4

I had already had forty-two babies, all fathered on me by the Medical Acts and dedicating their first few minutes of life to teaching me the elements of practical midwifery. They had been born either in the highly organised atmosphere of the St Swithin’s Maternity Department, or in the highly unorganised one of the dwellings huddled round the hospital walls and known for this purpose as ‘The District.’ But wherever the event took place, it always scared me greatly. Fumbling my way with sheets of newspaper and saucepans of boiling water in small insanitary bedrooms, my professional attention often distracted through the seat of my trousers being roasted by the traditional roaring fire, I could only repeatedly congratulate Nature on evolving a practically foolproof process.

But having a baby myself came as something of a shock. I suppose it does to any young man, despite the strong words of the marriage service, which he is probably at the time too distraught to hear. I also felt tremendously proud of myself. On reflection, this seemed remarkably stupid for achieving something within the reach of every zoological organism more advanced than the protozoal pond-dwellers, who reproduce themselves simply by splitting in two down the middle.

I was wholly unable to keep the good news to myself, and the following morning when Nikki rose from the breakfast table and made for the bathroom with the businesslike step of all such cases, I explained rather coyly to Grimsdyke that she was ‘suffering from a touch of the pregnancy.’

‘Good God, old lad!’ He stared at me as if I had just announced my intention of taking Holy Orders. ‘What, you mean – ? How long has this been going on?’

‘So shortly it’s almost indecent to mention it.’

‘Old Simon Sparrow to be a daddy,’ he murmured unbelievingly. ‘It shatters me a bit. Particularly when I recall our jolly days as students at St Swithin’s. It’s quite a strain seeing you patting the young chap on the head and handing him half-a-crown with a stern warning not to spend it on drink.’

‘That scene’s a long way ahead yet, anyway. And don’t forget it’s an even chance it’ll turn out female.’

‘And ninety to one it’s twins,’ said Grimsdyke, who had a head for such things. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised. Look at old Tony Benskin – he was one of the lads in our youth and no mistake, and now he’s got hundreds of them. Anyway, hearty congratulations to you both, and I hope I’ll be invited to take a glass of champagne at the christening. I must say, after my experiences in the beastly boat there does seem to be a lot of that complaint about at this time of the year.’

Dr Farquarson, my partner, was unimpressed – but after a lifetime of practice all over the world he would have been unimpressed even by witnessing the birth of Aphrodite.

‘I suppose your good lady’s perfectly certain of her diagnosis?’ he asked. He never smiled, but his eyebrows quivered when anything struck him as particularly amusing. ‘I’ve always held that lady doctors were never much good at that particular subject.’

I looked alarmed. ‘Good Lord, I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Now, that half-witted nephew of mine would improve immeasurably if he’d only settle down and found a family,’ he went on, scraping out his pipe with an old scalpel lying on his consulting desk. ‘Preferably under the thumb of some strong-minded woman. He looked in while you were out on your rounds, by the by, with some ingenious story of dropping my telescope overboard. I rather expected I’d seen the last of it when I lent it to him. He also tried to give the impression that he’d suffered the worst nautical hardships since Captain Bligh was set adrift from the Bounty.’

‘He really did have a bad time of it,’ I told him, in defence of my friend. ‘Anyway, before he can start a family he’ll have to start a job. And believe me, Farquy, he’s been seriously discussing plans with me for several jobs the last couple of days.’

‘He has with me, too. He’s heard somewhere the World Health Organisation are looking for a doctor to prepare a report on the loose women of South America, and he seems to think he’s their man. I hope he finds employment of some sort soon, if only for your sake. Otherwise he’ll be battening on you until it’s time for your child to go to school.’

The same day I proudly telephoned the news to my father, a busy GP on the south coast. But the announcement was complicated through his taking the call in the middle of his evening surgery.

‘Boil up plenty of water and keep your wife warm and I’ll be round in a couple of shakes,’ he said at once. ‘Is she having nice pains? One moment – no, no, Mrs Hartridge. It’s the smelly stuff in the big bottle you rub on your leg, and the white mixture in the little one you swallow. No wonder your arthritis hasn’t been getting any better. Hello? Hello? Don’t worry my dear fellow, everything’s going to be absolutely all right. Perfectly natural process, remember. Just get the cot and all the etceteras ready and tell her not to bear down till I arrive.’

The revelation to my wife’s parents was less clinical, Nikki dropping the information in a well engineered casual remark over tea the next weekend. This immediately swept the conversation with a flurry of technicalities about the coming baby’s equipment, which seemed to me more complicated than a jet pilot’s.

‘And when are you going to have him, my darling?’ asked her mother, making a sweeping embryological assumption.

