5

‘Matron. Sisters. Nurses. I am greatly honoured that you should ask me to officiate at this joyous occasion of presenting the student nurses’ prizes.’

The dean leant slightly forward, his spread-out finger-tips touching the table, wearing an expression of infinite benevolence.

‘I only wish it was an occasion which had occurred at a more joyous time for our country. Change and decay in all around I see, to make an appropriate quotation from Holy Writ. Well, from Hymns Ancient and Modern, at least,’ he corrected himself. ‘There is nowhere respect for Government, for Law, or for any authority whatever, sometimes even my own. Every day our peace is disturbed and our traffic jammed by a “demo” – horrible word, horrible habit. Generally by the idiotic public objecting to something which does them a lot of good, like fluoridization and vivisection. If people want to air their grievances, why can’t they write letters to The Times like me?’

He took a sip of water. ‘Violence is rife. So is vandalism, eroticism and absenteeism. Clap people in jail, and their accomplices demand “justice” – by which they mean instant release – for the “Wapping Six”, or some other popular combination of geography and numerals which, to my mind, indicates exactly where a tally of villains met its deserts.’

The dean gazed for some moments at the ceiling. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. I want to tell you of a paperback book I found the other day in the hospital corridors. I mean library. It is called “1984”. Quite horrifying. Though I suspect a good deal cosier than the real thing we’re going to face. I see our magnificent City of London –’ He waved an arm in its direction. ‘A distressed area, with workers coming with their battered bowlers from the ghost towns of Sevenoaks and Guildford, the offices of our great financial institutions recycled for the manufacture by hand of plastic Beefeaters and Union Jack knickers, to sell to Japanese tourists on Tower Hill. The Bank of England preserved as a national monument like Stonehenge, the Stock Exchange turned into the National Casino its doctrinaire enemies keep calling it –’

‘Lionel! You can’t say all that,’ objected his wife Josephine, who was laying the table round him that same Tuesday lunchtime, in the dining-room of their small house near St Swithin’s.

‘It’s a little joke, dear.’

‘You didn’t say it in a very jokey voice. Your whole speech is far too gloomy for the nurses’ prizegiving. You’ll have to rewrite it before tomorrow night.’

‘I can’t help it if the whole world is on the Cresta Run to ruin,’ the dean complained testily, banging the dining-table.

‘You’ll break a glass, dear. You should take the chance of cheering everyone up with an encouraging word, instead of passing round that the brakes have failed.’

‘Odi profanum vulgus,’ muttered the dean even more gloomily.

‘What’s that mean?’

‘It’s a polite Latin way of saying I loathe the common herd. Unfortunately, these days we have to go mooing along with the rest. Packaged tours, packaged foods, packaged views on television – ah, hello, my dear. As you were coming home for lunch today, I decided to join you,’ he greeted his daughter Faith. ‘I’ve rather eaten my way through the menu in the Bertie Bunn.’

‘Did you have a lovely dance?’ asked her mother, who was younger than the dean, dark-haired, soft-eyed and soft-bosomed. The dean had wooed Josephine while he was a St Swithin’s registrar, in the traditional medical way. She had been a nurse on night duty, and his romantic murmurings in the shaded light, his proposal of marriage itself, were jarred only by the recumbent patients periodically breaking wind.

‘The dance was fantastic.’ Faith kissed her mother. ‘I took hundreds of pounds for the tombola. Men seemed to be pressing money on me all evening.’

The dean frowned. ‘After a life of service to humanity, I am beginning to wonder if we show misplaced generosity towards society’s misfits. All these destitutes and meths drinkers and so on would be better treated by being given a good, solid day’s work digging up Oxford Street.’

‘Anyone there you knew?’ her mother asked.

‘Not a soul.’

‘I would offer you both a glass of sherry,’ the dean explained. ‘But I am examining again this afternoon, so must keep a clear head. Not that some of the candidates wouldn’t drive to drink the entire Salvation Army, with the band playing. Do you know what happened this morning?’ he continued fervently. ‘Sir Lancelot and I not only had to fail – that would have been a vastly inadequate penalty – but kick out of the hospital a harebrained public menace called Chipps – What’s the matter?’ he demanded, as Faith gave a cry.

‘Nothing, Daddy. But you’ve spoken of him. Often.’

