Doctor On The Ball

by Richard Gordon

  ‘Must be interesting,’ I murmured politely.

  He gave a low whistle. ‘You’d be amazed at some of the oaths people commission these days. You’re in the Cyhiraeth room? Did you know the shriek she used to utter foretold imminent death?’

  ‘Like a crash bleep for the cardiac arrest trolley,’ mentioned Dalrymple with a laugh. ‘I mean, you’re always seeing it on television.’

  ‘I’m hooked on the medical programmes,’ Harrington agreed. ‘Those miraculous heart transplants! Mind, they don’t seem to do the patients much good, but they’re wonderful for the surgeons’ exhibitionism.’

  ‘The sight of blood makes me faint.’ Rollo held a hand over his eyes.

  ‘I’ve a distant cousin who’s a surgeon,’ Harrington amplified. ‘Specializes in the feet. Never examined a patient above the ankle in his life.’

  I asked about big property deals up Rollo’s sleeve.

  He dropped his voice. ‘Yes! Top secret. I’ve been retained by Her Majesty to dispose of Windsor Castle to a consortium of Arabs. Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ The accountant and commissioner of oaths stared wide-eyed. ‘It’s for pressing reasons of State, which I certainly won’t divulge. I’ve just sent out the particulars: period residence, easy reach London and airport, stone-built, extensive views and many interesting features. I was putting my name on a board outside the front gate, but the authorities are proving rather petty.’

  Bronwen appeared behind the bar. We fell silent. We gazed upon the Delectable Mountains. ‘Can I get you anything to drink, now?’

  ‘Four gin and titties,’ I said. ‘Tonics,’ I said.

  ‘Large ones?’

  ‘Enormous,’ I said.

  19

  A week passed. I had caught nothing. Neither had Rollo. The colonel eyed the river penetratingly. He said the water was too clear.

  I met in the bar an agreeable new arrival called Forshaw.

  ‘What’s your line of country?’ he asked amiably. ‘Snap! So am I. What insurance company?’

  ‘The Rocksolid,’ I replied hastily. I knew of it only because my life’s savings were deposited therein.

  He whistled. ‘Lucky sod.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked vaguely.

  ‘Their sales commission, of course. Know what we say in the trade?’ He grinned. ‘Rocksolid bribe their reps so much to flog policies, it’s a wonder there’s anything left in the kitty for the customers.’

  I asked in alarm, ‘I hope they’re not going bust?’

  He laughed. ‘Well, they say your directors sleep with tickets to South America and dark glasses at the bedside. Tell me, how do you calculate your actuarial index?’

  ‘Never talk shop on holiday,’ I said severely.

  I slunk out, saying I had just remembered that I never drank before meals, doctor’s orders.

  It rained for three days. I had still caught nothing. Neither had Rollo. The colonel declared thoughtfully that the water was too drumbly. I asked shortly what drumbly meant. He looked pained, and said he imagined that every real fisherman knew about drumbly.

  Sandra said at dinner, ‘Don’t keep looking down Bronwen’s cleavage like that when she serves the soup, people are beginning to nudge.’

  I said, flustered, ‘If Quasimodo was serving it, I wouldn’t notice the hump?’

  She persisted severely, ‘I’d have imagined boobs as boringly commonplace to you as udders to farmers.’

  I took a lofty artistic tone. ‘The female breast is never drained of its Rubenesque beauty. As a sixteenth-century poet carolled, Heigh ho, fair Rosaline! Her paps are centres of delight, Her breasts are orbs of heavenly frame. Quite charming.’

  ‘You’re just a dirty old doctor,’ Sandra corrected me.

  Rollo, Dalrymple, Harrington and myself enjoyed a long talk in the bar after dinner about the effect of property values on life insurance, accountancy and oath commissioning, and vice versa. We were surprised when the colonel announced testily it was well past midnight and he was locking up. I tripped over a suitcase which Sandra had stupidly left in the middle of the bedroom floor. She expressed the hope from the pillow that next year I should be able to find an alcoholics’ home with fishing rights.

  In the morning Sandra stayed in the lounge with a book of crossword puzzles. She said that my catching nothing for ten days gave her the feeling of sitting to watch the trees grow, which was hardly less interesting, furthermore Lady Basingstoke seemed to imagine she was a combination of Princess Di and Mrs Thatcher, also she sensed a nasty cold coming on, but if the holiday was relaxing me she would not give all this a second thought.

