Brenda Bristols looked at him over her magazine. A career enlivened with sex-obsessed actors, wild-eyed directors, passionate playwrights and groping millionaires in nightclubs all over the world had left her unconcerned with life’s sexual vicissitudes. ‘Hello,’ she said amiably.
‘Help me,’ repeated her visitor.
‘Would you like me to buzz for a nurse?’ Or has your telly gone wrong?’
‘Dear lady! Please help me. May I come in?’
He slammed the door behind him, trotting across the thick apricot-coloured carpet to the high white bed designed by earnest and ingenious Swedes, with buttons and handles jutting all over it for placing patients instantly in a dozen different positions, all of them uncomfortable. He looked round wildly. ‘Where can I hide?’
‘There’s my bathroom.’ She nodded towards a second door. ‘It’s a little clammy.’
‘You don’t lead to the fire escape?’ he asked desperately, eyes falling on the sunlit balcony. ‘Or perhaps I could make a rope of sheets?’
‘I don’t really think I can spare the ones I’m using.’
‘I suppose it is seven storeys down. I should have to borrow dozens of them. And that would of course attract attention.’
‘Don’t you think it might also attract attention,’ Brenda Bristols mentioned, ‘even these informal days, running through the City of London in your little nightie?’
‘Perhaps you could lend me something?’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I could effect my escape in what they call drag. Yes, like Bonnie Prince Charlie with Flora Macdonald.’
‘I don’t think anything of mine would fit you terribly well, darling. But where are your own?’
‘They hid them. Last night. When they stuck me in the room across the corridor. I wanted to get out. My chauffeur was waiting. He probably still is.’
Brenda Bristols tossed aside her Private Eye. ‘But they can’t keep you in here, sweetie. Unless you can’t pay your bill. Then I suppose they make you wash up the bedpans, or something.’
‘Oh yes, they can.’ He grabbed her hand with both of his. ‘I’m a computer case.’
She sipped her martini in the other hand. ‘I do hope it’s not painful?’
‘It’s a terrible thing to suffer,’ he told her, cheeks shaking. ‘The computer downstairs diagnosed me as an acute schizophrenic with hay fever and pregnancy.’
‘You don’t look noticeably pregnant to me,’ she decided, inspecting him. ‘But I suppose you’re only a few weeks gone?’
‘I’m only repeating what the computer said,’ he told her miserably, still clutching her hand. ‘And I knew I had hay fever. I didn’t need any beastly computer to rub it in. I’ve suffered horribly from it for years. Then it decided for some reason of its own that I was pregnant.’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘So it decided that I must be suffering from delusions. That I was off my head. The computer never decided that it was off its head. Oh, no! It’s too arrogant, self-opinionated, ruthless and utterly inhuman. It’s got a personality exactly like both my former wives,’ he ended bitterly.
‘But surely,’ she pointed out calmly, ‘you can just tell one of the doctors that some slight computerized error has been made? Like with your gas bill?’
‘You can’t. That’s the basic trouble,’ he said frantically. ‘Apparently, once you start with the computer finding what’s wrong with you, the ordinary human doctor simply can’t interfere. If the computer makes a mistake, it’s supposed to sort itself out. The doctor would have to start from scratch, plodding away to find what you’ve got. When you quite likely haven’t got anything at all. I shall just have to stay until the computer has the common decency to admit it’s wrong. I shall probably spend the rest of my life here.’
‘It’s deliciously comfortable.’
‘But the expense! It makes Claridge’s look like Butlin’s.’
‘Have a drink. The ice is in the fridge under the telly.’
He poured himself half a tumbler of vodka from the bottle at her bedside and gulped it down. ‘Surely we’ve met before?’ he asked more calmly.
‘I’m Brenda Bristols. You’ve probably seen me on the box.’
‘Of course. I caught you in This Is Your Life. Tell me, did you know that compère fellow was disguised as a cow when you thought you were opening The Dairy Show?’
He sat on the edge of the high bed, glass in one hand, demurely tugging down the edge of his nightshirt across his hairy thighs with the other. ‘I’m Lord Hopcroft. You’ve probably seen me in the financial pages,’ he said modestly. ‘I own hotels.’
