PROFESSOR SMALL DIDN’T APPEAR for her round on the Wednesday after the unit meeting, having important business in an undisclosed location – or at least in a location she hadn’t disclosed to Emma, who could normally give an hour by hour account of the Prof’s whereabouts. But when she arrived for her round the following Wednesday, she turned up with unusually benevolent demeanour. She was on time, for a start. And she didn’t get upset when it turned out that no one had made the coffee. No one ever made the coffee, because, although it was understood that coffee should be made, it wasn’t understood precisely whose job it was to make it. Every week the first ten minutes of the round were spent discovering, debating, and rectifying the fact that no one had made it in a festival of confusion that set the scene for the phantasmagoria that followed. But not this week. The Prof had a very collected, very serene look on her face. She suggested sweetly that the two medical students might wish to make the coffee, and the two medical students, realizing that they were being invited to perform an important task that was critical to their medical training, gratefully complied. The Prof chatted amiably with Dr Morris as she waited for them to come back.
Goldblatt glanced at her uneasily. Something wasn’t right. Either the Prof was very happy about something – unnaturally, eerily happy – or someone had just shot her full of a major tranquillizer.
It wasn’t the latter. A fortnight earlier, in one of her increasingly frequent visits to the Prof’s office to complain about Goldblatt, Emma had told the Prof that Ludo, who was supposed to be filling in the Fuertler’s files, wasn’t filling them in at all. She, Emma, was forced to do it herself! The Prof had mentally filed away that piece of information in a special, dagger-filled cupboard in her brain, as she filed away all kinds of information, ready for the time when she might want to use it. And now, as far as the Prof was concerned, the time had come.
In reality, the time had gone. Only days after Emma had provided this information to the Prof, the improvisatory work of the Goldblatt Street Theatre had enabled Ludo to recover the files. Emma had tacitly conceded that her last and most cunning stratagem had failed – which meant that she hadn’t been able to think of another one – and since then Ludo had been industriously – if such a word could be applied to Ludo – filling the files in. Emma hadn’t dared to inform the Prof of this small but important development, because she couldn’t work out how to do it without revealing why Ludo hadn’t been able to fill the files in in the first place. But if Emma had known what the Prof was planning to do now with the information – or more accurately, the misinformation, as it had become – she might have summoned up the courage to bring the Prof up to date.
To put it plainly, the Prof was planning to slay Malcolm Goldblatt on her round and leave him lying flat in a pool of his own bubbling blood. From his very first day on the unit and his incomprehensible response when she had asked – very reasonably, she thought – to bring one of her patients in, the Prof had had a niggling feeling, playing constantly like a discordant tune in the background of her thoughts – or screeching at her like a siren in her head – that Malcolm Goldblatt didn’t respect her. Inspired by the events surrounding Mr Siepl, Emma had raised the volume by telling the Prof bloodcurdling stories of Goldblatt questioning her decisions on ward rounds and countermanding her orders. And at the unit meeting the Prof had felt his eyes on her like a hot breath on her neck, watching, judging, laughing. The boy needed taking down a notch or three, and the Prof, after much deliberation in front of the Scale, had decided to do it. Just as she had been exposed at the unit meeting, so she was about to put him in his place in the best way possible – in front of everyone.
The instrument was to hand. She was ready to unleash the information provided by Emma from the knife-filled cupboard in her mind where she had stowed it. If the boy wanted to behave as he did – aggravating and alienating everyone around him, junior and senior alike – his own record had to be spotless. And it wasn’t, was it? The SHO was supposed to be filling in the Fuertler’s files. Today, on the round, when she opened them, the Prof would ‘discover’ that the SHO hadn’t been doing her job, and that the SR had been compelled to fill them in for her. And if it’s up to a consultant to discover that an SHO isn’t doing her job, an SHO who is supposed to be supervised by the ward registrar, there’s only one person to blame, isn’t there?
The Prof already knew exactly what she was going to do. She had even rehearsed some of the speech. All of it, actually. And especially the really withering bits.
