14

The clinic was a short one that afternoon. Afterwards Mr Cambridge hurried off to Harley Street to see those patients who had saved enough from their surtax to add to his own, while I telephoned Nikki before idling an hour or so in the medical school library and driving north to the Cambridge household in Finchley.

Mr Cambridge had the misfortune of being Sir Lancelot’s particular professional protégé. In the days when my godfather was the red-bearded Mr Spratt, with a reputation already sweeping the corridors clean of students on his operating afternoons through the twin excellence of his professional instruction and his highly unprofessional anecdotes, he had spotted young Cambridge’s surgical potentialities and secretly determined to train the lad himself. Mr Cambridge was personally planning to take his new degrees back to the bloodless peace of the University, to smoke donnish days away watching successive crops of geraniums and undergraduates mature in the college court, but the afternoon the examination results appeared Sir Lancelot had stopped him on the steps of the medical school.

‘So you won the gold medal in surgery, eh, Cambridge?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Don’t look so modest about it, boy. I only just managed it myself. What now?’

‘I’ve put in for a fellowship at Trinity, sir,’ Mr Cambridge told him nervously.

‘Then withdraw it.’

‘I – I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘You heard what I said. You’d be no earthly good at research, you can take it from me. And if I didn’t know my students’ minds better than they do themselves I wouldn’t even teach needlework.’

‘Then what shall I do instead, sir?’ cried Mr Cambridge in despair.

‘Apply for my house-surgeon’s post. You may think it over and telephone me this evening. Not between eight and nine, or you’ll spoil my dinner.’

This invitation surprised Mr Cambridge greatly, particularly as Sir Lancelot had that morning hurled a blood-soaked swab at his head with the remark that he was ‘about as much use as a crate of corkscrews to the Band of Hope.’

Sir Lancelot told Mr Cambridge every day for the next year that he was the worst house-surgeon he had ever suffered, then he promoted him and told him every day for the next ten that he was the worst registrar he’d ever suffered, too. It was the only way he knew to toughen such a mild personality for the terrible self-criticism that runs among the successes and failures of a surgical career; but it left his pupil feeling afterwards like many other middle-aged Englishmen when confronted with their old headmasters.

I could see nothing of Sir Lancelot’s Rolls as I now drew up at Mr Cambridge’s gate, but his own Bentley was already standing outside.

‘Your godfather rang,’ announced Mr Cambridge opening the front door himself. ‘He’s delayed. Perhaps you’d care for a glass of sherry in the meantime?’

As I made my way in I noticed a steamer trunk in the hall.

‘Just arrived from Hereford,’ explained Mr Cambridge quietly.

‘I wonder what’s holding Sir Lancelot up?’ I asked. ‘He’s usually very punctual for appointments.’

‘It’s a committee meeting – the International Fraternity of Surgeons.’

‘But he resigned from that!’

Mr Cambridge nodded. ‘When he retired he resigned from everything – from the hospital rugger club to the Pantheon. Now he’s written to all the secretaries withdrawing it, and no one seems inclined to disagree with him.’

‘Of course, I’d be delighted if it means Sir Lancelot intends to spend more time in London,’ my host continued, when he had fetched the decanter. ‘I’m sure that all of us at St Swithin’s would agree. It’s only right that such great gifts as his shouldn’t be lost to the hospital entirely. Though I must confess that he seemed rather surprised at the place continuing to function without him at all.’

My godfather’s retirement had in fact given St Swithin’s its greatest stimulus since the empty antiquated outpatients’ block was blown up one night in 1941. Every consultant had been incubating little schemes to hatch in the milder climate once the thunder of his opinions had rolled away, and Mr Cambridge himself had almost at once started a statistical department (Sir Lancelot declared statistics as unreliable as weather forecasts), ordered air-conditioning for his operating theatre (Sir Lancelot would as soon have ordered himself a bottle of scent), and started smoking his pipe in the surgeons’ room (Sir Lancelot smoked only after dinner, and then only Havannas).

