“It doesn’t matter two hoots what you call it. It comes to the same thing.”
A thought occurred to me. “And when marriages go on the rocks,” I said, “which started off knee-deep in love?”
“The attraction of the genes,” Loveday said, “is only a start. It’s the thing that makes Mr Jones’ habit of going to bed in his socks bearable to Mrs Jones in the first years of marriage. Under the powerful mutual attractions they have for each other she probably doesn’t even notice.”
“And after the first years?”
“Then this thing that you, with stars still in your eyes, call love at first sight, and I put down to chemical reaction, begins to wear off and one of two things will happen. If Mrs Jones has any sense she will realise that, although Mr Jones goes to bed in his socks, which she hates, he is still the same Tom, Dick or Harry she agreed to marry and that he still enjoys her company, works cheerfully to keep her and helps her with the washing-up. She’ll put up with the socks, tell him frequently what a good sort he is, and discover suddenly that the more she tells him the better he is, and they’ll have every chance of living really happily ever after. If Mrs Jones hasn’t any sense – if she refuses to grow up with the years and wants to remain the self-centred girl she was, she’ll close her eyes to his good points, nag him about his horrible habits and will suddenly wake up one day to the fact that he doesn’t even help her with the washing-up any more but toddles down to the pub. Then all you have left is the stuff of which unfortunately most marriages seem to consist: Mr and Mrs Jones, two strangers, sharing nothing but a name, jogging along in various stages of animosity from the benign to the malevolent, under the same roof.”
“Aren’t you being a little cynical?” I said. “After all, I can’t see why just because Mr Jones goes to bed in his socks the marriage has to break up.”
“But then you aren’t Mrs Jones,” Loveday said, “and anyway the socks are only the jumping-off point. If you think they are the slightest bit unimportant go and sit for a day in the divorce courts. If it isn’t Mr Jones’ socks, it is Mrs Jones’ natural verbosity which her husband once thought so attractive, that provides the first spark.” Loveday carefully broke the long ash from his cigar into an ashtray.
“Nothing continues to grow without a little encouragement,” he said seriously, “not even love. It just dries up.”
I smiled.
“It’s no laughing matter,” Loveday said. “Marriage may be a funny institution but it has to be taken seriously. If it’s to work, that is.”
I was just about to pursue the conversation further when the phone, which was at Loveday’s elbow, rang. He picked up the receiver.
“No, I’m not the doctor,” he said, then “Thank God” to me and handed me the phone.
It was the district midwife phoning from the home of a patient whose baby I had promised to deliver.
Loveday followed me into the surgery and watched while I checked my equipment: rubber gloves, forceps…
“Big stuff,” Loveday said.
“It won’t be necessary. She’s a hefty multip. This is her sixth, I think – sixth or seventh, I always lose count.”
“Good Lord!” Loveday said. “I didn’t think that sort of thing happened nowadays.”
“She’s an Italian girl. Married an English chap who was over there in the army. It doesn’t seem to worry her. She’s crazy about all those children but homesick for Italy. The neighbours leave her alone rather: our usual attitude to foreigners. They think there’s something a bit odd about her when she goes on producing a child year after year, and give her a wide berth.”
“Ha!” Loveday said.
“Unintentional,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable; I don’t suppose I shall be long. The child will most probably have fallen out by the time I get there; she’s second-staging already.”
“I’ll wait a bit. If you’re too long you may have to buy yourself another bottle of apricot brandy.”
He saw me off at the front door, and shivered in the night air.
“Thank God I decided on dentistry,” he said. “Nine till five, five days a week.”
“Don’t pity me,” I called from the car. “I like it.”
And it was true. At home, sitting before the fire with Loveday, I had felt sleepy, lethargic, looking forward to nothing so much as bed. Now I was awake, exhilarated almost, because I was working and I liked my job.
The single street lamp threw eerie shadows down the tiny cul-de-sac on the Council estate.
