IT WAS ON THE day after the Prof’s performance with Mrs Constantidis that Dr Morris made good on his threat to play Goldblatt at squash. Goldblatt hadn’t expected to hear anything more about the idea after Dr Morris’s initial suggestion a few weeks earlier. When would he have the time? Dr Sutherland’s unit was depositing clots and puddles of patients all over the hospital, and was already enjoying its third locum SR since the real SR had escaped to the US. Each locum seemed to be older, more weary, less knowledgeable, and to leave more quickly than the one before. And on any given day, just in case any spare time should craftily try to insert itself into Dr Morris’s timetable, there were at least five fascinating patients waiting to be seen.
Thursday afternoons, as promised. Apparently there was a window of opportunity between the Immunology research meeting that ended at two o’clock on a Thursday and the Respiratory unit X-ray meeting that began at four. Strictly speaking, Dr Morris wasn’t required to attend either meeting, but they were both too fascinating to miss. And it wasn’t really a window between them. It was more of a wall, or perhaps a window that was bricked up with a million things Dr Morris had to do in those precious two hours, so many things that he had no chance of getting them finished anyway. He might just as well throw in a game of squash and get home an hour later than the hours-later that he normally got home. What difference would it make? He could still remember the gender and approximate ages of his two children, and he had never yet failed to identify them on sight. He had their pictures on his desk, and his wife supplied fresh ones every three months so he was always up to date. What could Goldblatt say? To refuse would be churlish.
One of the interesting aspects to all of this was that Dr Morris hardly knew how to play the game. And it wasn’t just squash. He readily admitted that he had no formal training in badminton, tennis, racquetball, or any of the other racket sports that, he claimed, he also loved to play. He played every game with equal vigour, zest, and, he confided cheerfully to Goldblatt as they walked on to one of the two courts in the basement of the hospital, a complete lack of technical expertise.
‘What I lack in technique I make up for in brute strength. That’s what the North Wales badminton champion told me after he beat me in the Gwent regional heats,’ he added in a very passable Welsh accent, closing the door of the squash court behind him.
‘I don’t suppose many people play badminton in Gwent?’ mused Goldblatt.
‘No,’ said Dr Morris. ‘Very few.’
Dr Morris also informed Goldblatt that he broke a lot of rackets. ‘If I don’t break a racket during a game of squash,’ he remarked as he jumped from foot to foot in a strange ritual to limber up the ankle ligaments, ‘I count myself lucky.’
‘Must make it expensive,’ observed Goldblatt.
‘No. I don’t play very much.’ For some reason, Dr Morris was still talking in a Welsh accent. He had arrived dressed in blue shorts and a white T-shirt, and now, having prepared his ankles, he was doing bending exercises for his knees.
Goldblatt watched.
‘It’s the walls in squash, they’re the tricky things,’ Dr Morris remarked.
‘Yes. Tennis is safer.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’ As he methodically proceeded to loosen each of the major joints in his body, Dr Morris described to Goldblatt how he had once damaged his left kidney playing tennis. He had gone storming up the court to return a crucial, match-saving volley, which he reached at full stretch before spinning gloriously out of control and slamming his loin into the net post on the backhand side. The pain was severe, he was soon passing blood, and he knew that he had done himself some kind of urological injury. He got a nephrologist friend to meet him in the Ultrasound department at seven o’clock the next morning to do a scan before the department opened for business, and he had the result in his hand before he limped off for his morning ward round. Moderate haematoma at the upper pole of the left kidney. He took the scan home and waved it triumphantly in front of his wife, who was a general practitioner, six months pregnant, and who immediately forbade him to play any more dangerous sports. Dr Morris chuckled as he recounted the scene. Goldblatt understood. There’s nothing more pleasing to a man than a moderate, fully reversible injury that shows up well on ultrasound and gives you the chance to display your stony fortitude in front of a fretting woman, even if it’s only your wife. Dr Morris was soon plotting his next tennis match. Naturally, he also wrote his case up and sent it to a sports medicine journal, where it was published, together with an image of the ultrasound scan and a picture of the offending net post, under the title ‘Urological trauma: an unusual tennis injury’.
