Doctor On The Job (3 page)

She left him. The door which clicked shut was handleless and almost invisible in the wall. ‘It’s a sort of medical dungeon,’ he muttered. He looked round nervously. ‘It all helps you to concentrate, I suppose.’ With both hands he tugged down the ends of his grey jacket. ‘What am I worrying about? Me, an important man, described in the newspapers as “Baron Bed-and-breakfast”? I’ve never had a day’s illness in my life, play two rounds of golf a week, don’t smoke, hardly drink, feel as fit as a flea –’ He jumped as the red light flashed, accompanied by a loud intermittent buzzing.

Lord Hopcroft squeezed through a gap in the plastic dome. Instantly the flashing and buzzing ceased. He sat on the stool. Nothing happened. He drummed his fingers lightly on the screen and whistled a soft tune. He began to wonder if something had fused. The blank screen suffused a bright blue. A question appeared in silvery capitals.

ARE YOUR PERIODS REGULAR?

Lord Hopcroft scratched his head. He wondered for a moment if it referred to some mannerism of speaking. He decided it best to do nothing. After a minute the silvery question flashed several times, to be replaced with,

ANSWER!

He pressed ‘Uncertain’. The letters flicked away at once, replaced with,

ARE YOU ON THE CONTRACEPTIVE PILL?

He replied promptly, ‘No’. The next question asked,

DID IT ITCH?

After some deliberation, he pressed ‘No’ again.

DO YOU GET THESE URGES OFTEN?

‘Matron!’ cried Lord Hopcroft.

Only the echoes sounded in his ears. The question started flashing. In exasperation he pressed ‘Yes’. He was asked in quick succession DO YOU GET UP AT NIGHT TO URINATE?, to which he said ‘No’, MANY TIMES?, to which he replied ‘No’ again, and MORE OR LESS THAN A DOZEN TIMES?, to which he bad-temperedly slammed all three buttons at once. GO THROUGH ‘IN’ DOOR IMMEDIATELY, commanded the screen, then went blank.

Lord Hopcroft had the impression of some fault creeping into the system. But he obediently quit the capsule and pushed open the door marked IN. Like most patients, he clutched a faith in his hospital and his doctors which was infinite, touching and potentially disastrous.

The further room was similar but even more frightening. The signal above another television screen was already flashing and buzzing amid a scientific jungle of apparatus, all glittering metal and glass.

PASS A SPECIMEN INTO THE YELLOW FUNNEL,

the screen was ordering him.

In his agitated mental state, Lord Hopcroft found this difficult. The message flashed, to be succeeded with,

‘PLEASE TRY.’

No luck.

YOU
MUST
PROVIDE A SPECIMEN, the screen exhorted. THINK OF NIAGARA FALLS.

‘You bloody stupid thing,’ Lord Hopcroft cried angrily.

KEEP CALM! it replied.

‘I utterly refuse to keep calm. If you must know, I’ve been secretly fed up with you computers for years. You’ve come to completely dominate our lives. You’re fickle, unreliable, and seldom give a straight answer. You refuse to accept the slightest criticism, and you overreact wildly at any attempt to correct your glaring faults. In fact, you’re exactly like women. And a damn sight more expensive to keep. Once I’m back in my office, I’m going to loose my computers into the street, and issue my staff with ledgers bound in lovely leather and quill pens.’

ABUSE WILL GET YOU NOWHERE, it told him.

‘Yes, it will.’ He seized the screen furiously and tried to shake it, but it was rigidly anchored to the desk. ‘Furthermore, you seem to imagine I’ve got a bladder like a camel.’

TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF ME!

‘You’re lucky I don’t smash your screen in.’

YOU WOULDN’T DARE.

‘Yes, I would. You just see.’

VIOLENCE IS DESPICABLE.

‘So is gross incompetence.’

PLENTY OF OTHERS APPRECIATE ME.

‘Plenty of others appreciated Fanny Hill.’

NOW NOW!

‘Matron!’ Lord Hopcroft’s voice rang out plaintively. ‘I want to go home. Let me out.’

His only answer was the screen flashing,

PASS A SPECIMEN INTO THE YELLOW FUNNEL.

Lord Hopcroft stared round. He saw a second stand of iced water. He filled several plastic beakers and tipped them down the funnel, laughing wildly. The whole screen flashed several times. It said,

YOU MUST ENTER HOSPITAL AT ONCE.

‘Nonsense,’ said Lord Hopcroft.