  I caught a fish! I hastened back to display it.

  ‘That?’ cried Sandra. ‘Why, if it was in a tin of sardines, it would contravene the Trade Descriptions Act.’

  I was deeply hurt. ‘I shall lay it in state with the other catches on that marble slab in the hall,’ I told her with dignity.

  ‘Then I shall disown both of you.’ She returned to her crossword. ‘I’ve just turned said Pepys into dyspepsia.’

  Rollo was laying a fish on the slab, too.

  ‘Mine’s bigger than yours,’ I claimed at once.

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ he replied huffily.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘It is not!’

  ‘A good quarter-inch in it. Look.’

  ‘Rubbish. It’s the way you’re positioning them.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of being unsporting?’

  He drew himself up. ‘I shall obtain a ruler.’

  Measuring, he exclaimed triumphantly, ‘There! A clear three-eighths of an inch in my favour. I should be obliged if in future you did not cast slurs on my veracity.’

  I decided that surgeons fish in the same spirit as they practise, ruthlessly competitively. The colonel told me as I returned the ruler that the water was now too high. Tomorrow the fish would be leaping thicker than the midges.

  Rollo was up to something. Next morning after breakfast he slipped off with a veal and ham pie and a bottle of claret. In Cyhiraeth, Bronwen was making the bed. She asked as she bent to her work about the availability of pop concerts in London and if I knew any of the stars. Lovely view.

  On the front steps stood Mr and Mrs Forshaw, whom I had been avoiding by dodging behind trees and into the loo. After chatting about the weather, Mr Forshaw asked, ‘What’s your portfolio?’

  ‘Samsonite,’ I said.

  He stared, then laughed. ‘I like it! But what are you holding?’

  I looked. ‘A fishing rod.’

  He slapped his thigh. ‘We need a few comics in the business. Who’s your broker?’

  ‘I don’t know, except he’s got three balls.’

  He did not laugh so heartily, and looked at me from the sides of his eyes. I strolled away noticing him muttering something to his wife and tapping his forehead.

  I caught nothing. The colonel stared, assessing the water, and expertly pronounced it too flat. We thought of leaving for home early. Sandra had finished the crosswords.

  As everyone sat down to dinner, the colonel appeared, agitated.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he implored. ‘Could you help yourselves from the kitchen hatch? Young Bronwen’s been suddenly taken ill. I must phone for the doctor.’

  I exclaimed, ‘What’s she got?’

  He replied distractedly, ‘I don’t know, but it’s something the matter with her chest.’

  I instantly stood and pronounced, ‘Don’t worry! I am a doctor.’

  So did Rollo, Dalrymple and Harrington.

  I persuaded Sandra to stay.

  On our last day, the colonel eyed the river, shook his head and declared that the water was too normal. I caught a huge fish.

  ‘Well, it’s Moby Dick compared to the other one,’ Sandra conceded. ‘It’ll end your holiday usefully relaxed, even if it’s the biggest miracle since the feeding of the five thousand.’

  As I proudly lay it on the post-mortem slab, Rollo appeared puffing under the
weight of two supermarket bags crammed with fish.

  ‘Congratulations!’ I exclaimed, green as the river weed with envy. ‘What brilliance. What skill.’

  ‘It’s easy if you know how,’ Rollo imparted modestly. ‘Like surgery.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I advanced under the camouflage of a laugh, ‘you weren’t using one of those powerful hormonal baits? Or maybe a lump of gorgonzola?’

  He lowered his voice. ‘No, but I found from the local community medicine feller where the village sewer’s been leaking into the river all summer. The fish are as thick there as customers in McDonald’s on a Saturday night.’

  ‘You might have told me,’ I complained bitterly.

  ‘I wanted to, after breakfast. But you’d disappeared to go over Bronwen’s chest again. You can’t have everything, can you? Will you and Sandra join us tonight, to help out with the eating? I happen to know that the colonel has an excellent bottle or two of Mersault ’78.’

  20

  The season of mellow fruitfulness found Mrs Iles pregnant. I beamingly congratulated her.

  ‘You’re the one I’ve got to thank for my condition,’ she asserted.

  ‘Oh, come.’ I pushed half-moons half down nose. ‘My intervention in the process was brief, if satisfying.’