The door of number twelve was open. On the stairs, in underwear and a variety of odd jumpers which represented their night attire, sat four of Graziella Smith’s five or six children.
“’Allo, Doc!” said the eldest, who went to school.
A small one said: “Ciaou!” shyly and buried her face in her sister’s lap.
Upstairs Graziella was rolling her mountainous frame in the bed and moaning: “Mamma mia, Mamma mia, Mamma mia!”
“Push, dear!” Sister Mildmay was saying calmly from the end of the bed.
“Mamma mia, Mamma mia, Mamma mia!” Graziella acknowledged me with her eyes but was too busy to say anything.
I took off my jacket, rolled up my sleeves and went into the bathroom to get scrubbed up. When I came back Graziella, with the help of Sister Mildmay, had given birth to a large boy baby.
“Too late!” Sister Mildmay said triumphantly.
“Don’t swank,” I said. “You didn’t give me much of a chance.”
“I only just got here myself,” she said, working competently. “She’s been having pains all day but didn’t say anything.”
While Sister Mildmay dealt with the baby who was now screwing up his ugly little face and crying, I waited for the expulsion of the afterbirth. I doubted if Loveday would have made much headway with the apricot brandy before I was back with him.
“Where’s Mr Smith?” I asked.
Sister Mildmay said something, but just then the woman in the house next door started to shout at her husband and a stream of swear words came clearly through the thin dividing wall.
When it was quiet again, except for the tiny wail of the baby, Sister told me that a neighbour had gone to fetch Graziella’s husband from his work where he was on night shift.
Ten minutes later, Sister Mildmay, still making soothing noises, was settling the baby in its basket on the floor.
“She seems to be bleeding fairly heavily,” I said. “Will you check her blood pressure for me, Sister, if the baby’s all right?”
It began to look as if everything wasn’t to be quite as straightforward as I had imagined. As the bleeding increased, I examined the abdomen and found that the afterbirth was incompletely separated from the uterus.
“I’m going to try to expel it,” I said.
Sister Mildmay wound the cuff of the sphygmomanometer skilfully round Graziella’s arm. The baby stopped crying and it was suddenly quiet.
“BP’s falling,” Sister Mildmay said, “and she’s looking awfully pale.”
I straightened up, having been unsuccessful in my attempt to remove the placenta.
“She’s lost roughly two pints, I should say.” Sister Mildmay bustled round trying to reduce the chaos but keeping one eye on the patient.
The baby, the basket in the corner tilted so that its feet were raised above its head, started to cry again, then stopped. Outside one of the children began to whimper, “Mamma! Mamma!”
“See if you can get them into bed,” I said. “We shall probably be here for some time.”
When Sister Mildmay came back it was obvious that I was going to need some help in removing the placenta because it would have to be done with an anæsthetic. The bleeding hadn’t stopped and Graziella would also need a blood transfusion. I went out to the call-box to ring the Obstetric Flying Squad. This service was an extremely useful one to general practitioners who did midwifery. It consisted of an ambulance which was always at the ready, an obstetric house surgeon, suppli
es of blood for transfusions, and extra nurses. For Graziella Smith I needed the help of the obstetrician so that one of us could give the anæsthetic while the other manually removed the placenta, and some blood to replace that which she had lost.
Back in the bedroom we waited. Graziella was almost unconscious. She had lost about four pints of blood and her pulse was barely palpable. I strained my ears for the sound of the ambulance bell and thought I heard it; the woman next door began to swear again and I wasn’t sure. I went down to the front door to look.
The white ambulance, ghostly in the lamplight, turned into the cul-de-sac. Its doors opened and down the steps ran three dark-cloaked nurses each carrying part of the equipment necessary for the blood transfusion. Following them, also hurrying, came the white-coated doctor.
“Hovis Brown!” I exclaimed as he passed under the street lamp.
He looked at me but didn’t slow down.
“Good Lord!” he said. “It’s you!”