‘I’ll get you a reprint if you like,’ said Dr Morris.
‘No thanks,’ said Goldblatt. ‘Did you win the point, at least?’
Dr Morris shook his head, grinning widely. ‘Straight into the net.’ He completed the last of his exercises, a painful-looking stretch of the shoulders. ‘All right. Watch out, Malcolm!’
Dr Morris wasn’t speaking metaphorically. On the second point, he chased a ball that Goldblatt had lobbed into the back corner. Pirouetting on his right foot, Dr Morris tried to return the ball by slamming it hard into the back wall. His racket slammed hard into the side wall, the ball ricocheted off the frame, hit the wall, and flew straight at his face. Dr Morris jerked his head away a split-second too late to avoid it and then, still pirouetting, went bouncing uncontrollably along the back wall until the opposite corner brought his escape to an abrupt halt.
Goldblatt walked over to the corner where Dr Morris had started his adventure, picked up the ball, and got ready to serve.
Not that Goldblatt himself was the world’s greatest squash Meister, but he had played at university and could manage a decent game. After a while he tired of watching Dr Morris storm into the back corners of the court and hit himself in the chest, arms, abdomen, legs, and head as he failed to return the ball. He began to toy with him. He planted himself in the middle of the court and sent Dr Morris right and left, up and down the court around him, chasing balls that were placed so that, with a final lung-bursting lunge, Dr Morris might just get his racket to them. When he decided to end a rally because Dr Morris was about to keel over in respiratory distress, he lobbed one into the corner, ran for the front to avoid the helicopter-like rotation of Dr Morris’s racket, and turned to watch the performance in the back court.
Goldblatt became aware of a sadistic pleasure and he surrendered to it unconditionally. He didn’t know why. He hadn’t the slightest ill feeling towards Dr Morris, not even after the grisly debrief in the cafeteria that Dr Morris had hosted the previous day. In fact, he liked him. He let Dr Morris win a few points so that he wouldn’t lose heart altogether and stop running. Dr Morris staggered compliantly from side to side, gamely chasing the ball and growing more and more exhausted. By the third game he was tottering around the court in a semi-comatose state with a face the colour of a ripe tomato. His breathing was louder than anything Goldblatt had heard since the six months he had spent as an SHO on a ward full of patients with emphysema.
Suddenly, Goldblatt had a terrible premonition. Dr Morris was going to die. A major artery was going to rupture behind his eyes and he was going to die right there on the court, and tomorrow morning the Prof was going to be the only consultant left alive on the unit.
Goldblatt glanced over his shoulder as he was about to serve. Dr Morris’s face was a stomach-churning patchwork of congestion. The areas around his eyes were as dark as liver, and his bulging eyeballs were fixed on the front wall with a frightening intensity. He was clutching his racket so hard that his arm was trembling. His thin white legs looked flimsy and unreliable.
‘Are you all right?’ Goldblatt asked.
No answer. The court echoed to the sound of Dr Morris’s stertorous breathing.
‘Are you all right?’ he shouted.
Dr Morris still didn’t look at him. But he must have sensed that Goldblatt was talking to him when the ball failed to appear against the front wall out of the edge of his field of vision.
‘Can’t think. Too tired. Just play.’
Dr Morris’s voice had a sinister staccato quality that reminded Goldblatt of people who have had cerebellar haemorrhages. Perhaps one of his arteries had already burst. Goldblatt couldn’t help thinking that Dr Morris’s death on the squash court would cut short a fine career and would be a great tragedy for Dr Morris, his wife, and his two young children, but it would be an even greater tragedy for himself, Ludo, and the HO, who would be left behind without any protection at all from the convulsive whims of Emma and the Prof.
‘Come on. Serve,’ came Dr Morris’s robotic, staccato voice.
Goldblatt served. Don’t die, Dr Morris, he thought as he hit the ball. Please don’t die.
