. Do you think me an ungrateful fool? I expect you do. I suppose I’m just a pig-headed little girl underneath.”

“No, not at all,” I said. There was nothing for it but to be as brave as possible. “I think you’re perfectly right. Absolutely, Nikki. I had exactly the same feelings about the Fellowship myself once. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have had the nerve to raise the subject at all.”

We talked a good deal after that. Then I kissed her good night and drove slowly back to my digs. I played cribbage with Mr Walters till midnight and I knocked over two more china ornaments.

“Had a row?” asked Kitten Strudwick a few days later.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You two. Lovers’ tiff, I suppose?”

“Miss Strudwick, I am at a loss to know what you’re talking about.”

“Go on with you! Why, the way you’ve been avoiding each other since Monday anyone would think you was both incubating the measles.”

“My relationship with Dr Barrington, if that is what you’re referring to, Miss Strudwick, is strictly and completely professional. I do wish you wouldn’t try and invent romance where it doesn’t exist. I’m afraid you’ve been reading too many of the waiting-room magazines.”

“Don’t worry, dearie,” she said cheerfully. “It’ll all come right in the end.”

The week had been a miserable one. I didn’t visit Nikki in her flat. I didn’t take her out to dinner. I saw her only briefly in the surgery, and I spoke to her only formally about medicine. I was short with Miss Strudwick, morose with the patients, forgetful with myself, and I developed a tendency to stare out of the window for long spells at a time. I suppose failure doesn’t cross the mind of a young man starting a proposal any more than it occurs to a young man starting a fight, or he wouldn’t embark on either. Now I realized in my periods of painful introspection gazing into the street how absurd it was for such a Caliban as myself to ask Nikki, or even any other girl, to marry him. I was simply the unmarriageable type, condemned to spend the rest of my life in digs, probably playing cribbage with Mr Walters until both of us joined Miss Ashworth’s floating band of non-paying guests.

“I dunno,” said Kitten Strudwick, interrupting one of my bouts of window-staring a few days later. “Why don’t you give her a whopping great kiss and be done with it?”

“Miss Strudwick,” I said resignedly. “I cannot try and hide the situation from you any longer. I appreciate sincerely the kind motives behind your advice, but I have to remind you that we’re not all playing in the pictures. In real life that sort of thing isn’t done. Besides,” I added, “it wouldn’t work.”

“It would work all right with me, I can tell you.”

“Possibly. But not with…other people.”

“Oh, don’t you be so sure. All girls are the same underneath. Look at all them kings and queens you read about in
Everybody’s
.”

“You would spare my feelings, Miss Strudwick, if you began to realize – as I do – that Dr Barrington wishes to have nothing whatever to do with me outside our mutual professional interests.”

“Go on with you! Why the poor girl’s eating her heart out. I’ve just been talking to her.”

“What?” I asked in horror. “You mean you’ve actually been discussing me with her?”

“‘Course I have, dear. In a roundabout sort of way, mind you. But a girl’s got to get it off her chest to someone, hasn’t she? Even if it’s only to yours truly.”

“I think perhaps you’d better get the next patient in, Miss Strudwick.”

“Okeydoke. Don’t forget what I said, though.”

It happened that evening Nikki and I found ourselves together for the first time in several days, through Miss Strudwick abruptly leaving us alone in the surgery.

“How’s the work going?” I asked as breezily as possible.

“Work?” She looked up from an intense search through the filing cabinet.

“For the Fellowship.”

“Oh, quite well. Quite well, thank you.”

“Difficult exam, of course, the Fellowship.”

“Yes, it is. Very.”

“Only ten per cent pass, so they say.”

“So they say.”

I fiddled with an ampoule of penicillin.

“I expect we’ll see each other before you go next week,” I said. “To say good-bye, I mean.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I expect we will.”

At the door she hesitated. “Richard –”

“Yes?”