The Prof tittered at something Dr Morris said as she waited for the coffee. She looked around and asked the HO if she would be so kind as to pass her the Fuertler’s files. Ludo almost wet herself with delight. Wasn’t the Prof going to be pleased when she saw that every Fuertler’s file was as full as a Fuertler’s file could be!
The Prof fingered the files as she continued to talk with Dr Morris. Holding them on her lap, she rubbed her hand slowly over the one on the top of the pile, as one fondles something very precious, very comforting, very powerful.
The students came back. The coffee that was the object of their critical training mission was distributed. Everyone settled down, to the extent that they could, squashed thigh-to-thigh in the doctors’ office.
The Prof invited the HO to start.
As the HO launched into the first patient, the Prof opened the top Fuertler’s file and turned to the pages where the current assessment was supposed to be recorded. The entry was complete – but the writing was unfamiliar. It wasn’t Emma’s. The Prof peeked at the signature on the final page. Quite illegible, but again, not Emma’s. The Prof glanced up at the SHO and saw that she was watching her excitedly. She took a peek at the second file. Same thing. She opened the third. The fourth. The fifth.
The Prof had stopped listening to the HO. She was opening one folder after another, dropping each one on the floor after she had finished with it. The last one went down.
The HO had stopped speaking.
The Prof looked up at her. ‘Go on,’ she said.
But the Prof’s tone wasn’t the gentle, mellifluous burble in which she had started the round.
Ludo couldn’t say for certain, but she didn’t think the Prof was as pleased with the Fuertler’s files as she had expected.
The HO kept going. Emma stared at the Prof, trying to catch her eye. The Prof glanced at her and gave her the tiniest flicker of a smile. There was a lot of pain and effort in that smile. Emma started breathing again. The Prof wasn’t blaming her! Emma didn’t know what was wrong, but as long as the Prof knew it wasn’t her fault, everything was all right.
But everything wasn’t all right, that was the whole point, and the Prof had grasped it in an instant. The HO’s voice droned on in a torrent of muddy, tedious information about her patients. Those Fuertler’s files weren’t meant to have been filled in. Not by the SHO, anyway. The Prof knew it, Emma knew it, Goldblatt knew it. There was only one possible conclusion. Goldblatt had deliberately had the files filled!
The filling of those Fuertler’s files suddenly seemed to be the greatest single act of insubordination the Prof had ever faced. She would have to respond swiftly, vigorously, decisively, or lose whatever respect she still commanded altogether. To falter now, she felt, would be to invite a complete breakdown of her authority, which had been under threat ever since Goldblatt’s unprecedented refusal to manipulate beds.
But how? The situation was almost impossibly tricky. After all, the Fuertler’s files were supposed to be filled. The fact that it had been an unspoken understanding that they hadn’t been filled merely made Goldblatt’s treachery all the deeper. He knew perfectly well that she wouldn’t be able to come out in the open and attack him for making sure that what needed to be done had been done. Well, there were other ways, and if Andrea Small couldn’t devise one of them she might just as well hang up her stethoscope and give away her textbooks. All she needed was a pretext. A good, old-fashioned pretext, like the Fuertler’s files themselves had been. But the Fuertler’s files were no longer a pretext, they were a cause. It would be no exaggeration to say that they were a cause célèbre. And what the Prof needed now was a pretext that would give her the opportunity to celebrate. Quickly.
She found it lying in bed three when they went out on to the ward.
‘Wait a moment, please,’ said the Prof, with icy, whetted politeness. ‘Did you just say Mrs Constantidis hasn’t had her echocardiogram?’
The HO looked at the Prof in surprise. That was exactly what she had just said, but she had already mentioned it when she presented the case of Mrs Constantidis, the lady in bed three, in the doctors’ office. The Prof, who had been looking through the Fuertler’s files at the time, hadn’t raised an eyebrow then. And Mrs Constantidis wouldn’t be the first patient who would have had to come back as an outpatient for a test that was part of the Fuertler’s work-up. Far from it. The various departments in the hospital were always cancelling and rescheduling, and patients would be in for weeks if you refused to let them go before every test was completed.
‘Did I just hear you say that Mrs Constantidis has not had her echocardiogram?’
