Doctor On The Brain (2 page)

The tragic death yesterday of Sir Lionel Lychfield FRCP, dean of St Swithin’s, was an event of more importance to his small circle of friends than to the world at large.

Sir Lancelot grunted. No, that wouldn’t do. He crossed out the words and tried again.

The tragic death yesterday of Sir Lionel Lychfield FRCP, dean of St Swithin’s, will grieve the many who admired him only through reputation even more than the few privileged to know him personally.

His pen scratched on powerfully. He had always felt a talent for that sort of prose.

The main courtyard of St Swithin’s Hospital was separated from a busy north London shopping street of stereotyped ugliness by a line of tall, stout, spiked iron railings, from which the students occasionally suspended banners announcing rag week or their objection to aspects of the political situation, or unpopular members of their own fraternity by their trousers. Inside were half a dozen venerable plane-trees and a pair of statues in memory of the hospital’s distinguished Victorian sons – Lord Larrymore, a physician like the dean, who claimed to have discovered the cause of tuberculosis had he not been forestalled by a bunch of damn foreigners like Robert Koch. And Sir Benjamin Bone, a surgeon like Sir Lancelot Spratt, who would have been appointed to Her Majesty’s household had the Queen not found his bluff, jolly bedside manner not at all amusing.

The ascetic-looking Lord Larrymore sat in academic robes with an expression of querulousness, left hand forever extended, as though arguing some arcane clinical point across the courtyard with Sir Benjamin. They had not in fact spoken during the final twenty years of their lives, following some complicated quarrel of which they and everyone else had forgotten the cause, communicating with bleakly polite notes transmitted by a hospital porter employed expressly for the purpose. Sir Benjamin stood in full-skirted frock-coat, a cocked head and quizzical expression as he eyed the skull in his huge hand suggesting an aging Hamlet with difficulty in hearing the prompter. Few of the busy hospital passers-by spared them a glance or a thought. Only the London pigeons continued to give them generous attention.

Even the patch of sickly-looking grass between them had now gone, cars and ambulances jamming the broad arena where once consultants clattered over the cobbles behind livened coachmen in their broughams and victorias, and their patients arrived less obtrusively, borne by the neighbours on a window-shutter. The dean hurried up the flight of stone steps to the plate-glass front doors leading to the main hall, briefly nodded good-morning to Harry the porter in his glass box, then made briskly towards his office along the wide, rubber-floored main corridor. Day and night this was always busy with hospital staff, patients on stretchers and wheelchairs, cylinders of oxygen, containers of food, trollies carrying everything from bottles of blood to the morning papers, and emitting a faint, ineradicable smell of phenol and distant long-stewing greens, to old St Swithin’s men as hauntingly nostalgic as the perfume of some lost, first love.

At that moment the dean’s daughter Muriel was sitting just some fifty yards away in the medical school library. She looked at her large wristwatch with its sweep second hand for the twenty-second time that morning. She bit her lip, suppressing her impatience. The moment was not yet ripe. She must control herself. Otherwise, she couldn’t effectively put the carefully thought-out plan into operation.

During her final year as a medical student, Muriel generally left home in the morning before her father. She liked to hang about the casualty department, or nose round the wards – the patients conveniently being roused and exposed to medical attention since well before six a.m. – in the hope of coming upon instructive cases before the other students began crowding about. Sometimes she disappeared to the library, the gift of a Victorian brewer, with its riotously carved pale oak, vaulted ceilings and almost opaque leaded windows, then thought the necessary background to piety, justice, learning or the medical treatment of paupers. She sat in a bay lined with books, at a table with piled bound volumes of the
British Medical Journal
and
Lancet,
propped open in front of her
Recent Advances in Medicine
, at its side a note-book. That morning she had neither made a note nor read a word. She stared at the printed page through large round metal-rimmed glasses, like the dean’s, as unseeing as a nervous patient behind a waiting-room magazine.

Muriel looked at her watch again. Two minutes and a half to nine o’clock. She stood up abruptly. Zero hour. If her timing was correct, running over the ground the morning before, she should arrive at her target precisely at the opportune moment.

She shut the volume of
Recent Advances
. She looked round anxiously. She was still alone. It was early for even a conscientious student to be found in the library, but some girl from her own year might easily have looked in to check some facts, then casually attached herself as Muriel left, ruining the whole scheme. She took off her reading-glasses and slipped them with her notebook into a capacious brown handbag. For a second her fingertips stayed in the depths. It was still there, of course. She fancied it was still even warm.

