Doctor On The Boil (12 page)

‘But how could I possibly manage that?’

‘Good grief, man, are you modern students lilylivered, or simply lacking in imagination? When I was a lad, we had to bend all our efforts simply to avoid that particular fate every Saturday night.’

George scratched his head. ‘All right,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll do my best. That is, my worst.’

‘And good luck to you.’

George scuttled away guiltily as the housekeeper appeared.

‘What is it, Miss MacNish?’

‘I’ve made another Dundee cake, Sir Lancelot. I wondered if you’d care for a slice or two with your morning coffee?’

‘Calories, calories,’ he sighed. ‘But it would be most acceptable.’

‘And what would you like for your dinner tonight? It’s a long time past Burns’ Night, but I know you’re fond of haggis.’

‘It always makes the dean sick.’

‘Och, I’ll boil him an egg. It won’t do him any harm. Would you believe it, Sir Lancelot, he locked away the best brandy? I’ve switched the bottles back again. To think of you having to drink the cheap stuff!’ She started clearing up the dishes. ‘I
am
glad you decided to stay with the dean. They’re a nice enough family, but it’s not the same as looking after a real gentleman. I look back on those days as the happiest in my life, I really do. Oh, there’s someone waiting to see you. A Dr Grimsdyke.’

Sir Lancelot’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I wonder what he’s after? You’d better show him in.’

Grimsdyke sat at the breakfast-table and accepted a cup of lukewarm coffee. He came to the point at once. ‘It’s about Miss Gray, sir. The girl who muddled up your X-rays. She wants her old job back at St Swithin’s. I wondered if you’d put in a good word for her?’

‘Me? The victim?’

‘It wasn’t really her fault, sir, but mine. And I particularly think she deserves a career. I intend myself to do some proper medicine again in hospital, which isn’t very well paid.’

‘I fail to see the connection, but both projects seem praiseworthy enough.’ He thought for some moments. ‘I’ll see if the senior radiologist is in a forgiving frame of mind. It’s the least I can do for you, I suppose, after that splendid treatment you arranged for me in the clinic.’

Grimsdyke looked concerned. ‘I hoped you were doing this more as a personal favour than a return for professional services.’

‘Why should you say that? Those injections were absolutely terrific. It was quite embarrassing this morning when the little Swedish girl brought in my early cup of tea.’

‘Sir…you suggested the formula should be published in the medical Press. Would you like me to disclose it to you?’

‘I’d be very interested. Though don’t forget I’m a surgeon, not a biochemist. I can’t understand a lot of complicated chemical symbols.’

‘I think you’ll understand this one, sir. It’s H
2
O.’

‘What!’

Grimsdyke tapped his forehead. ‘The effect is felt up here, sir. Very powerfully.’

‘To think! De Hoot was charging twenty pounds a jab for them.’

‘That’s all part of the treatment, sir.’

Sir Lancelot slumped in his chair. ‘You’re quite right – the effect has left me. Gone. Pht. Just like that.’

‘I thought you should know the truth, sir. As a matter of fact, I never thought the hocus-pocus would work on you.’

‘I appreciate your frankness.’ Sir Lancelot suddenly sounded weary. ‘It was an honourable gesture on your part.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

There was a pause. ‘Very well. No more can be done or said about it. I am going to St Swithin’s this afternoon. I shall put in a word for your radiographer. Now leave me. I want to think.’

Grimsdyke rose awkwardly. ‘Good-bye, sir.’

‘Good-bye, Grimsdyke,’ said Sir Lancelot in a voice of doom.

He sat for some minutes staring blankly at the remains of his breakfast. ‘I feel so old,’ he muttered. ‘So old. And I’m to be married. On Friday week. Oh God!’

Just before six o’clock that evening, Eric Cavendish was being driven in the Mercedes down a Chelsea street leading towards Godfri’s studios in the converted garage. Like all London side-streets, the kerbs were lined by an unbroken row of parked cars, which the chauffeur searched hopefully for a gap.

‘Double-park here a minute,’ the actor instructed him. ‘If the fuzz show up, just say it’s Eric Cavendish.’

