I clasped my brow. ‘Sandra–’
‘Yes?’
‘Can you still get into last year’s swimsuit?’
‘I should hope so.’
‘Ring Wintersun Travel. I’m taking my annual holiday.’
‘Whoever’s life we saved between us, doc,’ reflected Hal Tibbs when I next met him at the golf club, ‘at least we did the world a favour. We stopped poor old Nigel ever playing Hamlet.’
3
When I arrived in Churchford twenty-five years ago, the Victorian villas like ours had delightful gardens with tennis courts, which all summer emitted a cheerful ping and cries of ‘Sorry, partner!’
Then they built houses on the tennis courts. Next, they built houses on the gardens of those houses, filling in the serving courts. Now, whole families are accommodated in the sidelines.
When us quartet of single-handed doctors combined as sensibly as four handymen starting their own repairs business, the increased population justified our custom-built single-storey surgery a mile from my home in Chaucer Way, shopping street of the 1930s developers’ dream – convenient for station, fast trains to London – of living in rus and working in urbe. Like most dreams, this faded to the scruffy commonplace. Its tatty semis provide a third of our patients, the old middle class in the new human hutches a half, the remaining sixth our enviable émigrés, the classless new rich with lovely homes, a Merc and a Spanish girl.
Our waiting room has a functional decor, mustard-coloured walls enlivened with cheery posters warning the population on the dangers of smoking and of incautious eating, sex and stepping off pavements. The furniture enjoys the comfortless durability of bus seats, the plastic underfoot as obdurate to our patients as the marbled floors of St Peter’s to its pilgrims. It is warm, clean and odourless, its stereotyped bleakness accepted by the public in trouble with the equally nervous resignation it affords courts of justice.
Our four consulting rooms are small, with a couch and our everyday tools for taking blood pressure and looking into convenient orifices. We have a room of grey metal filing cabinets like the bowels of a warship, lots of loos, and of course somewhere to make the tea.
For ten years Mrs Jenkins our receptionist has discharged the job of secretary, filing clerk, checkout girl, public relations officer, tea lady, diplomat, first-aider, nanny, agony aunt and bodyguard, with the efficiency of Jeeves, Florence Nightingale, Portia and the Three Musketeers.
I suspected her keen cutting edge was blunting one breezy mid-February morning, when I demanded, ‘Where were my last two patients’ cards?’
‘You’re sitting on them. I left them on your chair, because you keep losing things in the muddle on your desk.’
‘Of course it isn’t a muddle. No more than the human interior. I know exactly where everything is. You haven’t brought my coffee.’
‘You are in a filthy temper this morning. You’ve drunk it.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘What’s that empty cup, then? Under the path forms.’
‘I’ve so many important things on my mind,’ I muttered. ‘This my final patient? Where’s his card?’
‘Can’t find it.’ Mrs Jenkins is small, dark and fiery-eyed.
‘Really! What’s his name, then?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Look here, you have absolutely no excuse–’
‘I have. It’s a case of loss of memory.’
‘Oh. I see. Well. Send him in.’
A slight, brown-haired, neat man in his thirties, wearing a carefully kept blue suit, plain shirt, nondescript tie and shining black shoes. He entered with an air of quiet desperation.
‘You’ve got to help me, doctor.’
‘So we don’t know who we are, then?’ I commiserated, sitting him down. ‘For how long haven’t we known? Or have we forgotten?’
‘It’s like this, doctor,’ he explained. ‘I found myself walking down the street, outside Marks and Spencer’s. I don’t know how I got there. I didn’t know who I was. Nasty turn, it gave me. I seemed to be in a nice place – trees, tea rooms, Green Line bus stops, and that. I asked someone the name, pretending I’d caught the wrong bus. Then I discovered this in my pocket.’
A small blue diary, sold by every stationer’s at Christmas. ‘Only thing filled in was doctor’s phone number. So I found a callbox and asked your lady outside for the address. Also, it seems I am blood group 0, Rh positive.’
‘I’ve some good news.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I’ve never set eyes on you before. So you’re perfectly healthy.’
