Doctor In The Swim (6 page)

After a night in an aeroplane it made a nice walk round to Miles’ place. The English summer, with its genius for stage effects, had switched off the blasted heath scene and relit the set with soft golden watery sunshine, glistening prettily on the green leaves of the trees and the red sides of the buses and giving the pavements the look of freshly swabbed decks. I took a deep breath of damp London air. There’s no place like home, I reflected, though it would be rather nicer if it had the New York licensing laws.

As I crossed the Brompton Road I felt pretty worried. I wondered exactly what sort of monster had risen to the calm surface of Miles’ marriage to rock the dream-boat. Chucking nuts about at home might be passed off as high spirits – after all, I bet Nell Gwynn and King Charles had no end of a time with those oranges – but from Miles’ further remarks I wondered nervously if I’d find Connie answering the door with a blood-stained hatchet in her hand, reckoning how many strokes she would take to go round the entire family.

As it happened, she looked her usual calm and frilly self.

‘Why, hello, Gaston,’ she smiled. ‘Quite a surprise visit.’

‘Yes, it is, rather.’

‘I expect you’re looking for my dear husband?’

‘Well–’

‘I’m afraid he’s out.’

I nodded. ‘I know. He’s just moved in with me.’

‘So that’s where the little swine’s bolted to, is it? Come inside.’

I was relieved to find young Bartholomew in the hall, sucking an ice lolly as healthily as any kid in London. He’d hardly time to offer me a sporting lick before Connie bundled him away, and holding one hand to her forehead exclaimed, ‘The strain!’

‘Yes, of course,’ I agreed for a start. ‘The strain.’

‘This last twenty-four hours. What I’ve suffered you’ll never imagine.’

‘Now, don’t worry, Connie,’ I sympathized, patting her hand. ‘I’m perfectly certain I can get Miles back home by dinner time.’

‘Miles? I am now rid of Miles for good and all, thank you.’ She sounded as though the chap were a nasty attack of the shingles. ‘The strain is keeping it quiet from the neighbours. To think! How I consoled Sue next door, when her husband ran off with his secretary last Whitsun. Poor dear Sue! And now the little bitch is going to gloat like stink. Now that Miles has abandoned me and his child, penniless in a heartless world,’ she continued, going into the Regency drawing room and throwing herself on the Chippendale sofa. ‘Pour me out a large gin, Gaston, there’s a dear.’

Supposing this as good a treatment as any for a broken heart, I reached for the decanter.

After a couple of quick gulps Connie pointed out, ‘I have given Miles the best years of my life.’

‘Quite. But what was it exactly that – well, fired him into outer space?’

‘You know what a nasty, narrow, sneaking, suspicious character he’s got?’

I did, but I supposed Connie knew even better, because Miles had lived with her for six years and he’d only just started with me.

‘You must admit, he has some very fine qualities, old Miles,’ I murmured sportingly, trying off-hand to think of one.

Connie swept her legs up on the sofa. ‘The man was simply trying to kill me. And little Bartholomew. Not to mention himself.’

I scratched my head again. I tried to picture the Miles ménage, with Connie upstairs polishing the top step and Miles downstairs sharpening up the breadknife on the back one. And what about young Bartholomew, I wondered, going about with the life expectancy of a prince in the Tower? I poured myself a gin too, subconsciously giving it a sniff for strychnine.

‘It all started when Miles went for a week’s fishing with Sir Lancelot,’ Connie announced, staring at the toes of her pretty little feet. ‘Sir Lancelot is apparently making an absolute fortune running some frightful racket in his house de-bloating capitalists.’

I nodded.

‘You know, Gaston, what a frightful hypochondriac Miles is?’

Noticing a half-empty box of chocolates beside her, Connie took up two or three.

‘But a doctor who isn’t a hypochondriac is as rare as a teetotal pub-keeper,’ I told her.

‘I don’t care in the slightest if Miles thinks he’s got everything in the book from arthritis to Zambesi fever. I only object when he gives them to me. He came back from Sir Lancelot’s all pink and rubbing his hands and saying we’d got to cut down on the calories. You can’t see anything wrong with my figure, can you, Gaston?’

‘Perfectly charming,’ I assured her.