  ‘Honestly, I’d like to run round telling everyone, “It’s all the doctor’s doing!” But I suppose it’s best to keep quiet and let the neighbours think it’s my husband’s?’

  I nodded gravely. ‘I’ve put several ladies in your position, and I always suggest exactly that.’

  She had been married ten years (husband in biscuits). She had tried everything. Relaxing Caribbean cruise. The kama sutra position. Oysters. Prayer. Catnip (recommended by Cromwellian herbalist Nicholas Culpepper). The couple desperately consulted me in early summer. I referred her to Bertie Taverill, gynaecologist at the General, who found her as fertile as the meadows of May. The microscope pointed accusingly to her husband.

  Thelma Iles was gingery, gentle, freckled and floppy. Edgar Iles was small, spectacled, energetic and edgy. He needed strenuous explanation that a low sperm count was unrelated to masculinity, aggressiveness, vigour, sexiness or management skills, and afflicted 1500 lusty fellow-countrymen a year. He had built up his biscuit business from crumbs, and desperately desired bequeathing it to a devoted son, subject to capital transfer tax avoidance. I suggested AID.

  ‘But what if the child comes out cross-eyed?’ he objected nervously. ‘Bowlegged? A nitwit?’

  ‘Not to mention the er,’ added Mrs Iles. ‘You know, doctor. The ethnic bit.’

  ‘The anonymous donors are screened far more carefully than the secret service,’ I reassured them. ‘Physically, mentally and er. Why, a couple of thousand Britons are conceived thuswise every year, to general satisfaction. A whole quarter of a million are already walking about the Western world, without attracting shudders.’

  Mrs Iles hesitantly inquired about technical details. Simplicity itself, I extolled: the lady has a quick affair with a syringe and a little lie-down afterwards. The specimen could be fresh or frozen, like smoked salmon. They agreed to consult a discreet doctor in Wimpole Street recommended by my son Andy, who seemed to know about such things. Now sperm and ovum had met like Romeo and Juliet, and Mrs Iles sat across the consulting desk like the cat who had eaten the cream purring at the milkman.

  ‘Though I cannot keep out of my mind the gentleman,’ she confided coyly. ‘I mean, was he handsome and distinguished like Prince Charles? Talented like Terry Wogan? Domineering like Robin Day? Or perhaps terrifically brainy? I keep reading how those Nobel prizewinners are offered as donors, just like Miss Worlds to open dairy shows.’

  ‘The secret will never be known,’ I told her cosily, ‘being locked away in the doctor’s files in Wimpole Street.’

  ‘I suppose it’ll be a little bastard?’ she asked sadly.

  ‘I’m afraid so. The law is less an ass than a mule, which combines stubbornness with sexual incompetence. But don’t worry, without bastards we shouldn’t have much of an English aristocracy.’

  She thanked me profusely and left a tin of de luxe chockie bikkies.

  I reflected how complicated ethical problems had grown since I was a young doctor, when the only one was presented by a panting half-naked wife alone in the house, and you had to face gravely the chances of getting away with it.

  Sandra greeted me at lunchtime, ‘Andy phoned from St Swithin’s. He’s home for a few days towards the end of the month.’

  ‘Good! With Imogen?’ She shrugged. ‘I’d love to meet her. How was she, during that cricket match? Nice? Quiet? Sense of humour?’

  ‘Oh, bubbling! In fits at Andy describing what a fool you were making of yourself as the umpire.’

  I changed the subject. ‘Perhaps Dr Quaggy’s right. Should I retire? I know, my dear, how you yearn for the warming sun like a newly planted tulip bulb. Why not transform my life into an everlasting holiday? Why not enjoy our castle in Spain – on a time-share basis, of course? Why should I linger in a profession with the top rate of alcoholism, suicide and hypochondria? There may be no retiring age for GPs, but why should I lay a shaky stethoscope on patients who are either alarmed at the medical Methuselah or reassured that their doctor has stumbled upon the secret of eternal life?’

  ‘You’d be bored,’ Sandra informed me. ‘Without patients, you’d be like Dr Barnardo without waifs.’