‘Yes,’ said the HO. ‘The Cardiology department was supposed to do her yesterday, but one of their machines broke down and they couldn’t—’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the Prof, who wasn’t sorry at all and couldn’t even make herself sound as if she was. ‘Did you say she hasn’t had her echocardiogram?’
‘Yes,’ said the HO, rewinding to the start of the tape. ‘The Cardiology department was supposed to do her yesterday, but one of their machines broke down and—’
The Prof, who had been staring fixedly out of the window while speaking to the HO, suddenly turned on her. The HO stopped. Her mouth stayed open, like a gulping fish.
‘Every one of my patients gets an echocardiogram. It’s part of the work-up. You have been told that. What have you been doing here for the past month?’
The HO stared.
‘Do you expect me to check every test you order on every one of my patients? Well? What do you think you’re doing here?’
The HO had frozen. The Prof’s eyes, which hadn’t left her face, turned her blood to ice.
Dr Morris was standing on the other side of the bed. Emma, following her loyalties, had taken a subconscious step towards the Prof. Ludo had taken four completely conscious steps in the opposite direction, trying to get behind Goldblatt. And no one helped the HO. The HO was out in the open like some nocturnal animal with short red hair caught in the spotlights of the Prof’s icy rage, and everybody else was going to let her freeze. Freeze, HO, Freeze! No one helps an HO.
‘Working her butt off.’ Even as the words came out, Goldblatt wasn’t sure whether he was actually saying them, or only thinking them.
No, he had said them. He caught a glimpse of the Prof’s face. He had definitely said them.
Some kind of spasm streaked across the Prof’s features. Outrage? Joy? Both. The one problem with the pretext lying in bed three was that the offence, strictly speaking, was the HO’s offence, the kind of misdemeanour an HO commits every day, and there was no guarantee that she would succeed in shifting the blame to the registrar. But Goldblatt had just done her work for her. Insufferably impudent as he was, he had joined himself to the offence.
‘And you, Dr Goldblatt. You are the registrar here, I understand.’
By this time there was complete silence in the room. No one else in there could pretend they weren’t aware of the confrontation that had broken out amongst the doctors gathered around bed three. One of the cleaners, who had been mopping under the bed opposite, cautiously straightened up. The lady volunteer who pushed the trolley with the newspapers, and had been chatting to one of the patients about the latest royal scandal on the front page of the Sun, clutched the bar on her trolley and slowly turned her head. The other three patients in the room stared silently. And Mrs Eleni Constantidis herself, the cause and occasion of this awful confrontation, caught in the middle of the doctors, was staring at Professor Small, pale, open-mouthed, and rigid with fear.
‘The echocardiogram is an elective investigation,’ said Goldblatt evenly. ‘Mrs Constantidis understands there was a problem with a machine. We’ve apologized to her, Professor Small. She’s very kindly agreed to come back as an outpatient to get—’
‘Mrs Constantidis,’ said the Prof, whirling to face Mrs Constantidis, who bunched abruptly into a cowering, rabbit-like posture and pulled the sheet right up to her neck. ‘Are you very upset that these doctors have failed to get your echocardiogram done?’
It took Mrs Constantidis a moment to realize that she was physically safe. After another moment she shrugged tentatively.
‘I can see that you are,’ said the Prof. ‘I would be as well. It is intolerable. Intolerable! Is it true that they have asked you to come back?’
Mrs Constantidis smiled hesitantly.
The Prof sat on the edge of the bed. Mrs Constantidis shifted apprehensively, wondering what the Prof was going to do to her now that she knew she had agreed to come back to have the echo-thing done when it was intolerable. Intolerable! What was going to happen? She should never have agreed. If she had known it would make the Professor this upset, she would have told the little doctor that she couldn’t do it. But the little doctor... she was just a young girl... who would have thought that such a sweet little doctor would ask her to do something intolerable? And now they were both in trouble. The Professor was going to punish the little doctor, and as for her, Eleni Constantidis, the Professor was going to send her away and never let her come back to the hospital again. Oh, what a lot of trouble she was in!
The Prof reached for Mrs Constantidis’s hand. Mrs Constantidis gave it to her reluctantly, half turning her head away in an anticipatory flinch.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the Prof, ‘I’ll get your echocardiogram done, even if my registrar can’t.’