He climbed out, flicking a speck from his stylish new suit. He had prepared himself with particular care that evening. For his last day at Dr de Hoot’s clinic he had asked for double doses of injections, and every time the needle went in he thought of twenty-year-old Stella.

He squeezed himself between two cars, walked jauntily a few yards along the pavement, then turned into a short road between two high buildings which led to the studio. He noticed two men in white coats standing in the middle of this passageway, between them on the ground a white-painted metal drum the size of a pressurized beer-cask. Their attitude vaguely struck him as strange. They had their heads cocked and seemed to be listening to it.

‘Good evening,’ he called genially.

‘Oh, sir!’ cried one of the white-coated figures in alarm. ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘In Chelsea, London, I guess.’

‘How terrible!’ exclaimed the other. ‘You just stepped right into it.’

Eric Cavendish came to a halt, frowning. ‘Into what?’

‘Didn’t you see?’ said the first urgently. ‘The notice.’

Eric Cavendish’s eyes followed his agitated finger in the direction of a large white card set against the opposite wall.

METROPOLITAN POLICE

DANGER!

RADIOACTIVITY

KEEP OUT!

‘What’s this?’ he asked in puzzlement. ‘Has the bomb dropped, or something?’

‘There’s been an accident,’ the second man told him. ‘Most unfortunate. Van taking radioisotopes to the hospital – run into by a taxi – right there on the corner – container split open – stuff all over the shop.’

‘It’s 131-iodine.’

‘Emits beta and gamma radiation.’

‘Half-life of eight days.’

‘Settles in the thyroid gland.’

‘Is there any danger?’ Eric Cavendish falteringly asked the smaller of the two.

‘Danger!’ Terry Summerbee gave a short laugh. ‘He asks if there’s any
danger
, Doctor!’

‘I shouldn’t like to be in that poor soul’s shoes, eh, Doctor?’ agreed Ken Kerrberry more grimly.

‘That’s the Geiger counter.’ Terry indicated the metal cask. ‘Just you listen.’

Eric Cavendish held his breath. He heard a ticking as loud as a cheap alarm-clock.

‘Now, wait a minute…’ The actor looked anxiously from one to the other. They were clearly doctors – they had stethoscopes sticking from the pockets of their white coats. They were young, but he supposed those clever researchers in radioactivity generally were. They spoke in an extremely learned fashion. ‘But what about you two?’ he demanded. ‘Shouldn’t you be dressed up like a couple of astronauts?’

‘
We’
re all right,’ Terry told him. ‘We’ve taken the antidote.’

‘That’s 14-carbon,’ Ken said briefly. ‘Half-life, five thousand six hundred years.’

‘But…but what are the effects?’

‘Sterility, derangement of the germ-plasm, and impotence.’

Oh, no!

‘That’s for a start,’ Terry added. ‘The long-term ones I should hesitate to mention.’

‘What am I to do?’ Eric Cavendish cried hopelessly.

‘Thank God, we can save you.’

‘You must be decontaminated instantly.’

‘I’ll do anything, Doctor…but right now,’ he remembered, ‘I’ve got a date.’

‘Instantly,’ Ken repeated. ‘Or I certainly can’t be answerable for the consequences.’

‘Nor I,’ Terry agreed. ‘To you or to unborn generations.’

‘Here comes the ambulance now.’

‘Thank heavens, Doctor! The patient’s in luck.’

‘Not a moment to lose.’

‘Already it may be too late.’

Eric Cavendish looked anxiously at the door of the studio, then at an ambulance backing into the cul-de-sac. ‘I’ve got a car and a chauffeur.’

‘A chauffeur!’ said Ken. ‘Poor man. Tell him to drive away instantly. He may still be all right. In we get. Doctor, don’t forget the Geiger counter.’

‘Where are you taking me?’ asked Eric Cavendish in anguish.

‘St Swithin’s Hospital. We specialize in cases like yours.’

The actor shouted some instructions to his chauffeur. The ambulance doors clanged. It drove at speed towards St Swithin’s, with all the policemen holding up the traffic.

Stella was already waiting outside the studio when a few minutes later Grimsdyke turned the corner. ‘Sorry I’m late, love,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I hope you were expecting me?’

