13

Outside Mr Clapper’s door was waiting a small, thin, brown man in a towelling hospital dressing-gown. He immediately grasped the dean by his lapels and said desperately, ‘Sir Lionel Lychfield… I know you. I’ve seen you in the ward. Help me, I beseech you. I must get out of here at once.’

The dean staggered back, alarmed. ‘Don’t tell me the patients are on strike, too?’

‘I am not his patient. I am his brother-in-law.’

‘I don’t think I entirely follow,’ said the dean confusedly.

‘Professor Ding’s. From Shanka. He is going to take my heart out and put in some total stranger’s.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember now. He’s here on an exchange professorship arranged by the Ministry of Overseas Development. An extremely worthy idea for breaking down tensions in Brixton and such places. He’s only doing it for your own good,’ the dean comforted the patient, trying to disentangle his fingers.

‘He is doing it for a fat pension from the crook who runs our country,’ the man said bitterly. ‘My heart is absolutely tip-top. I have bad feet, but my brother-in-law isn’t interested in operating on feet, which have little glamour.’

‘If you have any complaint whatever about your treatment,’ the dean told him, freeing himself, ‘you need have no fear that it will go unheard. As long as it’s well-grounded, efficient action will most certainly be taken on your behalf.’

‘Ah! Good!’ The man’s face suffused with joy. ‘I knew you were a good fellow. Wisdom and benevolence flash from your eyes as sunlight from precious jewels.’

‘Thank you.’

‘My relief is indeed heartfelt. How do I go about making use of this most welcome information?’

‘You are in a National Health Service Hospital, so you can enjoy all the benefits of our National Health Service administration. Exactly as if you had the advantage to be born a British subject,’ the dean explained. ‘A personage has been created exactly for your purposes. His title is the “Health Commissioner”, though the public always refer to him as the “Ombudsman”.’

“Ombudsman”,’ repeated the patient slowly. ‘Please, Sir Lionel, when can I find this powerful individual in the hospital?’

‘Oh, he isn’t in the hospital.’ The dean gave an amused glance. ‘I don’t know where he is, exactly. I suppose you could try Whitehall. But his location is immaterial, because of course all complaints must be made in writing. Mr Clapper in this office will certainly know the correct procedure.’ He indicated the door behind him. ‘You should certainly get a reply one way or another within six months to a year.

‘But in six months I shall be dead and buried,’ the man said, aghast. ‘With somebody else’s heart inside me, too.’

‘Well, that’s your problem, I suppose. Will you excuse me? I’ve an urgent meeting in the basement.’

The patient grasped the dean’s lapels again. ‘But, Sir Lionel – don’t you understand? Wherever this functionary exists, I must have him release me from the hospital immediately.’

‘There is nothing whatever to stop you discharging yourself whenever you feel inclined,’ the dean told him testily, trying to dislodge the fingers again. ‘This is St Swithin’s, not Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘Ah, there you is, my old china – !’ A voice came booming down the corridor. ‘You sure got me worried.’

The huge jovial figure of Professor Ding approached rapidly. His patient grasped the dean more firmly, making whimpering noises.

‘For just a minute you had me thinking that you was getting scared and doing the bunk before your life-saving operation. Sir Lionel Lychfield, I presume?’ He laughed loudly, shaking the dean’s hand powerfully while clasping his diminutive patient firmly round the shoulders. ‘This one, he mighty nervous. I keep telling him, “Don’t you quake so, sonny, this operation past the experimental stage, just routine, like having your tonsils out.”’

‘Most certainly great strides have been made in the technique of transplant surgery,’ the dean nodded agreement.

‘Nothing to it. We just waiting for some stupid bugger crash his car, come into hospital with the old heart still going pit-a-pat, but no breathing, no brain, no nothing, we plug him on to the old respirator, and we say, “Okay, count down to blast off”, then we sharpen up the old knife and we dig in.’ He squeezed the patient fondly, making him gurgle. ‘Simple as eating your Sunday dinner.’

‘You are in very good hands,’ the dean explained patiently to the little man, still pulling at his fingers. ‘I understood from the Ministry of Overseas Development that Professor Ding has an enormous reputation in your own country.’

‘As a witch doctor,’ said the patient.

Professor Ding patted him several times on the back, making his jaw wobble. ‘This ignorant sod don’t know which doctor is which doctor,’ he said. ‘Joke, hey?’ He laughed, but not as loud as usual. ‘Cummon, sonny boy. You and me gonna play lots more nice games of Scrabble, hey?’ He gave his patient a jerk, ripping him from the dean’s lapels. ‘We play Scrabble till that unknown benefactor of humanity goes and wipes his four litre sports job along a brick wall, hey?’

