Doctor On The Brain (4 page)

‘We could try some transference therapy. Excellent results have been reported recently in the journals, by bringing patients under the influence of hypnosis or sodium amytal right up against the feared objects – cats, goldfish, bus-conductresses or whatever.’ Sir Lancelot continued to look bleakly unenthusiastic. ‘Though with a man of your well-integrated personality we could move more simply. You must simply engender feelings of tenderness towards the cats. Stroke them. Pet them. Offer them saucers of milk.’

‘I could no more bring myself to touch one of those monsters than to pet a hyena with rabies.’

Dr Bonaccord looked pained again. As he had anticipated, the consultation was a trying one. ‘May I finish? You can achieve this quite simply by telling yourself they are not cats at all.’

‘What are they, then? Leprechauns in fur coats?’

‘Babies. Human babies.’

Sir Lancelot’s expression was doubtful. ‘I am not particularly fond of babies.’

‘Nevertheless, you’ll find it works. I can absolutely guarantee it. Next time you see one of those cats, say to yourself, “What a bonnie, dear baby! I must tickle its little tum-tum.” You’ll be surprised how different you feel at once. We have no fear of the young of our own species.’

Sir Lancelot grunted. ‘Worth a try, I suppose.’

‘Most certainly. I’ve had very good results with people like yourself, who are stuck in the anal stage–’

‘Kindly do not be disgusting.’

‘I am using the term in its psychological sense,’ said Dr Bonaccord quickly. ‘The preoccupation with the nipple–’

He broke off, with a sharp intake of breath. Sir Lancelot looked round in concern, to see him white-faced, clutching his middle. ‘I say, Bonaccord, are you all right? Or have you got this cat thing, too?’

‘Just…just my heartburn. It often comes on when I’m suffering psychological strain.’

‘Oh?’ Sir Lancelot abruptly stood up. ‘And how long have you been having that?’

‘The last few weeks. It’s nothing serious.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Park yourself in this chair. I’ll take a look at it.’

‘You really needn’t trouble–’

‘Come along, man! You don’t want to perforate a duodenal ulcer in the middle of a psychoanalysis, do you?’ More reluctant patients than Dr Bonaccord had quailed under the command of Sir Lancelot’s eye. He submissively lay on the chair, undoing the waistband of his trousers. Sir Lancelot deftly bared him from ribs to pubis, and laid a hand on his paunchy abdomen. ‘Hurt?’

‘Ooooo!’

‘H’m. Could be a p.u.’

‘It won’t mean an operation, will it?’

‘What’s the odds? It’ll do you a lot of good.’ Sir Lancelot always made it sound like a summer holiday.

‘You may think I’m terribly stupid, but…well, I have the most intense, if highly unreasonable, fear of anyone cutting me up.’

‘You mean, you’re stuck in the anal stage, too?’

‘I know it’s ridiculous. I’ve tried to overcome it. By transference, you understand. Like you and the cats. Telling myself surgery’s some sort of clever conjuring trick, resembling sawing a lady in half.’

Sir Lancelot shot his cuffs. ‘I don’t think I need get my knife into you just yet. A case for medical rather than surgical treatment, I should have thought. You’d better see a physician. Why not step next door and consult the dean? He may be a miserable old sod as a neighbour, but at least he knows his way up and down the alimentary canal.’

Dr Bonaccord did up his trousers, looking relieved. ‘Perhaps I’ll call this evening. It may just be the matter of a suitable diet, surely? I eat rather irregularly and unwisely, being a bachelor.’

‘Doesn’t Mrs Tennant lend a hand?’

‘My secretary keeps to her own flat,’ the psychiatrist said primly.

‘H’m,’ said Sir Lancelot. That’s not what the St Swithin’s students think, he reflected. But he supposed if a medical man shared his house with an attractive young woman separated from her husband, he couldn’t be blamed for putting a respectable face on it. ‘Well, I’ll take your tip about the cats.’

‘Come back and see me tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, tenderness,’ repeated the psychiatrist, stuffing in his shirt-tails. ‘
Tenderness
. You must grow to love those cats. Let them rub themselves against you. Let them walk over you. Let them sleep at the end of your bed.’

‘I shall do my best,’ said Sir Lancelot gamely. ‘Though I should prefer the affair to remain somewhat platonic, as the pair are undoubtedly heavily infested with fleas.’

The dean hailed a taxi outside the main gate of St Swithin’s. He would not after all be lunching in the hospital refectory that Monday. For once, he was sorry that he wouldn’t be meeting Sir Lancelot. Nothing can engender such a pleasant glow in a man who for years has been dominated by another, than the secret knowledge that he has the fellow’s obituary in his pocket.

