Doctor in Love

by Richard Gordon

  Beside him were two other notices, saying ELECTRO-CARDIOGRAPH ROOM and PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. One reading X-RAY DEPARTMENT was already fixed to the door of our downstairs lavatory. “Take them off immediately,” I ordered.

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Can’t? Why not?”

  “I’ve got my orders from the other doctor.”

  Before the argument could blossom, we were interrupted by the appearance of Dr Rogers through the open front door. Dr Rogers was a fat man who always seemed to be breathless and perspiring, summer or winter, sitting or running. He was the senior practitioner in Hampden Cross, and though growing into the pomposity almost unavoidable from a lifetime of telling people to eat less and go to bed earlier, he was a friendly professional neighbour. He now seemed in a more heated state than usual.

  “Ah, Doctor!” he began, wiping his bald head with his handkerchief. “Just a word…if you’ll permit…awkward time, I’m sure.”

  “Well I was going to take surgery, Dr Rogers.”

  “Matter of some importance.”

  I showed him into the empty consulting-room and closed the door.

  After looking at me with rising embarrassment for some seconds he announced, “Went to the cinema last night.”

  This seemed a thin excuse for interrupting my evening’s work, but I said politely, “A good film I hope?”

  “Oh, passable, passable. Can’t remember what it was about now. Never can these days. Generally go to sleep. My daughter tells me about them afterwards.”

  There was another silence.

  “Well, Dr Rogers,” I said. “I’m certainly glad to hear you had a pleasant evening. Now I’m afraid that I have to get on with the surgery–”

  “A medical man’s got to be on call,” he announced. “Any hour of the day or night. It’s only right.”

  I agreed.

  “Wouldn’t be doing his duty to his patients otherwise.”

  I agreed with this too.

  “But…well… Professional dignity, and so on. Eh? Quite inadvertent really, I’m sure. I’m not saying anything. Very pleased to see you in Hampden Cross. But obviously gossip starts among the others. Advertising, you know. Grave charge.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow–”

  “Trying to make myself clear. In the pictures. ‘Dr Gordon Urgently Wanted’ flashed on the screen.”

  “What! But that’s impossible!”

  “Afraid so, Doctor. Right in the middle of the big picture. Ah! Remember now – about an American fellow and another American fellow and some sort of girl.”

  “But it must have been a mistake,” I said. “I wasn’t even on duty last night.”

  “Mistake, Doctor? Couldn’t be. Was on every cinema in the district. Not only that, Doctor, it’s been appearing every night of the week. And, so I am to believe, at every separate performance.”

  I managed to show him out without seizing a scalpel from the suture tray and searching for Grimsdyke. I ran into Miss Wildewinde coming downstairs, carrying a suitcase.

  “Miss Wildewinde! Where are you going?”

  “Well may you ask!” she said furiously.

  “You don’t mean – you’re leaving us?”

  “That’s natural enough, surely? As I have been discharged.”

  “But…but you can’t! Miss Wildewinde, you can’t possibly,” I implored, gripping her arm on the doorstep. “It was Grimsdyke, wasn’t it? Yes, of course it was! He’s gone mad, Miss Wildewinde. Mad as a hatter. Insane. Certifiable. He’s got no right to, whatever–”

  “Take your hands off me, Dr Gordon, if you please. I don’t know anything about Dr Grimsdyke’s mental state. All I know is that he gave me a month’s notice this morning. And to think! All the years I’d been here with Dr McBurney.”

  “But Miss Wildewinde! I withdraw it, absolutely and immediately–”

  “I wouldn’t stay in this practice another second!”

  “I’ll double your salary,” I said desperately.

  “I wouldn’t even stay in the same district as Dr Grimsdyke, sane or insane, if you paid me a king’s ransom. Goodbye, Dr Gordon. A man will be calling for my trunks.”

  “Oh, she’s gone already, has she?” asked Grimsdyke calmly, as soon as I tackled him. “All the better.”

  “What the devil do you mean by it?” I demanded, banging the consulting-room desk. “I’ve never heard of such mean and miserable behaviour.”

