Doctor in Love (9 page)

“It is still beyond me to suggest a locum off-hand,” wrote Dr Farquarson from the Royal Neurological. “But I think you should really try to get an assistant of some sort or another, otherwise you’ll be joining me here. I suspect I shall be another couple of months out of things yet. Bobbie Cufford and his retinue seem unaware of any measurement of time more delicate than the calendar. I saw him again this morning – I regret to say that he has developed a most prosperous-looking stomach, and the bedside manner of a dead halibut – and he seems intent on keeping me out of circulation until the time comes for me to retire for good. They still haven’t got their diagnosis. Whether Bobbie cuts or not seems to depend on whether my right ankle jerk can raise a flicker. At least with general surgeons you’re in, cut, and out before you’ve time to draw a breath.”

“I was visited yesterday by my nephew, who very thoughtfully brought me a bunch of grapes and borrowed ten pounds. I am sorry that you had your differences. After hearing his story I can only express my heartfelt gratitude for your keeping both of us on the
Medical Register
and out of the
London Gazette
. I have long classified my nephew as a high-grade mental defective, but I am beginning to feel this too generous a diagnosis. He has gone I know not whither.”

Finding a new receptionist was easier than finding a new locum. A couple of days after Grimsdyke’s departure, as I struggled to hold two surgeries single-handed and see fair play in the waiting-room at the same time, a small cheerful-looking redhead of about nineteen pushed her way forward explaining that she had a “special appointment with the doctor”.

“Well, I’m the doctor,” I said, starting to shut the consulting-room door. “And I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait your turn with everyone else.”

“No, not you. The other doctor. The one with the bow tie.”

“Dr Grimsdyke has been called away on a long case and isn’t likely to return,” I explained.

Seeing her face drop in childlike disappointment, I added, “I’m Dr Gordon. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Dr Grimsdyke promised he’d make me his receptionist.”

“Did he?” I said, brightening immediately. “That’s different. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t keep a promise for him, is there?” She gave a glance which I felt compared me unfavourably with my late colleague. “If you’d like to join the practice, I assure you it’s a most interesting job. Plenty of time to yourself, too. Not to mention being part of the great army struggling against the forces of disease, and so on. Have you tried it before?”

“I can type a bit,” she said. “I was with Jennifer Modes.”

“How about a change? There’s nothing like variety.” She hesitated. “The other doctor told me there was a free flat as well. He said it would be nice for him to have me in easy reach for emergencies.”

I had hoped to move into Miss Wildewinde’s apartment myself, but I was prepared to put up with my present lodgings in exchange for the chance of occasionally being able to get back to them before midnight.

“Of course there’s a flat.”

“OK. I’ll take the job,” she agreed. “I’m proper sorry the other doctor isn’t still here, though.”

I found her one of Miss Wildewinde’s overalls and she started on the spot. Her name was Miss Strudwick, and she was as out of place in the surgery as a fan-dancer in church. But she was a willing helper. She had a chronic sinusitus which made her sniff a good deal, and an irritating habit of saying “Aren’t I a silly?” when she’d done something like spilling a carefully-gathered twenty-four-hour specimen over the lino, or sending a patient to a psychiatrist for a post-mortem report and a request to the coroner about the mental condition of his subject. She had no idea of professional sterility or professional secrecy, but she seemed to like the patients and gossiped affably with them all in the waiting-room. After a few days she even began to mellow towards me.

“Mind, all the girls at the Palais thought Dr Grimsdyke was ever so nice,” she confessed one night after surgery, while I was trying to teach her how to sterilize a syringe.

“That’s where you met him, was it?” I always wondered how Grimsdyke had spent his evenings in Hampden Cross. “Now you make sure the sterilizer is on, so, and wait until the water has come to the boil.”

“Oh, yes. There every night he was, almost. He did the mamba something delirious.”

“You first of all dismantle the syringe into its component parts, thus.”

“Mind, he wouldn’t let on he was a doctor to begin with,” she said, giving a giggle. “But of course I ought to have known from the start. He had such lovely soft hands to touch you with.”

“Then you wrap the barrel of the syringe in lint, like this.”

“Don’t you ever go to the Palais, Doctor?”