‘I’m honoured to offer him such hospitality as I can,’ the surgeon went on. ‘Though of course it is a little difficult now I’m in the middle of all my plans for the bicentenary celebrations. You knew that Pennyworth got the St Swithin’s council to vote me to take charge?’

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Yes, I heard this afternoon.’

I had also heard of Sir Lancelot declaring publicly this was only because Pennyworth put the motion at five o’clock, when everyone was dying for their tea and would have agreed to anything.

‘I think I can get royalty to open the historical exhibition in the Founders’ Hall,’ he told me proudly. ‘And Mr McCurdie’s statue to Humanity will look very well inside the Main Gate. But for some reason your godfather seems to object to – ah, hello, my dear,’ he broke off, as we were interrupted by his wife. ‘Sir Lancelot rang to say he’d be in for dinner as usual.’

‘I’m sorry, Simon, that your godfather has become so quickly bored with life as a country gentleman,’ she said to me.

‘I think he rather misses the bustle of hospital life,’ I suggested.

I suddenly remembered that Celia Cambridge and Sir Lancelot hated each other. For years they had conducted a complicated quarrel, the cause of which had long ago been forgotten by everybody including themselves, but which probably started when she kept him in control in the operating theatre by slapping freshly boiled instruments into his upturned thinly-gloved palm. Celia had been a famous theatre nurse at St Swithin’s, and when Mr Cambridge proposed to her after a steamy courtship among the sterilisers all the other nurses who wanted to be catty – and there are always far too few marriageable young surgeons to go round – declared that if she managed her husband like she managed her theatre she’d have him in Harley Street in no time. She was barely tall enough to reach across an instrument trolley, but she had the determination of the Brigade of Guards.

‘A pity he cut himself off so completely in the first place,’ murmured Mr Cambridge, staring at the carpet.

‘On the contrary, Bertie. I think it was a very good thing for the hospital that you got rid of him.’

‘But he’s a very great surgeon, my dear.’

‘I’m not denying that for a moment. But if you’ll excuse me for saying so, Simon, the way my husband and all the other men at St Swithin’s let Sir Lancelot go on bullying them year in and year out is nothing short of a disgrace.’

‘I was once his house-surgeon, my dear–’

‘Which doesn’t give him the excuse for treating you like one for the rest of your life.’

‘My godfather can be rather difficult at times,’ I admitted politely.

‘I never found him difficult at all. Bertie refuses to stand up to him, and that’s all there is to it.’

We heard the front door close.

‘I’m going back to the kitchen,’ said Mrs Cambridge promptly.

‘Celia is a little overwrought today,’ apologised her husband.

The sitting-room door opened, and Sir Lancelot was with us.

‘Cambridge,’ he said at once, ignoring me. ‘I wish you to raise the question of the hospital telephones at the next meeting of the medical council. Must I always be answered by a casualty porter in need of attention by both the speech-therapy and child-guidance clinics? When I tried to get in touch with you this afternoon the man replied most impolitely to my entirely reasonable demands for efficiency, and then abandoned the instrument for fifteen minutes on the casualty reception desk. I was in this period informed by various people that my wife was as well as could be expected, I must drive my ambulance at once to King’s Cross, and my stomach contents were ready if I would care to come and fetch them. Public relations, Cambridge! These days the telephonists are quite as important as the surgeons. I want to talk with you, Sparrow.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘By the way, Cambridge, I shall be conducting a certain amount of personal business while I am here. It might be convenient for me to have the small room across the hall as my study.’

‘Perfectly convenient, Lancelot.’

‘What’s for dinner?’

‘I think Celia’s got some…let me see…roast grouse.’

‘Yes, I am fond of grouse. Now perhaps you will leave me for a few minutes with this young man.’

‘My surprise at the scene I was obliged to participate in at your house,’ Sir Lancelot went on when we were alone, ‘was exceeded only by my amazement at reading your letter of explanation. To be taken in by a confidence trickster, and an amateur one at that, indicates a stage of mental retardation exploited by practitioners of the three-card trick on the corners of racecourses.’