‘But how nice. Fix me another drink, sweetie, will you? Lunch seems late.’
‘Complain to the maître d’hôtel,’ he counselled, pouring her a martini. ‘Or I suppose it would be the maître d’hôpital? I imagine this is all in order?’ he asked doubtfully, opening the refrigerator for the ice, his original agitation subsiding. ‘I mean, here am I, a member of the House of Lords, well respected in City circles, trotting about a strange woman’s bedroom wearing only a nightshirt apparently designed for hospitalized dwarfs. If it got in the newspapers –’
‘But we’re sickly, not sexy,’ she pointed out.
‘You know what newspapers can make of the most innocent situation,’ he said, returning with the glass.
‘Be a love and let down the end of my bed while you’re passing. The young little doctor-man seemed to want my feet in the air. But it’ll turn into an enormous armchair for eating. You press that red knob just underneath,’ she indicated.
‘This?’
Lord Hopcroft touched the red button. With an obedient purr, the bed see-sawed its foot steadily into the air, tipping on the apricot carpet the bank of pillows, the vodka martini and Private Eye. ‘How dreadfully clumsy of me,’ remarked Lord Hopcroft, as these contents were followed by Brenda Bristols.
‘Worse accidents happen in hospitals, I suppose,’ she said philosophically. She sat on the floor beside him, as the bed halted almost vertically.
‘What amazing telescopic legs,’ he murmured, as they both peered underneath. ‘I always thought my second wife possessed those. She managed to keep a remarkably sharp eye on my activities at cocktail parties. Shall I press this yellow button?’
There was another whirr. The bed tipped sharply sideways on top of them. ‘We’re trapped!’ he exclaimed, struggling to escape. ‘This hospital is absolutely dominated by its mechanical devices.’
‘Can’t you reach the other button with your toes?’ Brenda Bristols asked irritably, as they lay pressed together like two flowers in a book.
‘I don’t think I can. I really must apologize if I’m rather warm. It’s a very hot day.’ There was a knock on the door. Lord Hopcroft cried with alarm, ‘Nobody must see us like this.’
‘It’s only the girl with my lunch,’ she said impatiently. ‘And somebody’s got to get us out, haven’t they? Please come in,’ she called.
Pip entered in his brown coat, bearing the flowers.
A man’s opinions are formed less by events than the mood in which he discovers them. Karl Marx might have concurred about capitalism with John D. Rockefeller, had his theory not been conceived in the arid leathery womb of the British Museum Reading Room. Pip had that afternoon noticed for the first time the lines of Rolls-Royces parked outside the Bertram Bunn Wing, discovered its expensive shop, eyed its extravagant interior decoration, heard the soft music and felt the soft carpeting, jostled against the hurrying trays of savoury-smelling food and expensive bottles in baskets or dewy buckets. Three days before, it would all have brought hardly a shrug to his narrow shoulders. Now he saw everywhere pampering rather than nursing, comfort overlying cure, money before medicine. In the mood which had glowed and flamed within him that morning, he found it shockingly unjust that human beings with exactly the same diseases, undergoing exactly the same treatment in exactly the same hospital, should enjoy conditions as different as Dingley Dell from Dotheboys Hall.
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. Furth
er, private patients indulged in frolics certainly not to be countenanced by a St Swithin’s ward sister. ‘May I leave the flowers?’
‘My gentleman friend and myself are not, in fact, enjoying ourselves very much.’
‘We’re trapped in the jaws of this bed,’ Lord Hopcroft told him.
‘Could you be awfully useful and summon some assistance?’
Pip’s mind had been trained as a medical student in the wards of St Swithin’s to dissect and assess the elements of all alarming situations, then to take swift remedial action. He dropped the flowers and pushed a button on the wall, set in a red ring marked EMERGENCY. At once a light flashed and a bell shrilled outside the open door. He stood looking down sympathetically, waiting for someone to appear. Nobody did.
‘Can’t you make a rather more active sort of effort?’ Brenda Bristols complained.
Pip strolled round to the other side of the bed. ‘There’s a handle,’ he announced, starting to crank it. As the pair struggled free, a female voice came crossly from the corridor, ‘Why do patients keep pushing the emergency button by mistake? Anyone would think the nursing staff had nothing to do all day.’
