Doctor In The Swim (4 page)

When I knocked on Sir Lancelot’s door in the morning, I found him in his braces finishing his Bonnie Scotland Body-Builder and Orb of Florida Sunshine (porridge and grapefruit).

‘Grimsdyke,’ he greeted me sombrely, ‘I feel I have experienced a rather bad dream.’

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ I tried to cheer him up. ‘The story will never get home to St Swithin’s. Admittedly, I broke security with chum Archbold, but usually I am the very soul of discretion.’

‘You are very far from it,’ he said wearily. ‘Though I think I can trust you to keep your mouth shut on this occasion. Your better self, at least, will feel indebted to me for its fare.’

I noticed his suitcase was packed.

‘When are you off to Colorado, sir?’

‘I am not.’

‘Not, sir?’

‘Unfortunately, a cable recalls me to see an important case in London.’

‘Oh, really? What a dashed shame. When did it arrive?

‘The cable will be arriving during the morning, possibly before my departure. You will kindly show it to Archbold with appropriate apologies, and attend the remainder of the conference yourself.’ Sir Lancelot reflectively took a bite of his Sizzling Hot Buttered Staff of Life. ‘I fear, Grimsdyke, that I have, all considered, had rather too much of executives’ health.’

‘And that’s why I’m flying back alone,’ I explained to Lucy Squiffington, after making the story last a good slice of the Atlantic.

‘But you poor dear! New York certainly lived up to its reputation as one of the world’s most exciting cities.’

‘Oh, things quietened down a good deal once I got Sir Lancelot airborne. After that, I used to clock in at the conference in the morning, then slip down the freight elevator and see all those sights of New York I mentioned.’

‘Including the burlesque?’ smiled Lucy.

‘No, they’ve shut that down now. I went to the United Nations instead.’

The Vicar’s daughter interrupted to ask if we held British passports, rather inferring it was rotten luck if we didn’t.

‘But quite apart from New York, Lucy,’ I ventured, ‘the whole trip was worth it just to run into you once more.’

She switched on the eyes again. ‘Now, isn’t that sweet of you, Gaston?’

‘I’ve often wished I’d had the sense at Whortleton to ask for your phone number.’

She laughed.

‘Look here,’ I persevered. ‘It seems a shocking pity our just parting for good and all once the airline ticket runs out. I mean, couldn’t we have a little drink in Town some evening? Just for old times’ sake.’

‘But Gaston, of course. I’d love to.’

‘I say, would you really?’ I suddenly felt all warm inside, as though I’d swallowed a sunset. ‘Here’s my address and phone number.’ I scribbled on a bit of the waterproof brown-paper bag they tuck into the seat in front. ‘I’ve got a little mews flat down in Chelsea.’

‘That sounds terribly romantic.’

‘Not really. It’s only a converted horses’ larder.’

‘Fasten your seat belts and no smoking,’ announced the Vicar’s daughter over the intercom. ‘We hope you have had a pleasant flight.’

‘Pleasant flight?’ I thought. As far as I was concerned I could happily have gone on flying right round the world.

There’s nothing like an airport for bringing you down to earth. Apart from the freezing drizzle howling across the tarmac, more bossy girls in uniform, and the Customs men eyeing you as though you were Blackbeard the Pirate after a decent shave, it was eight o’clock in the morning all round and still only three a.m. inside me. And that wasn’t to mention the effect of all those free martinis wearing off.

I lost Lucy Squiffington in the Customs hall, and I must say I wasn’t really sorry. I caught sight of her through the crowd outside climbing into a plum coloured Rolls with chauffeur to match, and it struck me what a cloud-cuckoo-land I’d been living in. As I remembered, Pa Squiffington owned half a bank, and though I suppose the family couldn’t just drop in and fill up their wallets as necessary, a girl like Lucy must have attracted the chaps like a picnic attracts wasps. With elegant coves bearing titles and little moustaches hanging round her throughout London and the Home Counties, what could she see in seedy old Grimsdyke, in his rumpled suit and his nylon shirt he’d forgotten to wash the night before? Once she had her feet on the ground, the poor girl must have felt like Miranda when Caliban started getting uppish. I gave a bit of a sigh. Come to think of it, there’s nothing in the world quite so egalitarian as first-class travel.

I climbed on to the airport bus, keen to get home for a shave and a bath. Besides, I had to telephone my fiancée.

‘Hello?’ I said over the line. ‘Is that the Home for Delinquent Females?’

