Practice Makes Perfect

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Two women in one kitchen…”

  “Three,” Lulu said. “I wish I had a baby…”

  “Just hurry up with that coffee and you can have a piece of my sausage.”

  “Poison,” Caroline said, squeezing the last of the oranges.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the coffee or the sausage but suspected it was both. To my horror she was grating carrots into the orange juice.

  “Are you going to drink that or eat it?”

  “Hundred and fifty-one, hundred and fifty-two, knees to your chin, Hank, attaboy…”

  “Are there any raisins, Sylvia?”

  She was beginning to make me feel sick, unless it was the smell of Fred’s sausage.

  “Lulu, can’t you turn that thing down a bit, what with Eugénie bawling…in the larder…yes, sure I’m sure…you what, Peter? No? Then there aren’t. Oh, darling, relax and have some eggs and bacon. I’m sure it won’t hurt just this once.”

  “Poison. Ain’t that right, Mom? Hundred and ninety-two, hundred and ninety-three…”

  “Not ‘ain’t’, Hank, baby, how many times have I told you?”

  “Hundred and ninety-eight.”

  “Not in her ear, Penny…well if she turns her head you must follow her…no, Peter, her neck cannot revolve through an angle of three hundred and sixty degrees…let Penny do it.”

  “Two hundred!” yelled Faraday. “The bell. Somebody’s ringing the bell.”

  “Barbara Basildon,” Sylvia said, spooning eggs onto the plate. “I told her not before nine.”

  “I can’t go,” Lulu said, “the coffee’s on its last perk and this tune just sends me…”

  “I,” said Fred, clutching what remained of his sausage to his bosom, “will go.”

  “Let him wait,” I said, sitting down at one cramped corner of the table out of spitting distance of Eugénie, “we told him what time to come.”

  “No love in you, man,” Fred said, making for the door.

  “You wait till you move in here,” Sylvia said darkly. “We shall see how much love’s left in you then, man!”

  “Don’t breathe on him,” Lulu said, “he’ll drop dead from garlic asphyxiation.”

  My eyes met Faraday’s and I felt rather than saw Caroline’s meet Sylvia’s. Death was no longer funny even if it was a joke. It was with us right there in the kitchen.

  “Coffee’s up!” Lulu shouted, oblivious to the sudden undercurrent of sadness. “Hands up those who wish to be poisoned.”

  “Would it really have hurt him to wait?” I said when Fred came back. “All he wanted was nose-drops.”

  Fred gave Peter a push and made a place for himself at the table.

  “I love that man,” he said.

  Faraday gave him a queer look.

  Fred went on. “I can say to him, I am you, the loved person, you, the stranger, you – everything alive. In the experience of love lies the only answer to being human, lies sanity.”

  “But he only wanted nose-drops,” Sylvia said, putting the last of the bacon onto her plate.

  Fred ignored her and gesticulated with the sausage which had decreased considerably in length. “Productive love always implies a syndrome of attitudes; that of care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If I love, I care – that is, I am actively concerned with the other person’s growth and happiness; I am not a spectator, I am responsible, that is I respond to his needs, to those he can express and more so to those he cannot or does not express…”

  “May I have some of that, Mom?” Hank said, playing with his grated carrot and orange juice and pointing at the bacon.

  “Certainly not.”

  “…I respect him, that is (according to the original meaning of the Latin re-spicere)…”

  “Funny way you say it,” Peter said. “Mr Richards pronounces it…”

  “Don’t interrupt, Peter…”

  “But Mr Richards says…”

  “I look at him,” Fred said, “as he is, objectively and not distorted by my wishes and fears. I know him, I have penetrated through his surface to the core of his being and related myself to him from my core, from the centre, as against the periphery of my being.” He cut another slice of sausage which he washed down with coffee.

  Faraday’s eyes were wide.

  “I still say,” Sylvia said, resignedly picking up the pieces of the dish Eugénie had dashed to the floor and resolutely turning off Lulu’s transistor, “that all he wanted was nose-drops.”

  Ten

  The next few months passed in feverish activity through which ran a thread of nightmare quality. Bay Tree House sprouted in what seemed overnight from the ashes to its full five-storeyed glory. Sylvia engrossed in citron banister ropes and natty spice-racks neglected house, patients and children; Fred was holding Yoga classes every other morning in the waiting-room so that people calling for sleeping-pills found themselves standing on their heads; Faraday’s house was ready but he had a bout of fever connected with his illness and was confined to our spare bedroom; Lulu’s husband was in Leningrad and she had moved into the corridor but was permanently in the bathroom fixing her false eyelashes; Hank had our nerves worn to shreds with his violin; the twins were playing merry hell with the chaos, and Eugénie, thoroughly upset with the disarrangement of her routine, contributed day and night to the uproar. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if we had had something to eat, but Caroline out of gratitude for our hospitality to her family had offered to relieve Sylvia of the kitchen chores which meant that wild-rice nutburgers, celery loaf and Hollywood salad were coming out of our ears. We had frightful indigestion, were permanently hungry and slipped out to the nearest steak-house whenever we could.