Goldblatt’s sadistic pleasure had turned into masochistic dread. He ended the game in two minutes with a series of mercifully brutal shots that didn’t give Dr Morris a chance. Dr Morris collapsed. Goldblatt sat down against one of the side walls, watching him warily and getting ready to spring into action if he stopped breathing. Dr Morris lay flat on his back, staring at the roof, and his chest went up and down like a bellows.
Eventually he turned over and started to crawl. He dragged himself towards Goldblatt and propped himself up beside him.
‘All right?’ said Goldblatt.
Dr Morris forced a smile on to the death mask that had replaced his face. ‘Just need to get a bit fitter.’
‘You looked like you were going to die out there. You would have left us all alone with the Professor.’
Dr Morris smiled wanly. ‘Why do you think I was playing so hard?’
The lights in the court went out. They sat in the sunlight that filtered down from the windows in the gallery behind the court, like the half-light in a cathedral.
It was a strangely peaceful, contemplative atmosphere.
‘You wouldn’t really put in a complaint against Andrea,’ said Dr Morris after a while, unceremoniously rending the tranquillity.
Goldblatt turned to look at him. ‘Against who?’
‘Professor Small. Remember? You said yesterday that you might.’
‘Is it worth the bother?’ asked Goldblatt.
‘No,’ said Dr Morris.
‘You’re not saying that just to stop me, are you?’
‘No,’ said Dr Morris. ‘It isn’t worth the bother. And it won’t help you, you know. You’re already in enough trouble with her.’
Goldblatt nodded. He thought about what he had said yesterday when the Prof was attacking the HO. The words had just come out of his mouth. That worried him. Actually, it scared him. He hadn’t dared mention the episode to Lesley. He knew that sometimes he reached a point where he just didn’t care any more, and then there was no knowing what he would do. It had happened in the past. He didn’t want to reach that point on the Prof’s unit. He couldn’t afford to.
But he had the feeling that he had been in trouble with the Prof even before he had opened his mouth yesterday. He even had the feeling that her incomprehensible fandango on the round had been aimed in some obscure, indecipherable way at him.
‘You just have to do what she wants,’ said Dr Morris.
‘I know that.’
‘It’s not that hard.’
‘I thought that’s what I was doing.’
The sounds of a game starting up came from the court next door. No one arrived to kick them off their court. They continued to sit in the half-light.
‘I just can’t stand the crap,’ muttered Goldblatt reflectively. There was something about the half-light, the stillness, and the sound of the game next door – not to mention Dr Morris’s near-death experience – that induced an almost confessional feeling.
Dr Morris looked up from his racket, which he had been examining for cracks.
Goldblatt glanced at him and shrugged. ‘That’s why I do things like that, I suppose. Like yesterday. I can’t stand all the crap. I just want them to leave me alone so I can get on with the medicine.’
From next door came the thwack of the ball being hit.
‘What are you doing here, Malcolm?’ asked Dr Morris suddenly.
Goldblatt hesitated. He was always suspicious of questions with big existential overtones. ‘Watching you recover from one hell of a beating?’ he replied guardedly.
Dr Morris smiled. ‘No. I mean on Andrea’s unit. What are you doing in a locum job?’
‘It was available. What happened to the old SR, anyway?’
‘She left.’
‘Why?’
Dr Morris hesitated. ‘Differences with the Prof.’
‘Such as?’
‘Let’s just say that certain expectations weren’t fulfilled.’
‘On whose side? On the Prof’s or—’
‘Look, Malcolm, that doesn’t matter. Let’s come back to you.’
Goldblatt didn’t want to come back to him, but Dr Morris did.
‘You’re obviously a good doctor, you can certainly run a ward. There’s no doubt you’re SR level. That’s the problem with Emma. Why can’t you be a bit more patient with her?’
Goldblatt sighed.
‘All right,’ said Dr Morris. ‘All right. But I still don’t understand what you’re doing in a locum job. You’re too good for that.’
‘Have you seen my CV?’
‘I saw it when Andrea appointed you. Are you looking for an SR job?’
