‘Lionel! Have you gone mad–’
‘Absolutely out of the question.’ The dean was a small man, but he could tower over Sharpewhistle. He jabbed him with his forefinger, hard on the sternum. ‘How dare you ask to marry my daughter. You, you bounder. You cad, who goes round putting innocent girls in the family way.’
‘But, sir–’
‘Shut up. Get out of my house at once. I’m not at all certain I shan’t want you at my office tomorrow morning, to answer for a blatant piece of student indiscipline. Thank God I didn’t open the champagne!’
‘Father, please be reasonable–’
‘You’re not much better, my girl. It takes two to make a quarrel or a baby. When did all this happen, anyway? Not under my roof, I hope.’
‘It was the night of the May ball.’
‘Oh? In your friend Tulip’s flat? I’ll have her in my office in the morning for sure.’
‘It was in Edgar’s digs. I didn’t go to her flat.’
‘Ah! You deceived me?’
‘Well, I… I suppose I’d drunk too much champagne.’
‘So you were fuddled? Half-senseless? Your inhibitions gone. A sitting target for ugly little pocket-sized predators like Sharpewhistle here. And who poured this champagne into you? I don’t have to ask.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘I noticed it. Don’t think I didn’t. Sir Lancelot, absolutely plying you.’
‘Father, why must you blame everyone in sight? Sir Lancelot was being very kind. He said a shy girl like me needed a skinful before she got in the mood.’
‘Mood? What mood?’
‘Sir Lancelot said that premarital relations were far less likely to kill you than smoking cigarettes, more enjoyable and much cheaper. That it was the only pleasure the Government hadn’t yet got round to putting a tax on.’
‘But what extraordinary advice for Sir Lancelot to volunteer to a young woman! To the daughter of his oldest and dearest friend and neighbour, into the bargain.’
‘That’s not fair. If you must know, I asked Sir Lancelot’s advice outright, during the party. That’s what he gave me.’
A door slammed. The dean spun round, staring through the window. Sir Lancelot was leaving his house, in ginger tweed knickerbockers and deerstalker, in one hand a pair of fishing-rods in cloth covers, on his back creel and net, in his other hand an overnight bag. The dean threw the window open.
‘Lancelot – !’
The surgeon glared. ‘Been making a lot of noise in there, haven’t you? Sounds like the last act at Covent Garden.’
‘I wish to speak to you.’
‘Sorry, cock. I’ve suddenly decided to go fishing.’
‘Good evening, dean. I’ve been ringing your bell for some time, but nobody seemed to hear it.’
The dean turned his head, to see Dr Bonaccord on his doorstep. ‘What the devil do you want?’
‘It was about my dyspepsia–’
‘What the hell do you mean, Bonaccord, coming along at this moment of supreme crisis in my life, and talking about your horrible dyspepsia? Though as a matter of fact,’ he added, ‘it might not be a bad idea if you came in and took a look at my daughter. Lancelot! Don’t you dare creep off like that. I demand an explanation.’
‘For God’s sake, dean. What’s the trouble? My plumbing rumbling again, I suppose? I assure you that I have problems enough of my own.’
‘Your behaviour is utterly disgraceful. I withdraw my offer of that delightful academic job.’
Sir Lancelot frowned.
‘What job? In my entire life you’ve never offered me so much as a drink.’ He started to move away.
‘Stop! I want to talk about Muriel.’
‘That is not a subject I choose to delay my going fishing, however delightful.’
‘You have ruined her.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That is not putting it too strongly. You are responsible for fathering my grandchild.’
Sir Lancelot stared at the psychiatrist. ‘I say, Bonaccord. Be a good chap, will you? Get on to the relevant authorities and have an order made for the poor fellow to be put inside. Though if I were you, I wouldn’t venture inside his house without the strongarm squad. Absolutely raving, obviously. Sorry I can’t stay to help – with a bit of luck I’ll be tranquillizing myself on the banks of the Kennet before it gets dark. Perhaps you’d care for a nice brace of trout?’
10
‘Ah!’ cried the dean. ‘Not another! For God’s sake, not another.’
