4

Shortly after eight o’clock the following morning, at the workaday end of Chelsea’s King’s Road, where the boutiques and bistros give way to the football ground and the gasworks, a first-floor window shot up and a pale, good-looking, wild-haired young man in a frilled shirt and velvet dinner-jacket stuck his head through the curtains and remarked, ‘My God, it’s daylight.’

He ducked back into the small room, staring at his wristwatch. He shook it and tapped it. A long struggle to keep up with swift-footed time seemed finally to have killed it. The softly-ticking bedside clock caught his attention. ‘My God,’ he said again. ‘And it’s Tuesday.’

He stared round, wondering where his trousers were. The floor was plastic tiled, bare except for a bra, black tights, a crumpled dress. The bed was plain and narrow, jammed into the walls like a ship’s bunk. Half-covered by a sheet, long fair hair delicately curtaining her naked shoulders, both hands tucked under one glowing cheek, Faith Lychfield lay peacefully asleep.

The young man gingerly touched her nose with the tips of his fingers. She remained exactly as she was, but her eyes opened instantly, as if by some reflex.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Remember me?’ he asked politely.

‘Of course. Wasn’t it a super party?’

‘It was great, terrific. And I thought it was going to be deadly boring. I mean, the Annual Ball of the Destitute Reclamation Society doesn’t sound extra swinging, does it? I only went along because somebody gave me a ticket. I thought it would at least take my mind off my work.’

‘It’s all a frightful charity swindle, really. I can’t see how the destitutes get much, once they’ve paid for all the champers.’

‘But of course, I never wildly imagined I’d ever meet anyone so tremendously exciting and so vibrant as you there,’ he told her in a sober tone, sitting demurely on the edge of the bunk in his shirt-tails.

‘You are sweet,’ she said, still in the same position.

‘I must have dropped off to sleep,’ he suggested lamely.

‘It was awfully late when we climbed in through that window. Almost dawn. It’s a wonder we weren’t arrested. Policemen seem to be so suspicious these days.’

‘But how do I get out? This is a woman’s hostel, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t worry. The old ducks in charge are tremendously free and easy. They have to be, or they wouldn’t get any voluntary helpers. Of course, my parents think it’s a cross between Holloway and a nunnery. Daddy has rather old-fashioned ideas.’

‘Daddy,’ he murmured, scratching his bristly chin. ‘It could be just a little awkward, you know.’

‘But, lovey! Daddy never need know you’d been here. Or that you’d ever met me. He keeps me away from the students as though they were lepers with bells.’

‘Yes, but I ought to be seeing daddy in –’ He shook his watch, put it to his ear, then remembered the bedside clock. ‘Thirty-eight minutes. I’m taking my surgery clinical in St Swithin’s at nine.’

Faith sat bolt upright, hand to mouth. ‘Oh, Pip! You should have told me. I’d have set the alarm.’

‘The thought did pass through my mind. But I felt it would sound a rather prosaic suggestion in the circumstances.’

‘You’ll have to rush like the wind,’ she urged. ‘Daddy can be absolutely tigerish with people who don’t keep appointments.’

‘Yes, I’ll get a move on,’ he decided gravely. ‘But where are my trousers?’

‘Oh, dear, dear…’ Faith gazed round her cubicle, lit by a bar of sunlight evading the drawn curtains. ‘Did you take them off in here?’

‘It might have been outside,’ he admitted. ‘I remember we were in rather a hurry.’

‘Here they are!’ She tugged a crumpled pair of dark trousers from the bottom of her bed.

‘Thank you.’ He started putting them on. ‘I don’t honestly think it’s worth looking for my bow tie.’

‘But you are at least going to try taking the exam, surely?’ she asked with concern.

‘I shall have to.’ He gave a slight shrug. ‘Otherwise daddy will throw me out.’

‘Oh, no! You should have told me, Pip. I never imagined that you lived a life so desperate. I would have packed you back to your landlady for a cup of Ovaltine and a good night’s sleep,’ she told him firmly.

