Doctor And Son

by Richard Gordon

  ‘I’m honoured to offer him such hospitality as I can,’ the surgeon went on. ‘Though of course it is a little difficult now I’m in the middle of all my plans for the bicentenary celebrations. You knew that Pennyworth got the St Swithin’s council to vote me to take charge?’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Yes, I heard this afternoon.’

  I had also heard of Sir Lancelot declaring publicly this was only because Pennyworth put the motion at five o’clock, when everyone was dying for their tea and would have agreed to anything.

  ‘I think I can get royalty to open the historical exhibition in the Founders’ Hall,’ he told me proudly. ‘And Mr McCurdie’s statue to Humanity will look very well inside the Main Gate. But for some reason your godfather seems to object to – ah, hello, my dear,’ he broke off, as we were interrupted by his wife. ‘Sir Lancelot rang to say he’d be in for dinner as usual.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Simon, that your godfather has become so quickly bored with life as a country gentleman,’ she said to me.

  ‘I think he rather misses the bustle of hospital life,’ I suggested.

  I suddenly remembered that Celia Cambridge and Sir Lancelot hated each other. For years they had conducted a complicated quarrel, the cause of which had long ago been forgotten by everybody including themselves, but which probably started when she kept him in control in the operating theatre by slapping freshly boiled instruments into his upturned thinly-gloved palm. Celia had been a famous theatre nurse at St Swithin’s, and when Mr Cambridge proposed to her after a steamy courtship among the sterilisers all the other nurses who wanted to be catty – and there are always far too few marriageable young surgeons to go round – declared that if she managed her husband like she managed her theatre she’d have him in Harley Street in no time. She was barely tall enough to reach across an instrument trolley, but she had the determination of the Brigade of Guards.

  ‘A pity he cut himself off so completely in the first place,’ murmured Mr Cambridge, staring at the carpet.

  ‘On the contrary, Bertie. I think it was a very good thing for the hospital that you got rid of him.’

  ‘But he’s a very great surgeon, my dear.’

  ‘I’m not denying that for a moment. But if you’ll excuse me for saying so, Simon, the way my husband and all the other men at St Swithin’s let Sir Lancelot go on bullying them year in and year out is nothing short of a disgrace.’

  ‘I was once his house-surgeon, my dear–’

  ‘Which doesn’t give him the excuse for treating you like one for the rest of your life.’

  ‘My godfather can be rather difficult at times,’ I admitted politely.

  ‘I never found him difficult at all. Bertie refuses to stand up to him, and that’s all there is to it.’

  We heard the front door close.

  ‘I’m going back to the kitchen,’ said Mrs Cambridge promptly.

  ‘Celia is a little overwrought today,’ apologised her husband.

  The sitting-room door opened, and Sir Lancelot was with us.

  ‘Cambridge,’ he said at once, ignoring me. ‘I wish you to raise the question of the hospital telephones at the next meeting of the medical council. Must I always be answered by a casualty porter in need of attention by both the speech-therapy and child-guidance clinics? When I tried to get in touch with you this afternoon the man replied most impolitely to my entirely reasonable demands for efficiency, and then abandoned the instrument for fifteen minutes on the casualty reception desk. I was in this period informed by various people that my wife was as well as could be expected, I must drive my ambulance at once to King’s Cross, and my stomach contents were ready if I would care to come and fetch them. Public relations, Cambridge! These days the telephonists are quite as important as the surgeons. I want to talk with you, Sparrow.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘By the way, Cambridge, I shall be conducting a certain amount of personal business while I am here. It might be convenient for me to have the small room across the hall as my study.’

  ‘Perfectly convenient, Lancelot.’

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘I think Celia’s got some…let me see…roast grouse.’

  ‘Yes, I am fond of grouse. Now perhaps you will leave me for a few minutes with this young man.’

  ‘My surprise at the scene I was obliged to participate in at your house,’ Sir Lancelot went on when we were alone, ‘was exceeded only by my amazement at reading your letter of explanation. To be taken in by a confidence trickster, and an amateur one at that, indicates a stage of mental retardation exploited by practitioners of the three-card trick on the corners of racecourses.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about your inconvenience, sir,’ I said humbly.

