13

My dear Mrs Marston–’ I began.

‘Call me Diane, dear, do.’

‘My dear Diane, we are completely in your hands. I’m afraid we’ve simply got nowhere to go, except your house.’

It was a morning more than a fortnight later when Mrs Marston and I met again. Our rendezvous was a small hotel in South Kensington, which seemed to exist largely for the convenience of old ladies, parsons, and men of faded military appearance. We were sitting together in a small dark lounge, thickly forested with ferns which looked as weary of their surroundings as the residents.

‘I’m sorry I made such a bloody little fool of myself the other afternoon,’ she apologised briefly. ‘It’s that terrible temper of mine. And I was as strung up as hell. You know.’

‘Perhaps it was a rather inconvenient moment,’ I murmured meekly, calculating the chances of keeping a roof over the head of my wife and unborn child.

‘And now your lawyer’s told my lawyer the lot. And am I delighted! Do you know why?’

I shook my head.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do the moment I lay hands on that senile delinquent of a husband of mine. I’m going to take him by the scruff of his dirty neck and drag him straight down to Scotland Yard and tell them to charge him with embezzlement, or whatever it is. Then I’m going to put on my best hat and sit in the front row at the Old Bailey, and after that I’m going down to Dartmoor to watch him breaking stones for the next fifteen years, which he’s deserved ever since he got out of the cradle.’

She paused, coiling her indignation for another spring.

Our meeting had been arranged by Mr Robbinson, my family solicitor, a thin bird-like man rustling in a nest of red-taped papers high above Chancery Lane, whom I had known since the days when he would playfully tickle my ears with a writ.

‘You have been a very foolish young man,’ he had told me severely, when I called at his office earlier in the morning.

I agreed with him. I had a pregnant wife, no home, little furniture, an infuriated godfather, and – worst of all – the self-humiliation of people who have bought gold bricks, shares in imaginary oil-wells, Tower Bridge, and other tempting bargains.

‘Surely you of all people must know the danger of scorning professional advice?’ Mr Robbinson continued. ‘The result may perhaps not be quite so disastrous in law as in medicine, but I assure you that it is generally equally uncomfortable for the patient.’

He drew a slip of paper from a desk piled with the hopes of a score of litigants.

‘I have been making a few enquiries about Marston,’ he went on in a gloomy undertone to his top waistcoat button, the confidant of all his conversations. ‘The man has absconded to Australia – an enterprising part of the world, with the added attraction of being beyond the jurisdiction of the British courts. He is in company with the co-respondent, upon whom he has no doubt lavished your quarter’s rent. You will, of course, never see your money again. If it is any consolation to you, neither will a lot of other people.’

‘I’m afraid it isn’t much consolation,’ I murmured sadly.

‘Meanwhile,’ Mr Robbinson declared with some professional satisfaction, ‘you and your wife are liable to be evicted from the premises forthwith. And you can naturally be sued for trespass into the bargain. Why, you haven’t even got a tenancy agreement.’

‘I’m certainly going to get everything signed on the dotted line in future, believe me.’

‘Mrs Marston seemed on the telephone a somewhat volatile young person. But as there is no doubt about her bona fides I can only suggest you make yourself as agreeable as possible to her, in the hope she may let you remain in situ. Possibly,’ he concluded, ‘your profession will be of more use in the circumstances than mine.’

I found it difficult to make any impression at all on the wronged Mrs Marston, as she spent the first half an hour talking incessantly about her husband. Nothing is more boring than stories of other people’s marital adventures, though I had to hear so many in my professional hours I could have patiently endured another; but unfortunately she used a voice that brought several old ladies peering through the ferns like startled animals in the jungle, and scowls from a faded military man reading the Telegraph opposite.

‘And what do you think of that for the conduct of a so-called gentleman?’ she ended some involved episode centring round a hairbrush.

‘I think you’ve been a very brave woman,’ I said, this being my stock and prudently non-committal reply.

She paused to use her lipstick.

‘As I mentioned,’ I went on anxiously. ‘I’m afraid we’ve nowhere to go. We’ve a bit of furniture of our own–’

‘Sorry I had to take mine, dear. I’ve got a flat in the Earls Court Road, and I’m simply lost without the telly.’

‘And particularly in view of my wife’s condition–’

She gave a laugh.

‘I was forgetting about that. Poor duck! It must be terribly dull for you.’

‘No, it’s rather interesting, as a matter of fact.’

‘Who are you having a flirtation with?’

I looked rather surprised, but admitted, ‘Not with anyone, I’m afraid.’

‘Aren’t you really? But men have the most tremendous flirtations when their wives are expecting. All the ones I know do – some of them with me.’

She gave me a smile as smooth as her nylons, and probably just as synthetic.

‘Now, if we could arrange some sort of tenancy agreement–’

‘Do you know the Earls Court Road, dear?’

‘Not very well.’

She sighed deeply.

