Doctor On The Job (15 page)

‘You need a licence,’ Mr Grout pointed out gloomily. ‘Under the Public Health Act, 1936, Sections one hundred and eighty-seven to one-nine-five.’

‘What precisely was the job you lost?’

‘Junior administrator. As a matter of fact, all this trouble’s due to me.’ He nodded towards the crowded forecourt. ‘I was the one who gave Chipps his job as a porter. Only last Tuesday.’

‘You obviously have a flair for picking the coming man,’ Lord Hopcroft complimented him. ‘I may well have room for you in my new scheme. Would you care to join me for lunch in one of my hotels? Then you can come along and help me smash up our office computer. I have reason to suspect they can be unreliable instruments.’

‘Do you mind slipping out of the mortuary entrance under cover of this hearse, Dad?’ Pip was conducting Dr Chipps from the rear of St Swithin’s, the same time as Lord Hopcroft was leaving the front door with Mr Grout. ‘I’ll get mobbed if I show my face at the main entrance.’

‘In the old St Swithin’s building,’ his father reflected fondly, ‘the mortuary was the only route into the Nurses’ Home after midnight. I’m sure it was splendid training for the girls in the realities of their chosen profession, once you’d pushed them over the gate.’

‘Where should we go for this drink?’

‘I wonder if the Cock and Feathers still stands?’ his father suggested. Pip frowned, trying to remember. ‘It was a favourite among the students in my day. It should be just along this alley, as I recall. Though of course I haven’t been back to London more than a couple of times since I qualified.’

‘It was good of you to come and see me today, Dad.’

‘I thought I’d look you up,’ he explained casually. ‘It’s interesting to see you in your natural habitat. There’s the pub.’

‘Seems to be one I’ve overlooked,’ Pip confessed.

‘It hasn’t changed a bit. Though I’m afraid that little red-headed barmaid will have changed considerably.’

They pushed through the narrow doorway of a small, grimy pub, seemingly too insignificant for the baleful notice of the planners who had savagely redesigned the area. The sign overhead was faded, the single window giving into the public bar was unwashed, the interior was dim, empty, sawdust-floored and smelling strongly of beer in all stages of decomposition.

‘Morning, Horace,’ said a fat man in shirtsleeves and braces behind the bar. ‘Your usual?’

‘Please.’

‘You haven’t been in for some time.’

‘No. I’ve been living in Somerset.’

‘Nice down there?’ The man started drawing a pint.

‘Very nice.’

‘It must be getting on for…what? Twenty years?’

‘Nearer thirty, Sam.’

‘Time flies, dunnit?’

‘It certainly does.’

‘Seems like yesterday. Same for your friend?’

‘He’s my son.’

‘Don’t say? Yes, time does fly,’ the publican observed reflectively.

Dr Chipps took his son to a bench and a rough table in one corner. ‘Do you see, Pip? Once you’ve been a student at St Swithin’s, that’s not something you can wipe out of your life like some holiday you once enjoyed. The hospital isn’t just some modern technical school, turning out doctors who are simply garage mechanics for human beings. Though admittedly, that’s what the place now looks like,’ he conceded. ‘The buildings may be brand-new, but as an institution St Swithin’s has been going strong over four hundred years. And a bit of that history sticks to all of us.’

‘Perhaps I should have been more appreciative of my hospital if it hadn’t thrown me out,’ Pip objected mildly.

‘Some of the most zealous of St Swithin’s enthusiasts are its failed students. They look back on it as a sunny forcing-ground before they found success in other fields.’

‘Well, I’ve found success in another field.’

‘Only by trying to destroy St Swithin’s and everything it stands for,’ his father pointed out.

Pip sipped his pint. ‘It’s exactly that I’m proud of.’

‘That’s only your opinion,’ his father told him forbearingly.

‘I’m unshakeably convinced it’s the right one.’

‘What could you tell jesting Pilate? That the truth is only a point of view. Though I suppose black and white are the same thing to a blind man, and in my experience of humanity most people are pretty wall-eyed. That’s why they’re so easily pushed about by strongly minded and noisy activists. Like you.’

‘May I tell you what, in my eyes, St Swithin’s stands for? Starkly clearly?’

‘I think I’ve gathered that already from the papers. Private practice and doctors’ emigration. Both of which you are determined to stop. By allowing coronaries and appendices and haemorrhages and so on to die through lack of treatment.’

‘I was a little carried away by my own words at that particular point,’ Pip admitted shamefacedly.