‘Have I? Well, he was always up to some lunacy or other. Last Christmas, he brought the roast turkey into the ward in obstetrical forceps. Thank God we shan’t be suffering from that particularly painful affliction any more.’

‘But he might have been a simply wonderful doctor,’ said Faith, whose big grey eyes had grown rounder.

‘Rubbish. He doesn’t know his coccyx from his epicondyle.’

‘But what will he do now?’ she asked, her pink cheeks becoming rosier.

‘That is a matter of supreme indifference to me.’

‘With all his years of studying wasted?’ she insisted, her generous bosom heaving faster.

‘The amount of medicine which Chipps learnt at St Swithin’s hardly fits him for scrubbing the hospital floors, I assure you. In fact, today I have done the young man a service. I have stopped him becoming an utter disgrace to the profession.’

‘Are you sure you don’t know him, Faith?’ asked her mother, carefully setting down the final fork.

‘Oh, no, Mummy. I never mix with the students. Daddy doesn’t like me to.’

‘I merely want to spare you from the molestations of a bunch of drunken sex-maniacs who drive their cars too fast,’ the dean explained in a reasonable tone. ‘By the way, you’re off from the destitutes tomorrow evening?’ Faith nodded. ‘I’d like you to come on the platform with your mother when I present the nurses’ prizes. It will be a good opportunity to present yourself in public, being an extremely genteel one.’

‘Daddy, I may have another engagement.’

‘No excuses. This is a duty. You understand?’

‘Yes, Daddy. I would always do whatever I see to be my duty. You taught me that,’ she told him meekly.

‘What are you doing in that cupboard, Josephine?’ he demanded.

‘Finding the sherry.’

‘I told you, I’m examining this afternoon.’

‘But I’m not. And please don’t stare at me like Mr Pecksniff.’

The dean’s prickly eyebrows rose slowly towards the point of his head, like a pair of caterpillars crawling up a turnip. ‘Are you implying that I am a hypocrite?’

‘Oh, no,’ his wife replied lightly, producing the bottle. ‘Only in danger of becoming one. You get toffee-nosed about students who might disgrace your noble profession, then you make as much money out of it as you can pocket from your private wing filled with opulent Arabs.’

The dean glared. ‘Now you should like Pince, that horrible little union man.’

‘There’s every reason I might. He was expressing the views of a large number of people who work in St Swithin’s.’

‘My God,’ muttered the dean. ‘My wife a Communist. I’m in bed with a red. When that bottle of sherry’s finished, there’ll be no more, not these hard times,’ he warned her as she poured a glass for herself and her daughter. ‘I only bought a case of it to outwit the Chancellor of the Exchequer before the last budget. There is only one certainty one can grasp in this life, and that’s the price of drink always goes up.’

‘Nonsense, Lionel. You’ve bottles and bottles still hidden upstairs from outwitting successive Chancellors of all political hues. The whole attic looks like a skittle-alley. I think this is cuvée Healey,’ she decided, sipping delicately. ‘Though I don’t think yet we’ve exhausted the cuvée Barber, or even the cuvée Jenkins. Which was particularly good, as I remember. Now calm down, Lionel, and let’s all have a peaceful lunch.’

‘I’m not very hungry, Mummy,’ announced Faith. ‘I had a disturbed night.’

‘You shouldn’t go to bed with something heavy lying on your stomach,’ the dean snapped at her.

‘I don’t often get the chance, Daddy,’ she told him demurely.

At that moment, Pip Chipps himself was drooping disconsolately at one end of the St Swithin’s residents’ bar. This was on the ground floor of the housemen’s quarters, which with the nurses’ home and the rebuilt medical school formed a screen of separate buildings set round grassy squares to the rear of the thirty-storey hospital itself. The bar was an oblong room the size of a prosperous pub, with a fruit machine, bar billiards and darts, its decorations largely portable items of corporation equipment which had appealed to the hospital rugby team as keepsakes. Along one wall were pinned a number of girls from the gonadal magazines, added arrows and technical comments indicating the customers’ easy command of anatomy and gynaecology. In one corner stood a snarling, stuffed grizzly bear, Percy, the St Swithin’s mascot, in whose defence against other medical schools after football matches blood had been lost, noses fractured and even richly promising girlfriends abandoned.

