Clinical Judgements

by Claire Rayner

  ‘You do that,’ Sian said and jumped down from her stool. ‘And a fat lot of good it’ll do you. Anyone coming back? It’s been a hell of a long day and I’m going to bed —’

  Ted Scribner hadn’t meant to come in for a drink. He’d never been a drinker, just the occasional nip at Christmas or out with friends. Seen too much of the damage it did with his old dad; and anyway it wasn’t good for him the way he was. Years it had been since he could risk a half-pint of an evening. But it was nice to hear a bit of life, have a bit of company, even if you didn’t know anybody actually to talk to. And he had sat and nursed his glass of Cola hoping people would think it was something stronger because no one likes to look a fool, and listened and watched.

  And now, as the nurses began to drift out and he watched them go, he didn’t know what to do or what to think. Here he was, sitting here drowning his misery in Coca-Cola because there wasn’t a bed for him at Old East, and what did he find out?

  It was wicked, that was what it was, downright wicked. All the years he’d paid into the National Health, all the years he’d spent fighting for his country — and with damp-eyed nostalgia he looked back down the long dusty corridor of his own history to the four years he’d spent on Salisbury Plain as a storekeeper — all that he’d done and been, and now this. If he hadn’t heard it with his own ears, he wouldn’t have believed it.

  But what had he heard? He sat and stared into the depths of his glass and tried to remember. He’d had nothing to drink really, no proper booze, so his head ought to be clear, but it wasn’t easy to work it out. There’d been a lot of people laughing and that stupid juke box grinding away and of course the noise of the machine in the corner they were always playing with, which pinged away like some sort of demented clock, so it hadn’t been easy. But the girl had had a clear voice and there’d been no mistaking that she was talking about Old East. Well, all of them were. New at it he shouldn’t wonder; showing off, they were, new and pleased with themselves, all talking about what they’d done and the patients and all. But that one with the hair like a lavatory brush, the common-looking one, she’d had the loudest voice of all, even when she was being quiet and trying to keep things down. He’d heard it all right.

  Someone having a fancy operation the others thought wasn’t right to do. Something dirty it was. People only laughed like that when it was dirty, somewhere between belly button and knees, the way his old mum used to say. And that meant the same as himself really, didn’t it? This man, whoever he was, who was having an operation, was in the same ward he, Ted, was supposed to be in. That nurse had said the Genito-Urinary ward, the ward he would be in tonight if it hadn’t been for an emergency. Was this man having this peculiar operation — she had said he was to have his whatsit chopped off, hadn’t she? He couldn’t have imagined that, it was such a crazy thing to imagine, it had to be true — was he having it in the bed he, Ted, should have been in if only he’d left home that bit earlier this morning, and not got that phone call?

  He sat and thought a long time, long after the last of them had disappeared out into the street, staring at the sugary rubbish in his glass and thinking hard about what he could do, and then got up to go to the Gents, as usual, still thinking. There had to be something that would sort it out. If this man who was having an operation in his bed was really having what that spiky-haired nurse had said he was, then people ought to be interested. The question was, of course, to decide who were the people who would be interested.

  He walked home, still thinking, all the way along the highway, not bothering to get the bus, only having to stop once in a dark corner for the usual, and by the time he got there and found the cat waiting on the step for him, he knew he was going to do something. He wasn’t sure what, but something. They’d pushed Ted Scribner around quite long enough, thank you very much.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Bean salad,’ Esther said gloomily. ‘And aubergine purée. He’s been on a Turkish kick at the wine bar and it didn’t go as well as it should.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Kate said loyally, and reached for another piece of pitta bread. ‘Though I didn’t know it was specifically Turkish.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Richard said. ‘But what the hell — what do they know in Gants Hill? That’s why I’m going to close it and use the place as the base for the sandwich service. I can sell ’em a lot more tuna mayonnaise than I can aubergine purée, and anyway I’m bored with the wine bar. Got to stay open too late to make money. The sandwiches will go better, faster, and I can shut up in good time to get over to Acton.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if the various places were closer together,’ Esther said and refilled glasses all round. ‘But the way it is, I ask you! Here’s us living in Highgate and me working in Shadwell, and Richard belting around between the far East and the far West just to keep everything going. Spends more time in the car then he does in the kitchens. Mad, if you ask me —’

  ‘Like hell it is,’ Richard said and leaned back in his chair and stretched widely so that his shirt parted over his undoubtedly rotund belly, showing it hairy and expansive. ‘I get a chance to be on my own with no one nagging me and I can listen to Oliver on the radio and shout back at him when he trots out all that socialist stuff of his —’

  ‘God help me if you ever get a car phone,’ Oliver said equably. ‘Stay in the car, Richard, do me a favour. I’ve got enough problems with the rest of my listeners without you mucking in.’