‘The bathroom!’ exclaimed Lord Hopcroft, leaping in and shutting the door.
‘What are you doing, Porter?’ demanded the blue-uniformed matron, hurrying into the private room with cap streamers flying and flicking off the alarm. ‘And what are you doing, Miss Bristols? I don’t remember giving you permission to get out of bed. Oh, let me attend to it, you clumsy fool,’ she continued impatiently, seizing the handle from Pip. ‘Look what you’ve done to this patient. You might easily have fractured several of her vertebrae. You porters must not meddle with these beds, which need a certain amount of intelligence to operate. There, see how quickly I’ve got it straight –’ She stared and blinked. ‘Pip! What are you doing in this room? In that coat?’
‘Oh, hello, Auntie Florrie,’ he replied mildly. ‘I work here.’
‘I know you do.’ She stamped a stoutly shod foot. ‘Why aren’t you taking your exams?’
‘I failed.’
‘How utterly disgraceful.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘When I specifically instructed Sir Lancelot Spratt to pass you.’
‘Dear Sir Lancelot,’ murmured Brenda Bristols, slipping gracefully back into bed. ‘The bear with the swansdown hug.’
‘You may claim a personal relationship with your surgeon,’ said the matron, ignoring Pip to jerk her patient forward and slam the pillows behind her back. ‘But I should like you to know that it cuts absolutely no ice whatever with me. Nor that you are a national figure, having your photograph with no clothes on displayed in every lorry-driver’s caff up and down the country.’
‘Charming, how you go round cheering up the patients, Matron,’ she said silkily.
‘I regard you simply as another female in my care. Like those of any age, any appearance and any profession in the Bertram Bunn Wing.’ The matron pounded the pillows savagely. ‘All are exactly the same to me. I am a dedicated nurse. Aren’t I, Pip?’
‘Then perhaps you’d hand me my lunch?’ Brenda Bristols nodded towards the green-overalled girl standing uncertainly with a tray in the doorway. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Auntie Florrie –’ began Pip.
‘Shut up,’ the matron told him, plonking the tray on the actress’ knees.
‘Ugh,’ said Brenda Bristols. ‘Cold vichyssoise. Always gives me the gripes.’
‘If you don’t want it, you needn’t have it,’ said the matron furiously. ‘I’ll throw it down the loo.’ She opened the door of the bathroom. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, as Lord Hopcroft sidled shyly into the room, both hands holding the hem of his nightshirt tight across the top of his legs.
‘I came to borrow some toothpaste,’ he explained.
‘Miss Bristols! Why have you a half-naked man in your room?’
‘He’s my guru.’
‘Auntie Florrie –’
‘Shut up. When were you admitted?’ she demanded of Lord Hopcroft. ‘What’s your diagnosis?’
‘I’m several months in the family way.’
‘My brain is going.’ The matron drew the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘It’s all the sheikhs and their habits. I should have stayed in the National Health wards, where the patients at least do what they’re told.’
‘Auntie Florrie –’
‘Shut up.’
‘Auntie Florrie, I refuse to shut up.’ The determination was so unusual for Pip, she rocked back on her heels. ‘Did I understand you to say that you canvassed Sir Lancelot to pass me in my surgery clinical?’
‘Of course I did,’ she replied shortly. ‘You’d never have got through by your own unaided efforts in a month of very wet Sundays.’
‘Thank you very much,’ he told her sharply. ‘Now I know your opinion of my mental abilities.’
‘Don’t get all dignified, Pip, please,’ she said impatiently. ‘I have tolerated you as an amiable half-wit for years. So has the rest of the family, with the calamitous if understandable exception of your adoring parents. Now look here, Miss Bristols,’ she switched her attention. ‘Your charms may be flaunted in every Underground station, where I might add the public draw on many interesting additions –’
‘Auntie Florrie!’ shouted Pip. ‘I may be a halfwit, but I was dedicated to becoming a doctor. And through my own efforts, if you don’t mind. You have bossed me and my poor parents about quite mercilessly for years.’
‘Pip, you must try and control your vile temper. It only makes you utter insulting falsehoods which you immediately regret. Miss Bristols, you may be meat and drink to Lord Longford and Mrs Mary Whitehouse –’
‘Auntie Florrie, you’re a two-faced prig.’