No. He wasn’t looking for an SR job. He was hoping that, for the first time since the Big Bang sent matter flying into eternity across the starry spaces of the universe, time would stand still and he could be a locum registrar on Professor Small’s Fuertler’s unit for ever, or until he died, whichever was the later.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for an SR job.’
‘Any around?’
‘A couple.’
‘Any good?’
‘One is.’
‘You’re bound to get it,’ said Dr Morris. ‘You’d have a good chance at any job.’
Goldblatt wasn’t sure if Dr Morris was putting on such an optimistic front for his benefit or if he really thought the world worked as simply as that.
‘Where is this job?’
‘The Nailwright,’ said Goldblatt reluctantly. It was very tedious of Dr Morris to start talking about such depressing matters just when he was savouring the unsullied completeness of his victory on the squash court. Goldblatt was starting to wish that he had made him run just that little bit harder so that an artery of some kind really would have burst behind his eyes.
‘I trained at the Nailwright,’ said Dr Morris, as if that made any difference to Goldblatt or his prospects.
‘I know.’
‘Who’s the job with?’
‘Mike Coalport.’
‘Mike Coalport? I was a registrar on Mike Coalport’s unit!’
‘I’ve heard,’ said Goldblatt.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? It’s a very good unit. You’ll do very well there, Malcolm. Have they shortlisted?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
Goldblatt nodded.
‘Excellent!’ said Dr Morris. ‘When’s the interview?’
‘Four weeks.’
‘Have you been for the pre-interview?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Mike will want to get to know you. He always likes to see people before the interview.’
‘I’m seeing him about a week before.’
‘Good,’ said Dr Morris enthusiastically. ‘Well, this is excellent! I’ll ring Mike and have a word with him.’
‘That would be very kind,’ said Goldblatt wearily. He couldn’t be bothered explaining the futility of it to Dr Morris.
‘I’m sure you’ll get it.’
‘No you aren’t,’ said Goldblatt.
Dr Morris looked surprised. ‘Yes I am.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Well, I can’t be absolutely sure.’
‘I am,’ said Goldblatt.
‘What?’
‘Sure.’
‘That you’ll get it?’
‘No. That I won’t.’
‘Don’t say that. I’m sure you will.’
Goldblatt looked at Dr Morris. Maybe he really did see the world in such simple terms. He was a dedicated, good-hearted man who mistakenly thought he had the time to play games of squash that were likely to kill him. He probably believed in the perfectibility of human nature.
‘I won’t get the job at the Nailwright,’ said Goldblatt.
‘Don’t be so pessimistic. You’ll never get the job if you go in there thinking you don’t have a chance.’
‘Look, I know I won’t. I’m one of the Wise Men.’
‘On the other hand, no one likes an arrogant candidate.’
Goldblatt shook his head. ‘No. I’m one of the Wise Men. Don’t you understand what that means?’
Dr Morris frowned.
Goldblatt sighed. Sometimes you had to explain everything. ‘You know the story of the Three Wise Men?’
‘Of course I know the story of the Three Wise Men.’
‘And all those pictures with the Three Wise Men hovering in the background, with the cats and the dogs...’
‘The donkey and the ox.’
‘And the gold and houndstooth and lambswool, or whatever it was they were bringing.’
‘Gold, incense, and myrrh,’ said Dr Morris, who had been to Sunday school.
‘What are they there for?’ asked Goldblatt.
Dr Morris looked at him suspiciously. ‘What do you mean, what are they there for? They were there.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were a literal believer. I hope I haven’t offended you.’
‘I’m not a literal believer,’ said Dr Morris, sounding as if he might really start getting offended if Goldblatt went around repeating slurs like that.
‘What about your wife?’
‘No.’
‘Your kids?’
‘What are you talking about, Malcolm?’
‘All right, all right. So you’re not a literal believer. I believe you, literally. So tell me, what are the Three Wise Men there for?’
Dr Morris frowned.
He obviously needed a push in the right direction. ‘If we assume,’ said Goldblatt, ‘that they were never there historically, why are they there in legend?’