“I’m afraid I never seem to get the time, Miss Strudwick.”

“Go on – don’t call me Miss Strudwick.” She came a little nearer round the sterilizer. “Everyone calls me Kitten.”

“Er – the plunger is always boiled separately to avoid breakage–”

“You’re one of the shy sort, aren’t you?” She looked up at me. “You couldn’t say that about Dr Grimsdyke, I must say.”

“And the needles of course are sterilized as quickly as possible to avoid blunting–”

“But you’ve got ever such nice kind eyes.”

“Threading them through a square of lint for convenient recovery–”

“Wouldn’t you like to get a bit more friendly, seeing as Fate has brought us together?”

“Er – Miss Strudwick. The – er – temperature of the sterilizer has to be maintained at one hundred degrees Centigrade for two minutes–”

Our conversation was fortunately broken by the telephone calling me out to a confinement, and when I got back I was relieved to find that Miss Strudwick’s emotions had cooled with the sterilizer.

In the next few days it became clear that Grimsdyke must have been a highly popular partner at the local Palais. Girls looking almost the same as Kitten Strudwick appeared hopefully in the waiting-room every morning, and I could have taken my choice of half a dozen receptionists. But finding a locum seemed impossible. I wrote to the Secretary of St Swithin’s Medical School and to a medical employment agency in Holborn, as well as drafting a mildly misleading advertisement for the
British Medical Journal
. I interviewed one doctor, but he was so old that he seemed likely only to add to the number of my patients; another, with a red face and tweeds, not only arrived drunk but seemed to find nothing unusual in it. There was one excellent young man from India who politely told me that I was too young to be his professional senior, and another excellent young man from Inverness who politely told me that he suffered from schizophrenia. I seemed to have struck the hard core of medical unemployment. Whenever I had been out of work and wanted a locum’s job myself every practice in the country seemed fully manned, but now that I was in the unusual position of employer I couldn’t find any takers. I even began to hope that Grimsdyke would appear again at the front door – as indeed he might have done, with no embarrassment whatever – when I had a letter from the City General Hospital, in the East End of London.

“
Dear Dr Gordon
,

“
I should be glad if you would consider me for the post of your locum tenens, of which I heard today from Messrs. Pilcher and Perritt in Holborn. I am twenty-three years of age and qualified from the City General last December, subsequently holding the appointment of house surgeon to Mr Ernest Duff. I am now anxious to have some experience in general practice before continuing with surgery, in which I intend to specialize. Perhaps you would kindly let me know your decision as soon as you conveniently can? I would add that I possess a car.

“
Yours sincerely,

“
Nicholas Barrington,

“
BM, BCh (Oxon).”

I don’t think I had read a letter more gratefully since I opened the official envelope after my final examinations. The writer seemed sane, and wasn’t young enough to be a glorified student nor old enough to be a chronic drunkard. He sounded a little prim and precise, but that was only to be expected of an Oxford man. He had worked under Duff, who was so surgically eminent as to have two operations named after him. And even at St Swithin’s we recognized the City General students as a genially beery crowd like ourselves. Apart from this, the poor fellow’s following the will-o’-the-wisp of surgical specialization struck sympathy from my bosom: I felt that it would he nice to work with someone else who had probably failed the Primary too. Wasting no time, I took a risk and telegraphed Dr Barrington saying:

APPOINTED FORTHWITH COME IMMEDIATELY IF POSSIBLE ACCOMMODATION RATHER SHORT BUT CAN MUCK IN WITH ME UNTIL SETTLED STOP WORK HARD BUT FUN HOPE YOU DRINK BEER

“
GORDON

To which I had the reply:

ARRIVING NOON TOMORROW STOP YES I DRINK BEER

BARRINGTON

“Our troubles are over,” I told Kitten Strudwick happily that evening. “A Dr Barrington is arriving tomorrow to help us.”

“Oh, really? I wonder what
he
’ll be like?”

“Soft hands and a kind heart like Dr Grimsdyke, I expect. So put on your best pair of nylons.”

“Go on with you! I didn’t think you noticed my nylons.”

“Doctors are trained to be observant, Miss Strudwick.”