The door behind him flew open, and two large men in high-necked white jackets seized him by the arms and carried him out.

Shortly after eight o’clock the following morning, at the workaday end of Chelsea’s King’s Road, where the boutiques and bistros give way to the football ground and the gasworks, a first-floor window shot up and a pale, good-looking, wild-haired young man in a frilled shirt and velvet dinner-jacket stuck his head through the curtains and remarked, ‘My God, it’s daylight.’

He ducked back into the small room, staring at his wristwatch. He shook it and tapped it. A long struggle to keep up with swift-footed time seemed finally to have killed it. The softly-ticking bedside clock caught his attention. ‘My God,’ he said again. ‘And it’s Tuesday.’

He stared round, wondering where his trousers were. The floor was plastic tiled, bare except for a bra, black tights, a crumpled dress. The bed was plain and narrow, jammed into the walls like a ship’s bunk. Half-covered by a sheet, long fair hair delicately curtaining her naked shoulders, both hands tucked under one glowing cheek, Faith Lychfield lay peacefully asleep.

The young man gingerly touched her nose with the tips of his fingers. She remained exactly as she was, but her eyes opened instantly, as if by some reflex.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Remember me?’ he asked politely.

‘Of course. Wasn’t it a super party?’

‘It was great, terrific. And I thought it was going to be deadly boring. I mean, the Annual Ball of the Destitute Reclamation Society doesn’t sound extra swinging, does it? I only went along because somebody gave me a ticket. I thought it would at least take my mind off my work.’

‘It’s all a frightful charity swindle, really. I can’t see how the destitutes get much, once they’ve paid for all the champers.’

‘But of course, I never wildly imagined I’d ever meet anyone so tremendously exciting and so vibrant as you there,’ he told her in a sober tone, sitting demurely on the edge of the bunk in his shirt-tails.

‘You
are
sweet,’ she said, still in the same position.

‘I must have dropped off to sleep,’ he suggested lamely.

‘It was awfully late when we climbed in through that window. Almost dawn. It’s a wonder we weren’t arrested. Policemen seem to be so suspicious these days.’

‘But how do I get out? This is a woman’s hostel, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t worry. The old ducks in charge are tremendously free and easy. They have to be, or they wouldn’t get any voluntary helpers. Of course, my parents think it’s a cross between Holloway and a nunnery. Daddy has rather old-fashioned ideas.’

‘Daddy,’ he murmured, scratching his bristly chin. ‘It could be just a little awkward, you know.’

‘But, lovey! Daddy never need know you’d been here. Or that you’d ever met me. He keeps me away from the students as though they were lepers with bells.’

‘Yes, but I ought to be seeing daddy in –’ He shook his watch, put it to his ear, then remembered the bedside clock. ‘Thirty-eight minutes. I’m taking my surgery clinical in St Swithin’s at nine.’

Faith sat bolt upright, hand to mouth. ‘Oh, Pip! You should have told me. I’d have set the alarm.’

‘The thought did pass through my mind. But I felt it would sound a rather prosaic suggestion in the circumstances.’

‘You’ll have to rush like the wind,’ she urged. ‘Daddy can be absolutely tigerish with people who don’t keep appointments.’

‘Yes, I’ll get a move on,’ he decided gravely. ‘But where are my trousers?’

‘Oh, dear, dear…’ Faith gazed round her cubicle, lit by a bar of sunlight evading the drawn curtains. ‘Did you take them off in here?’

‘It might have been outside,’ he admitted. ‘I remember we were in rather a hurry.’

‘Here they are!’ She tugged a crumpled pair of dark trousers from the bottom of her bed.

‘Thank you.’ He started putting them on. ‘I don’t honestly think it’s worth looking for my bow tie.’

‘But you
are
at least going to
try
taking the exam, surely?’ she asked with concern.

‘I shall have to.’ He gave a slight shrug. ‘Otherwise daddy will throw me out.’

‘Oh, no! You should have told me, Pip. I never imagined that you lived a life so desperate. I would have packed you back to your landlady for a cup of Ovaltine and a good night’s sleep,’ she told him firmly.

‘I would allow myself to be thrown out of far better places than St Swithin’s for last night,’ he assured her solemnly.

She put her head on one side. ‘What’s your other name?’

‘Chipps.’

‘I don’t know anything about you. Except that I remember daddy mentioning your name now and then at home. It always seemed to make him rather excited.’

‘My own father’s a GP in the West Country. He was a student at St Swithin’s with yours. My mother writes poetry, which is published in the local paper. My auntie is matron of the Bertie Bunn Wing.’