‘Wait a minute!’ said Dr Morris. ‘You’re saying they weren’t really there?’
‘Where?’
‘In the stable.’
‘You think there was a stable?’
Dr Morris stared. ‘You’re saying there wasn’t a stable?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know. Maybe there was a stable. Maybe there wasn’t. Children must have been born in stables occasionally. What I’m saying is, let’s say it isn’t all absolutely historical. The Three Wise Men part, for instance. Forget the stable, let’s just look at that bit. Say it isn’t historical. Say it’s an embellishment. Say – odd as this might sound – that there weren’t actually three kings who just happened to be wandering around the Judaean desert one December night – which, by the way, can get bloody cold in the middle of winter – looking for somewhere to offload their gifts. In which case, why would someone put them there? Why would they add them to the story?’
Dr Morris thought. He stared into the strings of his racket, as if the answer might be threaded subtly into the strands like the numbers worked into an Ishihara colour blindness chart.
‘Well, they’re there to... worship Jesus,’ he said at last, looking up at Goldblatt.
‘Right,’ said Goldblatt. ‘But why does Jesus need to be worshipped by Three Wise Men?’
Dr Morris hesitated for a long time, trying to guess what Goldblatt was thinking. ‘Jesus doesn’t need to be worshipped, does he?’ he ventured.
‘Very good,’ said Goldblatt, who was genuinely pleased with the rapid progress Dr Morris was making. ‘Jesus doesn’t need to be worshipped. He’s Jesus. If he’s divine, he’ll be divine whether there are three kings or three beggars or nobody at all to worship him.’
Dr Morris nodded.
‘But...’
‘But we need to see him being worshipped!’ exclaimed Dr Morris excitedly. A smile came over his face, and he shook his head in amazement.
Goldblatt watched him. It would never have occurred to Goldblatt that Dr Morris would get such a kick out of biblical exegesis.
‘Why do you say you’re one of the Three Wise Men?’ asked Dr Morris.
‘Why am I one of the Three Wise Men?’ Goldblatt sighed. It was a long story.
‘Why? I still don’t get it.’
Goldblatt sighed again. Dr Morris was an intelligent man, but today he really needed everything spelled out for him. Maybe it was brain hypoxia. Lack of oxygen during the squash game had probably cost him a few choice neurons.
‘All right,’ said Goldblatt. ‘Think of an interview. How many candidates do you have?’
Dr Morris shrugged. ‘Three or four. Five, six. It depends.’
‘Optimally, how many would you have?’
‘Four,’ replied Dr Morris.
‘Exactly,’ said Goldblatt. ‘Why?’
‘It gives you enough good candidates. If you interview more than four you’re probably including people who aren’t really up to the job anyway. You’re just wasting your time.’
‘And if you’ve already decided who’s going to get the job?’
‘Four makes it look all right. It makes it look as if you really tried to find the best—’ Dr Morris stopped, eyes startled at what he had just heard himself say.
Goldblatt nodded. It was sad, he thought, that it had come out so easily. But Dr Morris wasn’t to blame. There was never any point in shooting the messenger. It came out so easily because it was true.
‘You need Three Wise Men in the background so the fourth can be seen to be the chosen one,’ said Goldblatt.
‘No, Malcolm.’
Goldblatt shrugged. ‘You said it yourself. Look, I’m a very good Wise Man, Dr Morris. I’ve had lots of experience.’
Dr Morris shook his head. ‘No. I’m sure you’ll get the job at the Nailwright.’
‘No. Wise Man. I can feel it. Wise Man again.’
Dr Morris gazed at him. He wouldn’t know what it was like, thought Goldblatt. He would never in his whole life have been a Wise Man. He would always have been the chosen one, the one to be exalted.
‘Have another look at my CV,’ said Goldblatt.
‘I’ll talk to Mike Coalport,’ said Dr Morris.
‘That would be kind,’ said Goldblatt tonelessly.