‘I would allow myself to be thrown out of far better places than St Swithin’s for last night,’ he assured her solemnly.

She put her head on one side. ‘What’s your other name?’

‘Chipps.’

‘I don’t know anything about you. Except that I remember daddy mentioning your name now and then at home. It always seemed to make him rather excited.’

‘My own father’s a GP in the West Country. He was a student at St Swithin’s with yours. My mother writes poetry, which is published in the local paper. My auntie is matron of the Bertie Bunn Wing.’

‘Who’s trying to make Sir Lancelot Spratt,’ Faith said brightly. ‘Everybody knows.’

Pip winced. ‘Sir Lancelot Spratt. I shall be looking him in the face –’ He took another glance at the clock. ‘In thirty-six minutes.’

‘You will have to shift a bit,’ she remarked, still sitting in bed.

‘I’ll get there. Don’t worry. Even if I have to steal a car. I really mustn’t fail this time. I think it would give my poor father a coronary. It’s my third try at the surgery, you see. And dad’s dreadfully keen that I should follow him as another doctor from St Swithin’s. May I see you again tonight?’

‘Of course.’ She pouted her lips for him to kiss briefly.

‘We have so many ideas in common.’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes shone into his. ‘The freedom of the individual –’

‘No police,’ he agreed with a nod. ‘No bosses. No landlords. No exams. No elite.’

‘Squatters’ rights –’

‘Housing on demand. Plus essential foodstuffs, transport, holidays and abortion.’

‘No cruel sports. Flog all huntsmen.’

‘Abolish the Army and the Navy. Also Ascot Week.’

They looked at each other, almost breathless with their reforming zeal.

‘See you at six?’ he asked.

‘That pub opposite Chelsea Town Hall.’

‘Lovely. Where’s my shoes?’

‘In the bookcase.’

He slipped them on. ‘I think that’s everything.’

‘Good luck for your clinical.’

‘It’ll be all right. I’m sure it will. I’ve never been so inspired before an examination in my life.’

Faith blew him a kiss and he nudged through the door. Then she yawned, put her head on the pillow and shut her eyes. She had the day off, and saw no reason for such adventures to mar a morning’s lie-in. She had an intensely practical outlook, like her father.

Unfortunately for his chosen career, Pip did not enjoy Faith’s talent for self-organization. This had rendered his admittance to the St Swithin’s Medical School a mystery, which deepened in the eyes of its consultants with every year that he somehow managed to remain in it. They started ascribing it to some unspeakable secret of the dean’s, remembered by Pip’s father from their student days together. The dean was even growing to wish that this was true.

Pip stood on the kerb in the King’s Road, blinking painfully in the strong sunlight. He dissected his problem in an unusually deliberative way. Bus or Tube would never get him across London in time. His next decision was to lie groaning in the roadway until someone summoned an ambulance. But he reflected that would whisk him only into the casualty department of a more convenient hospital, where he knew from experience he would have trouble extracting himself for several hours. A police car might prove unco-operative. He would have to hail a taxi, normally a gesture of unthinkable extravagance for a medical student on his own. As he climbed inside, he remembered that he had no money.

Shortly before five to nine, a pair of young men in white coats were anxiously pacing the wide, marble-walled, notice-bespangled entrance hall of St Swithin’s Hospital. The concourse was as usual crowded with people waiting, visiting or lost, either sitting, standing or being propelled horizontally, the mass cleaved by briskly trotting nurses, ambling brown-coated porters, and doctors of all ages and degrees of importance but all with the look of being required vitally elsewhere.

‘He isn’t in the canteen having a quick coffee?’ asked Tony Havens. Sir Lancelot Spratt’s house-surgeon was burly, dark-haired, clean shaven and wearing at that moment an unaccustomed frown of intense concern.

‘He’s not having anything. I’ve even been through the loos.’ His companion was Hugo Raffles, fair, slim and pink-cheeked, one of the junior anaesthetists resident in the hospital.

‘I’ve phoned his digs. The landlady says he hasn’t been in all night. Stroppy she was, too. Got him eggs and bacon for a specially fortifying breakfast. He hasn’t kipped down across in the residents’ quarters, I suppose?’