  He looked offended. “Don’t get so shiny, old man. It’s all for our own good. Why do you think people travel by airlines?”

  “I can’t see what that’s got to do in the slightest–”

  “Because all the airline advertisements show a blonde hotsie welcoming them up their gangway. Simple psychology. And that’s what we want,” he went on lightly. “Get a smasher for a receptionist, and trade’ll double overnight. As a matter of fact, I was rather looking forward to interviewing a few to-morrow afternoon. And how do you like the new furniture? It’s the American idea. In the States a doctor’s surgery really looks like one – all white paint and white trousers and you could do a gastrectomy on the floor. Impresses the patients no end. And of course the patients like to think you’ve got all the latest gadgets. Hence the door labels. Good idea, don’t you think? Excreta tauri cerebrum vincit – Bull Baffles Brains.”

  “If I’d had the slightest idea you’d be behaving in this criminally irresponsible manner–”

  “You don’t appreciate what I’m doing for you, old lad,” he said in a hurt tone. “Why, for the last couple of weeks I’ve had your name on the screen twice nightly in every flick house in town. Not my idea, of course,” he added modestly. “Remember Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer in Pickwick? They did it by being called out of church. I just brought the technique up to date.”

  I sat down heavily on the consulting-room desk. There didn’t seem to be anything to say to Grimsdyke. I still faintly believed that he had the best intentions; but his ideas on the legal limitations of salesmanship, if applied to merchandise instead of medicine, would long ago have landed him at the Old Bailey.

  “Wouldn’t you like a holiday?” I suggested quietly.

  “That’s very decent of you, old lad, but I’ve only just come. Anyway, uncle will be back as soon as they’ve whipped his disk out.”

  “Couldn’t you just clear off? I’d willingly stand your fare back to Ireland.”

  “That’s hardly the way to talk to a friend, if I may say so, old lad.”

  “I was not aware that you were one.”

  “Oh, I see. That’s your attitude, is it?”

  “It certainly is. And all I can say, Grimsdyke, is that the sooner you realize it the better.”

  “A fine expression of gratitude!” he said indignantly, “If you’re trying to tell me I’m not wanted–”

  “I can assure you that you’re not.”

  “I shan’t bother you with the trouble of my company any longer. I might tell you, Gordon, that my uncle shall hear of this as soon as I get to Town. If you want to ruin his practice, it’s not entirely your affair.”

  Half an hour later Grimsdyke had followed Miss Wildewinde to London.

  He left a difficult life behind him. Apart from repairing his ethical sabotage and soothing down Buckingham Palace Motors and the furniture shop, I had to run the practice single-handed without anyone to sort out the National Health cards, the telephone calls, or the patients from the waiting-room. I also had a disturbing note from my father saying, ‘Got an extraordinary letter from a fellow called Bill Porson I’ve hardly seen for years. Are you going to marry his daughter Cynthia? Is she the same one as last time? Are you behaving like a gentleman?” In “The Lodge” I started hiding a bottle of gin in my wardrobe, and I broke a china pixie, two shepherdesses, and an idiotic-looking horse. I felt that I was going rapidly downhill, psychologically and professionally.

  11

  “It is still beyond me to suggest a locum off-hand,” wrote Dr Farquarson from t
he Royal Neurological. “But I think you should really try to get an assistant of some sort or another, otherwise you’ll be joining me here. I suspect I shall be another couple of months out of things yet. Bobbie Cufford and his retinue seem unaware of any measurement of time more delicate than the calendar. I saw him again this morning – I regret to say that he has developed a most prosperous-looking stomach, and the bedside manner of a dead halibut – and he seems intent on keeping me out of circulation until the time comes for me to retire for good. They still haven’t got their diagnosis. Whether Bobbie cuts or not seems to depend on whether my right ankle jerk can raise a flicker. At least with general surgeons you’re in, cut, and out before you’ve time to draw a breath.”