Nikki laughed. ‘Oh, not for ages and ages. According to the book, next New Year’s Day at the earliest. And at the moment I can hardly believe I’m going to have one at all.’

‘It goes like a flash,’ said her mother, though sounding disappointed that we couldn’t produce the following week.

‘What’s all the fuss about?’ asked my brother-in-law, a pink-faced young man in twill trousers.

‘It’s just that about next Christmas your sister will be retiring from the world,’ I told him, feeling a little shy about it.

‘Retiring? But whatever for?’

‘She’s breeding.’

He seemed puzzled. ‘Breeding? Breeding what?’

‘Well, not Sealyhams. We’re having a baby.’

‘Good God, are you really? What, old Nikki with a baby? You don’t really mean it, do you? I’ve never thought of her doing anything like that at all. Mind you,’ he went on, recovering himself ‘if you’d waited a bit and had it just before the fifth of April, you’d have got a whole year’s income tax rebate. All the smart chaps I know in the City do. Congratulations, of course.’

But I got the impression that he took it all as a personal insult.

‘It seems silly that I can’t make any further contribution to the process except holding the wool for the bootees,’ I remarked to Nikki as we drove home. ‘I suppose I must take comfort from the male codfish, which I believe fertilises a million eggs in an afternoon and swims away into oblivion.’

‘You’ll have quite enough to do later on, dear,’ she said. After a pause she added, ‘This baby’s going to make quite a lot of difference to our lives.’

‘A pretty understatement.’

‘And it’s going to make quite a lot of difference to me.’ She looked fondly at her feet. ‘I can hardly imagine myself as one of those captive balloons we see sailing round the antenatal clinic.’ Nikki hesitated. ‘You won’t hate me then, Simon, will you?’

‘Hate you?’ I said in surprise. ‘But whatever for?’

‘It’s a form of the subconscious guilt-complex. Didn’t you know? It’s what the psychiatrists say.’

‘If we believed all the psychiatrists say we’d never get around to having any children at all,’ I told her. ‘I promise I’ll be the model expectant father – always at your side, giving moral support and helping with the washing-up to the end.’

Such resolutions were easier because Grimsdyke, perhaps deciding that he would be de trop at such a delicate time or perhaps preferring to face Zoë than another night on my camp-bed, had returned to the small flat he rented in Chelsea. I settled down to adjust myself to the psychological demands of incipient fatherhood for some quiet weeks, until he communicated with us again. The telephone rang one evening, and I was less surprised to hear from him than the number from which he was calling.

‘Hal – oo?’ said a finishing-school voice on the end of the line. ‘Dr Spar – oo? This is the Arundel Hotel, London. I have Dr Grimsdyke for you. One moo-ment, please.’

‘It’s Grimsdyke, from the Arundel,’ I whispered to Nikki across the sitting-room.

‘What on earth’s he doing in an expensive place like that?’ she asked, with a frown.

‘I expect he’s found some way of phoning free of charge from the gents’.’

But Grimsdyke’s voice came on the wire saying, ‘Ah, thank you, Miss Sherrington. Hello? Hello, old lad. Can you come and have a drink with me some time pretty soon?’

‘I’m practising hard to play the stern parent,’ I told him. ‘But I’m still ready to have a drink with you at any time. Where do you suggest?’

‘Here, of course.’ He sounded rather hurt. ‘This is not only to issue an invitation but to inform you of change of residence. Henceforward I am to be found at Suite 12a, The Arundel Hotel, Mayfair. Jolly sight more comfortable than your camp-bed, too.’

‘My dear chap, do be careful!’ I exclaimed. ‘You can get into the most frightful trouble in the courts these days, flitting about and not paying hotel bills.’

‘What an unworthy suggestion! Surely you don’t imagine I’d do anything like that? Anyway, I won’t have a chance to, because there isn’t going to be any bill. I’m on the staff – resident physician to the Arundel, no less. Just the job. You don’t have to shake your thermometer down, you dip it into the nearest champagne bucket. When can you come and help me to get through my entertainment allowance?’

We arranged to meet the following Thursday evening, when I should be in London for my weekly part-time (and unpaid) work at the St Swithin’s Hospital gastric clinic.

‘I must say, Grimsdyke’s new job would give me a frightful inferiority complex myself,’ I said to Nikki, recounting our conversation. ‘But it sounds like the one he’s been looking for ever since I’ve known him. For once he’ll be able to live above his income without it mattering.’

‘I’m quite sure he’s made a terrible mistake,’ Nikki disagreed. ‘He’s reached the age when he ought to settle down to a steady job with a future, instead of eternally flitting about like some sort of medical moth.’