  It was surprising, under the circumstances, that the practice functioned at all. In my early days of general practice I had been worried during any deviation from the ordinary that patients would (a) be upset, (b) leave my list, (c) report my misdemeanours to the powers that be. I had discovered over the years, however, that nothing, short of downright criminal negligence, made the slightest difference. In fact, that the odder the goings-on in house or surgery, the greater seemed the incentive to join our list. My doubts about Fred had been more than lulled by the huge influx of patients who adored him and I was happy to discover that my even graver doubts about Lulu had similarly little foundation. It was obviously I who was out of joint with the times. True, she was not so methodical as Miss Hornby, did not play the sergeant-major in the waiting-room as did Miss Simms, but she adored the patients and between her and Fred we had created a positive little love nest. It was, I suppose, that she was human and not afraid to show it; for this patients were willing to forgive the odd mistake in the prescriptions she made out or the out-of-date certificates she gave them, her mind on her eternal pop-music. She compared mini-skirts and eyeliner with the girls, flirted with the boys, cuddled the old ladies and had the eyes of the old men popping. Most of all though she loved the baby clinic because of her burning desire to become a mother herself. She looked after the tiny babies when they came for their prophylactic injections, played with the toddlers who before had spent their time trying to wreck the waiting-room, and talked wide-eyed and enviously to the mothers about sieved spinach and nappy-rash and optimum hours of sleep. It was “with-it” to say that the modern generation was incapable of putting in an honest day’s work; that today was not like the “old days”. If the latter statement was true the former was most certainly not. Without a doubt changes had been wrought; they were certainly not for the worse, however, and in many instances were for the better. We had once more become a young practice and it was having its effect on me.

  “Daddy,” Penny said to me one day accusingly, “you are growing your sideboards!”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “You are growing your hair like Fred’s.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish.” I smoothed my hair. “I just haven’t had time to get it cut. It’s my normal short back and sides.”

 
But it wasn’t. I felt the influence of Fred and Lulu was affecting me if only insidiously, and had whispered instructions to my barber to let the sideboards grow, in accordance with the modern, youthful trend.

  Suddenly, one blazing July morning, it was moving day; for everyone. I had seen some hectic days in my time but this out-hecticed them all.

  It started in the early hours, soon after Hank with his violin, to which we had now resigned ourselves, with a face at the bedroom window. It had hair down to its shoulders, a miner’s hat and steel-rimmed glasses.

  I nudged Sylvia. “Sylvia! Sylvia wake up. Did you order the window cleaner?”

  “Wassertime?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  “A.M.?”

  “A.M.”

  “I might have known.” She covered her ears against the slow murder of the Max Bruch violin concerto which once we had loved.

  “Some days I think I could cheerfully murder that child.”

  “Never mind Hank,” I said. “Did you or did you not ask the window-cleaner to call?”

  “What at six-thirty a.m.?”

  “Six-thirty a.m.,” I said patiently watching the bearded face.

  “No. Anyway, he fell off his ladder and will be in hospital for six weeks after which he’s going back to market-gardening…”

  “Sylvia, I only wanted to know if he had come to clean our windows, not his medical or social history.”

  “There’s no point in having them cleaned anyway if we’re moving.”

  “Exactly. But somebody is cleaning them.”

  She sat up. “They can’t be.”

  “They are.”

  She looked towards the windows, let out a piercing scream and disappeared beneath the bedclothes.

  Penny came in in her pyjamas. “You’ve woken the baby.”

  “Listen,” I said, “if she hasn’t been woken by Hank she certainly wouldn’t be disturbed by your mother’s mild attack of hysteria.”

  Penny pulled back the bedclothes and gazed at Sylvia. “Is she all right?”

  “Quite all right. Look, be a good girl and ask that man why he’s cleaning the windows.”

  She followed my gaze and went over to look.

  “He isn’t.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Cleaning the windows. He’s painting the house. Purple!”

  “Purple?”

  “And there’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Girl. No it’s not, it’s a boy. At least I think it’s a boy. He’s painting the garage.”

  “Purple?”

  “No. Orange.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. There’s a lot of pictures on the lawn of ladies with nothing on; and books; and an enormous sort of model of a man with nothing on. You can see his…”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.”

  “There’s loads of people having breakfast on the lawn…”

  I shut my eyes. “Any sign of Fred?”

  “Yes. He’s writing something. On my blackboard…” She was out of the room in a flash.

  “Sylvia,” I said. “Sylvia! Look, it’s no use sticking your head in the sand or under the bedclothes. To begin with we are moving…”

  “…You don’t have to tell me…”

  “…and secondly we shall have to do something about Fred.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She emerged. “Too late. You’ve taken him into partnership, sold him the house, what do you hope to do?”

  “He’s turning the place into a shambles.”

  “Well, we shan’t have to look at it. We shall be in Church…”

  “In church?”

  “Church Row Estate.”

  “But what will the patients think?”

  “You’ve given up worrying what the patients will think. Besides, as you know very well, they will be thoroughly intrigued by the whole thing.”

  “Purple and orange!”

  There was worse to come. As we discovered at seven-thirty the breakfast party on the lawn was merely an overflow. Our kitchen resembled the saloon bar of a pub on a Sunday morning. You could not get in for people, cooking and smoke.

