Sir Lancelot did not notice his former examinee. His attention was distracted immediately by a small, grey-haired, seedy-looking, thin, coloured man in red-striped flannel pyjamas and a St Swithin’s-issue blue towelling dressing-gown, who pushed into the lift while the doors were starting to close.
‘Sir Lancelot Spratt –’ said the new arrival breathlessly, as they began to descend.
‘Correct.’ Sir Lancelot looked down at him, stroking his beard. ‘I know you, don’t I? One of the patients from Shoreditch?’
‘No, no, much farther,’ said the man in agitation. ‘From Shanka.’
‘That’s it. The case Professor Ding is waiting to perform a cardiac transplant upon.’
‘That is all wrong,’ he declared in an urgent low voice. ‘I am not his patient. I am his brother-in-law.’
Sir Lancelot was puzzled. ‘The two conditions are not incompatible, I should imagine?’
‘But I am not ill. There is nothing wrong with me. Nothing whatever.’ The little man banged his chest hard, producing a drumlike noise. ‘You hear? I am as sound as a flea.’
‘But come! Professor Ding distinctly told me just two mornings ago that you were suffering from a complicated form of congenital heart defect. One which I thoroughly agree sees its only hope of relief in cardiac transplantation.’
‘I will not have an operation, not on my life,’ the patient said frantically.
‘You are not showing much gratitude to Professor Ding,’ Sir Lancelot said severely to the man wedged tight against his stomach. ‘For bringing you all this way, doubtless at great expense, so that your operation might be performed in our own well-equipped hospital.’
‘My heart is in the right place,’ he protested bitterly. ‘Listen, please, Sir Lancelot Spratt. You must help me. That assassin who runs our country wants to win the Nobel Prize. So he says to Professor Ding, “Boy, you gotta get plenty medical renown. Do some heart transplants and get in the newspapers, like all the other cutters.” Professor Ding! Do a heart transplant! I wouldn’t trust him to cut my toenails, between you and me, Sir Lancelot. But Professor Ding must have a try. Or he’ll end up deader than…deader than I’m going to be in the next fortnight,’ he ended, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
The lift stopped at the ground floor, and the occupants started unloading themselves. Pip stayed inside, wedged behind the breakfast-trolleys. Sir Lancelot and the man in the towelling dressing-gown stepped into the main hall.
‘But good grief –’ Hands deep in jacket pockets, Sir Lancelot started strolling towards the front door. ‘Why did you fall in with this plan? Which strikes me as more like premeditated murder than most surgery.’
‘I didn’t fall in with it. I had to. The President would have had me shot otherwise. I thought it wisest to travel to London, then escape. He never liked me, Professor Ding,’ the patient added. ‘I don’t think any man likes his brother-in-law.’
‘My, my. There you are. I just wondering where you got to.’ The beaming Professor Ding appeared from the direction of the entrance doors, taking his patient in a fiercely affectionate grasp by the arm. ‘You just going for a little stroll after breakfast, I guess? Now, now, you naughty man,’ he chortled, waving a finger vigorously under the other’s nose. ‘I tell you, don’t I? You gotta stay in your nice, comfortable, sterile St Swithin’s bed, till some unlucky geezer gets himself run over or similar, then the fun begins, eh?’
‘You never mentioned that you two were related,’ remarked Sir Lancelot.
‘Related?’ Professor Ding looked amazed, then grinned broadly. ‘Sure we’re related. We got the famous doctor–patient relationship.’
He laughed loudly for the best part of a minute.
‘The doctor–patient relationship,’ he managed to repeat at last. ‘Them’s the best relations in the whole world. They don’t go stay in each other’s houses. They don’t go borrow money off each other. Not like as if they was someone’s brother-in-law, hey?’
‘But am I to understand that he is your brother-in-law?’ Sir Lancelot asked in a more peppery voice, noticing that the Professor’s spirit of fun caused him to poke his miserable-looking companion several times in the ribs with his fist.