  I tucked into my cholesterol-free saltless salad. Since adopting the hobby of dietetics, Sandra had become as lunatic about food as Dr Lonelyhearts’ Scots professor of nutrition. ‘I’d miss mitigating human miseries and joining in its joys,’ I admitted. ‘Today I’d a lady who’d found pregnancy as elusive as I found fish in Llawrfaennenogstumdwy.’

  ‘With AID and test-tube babies and surrogate mothers and frozen embryos and fertility drugs, you meddlesome doctors have complicated a process which most people find admirably simple.’

  ‘Well, AID would be equally effective if we simply put both parties in a pitch-dark room and let them impregnate per viam naturalem.’

  ‘That happens,’ Sandra murmured.

  ‘Oh, AID’s a thriving leisure activity,’ I agreed. ‘There was something recently in the BMJ. Research on the population’s blood groups proved that one child in three couldn’t remotely have been the husband’s.’

  I guffawed. She raised her eyebrows. I observed, ‘I hope ours are the other two,’ but she did not seem to share Imogen’s bubbling sense of humour.

  The telephone rang. It was Mrs Iles, hysterical.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I muttered hurriedly, reaching for my bag.

  ‘But you haven’t finished your lunch. What’s the matter with the woman?’

  ‘I don’t know. She just kept screaming “Come at once!” Maybe she’s aborting. She was the one full of the joy of artificial sex.’

  ‘There’s apple pie, with cream for a treat.’

  But a doctor’s duty comes first.

  ‘The childless Ileses lived near the randy Watsons and the hungry Haymasons. They had a newly built colonial-style open-plan house with swimming pool, floodlit patio and brick-housed barbecue. Mr Iles was pacing beside the pool, pulling his hair and beating his chest.

  I asked anxiously, ‘Some complication of pregnancy?’

  He grabbed my lapels, eye-rolling. ‘Complications!’ he spluttered. ‘Look!’

  I observed through the double-glazing Mrs Iles on the G-plan sofa, ashen-faced and open-mouthed. On the Parker-Knoll opposite lounged a pale spotty youth wearing tight shiny black leather trousers, Guinness T-shirt, one gold earring, two swastika tattoos and a coiffure like a pink-haired Red Indian, smoking a cigarette with the air of owning the place.

  I slid aside the patio doors.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded fiercely.

  He looked round casually. ‘You gotta be the bleedin doctor.’

  ‘What right have you to sit there?’ I continued sternly.

  �
��Since you ask, mate, I’ve as much right as our beloved Queen to sit on er frone. I’m the father of this old bird’s child, see.’

  Mrs Iles put her hands to her cheeks and screamed.

  ‘Impossible!’ I stated.

  ‘No it ain’t,’ he remarked calmly. ‘I did a break-in at that wank doctor’s place. Purely from idle curiosity, gemme? Meantersay, you give someone somefink useful, you wanna know it’s not bin wasted, OK? I found papers wiv all the names on.’

  ‘Is this some devilish blackmail?’

  ‘Now waita minnit. Ain’t accusing me of dishonesty, aryer? I might not like that. And when I don’t like somefink I’m likely to get really roused, see?’

  He flicked open a knife from his trouser pocket. Mrs Iles screamed again and fainted.

  I put her head between her knees. Mr Iles shook his fists and cried, ‘My God, the shock’s killed her! You swine! You’ve murdered a mother and child at one go.’ The visitor poured himself a large Scotch from the repro-Tudor cocktail cabinet.

  I took her shoulders. Mr Iles took her feet. We carried her upstairs and lay her moaning on their circular bed in the fully fitted mirrored bedroom. I scribbled a prescription for tranquillizers.

  ‘What shall I do?’ asked Mr Iles agitatedly.

  ‘Administer TLC.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Tender Loving Care. Useful treatment when all else fails, thus widely practised.’

  The youth had lit a large cigar and was pouring a second Scotch.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ I announced resolutely.

  ‘Go on?’ he remarked off-handedly.

  ‘You’ll be locked up in one of those short-sharp-shock places for life, if I have anything to do with it.’

  ‘You kiddin?’ he suggested.

  ‘Frightening a highly sensitive newly pregnant woman like that. It’s criminal.’

  He looked as innocent as Orphan Annie.

  ‘Tell me wot I done wrong, guv,’ he implored.

  ‘Done wrong,’ I exclaimed. ‘Egad!’

  ‘Apart from a bit of burglary, like everyone else,’ he admitted. ‘Care for a Scotch?’