‘Who’s trying to make Sir Lancelot Spratt,’ Faith said brightly. ‘Everybody knows.’

Pip winced. ‘Sir Lancelot Spratt. I shall be looking him in the face –’ He took another glance at the clock. ‘In thirty-six minutes.’

‘You
will
have to shift a bit,’ she remarked, still sitting in bed.

‘I’ll get there. Don’t worry. Even if I have to steal a car. I really mustn’t fail this time. I think it would give my poor father a coronary. It’s my third try at the surgery, you see. And dad’s dreadfully keen that I should follow him as another doctor from St Swithin’s. May I see you again tonight?’

‘Of course.’ She pouted her lips for him to kiss briefly.

‘We have so many ideas in common.’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes shone into his. ‘The freedom of the individual –’

‘No police,’ he agreed with a nod. ‘No bosses. No landlords. No exams. No elite.’

‘Squatters’ rights –’

‘Housing on demand. Plus essential foodstuffs, transport, holidays and abortion.’

‘No cruel sports. Flog all huntsmen.’

‘Abolish the Army and the Navy. Also Ascot Week.’

They looked at each other, almost breathless with their reforming zeal.

‘See you at six?’ he asked.

‘That pub opposite Chelsea Town Hall.’

‘Lovely. Where’s my shoes?’

‘In the bookcase.’

He slipped them on. ‘I think that’s everything.’

‘Good luck for your clinical.’

‘It’ll be all right. I’m sure it will. I’ve never been so inspired before an examination in my life.’

Faith blew him a kiss and he nudged through the door. Then she yawned, put her head on the pillow and shut her eyes. She had the day off, and saw no reason for such adventures to mar a morning’s lie-in. She had an intensely practical outlook, like her father.

Unfortunately for his chosen career, Pip did not enjoy Faith’s talent for self-organization. This had rendered his admittance to the St Swithin’s Medical School a mystery, which deepened in the eyes of its consultants with every year that he somehow managed to remain in it. They started ascribing it to some unspeakable secret of the dean’s, remembered by Pip’s father from their student days together. The dean was even growing to wish that this was true.

Pip stood on the kerb in the King’s Road, blinking painfully in the strong sunlight. He dissected his problem in an unusually deliberative way. Bus or Tube would never get him across London in time. His next decision was to lie groaning in the roadway until someone summoned an ambulance. But he reflected that would whisk him only into the casualty department of a more convenient hospital, where he knew from experience he would have trouble extracting himself for several hours. A police car might prove unco-operative. He would have to hail a taxi, normally a gesture of unthinkable extravagance for a medical student on his own. As he climbed inside, he remembered that he had no money.

Shortly before five to nine, a pair of young men in white coats were anxiously pacing the wide, marble-walled, notice-bespangled entrance hall of St Swithin’s Hospital. The concourse was as usual crowded with people waiting, visiting or lost, either sitting, standing or being propelled horizontally, the mass cleaved by briskly trotting nurses, ambling brown-coated porters, and doctors of all ages and degrees of importance but all with the look of being required vitally elsewhere.

‘He isn’t in the canteen having a quick coffee?’ asked Tony Havens. Sir Lancelot Spratt’s house-surgeon was burly, dark-haired, clean shaven and wearing at that moment an unaccustomed frown of intense concern.

‘He’s not having anything. I’ve even been through the loos.’ His companion was Hugo Raffles, fair, slim and pink-cheeked, one of the junior anaesthetists resident in the hospital.

‘I’ve phoned his digs. The landlady says he hasn’t been in all night. Stroppy she was, too. Got him eggs and bacon for a specially fortifying breakfast. He hasn’t kipped down across in the residents’ quarters, I suppose?’

‘I’ve looked there, too. In and under every bed. We’d have surely heard by now if he’d decided to doss in the nurses’ home.’

‘I suppose he hasn’t taken an overdose of barbiturate, to avoid facing the examiners?’

‘That’s most unlikely. He can never even remember what the normal dose is.’

‘I’m fed up with nursing this case of chronic infantilism. Remember how we just got him here last time? When he thought the examination was the following day.’

‘Which he explained to Sir Lancelot –’

‘Who congratulated him on anticipating to learn the entire subject of surgery overnight. You should never give Sir Lancelot half a chance for a nasty crack. It’s fatal.’

‘Remember when he failed his anatomy?’ Hugo reminisced.

‘After being shown a pelvis, and asked to identify Alcock’s canal –’

‘And pointing to the vagina.’