“Yes,” I reflected, relaxing in the surgery chair comfortably for the first time since Dr Farquarson’s departure. “It’s going to be a bit of fun to have someone three years junior to me to kick about. I shall be able to hold my lapels and say ‘Come come, my lad – can’t you spot a simple case of craniocleidodysostosis? What on earth did they teach you at the General?’ Oh, yes, I’ll make the poor chap work all right.”

“I really don’t know, I’m sure,” she confessed. “You doctors ain’t a bit like what I thought you was. Do you want these prong things put back in the hot water?”

I was unable to meet my new colleague on his arrival the next day, as I expected to be out on my morning rounds until well past one o’clock.

“Tell him to stick his car round the back,” I told Miss Strudwick. “And I’ll be home as soon as I can. Make him a cup of tea, if he looks the tea type. Anyway, I’m sure you can entertain him.”

I struck a difficult hour trying to persuade a house physician to take a pneumonia into the local hospital, and it was almost two o’clock when I returned. I was at once both annoyed and worried to find that Barrington hadn’t arrived. It suddenly occurred to me that he’d found a better job and let me down, and I should have to start the dreary advertising and interviewing all over again. At that hour of the day the hall and waiting-room were empty, and Miss Strudwick had disappeared for lunch. The only person in sight was another of Grimsdyke’s clinical camp followers.

“I’m very sorry,” I said as I came in. “But you’re wasting your time. The job’s filled. Good morning.”

She looked disappointed. I felt rather sorry myself, because she was a small pretty blonde in a black suit, who looked much cleaner than Kitten Strudwick.

“Filled?” She frowned slightly.

“I’m afraid this is really not my responsibility at all. I’m Dr Gordon. If you were led to think there was a job here it’s my partner’s doing, and he’s left for good. It’s too bad, but I can’t do anything about it now. Good day.”

She gave a quick sigh. “Well, I’ll have to go home again, I suppose?”

“Yes, I’m afraid you will.”

“I must say, Dr Gordon, mistake or not, it’s been a good deal of inconvenience coming all this way from the middle of London.”

“The middle of London? Good God! is he offering jobs in all the Palais in London now?”

“I don’t think I quite understand?”

“Perhaps you didn’t meet Dr Grimsdyke in a dance hall?”

“I have been to a dance hall, certainly. I went to one in Tottenham Court Road last year. And, if you are at all interested, I enjoyed myself very much. But I haven’t been with or met a Dr Grimsdyke in those or any less interesting surroundings.”

“But then how on earth did you know that…?”

In my days as a student at St Swithin’s I had established a modestly flattering reputation among my companions for imitation of members of the hospital staff. I would often entertain the class with these impressions between theatre cases or while waiting for unpunctual physicians to arrive for ward rounds. Although I could mimic most of the mannerisms of many of the consultants, both my audience and myself agreed that my masterpiece was the hospital’s senior surgeon, Sir Lancelot Spratt. Using some cotton-wool for his beard, my impression of his lecture on chronic retention in old men brought laughter from even our most earnest students. I never gave this performance so well as the afternoon I delivered it from the lecturer’s rostrum itself, ten minutes before Sir Lancelot was due to occupy it. The laughter of my waiting classmates swelled almost to hysteria as I reached his description of the patient’s social difficulties on a picnic. It was at that point that I suspected even my own brilliance, and nervously turning round saw Sir Lancelot observing me with folded arms from the lecturer’s entrance in the corner. My feelings of that moment were exactly paralleled in Dr Farquarson’s surgery.

“You…” I said, staring at her. “You…you’re here instead of Dr Barrington?”

“I am Dr Barrington.”

“Dr Nicholas Barrington?” I snatched the letter from my desk.

“
Nichola
Barrington. And it would be rather a coincidence if there were two of us applying, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m most terribly sorry,” I gasped. “I thought you were one of my late partner’s popsies. I mean, I thought you were someone else. Oh, God!” I collapsed into the chair. “What a frightful business! Won’t you sit down? Will you have a cup of tea? Have you had lunch?”

“I had some at the local hotel, thank you. I thought I’d better install myself there. Though I’m very grateful for your kind offer of accommodation in the telegram.”