‘Oh, Miles carried on for days. He said obesity was the commonest nutritional disorder in the country, according to the
British Medical Journal
, and that over-feeding children should be punished as severely as starving them. Why, every time little Bartholomew asked for some sweets he was told they rotted his teeth and clogged his arteries. As for ice cream, Miles wanted to put it on the schedule of poisons. Smoking, of course, he’d forbidden months ago,’ Connie went on, lighting a cigarette. ‘Now he even stopped me having a little drink,’ she ended, holding out her empty glass.

I began to see the point, which I felt was quite an advance on Agatha Christie.

‘He hasn’t let me make a decent meal for weeks, and you know how proud I am of my cooking? He even tried to organize morning PT in Onslow Gardens, but thank heavens the police objected. Then’ – Connie hesitated – ‘one night Miles went too far. He accused me of being unfaithful.’

‘Here, I say,’ I exclaimed, becoming rather more interested.

‘With the apple pie,’ added Connie.

‘With the – the what?’

‘Oh, I was a fool, I suppose. When I thought he was asleep I crept down to the fridge and finished off the apple pie. Miles was absolutely furious. And then,’ she exclaimed triumphantly, ‘do you know what? The very next day I caught the little swine being immoral with the Camembert.’

She helped herself to more chocs.

‘Like all men, the toad came grovelling and swearing he’d never so much as look at another cheese again. And I,’ muttered Connie into her second gin, ‘like a poor weak woman forgave him. Then a couple of nights ago he accused me of committing misconduct with the sugar. I denied it. He said I had, he’d been counting the lumps. Then the beast asked, what about my affair with the coconuts, at a hundred calories an ounce?’

‘Nutritious stuff, coconut.’

‘It so happens, Gaston, that at the moment I happen to be rather fond of coconut. I lost my temper. I threw the coconuts at him. Even then, the yellow-bellied little worm hid behind the piano instead of taking it on the chest like a man, Oh, Gaston!’ exclaimed Connie, suddenly bursting into tears, ‘I’m so unhappy. And so hungry.’

‘Tut,’ I said, ‘Tut, tut, tut.’

What man can stand unmoved and watch a pretty girl weeping over her chocolate creams? As she showed no signs of drying up, I shifted to the sofa and placed a brotherly arm round her shoulders.

‘Dear Gaston,’ sobbed Connie, ‘you’re so sweet to me.’

‘Not at all. I’m only offering you the loan of my hanky.’

‘But Gaston, you
are
sweet.’ She laid a sisterly head on my lapel. ‘You’ll never know how I’ve tortured myself wondering whether…whether I really made the right choice.’

‘Bit late for going into that now, old girl,’ I murmured, giving her right ear a fraternal stroke.

‘Is it?’ Connie sighed into my shirt front. ‘Is it?’

I swallowed. Miles may have known all about that apple pie, but he didn’t know how chummy I’d been with Connie before he took her off to share his life in a hired Daimler. I’d seen her first, when she was brought into St Swithin’s after a taxi smash, still looking perfectly fetching with a Pott’s fracture. But as I was only a penniless student and Miles was already a resident doctor, not only had he more glamour but he was able to buy her better dinners as well. Also, Miles was a chap with the hide and single-mindedness of a charging rhino, and Connie was hardly out of plaster before accepting him.

I went about looking pretty cheesed off, like the knight who was given such a rotten time of it by La Belle Dame sans Merci. No birds sang for a bit, certainly. But it’s remarkably easy to confuse the diagnosis of a broken heart with a scratch from a playful kitten. Other girls came into my life, inspected the premises, and decided on alternative accommodation elsewhere.

By the time I was consoling her on the Chippendale sofa, Connie was merely the lady who handed out the soup whenever Miles happened to ask me to dinner.

‘I wonder so often,’ breathed Connie into my collar, ‘how life would have been had I married you instead, dear.’

‘A bit more cramped in my horses’ larder.’

‘But so much more thrilling, Gaston! How romantic I remember you looked, that lovely day you punted so beautifully up the river for a picnic.’

Actually, it had been pouring with rain and I fell in twice, but Connie was getting her memories in Technicolor.

‘And that gay week-end we had at Whortleton,’ Connie added.

Her Ma and Pa were there, and they only asked me along because they wanted someone to drive the car.