  “Fred!” I yelled. “Fred!”

  He had on white denim trousers, sandals and a spotted handkerchief round his neck; that was all.

  “Fred,” I said, “who are all these people?”

  He looked puzzled. “I don’t know, man; artists, writers, painters, trippers, labourers, dole signers, meeters, hangers-on, natural heads, policemen, blacks…this house is for people, man.”

  “But it’s my house.”

  “It’s July the first, man.”

  It was not my house.

  “If I’d thought…”

  “I don’t dig all the fury?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “They doing harm to someone?”

  “What about the practice? I suppose you’re painting the surgery puce?”

  “Not unless you say, man.”

  I remembered I had retained a lease on the surgery part of the house and that Fred was unable to interfere with it without my consent. That at least was something.

  “You want breakfast?” Fred was waving a hospitable arm towards the kitchen in which there was scarcely room to move.

  “Yes. So do Sylvia, Peter, Penny, Eugénie, Caroline, Faraday and Hank. Where do you suggest?”

  “There’s a place for everyone, man,” he said gently.

  It was useless to argue. “I just hope,” I said, “that your furniture doesn’t arrive before we’ve moved ours out.”

  “It’s here, man.”

  I looked around. “You don’t mean that stuff on the front lawn?”

  Fred nodded.

  “That’s all?”

  He nodded again.

  “Am I to understand that you are turning this once desirable residence into an art gallery, library and café?”

  Fred grinned. “That’s the scene, man. That’s just the scene.”

  We had our breakfast in the back garden. Sitting sedately at the garden table set with golden shred and cornflakes, I said to Sylvia bitterly, “Whose idea was Fred?”

  “Yours.”

  “But you encouraged him.”

  “If you remember, there was no alternative.”

  “I was perfectly happy here. I didn’t even want to move. Look at our house! Our lovely home. Look at the chaos. We shall probably have the police round, the neighbours will get up a petition. I was once a respectable practitioner, I’ve built up a reputation in the district…”

  “You don’t really want to turn into a fuddy-duddy at the beck and call of the State until you’re old and grey and bowed and beaten and bitter and you drop down dead in your tracks…”

  I pointed towards what was once my house. “I suppose you think this is going to prolong my life?”

  “Don’t worry so much,” Sylvia said pouring milk into Eugénie, “everything’s going to be fine.”

  I would like to have shared her optimism. She had insisted that I do the surgery as usual, I suspected to get me out of the way, as the removal men were going to see to everything and there was nothing really that I could do. Fred had been excused on grounds of moving in.

  My mood was in no way lifted by the first six patients who came into my consulting room, stopped in the doorway looking surprised and said, “Oh, I thought it was Fred.”

  I explained that Doctor Perfect and I had changed days owing to the domestic arrangements. One of them said happily, “Well, I suppose I shan’t be seeing you again, Doc. So thank you for everything you done for me and the Missus, and the kids get on a treat with Fred, always asking for him they are, even when there’s nothing the matter with them. Funny enough, the other day…”

  “Mr Hawkes,” I said firmly, “I am simply moving house. I am not, and shall not be leaving the practice and things will continue here in the surgery exact
ly as before. I shall be most grateful if you would enlighten your neighbours to this effect and any more of my patients with whom you happen to be acquainted.”

  “All right, Doc.” He looked quite crestfallen. “No offence, only…”

  “Yes, I know, rumours have been circulating but they are totally false. Everything will continue exactly as before…”

  The rest of my words were drowned in a series of threatening crashes from upstairs interspersed with sundry directions issued in the coarsest of terms. I assumed that the removal men had arrived.

  The first patient who was really pleased to see me and who cast me back into a wallow of nostalgia for bygone times was Maureen Grimshaw. Well Maureen Grimshaw that was; now she was Maureen Clarke. She was one of the first patients I had seen in the early days of the practice when she had been smothered in chicken-pox and aged about four. Her father had been doing time.

  Now she was covered in smiles. “Ooh, I’m ever so glad it’s you,” she said. “I wouldn’t have stopped for Fred.”

  I felt a secret glow of triumph.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with Fred,” she hastened to add, “I mean he’s nice really but ever so young and you’re more like a sort of father…”

  My glow of triumph faded.

  “…What I mean is, when it’s something ever so personal, I mean you couldn’t have someone like Fred, well I suppose you could, I mean I know he’s a doctor, but you feel ever so embarrassed; if you know what I mean?”

  I knew what she meant and she was thrilled to bits when I confirmed her suspicions that she was going to have a baby. She asked me when I thought it would arrive and when I told her said:

  “That’s ever so nice; Dad and Frank will be back by then.”

  “Where have they gone?” I asked, thinking her husband and father taking a holiday in the Bahamas or the Azores.

  She gave me a sidelong glance. “Usual place,” she said. “They done the safe down the Co-op.”

  Almost as if they knew, the surgery continued with a flow of old timers; people I had known before Fred, before Robin, before Sylvia even had played a major part in my life. People who had put their faith in me when I was just beginning and whom I had come to regard as my friends. Their presence put my recent misgivings about general practice into perspective.