‘Deliquent females speaking.’

‘Do you think you could get Miss Anemone for me?’

‘Miss Anemone? Just one moment, please.’

I was standing in the corner of my horses’ larder, holding the telephone and turning over the pages of the daily paper – a poor anaemic little thing after the
New York Times
, which is liable to suffocate anyone reading it in bed, and on Sundays comes in handy if the family wants to go out camping.

‘Hello?’ Anemone’s nice voice came on the wire.

‘Hello, Nenny. Here’s Gaston, back in circulation.’

‘Why, Gaston! And how was Cheltenham?’

‘Cheltenham was fine, thanks. Very bracing.’

‘I’m so glad,’ she said nicely. ‘What was the weather like?’

‘Oh, sort of mixed.’

‘And how’s your grandmother?’

‘The old dear’s in cracking form. Apart from her usual back, of course.

‘You might have rung me up just once, Gaston,’ Anemone chided me, though of course in a nice way.

‘But I told you, old girl, grandma won’t have a phone. She says it attracts the lightning in thunderstorms.’

‘Yes, but…well, you could have used a call-box, couldn’t you, Gaston?’

Odd, I’d never thought of that.

‘Oh, but I did. Unfortunately, I hadn’t the right change. You’d be surprised what a terribly complicated combination of sixpences and shillings you need to get through to you in the country.’

There was a bit of a pause.

‘You’re certain you still want to come down to the seaside with us?’ Anemone went on, not seeming particularly sympathetic about the sixpences.

‘Sure I do, baby. It’s going to be swell.’

‘Good heavens, Gaston! Since when have you taken to using American expressions?’

‘That’s the films. I went to a frightful lot of films in Cheltenham. Nothing else to do.’

‘Mummy says she hopes you weren’t bored.’

‘That’s very decent of her. Actually, the grandma’s no end of a conversationalist for her age.’

‘She means she hopes you weren’t so bored you went out drinking.’

‘Not so much as a pint of good old English beer has passed my lips.’

Remarkable how smug you can feel when you’re actually telling the truth.

‘Must ring off,’ I apologized. ‘The place is thick with threads I’ve got to pick up now I’m back in Town.’

‘But Gaston, you sound as though you’ve been to the other side of the earth.’

‘That’s the feeling you get in Cheltenham. Bye-bye, Nenny. See you soon.’

‘’Bye, Gaston.’

I gave the telephone a subconscious wipe with my sleeve, as though I’d infected it with something nasty. It was a pretty rotten way to behave towards a nice girl like Anemone. I sighed deeply. Like drowning kittens or fiddling your income tax, it was regrettable but it couldn’t be avoided.

And Anemone really
was
a nice girl. Everyone she met said so.

‘What a nice girl, Dame Hilda Parkhouse’s daughter,’ observed my older cousin Miles, calling at my flat the morning after introducing the pair of us during a party at his own house in Kensington.

‘Yes, a very nice girl,’ I agreed.

Which was odd, our ideas on women usually differing as much as Michelangelo’s from Epstein’s.

‘I fancy Dame Hilda was pleased to notice you so attentive to the young lady,’ remarked Miles, with one of those wintry smiles of his.

‘Oh, was I?’

I’d simply been passing Anemone the sausages on sticks and the little fishy things. Though I suppose one does become rather attentive towards unaccompanied blondes one finds at parties, even on Miles’ fruit cup.

‘Dame Hilda,’ continued Miles, taking another of his smiles from the deep-freeze, ‘thought you a charming young man.’

‘Really? Very decent of her.’

‘I did not, naturally, say anything to disillusion her,’ I should prefer Dame Hilda to imagine that our family flock presented a uniformly white appearance.’

That remark was typical of Miles. He was a chap whose one regret at the break-up of the British Empire was it leaving us short of uncomfortable colonies to ship people like me to.

‘Dame Hilda is, of course, a most important figure in our national life,’ my cousin went on, as I let the slur pass like a bad ball outside the off stump. ‘As a personal friend of the Prime Minister, I believe she could procure even me a safe seat in Parliament any time she felt inclined. “Miles Grimsdyke, MP.” That would be a joke, wouldn’t it? Eh? Ha, ha!’

‘Ha, ha,’ I said.

‘Or even a life peerage, what? Ha, ha, ha!’

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ I said.