The Prof gave Goldblatt a scornful glance. Then she looked back at her patient. Slowly, Mrs Constantidis realized that the Prof wasn’t going to send her away after all. She gazed at the Prof gratefully, eyes wet with emotion and relief.
‘Will you, Professor Small?’ she asked in a tiny voice, scarcely believing in the miracle that had just taken place.
‘Just see if I don’t!’ said the Prof.
The Prof got off the bed, paused only long enough to send a second withering glance in Goldblatt’s direction, and marched off the ward with a vicious clattering of heels.
Goldblatt stared after her. Mrs Constantidis stared after her. Ludo, the HO, and Emma stared after her. Dr Morris stared after her. Sister Choy stared after her. The two medical students who had come on the round stared after her. The other three patients in the room, the lady who pushed the trolley with the newspapers, and the cleaner stared after her as well, even though none of them knew what they were staring at.
What they were staring at – or not staring at, since Professor Small had disappeared and they were actually staring at the empty space from which she had vanished – was a consultant walking off her own ward round. Simply walking off. Goldblatt had never seen it before. Neither had the lady who pushed the trolley with the newspapers. Neither had anyone else. And, apart from staring, no one knew what to do.
Goldblatt wondered whether they were meant to stay where they were until the Prof came back. He wondered if the Prof was ever going to come back. Who knew how long they might have stood there if the lady who pushed the trolley with the newspapers hadn’t sighed, shaken her grey head, and started pushing her trolley again?
The cleaner dipped his mop in his pail and pressed hard on the pedal of the squeezer mechanism.
Dr Morris looked back at Mrs Constantidis. ‘We’ll try to get your echocardiogram done,’ he said guardedly.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, doctor,’ replied Mrs Constantidis. ‘Really. I only live in Cricklewood. Like I told the little doctor, I don’t mind coming back.’
Dr Morris smiled his mischievous smile. All at once there was a spring in his step. And he hadn’t even moved.
‘Right then,’ he announced briskly to the others, ‘let’s keep going. Let’s see how many of the patients we can get through before she gets back.’
They got through all the patients before she got back. Once the echoes of the Prof’s footsteps faded away and they had recovered from their suspended animation, it turned into a quick, punchy, feisty round led with verve and gusto by Dr Morris at his clinical best. Once you let Dr Morris off his leash, his love of medicine took over, and there was no place for anything else in his sharp and inquisitive mind, not even the terrible prospect of the Prof’s return. Instinctively, everyone joined in. They felt so carefree, so light. Even Ludo entered into the liberated spirit of the morning, trying her hand at a couple of wobbly answers when Dr Morris launched a Teaching Attack on peripheral neuropathies. Pretty soon it was hard to believe there had ever been a Prof. They were crazy, of course, unhinged by the sweet scent of freedom. The irrational elation of the doomed. As they were walking back towards the doctors’ office, a certain familiar clattering of heels came towards them from around the corner.
The HO, who was pushing the notes trolley, stopped. Everyone stopped with her. Later Goldblatt wondered what would have happened if the HO had kept going. Would the Prof have turned and followed, running alongside the trolley as she berated them instead of dancing an ill-tempered little jig on the spot where she stopped to confront them? Like all the great questions in life – the size of the universe, the meaning of existence, the reason nerve fibres cross from one side to the other in the spinal cord – he would never know the answer. Because the HO, in fact, stopped.
‘I don’t know what you’re all doing here,’ the Prof shouted, without so much as a hello, ‘if you can’t even get a simple echocardiogram done on a patient!’
Goldblatt scrutinized the Prof carefully. Yes, she was mad. Absolutely insane. Whatever it was that had happened to her since she had marched proudly off the ward, it had driven her into a state of complete and certifiable lunacy.
‘If I have to do everything myself, I don’t know what’s the point of having you all here!’ she shrieked, stamping her feet in frustration.
‘Are the cardiologists going to do the echocardiogram?’ Emma asked brightly, thinking that she was throwing a Dorothy Dixer that would enable the great chief and leader to paint the glorious picture of her latest conquest.