We had no time for further conversation except about our patient.
Hovis and his organisation somehow managed not to fall over each other in the tiny bedroom, and we set about our first job of replacing some of the blood which Graziella had lost and was still losing.
With some trepidation, I tried to get the transfusion needle, through which the blood would flow, into the vein in Graziella’s arm. Her blood pressure was by now so low that the vein was practically collapsed. To my surprise I managed it at the first attempt and released the clip on the tube which connected the needle with the bottle of blood. It began to flow rapidly.
When the first bottle of blood was empty we replaced it with a second, a third and then a fourth. While it was flowing we got everything ready for the removal of the placenta.
By the time she had received the contents of the fourth bottle of blood Graziella’s blood pressure had risen and her pulse was strong enough for what we had to do.
I administered the chloroform on an open mask while Hovis, masked and gowned, removed the placenta from the birth canal.
I gave her an injection. Almost immediately the womb contracted and the bleeding, which had now been going on for over an hour, stopped.
Graziella who, because of the loss of blood, had been unaware of what had been happening, heaved herself up.
“Cosa c’é?” she said. Then looked round at all of us. “Watta matta, Dottore?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “You just lost a little blood which we had to replace.” I pointed to the corner. “You have a lovely little boy.”
She looked suspiciously at Hovis’ white gown. “I seeck, me?”
“Not at all. You’re fine. Bella!”
“Grazie,” she said and sank back. “Multa stanca…”
It was hardly surprising that she was tired.
The crisis over, Hovis and I went down to the kitchen, leaving the nurses to tidy up Graziella, and the chaos. One of his organisation had made coffee and was raiding Graziella’s larder for the sugar which she couldn’t find.
“That’s some set-up you’ve got,” I said to Hovis whom I hadn’t seen since our student days, and whose real name I was unable to remember. “I’ve never had to use it before.”
“Always ready to oblige,” he said, his hair as blond as ever, if thinner, and sticking out at right angles from his florid face.
“I must say I was pleased to see you.”
He sipped his coffee. “Ugh!” he said. “You let the milk boil, Nurse. Everybody always is.”
“Her pulse was nearly non-existent,” I said, still surprised at the hæmorrhage Graziella had decided to have.
“Don’t let it worry you,” Hovis said; “just send for Uncle Hovis and his concert party.”
His facetiousness reminded me of Faraday.
“You hospital doctors are all the same,” I said; “you never see a patient more than once or twice. It’s all the same to you if they live or die!”
“By that I gather you’re wearing yourself out in GP,” Hovis said.
I nodded. “At least I know the names of my patients. It’s not just ‘that woman up in Florence Nightingale with the carcinoma of the pancreas or the old boy in William Pitt with the pulmonary embolism.’”
“I never could remember names, anyway,” Hovis said, “so it’s just as well I’m not in your line.”
The nurse refilled our coffee cups, then Hovis said: “By the way, have you any idea what happened to Spiky O’Flanagan?”
I remembered the tufty-haired Irishman who had been in our year and who had been more preoccupied than most of us with the pursuit of skirts.
“Didn’t he marry that girl he got into trouble, and buy a practice in Melbourne?”
“Maybe. What do you think of Marshlake getting a consultantship at the National?”
We finished the coffee before we had exhausted the long list of acquaintances with whom we had sweated away the long years in hospital and sworn never to lose touch with but, after qualifying, had never seen again.
As we stood up, stretching, to go and have another look at the patient, Hovis said: “By the way, haven’t you got a fellow called Archie Compton somewhere round here?”
I felt my hackles rise. “Yes. Do you know him?”
“We were together while I was doing my fellowship. He was with Sir Peter Tollings for a couple of years – the apple of his eye.”
“So he does know something about skins, then?”
“I should say. As much as Sir Peter, if not more. Felt he had to have a change, though, after the accident. Went to pieces, poor fellow. I heard he was having a shot at GP round here.”