The dean hurried away in the direction of the stairs, reflecting on the tenderness of African surgical professors, who so considerately calmed their patients’ preoperative nerves by playing cards with them. He could hardly imagine Sir Lancelot making up a four at bridge with a gastrectomy, a cholecystectomy and some piles.

The St Swithin’s concourse downstairs looked much as usual. Nobody seemed to be taking much notice of a single porter in his brown coat standing with a placard saying BACK ACHE. Through the front door, the dean could see a television camera with its crew, and the kilted Forfar McBridie marching up and down for them playing the bagpipes.

The dean turned towards the steps leading into the basement. He saw his first difficulty as prizing Faith away from the side of Pip. Possibly he would have to utter some white lie, like her mother having broken a leg. But this was spared him by Faith herself hurrying upstairs. ‘Daddy,’ she said at once. ‘I want to have a very serious word with you.’

The dean invited her into the staff canteen behind the lifts for a cup of coffee.

‘Daddy,’ said Faith, sipping from her white plastic beaker as they took a table in one corner. ‘You have been very, very naughty.’

‘Me?’ returned her father indignantly. ‘When I have been humiliated before our entire complement of student nurses by my own daughter, who openly connives with this pint-sized Lenin to inflict starvation upon my patients –’

She laid a finger softly on his lips. ‘Daddy, you are suffering from hubris.’

‘You make it sound like a particularly unpleasant disease, and I am not suffering from anything of the kind.’

‘Yes, you are,’ she said quietly. ‘You and all the doctors at St Swithin’s. The sorrow is that you don’t know you’ve got it. And as you always say, Daddy, it’s the patient who makes his disease fatal, by overlooking it. I worry about you, honestly I do.’ She looked at him wide-eyed. ‘You forget that the hospital care of sick people is a team effort –’

‘Of course I don’t. I tell the students exactly that every year in my inaugural lecture. Some of the old hands know it well, and utter groans at that juncture.’

‘But a team effort of the humblest as well as the highest,’ she persisted softly. ‘A hospital can’t work without consultants. But it can’t work without porters or laundry workers or cleaners, either.’

‘Exactly. The difference is, my dear,’ he told her tartly, ‘that my importance is apparent when I start work. Theirs only when they stop.’

Faith considered this. ‘I don’t think that alters the principle. Anyway, Pip doesn’t see it that way. He wants you to arrange for representatives of these workers to have a seat on the council which runs St Swithin’s. Then he’ll call off the strike.’

‘Outrageous! Am I to argue about such matters as the provision of a new electroencephalograph, or even of a place to park my car, with one of the hospital porters?’ he asked contemptuously.

‘Pip says that’s what happens in Russia,’ she told him calmly. ‘All the health service workers have been in the same union for years. Including the doctors. And everyone knows that Russian medicine is among the best in the world.’

‘I don’t care if Russian doctors operate to the sound of balalaikas and have snow on their rubber boots. Here we’ve still got the shreds of democracy. Which means that I give the orders and the porters carry them out.’ The dean folded his arms decisively.

Faith sighed. ‘Well, Daddy, those are Pip’s conditions for calling off the strike. Until they’re met, I’m afraid you won’t be able to use the Bertie Bunn for making more shekels from sheikhs. But that’s the wrong currency, isn’t it?’

‘If Pip Chipps takes my advice, he’ll hop on the next train home to Somerset. These porters will soon tumble to it, that he’s simply leading them a dance to satisfy his own abnormal sense of humour. I shouldn’t like to be in his shoes then. Pretty tough-looking eggs, some of the porters. Criminal records, too, I shouldn’t doubt.’

‘Please don’t delude yourself, Daddy. We’ve no blacklegs and no scabs.’

‘When I started medicine, a blackleg was an advanced form of gas gangrene, and a scab was something you got from chicken-pox. Now they mean anyone who values human life above union solidarity.’

‘I know you feel frustrated over the trade unions, like many of your class,’ she told him patiently. ‘But you must accept modern life as it is.’

‘Yes. With everyone doing exactly what they like, not giving a thought to the convenience or comfort of their fellow-beings. And the worst offenders of all are governments.’

Faith stood up. ‘I must rush now. I’ve got a meeting of the strike committee. If you want to surrender, you’ve only to phone down to the porters’ room.’

The dean banged the pink formica top of the table. ‘We shall never surrender,’ he declared stoutly. ‘We shall fight at the bedsides, we shall fight on the landings, we shall fight in the filing departments and in the stores, we shall fight in the halls. We shall defend our hospital, whatever the cost may be. And furthermore, you stupid little girl,’ he ended, losing his temper, ‘all your lecherous lunatic’s former student friends will give exactly that answer when I appeal to their common sense to chuck him out neck and crop.’

She left her father scowling into the dregs of his coffee. His diplomatic offensive seemed to have crumbled under her counter-attack. He would charge upon a more vulnerable flank.