‘Of course I was, Gaston.’

‘And no one else?’

She hesitated just a second. ‘No, no one else at all.’

‘Not this Eric Cavendish bloke?’ She pressed against his chest. ‘I don’t suppose he’s even thinking of you now–’

She broke away. ‘That notice – against the wall!’ He inspected it and laughed. ‘Oh, that? Probably some student joke.’

Eric Cavendish was certainly not thinking of Stella, nor of anything except himself. He lay on a stretcher in the ambulance while the two doctors discussed his case between themselves. Though he was lost with the medical terminology, everything they said seemed progressively frightening.

‘Am I going to live?’ he cried.

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘Science will do its best for you, of course.’

‘But why wasn’t there some warning – something on TV or the radio?’

‘You mean you didn’t hear it?’

‘Oh, God.’

The ambulance stopped and reversed.

‘Here we are,’ said Terry. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Eric Cavendish.’

‘E Cavendish. Right. You’ll be quiet, won’t you? The hospital is full of radioactive cases, all seriously ill and a good many of them dying. This way.’

Eric Cavendish stepped out. He was outside a forbidding-looking hospital building. His escorts hurried him through a small side-door reserved, they explained, for contaminated cases. It led to a plain, long empty corridor with two or three wheel-chairs and trolleys stored in it. Terry opened another door. ‘This is the decontamination room.’ It was a cubicle with only a table, a hard chair and a clinical couch. ‘Now take your clothes off.’

‘Clothes? All of them?’

‘Of course. They go to the fabric decontamination centre. We will be back to decontaminate you later.’

‘But supposing someone else walked in? A nurse, or someone.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll lock the door.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’ It occurred to Eric Cavendish that in the panic he had not expressed gratitude to his saviours. ‘I’m very grateful to you both, for your life-saving action.’

‘All part of the day’s work,’ Terry told him cheerfully. ‘By the way, I think we’d better take that corset affair, too.’

They left him alone. He heard the key turn in the lock. He sat down gingerly on the hard chair and put his elbows on the table. It occurred to him that he had omitted to ask exactly how long they would be. He wished he had a cigarette. He looked round hopefully for something to pass the time. There was a leaflet on the floor in the corner, which he picked up and found to be headed POSTNATAL EXERCISES FOR MOTHERS. It seemed a strange thing to find in such a ghoulish place. He sat down again and shivered.

At that same moment, Sir Lancelot Spratt was advancing purposefully across the open space behind the main hospital building towards the new surgical block, a gloomy but stern look on his face. This intensified as he noticed his bride-to-be in her uniform, walking through the automatic doors just ahead of him. He stroked his beard and grunted. Then rearranging his features into one of unctuous charm, he lengthened his stride to catch her.

‘Hello, Tottie, my dear. What a pleasant surprise! I’m just up to Professor Bingham’s ward to refresh eye and hand with a few of his cases.’

‘Hello, Lancelot. I’m on my way up there, too. Sister’s off sick, and the new staff nurse seems to be making rather heavy weather of it.’

They reached the lift. Sir Lancelot gave a deep sigh. ‘It seems such a waste.’

‘I don’t think I follow.’

He pressed the button for the top floor. ‘You, Tottie, a highly trained and most experienced member of the nursing profession, from tomorrow week will be lost to humanity.’

‘But Lancelot, you know how much I shall prefer looking after you.’

‘Doubtless, doubtless. But it does seem a tragedy, that’s all.’

‘What do you want me to do? Carry on with my job? Lady Spratt, a working wife?’

‘No, no. I’d never suggest a thing like that.’

‘Perhaps you’d kindly tell me what you
are
suggesting?’

‘You might possibly – bearing in mind the undeniable success of your career and the uncountable benefits it has bestowed – think twice before abandoning it for such a mundane institution as marriage?’

‘No.’

‘I mean, the world contains few matrons but many wives.’

‘What the hell are you getting at? You’re quite beyond me, Lancelot. First you want the wedding next year, then you agree to a couple of months, then you ring me up to say you can hardly wait and we’ve got to get married next week. Can’t you make up your mind?’

‘It is a big step in one’s life, deserving a great deal of thought.’