The dean had intended posting it to the editor that very morning, but so many little improvements kept edging into his mind. He could for instance change the passage about Sir Lancelot’s teaching methods –
undeniably effective, if reminiscent of a Victorian admiral addressing midshipmen on the quarterdeck
– to,
reminiscent of a fearless sergeant-major conducting bayonet practice
. And there was something to be squeezed in about,
he regarded life as one long after dinner, with himself the principal speaker.
He would put it in his desk drawer for a while. Time would only lighten the task, which was like trying to review some spectacular and noisy performance well before the final curtain.

‘The Crécy Hotel,’ he ordered the driver. His lunch with the Member of Parliament had been fixed for that very day. Frankie Humble was not one to let grass grow under anyone’s feet.

The Crécy Hotel overlooking Hyde Park was one of the crop like concrete asparagus which had shot up in central London over the past five years. The dean had been there only once before, to a party of American neurophysiologists, and had thought the prices outrageous. He went through the stylish lobby to the porter’s desk.

‘Dr Humble?’ he asked. ‘I’m Sir Lionel Lychfield.’

‘Dr Humble has a table in the Starlight Room, sir. The page will show you to the lift.’

When the lift doors opened on the top floor, the dean recognized his professional colleague instantly, even from the rear. No one but Frankie would lunch indoors in a three-foot cartwheel hat of pink and white tulle trimmed with yellow artificial roses.

‘Lionel, my
darling
! So delighted you could make it. Was it an awful inconvenience?’

‘It is never an inconvenience meeting you, Frankie.’ The dean drew on forgotten stores of gallantry as he sat opposite, beside a window overlooking London.

‘Sweet man. Have a vodka martini. It’s all I allow myself these days. At home, I put a millilitre of vermouth in with a syringe. Weight, you know. These cruel contradictions of life! Eating and obesity, idleness and poverty, love and pregnancy. You must tell me all the latest scandal from dear St Swithin’s. How’s Sir Lancelot?’

‘Dead,’ said the dean sombrely.

‘What!’

‘I mean…not yet. But nearer to it, obviously. That is, nearer than yesterday. Or come to that, than the day before.’

‘You
are
gloomy! You’d better get that glassful down your gullet and have a refill.’

Dr Frances Humble MP took a gulp of her third vodka, with onion, not olive. She was tall, fair and sunburnt, and in the ten years since captaining the St Swithin’s tennis and golf teams had lost nothing of the look of being instantly ready to strip off and play any vigorous game that anybody cared to suggest. Like many other medical persons, she had turned to politics as a means of expressing even more fully a natural inclination to make people do what she thought good for them. The dean had admired her since her first professional job as his house-physician – she had seemed so intelligent, so definite, so clean-living and so efficient at everything she cared to indulge in. She was just like his daughter Muriel. Frankie also had small, soft blonde hairs covering her strong, brown forearms, which every time the dean had noticed them for years gave him a hot feeling in the back of the neck.

‘And how’s the political scene?’ he asked, as the waiter brought his second drink.

‘Much the same,’ she told him gaily. ‘Isn’t it remarkable, however many elections we hold the same people seem to bounce to the top, all wearing their broad grins and holding their gin-and-tonics?’

The dean sighed. To any scientist, the ramshackle, haphazard machine of politics was incomprehensible. ‘I often wish I could make some sense out of the manoeuvring of the world’s rulers.’

‘But so do I! Political life’s so full of contradictions. We have socialist millionaires. We have God knows how many Tories living on the old age pension. The rich nations get richer and the poor ones poorer – though admittedly the lamentations about it in the better newspapers are very touching. Our economy pours out a cascade of total inessentials, and men will commit murder to acquire more of them. Quite mad. We only enjoy peace, perfect peace, because war has at last become efficient enough to have a reasonable promise of killing absolutely everybody. The quenelles of lobster here are perfectly delicious. I do hope you’ll start with them?’

‘Thank you. But I mustn’t drink any more.’

‘You’re seeing patients this afternoon?’

‘No, but I have a lot of important administrative work at St Swithin’s.’

‘I’m sure you could do that with your eyes shut. After all, you are one of the greatest deans in the history of the hospital.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Even when I was your houseman, I was staggered by your ruthless efficiency as an administrator.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Yet you manage to be such an utterly delightful person at the same time.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You know, Lionel, what an enormously tender spot I’ve always had for you?’

‘Thank you. How’s your husband?’

‘Didn’t you see in the paper? Just left on a trade mission to South America. He’ll be away six weeks.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s awfully dreary, alone in the flat.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Particularly in the evenings.’