‘It’s terribly lonely being a woman all by herself in the world again. Without even a damn soul to tell your troubles to. Do you remember when I told you all my troubles once? It was the first time you looked at my chest.’

‘Of course,’ I replied, feeling such grateful memories should be encouraged. ‘I hope I did you some good.’

She clutched my hand. ‘You did me the world of good.’

‘About a tenancy agreement–’

‘Do you know what I’d like to be doing more than anything else at this very moment?’

‘That is, if you’d let us go on living there–’

‘I’d like to be lying tucked up in bed, with you beside me listening to all my troubles. Even the ones I never told that hog of a husband of mine, supposing he’d had the good manners to listen.’

‘Disgusting!’ exploded the man opposite, crumpling his Telegraph and stalking away.

‘Now what on earth did he mean by that?’ demanded Mrs Marston indignantly. ‘Do you think he’s being insulting?’

‘Perhaps it was something he read in the paper,’ I said quickly. ‘About the agreement–’

‘I’m not at all sure you shouldn’t give him a punch on the nose. There’s far too many people of his type about these days. I don’t think I like this place anyway. Good God, is that the time? I’ve got to be at Kettner’s in two minutes. Get me a taxi, dear.’

‘Mrs Marston – Diane–’ I implored, following her into the street determined to continue the conference at all costs. ‘About your house–’

‘There’s a taxi. Taxi, taxi! What about my house?’

‘Can we please stay in it?’

‘Why, do you want to? I’m much too flustered to talk about things like that just now. Bye, bye dear. You go back and give that old so-and-so in the hotel a piece of your mind.’

‘But the house–’

‘Come and see me in the Earls Court Road. Any time. Just give me a ring.’

She shouted her telephone number from the cab and swept off, and for the first time I felt a twinge of sympathy for her husband.

‘I seem to be completely useless at any sort of business negotiation,’ I said hopelessly to Mr Robbinson on the telephone a few minutes later. ‘Perhaps you’d better handle it all yourself.’

‘She might be persuaded to sell the property,’ he conjectured sombrely. ‘Though that would be somewhat expensive for you. I might be able to arrange a mortgage, but you will still have to find a sizeable sum yourself.’

‘Do whatever you like,’ I said in desperation, and rang off.

I felt that Mr Robbinson would at least escape the invitation to the Earls Court Road.

I also felt that I was totally inadequate for the responsibility of conducting a wife and child through the world, but there seemed nothing else I could do. I moodily took a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a teashop and I went as usual to my Thursday clinic at St Swithin’s.

Doctors have a weakness for escaping from the world into their profession, and as I pushed aside the heavy glass doors of the surgical block that afternoon, to sniff the familiar mixture of antiseptic, floor-polish, and stewing fish exhaled by all British hospitals, I had a warm feeling of homecoming. Englishmen show the same unaffected reverence towards their old tutorial establishments as Americans towards their old mothers, and I was unashamedly fond of the ancient place – though St Swithin’s was not in fact thought particularly old among the stately hospitals of England which stand so inconveniently in the middle of our industrial towns. It was young compared with Guy’s, which was founded on a successful speculator’s profits from the South Sea Bubble, and infantile compared with St Thomas’, which rose on the banks of the Thames in company with the Tower. St Swithin’s was said to have started as an apothecary’s shop on the green northern edge of the City, once patronised by Dr Johnson seeking a cure for the melancholy, and evolved like such successful institutions as our Monarchy, Parliament, and Church by a series of brilliant makeshifts. Nourished by the purses of the City merchants it turned into an Almshouse for the Sick Poor, which under the Victorians became an Institution for the Industrious Indigent, and under the National Health Service an adjunct to North Metropolitan (No. 15 Area) Regional Hospital Board. Meanwhile its buildings struggled like trapped animals to regain the countryside which yearly receded further, until in the middle of the nineteenth century they gave up the fight and came to rest between two sets of railway lines and a gin distillery, where today they present much the same appearance as first depressed the wounded veterans of the Crimea.

As stomach ache can be caused by anything from duodenal ulcers to unrequited love, the gastric clinic at St Swithin’s was run jointly by Mr Hubert Cambridge, FRCS, one of our surgeons, Dr Peter Pennyworth, FRCP, the senior physician, and Dr Granley-Dowkins, DPM, the psychiatrist. The patient’s fate largely depended on which of this abdominal triumvirate laid hands on him first, Mr Cambridge giving his sufferers a cheerful slap on the umbilicus with the advice ‘You’ll be far better off with it out,’ Dr Pennyworth taking them into his ward for six weeks on a bland diet, and Dr Granley-Dowkins plunging into their subconscious sexual activity at the age of two. Although some of Mr Cambridge’s cases continued to complain of their non-existent stomachs, and one of Dr Granley-Dowkins’ perforated his duodenal ulcer on the analyst’s couch, the clinic worked usefully and was even applauded as an enlightened essay in social medicine. As it is the job of the family doctor to explain away specialists’ failures for the rest of the patient’s life, I was chosen to attend as their representative – though perhaps less through my clinical abilities than the personal friendship I had enjoyed with Mr Cambridge over several years.

