8

I recognised at once the bold sweep of the black ink on the envelope automatically redirected by the Post Office.

‘It’s from my godfather,’ I exclaimed over the breakfast table. ‘And the old boy hasn’t so much as sent us a Christmas card since we were married.’

With interest sufficiently strong to be confessed as excitement, I opened the letter from Sir Lancelot Spratt, KBE, MC, DSc, MS, FRCS.

 

Evan’s Farm,

Much Chilvers,

Herefordshire.

 

Dear Sparrow, (Sir Lancelot regarded Christian names as suitable only for addressing children and dogs.)

Your father spent a few days with me recently. I learn that your wife is shortly expecting a child. I am disappointed that you did not inform me of this, though not pained – after all, I am now an old man of little use to the world, finishing my days as untroublesomely as possible in the country. But I have something of importance in mind concerning your future infant, or infants. You will kindly meet me at the Parthenon at four o’clock next Monday afternoon.

 

My regards.

L. S.

 

‘He’s actually coming to London,’ I announced in surprise. ‘After he swore he’d never set foot in the place again as long as he lived.’

Nikki looked alarmed. ‘Oh, dear! I’ll have to meet him.’

‘He’s not really so bad as everyone makes out,’ I reassured her. ‘All these old hospital figures are half-myth and half-monster.’

‘So’s the Abominable Snowman, but I wouldn’t like to meet him either.’

‘It’s a pity you got him in your surgery finals, dear. Though he was probably only putting on a fierce face to convince himself that he wouldn’t be influenced by a pretty one. He’s really only a paper dragon.’

‘Perhaps so, Simon. But at the time the smoke and flames seemed realistic enough. And it’s going to be very awkward for you to go to London on Monday.’

‘It would be very much more awkward for me if I didn’t,’ I told her.

I had not seen my godfather since he retired from the surgical staff of St Swithin’s two years before, an event which had the same impact on the hospital as the Duke of Wellington’s funeral on Victorian London. On his last operating afternoon I had joined his fellow surgeons and physicians gathered in the draughty Founders’ Hall to present him with his portrait – a representation in scarlet robes, holding a skull, and wearing an expression of serenity observable in life only while sleeping through his colleagues’ ceremonial lectures.

It was an occasion of genuine sadness both for his friends who referred to him as ‘A Rembrandt of the Scalpel’ and for his enemies, who referred to him as ‘Old Blood and Thunder.’ For thirty years Sir Lancelot had a say in everything at St Swithin’s from the choice of a new consultant to the choice of a new floor polish, until he thought getting his own way there as natural as the law of gravity and just as convenient for the orderly planning of human affairs; but he was the last of the surgical generation which once strode so largely down the stony Edwardian corridors, whose love of his hospital was less only than his love of his country and his family (indeed it often exceeded the last when Lady Spratt was having one of her difficult turns). He was a man too big for the age when British consultants resemble the Civil Servants they so often fear they are becoming.

‘It is almost fifty years since I first came here,’ Sir Lancelot ended a dignified speech that afternoon describing the changes he had seen in St Swithin’s, in tones only faintly suggesting that most of them were for the worse.

‘I was a frightened student with a second-hand anatomy book under my arm, and my only luggage was a dissecting set and a blue serge suit – both, I confess, the property of my father. After so long it is hard to believe that the time has really come for us to part. But it has, and let us have no sentimentality about it.

‘I have now only one wish – to be remembered among you in the words of the immortal Horace, Integer vitae scelerisque purus – “He that is unstained in life and pure from guilt.”’

He dropped his voice. For once he made the translation sound an afterthought instead of a condemnation of the appalling lack of classical knowledge among modern doctors.

‘As for my own plans,’ he concluded. ‘I intend to a pass such days as the Lord may be pleased to spare me living quietly on my estate in Herefordshire. In the country, with my library, my casebooks, and above all my memories, I shall at last have an opportunity to contemplate – an exercise impossible, ladies and gentlemen, when you exhaust the days and energies of a lifetime chasing pathology all round the abdomen.’

‘And guineas all over London,’ muttered someone at the back.

So Sir Lancelot disappeared from St Swithin’s, to expend his undiminished vigour on growing fruit and treating Lady Spratt’s lumbago. As his Rolls drove for the last time from the hospital courtyard, with its few plane trees blackened by the London fogs and its pair of statues whitened by the London pigeons, and carried him through gates where he could remember patients being borne on window-shutters and consultants clattering up in a coach-and-pair, everyone felt that he was vanishing into the mists of medical mythology.