  ‘I’ve got a car phone,’ Richard said. ‘But there’s no way I’d use it to call in on your show! Not worth the money.’

  ‘Lovely fella, Esther,’ Oliver said. ‘Where the hell did you find him? No wonder everyone says, “love her, hate him” —’ And he grinned at Kate.

  ‘Lying around somewhere scruffy,’ Esther said. ‘So I just scooped him up out of pity. I’ve got baklava. Anyone interested?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Greek pastries, dripping in honey, and sweet as all get out. Nice enough, though —’

  ‘I thought it was a Turkish kick? How did the Greeks get in there?’ Oliver said and held out his hand for the plate Esther offered him. ‘Or can’t you tell the difference between ’em, Richard? Still stuck in the Cyprus of the fifties, are you?’

  ‘Better than being stuck in the Britain of Wilson and his crew,’ Richard retorted. ‘That chap you had on Friday, ranting on about the bloody welfare state being eroded — where do you find ’em, for God’s sake? Time these lazy buggers were made to get up off their arses and work for a living the way the rest of us do. If they spent half the energy working they spend skiving at the Social Security offices they’d be sitting pretty —’

  ‘Like hell they would,’ Oliver fired up at once and Kate sighed. It was too easy for Richard to rile him; why wouldn’t Oliver see that the man was just being outrageous and trailing his coat? He was nothing like as right wing as he always pretended to be when Oliver was around; he couldn’t be or Esther wouldn’t put up with him. She wasn’t a political person at all, but she had a clear view of what she thought was right and what wasn’t, and she’d never have stayed with Richard so long if he didn’t share most of her opinions about the way the world was run; of that Kate was convinced. But as soon as Oliver was within hearing he was off, castigating everything from the race relations industry, as he called it, to the ‘halfwits knocking on all the time about nuclear disarmament’ and anything else in between he could think of to annoy Oliver. And every time Oliver rose to the bait like a trout to a tickling finger while Richard sat and grinned and pulled at his beard and laughed at him. Bloody man; and she caught Esther’s eye, who looked as bored with the two men as she did, and without exchanging a word the two of them got up and began to collect the dishes to take them out to the kitchen.

  ‘I really resent this sometimes,’ Esther said as she scraped plates and stacked them into the dishwasher. ‘I mean, why shouldn’t they clear up after us? But it’s the only way to get any peace —’

 
‘I wish Richard wouldn’t do it. Oliver’s too easy a target, to be honest —’

  ‘That’s why he does a good programme,’ Esther said. ‘If he didn’t care, it’d come across. At least he’s talking. When you got here I thought he’d brought his own private thunderstorm with him.’

  Kate flushed, and bent her head over the wooden salad bowl she was oiling, rubbing hard so that she didn’t have to look at Esther. ‘Oh, we had a bit of a natter on the way,’ she muttered. ‘Sorry it showed —’

  ‘This is me, remember?’ Esther said and put an arm across Kate’s shoulders and hugged her briefly. ‘Like, I notice things about you. Always did — so what is it this time?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Kate said bitterly. ‘It’s always the same, isn’t it? Those kids of his. I’m trying to make a plan to get away for the last week in October, just the two of us, and he says he can’t, it’s half-term, maybe the children will come over, and he knows and I know Sonia’ll find some way to screw that up. And I said so and then —’ her voice dwindled away. ‘And it all went downhill from there.’

  ‘I know,’ Esther said and her voice was sympathetic and warm. ‘I know. They’re buggers, these men, aren’t they?’