‘There he is!’ Tony exclaimed.

Pip came hurrying through the front door, open frilly shirt flapping.

‘What a bit of luck, running into you,’ he remarked. ‘Lend me a few quid.’

‘If that’s your only worry –’ Tony began crossly.

‘I’ve got a taxi waiting to be paid outside. I spent all I’d got on tombola tickets.’

‘Compulsive gambler, eh?’ murmured Hugo.

‘Do you realize, you git, that you have precisely six minutes before appearing for your surgery clinical?’

‘I rather thought the time was getting on. My watch has been somewhat disrhythmic recently. But there’s no need to panic. I made it in the end, didn’t I?’ he ended smugly.

‘But you can’t walk into an exam looking like that,’ Tony told him sharply.

Pip stared down at his dishevelled clothes. ‘I suppose I can’t. But you can lend me your white coat.’

‘You also need a tie.’

‘And a shave,’ said Hugo. ‘You know how dangerous it is, giving Sir Lancelot half a chance of referring to Sweeney Todd.’

Pip rubbed his chin again. ‘Perhaps I do. Well, I know I can rely on friends like you to sort me out.’

‘Come on, let’s at least get near the field of battle,’ Tony exhorted, grabbing Pip by the sleeve of his velvet jacket.

The examination was being held in Virtue Ward, Sir Lancelot Spratt’s men’s surgical on the tenth floor. Surgery itself had been transformed since the heyday of Sir Frederick Treves and Sir Bertram Bunn. The surgery finals had hardly changed at all. Cases from the wards and from out-patients, whose diseases did not proclaim themselves too subtly, were invited to pit their ills against the wits of the students. The patients’ fee was small, but many volunteered readily to return to the hospital for the chance of so painlessly helping to advance surgical science. Besides, the uninhibited discussion of each other’s ailments during the breaks for tea and biscuits had the flattering effect of membership to an exclusive club.

The three took the lift to the tenth floor. Hugo remembered a large cupboard outside the ward, used as a store for patients’ clothes and belongings. They dodged inside. Tony and Hugo had two minutes to prepare Pip, physically and mentally.

‘Remember, Sir Lancelot has mellowed recently. Everyone says so. There’s no need to be scared of him any more.’ Tony Havens was hastily knotting round the neck of Pip’s frilly shirt a pink and silver St Swithin’s Cricket Club tie, with a motif of crossed bats and scalpels. ‘He won’t eat you.’

‘Not in one bite anyway,’ said Hugo Raffles, busy on Pip’s chin with an electric razor.

‘Yes, but do you know any of the patients?’ Pip asked impatiently.

‘Only two. Sir Lancelot’s been switching them around this time. He knows there’re too many of the old chronics who come up for exam after exam, which we all get wise to. Look out for the patient with a large lump on the back of his neck. It’s a lipoma.’

‘A simple lipoma should be easy enough to diagnose.’ Pip nodded with gratification.

‘Watch it. Don’t forget to whip back the bedclothes. He’s got no legs,’ Tony informed him.

‘I hope this shave is quite comfortable?’ inquired Hugo. ‘The razor’s a bit ropey. It’s the one they use for the ward preops.’

‘Miss the absence of legs,’ Tony continued severely, ‘and Sir Lancelot’s got you spit-roasted for not obeying the basic rule of examining the whole patient. There’s one old boy you must particularly look out for. I heard he was there from last week’s candidates. He’s one of Sir Lancelot’s old patients, a gloomy-looking skinny fellow with smooth grey hair and a camel-coloured dressing-gown. He’s generally reading the
Daily
Mirror
. You’d think there was nothing wrong with him, except for slight varicose veins in the left leg, which don’t require treatment –’

‘He’s one of those trick examination cases?’ Pip interrupted brightly. ‘With nothing whatever the matter, but the students make up the most fantastic diagnoses –’

‘Not on your life. He’s got a glass eye. Miss it and you’re sunk.’

‘Sir Lancelot has a spectacular way of failing students with that one,’ Hugo added, shaving Pip’s upper lip. He takes a pencil and simply taps the glass eye smartly with the butt of it.’

‘Grey-haired old boy? Camel-coloured dressing-gown?
Daily Mirror
? I’ll remember that one.’

‘The rest will be the usual surgical slag of bumps and bones,’ Tony told him. ‘I haven’t been able to lay hands on any more dead certs, though I heard the rumour of a Chinaman with jaundice just to fox everybody.’