Emma had just forfeited, with eight helpful words, all the credit she had built up by misinforming the Prof that all those filled-in Fuertler’s files hadn’t been filled in.
There had been no glorious conquest. There had been nothing but ignominious defeat. The Prof had just spent half an hour raving to an unimpressed cardiologist who, coolly glancing through the booking schedule, found an outpatient appointment next week for a non-urgent scan on a patient called Constantidis who lived four miles away in Cricklewood with no known cardiac problems. He didn’t see why he should turn his department upside down trying to slot this Constantidis in on his one remaining operational echocardiogram machine between the man with the failing heart transplant and the pregnant twenty-three-year-old with acute mitral regurgitation. And the Prof hadn’t been able to make him see, no matter how many lies she told. He was wilfully blind. He had no guilt, either. Machines break down, he had said, shrugging with cardiological insolence. What can you do?
It had been a long journey back to the ward, and the Prof, who had almost decided not to make it, didn’t need a Dorothy Dixer from some ersatz SR to remind her of the outcome of her joust in Cardiology.
The Prof impaled Emma with a venomous glance. ‘They are going to try very hard,’ she lied, and, before Emma could give her any more help, she grabbed Dr Morris by the arm and dragged him away.
Emma stood for a moment, glared at Goldblatt, and then went off to her office. Sister Choy slammed shut the nurses’ communication book and stalked off, muttering something about consultants interfering with discharge plans. Only Goldblatt, Ludo, and the HO were left in the corridor.
The HO frowned. ‘Shall I ring Cardiology and see what time they’ve booked her?’
Goldblatt shook his head.
‘But she’s going home today!’
‘Correct,’ said Goldblatt.
‘Then what will I do?’
‘If the cardiologists have a slot for her, they’ll find her before she goes. If they don’t have a slot, she’ll come back next week as planned.’
The HO looked confused. ‘But they might fit her in at the very end of the day! What if she’s already gone?’
Suddenly Goldblatt felt very protective towards the HO. There was so much she still had to learn, so much to suffer. And then, having learned and suffered, she would be changed for ever.
‘Clinical need,’ said Goldblatt. ‘Remember that? That’s what matters. Forget what you saw here today. I mean, remember it, but only so you can forget it.’
The HO was watching Goldblatt intently, as if he were some kind of sage. It almost made him feel awkward. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the HO was extremely perspicacious for one so young, and probably knew a sage when she saw one. Who was he to doubt her judgement?
They walked back to the doctors’ office.
‘There was no clinical need to get that echo today,’ he said. ‘There was another need, but it wasn’t clinical.’ Goldblatt stopped and let the HO push the notes trolley into the office. He followed her in and drew up a decision tree on the whiteboard to illustrate the rationale. ‘She goes home and comes back for the echo,’ he concluded. ‘Ignore the cosmetics and concentrate on the substance. Otherwise, you don’t know what effects you’re having. If she gets that echo today, she bumps someone else who needs it more.’
‘The Broderip–Anderssen Principle?’ said the HO.
Goldblatt looked at her in surprise. Obviously you had to be careful in front of the HO. Like many small people, she often remembered what you said.
‘Exactly,’ he replied.
Ludo laughed caustically. ‘Don’t you know where he got that principle—’
‘Shut up, Ludo,’ said Goldblatt.
Ludo looked hurt. Goldblatt thought that would please her.
He turned back to the HO. ‘Send Mrs Constantidis home. If the cardiologists want to get her first, they can have her. Otherwise she comes back next week.’
Mrs Constantidis went home. The cardiologists didn’t get her. They didn’t try to get her. And the Prof did nothing else to make sure they would.
The Prof had no intention of doing anything else. The last thing she wanted was to prolong her involvement with Mrs Constantidis, who had probably never even needed a Fuertler’s work-up in the first place. In fact, when the Prof came to think about it, she had only organized an admission for Mrs Constantidis because Mrs Constantidis had begged and begged in clinic, or at least agreed very readily when the Prof suggested that she should be admitted, and the whole affair had been very dubious from the start.