And with any luck they wouldn’t hear of him again till his memorial service.

Sir Lancelot’s evacuation of the surgical battlefields on which he had won and lost so many spectacular actions still caused arguments at St Swithin’s, being variously put down to the threat of bronchitis or the threat of blackmail. As an emeritus surgeon he could have commanded many privileges, from offering his opinions on baffling cases to enjoying his lunch in the hospital refectory, and several old consultants continued to haunt the wards until they slipped almost unnoticeably under one of the bed-covers themselves.

‘I refuse to play Ancient Mariner of the surgical seas,’ was all he replied when questioned. ‘Besides, it’s tediously simple being an emeritus consultant – there are sufficient people underneath to make all the mistakes first.’

It was therefore with much curiosity the following Monday that I put on my best suit and a stiff white collar and drove down to London to meet him, with feelings in my stomach that I remembered from the mornings before my viva voce examinations as a student.

The Parthenon was Sir Lancelot’s club in St James’s, and like everything else about him the grandest and most distinguished available. I knew nothing about London clubs, except the ones Grimsdyke took me to where blondes played pianos in the basement, but the Parthenon struck me as a series of long gloomy rooms filled with long gloomy armchairs in which long gloomy gentlemen sat asleep.

‘Sir?’ asked the porter.

I gave Sir Lancelot’s name, feeling like Hamlet asking if his father’s ghost were in.

‘Sir Lancelot is expecting you in the morning room, sir.’

I had a moment of panic wondering how warmly I should greet my godfather. He was a man who became as uncomfortable in the presence of emotions as Napoleon was said to be in the presence of cats. But Sir Lancelot solved the problem by merely glancing up and saying, ‘Have some tea, Sparrow,’ as though I had slipped outside for a few minutes.

I had found him in morning clothes and cravat, eating hot buttered crumpets from a dish warmed with a small tank of hot water, spreading them alternately with strawberry jam and Gentleman’s Relish. I obediently took a large black leather armchair opposite.

‘You’re looking very well, sir,’ I began politely.

‘I am very well. I can walk three miles before breakfast and finish The Times crossword while I’m eating it. Can you? William, another tea, if you please.’

There was a short silence.

‘Don’t sit on the edge of your chair, boy. You’re not a schoolgirl with an adolescent lordosis.’

‘It’s a pity you had to retire, sir,’ I said, rearranging myself.

‘It’s a pity any of us have to retire. Why a man should be considered capable of performing major abdominal surgery the day before his sixty-fifth birthday, and incapable of anything except a little gentle gardening the day after, is totally beyond my comprehension.’

I agreed with him.

‘And as usual, Sparrow, the medical profession’s handed the dirty end of the stick. Look at the judges, sitting up there mumbling into their wigs till they’re ninety. I’ll wager half the bishops in the Establishment are too arthritic to get up the pulpit steps. And if you want a perfect study in senility take the House of Lords – which I ought to know, I’ve seen inside a good many of ’em. But with us it’s all out at sixty-five, whatever the state of your brains or your blood pressure. That’s the trouble with the modern world, there’s no scope for individuality. God knows what would have happened to Leonardo da Vinci today. Got run in for breaking the Anatomy Acts for a start, I suppose.’

I could see that my godfather hadn’t changed.

‘Are you enjoying life in the country, sir?’ I asked timidly, as the club butler shuffled up with my tea.

‘I don’t believe you can enjoy life anywhere these days, when it’s easier to live like a saint than live like a gentleman. You mustn’t smoke because it gives you cancer of the lungs, you mustn’t eat because it gives you obesity and heart attacks, and you mustn’t drink because it’s too damn expensive. And the only time I hear of my friends is when I read their obituaries in the BMJ.’

He wiped his fingers on a yellow silk handkerchief.

‘What’s going on in Town?’ he asked abruptly.

After chatting for a while about such things as the promenade concerts and test matches, I asked guardedly how long he intended to stay. I felt it would be a matter of interest to anyone I met in St Swithin’s.

‘I’ve a few errands to do,’ he said, seeming disinclined to answer. ‘The missus wants some more dried ginger and belladonna plasters and so on. But I didn’t ask you here for social gossip. I wish to have a serious and confidential talk with you, Sparrow. Don’t worry about the feller in gaiters,’ he added, noticing my glance towards a nearby chair. ‘Deaf as a post for years.’