“What accident?” We stood in the tiny hallway where the red wallpaper was peeling at child level.
“Didn’t you know? His wife and baby were both killed in that train smash at Wapping. Nice girl. Pretty. He brought her up to the hospital once or twice before they were married. Hart, I think her name was. Pamela or Muriel or something. Terribly, terribly sad!”
“Hart?”
“Think so. Let’s see what’s going on upstairs.”
The room was now magically tidy and the patient, in a neatly made bed, was sleeping soundly.
The hospital nurses put on their capes and gathered up the equipment they had brought. Together, with Hovis, they disappeared as efficiently as they had come, if less urgently.
“Well,” Sister Mildmay said, “we didn’t expect that.” She leaned over to look at the baby. “Bonny little chap!”
I left her to wait for Mr Smith and set off in the quiet night for home, my brain whirling with thoughts of Graziella Smith’s post partum hæmorrhage, Hovis Brown, Sylvia, and Archibald Compton. I passed the traffic lights at red; fortunately the road was deserted.
When I got home Loveday had gone; so had half the apricot brandy.
Fifteen
It was good to have Sylvia home. The house felt normal again and I was able to relax.
The busy flow of flus, coughs and colds was beginning, with the warmer weather, to die down and I was usually able to finish most of my visits in the mornings. In my free afternoon hours I decided, since time was getting on, to paint the small, sunny room we had agreed to make into the nursery. There had been no difficulty in selecting which room the new addition was to occupy; the trouble started when I had to decide upon the paint. Not that it was really trouble, but a sort of clashing under-current of wills that never quite came out into the open.
It had begun with what Humphrey Mallow had told us when Sylvia came out of the hospital.
The tests he had carried out showed that she had no kidney lesion, but in view of the hypertension and the headaches she was getting because of it, he had told us both that he would strongly advise us, in Sylvia’s interest, to content ourselves with one child. We were both a little disappointed as we had always visualised ourselves with a large family, at any rate anything up to four. It wasn’t long, though, before we both managed to reorientate our ideas and came to the conclusion that
if we produced one healthy baby and Sylvia remained well we should both be very happy. One evening, though, we discovered quite by chance that we each had very different ideas about what was to be our only child.
I had had a particularly long and arduous surgery during the course of which I had seen an acute appendix and an early pneumonia, both of which had held me up. It was nearly nine o’clock, and I had been going on steadily since six, when I pressed the buzzer for the last patient. It was not a patient: it was a young man with an enormous handlebar moustache and a briefcase, who travelled for one of the drug houses. He bounced in jauntily, although he must have been waiting patiently to see me for over an hour.
“No, Mr Piper,” I said wearily, totting up in the day book the number of patients I had seen. “Not tonight. I’m too tired and I’d like to have my dinner. Call in later in the week, there’s a good chap.”
Mr Piper, sitting on the examination couch, was already unfastening the straps of his briefcase. He was one of the more persistent of the drug firm representatives, who phoned, called or waited patiently until one’s resistance was so worn down that it was usually quicker to let them have their say than argue.
That night, though, I was determined. Since Mr Piper had developed, by virtue of his calling, a hide like a rhinoceros and was completely impervious to hints, I stood up and held open the door firmly.
With the speed and sleight of hand of a conjuror, he had strewn the couch with an assortment of highly coloured literature.
“I won’t keep you one moment, Doctor,” he said rapidly, his moustache twitching as he talked. “As you are well aware, the need for sedation in modern life has been gone into ad nauseam and I don’t need to remind you about stress phenomena, anxiety states, tension…”
“Mr Piper!” I said.
“…what is needed more than anything is a sedative that is safe, effective, non-addicting, and with no aftereffects. Now we have something that supplies all these qualities – and a few more besides…”
“Mr Piper, please!” My voice was hoarse. I was no match for Mr Piper. I sat down at my desk and put my head in my hands. The voice went on:
Love on My List Page 13