  “I was visited yesterday by my nephew, who very thoughtfully brought me a bunch of grapes and borrowed ten pounds. I am sorry that you had your differences. After hearing his story I can only express my heartfelt gratitude for your keeping both of us on the Medical Register and out of the London Gazette. I have long classified my nephew as a high-grade mental defective, but I am beginning to feel this too generous a diagnosis. He has gone I know not whither.”

  Finding a new receptionist was easier than finding a new locum. A couple of days after Grimsdyke’s departure, as I struggled to hold two surgeries single-handed and see fair play in the waiting-room at the same time, a small cheerful-looking redhead of about nineteen pushed her way forward explaining that she had a “special appointment with the doctor”.

  “Well, I’m the doctor,” I said, starting to shut the consulting-room door. “And I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait your turn with everyone else.”

  “No, not you. The other doctor. The one with the bow tie.”

  “Dr Grimsdyke has been called away on a long case and isn’t likely to return,” I explained.

  Seeing her face drop in childlike disappointment, I added, “I’m Dr Gordon. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Dr Grimsdyke promised he’d make me his receptionist.”

  “Did he?” I said, brightening immediately. “That’s different. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t keep a promise for him, is there?” She gave a glance which I felt compared me unfavourably with my late colleague. “If you’d like to join the practice, I assure you it’s a most interesting job. Plenty of time to yourself, too. Not to mention being part of the great army struggling against the forces of disease, and so on. Have you tried it before?”

  “I can type a bit,” she said. “I was with Jennifer Modes.”

  “How about a change? There’s nothing like variety.” She hesitated. “The other doctor told me there was a free flat as well. He said it would be nice for him to have me in easy reach for emergencies.”

  I had hoped to move into Miss Wildewinde’s apartment myself, but I was prepared to put up with my present lodgings in exchange for the chance of occasionally being able to get back to them before midnight.

  “Of course there’s a flat.”

  “OK. I’ll take the job,” she agreed. “I’m proper sorry the other doctor isn’t still here, though.”

  I found her one of Miss Wildewinde’s overalls and she started on the spot. Her name was Miss Strudwick, and she was as out of place in the surgery as a fan-dancer in church. But she was a willing helper. She had a chronic sinusitus which made her sniff a good deal, and an irritating habit of saying “Aren’t I a silly?” when she’d done something like spilling a carefully-gathered twenty-four-hour specimen over the lino, or sending a patient to a psychiatrist for a post-mortem report and a request to the coroner about the mental condition of his subject. She had no idea of professional sterility or professional secrecy, but she seemed to like the patients and gossiped affably with them all in the waiting-room. After a few days she even began to mellow towards me.

  “Mind, all the girls at the Palais thought Dr Grimsdyke was ever so nice,” she confessed one night after surgery, while I was trying to teach her how to sterilize a syringe.

  “That’s where you met him, was it?” I always wondered how Grimsdyke had spent his evenings in Hampden Cross. “Now you make sure the sterilizer is on, so, and wait until the water has come to the boil.”

  “Oh, yes. There every night he was, almost. He did the mamba something delirious.”

  “You first of all dismantle the syringe into its component parts, thus.”

  “Mind, he wouldn’t let on he was a doctor to begin with,” she said, giving a giggle. “But of course I ought to have known from the start. He had such lovely soft hands to touch you with.”

  “Then you wrap the barrel of the syringe in lint, like this.”

  “Don’t you ever go to the Palais, Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid I never seem to get the time, Miss Strudwick.”

  “Go on – don’t call me Miss Strudwick.” She came a little nearer round the sterilizer. “Everyone calls me Kitten.”

  “Er – the plunger is always boiled separately to avoid breakage–”

  “You’re one of the shy sort, aren’t you?” She looked up at me. “You couldn’t say that about Dr Grimsdyke, I must say.”

  “And the needles of course are sterilized as quickly as possible to avoid blunting–”

  “But you’ve got ever such nice kind eyes.”

  “Threading them through a square of lint for convenient recovery–”

  “Wouldn’t you like to get a bit more friendly, seeing as Fate has brought us together?”