She stared speechless.
‘Yes, you are.’ Pip was carried away. ‘You’re a complete phoney. You boast you’re a dedicated nurse. What do you do? Run a clinical clip joint. This wing charges breathtaking prices, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Because the National Health Service has become so ramshackle that a lot of people will pay almost anything, even all their savings, just to escape its clutches.’
‘Please keep that sort of talk for your disreputable friends,’ she said icily.
‘I shall,’ Pip returned firmly. ‘You wait and see.’ He raised his clenched fist. ‘Porter Power!’
He left. He heard behind him an enthusiastic burst of applause from Brenda Bristols.
10
‘Harold –’ Pip came running in the sunshine back to the main block of St Swithin’s. He saw that his fellow-porter was unlucky enough to be burdened with another job that afternoon. Harold Sapworth was slowly pushing a low trolley loaded with crates marked MEDICAL SUPPLIES – URGENT into the goods entrance at the rear of the hospital. ‘Can you spare a minute?’
‘Long as you like, mate.’ Harold leant on the handle of his trolley and pulled an emaciated home-rolled cigarette from the top pocket of his brown coat. ‘No hurry. Got all day, if you want.’ He struck a match. ‘Where you bin? Out for a few pints? You looks pink around the chops.’
‘I am drunk, but with indignation.’
‘Go on?’
‘I delivered those flowers in the Bertram Bunn Wing. I had an altercation with the matron.’
‘Go on?’
‘The Bertram Bunn Wing is a towering social injustice, which should be demolished.’
‘Go on?’
‘Please don’t keep saying “Go on” like that, Harold. Haven’t you any opinions of your own?’
‘You gets good tips there. Some of them wogs hand out quids like they was Green Shield stamps.’
‘Harold, I implore you to raise your eyes from the mud to the stars.’ Harold Sapworth dutifully looked upwards. ‘Now let me get this absolutely right. The same porters, cooks and bottlewashers serve the Bertie Bunn as the St Swithin’s National Health patients? The same telephonists put through their calls from the central ho
spital switchboard? If the Bertie Bunn went up in flames, exactly the same hospital firemen would carry all the sheikhs out over their shoulders? But do these porters, cooks, firemen and so on realize how they’re being exploited?’
‘Shouldn’t think so. Most of ’em can’t speak English.’
‘Harold, I am going to hold a branch meeting of the union,’ declared Pip, clapping his companion on the shoulder.
‘Hold it here and now, if you like. No trouble. You and me’ll do. Pass a resolution, write it in the book. Arthur Pince and me worked it like that for years. Mind, Arthur was a gaffers’ man. Still, he had problems of his own.’
‘That’s not democracy, Harold. That’s not what Oliver Cromwell, Earl Grey, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone and Clem Attlee fought for.’
‘Go on?’
‘What the great Reform Bills gave the British people in the last century, we shall give the workers of St Swithin’s today. That is, a say in the decisions which dominate their lives. I see my duties as shop steward as primarily educative rather than executive. I’ll book the Founders’ Hall for tonight. What’s a convenient time? Seven o’clock?’
‘No one will come,’ said Harold gloomily. ‘Especially if there’s something good on the telly.’
‘I shall make them come,’ said Pip earnestly. ‘I’ll go right through the hospital crying, “Workers Awake!”’
‘Won’t be popular down below, this weather,’ Harold grumbled. ‘Afternoons, most of ’em doze off.’
A few minutes later, Pip was knocking deferentially at the door of Mr Grout’s office on the first floor.
‘If it’s about the dartboard,’ said the junior administrator as Pip was admitted, ‘Mr Clapper is away for the afternoon playing – playing host to a very important conference at Sunningdale.’
‘I want to convene a meeting of ACHE.’
‘That should present no administrative difficulty.’ Mr Grout reached into his glass-fronted bookshelf. ‘Let me see, General Whitley Council Handbook…Paragraph one, “No obstacles should be put in the way of granting facilities for staff organizations participating in meetings…” What notices do you intend to display?’ he asked, looking up. ‘They should be submitted to my prior approval, but permission to exhibit should not be unreasonably withheld.’
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