  ‘And so you should be. It was only with difficulty that I found a bed for the night at the club.’

  He paused, and went on reflectively, ‘But one cannot live in a club for ever. One begins to suspect one is as decrepit as the other members look. It’s a pity I sold the house in Harley Street. I never stay in hotels, of course. They kindly offered me a shakedown here,’ he continued, looking round like a health visitor in some particularly unfortunate slum. ‘Though it is not wholly satisfactory, and Cambridge’s wife can sometimes be very irritating.’

  ‘Do you expect to be staying long, sir?’ I asked hesitantly.

  ‘I must certainly stay a short while to give Cambridge a hand with the bicentenary. God knows what they’re all up to at St Swithin’s. Cambridge is of course perfectly hopeless on committees. He always loses his agenda and forgets to address the chair and votes the wrong way. Anyway, you can never hear yourself speak in the St Swithin’s council for the scream of grinding axes.’

  Doctors are enthusiastic politicians, and visitors to our big hospitals would be surprised to overhear the groups of specialists conversing earnestly in the corridors discussing not matters of life and death, but whether the building sub-committee could get away with painting the professor of bacteriology’s new departmental lavatories bright pink.

  ‘Committees are simply a means of providing our ruling classes with an excuse to waste time and a bit of excitement,’ Sir Lancelot declared. ‘A hundred years ago they had mistresses instead. Anyway, all the real work’s done in the corridors outside. You might pour me a glass of that sherry.’

  ‘What they really need to celebrate the bicentenary is a congress of the International Fraternity of Surgeons,’ he announced as I handed him his drink. ‘I shall have a word with Cambridge about it after dinner.’ Then he asked abruptly, ‘You still have a roof over your heads?’

  ‘Strictly speaking, I’m afraid we haven’t.’

  ‘It is, of course, a matter of supreme indifference to me whether you yourself sleep in the nearest cowshed. It is only your wife who has my sincerest sympathy. You have tackled this hennaed harridan?’

  ‘Mrs Marston? Not with much success, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s rather difficult to handle, sir.’

  ‘If you are incapable of handling difficult women at this stage of your professional career, I despair for you. I can only say – Good God! What in the name of heaven is that?’

  To my alarm he was staring in horror at something on the table behind me.

  I was at first puzzled myself, turning round to discover an object resembling an ostrich egg with holes bored in it. But noticing the word ‘Humanity’ on a small pedestal underneath, I suggested, ‘Perhaps it’s the model for the new St Swithin’s statue?’

  Sir Lancelot flung open the door.

  ‘Cambridge!’

  ‘Yes, Lancelot?’ Mr Cambridge appeared almost at once.

  ‘Do you mean you actually intend to stick that inflated renal calculus on public view?’

  Mr Cambridge followed Sir Lancelot’s finger nervously. ‘I’m afraid it has – er, already been commissioned from Mr McCurdie,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then tell the feller to knock up someth
ing different. If I ordered Humanity I’d expect to get Humanity. Something with angels and so on. Really, Cambridge! I must insist you get the council to countermand that pathological monstrosity at once. Yes, my dear?’

  ‘Dinner is ready,’ announced Mrs Cambridge, a little pale.

  ‘Excellent! I am extremely hungry.’ He turned to me. ‘Would you care to stay for a bite?’

  I explained that mine was waiting at home, and gratefully took the opportunity to say goodbye.

  ‘I once learnt a very interesting way of preparing grouse,’ I heard Sir Lancelot declaring as he made his way towards the dining-room. ‘Which I shall demonstrate to you, my dear, one of these fine days.’

  ‘Celia has asked me to say how delighted we are you’re having a baby,’ said Mr Cambridge, distractedly at the front door. ‘Though – if you’ll forgive me for saying so, Simon – it might have been very much easier for everybody if you’d put off the whole idea until after our bicentenary.’

  15

  ‘“Either you or your husband must first have actually paid twenty-six contributions of any class for the period between the time of entering insurance and the date, or expected date, of your confinement,”’ I read to Nikki.