‘Lionel,’ said his wife.
‘That’s two entire teams, a referee, and a pair of linesmen.’
‘Lionel!’
The dean raised his head from the pillow. ‘Dear me. I must have been having another of my dreams.’
‘You were counting out loud.’
‘Yes, I remember now. I was in St Swithin’s and was suddenly called into the maternity department to perform a delivery. I was in a panic, as I’d absolutely forgotten all my midwifery – it was one of those awful dreams, you know, like when you’re on the stage in front of a huge audience and you’ve no idea of your lines and stark naked into the bargain–’
‘Perhaps, Lionel, you’d better go and see Dr Bonaccord after all?’
‘There was the mother, groaning away and bearing down. I remember distinctly, I sat down between her legs in the lithotomy position, and the babies came popping out like rabbits from a warren–’
‘To quote from my favourite book, The Diary of a Nobody, nothing is so completely uninteresting as other people’s dreams.’
‘The funny thing was their all being in football togs. There were twenty-five babies altogether. I remember distinctly thinking they were Chelsea v Arsenal. Strange. Must be through looking at the television on Saturdays. I can’t think of any other reason for having such a strange – Oh God!’
His wife got out of bed. ‘It’s almost eight o’clock.’
‘Josephine, I’ve just remembered. That ghastly business about Muriel. I suppose I didn’t dream that too?’ he added hopefully.
‘Muriel’s already left the house.’
Supported on an elbow, the dean picked irritably at the turned-down sheet. ‘I wish she hadn’t rushed off like that. I wanted to speak to her. I hardly had a chance last night, with her going upstairs and slamming the door.’
‘Can you blame her, after you made such an exhibition of yourself?’
‘She mustn’t let this get round St Swithin’s. It would undermine my authority with the students completely. That’s difficult enough to maintain as it is.’
‘I do hope she got herself some breakfast.’
‘Why are you so obviously taking her side?’
‘She needs all the support she can get, poor dear.’ Josephine went through the door into their bathroom. The dean grunted, and lay glaring across the bedroom. He reached for his large glasses and the four sheets of paper he had been reading the night before. Taking his ballpoint, he scratched out some lines on the last page. He wrote instead. His final years were made painful for his friends by a depravity which made him actively corrupt young persons of the other sex, instead of guiding them away from the shaming temptations of the age. The dean got out of bed, in his blue-and-white spotted pyjamas.
‘She won’t have an abortion, I suppose?’ the dean asked gloomily, as his wife turned off the bath-taps. ‘I could easily fix it with the hospital. One needs a green form, I believe. It’s the only one the gynae people say to arrive by first-class mail.’
‘No, she won’t.’ Josephine lay splashing her good-looking legs in the water.
‘I can’t understand Muriel, when half the young women of Europe are flocking here for that specific purpose.’ He leant against the bathroom door-post. ‘Or she could have the child adopted. But no, I don’t think so. I do not at all like the idea of a face which might be similar to my own amid a family of persons I do not know, nor perhaps would even care to.’
‘All this scratching about is quite unnecess
ary, Lionel. She’s going to marry Edgar.’
‘She’s not.’
‘You’re quite impossible.’ Josephine soaped herself with a large yellow sponge. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘Quite frankly, I think he’s a little pustule. He does all the things I find particularly distasteful in the hospital.’ The dean mounted his clinical-looking bathroom scales. ‘He pushes himself to the front of all my classes. He asks intelligent questions to which he already knows the answers. And he corrects my own diagnoses. That he is sometimes right and I am wrong has nothing to do with it. The students are all far too uppish these days. They’re completely lacking in the basic Hippocratic art of concealing the fact they consider their teachers to be a doddering bunch of old fools.’ He started fiddling with weights on the balance-arm. ‘Furthermore, Sharpewhistle has an enormously inflated opinion of himself over this television quiz rubbish. He has no conversation. He is overweight. And he smells like an attendant in a sauna bath. But there’s another reason Muriel isn’t going to marry him. She doesn’t like him, either.’
Josephine lay in the scented warm water in silence.