But he seemed disinclined to look on the bright side.
‘Try and remember – had you arrived in Churchford by car?’
‘I might have descended from Heaven,’ he replied bemusedly.
‘Well, an attack of amnesia won’t excuse even a chariot of fire left at a meter, not with our fearsome parking women.’
He frowned. ‘A meter? A parking meter? Yes, it seems to mean something…’
I too needed to remember. What was the psychology of amnesia? Had I treated a case before? I had completely forgotten. I recalled something about amnesia providing escape from difficult circumstances.
‘Any personal problems?’ I inquired. ‘Pockets contain a summons to appear at the Old Bailey? Or a letter regretting that your firm must dispense with your valuable services? Something in capitals saying the photos will be handed over for five grand in used tenners? Your own suicide note?’ I suggested hopefully.
‘Nothing except half a packet of mints and a few quid.’
‘We’d better phone the police,’ I decided. ‘At this moment, they’ve probably got frogmen looking everywhere for you in the local reservoir.’
He moved uneasily in his chair. ‘I’d prefer not getting involved with the police, if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh? On the run?’
‘I’ve a vague feeling of guilt about something,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe I left a loving wife and lots of little ones somewhere? This was tucked in the lining of my jacket.’
He passed a cracked photograph of a fat grinning blonde in a minute bikini lying on a beach under a sign saying CERVEZA.
I exclaimed, ‘Your case is cured.’
He jerked with relief.
‘You are Mr Ackroid.’
‘Go on?’
‘This is Mrs Ackroid.’
‘Coo.’
‘I’d recognize her laparotomy scar anywhere.’ I buzzed Mrs Jenkins to get the Ackroid number. ‘Mrs Ackroid? This is Dr Gordon. Good morning. I have some important news for you.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Your hubby will be home in ten minutes.’
‘Christ! I haven’t seen the bugger for three years.’
I felt disconcerted, as if the returning Argonauts were told to stuff the Golden Fleece.
‘What’s he been up to?’ she demanded sharply.
I broke the news. ‘I’m afraid that he’s suffering from an attack of loss of memory.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t put nothing past him.’
‘Would you care to speak to your husband?’
‘Not much point, is there? If he doesn’t remember who I am.’
‘Obviously I must restore him to base. And I feel sure, Mrs Ackroid, that his memory will come flooding back once joyously reunited with yourself. Such patients respond excellently to loving and orderly environment.’
‘I don’t know how I shall manage, I really don’t, it’s been a terrible day already, what with the washing machine.’
‘You’ll have plenty to talk about,’ I consoled her. ‘A lot must have happened in three years.’
‘Bloody right, it has. Well, I suppose somebody’s got to take him in.’
‘An admirable sense of family responsibility,’ I congratulated her. ‘Put on your best dress.’ I replaced the telephone. ‘You can toddle along home now, Mr Ackroid.’
‘I’ve forgotten where it is.’
‘Ah! I’ll drop you
on my way to visit the St Boniface Twilight Home.’
Mr Ackroid seemed to be steadily losing enthusiasm. He silently collected his dark overcoat from the waiting room. He sat sullenly in the car as I drove towards Rosemary Road, beyond the railway line. It started snowing.
‘Aren’t you excited at the prospect of being reunited with your dear ones?’ I inquired.
‘I’ve a feeling I’ve got problems.’
‘But now you’ve a lovely wife to help you forget them.’
‘Forgetting is something I’d like to forget about,’ he remarked gloomily, as I stopped at the gate of a mock Tudor semi-det.
The front door opened.
‘Christ!’ screeched Mrs Ackroid. ‘That ain’t my bleeding husband. It’s Mr Hemmings.’
She grabbed his sleeve, pulled him across the tiny front garden, hauled him inside and slammed the door.
What to do? My professional duty was discharged. I shrugged. I drove off. It would clearly be best to let them sort it all out themselves.
Mrs Jenkins remarked in my consulting room between patients the following Monday morning, ‘I’m surprised that you were fooled by the shifty sort who pretended he’d lost his memory.’