‘I don’t suppose anyone took you too seriously,’ his father told him easily. ‘The country’s pretty used to trade union braggarts who enjoy making the public’s flesh creep on television.’

‘Dad, you’ve only diagnosed the symptoms of my argument against St Swithin’s. Not the condition that’s causing me to form them. I really object to something more fundamental. To doctors setting themselves up as something special, as people way above their fellow workers in the National Health Service.’

His father nodded. ‘Very well. Shall we become even more fundamental than that? Who is the only special person in any hospital?’

‘The patient,’ Pip answered promptly.

‘And don’t you see, Pip, how the doctor at the bedside is the most important person that patient will ever know in his entire life? Just for those few minutes of his consultation, the doctor becomes more important than the patient’s wife and children. More important than his boss, certainly more than his Prime Minister. And if I may say so, more important than any hospital porter.’

The pub remained empty. The man in braces stood behind his beer-taps staring at the pair, but from habit blind and deaf and lost in thoughts of his own – which he had long ago told Dr Chipps he discovered vastly more entertaining than the conversations of his customers.

‘That’s not a rôle the doctor seeks,’ Pip’s father continued. ‘Doctors are humble people, despite the jokes against them. Anyone must be humble, who’s picked to bits the corpse of a fellow human and seen what a ridiculously frail thing it is. We wear our importance for exactly the same reason as we do most other things in our lives. Directly or indirectly to help our patients. Our raw material is the defenceless human body, our stock in trade is life and death. We doctors are different, and we’ve got to stay different.’

Pip sipped his tankard of beer for some moments in silence. Then he gave a smile, and suggested pleasantly, ‘I know how all this is ending up. Imploring me, as my father, to call off the strike.’

‘Only advising you to. The doctor can but advise, the decision is always the patient’s, even if it’s to let himself die. And sometimes the patient is the wiser of the two. But you could become the most popular man in the country by ten o’clock tonight, Pip. If you’d be the first union leader to stand up on television and say, “We’re going back to work. Now I’ve had a chance to think things over, I can see quite clearly that we were in the wrong.” Everyone in the Kingdom is heartily fed up with union bullying, I can assure you of that. And anyway, hospitals are the very last places for the exercise of trade union power politics. You’re only hurting people who are sore enough already.’

‘It’s not quite so simple,’ Pip objected. ‘I’ve my members of ACHE to think of. I would never break faith with them. They’d never forgive me if I did.’

‘You talk as though your members had a more binding relationship to you than to the Queen,’ said his father more shortly.

‘Perhaps they have? The trade unions are a state within our State. They enjoy first call on the loyalty of their members, who are far more scared of breaking union solidarity than they are of breaking the Law of the land. That’s because simple individuals feel hopelessly inadequate and unprotected in the face of our complex modern society. If you want to solve the trade union problem, Dad,’ Pip added with a grin, ‘you’ve got to go back to the Middle Ages and start again in a different direction.’

‘Well, think over all I’ve said.’ Dr Chipps drained his tankard. ‘My train leaves Paddington in an hour.’

‘So soon? I haven’t got a watch.’

‘You don’t need one in the city, where the passage of time screams at you every minute. Only in the country, where it simply gets light and gets dark. I must be back for my special surgery on Saturday evening. It’s for the psychologically distressed, the depressives, the insomniacs, the hysterics, the plain unhappy, the people you just mentioned who can’t cope with modern life. I make time at weekends to sit and talk to them. I could pack them off to a psychiatrist in hospital, but I think the family doctor works rather better. After all, I know these patients pretty well. I try to sustain the doctor’s traditional rôle with them – a friend in health, a saviour in sickness, a companion in death. A lot of practitioners busier than me dish out tranquillizers and barbiturates by the shovelful. But I believe that my personality is less toxic than drugs, and less likely to result in death from an overdose. Besides, it’s the best of the fishing season,’ he ended, ‘and I might manage an hour on the river at dusk.’

‘But you’ve time for another pint?’

‘Always.’ Dr Chipps raised the tankard. ‘“Then to the spicy nut-brown ale.” I do wish your mother could write lines like that.’

At that same moment, Sir Lancelot Spratt was driving westwards from his Harley Street consulting rooms towards the City, beside him in the Rolls one of his patients.

‘It’s a great relief, I must say,’ Sir Lancelot’s companion remarked thankfully. ‘Getting the bandage off at last. Five days is a long time to see absolutely nothing of the world about you.’

‘You kept it on religiously, did you, Alfred? And indulged in absolutely no activity?’

‘I always obey doctors’ orders. I’ve a high respect for the medical profession. And you can’t complain that I don’t show it in a practical way.’