‘I’ve looked there, too. In and under every bed. We’d have surely heard by now if he’d decided to doss in the nurses’ home.’

‘I suppose he hasn’t taken an overdose of barbiturate, to avoid facing the examiners?’

‘That’s most unlikely. He can never even remember what the normal dose is.’

‘I’m fed up with nursing this case of chronic infantilism. Remember how we just got him here last time? When he thought the examination was the following day.’

‘Which he explained to Sir Lancelot –’

‘Who congratulated him on anticipating to learn the entire subject of surgery overnight. You should never give Sir Lancelot half a chance for a nasty crack. It’s fatal.’

‘Remember when he failed his anatomy?’ Hugo reminisced.

‘After being shown a pelvis, and asked to identify Alcock’s canal –’

‘And pointing to the vagina.’

‘There he is!’ Tony exclaimed.

Pip came hurrying through the front door, open frilly shirt flapping.

‘What a bit of luck, running into you,’ he remarked. ‘Lend me a few quid.’

‘If that’s your only worry –’ Tony began crossly.

‘I’ve got a taxi waiting to be paid outside. I spent all I’d got on tombola tickets.’

‘Compulsive gambler, eh?’ murmured Hugo.

‘Do you realize, you git, that you have precisely six minutes before appearing for your surgery clinical?’

‘I rather thought the time was getting on. My watch has been somewhat disrhythmic recently. But there’s no need to panic. I made it in the end, didn’t I?’ he ended smugly.

‘But you can’t walk into an exam looking like that,’ Tony told him sharply.

Pip stared down at his dishevelled clothes. ‘I suppose I can’t. But you can lend me your white coat.’

‘You also need a tie.’

‘And a shave,’ said Hugo. ‘You know how dangerous it is, giving Sir Lancelot half a chance of referring to Sweeney Todd.’

Pip rubbed his chin again. ‘Perhaps I do. Well, I know I can rely on friends like you to sort me out.’

‘Come on, let’s at least get near the field of battle,’ Tony exhorted, grabbing Pip by the sleeve of his velvet jacket.

The examination was being held in Virtue Ward, Sir Lancelot Spratt’s men’s surgical on the tenth floor. Surgery itself had been transformed since the heyday of Sir Frederick Treves and Sir Bertram Bunn. The surgery finals had hardly changed at all. Cases from the wards and from out-patients, whose diseases did not proclaim themselves too subtly, were invited to pit their ills against the wits of the students. The patients’ fee was small, but many volunteered readily to return to the hospital for the chance of so painlessly helping to advance surgical science. Besides, the uninhibited discussion of each other’s ailments during the breaks for tea and biscuits had the flattering effect of membership to an exclusive club.

The three took the lift to the tenth floor. Hugo remembered a large cupboard outside the ward, used as a store for patients’ clothes and belongings. They dodged inside. Tony and Hugo had two minutes to prepare Pip, physically and mentally.

‘Remember, Sir Lancelot has mellowed recently. Everyone says so. There’s no need to be scared of him any more.’ Tony Havens was hastily knotting round the neck of Pip’s frilly shirt a pink and silver St Swithin’s Cricket Club tie, with a motif of crossed bats and scalpels. ‘He won’t eat you.’

‘Not in one bite anyway,’ said Hugo Raffles, busy on Pip’s chin with an electric razor.

‘Yes, but do you know any of the patients?’ Pip asked impatiently.

‘Only two. Sir Lancelot’s been switching them around this time. He knows there’re too many of the old chronics who come up for exam after exam, which we all get wise to. Look out for the patient with a large lump on the back of his neck. It’s a lipoma.’

‘A simple lipoma should be easy enough to diagnose.’ Pip nodded with gratification.

‘Watch it. Don’t forget to whip back the bedclothes. He’s got no legs,’ Tony informed him.

‘I hope this shave is quite comfortable?’ inquired Hugo. ‘The razor’s a bit ropey. It’s the one they use for the ward preops.’