With a brisk step, Muriel turned towards the library door. She was tall, like her mother, her feet in flat shoes rather too large. Her plain brown dress was new, but like all her clothes seemed to belong to the fashion before last. Her hair was gathered into an untidy ponytail by a twisted rubber band. She was slim – when inspecting herself in her bedroom mirror on the top floor of the dean’s house, as she had so frequently over the past few weeks, she had to agree that her anatomy, though no different from any other girl’s, was tastefully distributed. It was a conclusion which frightened her a little. Had she tried, she could have made herself look as inviting as any of the hundreds of young women working at St Swithin’s. But she told her mother she hadn’t the time, and her father agreed beautification was quite unnecessary, the male students at St Swithin’s being as undiscriminating as a bunch of sex maniacs newly liberated from Broadmoor.

Muriel left the library for the courtyard, but turned away from the steps of the main hospital entrance. St Swithin’s had grown as haphazardly as London itself, and in the four hundred years of its existence had thrown up buildings which met in awkward corners and narrow passages all over its irregular site. She followed a flagstoned alleyway beside the Georgian maternity department, skirted the brand-new sixteen-floor steel-and-glass surgical block and with a quick glance over her shoulder made towards the red-brick baronial battlements housing the pathology laboratories. She hurried past the gothic front door, and with another apprehensive glance turned round the back, then briskly mounted the black metal fire-escape. The door leading into the third floor was slightly ajar. She had left it so the previous afternoon.

Muriel glanced right and left. The dim, bleak, green-painted passage was empty. She walked to a frosted-glass door at the end, marked in red CLINICAL PATHOLOGY. She tapped.

‘Come in.’

She opened it. Mr Winterflood, pipe clamped between his teeth, tartan scarf round his neck, was just taking off his fawn raincoat. Her timing had been superb, Muriel thought. As efficient as everything else she did – well, almost everything else, she supposed, in the circumstances.

‘Well! It’s Miss Lychfield. And how’s the dean keeping?’

‘He seems very well, thank you, Mr Winterflood. I’m sorry to catch you just as you’ve arrived.’

‘Wait a sec. I’ll get my white coat on.’ He unwound the scarf. ‘Got to wrap up well, you know. Some of these bright mornings are treacherous. I mean, for a man with all my complaints. “A walking pathological museum”, the dean once called me. Though I expect he can hardly wait to get me downstairs on the post-mortem table. Eh?’

He gave a laugh, and taking a match from the pocket of his thick woollen khaki cardigan filled the small, untidy laboratory with smoke. The chief technician was a small fat man with a thick insanitary-looking moustache and abnormally bright red cheeks. He had been a patient of St Swithin’s since childhood, and if he had succeeded in rising from the severely-drilled ranks in the wards to the hospital staff itself, this was less through his abilities than his doctors’ concern to keep track of him until they could discover exactly what the devil had been going on in his inside.

‘I’ve got a specimen.’ Muriel opened her bag as he pulled on his white coat. ‘I thought I’d bring it up myself.’

‘From one of your patients, is it?’

‘Well, yes. Or rather, well, no. That is, it’s from a friend.’ She produced from her bag a small screw-capped hospital specimen bottle filled with straw-coloured fluid.

‘What’s it for?’ Mr Winterflood held the bottle to the light with a knowing eye. ‘Sugar and albumen?’

‘Well, er, no. Pregnancy.’

‘Ah.’ He put the bottle with a flourish on the laboratory workbench. ‘That simple little specimen, it’s like a bomb, isn’t it? Could change the shape of two people’s lives overnight. I’m a philosophical chap. I often think about that. Some of the ladies, they go into tears of joy knowing that they’re at last going to have a little one. Others…a terrible state they get into. Threaten suicide maybe. Do it sometimes, for all I know. Not so much these days, of course, when such matters can be rectified through the proper channels. But it still puts a fair cat among the pigeons. Strange, isn’t it? Same event, different reaction. As I always say about this life, it’s not what happens to you, it’s the way you look at it. Now, if the Prime Minister took my advice–’

‘When will you have the result?’

‘This evening do you?’

‘I’ll come up.’

‘Don’t bother, Miss. I’ll phone your friend.’