The dean inspected the balance. ‘It can’t be over ten stone, surely?’ he murmured. ‘You must agree, Josephine? If only from seeing them together last night? A girl announcing her engagement is supposed to look radiant, even in these unromantically lecherous days. Muriel only looked as she did when her wisdom teeth were giving trouble.’
‘I’m afraid I do agree,’ his wife said quietly. ‘However hard I’ve been trying to convince myself otherwise. But…well, he is the father of her child, as they used to put it at Drury Lane.’
‘She must have been out of her head to let an unprepossessing, odoriferous creature like him… Though of course, she had no control of herself at the time,’ he added warmly. ‘She was full of Lancelot’s champagne.’
‘She wasn’t the only one that night, dear.’
The dean shrugged. He tapped the balance vigorously with his finger. ‘It must be under ten stone, on my careful diet. Well, if I was a bit tiddly myself, it was only because one doesn’t often get a free drink out of Lancelot, and it seemed worth making the most of it.’
Josephine pulled the bath-plug out with her toe. She gave a sudden giggle. ‘When I was Muriel’s age, you were always dragging me into bed, weren’t you dear? Ah, well. Times have changed.’
‘In those days I didn’t have so many things on my mind. Very demanding, being the dean you know.’
‘I’m sure.’
The dean tried standing with one foot off the scales. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, to think that I perform sex exactly the same way as all other men?’
His wife started towelling herself. ‘What are you going to do about that vice-chancellor’s job?’
‘Ask Frankie to offer it to Lancelot. I don’t think she’ll mind. Hampton Wick are desperate for anybody.’
‘But will Lancelot take it?’
The dean switched on his electric razor. ‘There’s a good chance. He’s very fond of Frankie. In fact, he’s the only person at St Swithin’s she can twist round her little finger. That he is himself an utterly amoral person – not so much permissive as actually stimulative – should recommend him for running a sexual cesspool like that.’
‘But will he take it when he hears you’ve already turned it down?’
The dean laughed. ‘He won’t hear anything of the kind. Frankie’s no fool.’ He gave a crafty look. ‘And neither am I, dear, eh?’
‘Well, what are we going to do about Muriel?’
‘Oh God. Let me turn to that after I’ve got some bacon and eggs inside me.’
Muriel was at that moment breakfasting off a bar of nut chocolate, alone in the St Swithin’s library, in front of her on the table an open copy of Diagnostic Procedures in Clinical Practice, of which she had not read a word. She sat for some time staring blankly ahead, her long fingers playing with the remains of the chocolate packet. Then she abruptly swept them up and dropped them in the wastepaper basket, snapped shut the book, tucked it under her arm and strode out. She had to find someone to talk to.
It was another sunny morning, and Tulip Twyson was coming briskly through the gate from the main road, notebooks in hand and blonde hair streaming behind. As Muriel hurried towards her across the courtyard, Tulip stopped dead.
‘Muriel! What’s the matter, love? You look as though you’d seen a ghost. Of one of your own patients, too.’
‘You remember what I told you yesterday? About how I was worried? Well–’
‘Oh, dear! You mean, you really are preggers?’
Muriel nodded glumly. ‘It’s for sure. I took a specimen up to the path lab for old Winterflood to test.’
‘Perhaps he just made a mistake? He’s getting shaky enough these days.’
‘I thought of that. I got him to repeat the test, there and then, under my own eyes. I watched his every move. Taking the urine from the specimen bottle – which had my name on. Putting a drop on the black slide. Adding two drops of the reagent–’
‘No agglutinization?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. Not a trace.’
‘Poor Muriel! That does sound pretty definite, doesn’t it? Of course, these immunilogical tests are not one hundred per cent accurate–’
‘They’re ninety-eight per cent. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid it does rather seem you’ve got a bun in the old oven.’
‘It’s a terrible shock. Apart from anything else, it’ll ruin my chances of the gold medal.’
‘That little fat-arsed tick Sharpewhistle will win it.’
‘It’s his bun.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Edgar Sharpewhistle’s. He put it in the oven. After the May ball.’