‘Miss the absence of legs,’ Tony continued severely, ‘and Sir Lancelot’s got you spit-roasted for not obeying the basic rule of examining the whole patient. There’s one old boy you must particularly look out for. I heard he was there from last week’s candidates. He’s one of Sir Lancelot’s old patients, a gloomy-looking skinny fellow with smooth grey hair and a camel-coloured dressing-gown. He’s generally reading the Daily Mirror. You’d think there was nothing wrong with him, except for slight varicose veins in the left leg, which don’t require treatment –’

‘He’s one of those trick examination cases?’ Pip interrupted brightly. ‘With nothing whatever the matter, but the students make up the most fantastic diagnoses –’

‘Not on your life. He’s got a glass eye. Miss it and you’re sunk.’

‘Sir Lancelot has a spectacular way of failing students with that one,’ Hugo added, shaving Pip’s upper lip. He takes a pencil and simply taps the glass eye smartly with the butt of it.’

‘Grey-haired old boy? Camel-coloured dressing-gown? Daily Mirror? I’ll remember that one.’

‘The rest will be the usual surgical slag of bumps and bones,’ Tony told him. ‘I haven’t been able to lay hands on any more dead certs, though I heard the rumour of a Chinaman with jaundice just to fox everybody.’

‘I’m quite sure I can pass by my own unaided efforts,’ Pip declared proudly. ‘I feel superbly confident this morning.’

‘Where did you get to all last night, anyway?’ Hugo asked.

‘I was at a home for destitutes.’

‘Is there any room? Your breath reeks of stale booze.’

‘It’s champagne,’ Pip told Hugo, sounding offended.

‘I’d still advise you to answer all the questions out of the side of your mouth.’

The ting of a bell came from outside.

‘You look good enough to kiss,’ added Hugo admiringly, switching off the razor.

Pip slipped Mike’s white coat over his velvet jacket. To their calls of ‘Good luck!’ he shot through the swing doors of the ward. Standing immediately inside was Sir Lancelot.

‘Cold?’ the surgeon greeted him.

‘No, sir. If I’m shivering, it must be from fright.’

‘Then turn down the collar of your white coat. Good God, boy,’ he exclaimed, as Pip obliged. ‘I thought that sort of shirt went out with Beau Brummell.’

‘It has come back, sir.’

‘This is an examination, not a dress show, I suppose,’ Sir Lancelot admitted wearily. ‘I have become so resigned to the sartorial vagaries of our students, I should not be unduly disturbed if they appeared for their finals in an ermine jock-strap and a straw hat. Of either sex.’

Pip’s confidence rose. His two friends had been right. Sir Lancelot was mellowing. Pip had been studying energetically if disorganizedly the past six months. He felt that, barring some outrageous howler, he had a good chance of leaving the ward virtually a qualified doctor.

‘I didn’t know you played cricket?’ added Sir Lancelot with a frown.

‘I thought this tie went rather prettily with the shirt, sir.’

‘H’m. Well, you can open the bowling, Mr Chipps, by taking a look at that grey-haired gentleman just over there. The one in the camel-coloured dressing-gown who’s reading the Daily Mirror.’

What luck! thought Pip. He was already on the path to qualification. He decided to make the most of his foreknowledge. ‘I think I can make at least one diagnosis in that case from here, sir.’

‘Indeed?’ said Sir Lancelot with interest.

Nonchalantly strolling up to his patient, Pip took a skin-pencil from the top pocket of Tony’s white coat, and grasping the patient firmly by the top of the head thrust the end without a word firmly into his right eye.

‘Yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’ said the patient. ‘You bloody maniac! Do you want to blind me?’

‘Get out of the ward this instant, you juvenile Oedipus,’ roared Sir Lancelot.

‘Oh, bother,’ murmured Pip. ‘Wrong eye.’