  But of course she doesn’t know, Kate thought. She doesn’t know at all. It had been one of the worst fights they’d ever had; he’d even parked the car at the side of the road to shout at her, not able to trust himself to go on driving, and then she, to her own fury, had wept and at once of course he’d been all compunction and had apologised desperately and admitted that he was wrong; it was just that whenever the children came into any equation he couldn’t get things to work out at all and he didn’t mean to hurt her, and then he’d wept too, and that had made her feel appalling, and she had reached for him to kiss him, and that had been like a fuse newly lit to him; and there, in the car at the side of the road they’d made love in the craziest fashion, like a pair of petting teenagers as the headlights of passing cars in the evening dusk threw fitful glares over them and the roaring engines went by making the car shake, and neither of them had cared as they groped at each other and rubbed and hugged and clung; until both had climaxed virtually simultaneously and then collapsed against the windows of the car, rubbing away with their shoulders the steam their excitement had set there, and breathing heavily.

  They’d laughed of course after that and tidied themselves and finished the journey to the Pelhams, arriving, amazingly, only twenty minutes late. But though Oliver had grinned at her secretly from time to time there had been no doubt in her mind. He was more than usually distressed by what was happening with Sonia and the children, and that made him remote, unreachable in a way. And she felt a little chill of fear move in her and she thought — It’s time I had a baby. And didn’t know why the two thoughts should have melded themselves like that because of all reasons to have her own baby, fighting with Oliver was definitely the worst.

  By the time they came back into the dining room with coffee, the two men had left behind the argument about the welfare state and its benefits and were on to hospital closures. Richard was well away, pontificating loudly — he’d had rather more of the rough red wine than the rest of them — on the crazy waste of money the NHS represented.

  ‘There’s you lot at Shadwell,’ he said to Esther. ‘And St Kitts up the road and God knows how many more hospitals littered around the place, all within a stone’s throw or two of each other. And yes, I know you’re all busy, but that’s only because you’re there. It’s a law of commerce and it’s got to be a law of everything else too. Where something’s offered, made available, people turn up to use it. I opened a restaurant in Acton on a shopping parade where there’d never been a restaurant before, and what happened? Within months I’ve got a regular clientele and plenty of passing trade. What did those people do before? They went without, ate at home or whatever. Well, it’s the same with hospitals and doctors. Set enough of ’em up and the customers come. In the old days when people couldn’t afford to be ill, because they had to pay doctors and hospitals, they didn’t get ill. Now, they get ingrowing toenails and right away they’ve got to have doctors and treatments and bandages and all the rest of it — and a cash handout too if it’s going. Money chucked away because the toenail’d get better by itself left alone. Or they’d deal with it themselves the way people used to —’

  ‘Oh shut up, Richard,’ Esther said wearily. ‘You know that’s all a lot of cobblers. Look at the wine bar, for Christ’s sake. You opened that where there’d never been one before and what’s happened? Even aubergine purée doesn’t bring ’em in and suddenly we’re making sandwiches till they come out of your ears, and God help us all if that doesn’t work because the freezer’ll explode with them. You’re just complaining because you want me to give up my job. I’ve been there before, ducky, heard it all. And I’m not leaving Old East and there’s an end of it.’

  ‘You’d better not,’ Kate said, alarmed. ‘Hey, what is all this? I can’t do without you in my ward, Esther! Richard, what are you on about now?’

  ‘I’m on about common sense,’ Richard said. ‘There she is, putting all that effort into that place, and getting flumpence for it, and if she worked with me in the restaurant, I could open another, really make the business take off. We’d be working for ourselves, not for some gobbling welfare system that eats up money and spits out misery. It’s all it does, and you know it. How many people live that much better a life because of what you lot do, eh? Kidney dialysis? Big deal — they live another year or two, and that’s it. Transplants? Forget it, cost too much to be practical and anyway there aren’t enough to go round. It’s all so daft. Let someone else do it — time you showed a bit of common sense and started to work for your own.’ Richard was getting belligerent now as the level dropped in the third bottle of wine, and Esther looked at him and made a face and then threw a comical look at Oliver.