The whole affair had been even more dubious at the end. It hadn’t turned out quite as the Prof had planned, or even remotely as she had planned, and the Prof had to admit that she herself was largely to blame for it. At the time, her spontaneous impulse to walk off the ward had seemed a stroke of inspiration that would put Goldblatt to shame, but it turned out to be a complete debacle, and the only way she could overcome its after-effects was to pretend that it wasn’t, which just added to the humiliation because everyone knew that it was. As far as the Prof was concerned, the whole episode was distasteful and unpleasant and no one who was involved in it seemed to love her, except for Mrs Constantidis, and if the Prof was perfectly honest with herself – which she felt she probably had to be, given the circumstances – she had to admit that the only reason Mrs Constantidis loved her was because she had promised her something that she didn’t deliver. By now it was very likely that Mrs Constantidis didn’t love her at all. The sooner she forgot the whole unsavoury episode, the better.
Which is exactly what the Prof set out to do. When she got to her office, she shut the door in Dr Morris’s face and locked him out. Then she turned and gazed at the Scale. It stood proud, upright, dependable. Immediately, the Prof felt calmer. Soon, she knew, the details of this nasty little event would be put out of her mind. The Prof had put many other nasty little events out of her mind in the past, and she didn’t see why this one should be different. She closed her eyes, waiting for calmness to suffuse her.
But it didn’t. Or wouldn’t. Instead, she felt a slight wave of nausea. She opened her eyes. Now the Scale looked narrow, flimsy, and underfilled.
She had set out to teach Malcolm Goldblatt a lesson, but she felt that the opposite had occurred. He had taught her a lesson. Or at least she had taught one to herself, and somehow he had had a part in making her do it.
If anything, his insubordination was getting worse.
Not only that, she was starting to feel scared of him. Andrea Small had to admit, if she looked into her heart of hearts – which was always a difficult thing to do, whatever the circumstances – that Malcolm Goldblatt intimidated her.
What was she to do about the boy?
On the other side of the door that had been shut in his face, Dr Morris walked away in disbelief. The Prof had just staged the most divisive and destabilizing performance he had ever seen on a medical unit, and what had she done next? Locked herself away in her office and left him to pick up the pieces! Dr Morris had an awful premonition that this role was going to become more and more familiar, as were the tortuous conversations in which the Prof was now regularly embroiling him, leading him through the psychedelic pastiche of her professorial torments and intrigues.
He felt used and manipulated and resentful, but the pieces had to be picked up, and it was clear that the Prof had no intention of doing it.
He bleeped the team and had them meet in the cafeteria for a debrief over an early lunch. When they gathered he sent them off to buy sandwiches with strict orders to rendezvous at one of the unoccupied tables on the far side of the room. Once there, he sat at the head of the table as if he was the Father of the Unit, trying to patch things up after the silly tiff that everyone had just had with Mother and thus prove that they were one happy family once more. Unfortunately they had never been one happy family, or even an unhappy family, and Father Morris’s plan was therefore doomed from the outset by the logical impossibility of imposing the restoration of a state of affairs that had never existed to begin with.
Not surprisingly, Father Morris was finding it difficult to start. It was one thing to get them all together as if he knew exactly what he was going to say. But he was just as shocked and demoralized at the Prof’s performance as they were, and now that he was supposed to start talking he really didn’t know if was going to be able to say anything that would sound as if he wasn’t. He wished he was somewhere else, with some impossibly difficult patient, for instance, who suffered from ten obscure, life-threatening and undiagnosable diseases. Then, at least, he would have known what to do.
There was plenty of noise from the rest of the cafeteria, but at the table of the Small gang the only sounds were of concentrated chewing and swallowing. Between each bite of his sandwich, Dr Morris glanced around nervously, took a deep breath and cleared his throat, only to end up putting his sandwich back into his mouth. Unfortunately, as a prop, a sandwich has only a limited life, especially if you keep eating it. Everyone else’s sandwiches were soon finished as well. Dr Morris’s debrief was turning out to be very brief indeed, and was threatening to disappear into the same capacious void that had swallowed up the new echocardiogram appointment the Prof had promised to secure for Mrs Constantidis.