‘Well, you know old Grim,’ I told her resignedly. ‘He’ll never be the staid practitioner dishing out weighty advice across the top o his finger-tips – he doesn’t take himself half seriously enough. Besides, you only see doctors like that in the malted milk advertisements. Yes, it’ll be fun to have a comfortable drink in a really first-rate London hotel,’ I went on in pleasant anticipation. ‘Even at the annual hospital ball we used to whisk the girls out to the nearest pub between dances to cut down on expenses.’

I was thinking again about Grimsdyke’s professional career as I drove my small saloon car through the rush hour traffic in Piccadilly the next Thursday. I supposed that he was really too much of an individualist to be a successful family practitioner. Doctors differ, but even in medical school they start conforming to type – all the hearty students at St Swithin’s who went mountain-climbing and beer-drinking seemed to take up surgery, the quiet ones covered with spots and the dust of the library shelves turned into successful physicians, the gloomy men who smoked dirty pipes and spat in the laboratory sinks were later pathologists, and all the mad ones, of course, became psychiatrists. But Grimsdyke was more enterprising and extroverted than any of us, and would probably have fitted satisfactorily into the national medical structure only as the Minister of Health.

I found him waiting inside the revolving doors, dressed like a successful young barrister.

‘Jolly nice to see you, old lad,’ he greeted me warmly, as a man like a City toastmaster stripped off my coat. ‘Where would you like to go for a drink?’

‘In the bar, I suppose,’ I said, looking round with some reverence.

‘We have five cocktail bars here,’ he explained proudly. ‘What do you think of my new home?’

The Arundel seemed probably the most exclusive, and certainly the most expensive, hotel in the West End. It had none of the Palais de Versailles air of big hotels all over the world, but was one of those smaller ones in London which are decorated to provide an intensely English atmosphere. The hall contained an open fireplace wide enough to spit an ox, flanked with suits of armour so well burnished they looked ready to go out and give battle in Berkeley Square. Beyond them an Adam staircase cascaded to the feet of a marble nude, whose attitude and bust measurement were more modest than some of the women I noticed sitting about in the lounge. The place seemed intended to give guests the impression of staying in the country seat of some fine old English nobleman; and it was full of Americans, who were the only people who could afford to stay there.

‘Very charming,’ I said.

‘The American Bar will be nice and empty,’ suggested Grimsdyke. ‘It’s the only place the Americans don’t seem to go. And don’t worry about the drinks,’ he added, as I followed him through another luxurious lobby. ‘I just sign for them. A very convenient arrangement, don’t you think?’

‘But how on earth did you manage to get a magnificent job like this?’ I asked, as we sat down in a corner of the bar.

‘The Grimsdykes, old lad, may often be on their uppers,’ he explained a little grandly. ‘But they always fall on their feet. Do you remember Miss Hales?’

I frowned.

‘Which one of your girl friends was that?’

‘No girl friend. Miss Hales was at my table on the ship. She was the one with the kidneys, which she talked about every time she could get them in edgeways. Fortunately for me, as a conscientious servant of the shipping company I lent a sympathetic ear, instead of shoving her through the nearest porthole in the public interest. It was only when presenting my modest account at the end of the voyage that I discovered she lives here permanently. When she volunteered that the dear hotel doctor had been carted off to hospital – with symptoms sounding to me suspiciously like cirrhosis of the liver – I smelt the chance of a job. She very decently said she’d have a word with the management, and I can only suppose the old bird runs up a fantastic bill here every week, because they just told me to come along.’

‘And very nice, too.’

He paused.

‘Yes and no. Mind you, this is the way I really like to live – cordon bleu cuisine, early tea and biscuits in bed, chap to press your pants, and within a taxi-hoot of Piccadilly Circus. The snag is, they give me a reproduction of Nell Gwynn’s bedroom and plenty to eat and drink, and damn all else. Why, it’ll take me months even to pay for these togs I had to buy.’

‘But surely you’ve got lots of rich and aristocratic patients?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Indeed,’ he agreed, ‘I have what you might call an embarras de duchesse. But the blasted manager only lets me keep ten per cent of the fees. You can’t imagine what a mean bunch they are backstage,’ he went on indignantly. ‘If I ran a place like this, you’d see me on the doorstep day and night welcoming my old friends to wine and dine lavishly at my expense. But this lot pretty well count the bubbles in the soda-water. However, I didn’t ask you here to weary you with the trials of a hotel doctor’s life. Fact is, old lad, I want a bit of professional advice. And at this particular moment you seem just the man to give it to me.’

‘I don’t suppose I can be of much help,’ I said, wondering what trouble he had got himself into now. ‘But I’m more than ready to do my best.’

‘Let’s have another gin,’ said Grimsdyke, reaching for his pencil. ‘And I’ll tell you all about it.’