‘You looked so lovely on the end of the pier,’ murmured Connie,

‘Interesting spot, Whortleton.’

Connie blew her nose. ‘And now my life is ruined and I shall never ever be happy again.’

I patted her shoulder. ‘There, there, come, come. Tut, tut.’

‘Oh, Gaston,’ breathed Connie, pushing aside the chocs and making herself more comfy. ‘You’re such lovely ointment for a bruised soul.’

At that moment I felt I’d better be going.

‘Must you, Gaston? Come and see me again, dear.’ She stuck the handkerchief back in my pocket. Otherwise I shall simply expire from loneliness. About six is the most convenient.’

When I got into the street I realized I’d forgotten all about Miles’ ruddy woolly slippers.

‘Gaston, how sweet of you to come.’

It was a few hours later, and Lucy Squiffington was greeting me in a room that looked like a combined effort by the Antique Dealers’ Fair and Chelsea Flower Show.

‘And here,’ she added, indicating the chap in the baggy tweed suit on the sofa, seeing how many times he could twist his right leg round his left, ‘is George.’

‘Dear old Squiffy!’ I cried.

He hadn’t changed a bit. He was still a tall thin fellow with big glasses, hair like the stuffing in an Army mattress, and all his joints apparently held together with elastic bands. Squiffy had always gone about looking as though an arm or a leg were likely to drop off at any moment, and if it had he would never remember where he’d left it, being pretty absent-minded as well.

Naturally, we all three had a jolly good giggle about the dear old days at Whortleton. I couldn’t stop that warm intragastric feeling coming back every time I took another look at Lucy, even though I kept reminding myself that I was present merely as the Squiffingtons’ professional adviser. And I had to admit that poor old Squiffy himself was in something of a state. He’d always been a restless sort of bird, writhing about as though he’d just put on a new pair of woollen combs. Now the poor fellow was as jumpy as a plate of snap-crackle-pop when you pour the milk on.

‘Bashing atomic physics from nine to five must be no end of a strain,’ I suggested, feeling for a diagnosis over the teacups.

‘It’s all most frightfully secret, of course,’ said Squiffy, reaching for the cake. A greedy beggar he’d been at school, I remembered.

‘Perhaps you’d explain the quantum theory to me when you have a moment? I’m afraid my own knowledge of physics pretty well ended on Archimedes’ bath night.’

‘The quantum theory?’ mumbled Squiffy through the cake. ‘I’m not at all certain that isn’t on the secret list.’

‘But surely, George!’ complained Lucy. ‘Must you always behave like an oyster with laryngitis? You could at least tell us where you’re stationed.’

‘More than my life’s worth. Top security. Yes, indeed! A lot of people would like to find out in – in – you-know-where.’

‘I suppose you must know the famous Sir James?’ I hazarded.

‘Oh, Jimmy? Yes, very well. Jolly good boss, too. Saw him only yesterday.’

‘Remarkable how quickly he’s recovered from that bad car smash.’

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

‘Considering it happened only last Saturday.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Squiffy.

‘Out in Australia,’ I went on.

‘You mean
that
Sir James?’ asked Squiffy crossly. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

‘I don’t think we’re being kind to George’s nerves, Gaston.’

‘Let’s stop talking shop,’ said Squiffy, trying to pout and eat cake at the same time.

Lucy patted my hand on the sofa. ‘Gaston will tell us absolutely everything that happened since that awful nanny with the moustache bundled me into the train at Whortleton.’

I sat back to oblige, but I’d hardly opened my mouth before a chap in a white jacket opened the door and announced, ‘Mr Basil Beauchamp.’

‘Basil Beauchamp!’ I jumped up. ‘Oh no! You don’t mean the actor?’

‘Of course,’ smiled Lucy. ‘Quite an honour, isn’t it? Show Mr Beauchamp straight up.’

I said nothing. For the second time this bounder Basil was blighting my life, another second and he bounced in, all teeth and carnation.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked at once,

‘Good lord, Grim,’ returned Basil, the number of teeth on view diminishing quickly. ‘But what on earth are you doing here?’

‘What, you two know each other?’ asked Lucy, looking surprised.

‘Know each other? Why Basil and I have been pals for years and years. Haven’t we, Basil? When I was a medical student we used to share the same digs,’ I explained.