‘Not to mention her being a lifelong confidante of Lady Spratt. I fancy she could bring pressure on Sir Lancelot to find even you a respectable position in the National Health Service. Ha, ha, ha, ha!’

‘Ha,’ I said.

Miles had become buddies with Dame Hilda when they’d both sat on the Royal Commission to inquire into the State of Public Morality. My cousin was a severe little chap with a bristly moustache, who the family mentioned in the same breath as myself only when pointing out how interesting the variations were in the heredity of intelligence. He was not only the youngest surgeon on the consultant staff of St Swithin’s Hospital but also a great one for blocking up our sociological rat-holes, and I fancy saw himself going down in the history books as the fellow who finally put the country right by stopping everyone buying a packet of fags after eight o’clock or going to watch Shakespeare on Sundays.

As for Dame Hilda, she was the well-known penologist you kept seeing on the telly, who busied herself sorting out the odd fish thrown up by the crime waves. At the time of the party Miles and Dame Hilda were having no end of fun together going round the prisons, trying to decide for the Government if chaps who sandbagged old ladies should be told they were naughty boys and not to do it again, or sent across to the Tower and given a go on the rack,

But I should never have become engaged to Anemone, or even seen her again, if it hadn’t been for a series of amazing coincidences.

A couple of evenings after the party Miles telephoned to say a patient whose stomach he’d removed had sent him a couple of seats for the latest musical, but as he had an emergency appendix in St Swithin’s perhaps I could take Anemone instead?

‘Anemone so rarely enjoys the lighter amusements of London,’ he explained over the line. ‘She’s such a nice girl, so devoted to helping her mother with the delinquent females of Yorkshire.’

I quite enjoyed the musical, and Anemone was a perfectly nice companion. She was a girl with that fair, healthy, weatherproof sort of beauty, which is understandably so popular in England. Admittedly, she went about looking like a badly furled umbrella, but she didn’t talk too much and she laughed at all my jokes, though I only told her the nice ones, of course,

Now, the odd thing was, three days later Miles rang to say he’d a couple of tickets for the new comedy from a patient whose gall-bladder he’d removed, but he’d been called to St Swithin’s to do an emergency splenectomy. It was a nice little comedy and Anemone and I laughed no end, but I could really sympathize with poor Miles’ rotten luck when the very next evening he telephoned to say he’d got a couple of stalls for the Old Vic from a patient whose warts he’d removed, but couldn’t go because of an emergency meeting of the Hospital committee.

The Old Vic was fine, all blood and blank verse, though when Miles appeared himself the next morning waving a couple of seats for the latest ice show from someone he’d cured of chronic chilblains, he found me sitting up in bed shivering.

‘It’s only my share of the flu epidemic,’ I snuffled. ‘I must have picked it up in all those crowded theatres. I can cure it in a jiffy with a bottle of whisky and a hat.’

‘And how do you intend to do that, pray?’

‘Go to bed, put the hat on the bedpost, and drink the whisky till the hat moves.’

‘You must not take influenza lightly, Gaston.’ Miles, being a consultant, couldn’t treat any sort of illness without making a frightful fuss about it. ‘You may quite easily develop a staphylococcal pneumonia.’

He produced his stethoscope.

‘Alcohol is out of the question, of course,’ he announced, pocketing my cigarettes for good measure. ‘And naturally you will need nursing. I will send someone round twice a day to rub your back.’

He left me staring at the low ceiling with that frightful filleted feeling you get with flu. Then Anemone suddenly appeared, loaded with magazines, fruit, and Gee’s linctus.

‘Miles couldn’t get anyone at the nursing bureau,’ she explained with a nice smile. ‘So Mummy suggested I volunteered instead.’

‘But dash it!’ I sneezed back at her. ‘That’ll completely ruin your stay in London.’

‘I shall enjoy it, Gaston.’

She started to smooth my pillow. Her face took on a saintly look, like the girls in the disinfectant advertisements,

‘I always wanted to take up nursing,’ she continued softly, ‘except that some of the things you have to do aren’t very nice, Now where can I make you some barley water?’

Anemone came every morning and left at teatime – naturally, there was nothing whatever about the arrangements you could possibly think was not quite nice, I must say she cheered me up no end, even when the terrible influenza depression crept up, until you reach the stage when you stop thinking even the political speeches in the newspapers are funny. Then one afternoon I suddenly realized I was wondering where I’d hidden my spare cigarettes, and Anemone brought me my first lightly boiled egg, and I found I was asking her to marry me.