‘Maybe he is. Who knows? In Shanka we got as many wives as we can afford, like you in England with cars and golf clubs and similar.’ Professor Ding laughed again, giving his patient another pummelling. ‘People sick with the heart trouble get screwy ideas, Sir Lancelot. I guess you know that.’ The professor tapped his own forehead. ‘It’s the anoxia. Come on, my good fella. We ride right up again in the lift to the ward, I’ll go and sit right in there with you. We’ll have a nice game of Scrabble, until some stupid bugger get himself run over, then it’s Hey ho! Off to work we go.’
The little man gave Sir Lancelot an agonizedly imploring look. But the only action of the St Swithin’s surgeon was to raise his bushy eyebrows and shrug his broad shoulders. Sir Lancelot knew how a man could steel himself for a major operation, then try and dodge when it became imminent, ingeniously parading some excuse which left his courage unquestioned. He had heard before of dissuading wives and friends, of amazing recoveries in health, of miraculous visits to faith healers, all propounded as the scalpel of Damocles was about to descend. The ebullient Ding was perhaps not the stereotype of a surgical professor, Sir Lancelot reflected as he pushed through the wide front door. But he supposed that in such an uninhibited and unruly country as Shanka a certain informality in professional manner was hardly noticeable.
8
Shortly before one o’clock that lunchtime, Pip took off his brown coat, threw it over his shoulder, and stepped into the residents’ bar. As he expected, his two old friends were leaning with pint mugs in their usual corner.
‘Come to collect the empties?’ called Tony Havens at once, grinning.
‘Seen the dean yet?’ asked Hugo Raffles eagerly.
‘I’ve hardly seen anyone at all. You’d be amazed at life below stairs in this hospital. Do you know exactly what I do? Sit on my backside all day with about a hundred other porters, down in the basement. Doing absolutely nothing all day long, except taking tea breaks.’
‘The theatre porters will be demanding tea breaks during operations next,’ Tony suggested. ‘I can just hear Sir Lancelot saying, “Scalpel,” then the hooter blowing and everyone walking out, leaving the patient all alone connected to the automatic respirator.’
‘But it’s really quite a scandalous system,’ Pip insisted. ‘It’s a terrible waste of money for the Health Service, and it’s definitely bad for staff morale.’
‘The Government possesses unlimited money, dear boy, and the porters possess unlimited sloth,’ Hugo told him. ‘So what’s the odds? There are much more worthy things to reform in the hospital. We residents could do with a squash court, for a start.’
‘But portering is an essential hospital service,’ Pip countered earnestly. ‘In the 1963 Report of the King Edward’s Hospital Fund, which I read last night, it stated that the planning and supervision of portering was of fundamental importance, and much overlooked.’
‘When you’re working a hundred hour week as a houseman,’ Tony told him briskly, ‘you’ve more on your mind than the mental health of the hospital porters.’
‘Porters are people,’ Pip murmured. He was disappointed. He had innocently expected them to be spellbound by his experiences.
‘We really must fix this confrontation with the dean,’ Hugo continued. ‘With of course as many of the lads present as possible. Perhaps you could fix wheeling in the patient for his clinical demonstration? That’s in the lecture theatre this afternoon. It would provide a delightfully dramatic setting. Then you can push off and find this lucrative job with a drug company or tin leg maker or whatever.’
‘I’m not so sure that I don’t just want to stay a hospital porter.’
‘Oh, come, a joke’s a joke,’ Tony said.
‘It’s very edifying, seeing hospital work from t
he underside.’
‘You must be mad,’ Hugo told him. ‘I’d rather be an abortionist’s tout. The rake-off’s better.’
‘Nobody pays any attention at all to the ancillary staff,’ Pip complained. ‘The doctors at St Swithin’s seem to think they’re the only people who matter in the whole place.’
‘You’re right. We are,’ Tony agreed.
‘Why, I might even rise to be head porter in time,’ Pip suggested. ‘You two would be consultants by then, I suppose.’
‘Maybe. But not at St Swithin’s,’ Tony declared. ‘We’re both emigrating.’