“I – er, talking of the Fellowship, I’m having a bit of trouble trying to learn up my pathology. You used to be a pathologist at St Swithin’s, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Could you possibly spare a moment some time before I go – just to come up and run through some blood slides?”

I felt the least I could do after forcing my attentions on the girl was to teach her a little pathology.

“Of course. I’ll do anything to help, Nikki. I’ll bring up my microscope tonight.”

There are few situations leading to such intimacy between a man and a woman as sharing the same microscope. You have to sit close together, with your heads touching as you take turns to look down the eyepiece, and your fingers keep getting mixed altering the focusing screws. It happened as unexpectedly as a sneeze. We were calmly discussing the pathology of pernicious anaemia and I was pointing out the large number of megaloblasts at the other end of the instrument, when I looked up and said, “Oh, Nikki!” and she said, “Oh, Richard!” and she was suddenly in my arms and I was kissing her wildly and we were going to be married.

Nikki and I, like several million others, decided on a “quiet” wedding. But there is as little chance of planning a quiet wedding as planning a quiet battle: too many people are involved, all with conflicting interests. To the bride, the event seems mainly an excuse for the uninhibited buying of clothes; to the groom, the most complicated way of starting a holiday yet devised. The bride’s friends see it as a social outing with attractive emotional trimmings, and the bridegroom’s as the chance of a free booze-up. The relatives are delighted at the opportunity to put on their best hats and see how old all the others are looking, and to the parents it comes as a hurricane in the placid waters of middle-age.

It is a shock to any young man when he realizes that his fiancée has parents. I had always seen Nikki as a single star out-glittering the firmament, and it was strange to think that she belonged to a family like everyone else. But my first duty as a betrothed man was to meet them, and this was arranged for teatime the following Saturday on the polite excuse of my coming to ask her father’s permission to propose.

“I’m terribly sorry to shoot off so soon after you’re back at work,” I apologized to Dr Farquarson before I left Hampden Cross. He had taken my original breathless news with disappointing calmness. But he was the sort of man who on hearing the Last Trump will only demand who’s making that horrible din.

“So you’re off to be inspected, then?” He gave a quiver of the eyebrows. “Well, I can think of pleasanter ways to spend a Saturday afternoon, to be sure. I remember when I first faced the parents of my own poor dear wife. She was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister with views. I’d only one suit at the time and I’d just got in from a midwifery case, so I reeked to high heaven of chloroform. Her father had hardly opened the door before he accused me of being at the bottle. I told him that if a man couldn’t distinguish the smell of whisky he wasn’t fit to preach to Scots parishioners. After that we got along excellently.”

I laughed. “I expect I shall drop my tea on the best carpet and trip over the cat and give all the wrong opinions on her father’s pet subjects.”

“Och, it’ll be no worse than your surgery finals. Don’t fash yourself.”

Nikki had now left the practice, and I was meeting her for lunch in the West End before driving out to her parents’ home at Richmond. Once I saw her again all thoughts of my coming teatime ordeal flashed away. We drove over Kew Bridge in tremendous spirits, our conversation running largely to “Is my little bunny-wunny quite comfy-wumfy?” “Of course your little bunny-wunny’s quite comfy-wumfy if my big bunny-wunny is,” which proves that everyone becomes slightly unhinged at such times in their lives.

The Barringtons lived in a pleasant white house by the River, and as I stopped in the short drive the door was flung open by a pink-faced young man of about eighteen with whipcord trousers, a check sports jacket, and a pipe the size of some small wind instrument.

“Richard, this is Robin, my young brother,” Nikki said as we got out of the car.

He gave me the look of deep suspicion reserved by men for chaps likely to go off with their sisters.

“Fancy anyone wanting to marry Nikki.”

“Robin, don’t be a beast!”

“I thought you’d marry Bill Wharton.”

“Robin!”

Noticing that I looked surprised, he added “Oh, Bill Wharton was an old friend of Nikki’s. Didn’t you know?”