It was no idle boast. Goldblatt was a very good Wise Man. And he did have lots of experience. He had hovered in the background as a Wise Man at interviews at which some very fine physicians had got jobs. Some of those physicians had been so fine that it was almost an honour to have been selected to hover at their interviews. He had also hovered at interviews at which some not so fine physicians had got jobs. That was less of an honour. A less sophisticated mind might have perceived it as an injustice. But not Goldblatt. He was wise enough to realize that this was simply one of the things that happened to Wise Men. It wasn’t all brandy and cigars. You were there to do a job, just like a bodyguard or publicist. Made no difference if you didn’t like the star. You still had to do it. No point getting angry about it, and even less sense in trying to change it. It was an inherent drawback of the Wisdom profession, and as a Wise Man you simply had to come to terms with it.
But there was one thing that really did confuse him. How had he become a Wise Man in the first place?
That was something he definitely wanted to know, and he would have offered a substantial sum to anyone who could have given him a convincing account of the process. He couldn’t remember having chosen to do it. Excluding the possibility that he had been drugged, kidnapped, driven to a deserted country house, and forced to volunteer for the job by cowled men under the flicker of tallow candles – which he was then unable to remember on awakening the following morning and finding himself back in his flat – there was only one possible explanation. Someone must have decided for him. But who?
Was it one person or was it many? Was there some body of Eminent Physicians who met secretly to nominate Wise Men? Was this body split into councils for the different specialities, like the Royal College of Physicians? Did they wear velvet robes and plumed berets when they deliberated? Goldblatt would have liked to meet these people. These were only some of the questions he would have asked them, and he would certainly have listened to the answers with attentiveness and tact, willingly signing any secrecy clause they put in front of him.
He wasn’t the only Wise Man, that was one thing of which he was sure. He had seen others, hovering along with him in the background, but he had never spoken to them of their Wisdom. Maybe some of them weren’t yet aware that they were Wise Men. Goldblatt himself had only become aware of it recently, but in retrospect he realized that he had been hovering in the background for over two years. He had become a Wise Man long before he understood that the transformation had taken place. Now that he understood this, statements and events that might once have seemed perfectly innocent took on a whole new meaning. The Wise Men and the Eminent Physicians were the two halves of an enormous, silent, and at least partially self-oblivious network that concatenated like the branching fibres of an unsuspected nervous system deep into every tissue and fibre of the body medical, determining the contraction of every one of its sinews and the movements of each of its joints, while the consciousness of the body itself, even as it moved in the direction secretly chosen for it, remained entirely ignorant of its operations. And he, Malcolm Goldblatt, at some undefined point in the past, had been inducted into it.
But if he had to be part of it, why did he have to be a Wise Man? Why couldn’t they have waited a few years and inducted him as an Eminent Physician instead?
Recently, an even more horrible question had taken root in Goldblatt’s mind. What would happen when his usefulness as a Wise Man was at an end? You could probably be an Eminent Physician until the day you died, but you couldn’t remain a Wise Man for ever. You couldn’t turn up at fifty and still be a convincing Wise Man while some lucky thirty-year-old got the job you had applied for. It just wouldn’t look right. How did you get out of it? Assuming, unlikely as it might seem, that you wanted to resign your commission, to whom did you return it?
Obviously, he didn’t mention any of this to Dr Morris when they were sitting on the squash court. Unless you had thought about it carefully and had weighed the overwhelming evidence, it would sound like a conspiracy theory, and Goldblatt, for one, detested conspiracy theories and found them entirely unconvincing. Besides, how did he know that Dr Morris wasn’t part of the plot?
The manner and haste with which Dr Morris denied understanding what Goldblatt meant when he said he was a Wise Man was very suspicious. But even if he refused to acknowledge Goldblatt’s role as a Wise Man, Dr Morris wouldn’t be able to deny that Goldblatt had a problem. Fundamentally, it was a problem of imbalance, and one look at his CV was sufficient to reveal it. Goldblatt lacked some things that he needed, and he possessed other things that he ought not to have had at all.
Lesley laughed about it. Sometimes she cried about it.