Pip looked surprised. ‘When did you decide this?’
‘Over the past five or six months. Hugo and I seem to have talked about nothing else. Have we?’
‘You never mentioned it to me,’ he objected.
‘We rather lost touch with you, Pip, after we qualified last Christmas and you were still a student,’ he explained condescendingly.
‘San Francisco or Sydney, St Tropez or even Sark,’ Hugo speculated. ‘Anywhere to get out of this country, where the shortage of people who actually practise medicine is matched by the abundance of administrators telling us how to do it.’
‘We’re going somewhere doctors are still respected. Instead of finding themselves at the beck and call of a public who’s never had anyone to order about in their lives before, and rather take to the experience.’
‘To lands where money is pumped into medical research, instead of broken-down shipyards and motor-bike factories to keep bone idle workers in overpaid jobs.’
‘Where the patients are obese, and so are the fees.’
‘A nice little surgical clinic in upstate New York would do me,’ Hugo suggested. ‘The Yanks go for English doctors. We apparently have such a cheery way of telling people they’re going to die.’
‘I don’t think I’d care to desert the ship,’ said Pip solemnly. ‘Even though it’s sinking so fast the rats have to swim upwards.’
‘Come off it, Pip,’ Tony scoffed. ‘What’s a house job in a British hospital these days? It’s a perch, before flying off to fresh woods and pastures new. There’s no point staying at home longer than to learn the surgical ropes. And British doctors are not the only ones on the move. We shall be replaced by the equally great migration from the medical schools of the East.’
‘You know, I think it’s an entirely natural phenomenon,’ said Hugo thoughtfully. ‘This global east to west movement of doctors across the northern hemisphere. Do you suppose it’s something to do with the Trade Winds?’
‘So in the end everybody’s happy,’ Tony decided. ‘We British doctors are happy, because we finish up with enormous cars and swimming pools and stupendous life insurance. The Eastern doctors are happy, because Cricklewood is altogether less crowded and smelly than Calcutta. So please don’t make cracks about rats, Pip. Though to my mind, the rats were obviously the most intelligent beings on board.’
‘But what about the welfare of the patients?’ Pip asked.
‘Screw the patients,’ said Hugo.
Tony Havens ordered two more beers.
‘What about me?’ complained Pip. ‘I haven’t had a drink at all yet.’
The other two exchanged glances.
‘Pip, dear boy,’ said Hugo, ‘Tony and I were discussing this very matter before you came in. As you know, this bar is a club. That’s some technicality to do with the liquor licence, I believe. It’s restricted to the medical staff and the medical students. Not the porters. Sorry about that.’
‘Don’t talk such balls,’ Pip objected crossly. ‘You know we’ve had all sorts in here. Policemen, firemen, newspaper reporters, peculiar people from television –’
‘Signed in as guests,’ said Tony.
‘Then why can’t I be signed in as a guest? I’ll pay for my own drinks, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’
There was another silence. ‘Look, Pip,’ Tony continued. ‘We’d love to buy you unlimited drinks. But they’ll have to be in the pub down the road. You see, you are a porter. And if we let you come and drink here, all the other porters will want to.’
‘We’ve had this trouble before,’ Hugo added. ‘Some dreadful little oik down there in the basement had the ruddy nerve to ask old Clapper why he and his fellow-workers couldn’t come in here and booze away to their hearts’ content. I’m sure you see the fundamental pathology? No one would object to the odd porter coming in for a pint. But with the workers, it’s not only a case of one-out-all-out, it’s of one-in-all-in. If we let you put a foot in the door, those bloody-minded barrack-room lawyers downstairs would cash in. You must know their “I’m all right, Doc,” attitude, better than I do. The residents would be paying for your breaching the dyke long after you’d gone off to find yourself a decent job.’
‘What was the name of that horrible piece of work?’ Tony frowned. ‘Sapworth, that’s it. Some arrogant little sod to do with the union.’