  ‘Ignore the slob,’ she said cheerfully. ‘He always starts on this when he’s had a good supper. Gets ideas about making us into the Fortes or the Mario and Franco of Highgate, I shouldn’t wonder. He’ll change his mind by tomorrow. If he really had me around all the time, he’d go out of his head —’

  Oliver was staring at Richard. ‘Do you really think that?’ he said suddenly and Richard looked up and blinked at him owlishly.

  ‘Mm? Think what? Mario and Franco —’

  ‘No,’ Oliver said even more abruptly. ‘That illness is encouraged by the availability of care. Honestly, now I know you send me up and argue just for the sake of it most of the time, but this is a new idea. Do you really think that if hospitals closed and doctors went away people’d be better? Less ill?’

  Richard squinted down at his glass. ‘Let me think. I suppose I was shouting off my mouth a bit but — well, yes I do. Not all the way, I suppose. I mean people break legs, get cancer and so forth — but half the time you hear about people being ill, having treatment and what for? I’ve got a girl, a waitress, has to have psychotherapy every other day for God’s sake — NHS doing it for her — and why? Because she’s hooked on these drugs, what d’you call ’em — tranquillisers. GP’s dished ’em out for years, and now she’s trying to get off them, gets attacks of panic, all sorts of crazy things, so she sees this chap for an hour at a time, must be costing a bomb. And she wasn’t ill in the first place, was she? Just scared, or miserable or sorry for herself or something —’

  ‘You’re a hard devil, Richard,’ Esther said. She was sitting now holding her coffee cup in both hands and staring over the rim of it at her husband. ‘Until you get something wrong yourself of course. If you had an ingrowing toenail, I can just hear the way you’d shriek.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t go off to some damned quack over it,’ Richard retorted. ‘I wouldn’t start swallowing happy pills when I got fed up with it, would I? So I wouldn’t need a psychotherapist at Christ knows how much an hour, paid for by the taxpayers, thank you very much. It’s all a con, you know it is — you told me your
self. Half the work you do there at that bloody Old East of yours is a waste of time. They’re either dying and no one can do anything or it’s their own bloody fault. Smoked or ate themselves half to death and then —’

  ‘Or drank themselves sick,’ Esther said dryly and moved the bottle pointedly. ‘And well, yes, you’ve got a point. A lot of the things we do for people are needed because they were so daft in the first place. Like that chap in the side ward; remember him, Kate? The one who died last week — I warned him that would happen to him if he went on drinking the way he did, and what did he do? Destroyed his liver as well as his kidneys — but all the same, they need to be looked after. You can’t say, “It’s your bed, lie in it”, can you?’

  ‘Why not?’ Oliver said, and stared at Esther with a sharp direct sort of stare that made her uncomfortable. ‘When people are the engineers of their own sickness maybe they ought to be left to stew a bit.’

  ‘Ha!’ Richard said. ‘Some bloody socialist you turn out to be under the skin!’ And he laughed. ‘My God, my living has not been in vain, I swear. I’ve talked to the man for half an hour and I’ve converted him to common sense!’

  ‘Like hell you have,’ Oliver said and grinned at him. ‘But you’ve given me a great subject for my big Friday Debate programme next week. Bless you, you old villain. I’ll make a good thing out of that.’

  ‘You see?’ Richard appealed to Kate. ‘You see what sort of bloke you’ve got here? Talks about principles and then uses them shamelessly as programme fodder to help him earn his fat salary. It’s a rotten old world, that it is, that it is.’

  ‘Now just a minute!’ Oliver said and leaned forwards over the table and Esther threw up her hands and got to her feet. ‘That’s it, Kate,’ she said. ‘Let ’em get on with it. Come upstairs and help me choose what to wear for Danny’s school prizegiving. He’ll kill me if I don’t get it right and as far as he’s concerned I’m the worst frump that ever drew breath anyway. And we can talk sense while these two shout at each other —’ And indeed Oliver was already in full flight, defending the importance of bringing real and important issues into his programme and denying vehemently that money played any part at all in his thinking. And Kate looked at him, at the rough untidy greying hair and the sharp-cut lines of his nose and cheeks and sighed. Life would be a lot easier if Oliver weren’t quite so intelligent and quite so thoughtful. Thinking too much was beginning to drive both of them apart. And she went upstairs to go through Esther’s wardrobe feeling as miserable as she could remember being for a very long time.