Dr Morris took another deep breath, cleared his throat, and made his mouth talk.
‘Listen, I just want to say...’ he began before frowning and stopping for a moment. Then he started again. ‘Look, we’re all in this together. Let’s try to step back from what happened today and look at ourselves. We’re a team, aren’t we? Emma? Malcolm? That’s how we work, like a team.’ There was a wet and depressing doggedness in Dr Morris’s voice, as if he knew – and he knew that they knew – that he was saying something that was completely at odds with reality, but there was nothing else he could think of to say. ‘Come on!’ he exhorted them beseechingly. ‘We’re a team!’
Faced with an almost pleading look on Dr Morris’s face, Goldblatt nodded.
Dr Morris continued in his wet and dogged tone. Goldblatt glanced at Emma. She was staring at him. She looked away quickly. Her face began to flush.
Now Ludo was whining. ‘But I filled them in! I had them all filled in and she didn’t even care. All she cared about was that echo.’
‘And that was the cardiologists’ fault!’ the HO added, with all the indignation she had bottled up when the Prof had turned on her. ‘I went down there the day she arrived and booked it. They said they’d do it. Then they rang me up and said one of their machines was broken and they’d do it as an outpatient. It wasn’t only Mrs Constantidis. They did it to Mr Galloway as well. And last week they did it to Mrs Patel. And to Mrs Golpher. And to—’
‘All right!’ said Dr Morris, who sensed that the big message was getting lost in a wealth of HO-ish detail. Besides, he knew that what had happened had very little, if anything, to do with Mrs Constantidis’s cancelled echocardiogram. ‘It’s been a very unpleasant experience for everyone. Let’s not dwell on the past. Let’s see what we can do to make sure nothing like this happens again. If we can do that, we can make things a lot easier for ourselves. There are certain things the Prof wants done. She’s the Prof and it’s her unit. Whatever we might think of her and the way she does things and her abilities as a clinician—’ He stopped himself. ‘I mean, the point is, she’s built this unit up, and we have to respect that. We have to respect the way she wants things done, and we have to make sure they get done in the way she wants. There’s no way around that. Now, she wants the Fuertler’s files to be filled in—’
‘But they were filled in!’ Ludo objected, injecting real passion into her whine.
‘All right. She wants the work-up done on her patients—’
‘But it was done!’ snapped the HO. ‘All except that echo, and it was all organized, and Mrs Constantidis was happy to go home and come back, and there wasn’t—’
‘All right! All right!’ exclaimed Dr Morris in exasperation, covering his ears with his hands. He looked around for a moment. ‘Listen, there’s been a lot of stress for the Prof lately. And not just for the Prof. There have been a lot of changes recently on the unit, and they haven’t been easy.’
‘No, they haven’t,’ said Emma, her voice trembling.
Goldblatt looked at her. He hoped Emma wasn’t going to start crying. He was going to be sick if she started crying.
‘I know. It’s been very difficult,’ said Dr Morris with what seemed to be almost genuine sympathy.
Goldblatt thought he was going to be sick whatever happened.
‘It’s been... very hard,’ said Emma.
‘I know it has,’ said Dr Morris.
Dr Morris did know. Emma had come crying to him a number of times – ostensibly about the way the unit was running, but mostly about Goldblatt – and he guessed these appearances were mere dress rehearsals compared with what she did in front of the Prof. The more he thought about it, the deeper seemed the divisions within the unit, and the more he wished that he could follow the Prof’s example and lock himself in his room.
‘It’s been... awfully...’ said Emma.
‘I know,’ said Dr Morris.
Goldblatt was going to pass out if this kept going.
‘It’s just...’
‘I understand.’
‘Yes,’ said Goldblatt suddenly. ‘It has been difficult.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Morris briskly, without any trace of the sympathy he had lavished on Emma, ‘the point is, the Professor’s been under a lot of strain recently. We have to recognize that. We have to recognize that this may have contributed to what happened today. So what I’m saying is that I want you all to understand it in that way and try to be sensitive to it.’