‘Only in medicine,’ Lesley would say, with a depth of bitterness in her voice that Goldblatt found very moving. ‘Only in medicine could they prefer those snotnoses to you.’
Goldblatt would have agreed, except it went against professional etiquette to refer to your colleagues as snotnoses, even if they had just beaten you at an interview, and it was a cardinal law of the profession that you never broke ranks in front of an outsider, even if you were having intercourse with her at the time.
‘I can’t believe they preferred that snotnose to you,’ she would say after the latest Wise Man episode, ‘just because he has a research degree.’
This was the thing that was most lacking in Goldblatt’s CV. He had the right academic achievements, the right hospitals, the right experience. But he didn’t have a research degree.
A research degree, either an MD or PhD, required you to interrupt your clinical training for two or three years, and people usually did it after they had passed their second part exam and done a year or two as a registrar and had acquired a patron who would help them get a place in a laboratory and then an SR job afterwards. It made perfect sense if you were one of the tiny minority who planned to combine a research career with clinical work, but for everyone else who had no intention of doing that, no one pretended that it made any difference to their ability to treat patients or to manage and develop junior staff, which were the two roles they would actually have to perform. Nonetheless, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you had to have a research degree if you were going to get a job as a hospital consultant.
Goldblatt understood the situation. So it might have been supposed that he would have bowed to the inevitable, spent his two years in the lab, done his MD, and got it over with, like everybody else.
Malcolm Goldblatt? Bow to the inevitable? Like everybody else?
Nothing appealed to him less than the thought of incarcerating himself in a lab and burrowing blindly around some remote outpost of science to get results that might or might not make a difference to a tiny minority of the population in about thirty years’ time. It wasn’t what he had signed up for. He simply wasn’t cut out for it.
But that was only half of Goldblatt’s problem. It wasn’t just what was missing that unbalanced his CV, it was what was there in its place.
‘I can’t believe they preferred that snotnose to you!’ Lesley would say after the latest Wise Man episode. ‘Don’t they give a toss about everything else you’ve done?’
No, they didn’t give a toss. In fact, it worked the other way around. The other things he had done were a stain on his character. And the biggest stain of all was the fact that he had left medicine to do a law degree.
This was one thing Lesley could never understand. Goldblatt didn’t understand it either, but he had given up trying. It was just a fact. The profession regarded him with suspicion. He had been outside the fold. It was as if he had lapsed in some way, and even though he had returned, he couldn’t be entirely trusted. Who knew what things he had seen when he had been on the outside? Who knew what contamination he had brought back with him? Who knew when he would lapse again?
He did the law degree after his second year as an SHO. He had just passed the second part exam and was poised, like his peers, to get a registrar job and go on with his specialist training. But unlike his peers, and against the strident advice of a number of consultants who warned him of the risks he ran if he ever tried to come back to medicine, he went off to do a law degree. Why? He had told himself many things at the time. He had told himself that he wanted a profession that would enable him to act more independently, a profession that would give him a greater intellectual challenge. He had told himself that he wanted to earn vast and unimaginable riches representing clients of dubious morals and unfathomable finances. He had told himself that his razor-sharp mind, his instinctive understanding of the human psyche, his victory in the school debating competition in the sixth form, and his collection of crime fiction all pointed clearly in one direction.
Which of these things were true, which delusion? Even now, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was just restless. Maybe it was just one of those phases in life.
He enjoyed doing it. He finished the degree and arranged a pupillage. Then he inexplicably deferred his pupillage and went to work on a six-month contract for Free from Bondage, a non-governmental organization that campaigned against child slavery. Not that he necessarily believed that he had a self-destructive streak in his character, but if, for sake of argument, you wanted to build the case that he did have one – as Lesley had on occasion – this was as prime a piece of evidence as you could ask for. Free from Bondage, and its temporary, scantily funded job, took him about as far as you could get from the vast and unimaginable riches that supposedly were the reason he had done law in the first place. It was a tiny, newly established shoestring organization, and he was the legal department. He prepared their first ever submission to the UN Subcommittee on Slavery, and represented them at a conference in Manila. And then the six months were up and the grant that had funded him ran out. He would have stayed longer, but he couldn’t. So he left. But something had happened inside his head. Maybe he doubted both the lies and the truths that he had told himself when he had started his legal odyssey. Or maybe he had just got over that phase in his life, if that’s what it had been. Either way, he didn’t take up his pupillage.