Pip drew himself up. ‘Mr Harold Sapworth is not an arrogant little sod. Or even a horrible piece of work. He is suffering from a somewhat disorganized home life, which would drive anyone of less resilient personality to suicide, or possibly murder. He enjoys instead a healthy mental attitude and a sound grasp on the essentials of life. Also, he loves his mother. And further, he happens to be one of my personal friends. Not to mention one of my close colleagues in the trade union movement.’
‘You haven’t joined ACHE?’ they both asked in horror.
‘I am the shop steward,’ Pip told them with dignity.
‘Pip, you’re suffering from illusions,’ Tony said anxiously. ‘How about you and me taking a little stroll to see Dr Bonaccord?’
‘On the contrary, for the first time I am beginning to see life clearly. I shall seek our Mr Sapworth and take him for a beer in the nearest public bar. Where we shall plot how to speed up the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system, as prognosticated by the clear-sighted if somewhat excitable K. Marx in the British Museum Reading Room. Workers of the world, unite.’ He raised his clenched fist. ‘You have nothing to pull but your chains. Sending you lot down the plughole,’ he directed enthusiastically at his friends.
He strode from the bar.
Pip had left Harold Sapworth lying on a bench in the porters’ pool, reading a girlie magazine and munching beetroot sandwiches. He supposed that his fellow porter would be remaining there until the next tea break. He was surprised on entering the tiled basement corridor to find Harold behind a vast bouquet wrapped with cellophane and trailing coloured ribbon.
‘They got me a job to do,’ he explained gloomily. ‘Bunch of flowers to deliver to that bird Brenda Bristols.’
‘What, the actress?’ Pip said spiritedly. ‘Lucky man. I wouldn’t mind the chance of meeting her. Particularly sitting up in bed.’
‘Go on?’ Harold sucked the top of his thumb. ‘You can help me out, then. I said I’d nip down to the betting shop for the lads before the first race. Wouldn’t like to be late. They’d get proper stroppy if one of them was on a winner.’
‘Which ward’s she in?’ Pip asked, taking the flowers.
‘She’s not in St Swithin’s actual. Not the likes of her. She’s ritzing it in the Bertie Bunn Wing. You’ll know your way around.’
‘I’ve never been inside the Bertie Bunn in my life,’ Pip told him.
No student had. Unlike the National Health patients in St Swithin’s, private ones were not liable to be abruptly set upon by twenty or thirty young men and women in white coats, prodding and pummelling and discussing what was wrong between themselves as though the object of their attention had already succumbed to the death which he now gathered was swiftly inevitable.
‘Go on? It’s got colour telly and that, and they has their veg served separate.’
‘But hasn’t it got porters of its own?’
‘Suppose not. They don’t have doctors and nurses of their own, do they? It’s all worked out somewhere under the National Health.’
/> ‘But don’t you object, taking flowers to private patients?’
‘Never thought about it, really. I must get on and place them bets.’
‘Perhaps you’d join me for a drink this evening after work, Harold?’ Pip remembered. ‘In the local. I expect you’d really prefer the residents’ bar?’ he added pointedly.
‘Wouldn’t go near that place. I hear the beer’s gnat’s piss and the prices is shocking.’
Pip looked puzzled. ‘But surely, you headed a campaign to have porters allowed in it?’
‘That was only a matter of principle.’
‘I see.’ Pip nodded several times. ‘Like not dropping your guard in boxing? Or to be more exact, aiming a crafty punch where it would hurt most?’
‘That’s right, mate. You’re learning fast,’ said Harold admiringly. ‘Give a big kiss from me to Brenda Bristols.’
9
As Pip started out with her flowers from the basement of St Swithin’s, Brenda Bristols was sitting up in bed against a bank of pillows, in a plunging transparent nightie, sipping a vodka martini and reading Private Eye while waiting for her lunch. The door of her room flew open, revealing a short pink man in glasses, dressed in a plain white nightshirt reaching half-way down his lumpy thighs, crying, ‘Help me!’
Doctor On The Job Page 7