I said firmly, ‘It was a genuine case of amnesia. Which is a form of psychological hysteria, like sleepwalking, fits of the shakes, creepy-crawly feelings up the skin, even imaginary deafness and blindness,’ I educated her. ‘All in the mind, with no bodily cause and causing no bodily harm. Always happening to soldiers in battles, and I believe the Army puts them in the glasshouse for losing their memory like any other item of their equipment. My patient is probably reacting to a tricky marital situation. I can only speculate.’
‘Not for long. Mrs Ackroid’s outside.’
Mrs Ackroid took the patient’s chair, beginning anxiously, ‘There’s something queer about my Charlie. That’s Mr Hemmings.’
‘Are you embroidering the rich tapestry of his life as you gather the stray strands of memory?’ I inquired.
‘No, we’re not.’
‘But surely he can recall his job? His favourite viewing? His National Insurance number?’
‘He can’t remember nothing. He just wanders round the house staring out of the window and heaving deep sighs and saying he’s probably done something awful, maybe murder, maybe fiddling the social security, it gets on your nerves.’
‘Exaggerated feelings of guilt and self-reproach are common in depressed patients,’ I reassured her.
‘There’s other things.’ She leaned forward. ‘Charlie shouldn’t have been at home anyway, last weekend. He works on North Sea oil, you see. So he gets back only every other one, sometimes not even that when they’re busy after striking a gusher, or whatever. I’m worried they’re missing him. I mean, I get good money at the burger bar, but he doesn’t want to risk the sack, every little helps these days, doesn’t it?’
‘Put the point to him. He seems an admirably sensible man.’
‘He’s ever so nice when he’s sane,’ she said fondly. ‘And a real home bird. I often say of a Saturday let’s go down the pub, but he says, I would rather sit viewing by the fire alone with you, my darling, in pubs you never know who you’re going to meet.’ She was suddenly despairing. ‘I just don’t know how to handle him, doctor, especially as I’m in the middle of redecorating the bathroom and toilet.’
‘Ignore his mood, Mrs Ackroid,’ I instructed her. ‘My best advice is to be loving.’
‘Oh, he hasn’t forgotten anything about that, believe you me. You think Charlie’s one of the quiet sort? But once he gets going, honest, if you made a video of it we’d be run in for hard porn.’ She wriggled her pelvis reminiscently in the chair.
At evening surgery that Monday Mrs Jenkins announced, ‘The man you gave to Mrs Ackroid is in the waiting room. Why don’t you call the police?’
I demanded crossly, ‘Surely you can tell the difference between the clinical and the crooked?’
‘In this job you learn to spot the phoneys quicker than a computer spots stolen credit cards,’ she told me crisply. ‘That’s why I think you’re being conned like a bumpkin in Soho.’
‘Kindly send in my patient,’ I ordered icily.
Mrs Jenkins had been overdoing it. I must suggest to my partners that she enjoy a rest.
Charlie started awkwardly, ‘I’ve got a bit of a confession to make, doctor. I hadn’t lost my memory outside Marks and Spencer’s. It happened earlier that morning. Shall I go on?’
‘Please,’ I invited.
‘It had already gone when I woke up. I didn’t know where I was. I suppose we all get that panicky feeling from time to time, away from home.’
‘I have it inevitably in hotels, particularly as all the bedrooms these days look exactly the same.’
‘So I screwed up my eyes and said, “It’s all right, me old chum, another moment and everything will come back.” But it didn’t. I opened them again. I was in a small room with big pink roses on the wallpaper, a scruffy carpet and bright pink curtains keeping out the sunlight. Worse, I didn’t know who I was. I was in a bed with a pink muslin canopy draped over the top end. I turned, and found myself six inches from a pink-faced ginger-headed girl, with her eyes shut and her mouth wide open, who I didn’t know from Eve. She didn’t have a fig leaf, neither.’
‘Disconcerting,’ I sympathized.
‘Before I could react to this, without opening her eyes or, I think, closing her mouth, she grabbed me by what you doctors call the organs.’
‘Do go on.’
‘Well, what was I to do? Not much choice, really. So I did. I mean, wouldn’t you?’