There were scrawled notices on a board offering for sale items as varied as motor-bikes and microscopes, guitars and gastroscopes, amplifiers and articulated hands and feet. Even the graffiti were specialized, like You Are Never Alone With Schizophrenia, An Obstetrician is a Man who Sews Tears in Other Men’s Fields, and Why Did the Hormone? Because She Had to Spend Her Oestrin Bed.

Whenever the bar was open – it seemed to have developed an immunity to the licensing laws – it acted as a powerful polarizer in the St Swithin’s social life. It was available to the doctors and clinical students, most of its denizens men and women under thirty. Hospitals may be depressing places to contemplate, but they are staffed essentially by the ebullient young. The residents’ bar was not below a visit from the senior consultants like Sir Lancelot Spratt, or even austere professors. Dr Bonaccord, the remote, other-worldly St Swithin’s psychiatrist, wandered in to relieve his inner tensions. The dean regularly tried to close it down.

‘Console yourself that it was just terribly bad luck,’ Hugo Raffles was sympathizing with Pip over their pints. ‘After all, it was an evens chance that you picked the wrong eye.’

Pip complained in reply, ‘It wouldn’t have happened, if you’d never told me about that patient in the first place.’

‘What ingratitude,’ objected Tony Havens. ‘After we’d gone to all the trouble of nosing out the cases, not to mention poncing you up when you reeled into the hospital looking like a long-lost swab.’

‘You’re always getting me into some sort of a mess,’ Pip declared self-pityingly. ‘Apart from Sir Lancelot’s operating boots, there was the time you told me the dean wanted his rear bumper chained to the hospital railings because of car thieves –’

‘What’s a little harmless fun, dear boy?’ Hugo slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Surely you can take a joke?’

‘No, I can’t. Not really. I’m very sensitive. I think I inherit it from my mother.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Tony disagreed. ‘We used to pull your leg because we thought you never minded. That’s what made you so popular in the medical school.’

‘We all love you,’ Hugo assured him.

‘Do you? Then find me a job.’

The two stared thoughtfully at their beer. ‘That could be a problem,’ confessed Tony. ‘What do most ex-medical students do?’

‘Go round GPs doing high-pressure salesmanship for expensive and generally useless products from the big drug companies,’ Hugo told him. ‘Just like the struck-off doctors do.’

Pip shook his head. ‘That doesn’t appeal. I’m too honest.’

‘The Church?’ suggested Tony. ‘You wanted to be a psychiatrist. Religion these days is only practical psychiatry with singing on Sundays.’

‘The Law?’ added Hugo. ‘You’ve the makings of a great coroner.’

‘Don’t you have to be a doctor as well?’ Pip objected. ‘My father says that coroners are exceptional drop-outs, who have managed to fail in two professions, not one.’

His two friends sipped their beer in nonplussed silence.

‘It seems such a scandal that all the medicine I have managed to pick up here should be wasted,’ Pip pointed out miserably. ‘Just because I got an unfair reputation in the hospital for hamfistedness. I admit, I always somehow seemed to drop on the floor instruments and X-rays and the notes –’

‘And sometimes the patient,’ Tony reminded him.

‘But I do honestly want to help people who can’t help themselves. I know that’s not a thing any of us care to confess at St Swithin’s – particularly in the bar – but I can’t see any other reason why we’re here at all.’

‘Anyone come up with other suggestions?’ asked Hugo.

‘Yes. The dean. He advised me to become a hospital porter.’

‘But that’s a magnificent idea,’ said Tony, grinning.

‘Do you think so? But what sort of hospital should I apply to?’

‘Here. St Swithin’s,’ Tony told him. ‘Just imagine the scene – you pushing a stiff down the corridor and running into the dean. It would make Stanley and Dr Livingstone look a very casual encounter.’

The two housemen started laughing so heartily that everyone near by asked to be let into the joke.

‘I can just see the dean’s face,’ Hugo managed to say. ‘As you catch him in the epigastrium with a trolley of the patients’ dinners.’

‘He might throw me out all over again,’ said Pip, not joining in the fun.

‘Impossible, dear boy,’ Hugo told him. ‘Porters come under the hospital administrator. The dean can’t sack porters any more than Mr Clapper up in the office can reach for a scalpel and dig into the patients.’

‘It could be rather humorous,’ Pip agreed doubtfully. ‘But Mr Clapper might not take me on.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Tony Havens swallowed the remains of his pint. ‘You speak English, and you’re pink.’