‘No! But Muriel, you must have been stoned out of your mind?’
‘I was a bit woozy, I suppose. More than a bit, possibly. But I admire Edgar, you know. Very much.’
‘Of course, I’m sure he’s very charming and delightfully entertaining when you get him close to,’ Tulip said quickly.
‘In fact, I’m going to marry him.’
‘Isn’t that taking pregnancy rather too seriously altogether?’
‘I’m in love with him.’
‘Now you’re being silly.’
‘Well…perhaps I shall grow to love him afterwards. They say it happens.’
‘Listen, Muriel, you’re hardly the first girl to get herself in pod when she was laid after a party. If they all married the fellers, they’d be doing nobody any good except the divorce lawyers. I know as well as anybody – when you’re pissed, anything in trousers looks lovely.’
Muriel looked at her imploringly. ‘Then what should I do?’
‘Gynae out-patients is at nine.’
She hesitated. ‘Do you know, Tulip, I deliberately sought you out this morning. I suppose because I knew subconsciously that you’d persuade me to change my mind. And so take half the responsibility for it. I could never have decided on an abortion all on my own. I relied on you to lead me astray. I’m sorry.’
‘A little human failing we see every day, isn’t it, love? You should never ask for advice unless you’re certain it’s really going to be unnecessary.’
‘I suppose I’d better tell…the father.’
‘I’d say he had a certain interest.’
Muriel looked at her watch. It was just after nine o’clock. She knew her studious fiancé would be in the hospital somewhere. He generally liked to spend an hour before ward-rounds in the pathology museum, looking at the bottles. Leaving Tulip, she retraced her steps of the morning before. This time she did not mount the fire-escape, but went through the main entrance of the pathology building into the room occupying its ground floor. This was filled with racks containing glass bottles of white spirit, in which were items which people had brought into St Swithin’s and left without. The only living being in the room was Edgar Sharpewhistle, by the
window in his short white coat, soulfully gazing at a jar containing a large spleen with purple patches all over it.
‘Edgar, I want to talk to you.’
‘Oh, hullo…my love.’
‘About the baby. I’m going to lose it.’
He put the spleen on the window ledge with a deliberate motion. ‘Changed your mind, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know if I care for that.’
‘What do you mean? When I told you I was pregnant, the first thing you said was, “Let’s get you emptied as soon as the clinic’s open”.’
‘It just seems a pity now. As we’re getting married.’
‘That won’t be necessary, of course.’
Sharpewhistle picked up the bottle again and turned it round slowly, looking at it keenly. ‘I don’t know about that. I asked your folk. I got myself in the right psychological state for marriage. I’ve given notice at my digs. I’ve been to a lot of trouble.’
‘I’m extremely sorry if you’ve put yourself out unnecessarily. But it will be less bother in the long run.’
‘But I want to marry you, my love. I’m dead set on it, to tell the truth.’
Muriel tapped her foot impatiently. ‘Of course you’re not. I only got you into my parents’ house at all last night by threatening to make a hysterical scene in the middle of the hospital courtyard.’
‘I’ve been thinking it over. Your dad was right. We’d make an exceptional couple, with our intelligence. We’d go far together at St Swithin’s. Your father may be a mean old devil, but he’d certainly ease the way.’ Sharpewhistle laughed. ‘There never was one for nepotism like the dean, that’s what everyone says. He’s noticeable even in a place riddled with it like St Swithin’s.’
Muriel looked at him witheringly. ‘If you had any self-respect, you’d rely on your own brains to get ahead. Anyway, why should you need any help at St Swithin’s? From my father or from anyone else.’
‘That’s fair enough. I could stand on my own feet here. But St Swithin’s isn’t the whole world, you know, despite a lot of people inside seeming to think so. I’m not going to waste my talents away here. Certainly not! I want to spread my wings. And your dad let out last night that he was getting that vice-chancellor’s job at Hampton Wick. The students are bright enough there, even if they are a little high-spirited now and then. And an academic career is something I’ve always thought myself admirably suited to.’
Doctor On The Brain Page 7