“Robin! Really!”

“Anyway, how do you do,” he said, shaking hands powerfully. “I say,” he went on, indicating my modest saloon car. “That isn’t this year’s model, is it?”

“Yes, it is, as a matter of fact.”

He whistled. “But didn’t you know? On that model the back axle always goes after ten thou. You ought to have got one of last year’s.”

“Good Lord, does it?”

“1 think we’d better go and face the family,” said Nikki, taking my arm.

Bracing myself, I followed her into the house. The Barrington’s sitting-room looked like the third act of a domestic comedy when the curtain had just gone up. To the right, a slim dark woman who might have passed as Nikki’s elder sister was sitting behind a tea-tray. Centre, his back to the fireplace and hands deep in his jacket pockets, stood Commander Barrington. He was a tall, grey-haired man in a blue suit, who I gathered from Nikki had now given up sailing ships for insuring them. Symmetrically on the left was an older woman in a yellow dress that seemed to be composed mainly of fringes, whom I took to be Aunt Jane. Aunt Jane, Nikki had explained, lived with them and had a secret of amazing complexity. All three were now looking at me with the strained but polite interest shown by parents when their young children appear during cocktail parties with some strange object found in the garden.

“Mummy, this is Richard.”

“So you’re
really
going to marry Nikki!” exclaimed Mrs Barrington at once.

“Shush, shush, Connie!” whispered the Commander loudly. “We’re not supposed to know about it yet.”

“Oh! Of course.”

I was introduced all round. Then there was silence, broken only by Robin blowing loudly through his pipe. But the Commander, clearly the man for any crisis, said heartily, “How about a spot of tea?”

“Milk or lemon?” said Mrs Barrington with great relief.

The British nation is fortunately at its best when overpowering some awkward social situation, whether caused by mutual embarrassment or water suddenly appearing through the dining-saloon deck. The brilliant national ruse of discussing the weather allowed us all to exchange stereotyped phrases while wondering what the devil to talk about next, then the Commander and I maintained a thoughtful conversation on fishing before realizing that neither knew anything whatever about the subject. Aunt Jane started to say something about her tragic life but was silenced by an abrasive glance from Nikki’s mother, and Robin found time to tell me that my particular make of watch and fountain-pen were unfortunately those known to collapse inexplicably during use. I made an unfortunate noise drinking my tea and I dropped a cake plate on the poodle, but the occasion wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. I felt that the Barringtons were relieved to find that at least I didn’t lick the jam spoon or suffer from multiple tics.

“I expect,” said Nikki with a meaning look as the cups were being stacked, “that you and Daddy want to have a word together?”

“A word?” The Commander sounded as if nothing had been farther from his mind. “Yes, of course. By all means. Anything you like. Perhaps you’d like to step into my cubby-hole, Richard?”

I followed him to a small room on the other side of the house which was filled with books and decorated with pictures and models of ships. The terrifying moment had come at last. The scene was so familiar from comic drawings that now I didn’t know how to perform it. Did I stand to attention and ask for the honour of the hand of his daughter? Or did I just make some sort of joke about adding Nikki to my income-tax? Either approach would not only make me look foolish but – as I hadn’t taken the measure of the Commander yet – might land me in the Thames.

I caught his eye. I suddenly realized that he was as nervous as I was.

“How about a gin?” he suggested.

“What a good idea, sir.”

“I was afraid you were a teetotaller.”

“Teetotaller? But what on earth gave you that impression?”

“Nikki said you were sober in your habits.”

“Good Lord! I hope she isn’t too blinded by love.”

“Wasn’t that meal absolutely ghastly?” he said, taking a bottle and two glasses from a cupboard. “Talk about torture by teacups.”

I made some polite remark about the nice cakes.

“The trouble is, women will insist on doing things that way. I hate tea usually. Never eat it. I generally have a cup alone in the potting-shed. Water?”