‘I’m very sorry about your inconvenience, sir,’ I said humbly.

‘And so you should be. It was only with difficulty that I found a bed for the night at the club.’

He paused, and went on reflectively, ‘But one cannot live in a club for ever. One begins to suspect one is as decrepit as the other members look. It’s a pity I sold the house in Harley Street. I never stay in hotels, of course. They kindly offered me a shakedown here,’ he continued, looking round like a health visitor in some particularly unfortunate slum. ‘Though it is not wholly satisfactory, and Cambridge’s wife can sometimes be very irritating.’

‘Do you expect to be staying long, sir?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘I must certainly stay a short while to give Cambridge a hand with the bicentenary. God knows what they’re all up to at St Swithin’s. Cambridge is of course perfectly hopeless on committees. He always loses his agenda and forgets to address the chair and votes the wrong way. Anyway, you can never hear yourself speak in the St Swithin’s council for the scream of grinding axes.’

Doctors are enthusiastic politicians, and visitors to our big hospitals would be surprised to overhear the groups of specialists conversing earnestly in the corridors discussing not matters of life and death, but whether the building sub-committee could get away with painting the professor of bacteriology’s new departmental lavatories bright pink.

‘Committees are simply a means of providing our ruling classes with an excuse to waste time and a bit of excitement,’ Sir Lancelot declared. ‘A hundred years ago they had mistresses instead. Anyway, all the real work’s done in the corridors outside. You might pour me a glass of that sherry.’

‘What they really need to celebrate the bicentenary is a congress of the International Fraternity of Surgeons,’ he announced as I handed him his drink. ‘I shall have a word with Cambridge about it after dinner.’ Then he asked abruptly, ‘You still have a roof over your heads?’

‘Strictly speaking, I’m afraid we haven’t.’

‘It is, of course, a matter of supreme indifference to me whether you yourself sleep in the nearest cowshed. It is only your wife who has my sincerest sympathy. You have tackled this hennaed harridan?’

‘Mrs Marston? Not with much success, I’m afraid.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s rather difficult to handle, sir.’

‘If you are incapable of handling difficult women at this stage of your professional career, I despair for you. I can only say – Good God! What in the name of heaven is that?’

To my alarm he was staring in horror at something on the table behind me.

I was at first puzzled myself, turning round to discover an object resembling an ostrich egg with holes bored in it. But noticing the word ‘Humanity’ on a small pedestal underneath, I suggested, ‘Perhaps it’s the model for the new St Swithin’s statue?’

Sir Lancelot flung open the door.

‘Cambridge!’

‘Yes, Lancelot?’ Mr Cambridge appeared almost at once.

‘Do you mean you actually intend to stick that inflated renal calculus on public view?’

Mr Cambridge followed Sir Lancelot’s finger nervously. ‘I’m afraid it has – er, already been commissioned from Mr McCurdie,’ he admitted.

‘Then tell the feller to knock up something different. If I ordered Humanity I’d expect to get Humanity. Something with angels and so on. Really, Cambridge! I must insist you get the council to countermand that pathological monstrosity at once. Yes, my dear?’

‘Dinner is ready,’ announced Mrs Cambridge, a little pale.

‘Excellent! I am extremely hungry.’ He turned to me. ‘Would you care to stay for a bite?’

I explained that mine was waiting at home, and gratefully took the opportunity to say goodbye.

‘I once learnt a very interesting way of preparing grouse,’ I heard Sir Lancelot declaring as he made his way towards the dining-room. ‘Which I shall demonstrate to you, my dear, one of these fine days.’

‘Celia has asked me to say how delighted we are you’re having a baby,’ said Mr Cambridge, distractedly at the front door. ‘Though – if you’ll forgive me for saying so, Simon – it might have been very much easier for everybody if you’d put off the whole idea until after our bicentenary.’