Dr Morris paused for a moment. No one said anything. Emma was gazing absently into the distance, lost in painful reflection on all the difficult changes that had taken place on the unit. Ludo and the HO were staring at the remains of their lunches on the table in front of them. They looked as if they were ashamed.
Goldblatt gazed at them. Of what? What had they done to be ashamed of? Not Ludo, but the HO, anyway.
‘Let’s just think beyond what each one of us is doing a little bit,’ said Dr Morris. ‘We’re all working together, aren’t we? No one’s trying to make anyone look bad. No one’s competing for anyone else’s job. Malcolm’s not competing for Emma’s job. And Emma’s not competing for Malcolm’s job. Right?’
For a moment Goldblatt wondered about that. Was it even possible for someone to be competing for a job that was more junior than her own and from which she had just been promoted?
Dr Morris looked around the table earnestly. Suddenly he felt that he was really getting through to them. Maybe the idea of having this talk was going to pay off, after all. ‘We just have to make sure we do the things the Prof expects,’ he continued with a note of optimism creeping into his voice. ‘All right? Let’s do it, like a real team. We can do it, I know we can. Let’s just do it and we won’t have any repeats of today.’
‘Excuse me.’ Goldblatt pointed at the HO. ‘Look at her.’
‘What?’ said the HO. She looked down in alarm to check the buttons on her blouse.
Dr Morris frowned. It had all been going so well, and it had been starting to sound so sensible, even to him.
‘She’s been a doctor for six weeks,’ said Goldblatt. ‘Six weeks, Dr Morris. And after six weeks, some professor subjects her to a personal attack in front of the patients she’s supposed to be looking after. She didn’t start with much self-esteem. Presuming it hasn’t been totally destroyed, how’s she going to go back to those patients with any credibility? And you’re teaching her this is the way we treat each other? You’re teaching her that when a consultant goes berserk, her job is to identify the trigger so she can find a way to prevent it happening again? What is she? The local slave?’
‘Yes,’ said the HO. ‘What am I? I didn’t start with much self-esteem. I’ve only been working for six weeks and—’
Goldblatt raised his hand. She stopped.
Dr Morris was staring at him. His mouth moved, groping towards articulation. But nothing came out of it.
‘You’re right, Dr Morris. The Prof’s the Prof. And whatever we think of her, we have to respect that. It’s her unit. She has the right to expect that certain things are done. And we have to do them. But she has to realize we can only work in the system we’ve got. This is the National Health Service, for Christ’s sake. Shit happens. She knows that. And if she doesn’t know it she ought to grow up and learn. She can’t just take it out on the nearest person. In the end, what matters is the treatment her patients get. And we have the right to expect her to understand that.’ Goldblatt smiled incredulously. ‘She’s under stress? We’re all under stress. Look at Emma, for God’s sake.’
Everyone looked.
‘I have no intention of tiptoeing around because some professor can’t control her urges,’ Goldblatt muttered.
‘That’s putting it a bit strongly,’ said Dr Morris.
‘Look at her,’ retorted Goldblatt, pointing at the HO again.
The HO gazed dolefully at Dr Morris with a hangdog look on her face. Her glasses slipped down her nose, and she let them teeter dangerously, too dejected to push them back up. The HO learned fast and was rapidly becoming a skilled and versatile accomplice. Her acting experience probably helped.
‘I’ve only been a doctor for six weeks,’ she said plaintively.
‘All right,’ said Dr Morris in exasperation. ‘Just make sure everything gets done. Just get it done. And let’s try not to let this happen again.’
‘Everything’ll get done, everything that can be’ said Goldblatt grimly. He shook his head in contempt. ‘That was abuse out there on the open ward. I’ve got a mind to put in a complaint against the Professor.’
Emma’s mouth dropped in horror.
Goldblatt’s bleep went off before he could say anything else. He got up and went to one of the phones on the cafeteria wall. Switchboard connected him with the husband of one of the Prof’s patients who had rung to complain about his wife being cancelled.
Across the cafeteria, Emma was saying something to Dr Morris, shaking her head and frowning unhappily. Dr Morris nodded with an expression of forced sympathy. Or boredom.
Goldblatt watched them, still angry. After a moment he had to ask the husband on the phone to start his complaint again.