That afternoon I trod the well-known corridors warily. I’d had no communication from my godfather beyond a curt acknowledgment of my letter of apology, but I thought it unlikely that his uncomfortable half-hour with us would drive him straight back to Herefordshire. I had heard of his old consulting desk being moved into his new study, where he sat every morning staring across some of the prettiest scenery in England struggling to start his memoirs and finish his monograph Spratt on the Colon; but I felt that the remote contemplation he had promised both himself and his colleagues would be difficult. Medicine is as gregarious an occupation as bus-conducting, and Sir Lancelot had reached the eminence at St Swithin’s of being unable to move about the place at all without a sizeable procession immediately forming up behind him. After a lifetime of being followed everywhere by housemen, registrars, secretaries, sisters, students, and anyone curious to discover what all the fuss was about, he suddenly found himself with no one to impress but his neighbours, no-one to command but his fruit pickers, and no one to talk to but Lady Spratt, who had rumbled him long ago. I felt that he might again be prowling round the hospital, with the same demoralising effect on the inhabitants as Jim Corbett’s man-eaters prowling round Kumaon.

The gastric clinic was held in a long, cold, tiled room on the third floor of the out-patients’ department, into which appetising smells from the kitchen were constantly wafted through the agency of some malevolent architect. The apartment was divided into sections by the familiar hospital screens, behind which I could hear as I entered the murmur of the three specialists pursuing their separate paths to eupepsia.

I had a battered consulting desk in one corner, with a rack of coloured forms and a big pewter inkpot which probably hadn’t been used since consultants wrote their prescriptions with the care of Latin elegiacs. I slipped on a white coat as I bade good afternoon to our rather superior nurse, who must have been learning to drink her school milk through a straw when I first came to St Swithin’s myself, and prepared for the problems of my first patient.

But I had hardly sat down when Mr Cambridge appeared.

‘Ah, there you are, Simon,’ he said at once. ‘Been looking for you all round the refectory at lunch.’

‘I found a bite outside,’ I explained. ‘I had an appointment at the other end of London.’

‘Nurse, I think Dr Granley-Dowkins wants you.’ He waited while she disobligingly wandered out of earshot and went on, ‘Will you forgive me, my dear chap, if I ask you to discuss a personal matter?’

‘Of course I will,’ I said readily.

Mr Cambridge seemed unusually agitated. The most popular consultant at St Swithin’s, he was an amiable, short, fat, pink man with half-moon glasses, a surgical Mr Pickwick, who was famous in the hospital for being rather absent-minded. Fortunately for his patients he never forgot an abdomen, but he was generally unable to recall where he was going, where he had come from, or whether he had had his lunch. The diaries which showered on him each Christmas being scattered all over London by Easter, he managed his daily life only by going from one activity to the next by a series of conditioned reflexes, like Pavlov’s dogs. Perhaps he was the last of the medical eccentrics, who have unhappily been steadily dying out since the eighteenth-century surgeon John Sheldon insisted on embalming his dead mistress and keeping her in his bedroom until she was eventually ousted by his wife.

‘Your godfather, Simon,’ Mr Cambridge began, absently tearing up a test meal request form. ‘Do you happen to know what brought him to London?’

‘Oh, that’s quite simple. Some family business about that child I told you we’re having.’

‘Good gracious, are you having a baby? I didn’t even know you were married. But have you any idea,’ he went on anxiously, ‘how long he’ll be staying?’

‘He may have gone back already for all I know. Our business is concluded – quite concluded. I haven’t any idea where he is.’

‘I have,’ said Mr Cambridge. ‘He’s staying with me.’

We passed a second of mutually sympathetic silence.

‘I’m delighted, of course,’ the surgeon continued. ‘Absolutely delighted. He may be a rather difficult guest, but it’s not often one gets the chance of inviting so distinguished a colleague to share one’s home. Though I didn’t actually invite him, I suppose,’ he reflected. ‘He just sort of arrived.’

‘Has he been seen in the hospital?’ I asked immediately.

‘Seen? My dear chap, he’s hardly ever out of the place. Now he’s no routine clinical work to occupy him, of course, he’s plenty of time for visiting us. Though it is sometimes a little awkward, I must admit. Just when I’d got used to him staying out of my operating theatre, too.’

Sir Lancelot had for several years the habit of dropping into Mr Cambridge’s theatre between his own cases, making thin jokes over the surgeon’s shoulder if he were in a good mood, or staring in silence for ten minutes before sniffing loudly and departing if he were in a bad one.

‘Which reminds me,’ Mr Cambridge went on. ‘He wants to see you tonight at half-past six, at my house.’ He paused as he caught my eye. ‘Perhaps he would really have been happier if he’d stayed among his fruit,’ he added. He gave a sigh. ‘And perhaps we should have been, too.’