They reached the top floor.

‘You’re not trying to get out of it again, are you?’

‘I? Perish the thought.’

‘I should damn well hope so.’ She moved away with a determined step. ‘Because you’re not going to.’

‘Sir Lancelot–’ Bingham in his white coat was standing outside the lift. ‘I understand from my house surgeon that you intend to operate this evening on an inguinal hernia from my wards.’

‘Quite so. It is a comparatively simple operation, just what I need for flexing my surgical muscles again. The houseman assures me there is a case in, even though the patient happens to have been admitted for something quite different. I suppose you do your hernias these days as out-patients? It will be an unexpected bonus for the man’s stay in hospital.’

‘I’m afraid you are mistaken. The theatre is not available for you.’

‘On the contrary, Bingham, I have told the theatre sister to prepare for the case in ten minutes. I shall examine the patient pre-operatively in the anaesthetic room.’

‘I have countermanded your orders.’

‘How dare you! You know perfectly well my rights under the terms of the charter.’

‘The charter doesn’t give you any right to upset everybody in the hospital. Not only the staff and the nurses, who can take it. But the patients, who can’t. On their behalf, I ask you to get out of my wards at once.’

‘You do, do you? Well, if you’re acting only for high-minded humanitarian reasons, I shall accede. At a price.’

‘What price?’

‘My fifty thousand quid.’

‘I refuse to submit to blackmail.’

‘Blackmail! When every single penny piece of it’s my own?’

‘You will leave my wards, and without a single condition–’

They were interrupted by the lift door opening. It emitted the dean, Harry the porter, and a fat man in a blue uniform and chauffeur’s cap.

‘Bingham! Thank God. Something terrible has happened–’

‘If you’ll forgive me,’ said Sir Lancelot loftily, moving away, ‘I shall be about my duties.’

‘Yes, please, Lancelot, leave us,’ said the dean distractedly. ‘It’s the students, Bingham.’

‘What are you getting excited about? It’s Rag Week,’ Bingham said impatiently.

‘In the usual way, I wouldn’t be excited, no. A joke’s a joke, and I’m the first to laugh. But this time…I’ll explain. Do you know a film actor called Eric Chatterley?’

‘Eric Cavendish,’ the chauffeur corrected him.

‘Exactly. He was driven away from somewhere in Chelsea in an ambulance. It was very strange. He hadn’t been ill or had an accident or anything.’

‘I thought I’d better follow up, sir,’ said the chauffeur. ‘The poor gentleman might want his relatives informed.’

‘And there’s not so much as a smell of him in the hospital, sir,’ added Harry.

‘You’ve checked in casualty?’ asked Bingham.

‘Twice, sir.’

‘You see, it’s the students,’ said the dean. ‘Kidnapping. Dear me, dear me! If anything happened to the fellow, there’d be the devil to pay. He must be valued in millions of dollars.’

‘Summerbee and Kerrberry.’ Bingham stopped the two students trying to sidle unseen into the lift. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

‘Oh, no, sir.’

‘But you’re on the Rag Week committee, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir. But we decided this year just to put a live alligator in the Serpentine.’

‘Perhaps we’d better search the hospital, Dean.’

‘Now you mention it, sir, I do seem to remember some of the boys whispering about nabbing someone or other,’ Ken Kerrberry said. ‘They were planning to hide him in the place they store the gas and oxygen cylinders.’

‘Thank you.’ The dean nodded briskly. ‘I’ll remember your helpfulness later, Mr Kerrberry.’

All six went down in the lift together.

At the door of the surgical block, the two students walked slowly away in the opposite direction towards the maternity department. Once out of sight, they broke into a run towards the empty ante-natal clinic on the ground floor. As they hurried along the corridor, banging and shouting came from the room in which Eric Cavendish was imprisoned.

‘Let me out! I’m dying of cold in here. Doctor, Doctor! I’d rather die of radiation sickness than cold. At least it takes longer–’

‘Relax, Mr Cavendish, relax, everything’s going splendidly,’ Terry shouted cheerfully through the door. He added to Ken in a whisper, ‘I suppose we’d better release him?’

‘You heard the dean. He’d really have it in for us.’