‘I cannot answer hypothetical questions, as the politicians say on television.’
‘She didn’t even open her eyes till afterwards, when she said, “How’s your poor head, Fred?” Come to think of it, I had quite a headache. She said, “I’m sure he didn’t really mean to duff you up, he was only showing off.” I asked, “What happened?” She said, “When he hit you, you banged your head against the lounge doorpost and passed out. I carried you up to bed. Kevin’s ashamed of himself this morning, I shouldn’t wonder.” “Who’s Kevin?” I asked. “Oh, come on,” she said. “My husband, of course.”’
‘Intriguing.’
‘Then I heard a creak outside the bedroom. There were other people in the house, see? Perhaps the husband? I thought. She leaped out of bed and started putting on her bra and pants warming on the electric heater, then pulled hack the curtains and said, “You’d think it was spring,” slipped into a pink satin housecoat and left me. Through the window I found rows of council houses, all with their back gardens and washing lines. I began to notice a nice smell of frying bacon. Lying on the tatty dressing table was a plugged-in electric razor, so I had a quick shave, put on this very suit, and went downstairs. The girl was at the kitchen table with a fat woman who must have been her mum, and a thin bloke smoking a hand-rolled and reading the Sun.’
‘You are obviously one of the family,’ I observed encouragingly.
Charlie – or Fred – nodded. ‘Mum asked, “How’s your head?” and shovelled me a plate of bacon, fried eggs, sausages and fried bread. “That Kevin will find himself inside again quicker than you can say the Sweeney Todd,” she said. And the old boy said, without looking up from the Sun, “They oughter bring back the rope.” And the girl said, “Fred, I didn’t know Kevin was getting out yesterday, honest I didn’t, I’d got it wrong about his remission.” I said – a bit anxiously – “Is he upstairs?” and she said, “What, have that perverted villain in the house, you must be joking, he could sleep on a park bench as far as I’m concerned, though I suppose he’ll be back some time, after all he is my husband, and maybe he’ll still feel a bit sore about finding you here, Fred dearest, I should take a walk.”’
‘A prudent suggestion, perhaps.’
‘So I put on my overcoat as it seemed a chilly time of year, and at the front door the old boy tucked the Sun under his arm and sai
d, “I’d like it today.” I said, “What today?” and he said, “That thump last night make you lose your memory, or something? The money.” “Ah, the money,” I said. He said, “The bloke what I owe it to is turning nasty. I mean, Fred, you been getting your knees under the table, living off the fat of the land, frozen duck, I ask you, about time you contributed to the household expenses, not to mention you having a slice of our Norma for long enough. You can’t be short of a bob, with this market research job what gets you running round the country for weeks on end, but if you’re feeling a bit doubtful about the donation maybe I’ll tell Kevin a few things what I overhear between you and our Norma through the bedroom wall? These houses are a proper disgrace the way they’re jerry built, someone made a packet out of it somewhere, believe you me.”’
He paused. I placed my fingertips together. The sparseness of my comments indicated only the busyness of my brain.
‘The old boy added in a nasty way, “Might make Kevin want to finish off last night’s job, then?” So I started walking pretty smartish, anywhere to get away, along those roads of exactly the same houses, till I found myself in a busy shopping street and felt in my pockets and rang you up.’
‘Nothing you have just told me ever happened.’
‘But doctor! It’s as vivid as you are sitting there, all pink with your half-moon glasses.’
‘There is a lovely poem by the late Walter De la Mare, which proclaims, Memory – that strange deceiver! Who can trust her? How believe her? You lost your memory, certainly. I estimate some time before last weekend. Possibly you cracked under the strain of the North Sea. It must be dreadfully uncomfortable and draughty. But the rest is pure hallucination,’ I told him impressively. ‘Hallucinations are not uncommon concomitants of any psychological disturbance. This remarkably deprived family you have described will shortly fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day, as the Hymn Book puts it.’
With unaccustomed animation, he jumped up and shook my hand.
I beamed. ‘You just go back living happily with Mrs Ackroid, who I know greatly appreciates you.’
Doctor On The Ball Page 3