‘Indeed. Not many of my patients would come along regularly twice a year to the examinations, and allow the students to test their brains upon them. I only hope it’s support which the medical profession won’t lose after your last experience?’

‘Oh, there’s nutcases about everywhere these days,’ the patient said accommodatingly. ‘Don’t you worry, Lancelot, it takes more than that to put a bloke like me off. Though having only one eye in the first place, it was admittedly a bit scary at the time. I must say, you did a fine job on the damage. But it was a bit hard trying to pick up all this fuss you’re having at St Swithin’s only from lying on my back listening to the radio bulletins. I itched to read a paper or watch the telly.’

‘I didn’t really want to expose the eye for another week,’ Sir Lancelot informed him, driving well over the speed limit along almost empty Saturday morning City streets. ‘You seem to have recovered pretty well, but I fancy I was very wise to keep it out of action.’

‘Better find if I can sort things out in your hospital, I suppose,’ said his passenger gloomily. ‘Though now I can see, I was hoping to get away for some golf.’

‘Wasn’t there anyone on your union’s executive, Alfred, who would have taken action about St Swithin’s while you were
hors de combat
?’

‘The whole lot’s off on a special charter flight to Barbados. I’ll have it sorted out in a jiffy, don’t you worry. This bloke everyone’s talking about. Chipps. Must be some screwy hothead. Bane of my life, that lot. And of every other fair-minded and decent union official in the land. They’re always stirring it up. No wonder they say that the country’s ungovernable. What do you expect, when any hairy twit with a loud enough voice can get sensible men to listen? I reckon the country’s simply losing its sense of humour.’

‘We have not yet quite reached that ultimate disaster. Though I would agree with you and the late E M Forster – whose works I am reading in bed – that what the world needs today are such negative virtues as
not
being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful. Positive ideas always seem to get so many people hurt or killed, or if they’re particularly lucky locked up.’

Sir Lancelot stopped his car outside the mortuary entrance at the rear of St Swithin’s. ‘You’ll find Mr Pip Chipps down in the porters’ room, Alfred. That’s in the basement. You’ll excuse me if I leave you to it? I’ve a case waiting operation in the Clinic.’

‘Thanks for the lift. See you at the golf club.’

The long, lean form of Alfred Dimchurch left the Rolls and made its way into the hospital and down the stairs. He remembered the route to the porters’ room in the basement. He pushed the door open. In the smoke-streaked atmosphere stood a small knot of brown-coated men, a pretty, fair girl, the well-recognized Harold Sapworth, and a young man in the act of addressing them from a bench.

‘In inaugurating this splendid dartboard,’ Pip was declaiming, ‘which apparently has for some months been tucked into the back of Mr Grout’s desk upstairs, I ask you, Brothers, to see it not as a gift, but as an absolute and minimal right which justly demanded –’

He was interrupted by a noise like a tiger awaking from a bad dream. ‘You!’ demanded the visitor. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Me? I’m Pip Chipps, of course.’

‘Chipps? Chipps? You? You walking case of grievous bodily harm? You murderous maniac? You madman who goes round trying to blind people for life –’

‘And what are
you
doing here, may I ask?’ inquired Pip, recovering his dignity. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re an examination patient. I agree, I made a misdiagnosis in your case. That can happen to the cleverest of doctors. I apologized at the time, if you remember. You now seem none the worse for your experience. I don’t see why you should come hounding me down here to complain. I’m a very busy man. As you ought to know, if you read your newspapers.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing here, laddie. I’m Alfred Dimchurch. I’m President of ACHE, that’s who I am. And I expel you from the union forthwith,’ he thundered.

Pip gazed quickly round. ‘You can’t.’

‘Oh yes, I can. I can expel anyone I like. Look in the rule book. Not that I expect you’ve so much as laid hands on it. If only I’d had my sight these last five days, and seen who was causing this childish trouble –’

‘Brothers! Comrades!’ Pip threw open his arms, standing on the bench. ‘Lend me your ears. You have seen the terrible injustices existing in this hospital. You have seen the vile iniquities of its doctors. You have seen, too, my fight against both. Brothers, this is no time to lose your commander. Not in the heat of battle, with victory in our grasp, the smell of our enemies’ blood on our boots. No, it is the moment from which I am confident of leading you to the utter rout of capitalism itself. You would not want me to desert my troops, would you? Whatever this old buffer says, I shall stay. I shall not break faith with my valiant army. On, on! Once more unto the picket line, dear brothers. Cry “God for Harold! England and St Swithin’s!”’