Doctor at Large (4 page)

‘Of course, Doctor.’ He picked up another bundle of papers. ‘I thought that you wished to leave the country for some reason or another… Of course we have many practices. I wouldn’t like to say how many bright young men like yourself I’ve set on their way. It’s a sort of hobby, really. This’ – he indicated the office–’ is not my true habitat. Oh, dear me, no! You’d be surprised if you knew what it was. I have many interests. But once’ – he became sad – ‘the life of one I hold very dear to me was saved by the skill of a young doctor. Now it is my only pleasure in life, helping such young men along their difficult path.’ He looked as if he were about to burst into tears, and I was beginning to feel it was my lucky day. ‘Some might call me eccentric, but–’ He smiled faintly, and dabbed beneath his spectacles with a handkerchief. ‘Forgive an old man’s ramblings. I am always touched at the sight of a doctor at the threshold of his career.’

He became more businesslike and continued, ‘Here’s just the thing for you. Semi-rural in the Midlands – the Dukeries, you know.
Locum tenens
. I know the doctor personally. A most excellent gentleman and a fine clinician, a fine clinician. You will learn a great deal from him. And the remuneration, Doctor! All found and ten guineas a week. Not to be sneezed at, eh?’

I hesitated.

‘It’ll be gone by lunch-time, I guarantee.’

‘Semi-rural, you said?’

‘More than semi.’

‘All right. I’ll take it.’

‘You’re very wise, I think. Now I expect you’d like some money?’ He chuckled. ‘Forgive me, Doctor, forgive me! An old man’s privilege. I know with young doctors things are often a little – strained. You’ll need your books. And some equipment. Eh?’ He drew an old leather wallet from his pocket, took out a packet of white notes, and laid them on the desk. ‘A hundred pounds would perhaps be of use to you?’

‘But – but you mean as a gift?’ I said in amazement. ‘It’s ridiculous! I couldn’t take it.’

‘Well, let us call it a loan, then? Yes, a loan. I understand your embarrassment perfectly, Doctor–’

‘I haven’t a scrap of security–’

‘That doesn’t worry me in the least. Not in the least. Just to make you feel it’s no more than a business transaction perhaps you’ll sign here–’

I signed.

‘There’s a little interest, to make it less personal,’ he admitted. ‘Fifteen per cent per annum, payable quarterly. Now perhaps you’ll favour me with a signature on this too, Doctor–’

‘What is it?’

‘Just the usual form about the practice. I take a small commission to pay for the overheads. So expensive these days.’ He blotted both my signatures. ‘That’ll be thirty-three and a third per cent of your salary for the first year. After twelve months you won’t have to pay me a cent. Not a cent. Good morning, Doctor. Here’s the address of your practice. Go as soon as you can, won’t you? The train service is very good. Don’t lose touch with me, now. That would never do. Send me a postcard. Goodbye, Doctor. Goodbye. Next, please.’

I descended the stairs feeling as though I had nodded to a friend at an auction and found myself the purchaser of a large suite of Chippendale furniture. At the bottom I bumped absently into someone coming through the door.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.

A violent blow on the back sent me staggering.

‘Richard, you old bastard.’

‘Grimsdyke!’

We shook hands delightedly. Although we were close companions in medical school, I hadn’t seen him since the afternoon he failed his finals.

‘What the devil are you doing in this den of thieves?’ he demanded at once.

‘Looking for work.’

‘God help you! Is Father Bloodsucker up aloft?’

I looked puzzled.

‘Old Pycraft – the vile criminal in a frock coat and brass glasses.’

I nodded.

‘Damn! Sure it wasn’t old Berry? Tall thin character, bald as a pillarbox?’

‘No, it’s Pycraft all right.’

He frowned. ‘I thought it was Berry’s day. He’s almost human, sometimes. But Pycraft – Oh, hell! We must go and have a drink.’

‘In case there’s any danger of this developing into an all-day session,’ I said as we stepped out, ‘I must warn you that I’ve just been given a job to go to.’

‘What, by those people? Then you’ll need a drink. Come on, they’re open.’

The lights of the pub next door sent a warm yellow welcome through the fog. The bar was old-fashioned and cheerful, with a sprightly young fire leaping in the grate and the landlord screened away behind an arrangement of mahogany and frosted glass that afforded a cosiness contemptible to modern pub architects.

After several minutes’ conversational back-slapping, Grimsdyke ordered the drinks and asked through the barrier, ‘Have you the morning paper –
Times
or
Telegraph
? Thanks.’

He searched for the City page and read closely through it, moving his lips.

‘Forgive me, Richard,’ he said, glancing up. ‘I was all right at the close of yesterday’s business, but I’m a bit worried about Cunard and Vickers. However, they’re holding their own. Pretty satisfactory all round, I’d say. My brokers are the smartest chaps in the City, but I like to keep an eye on my investments. Ah, the beer!’ He folded the paper and poked it back, ‘To the happier days of our youth!’