Sir Lancelot sat for some moments stroking his beard.

‘I have never been a particularly conscientious godfather to you,’ he declared to my surprise. ‘I don’t mind telling you I only took on the job because your father was my house-surgeon. I didn’t have time to do much about it. I didn’t have time to do much about anything, it’s beginning to strike me,’ he went on reflectively. ‘As a busy surgeon you have to hurry through life with one eye on your watch, like the White Rabbit. Also, I thought you were a bit of a fool,’ he added amiably. ‘But I suppose you got in with the wrong set – that Grimsdyke, and suchlike. Which is why I’m particularly gratified that at last you’ve settled down like a responsible member of society and started a family.’

‘Very kind of you to say so, sir,’ I murmured.

‘As you know,’ he continued, taking no notice of my remark. ‘I have neither children, nephews, nieces, cousins, pet dogs, parrots, nor leanings towards the Medical Benevolent Fund. Whatever you hear at the hospital, I’ve never been a particularly rich man. But I was brought up in the house of a mine-workers’ GP on Tyneside, where to avoid suffering from mass nutritional deficiency we had to keep a watch on every ha’penny, and the habit stuck. So a few years ago I found that I could endow a few scholarships at St Swithin’s.’

We were interrupted by an elderly member who murmured as he passed, ‘Afternoon, Spratt. Been away?’

‘Did his right inguinal hernia five years ago,’ explained Sir Lancelot, glancing after him keenly. ‘Now it looks as if the other side’s coming down. Do you know, I’ve spotted two emphysemas and a spondylitis since lunch? Veritable mines of pathology, these old London clubs. But I digress.’

He lay back and placed together the thin fingertips that had explored ten thousand abdomens.

‘Do you know why I left London?’ he demanded.

‘To follow the example of Candide, sir?’ I suggested.

‘I assure you I should much rather have followed the example of a brewer’s dray-horse and died in harness. In short, I was disgusted at the way St Swithin’s treated me.’

As I looked surprised, he explained, ‘I had been promised – or almost promised – an official letter inviting me to stay on the staff till the hospital bicentenary next year. All I got was a chit from the administrative officer – that beastly little man I hadn’t spoken to for years – reminding me to leave the keys of my locker before departing. After half a century I was kicked out like one of the surgery porters. There’s socialised medicine for you.’

He paused to blow his nose wrathfully.

‘You’ll keep quiet about all this?’ he asked with a sharp glance.

‘I should certainly be most discreet about your affairs, sir.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, because otherwise I’d break your neck. You know me, Sparrow. I never do things by halves. I’m either in or out. And I was out. So I wrote to my patients to close down my practice in London, and to my agent to open up my place in Hereford. And here we are.’

I said nothing, knowing what a painful self-amputation it must have been. But like all good surgeons, Sir Lancelot was an incorrigible exhibitionist.

After searching for some consoling remark I told him, ‘Everyone at St Swithin’s has missed you very much.’

Sir Lancelot seemed amused. ‘My dear feller, one half of the staff could hardly wait to get rid of me, and the other half has been expecting me to drop dead for years. You can’t imagine how demoralising it is to find your junior colleagues inspecting you over lunch for the first signs of arteriosclerosis, cerebral softening, and general decay and ruin. But the net result is no scholarships for St Swithin’s.’

He paused as the arthritic butler appeared to gather our tea things.

‘Instead,’ Sir Lancelot went on, ‘I intend to educate the brood of the devil I know. I’m not aware how many children you intend to have, Sparrow, but. I’m going to settle some cash on ’em. Don’t thank me,’ he said quickly, seeming alarmed at the possibility. ‘I distrust gratitude almost as much as I distrust flattery. Save a man’s life and he complains the stitches tickle and your bill’s too high. Do something in five minutes for his piles or his flat feet and you’ve got a devoted friend for life. Besides,’ he added after a moment, ‘if you don’t get it, the tax merchants will.’

He gave a short laugh.

‘I remember when the old Duke of Helford fell off his horse, they sent for his accountants before they sent for his doctors. It was myself who pulled him through in the end. Then he went and got married again to some young chit and blewed the lot. Family hasn’t spoken to me since. I’m coming to see what sort of a home you run, Sparrow. What’s the address again? I shall arrive next Tuesday week after luncheon, and I shall be staying the night.’