‘La Vie de Bohème
,’ said Basil quickly. ‘Those carefree prentice days.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Yes, Dr Grimsdyke and I were indeed once
en garçon
in the same
atelier
. One leads that sort of life while one is waiting for managements to discover one. I believe Dr Grimsdyke still expresses his gratitude for my tempering his own youthful excesses. It was I who kept your nose to the midnight oil, eh, dear chappie? I say, what gorgeous gladioli,’ said Basil, burying his nose in them and changing the subject.

I felt my blood pressure leaving the launching-pad. The chap was nothing but a ruddy liar. Basil Beauchamp (pronounced Beecham) might now be the famous actor, with a biscuit-coloured Rolls, his face on the sides of all the buses, and a rather messy dish named after him in one of the posh West End restaurants. But in the days he rented the room next to mine his only audience was the landlady’s daughter, who lashed him up with ham and cocoa in the kitchen when Mum was out, while he gave her Great Love Scenes from the Classics. And he’d have shifted to even tougher lodgings if I hadn’t raised a few bob every quarter to repay those informal loans made to him by the local Gas Board, once he found how to fiddle the lock on his meter. That was why Basil never liked swapping jolly reminiscences when I bumped into him from time to time, particularly as I’d overheard everything the landlady had to say when she discovered where all that ham was going.

‘But how wonderful that you should be old cronies.’ Lucy gave another smile. ‘Because Basil and I are very, very close friends indeed.’

‘Oh, are you?’

‘Don’t you think I’m a tremendously lucky girl, Gaston?’

‘Lucky? Oh, yes. Of course.’

Basil, who was still in the gladioli, seemed to think so too.

‘That’s still absolutely off the record you understand,’ he added quickly in my direction.

‘Yet another of the afternoon’s secrets,’ Lucy laughed.

‘Those ghastly gossip columns!’ remarked Basil, shuddering.

‘But Gaston would surely never breathe a word to the papers,’ declared Lucy.

‘H’m,’ said Basil,

‘You see, Basil’s divorce isn’t quite tied up yet. That’s one of the reasons I went to New York. Dear Basil was kept here with his latest film, of course.’

‘Yes, I heard you’d been unloaded – been separated,’ I told him.

Before his starring days Basil had been taken on the household strength of some frightfully rich American woman in the capacity of husband, for which there happened to be a vacancy at the time, though I think he was relieved to find later it was only a temporary job to go with her season in London.

‘You must tell me about those dreary lawyers in the car, my sweet,’ said Basil, seeming anxious to have Lucy elsewhere.

‘Of course, darling. Basil’s taking me to the dress rehearsal of a charity matinée we’ve been organizing for months, and I’m absolutely thrilled.’ Lucy collected her bag and gloves. ‘There’s nothing quite so exciting as the stage, is there?’

‘Come along, my angel,’ urged Basil, giving me a bit of a glance. ‘Those poor players will be strutting and fretting, you know. Do remind me, dear chappie, to send you a couple of free seats, won’t you?’

Another moment and they’d left me alone with Squiffy, still eating.

‘Grim, old man,’ said Squiffy.

I made no reply. The interview had left me wallowing in a wave of nausea, particularly with the noise Squiffy was making over his cake.

‘Grim, old man.’ Squiffy started to choke, indicating that he wanted to say something urgently. ‘I’ve some pretty dashed important news to tell you.’

‘Yes?’ I wondered what it was Lucy put behind the ears to make her smell so nice.

‘But it’s a dead secret.’

‘Not another?’

‘I mean, this is a real one.’ Squiffy scooped up the crumbs. ‘I’ve absolutely got to spill the beans to someone and I know I can confide in you, Grim. Do you remember how you kept quiet at school, when I slipped the Head’s tea-party that plate of hair-cream sandwiches? Besides, doctors have to keep secrets, don’t they, or they get hauled up before the medical beaks? I’m afraid this is going to be a bit of a shock,’ he went on. ‘But – well, I’m not really an important scientist.’

‘No?’

‘I’m a scientist, of course. Well, sort of…oh, dear!’

He got up and started striding about, arms and legs in all directions.

‘It’s my old man’s fault,’ he declared.

I helped myself to another cup of tea.

‘You know what he’s like, Grim?’