  ‘“And second have paid or been credited (for example, for weeks of sickness or unemployment) with at least twenty-six contributions of any class for the last complete contribution year before the benefit year in which the confinement takes place, or in which the confinement is expected.” Now what the devil does all that mean?’

  I was studying leaflet NI/17A, the sixteen-page pamphlet by which Her Majesty’s Government instructs her subjects how to claim the compensations they have voted themselves for perpetuating the population. ‘What on earth’s the difference between a contribution year and a benefit year?’ I grumbled.

  I read on: ‘“A benefit year is a period of twelve months beginning five months after the end of the contribution year.” What can they possibly mean by that?’ I asked. ‘It seems an awful pity for the chaps in Whitehall that God didn’t decide on a tidy period of twelve months, with an extra day on leap years.’

  ‘Nine months is quite enough,’ said Nikki, putting down her knitting. ‘Do you know what I’m going to do the moment I’m back in circulation?’

  ‘Buy a lot of tight-waisted dresses?’

  ‘I’m going to storm the platform at the next meeting of the Royal College of Obstetricians and insist on delivering a lecture. I’m going to call it “The Minor Disorders of Pregnancy,” and announce it with a hollow laugh. For months I’ve had cramp, swollen ankles, varicose veins, heartburn, and backache – not to mention breathlessness and frequency – my face is puffy, my hair’s ghastly, and I feel the size of the dome of St Paul’s. And every time I complain to Ann she asks what I’m worrying about, my blood pressure’s fine, and looks at me as though I were being fussy.’

  ‘Don’t worry darling,’ I told her cheerfully. ‘It won’t be for much longer. Pregnancy’s an eminently self-limiting condition.’

  ‘At the moment I’m getting terribly fed up with the whole project.’

  ‘A perfectly normal psychological reaction.’

  Nikki snorted. ‘Heaven knows what would happen if men could be pregnant. I daren’t even begin to think of the fuss that would go on.’

  My wife had burgeoned since the afternoon of Sir Lancelot’s visit. The year had now reached that depressing season when dusk chases dawn so briskly across the English rooftops, and the baby – which had previously seemed almost as theoretical as the drawings in my old embryology books – had a pulse of its own and was kicking like a Twickenham full-back. Its approach was signalled to the neighbours by a string of washed new nappies fluttering from the clothes line in the Marston’s garden, for their broken home was now our own. The negotiations had been managed by Mr Robbinson, and I was frighteningly in debt to something called the Everlasting Building Society, whose directors seemed to take him a good deal out to lunch. Nikki and I lived among a discarded suite of my father’s waiting-room furniture and several fretwork bookcases made by her brother, but I was very content, except when reading advertisements for fast cars. Meanwhile, Dr Ann Pheasant called frequently, poked Nikki’s abdomen like a jolly farmer befriending his pigs, and told me the little nipper was lying beautifully and she thought she could feel the feet.

  My godfather, to my relief, now took little notice of us, being far too occupied reorganising the plans for the St Swithin’s bicentenary. This interference disconcerted not only Mr Cambridge but all the consultants in the hospital, for though they all had agreed that the anniversary should be celebrated they equally strongly all disagreed how. The surgeons wanted to build more operating theatres and the physicians more medical laboratories, the obstetricians proposed a new antenatal clinic and the pathologists a new post-mortem room, the ophthalmologists suggested a new ocular department in place of the disused laundry (which they described as ‘a perfect site for sore eyes’), the hospital chaplain wished the event to be celebrated with stained glass, and the director of the VD department with a champagne party.

  But Sir Lancelot championed none of these schemes. There had been no more fearsome politician in the history of St Swithin’s, and his ability to breathe a word in the right ear or to grasp the right lapel would in Westminster probably have put him in the Cabinet. Although no longer on the council himself, he persuaded sufficient old friends to vote for an International Surgeons’ Conference and had already been heard booming to an advance party of Continental colleagues, ‘Pardon mille fois que je suis en retard pour l’operation, messieurs, mais le big end de mon motor car est allé au coin de Oxford Street.’ He was not a man to let anything so flimsy as a language barrier stand between himself and the personal expression of his opinions.