‘She’s not on the telephone.’

‘Oh. Married, is she?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. I see. Might be awkward, leaving a message. She thinks she’s in the pudding club, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Far gone?’

‘Not very. In fact, she’s not
really
sure. That’s why she sent the specimen.’

‘Nothing like it for making a girl proper impatient, eh?’ He lit his pipe again.

‘That’s right.’

‘What’s the naughty little lady’s name?’

‘Smith.’

‘Come on!’

‘Must you really have her name? She’s a…very old friend.’

‘I must, Miss. Lab regulations. All specimens must be clearly labelled with the patient’s name, age and ward. What would happen if the professor came in and found the bottle? Could get me in the cart good and proper. Or he might easily decide to do this very test himself, to demonstrate to the students. He’d have to read out the patient’s name–’

Already tense with the anxieties of the morning, Muriel felt her head swim. ‘Mr Winterflood, I particularly want
you
to do that test. The professor mustn’t come near it. You see, it’s mine.’

‘Oh.’ Mr Winterflood picked up the bottle again and inspected it with more reverence.

‘
Please
will you do this for me?’ Muriel implored. ‘Of course, it may well be negative. But even so, I don’t want the news of it to get about the hospital. Surely you can see that?’

‘Don’t worry, Miss. You can rely on my professional discretion. I’ll mark your name on it in pencil, and rub it out immediately afterwards. How’s that?’

Muriel looked nervously at her watch. She had chosen her moment carefully, before the professor usually arrived. But he could walk in any time, and he was an old friend of her father’s who had punctured her as a baby with her immunizing injections. It was essential he knew nothing of it. ‘That sounds a very sensible arrangement, Mr Winterflood. I must run along now, but I’ll be back at five-thirty.’

‘Right you are. Let’s hope it’s just a false alarm, eh?’

Muriel hurried down the fire-escape and retraced her path to the courtyard. She still had twenty minutes before appearing in the wards for her father’s teaching round. She had been allotted an interesting case of thyrotoxicosis, and particularly wanted to shine as she presented it to the class. But it was difficult to think adequately about work, or about anything, with that little bottle in Mr Winterflood’s laboratory deciding the shape of her entire life to come. As she mounted the stone steps, a voice called her name.

Muriel spun round. ‘Tulip? Where had you got to? I haven’t seen you since the night of the union ball.

‘Oh, I had my midder to finish, then I went to Torremolinos for a fortnight.’

‘But how super. Have a good time?’

‘Oh, great. All those dreamy pink Scandinavians working off a lifetime’s inhibitions as their epidermis peeled in the sun.’

The two girls pushed open the plate-glass doors. Tulip Twyson was neither shapelier nor better looking than Muriel, but her skill in making the most of basic ingredients was like an experienced French chef against a suburban housewife. Her long blonde hair hung loose, her rather sharp face was fashionably tanned, and she wore skirts so short that the dean was continually mystified at the rate the male members of his bedside classes managed to drop their pencils.

‘Tulip,’ asked Muriel. ‘Will you do me a tremendous favour? If anyone asks, say I spent the night after the May ball in your flat.’

Tulip raised her eyebrows. ‘No problem. But who was it?’

‘I’d rather not say.’

‘OK. What was he like as a performer?’

‘Oh…well…I wouldn’t know.’

‘You mean, you’d passed out?’

‘No, not at all. But you see, Tulip…and this is something I’d only tell
you
… I’d never done it before. Ever.’

‘Virtuous you.’

‘I’ve never seemed to have the time.’ She looked apologetic. ‘All my life, I’ve devoted myself to my work. That’s partly through Father, I suppose. You know how severe he is. He thinks I ought to qualify – even win the gold medal – before I start thinking about men.’

‘He’s like those schoolmistresses who told you masturbation ruins your hockey. Personally, I always found it less exhausting and very much warmer.’

‘I know I’m an adult. Why, I’m almost middle-aged compared with some girls I’ve known who’ve got married. But I’ve a career to make. I’m determined on that, you know. I’d really love to be the first female consultant ever elected to the St Swithin’s staff.’

‘We all have our strange ambitions, love.’

‘After all, my father is the dean, and he’d help. That sort of thing goes on all the time at St Swithin’s. But he certainly wouldn’t if he thought I’d let him down.’

‘A pity nothing came of your thing with lovely little Terry Summerbee.’