“Thank you.”

“And didn’t you think we were about the dreariest family in creation?”

This remark was not what I had expected. “But I thought that was what you were thinking about me.”

“You! You looked frightfully composed and superior.”

“If I may say so, sir, that’s just what struck me about you.”

“Good God! I’ve been sweating blood at the thought of this afternoon for a week.”

We both laughed.

“Besides which, you blighter,” the Commander continued, handing me my drink, “you’ve done me out of a perfectly good afternoon’s golf. Do you play?”

“Yes, I do a bit, as it happens.”

We discussed golf for twenty minutes over a couple more gins, then the Commander stood up and said, “I suppose we’d better go back to the ladies.”

I re-entered the sitting-room feeling much better than when I had left it.

“Sorry we’ve been so long, Connie,” Nikki’s father said jovially. “But we seemed to find a lot of things to discuss. Richard here’s coming down one Sunday, and Robin and I’ll make up a foursome with old Doc Clark. You’ll like Clark, Richard – a good scout, though he does putt like a one-armed fiddler. We’ll give you a run for your money all right.”

“It’s really very kind of you to invite me.”

“Not a bit. Delighted to see you. Can’t tell you what a strain it is, playing against the same old crowd week after week. It might do my game a power of good. Couldn’t do it much worse, eh, Connie?”

“What did Father say?” whispered Nikki, beside me on the sofa.

“Say? What about?”

“About
us
, of course.”

“Good Lord, Nikki! As a matter of fact, I completely forgot to ask him.”

None of the family raised the subject again, and in a few minutes we were all discussing where Nikki and I were going for our honeymoon.

“This is my father,” I said, introducing Nikki.

“My dear Sally! How delighted I am to see you at last.”

“Not Sally, Father. I think you’ve –”

“But how perfectly stupid of me. How are you, Cynthia?”

“Nikki, Father, Nikki. And here comes my mother. Mother, this is Nikki.”

It was the return fixture the following week. Nikki went through it more comfortably than I did. Within ten minutes she was sitting close to my mother by the fire, cosily discussing the technical details of wedding-dresses.

“But I
must
show you these, Nikki.” My mother suddenly produced a large leather-bound scrap-book from her bureau. I viewed this with intense alarm. I had for years suspected its existence in the house, like some unpleasant family ghost, but I had hoped that it would never be materialized in my presence.

“Not that, Mother!” I cried.

“Why ever not, Richard? Nikki will be terribly interested. The first ones aren’t very good,” she explained, opening the pages. “That was taken when he was three months. Wasn’t he sweet, with his little frilly nightie?” Nikki gave a delighted gurgle. “And this one was when he was two, down on the beach with nothing on at all. And this one –”

“Mother, I’m sure Nikki really isn’t at all interested…”

“But I am, Richard, tremendously. And I don’t think you’ve changed a bit. Especially when you’ve forgotten to get your hair cut.”

“
Didn’t
he have lovely curls? Here’s the one of him down at Frinton in his little sailor suit…”

I had to sit for twenty minutes while my future wife followed me from infant nudity to my academic gown and rabbit’s fur hood, holding my qualifying diploma and sharing a corner of a Greek temple with a palm in a brass pot. I felt this gave her a bitterly unfair advantage in our marriage before it had started.

“If we have any children,” I said, as we started to drive back towards London, “I’m going to take dozens and dozens of photographs of them and put them in the bank. It’s a better way of keeping them in their place than a slipper or a child psychiatrist.”

“But I thought they were lovely, darling. Particularly when you were an oyster in the
Walrus and the Carpenter
.”

I groaned.

“Nikki,” I said. “If you still want to marry me after that, shall we have the wedding on February the first?”

“In two months’ time? But why particularly the first?”

“It’ll be a nice easy date for me to remember for anniversaries.”

“Of course, darling.”

“We’ll put it in
The Times
on Monday,” I said.