‘Quite.’

‘Have another vodka.’

‘Thank you. I mean, no.’

‘Of course you will. Waiter!’

She was wearing a smart red sleeveless dress, and as she summoned the wine waiter the sunlight caught the little hairs on her forearms. The dean felt as though someone had applied an old-fashioned kaolin poultice just above his collar.

‘Dear Lionel.’ She gave the smile which had so often flashed across tennis-nets after administering someone a trouncing. ‘I need your help. No, it’s more than that. It is
you alone
who can save me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Lionel,
do
try and talk instead of emitting noises. You know how interested I have become in education?’

‘An admirable preoccupation in any politician.’

‘Well, it’s a good line. We must all have one, of course,’ she continued cheerfully. ‘It’s a quite heartening sight these days, seeing so many professional do-gooders on the make. Against pollution, for instance. Or for consumer protection. They’re the latest-model bandwagons. But the voters will get tired of them. People have filthy habits naturally, and only worry about mucking up their environment through feelings of guilt, in this age of excruciating self-indulgence. As for consumer protection – well, selling anything from a beggar’s box of matches upwards has always had a robust element of cheap-jackery in it. I think people rather enjoy being slightly diddled, if it’s done with style. But education will go on forever. People will never think they can get enough of it – like leisure, the poor dear deluded fools.’

The dean was feeling confused with this brisk political analysis. ‘What do you want me to do? Present the prizes at some secondary modern?’

‘Lionel, you have a charmingly modest view of your talents.’ The waiter set down his third drink. ‘I get the barman to make those with genuine Soviet vodka, of course – so much stronger. No, Lionel. As dean of St Swithin’s you have gone far in the educational world. I want you to go further. Much further. Ah, here’s the head waiter. Let’s order. I’ll tell you what I’ve in mind for you when we’ve finished eating. You look as though you could do with a good meal, I must say. Quite peaky, in fact. Is that wonderful Miss MacNish of yours off form?’

‘She has been seduced by Sir Lancelot.’

‘What a shame. And Josephine never did claim to shine in the kitchen, did she? I adore
cordon bleu
cooking, of course. Such a pity you didn’t wait a few years and marry me instead.’

The warm feeling spread up to the dean’s scalp and down his backbone. He suddenly felt quite frightened of himself. He was of course a devoted husband and family man…but it was not only in the kitchen that Josephine might shine less brilliantly than the lithe, blonde, tigerish lady running her eye critically down the menu.

‘My God, you
do
look hungry,’ she said, glancing up.

Frankie designedly kept the dean waiting until his coffee and brandy before returning to the reason for her invitation to lunch.

‘Lionel, have you thought of your future?’

‘I don’t think I have one. I have achieved all I set myself to do.’

‘Then I offer you new worlds to conquer, my dear little Alexander the Great. What would be your next step up from dean?’

‘There simply isn’t one.’ He thought a moment. ‘Except to be vice-chancellor of a university.’

‘Exactly.’

The dean sat up. ‘But that has been something quite beyond my wildest dreams.’

‘But you’d make a splendid vice-chancellor. If you can handle the St Swithin’s students, you can handle anyone. You would have to move house, of course.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t mind in the least,’ said the dean warmly.

‘And resign from St Swithin’s completely.’

‘A pang, but soon assuaged.’

‘And give up the practice of medicine.’

‘Like yourself.’

‘Might I take it, then, you’d accept an official offer?’

‘You might well.’

‘Good. Then a Ministerial announcement will be made, a week today, next Monday. I’m on the university senate, of course. I was given responsibility for sounding you out. We may be a comparatively new university, but that, don’t you think, only widens the scope for impressing upon it your own ideas, your own methods, your own
personality
, Lionel.’

The dean was aware through the brandy fumes of some item vaguely worrying him. ‘But which university does it happen to be?’

‘Hampton Wick.’

The dean clutched the tablecloth.

‘What’s the matter, Lionel? Dyspepsia?’

‘No…it’s just that…you did say Hampton Wick?’

‘Very convenient for central London. You won’t miss your friends, the theatres, that sort of thing. Is that really the time? I must fly. I must be at a conference on mental health by two-thirty. Where’s the waiter? Be a dear and pay the bill, will you? I’ll send you a cheque later. The letter of appointment will be in the post tonight. Do give my love to Josephine. What a pity you lost that nice Miss MacNish. Everything will go very smoothly, and I can hardly wait for your inaugural address to the students next October. Do look after yourself. Bye.’

The dean sat gripping the tablecloth. ‘Hampton Wick!’ he muttered. ‘My God, what have I done? What have I done?’