2

‘Morning, Solly,’ said Sir Lancelot, passing the St Swithin’s skin specialist in the doorway of the dining-room. ‘I hope you’re encountering no sales resistance among our customers.’

‘Some of my best patients are Arabs,’ Dr Cohen told him.

The medical staff dining-room in the Bertram Bunn Wing was a small, bright apartment on the first floor, overlooking the garden. It was decorated with an allegorical mural depicting Charles Hill of the British Medical Association and Nye Bevan inaugurating the National Health Service in 1948. Both were depicted as Florence Nightingales passing soothingly with their lamps along rows of agonized, frenzied casualties, and nobody could decide if these represented the suffering public or the medical profession. Sir Lancelot always ate with his back to it.

‘Hello, Lancelot, what have you been up to?’ asked Sir Lionel Lychfield, the Dean of St Swithin’s Medical School, looking up from The Times as the surgeon sat next to him at one of the square tables.

‘The Sheikh of Shatt al Shufti’s bilateral inguinal hernia. I did his hydroceles for an encore. I was going to leave them as shock absorbers for riding his camel, but of course the fellow hasn’t had a rougher ride than a Rolls-Royce for years. I hope he won’t be cross. At home, he punishes thieves by lopping off their hands. And I suppose other offenders by the removal of similarly appropriate parts. I distinctly didn’t like the look of his two bodyguards lurking outside the operating theatre.’

Sir Lancelot opened the glossy-covered menu. The Bertram Bunn Wing enjoyed the reputation among medical consultants as the best place to eat in London. The food came from the same kitchens as the St Swithin’s National Health patients’, but its own chef toothsomely overcame the challenge of all possible physical states, religious obligations and national or personal tastes. He provided a dozen attractive diets – low calorie, low sodium, high protein, low cholesterol, diabetic, duodenal, vegetarian, kosher, Mohammedan, Cantonese, Pekinese and Indian, as well as his normal cordon bleu. This nourishment being heavily subsidized, the dean ate there whenever he could in preference to the St Swithin’s consultants’ mess. He was famous in the hospital for a purse as tight as an oyster with lockjaw.

Sir Lancelot asked the young waitress in a green ward orderly’s smock for some cheese sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. The dean ordered entrecôte garni with extra vegetables. ‘The matron’s gone neurotic again, by the way,’ Sir Lancelot told him.

‘I do wish she were a more stable sort of female,’ the dean said testily. He was short and skinny, with a pointed bald head and large round glasses beneath straight, bristly black eyebrows. These became agitated in his frequent storms of exasperation, when they always suggested to Sir Lancelot a pair of hairy caterpillars performing a love-dance. ‘But of course, she is highly decorative, as matrons go,’ the dean conceded. ‘And if you’re paying an absolute fortune for your penthouse, you don’t want to be ushered into it by someone with the appearance and attitude of a seaside landlady during a wet August.’

‘She’s threatening to go again. But she won’t. She had exactly the same tantrums last January. You may remember, that was when a newly admitted patient, understandably unfamiliar with such complexities of civilization as air-conditioning controls, lit a fire in the middle of his room by chopping up the furniture. She’s also been on about her nephew, Chipps. I suppose if I have to fail him in surgery again tomorrow, he’s for the boot?’

‘Most definitely. Can’t encourage idleness in the medical school. It doesn’t matter whose nephews they are, even the Minister of Social Services.’

Sir Lionel Lychfield was one of St Swithin’s dozen or so consultant general physicians. But as dean of the medical school, he exercised the power and high-minded severity over its students of Dr Arnold at Rugby. ‘That’s the trouble with the younger generation,’ he went on. ‘Laziness, lack of application, no sense of purpose, complete indifference to their elders, and in fact to all authority whatever. Not all of them, naturally,’ he corrected himself briskly. ‘Some of our young are absolutely first-class. They restore your faith in the coming generation and humanity in general. My youngest daughter Faith, for example –’

‘You told me about your youngest daughter Faith at lunch last week,’ Sir Lancelot interrupted.

‘Young Faith! Barely eighteen years old. Already with the serious intent and the sense of vocation of a budding Florence Nightingale.’ The dean nodded proudly towards the mural. ‘Faith neither smokes nor drinks nor wears jeans, and devotes her life to helping the underprivileged –’

‘So you were saying last week –’

‘Do you know what she’s been doing all this month? Living in this austere hostel under barracklike discipline down in Fulham. On a pittance – I must say, these voluntary service organizations do quite blatantly exploit the good nature of girls like Faith. She gives the full benefit of her sweet and altruistic character to the down-and-outs they collect off the Embankment and similar places. Though I suspect most of them are simply too lazy to do a decent day’s work, and if I had my way would be given a pick and sent down the coalmines.’

