20

I had prepared myself to experience all manner of noble feelings when I first looked at my son. But as I rushed upstairs after Grimsdyke’s shout, ‘Right-ho, Simon, you can order a set of trains – it’s a boy!’ all I could think as I inspected the pink and noisy lump was, ‘Good Lord! Did I do that?’

The rest of the night was rather confused. Ann Pheasant arrived shortly after the baby (as I am sure all five of us had more than once as midwifery students), and seeming demoralised by the presence of Sir Lancelot made a few remarks about abnormally rapid labours and withdrew. Nikki sat serenely in bed, holding her baby and drinking the traditional cup of tea. My godfather looked highly pleased with himself, and even slapped Grimsdyke on the back. No one took much notice of me.

In an hour or two the nurse appeared and firmly took possession of the infant, and when I woke up after a doze on the sofa I found Grimsdyke frying bacon and eggs.

‘I particularly want to be back for lunch at St Swithin’s today,’ explained Sir Lancelot, who was breakfasting in the kitchen. He seemed to smile at some inward joke. ‘I intended only to sponge on you for a bed, even though it was that infernal canvas contraption. I might say that now I feel I’ve earned it.’

‘You certainly have, sir.’

‘I’ll stay at the club for a while,’ he told me, ‘and then go back for a bit of rest to Hereford. I think I can leave the bicentenary to Cambridge, now I’ve put him on the right path. But first I would like a word with you and your wife, Sparrow. And the baby, too, if you like. After all, it concerns him.’

Nikki had just finished the early feed when Sir Lancelot and I appeared in the bedroom.

‘I expect you know what I’ve got to say,’ he began, after tickling young Lancelot’s nose. ‘Despite my somewhat disillusioning experience when last in this house, I think, Sparrow, that you have somewhat surprisingly turned into a reasonable member of society. That the metamorphosis is entirely due to your charming wife I have no doubt whatever.’

Nikki smiled.

‘And so my offer of financial assistance – not to you, but to the little brat who is at this moment interrupting me – still stands.’

I hesitated. Then I said, ‘It’s very kind of you, sir. We – we greatly appreciate it. But – if you don’t mind – we’d rather just stand on our own six feet.’

Sir Lancelot said nothing. I wondered if I had detonated a delayed explosion.

‘You are quite right,’ he declared quietly after some moments. ‘I think that I should have made precisely the same reply in similar circumstances. But I nevertheless ask you to accept. It is you who are doing the kindness, not me.’

My godfather got up and walked slowly about the room, his hands clasped behind his tail coat.

‘We all grow old,’ he said. ‘It is only physiological. The dermis loses its elasticity and wrinkles. The arcus senilis holds the iris in its embrace. The bones grow brittle, the joints arthritic. Our temperatures fall, our metabolism slows. But worst of all is a chilling of the spirit.’

He paused, with a look of humility I had seen before only when he referred in lectures to famous professional forbears.

‘I’ve had a good life. But I suppose all I’ve really got to show for it is a row of bottles in the St Swithin’s pathology museum. Oh, I know I’ve made a good many people more comfortable. I’ve prolonged for a while a good many lives. I might even have saved one or two. But a surgeon’s on earth to do surgery like a shoemaker’s on earth to make shoes. And neither has the right to get sentimental about it.

‘That is not to say I’m belittling the profession that all three of us are privileged to belong to. I’m not. No man or woman can do better than apply his life to maintaining the health of his fellow creatures. Without health this world seems to contain no comfort, and the next no kindliness. And our reward is in the mind – a mind trained to strip the pretences and prejudices that men cover themselves with like their clothes. I believe it is only we who discover what is basically good or bad underneath. I should have hated to have lived without experiencing that.’

He stood stroking his beard for some seconds. His namesake stopped crying, yawned widely, and went to sleep.

‘If I had children of my own, I should hope that one at least followed me to St Swithin’s. You yourselves cannot realise at this moment what comfort that would be to me – to know that I had a personal interest in someone walking the same path not only of myself, but of Pasteur, John Hunter, or Horder. It is highly unlikely that I shall be in existence when this young man might decide to take up medicine. But it would be enough for me to feel that I was going to be of some help to him if he should.’

Sir Lancelot paused.