  Sir Lancelot further disconcerted the St Swithin’s staff by starting operative surgery again, by simply inviting himself to assist Mr Cambridge in his theatre. His notion of assisting at an operation was like the Yarmouth waiter’s of assisting young David Copperfield with his dinner, and after declaring ‘I want you to treat me exactly as yer houseman, Cambridge, and swear at me if I get in the way,’ he would take over more and more of the procedure until he was shortly cutting out anything he fancied himself. Mr Cambridge meanwhile was becoming noticeably short tempered and developing the beginnings of a facial tic.

  ‘Is the old boy still staying with the Cambridges?’ asked Grimsdyke, when Nikki and I met him in London a few days later.

  ‘He’s practically one of the family,’ I told him.

  ‘Poor old Cambridge!’ said Grimsdyke.

  ‘Poor Mrs Cambridge,’ said Nikki.

  We were enjoying what was probably my wife’s final outing, sitting in the bar of a small West End restaurant where Grimsdyke had insisted on taking us in compensation for the dinner snatched from our lips at the Arundel. It was a plush-lined place with pink lighting which gave all the food the look of being laced with cochineal and all the guests of suffering from polycythaemia rubra vera, and the head waiter had given Nikki a look of fearsome disapproval on arrival; but Grimsdyke declared that it was the current place to watch all the fashionable actors, actresses, and politicians feeding themselves, if you wanted to.

  ‘How about splitting a bottle of Bollinger before we eat?’ asked Grimsdyke, turning to more serious topics.

  As I hesitated, he added, ‘Just the thing for Nikki’s condition. All the old midder books advise a glass to keep the mother’s spirits up, along with a daily ride in the Park. And don’t worry about the bill;’ he went on. ‘Old McGlew’s stomach is paying for it.’

  ‘But hasn’t he gone back to his pork butchery?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘He’s in town again. But having got fed up with the way they do boiled fish at the Arundel he’s taken a tasteful flat in Grosvenor Square, where I continue to lavish medical attention on him. I don’t want to boast, but the chap’s come to rely on me so much I pretty well have to tell him when to ch
ange his socks. Besides,’ Grimsdyke added, nodding towards the restaurant entrance. ‘I’ve another guest arriving in a few minutes whom I particularly want to impress. What’s your ogreish old godpop doing, anyway?’ he demanded, ordering the champagne.

  ‘Mainly wrecking all poor old Cambridge’s plans for the bicentenary. Though why he should make such a nuisance of himself I don’t know. Particularly when a few months ago he swore he wouldn’t touch the business with the end of a long pair of forceps.’

  ‘But haven’t you heard the gossip?’ asked Grimsdyke, who always had. ‘Why, in order to mark the bicentenary of the dear old place,’ he went on, as Nikki and I shook our heads, ‘the powers that be are dishing out a knighthood. You know, an honour for all worn by one, like when they give a medal to the captain of a ship which goes down very decently with all hands. It’s all terribly secret, of course,’ he added, lowering his voice slightly. ‘And no one knows who’s going to be the lucky chap. But obviously if old Cambridge runs the fun and games he’s well in the running.’

  ‘But why should a modest fellow like Cambridge let himself in for it in the first place?’ I asked, feeling puzzled. ‘I know he hates messing about with committees and he doesn’t give a damn for titles. Anyway, his practice is big enough to do without a built-in advertisement.’

  ‘Personally I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be a knight,’ Grimsdyke agreed, ‘now that it doesn’t involve something exciting in the line of rescuing beautiful maidens from dragons. You just have to make a lot of speeches and get touched by every charitable organisation in London. Though there must be something in it, I suppose,’ he added inspecting the bubbles in his glass reflectively. ‘Look at those chaps in the Civil Service, slaving away on a pittance – from ten to four, that is – just to call themselves Sir Thingummy Whatnot in Bournemouth for a couple of years before their arteries pack up.’

  ‘For a surgeon who’s reached the top,’ I suggested, ‘I suppose it’s a way of going into posterity.’