Lesley warned him. They had been together for only a year at that stage, but that didn’t stop her. Not in so many words, but she warned him.
‘Of course, if that’s what you want, Malcolm,’ she said, looking deep into his eyes. And then she shook her head.
It was the shake of her head that said it, more than any of the words she uttered. ‘Don’t do it, Malcolm,’ said the shaking of her head. ‘Don’t do it to yourself.’
But Malcolm did it. He found himself a registrar job in a district hospital on the outskirts of London, which was mediocre enough to want him after he had been three years outside the fold – which gives some idea of how mediocre it must have been – and went back to medicine.
Over the next three years he worked himself back into the golden circle of London teaching hospitals, one reg job after another. But when he reached the point of progressing to SR, the jobs just slipped through his hands. He had been to a whole chain of interviews but was a Wise Man every time. One interview after the next. Always shortlisted, never appointed. The imbalance on his CV was killing him.
It made Lesley mad with frustration as she saw him become a Wise Man while the jobs went to snotnoses who had dutifully done their undergraduate training and their hospital jobs and their MDs and had never so much as taken a look at the world outside a hospital since they had arrived at medical school. Goldblatt was starting to feel guilty that he had ever dragged her into this horrible, impossible world of his. Perhaps she would have been happier if he had never asked her out for that first fateful drink. She was successful, she was sought after. As far as he could tell, her world was a cloud floating high above the realities of life, where the days – and many of the nights – passed in the prosecution of complex commercial cases involving the vast and unimaginable riches of which he had dreamed. Why did Lesley want to keep mixing herself up in the messy world of an unwanted hospital registrar?
‘They’re like Stalin,’ she said.
‘That may be taking it a bit far,’ cautioned Goldblatt.
‘It isn’t. They’re like Stalin. Once you’ve seen the outside world you can’t be trusted.’
‘Do you think they’ll shoot me?’ asked Goldblatt, who had read Darkness at Noon.
‘Don’t joke about this,’ said Lesley. ‘Joke about anything else, but not this.’
Goldblatt didn’t see why he shouldn’t. This was his joke. More than that, he was the joke. He couldn’t see how you could reasonably be prevented from joking about it when, in fact, you were it.
‘That bastard Oakley!’ she said. ‘He was the one. He killed you, Malcolm.’
Goldblatt didn’t reply. Oakley hadn’t necessarily been a bastard. Just weak, indecisive, cowardly, vengeful... all right, a bastard.
‘And Rothman! He wasn’t any better.’
Not much. But he told better jokes.
‘How can you keep getting knocked back for these snotnoses?’ she demanded in anguish. ‘How can everything else you’ve done get constantly disregarded?’
‘It’s not having an MD,’ he would say, almost feeling as if he was defending them.
‘What about all the other experience you have?’
‘True. That’s another problem.’
‘No!’ she would cry. ‘Only in medicine. Only in medicine would that be a problem! Anywhere else they’d value your experience. They’d say you’re well rounded.’
‘They say I’m not committed.’
‘You came back. What more do they want? Do they want you to spill your guts?’
Possibly, thought Goldblatt.
‘God damn them!’ she’d say, and she’d mean it.
God damn them, Goldblatt thought. And he’d mean it as well. God damn them. God damn them to hell.
‘Malcolm, how long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?’
When she got to that point, Goldblatt would shake his head helplessly. He didn’t have a reply. He hardly knew why he had left medicine in the first place, all those years before, much less why he had come back to it.
He didn’t know. He really didn’t. Perhaps he had known once. He must have. He tried to remember the reasons. And that’s when the old Jewish lady, who had come to him as a patient in one of his clinics, would spring to mind.