‘My dear Alfred, I do apologize,’ continued Sir Lancelot hastily to the patient. ‘I’m afraid there’s always the risk of some student becoming completely unbalanced through the stress of the examination –’

‘Unbalanced?’ demanded the man in the camel dressing-gown, hopping about and clutching his eye. ‘He’s not unbalanced. He’s a sadist. He’d commit grievous bodily harm easier than kiss my –’

‘Ah, Sister, an ophthalmic dressing, quickly,’ Sir Lancelot ordered, as she hurried to investigate the disturbance. ‘Please let me see the injured organ,’ he added with pressing solicitude, peering into the man’s face. ‘No permanent damage, I hope, as far as I can tell.’

‘I really am most dreadfully sorry,’ apologized Pip.

‘Get out,’ repeated Sir Lancelot furiously.

‘Does that mean I’ve failed?’ he inquired.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ asked the dean, fussing into the ward wearing his white coat. ‘Is one of the patients having a fit?’

‘This menace to society came into the examination room and promptly started attacking people with a sharp instrument,’ Sir Lancelot explained.

The dean gave his thin smile. ‘Sounds like a typical surgeon.’

‘This is no time for joking,’ Sir Lancelot reminded him fiercely. ‘The fool might well have injured the patient’s one good eye for life. Worse still, he could have laid the hospital open to astronomical damages.’

This took the smile from the dean’s lips. ‘Exactly. It’s bad enough already, patients queueing up to sue us if they so much as get a splinter under their nail from the ward draughts’ board. We have to carry more insurance than a jumbo jet. Particularly as the judges are utterly reckless throwing about our money. They take a mischievous delight in getting the better of we doctors. Lose your sense of smell and you can go off on a world cruise, lose an arm and you can retire in comfort for life. We’re a source of huge and unexpected wealth for the British public, like the football pools – It’s you, Chipps. As I might have expected,’ he recalled.

‘The idiot luckily missed the cornea,’ said Sir Lancelot, peering again. ‘But it’ll have to be bandaged up for the best part of a fortnight, I’m afraid, leaving you completely in the dark, Dimchurch. It’s particularly unfortunate, as you so kindly volunteered your services out of admiration for our noble profession.’

‘It is a blessing for humanity as a whole,’ the dean comforted the patient. ‘I can assure you that this young man, purely as a medical student, was a greater danger to the public than a berserk abattoir attendant. Had he gone into the world as a qualified doctor, he would have made the Black Death look like a flu epidemic. You should join the roll of great medical martyrs –’

‘I don’t want to be a bleeding martyr. I was planning to play golf this evening.’

‘Do you want to see me in your office, sir?’ Pip asked the dean mildly.

‘No.’

‘You mean the…the incident is closed?’ Pip suggested hopefully.

‘Firmly closed. But not, I fancy, in the way you imply. I do not wish to see you in this hospital after the next five minutes. Nor in its vicinity. Mr Chipps, I know your father well. I admire him as a general practitioner of the best old-fashioned sort. I did my utmost here to allow you to follow in his path. I turned a blind eye to so many of your antics at St Swithin’s, that I must on countless occasions have shared the affliction of our friend here in the camel-coloured dressing-gown, who would from his manner of jumping about and swearing still appear to be in considerable physical and mental suffering. This is too much, even for such a reasonable person as myself. You are expelled. You can appeal to the medical school council, but I would advise against it. I believe there is a paragraph in our original Charter from Queen Elizabeth the First, empowering the flogging of students at the front gate, if not their hanging from it.’

Pip stood staring at the floor, slowly shaking his head. ‘I didn’t come to St Swithin’s just because my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps, you know. There’s something much more important. I am simply filled with an honest desire to help sick people.’

‘In which case, I suggest you apply for the job of a hospital porter,’ snapped the dean. ‘Please do not omit to return to my secretary the keys of your locker, or the appropriate sum of money in lieu.’

‘So this is the end?’ asked Pip, still unbelievingly.

‘It is. Goodbye, Mr Chipps.’

Pip left the ward, sadly unbuttoning his white coat. Tony Havens and Hugo Raffles were waiting at the end of the corridor.

‘How did you get on?’ they both asked eagerly.

‘Pipped,’ said Pip.