‘And our future prosperity!’

After the first draught I lowered my glass and looked at him in puzzlement. As a student he had more money than the rest of his companions together, and had presented a smart and fashionable contrast to the remainder of the medical school. Now he was wearing a torn mackintosh over a baggy Donegal tweed suit, and a frayed yellow-and-green check waistcoat with brass buttons. His shoes were worn, his collar curled, his cuffs were grubby; one of his gayest bow ties flew from his neck in jaunty defiance of the rest of his outfit. There was a moment of embarrassment as he noticed my look, then he put down his drink and announced, ‘I’m qualified.’

‘Qualified? Congratulations, my dear fellow! But – but how? There hasn’t been an exam since the one you failed.’

He laughed. ‘Not in London, certainly. But I take a broad view of the whole subject of examinations. I am now entitled to put after my name the proud letters “PCAC.” I am a Preceptor of the College of Apothecaries of Cork. Ever heard of it?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘You’re far from the only one. You know I never saw eye to eye with the examiners here. I take an intellectual view of medicine, old lad, and let’s face it – medicine isn’t an intellectual subject. Any fool with a good memory and a sharp ear for squeaks and rumbles can become a doctor.’

‘True,’ I admitted sadly.

‘I heard about the Cork College from a bloke I met in a pub in Fleet Street. Apparently this useful institution is still allowed to award diplomas that put you on the
British Medical Register
, and no one’s tumbled to it. It’s like not paying any income tax in Jersey, and all that. I booked a ticket to Cork and arrived a couple of days later. It was early in the morning, so I walked up and down the street looking for this College, but all I could find was a door with a bloody great brass knocker on it, which I knocked. Inside was an old hag scrubbing the floor. ‘Have you come to be made a doctor?’ she said. ‘I have,’ I told her. ‘Upstairs,’ she said, and went on scrubbing.

‘Upstairs was a sitting-room with a nice fire and a young fellow sitting reading the
Irish Independent
over his breakfast. When I acquainted him with the nature of my business he said he’d be delighted to accommodate me, and if I’d come back after the weekend I could have the examination. I told him that was ridiculous – I had many pressing engagements in London on Monday morning. He said he was sorry, but he was off playing golf in the country and there was nothing he could do about it. Eventually he said, “Well, the examination consists only of a
viva voce
, and seeing that there’s only one candidate we can just as well hold it in the taxi. Hand me my golf clubs, Mr Grimsdyke, and we’ll be off.”

‘In the back of the cab he started, “Now tell me something about urea?” I asked, “You mean that chemical substance, or are you referring to my lughole?” He said, “Well, we won’t go into it further. How would you treat an old woman of eighty who went crazy one Sunday afternoon and fell down and broke both legs?” I thought a good bit, and said, “I would bring about the unfortunate creature’s timely demise with the soothing juices of the poppy.” He agreed, “I think that’s about right. I’m anti-clerical myself.” He asked me a few more questions walking down the platform, then took his clubs and said I’d passed and the examination fee was fifty guineas. It happened I had fifty-odd quid on me, so he stuffed them in his mackintosh pocket and wrote out the receipt on a bit of newspaper. As the train left he yelled out of the window that my diploma would follow, and sure enough it did. Damn great thing with a seal on like the Magna Carta. I hear the Government’s got wind of the place now, and they’re going to shut it down. Shall we have the other half? Your turn.’

When I had ordered the drinks, Grimsdyke continued, ‘That was the beginning of my troubles. You remember my grandmother’s bequest – a thousand a year during my training to be a doctor? That stopped on the nail, of course. In short, my financial affairs were unprepared for the sudden disaster of my passing, as I had already got through the next three or four years’ allowance on tick. A certain amount of retrenchment was necessary. Visits to the pop-shop. The car’s gone, and so have the golf clubs. Even some of the suiting. Hence the appearance of having dropped off a haycart. Damn unpleasant.’

‘But why on earth,’ I demanded, ‘did you ever bloody well qualify at all? You could have gone on failing and stayed a medical student the rest of your life. At a thousand a year, that’s what I’d have done.’

‘Pride, old lad,’ he explained, looking into his glass sadly. ‘Do you know why I failed my finals in London? I was doing damn well in the clinical. It was one of those days when golf balls look the size of footballs and the greens as big as Piccadilly Circus – you know. The physical signs were sprouting out of my patient like broccoli. I found he’d got an effusion at his left base, and I spotted he was fibrillating. I even heard his diastolic murmur, a thing I’d never been able to accomplish all my years in the medical school. Gave me quite a start. I trotted all this out to the examiner, feeling pretty pleased with myself. He kept nodding and saying, “Quite so. Exactly. Excellent,” and I saw myself bowing out in a lofty sort of way to the applause of the assembled company. Then he asked, “Anything else?” And I said, “Impossible, sir!” And do you know,’ said Grimsdyke savagely, banging his glass on the bar, ‘the bloody patient had a glass eye. And the old fornicator failed me.’