‘A bit of a tough egg, he struck me.’

I hadn’t seen Pa Squiffington since I buried him in the sand at Whortleton. Though I’d often thought of the old boy while looking for the racing news in the paper and spotting the item headed ‘City Notes’, which generally says something like, ‘There was much calling for money in Lombard Street today.’ There goes poor old Pa Squiffington, I told myself, up and down the gutter hollering at the open windows, buttonholing chaps in top-hats, trying to touch the copper directing the traffic, ending up on the doorstep with his bowler hung out hopefully.

I gathered Squiffingtons Bank wasn’t one of the common sort with a counter downstairs, where they take the cash from all comers. According to Squiffy, who’d often prowled the corridors optimistically, they never handled the vulgar stuff at all. Financial wizards – if it was a nice morning and they’d holed all their putts on Saturday – simply told their secretaries to send it round a million. And if Pa Squiffington never saw it being unpacked, Squiffy certainly didn’t see it at all. His father was one of those lean athletic executives, whose idea of a rip-roaring evening, I remembered from Whortleton, was a game of chess and a chocolate biscuit with his Horlicks.

‘You know the old man wanted me to be a doctor,’ Squiffy went on, absently cutting another piece of cake, ‘The great-grandad who founded the bank – that’s the one over the fireplace with the face like the underdone steak with side-whiskers – was the son of a doctor in Canada, who got no end of a name stalking about in blizzards patching up people eaten by bears. I was obviously a frightful duffer at business – you remember at school I could never work out what those tedious chaps A, B, and C owed each other after those rather shifty deals in compound interest. But for some reason the medical schools didn’t agree with the old man, so he packed me off to Canada for a year or two. When I came back he announced that I should be a scientist, science being all the thing.’

‘They’re even teaching it these days at Eton.’

‘I think Dad already saw me stepping up for the Nobel Prize,’ Squiffy went on. ‘But of course one has to make a start somewhere, and after going round a few universities I was finally enrolled up at Mireborough – oddly enough, just after the old man had donated a new boathouse. They were pretty tough towards me at Mireborough, with their northern independence and all that,’ he added morosely. ‘Even after the old man had donated a new library – he rather fancies himself as a pocket Rockefeller, you know. And as he’d recently donated a new chemistry laboratory I really can’t see why they made such a fuss just because I burnt the old one down.’

Squiffy sprawled in his chair.

‘It was the practical exam, and I don’t know what went wrong, quite. They shouldn’t set such damn fool questions, I suppose. The Fire Brigade had hardly cleared up before they told me it would be cheaper for the University all round if I left. Luckily, the old man had just set off for Karachi, but I had to find a job – he never donates anything to me, of course. A bit tricky it was, too, as I wasn’t even a BSc (Mire.). Luckily, a fellow in my year tipped me for one in the middle of Dorset.’

‘Not meddling with the Government’s atoms?’ I asked nervously, feeling that next time Squiffy blew anything up he’d do it properly.

‘Actually, I’m a stinks beak in a prepper,’ he confessed. ‘A miserable hole it is, too. The Head’s got the outlook of an undertaker with an overdraft – charges for test-tubes and chemicals, and probably for use of force of gravity as well. But that’s only half the trouble.’

He paused, and having finished all the cake started on his nails.

‘You see, Grim – Good lord, is that the time? Squiffy jumped up. ‘I’ll miss my train, and there’ll be the most almighty row if I’m late. What do you think of that fellow Beauchamp?’ he added, bolting for the door. ‘In my opinion he’s a bit of a stinker.’

‘Yes, he’s a hit of a stinker in my opinion, too.’

‘Not at all the sort of fellow I’d like to see Lucy fixed up with,’ Squiffy continued, disappearing.

‘Not at all the sort of fellow I’d like to see her fixed up with, either,’ I agreed.

Though why, I asked, finding myself alone among the remains of the tea and the gladioli, should I worry what fellow Lucy got herself fixed up with? I didn’t care a rap if she was a very, very close friend of every male performer in Shaftesbury Avenue and Bertram Mills’ Circus. I was, I told myself, no more concerned with the affair than if I were watching Basil canoodling with his leading lady beyond the footlights. I swallowed the last of my tea and left. After all, I was perfectly happily engaged, to quite the nicest girl in the world.