Noticing that Sir Lancelot was staring dreamily out of the window, the dean turned back to his newspaper, giving it an irritated shake. ‘God knows what the country’s coming to,’ he muttered. ‘Everyone today seems to think he’s entitled to a job for life, doing exactly the same work for steadily rising pay, even if nobody wants in the slightest what he happens to be making. Otherwise, everyone simply comes out on strike, and lives on the benefits the rest of us have to provide under this ghastly “pipsqueak” taxation. It’s a wonder there aren’t still factories making horseshoes and carriage-springs –’

He broke off with a noise like a rusty gate in a gale.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Sir Lancelot, looking alarmed.

‘They’ve caged our fox.’ Sir Lancelot seemed puzzled. ‘The St Swithin’s shop steward. Or our “SS man”, as I preferred to describe him,’ the dean added grimly. ‘That little twit who represented all the trade unionists at St Swithin’s, ever since they merged into the Amalgamated Confederation of Hospital Employees, ACHE. Read that.’

He indicated the In brief column.

 

MALE NURSE JAILED

Arthur Pince (22), male nurse, was imprisoned for three years at the Old Bailey for indecent exposure and shoplifting. Mr Pince asked for a record number of 82 other charges to be taken into consideration.

 

‘They said he was the most bent shop steward in Britain,’ exclaimed the dean in anguish. ‘You could have used his vertebral column for a corkscrew.’

‘I know nothing about this man’s activities. All politics bore me, and hospital ones to distraction. From his utterances, I always thought him a seagreen incorruptible Robespierre.’

‘Muddy and loaded with valuable flotsam and jetsam, more likely,’ said the dean with a bitter laugh. ‘These revolutionaries are all the same. Morality and misery for the masses, sybaritism for themselves. Pince was as susceptible to flattery as an infant to chicken-pox. He took bribes – or rather presents in the interests of good employer-staff relationships – with the ease and frequency of bookmakers taking bets on Derby Day. I believe he was also susceptible in the right mood to blackmail.’

‘I play golf with the President of ACHE,’ reflected Sir Lancelot, but the dean was too distracted to hear.

‘I wish the stupid twerp had mentioned his little legal difficulties. I’ve several good friends among the judges. And what’s a touch of indecency, when one can’t walk more than half a mile about London at night without getting one’s face smashed in?’

Sir Lancelot looked puzzled. ‘But if I never had any dealings with this Pince person, I don’t see why any other members of the medical staff should.’

‘You nevertheless enjoyed the benefit. If we hadn’t kept him sweet, he’d have started interfering with the hospital’s private beds.’ The dean embraced his surroundings with a quick glance. ‘That doesn’t seem to worry you?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘But surely you must be in favour of private practice?’ the dean asked impatiently.

Sir Lancelot sat back to meditate on this question. ‘In principle, yes. I think people should be allowed to pay, to avoid dying among people they would not usually be seen dead with. Also to perform their bodily functions in solitude and switch off the television when they feel like it. And doubtless we must condone the snobbery of the Shires, by keeping their daughters from aborting in public beds. It also occurs to me that private beds could richly subsidize the free ones. But raising the standards of the lowest towards the highest, instead of vice versa, would go against the cherished principles of the British people.’

Ignoring the lecture, the dean stared resentfully at the news item. ‘We shan’t have the luck to be landed again in the power of an immature youth who combines sex and kleptomania. Those union bosses knew perfectly well that something fishy was going on at St Swithin’s. They’ll see our members of ACHE elect a really tough egg as the new SS man.’

‘I deplore hospitals becoming a circus for trade union power politics, like every other institution in the country,’ observed Sir Lancelot loftily, as his lunch arrived. ‘But that is a trivial activity, compared with getting the patients on their feet. How unappreciated are the minor miracles of modern science,’ he remarked, holding up his glass. ‘This fresh orange juice is transported in little drums in a state of unrelenting iciness from the steamy groves of Florida, Dipping through the Tropics by the palmgreen shores, as Masefield put it, just to satisfy my passing whim in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. Wonderful. Sir Bertram Bunn himself could never have foreseen it.’

The dean shot him a narrow glance. Everyone at St Swithin’s was saying how Sir Lancelot had mellowed since his wife died. He wondered if it was really softening of the brain.