‘That really is hard luck,’ I said sympathetically. ‘Particularly as I’d been out the night before with Nicky Nosworth from Guys, who’s had a glass eye for years. In fact, he showed me the bloodshot one he’s got for the morning after, and the one he upsets everyone with when he gets bottled, with crossed Union Jacks instead of a pupil.’

We drank in silence for a few moments, contemplating this tragedy.

‘All you fellows had got through,’ Grimsdyke continued. ‘So I thought, “To hell with the cash! I can damn well be a doctor too!” And look where it’s got me.’

‘There’s always your investments.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he sighed. ‘My investments.’

‘Have you got a job?’

‘I’m a sort of chronic
locum tenens
. Life really got difficult when I fell into the hands of the crooks next door. You must have been pretty hard put to it, ending up with those financial fiends?’

‘I was. The cash was running pretty low. I had to get work somewhere, and I was lured by their advertisements.’

He nodded. ‘How much is the job paying?’

‘Ten guineas a week.’

‘You ought to have stuck out for sixteen, at least. I suppose you’ve never been in practice before?’

I shook my head.

‘Then watch out. It’s not the doctors who are the trouble – it’s their wives. Remember that, old lad, if nothing else. By the way, can you lend me some money? My investments take practically every penny these days.’

‘Of course! My small resources are at your disposal.’

‘I suppose Wilson, Willowick, and Wellbeloved pressed a hundred quid on you? A tenner will do me. Here’s my card, though I hope you won’t have to remind me. I may be poor, but I’m still honest. Thanks, old lad. Do you want any tips for the market? No? Then your very good health.’

Before going to my practice I had two essential purchases to make.

I went to a ready-made tailor’s in Oxford Street and gingerly walked through the chromium halls looking at the dummies, which demonstrated that the suits fitted all right if you were in the grip of
rigor mortis
. I was sneaking towards the door when a salesman sprang at me from a thicket of Shaftesbury Avenue tweed, and within a minute was helping me off with my clothes in a cubicle.

‘I want something for – er, business. Pretty dark and dignified, you know.’

‘But you don’t want to look like an undertaker’s clerk, sir, do you?’

‘No, I certainly don’t want to look like an undertaker’s clerk.’

‘How about this, sir?’ he said, briskly producing a suit with the air of a maître d’hôtel offering something exceptionally choice from the kitchen. It was a blue tweed, with a pronounced herringbone, a mauve check overlay, and a faint red stripe. ‘Wears like tin plate, sir, just feel. Lovely bit of cloth. Magnificent quality. You won’t be seeing anything like this again, sir.’

The suit certainly looked good value; but the pink lights and rosy mirrors in the shops would have sold out a stock of sackcloth and ashes.

‘The sleeves are a bit long,’ I said dubiously.

‘They’ll work up in no time, sir. Never fear.’

‘All right, I’ll take it.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be very satisfied, sir,’ he said, immediately wrapping it up. He winked. ‘You’ll be cutting quite a dash with this at the Palais on Saturday nights, eh, sir?’

My next necessity was a car. A GP without a car is as useless as a postman without legs, but I had less than seventy pounds left with which to buy one. I looked wistfully in the manufacturers’ showrooms in Piccadilly, where brand new cars were displayed as carefully as the cigarette cases in the jewellers next door, but even the second-hand ones in Euston Road garages were beyond my means. I finally arrived at a bomb site in Camden Town where a line of cars with prices whitewashed on their windscreens stood under a banner saying HONEST PERCY PICK.

‘Lovely job, this one,’ said Percy Pick, kicking a tyre affectionately. He managed his business without moving his hands from his pockets, his hat from his head, or his cigarette from his mouth. ‘Good for another fifty thou., easy.’

‘The price is a bit steep for me, I’m afraid.’

He snorted. ‘Garn! Don’t expect me to give it away, do yer? I’ll come down to a ’undred.’

I shook my head.

‘How about this?’ He slapped a bonnet in a row of cars waiting pathetically to be bought like puppies in a dogs’ home. ‘Only one owner.’

‘He must have died a very old man.’

‘How about a mo’bike if you’re so broke?’

‘How much is that one over there?’ In the corner of the site was a large, black, heavy, hearse-like car which looked as immobile as a chicken coop. Percy Pick seemed surprised to see it.

‘You can have it for fifty,’ he said quickly.

‘Does it go?’

‘Go? Of course it goes. All my cars go.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Let’s see.’

The next morning I set off to my practice, wearing my new suit and driving my new car, reflecting that I had already learnt much of the sordid world outside the overprotective walls of St Swithin’s.