‘I’m talking a lot,’ he said briskly. ‘I thought I wouldn’t have to bare me soul like this, Sparrow. I imagined it would have been perfectly easy to have bullied you into it.’

‘Of course, we accept, gratefully,’ said Nikki. ‘Don’t we, Simon?’

‘Then I’m delighted,’ was all Sir Lancelot said.

‘I was afraid before,’ Nikki went on frankly, ‘that you would terrorise us about how to bring him up.’

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Sir Lancelot. ‘Me? Why, I’m scared stiff of children.’

Shortly afterwards my godfather left for London. ‘I’ll come back and see you one of these days,’ he announced, as I bade him farewell at the door. ‘Meanwhile,’ he added, catching sight of an object on the hall table, ‘I hope my wedding present will prove useful.’

‘By the way, sir,’ I asked, emboldened by our new relationship. ‘What exactly is it?’

‘My dear chap, I haven’t the slightest idea. I picked it up at an auction and have been trying to get rid of it for years.’

The fog had disappeared with the other trials of the night, and in crisp sunshine I picked up the papers and letters left unnoticed on the doormat. Then the telephone rang.

‘It’s for you,’ I called to Grimsdyke. ‘It’s Zoë from London.’

‘She wants me to take her out to lunch,’ he exclaimed in delight, after a brief and almost whispered conversation. ‘She actually wants me to buy her food. She rang up specially to find me. Do you realise what it means, Simon? Do you understand? She doesn’t think I’m an uncouth great baboon after all. She agrees to be seen in public in my company. She actually wants to put up with my footling conversation. She’s prepared to look at my vacuous great face. She’s–’

‘Take it easy, Grim,’ I said, smiling. ‘There’s a long way to go between taking a girl out to lunch and leading her down the aisle.’

‘But the Grimsdykes old lad,’ he explained proudly, ‘are fast and efficient workers, once they get their teeth into a job. Bet you a quid in another couple of years we’ll be pushing our prams out together?’

I laughed.

‘Done!’

‘Just you wait and see. Must rush off now if I want to tidy up a bit in Town. Lots of love to mother and child. And thanks for the excitement.’

As he grabbed his corduroy cap and hurried down the path I absently looked at my letters. The first had an Australian stamp on it. I ripped open the envelope.

 

Sydney, NSW

 

‘Dear Doctor,

Don’t I turn up in the most peculiar places? I am living with Harold again and we are terribly happy. That nasty bit of baggage has gone off with a sheep farmer. I could have told him so. Harold was very, very naughty in England, and I’m going to see he works hard and pays every penny back in Hampden Cross. But with you he really could have got into awful trouble. It was all that baggage’s fault. Harold is so sweet and simple he is easily led astray. That’s why I’m insisting he makes it up to you first, with a big whack over as conscience money. I’m not putting our address, so you can’t try and return it. Didn’t I tell you I’m having a baby in July? Isn’t it thrilling? No of course I didn’t, I couldn’t have been having it then, could I?

 

Love,

Diane Marston

 

Pinned to the letter was a cheque for five hundred pounds.

‘The sports car!’ I cried at once, any thought of providing for my new family basely obliterated. I was about to run upstairs to tell Nikki, when I found myself face to face with Sir Lancelot Spratt on the front page of the morning paper.

‘But what on earth’s the old boy been up to–’

Then I saw a headline saying New Year’s Honours List.

Half-way down the column it announced simply –

 

Barony for Doctor

Sir Lancelot Blyth Spratt, surgeon at St Swithin’s Hospital, London, becomes a Baron for services rendered to international co-operation in medicine.

 

‘Lord Spratt!’ I gasped.

I stood still, letting the paper drop to the ground.

‘So that’s why the old boy has made such a fuss about the bicentenary. Poor old Cambridge – I only hope he wangles a knighthood for him one day. And by George,’ I added, recovering from the shock, ‘aren’t those noble rafters going to ring at Westminster!’

After Nikki and I had laughed over the news I was allowed by the nurse the privilege of holding my son. It was almost impossible to believe that he too might one day go to St Swithin’s, to sit in the same lecture benches, listen with the same inattention, react to the starkness of medical education with the same high spirits, play the same games, drink in the same pubs, fumble his way round the same wards, and flirt with much the same sort of nurses. Like Sir Lancelot and myself, he would become part of St Swithin’s. But, more important, St Swithin’s would always be part of us.