  “Er – Miss Strudwick. The – er – temperature of the sterilizer has to be maintained at one hundred degrees Centigrade for two minutes–”

  Our conversation was fortunately broken by the telephone calling me out to a confinement, and when I got back I was relieved to find that Miss Strudwick’s emotions had cooled with the sterilizer.

  In the next few days it became clear that Grimsdyke must have been a highly popular partner at the local Palais. Girls looking almost the same as Kitten Strudwick appeared hopefully in the waiting-room every morning, and I could have taken my choice of half a dozen receptionists. But finding a locum seemed impossible. I wrote to the Secretary of St Swithin’s Medical School and to a medical employment agency in Holborn, as well as drafting a mildly misleading advertisement for the British Medical Journal. I interviewed one doctor, but he was so old that he seemed likely only to add to the number of my patients; another, with a red face and tweeds, not only arrived drunk but seemed to find nothing unusual in it. There was one excellent young man from India who politely told me that I was too young to be his professional senior, and another excellent young man from Inverness who politely told me that he suffered from schizophrenia. I seemed to have struck the hard core of medical unemployment. Whenever I had been out of work and wanted a locum’s job myself every practice in the country seemed fully manned, but now that I was in the unusual position of employer I couldn’t find any takers. I even began to hope that Grimsdyke would appear again at the front door – as indeed he might have done, with no embarrassment whatever – when I had a letter from the City General Hospital, in the East End of London.

  “Dear Dr Gordon,

  “I should be glad if you would consider me for the post of your locum tenens, of which I heard today from Messrs. Pilcher and Perritt in Holborn. I am twenty-three years of age and qualified from the City General last December, subsequently holding the appointment of house surgeon to Mr Ernest Duff. I am now anxious to have some experience in general practice before continuing with surgery, in which I intend to specialize. Perhaps you would kindly let me know your decision as soon as you conveniently can? I would add that I possess a car.

  “Yours sincerely,

  “Nicholas Barrington,

  “BM, BCh (Oxon).”

  I don’t think I had read a letter more gratefully since I opened the official envelope after my final examinations. The writer seemed sane, and wasn’t young enough to be a glorified student nor old enough to be a chronic drunkard. He sounded a little prim and precise, but that w
as only to be expected of an Oxford man. He had worked under Duff, who was so surgically eminent as to have two operations named after him. And even at St Swithin’s we recognized the City General students as a genially beery crowd like ourselves. Apart from this, the poor fellow’s following the will-o’-the-wisp of surgical specialization struck sympathy from my bosom: I felt that it would he nice to work with someone else who had probably failed the Primary too. Wasting no time, I took a risk and telegraphed Dr Barrington saying:

  APPOINTED FORTHWITH COME IMMEDIATELY IF POSSIBLE ACCOMMODATION RATHER SHORT BUT CAN MUCK IN WITH ME UNTIL SETTLED STOP WORK HARD BUT FUN HOPE YOU DRINK BEER

  “GORDON

  To which I had the reply:

  ARRIVING NOON TOMORROW STOP YES I DRINK BEER

  BARRINGTON

  “Our troubles are over,” I told Kitten Strudwick happily that evening. “A Dr Barrington is arriving tomorrow to help us.”

  “Oh, really? I wonder what he’ll be like?”

  “Soft hands and a kind heart like Dr Grimsdyke, I expect. So put on your best pair of nylons.”

  “Go on with you! I didn’t think you noticed my nylons.”

  “Doctors are trained to be observant, Miss Strudwick.”

  “Yes,” I reflected, relaxing in the surgery chair comfortably for the first time since Dr Farquarson’s departure. “It’s going to be a bit of fun to have someone three years junior to me to kick about. I shall be able to hold my lapels and say ‘Come come, my lad – can’t you spot a simple case of craniocleidodysostosis? What on earth did they teach you at the General?’ Oh, yes, I’ll make the poor chap work all right.”

  “I really don’t know, I’m sure,” she confessed. “You doctors ain’t a bit like what I thought you was. Do you want these prong things put back in the hot water?”

  I was unable to meet my new colleague on his arrival the next day, as I expected to be out on my morning rounds until well past one o’clock.