‘The bloke himself might turn nasty.’

‘But remember what Grimsdyke said. He’s got a terrific sense of humour. He’ll probably roar his guts out.’

‘I hope so–’ Terry paused, key in his hand. ‘His clothes!’

‘Oh, God.’

‘That was your bloody stupid idea, hiding them among the patients’ gear up in the ward cupboard.’

‘It was your bloody stupid idea of taking them, anyway.’

‘We had to be sure be didn’t escape, hadn’t we? In his movies, he gets out of bloody sight trickier situations than this.’

Eric Cavendish started banging on the door again. ‘Get one of those trolleys – the one with the blankets,’ Ken commanded.

The actor was standing in the middle of the floor, shivering and preserving his modesty behind POSTNATAL EXERCISES FOR MOTHERS.

‘What’s that trolley for? Where are you taking me?’

‘Jump on, Mr Cavendish. No need to worry. We’re just taking you up to the other decontamination room, where your clothes are waiting for you. In a few minutes you’ll be able to walk out of the hospital, perfectly clean and well. We’ve even sent for your chauffeur to collect you.’

‘Oh – thank you, Doctor,’ said Eric Cavendish, calming down and climbing gratefully under the blanket.

With a sense of relief he let himself be wheeled along the corridor, through a door, across an open space, through more doors, and into a lift. He noticed that his doctors had fallen silent, and propelled him at a brisk trot. The lift stopped. They pushed him into another spacious, well-lit corridor.

‘You’ve been a devil of a time with that patient of mine. Come along, boy, not that way, the anaesthetic room’s here. Surely you’ve learned at least that in the hospital?’

‘I recognize that voice–’ Eric Cavendish raised his head. ‘Well! Fancy meeting you in this charnel house.’

‘My dear Cavendish, so
you’re
the patient? That idiotic houseman never told me it was a private case. I didn’t imagine full-time professors were allowed them, but I suppose everything has lapsed badly since my day. I shall pass the fee to Bingham, anyway. Come along, boy, push him in,’ Sir Lancelot snapped to Terry, dragging the trolley into the small, cream-painted bare anaesthetic room with his own hands. ‘Now let me see, Cavendish, what were you admitted here for? I must say, you never mentioned it when we were sharing a room in that quack’s establishment. I hope it isn’t one of those diseases people feel ashamed of?’

‘I was admitted for decontamination, I guess.’

‘Really? How extraordinary.’ Sir Lancelot whipped off the blankets. ‘Cough.’

The actor coughed.

‘Again.’

Sir Lancelot looked puzzled. ‘Which side is it?’

‘Is what?’

‘The hernia.’

‘But I haven’t got a hernia.’

‘Come, come, man, you can’t get out of an operation because your nerve fails at the last moment. Of course you’ve got a hernia. On the left, I think. Not a large one, but pronounced enough. Right you are. Everything’s ready. I’ll have it sewn up for you in no time.’

The actor sat bolt upright. ‘What
is
this? You’re not going to operate on
me
.’

‘And why not, pray? You signed a standard consent form, I presume? It states specifically that you may possibly not have the surgeon of your choice, and that the extent of the procedure is left entirely to his skill and discretion.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Eric Cavendish shouted. ‘And if there was, I wouldn’t let you within five miles of it.’

‘Now you’re being insulting.’

‘I’m not. I’m being sane. I remember all those spine-chilling tales you told me. About the kidney coming away in your hands. About the blood lapping over the top of your rubber operating boots. About the time you lost your half-hunter watch–’

‘Come along, Cavendish, play the man! You may be the neurotic type, but you’ve nothing to fear–’

‘I am
not
going to have an operation!’

‘You are.’

‘I have made my mind up.’

‘And so have I. Hold him!’ Sir Lancelot cried to the two students, listening to the exchange with the numb feeling of car-drivers who have precipitated a nasty accident. ‘Go on, jump on him.’

Eric Cavendish leapt from the trolley. He abandoned even his blanket. He fled through the anaesthetic room doors. Outside was the matron.

He stopped short. ‘Good God, Charlotte. What are you doing here?’

‘Good God, Eric. But what are
you
doing here?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Like that?’