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!”’
Pip’s speech was met with a sound new to the orator’s ears. A raspberry. He looked down. It originated from Harold Sapworth.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Pip asked, pained.
‘Stow it, mate. We’ve heard all that before.’
‘I was only asking you to carry on with the strike. I thought the burden of my words pretty clear.’
‘The strike’s off, mate.’
Pip gazed unbelievingly. ‘I gave no orders to that effect.’
Harold sucked the tip of his thumb. ‘Nothing to do with you, mate. You’re nothing to do with us either, mate.’
‘But I’m your friend,’ Pip protested hotly.
‘We got a closed shop here at St Swithin’s. You ain’t a union member any longer. So you’d better hop it double quick, afore we take what you might call appropriate action, that is, putting the old boot in.’
‘How dare you,’ said Pip, turning pink.
‘And what’s all this here, then?’ Harold Sapworth produced some closely written sheets of paper from the pocket of his own coat. ‘What I found in that geezer Grout’s desk, when he sent me up to collect the dartboard this morning. Your writing, ain’t it?’ he asked Pip threateningly. ‘Scheme for making a hundred of your mates down here redundant.’
‘Some shop steward,’ snorted Alfred Dimchurch.
‘Bleeding scab, rather,’ Harold Sapworth agreed.
To a fanfare of hostile noises, Pip said furiously to Harold Sapworth, taking off his brown coat, ‘I’ve a damn good mind to thump you one.’
‘Wouldn’t if I was you, mate. You’re well outnumbered. Even forgetting our President, who may be a bit past handing out a bunch of fives. Don’t want to end up in the hospital, do you? Wouldn’t have a very comfortable stay there, either, if you asks me.’
Pip threw his coat savagely to the concrete floor. ‘I’m damned if I’m giving in without a fight, you uneducated Judas.’
Then it happened again. Faith slipped her hand in his. He stopped.
‘Pip, love,’ she said quietly. ‘It is far, far wiser to fight another day. By then, you see, nobody may be feeling like it.’
21
‘My dear Josephine,’ said the dean of St Swithin’s to his wife, as he relaxed in the bow-windowed parlour of his house in Lazar Row just after six o’clock that evening. ‘This definitely calls for a celebration. Fetch some sherry. Reach deep into my shoe cupboard upstairs for a bottle of the very old cuvée Butler. That really was an excellent year.’
He lay stretched in his deep armchair, humming and beating his fingertips together delightedly. There was a flash outside, a crash of thunder and the rain began to hose down. The break in the splendid week’s weather had arrived as foreseen by the morning’s paper. It caused the dean only to break out reedily from The Mikado, ‘“The threatened cloud has passed away, And brightly shines the dawning day.”’ He had always fancied himself at amateur theatricals.
As Josephine returned with the dusty bottle and three glasses, he continued cheerfully, ‘St Swithin’s can breathe again. The country can breathe again. We are all back to square one. Exactly where we were sitting comfortably before that adolescent agitator ran amok. The trouble I’ve been put to! The worry I’ve suffered! At last we can get on with our proper work of being doctors, not industrial conciliators. Who’s the third glass for?’ he asked sharply.
‘Faith, of course. She’ll be in soon. She phoned to say she’s home for the weekend.’
‘I don’t know how Faith dare show her face in the house.’
‘Lionel, you really can’t talk like that about your own daughter. You should anyway be in a magnanimous mood all round. That’s what Winston Churchill advised any victor.’
The faint scowl which had congealed on the dean’s brow evaporated. ‘Yes, I agree. I’m simply relieved that the horrible nightmare is over. I’d no idea that Dimchurch was one of Lancelot’s golfing partners. Lancelot certainly does keep strange company. I suppose it’s understandable, nobody else in any civilized golf club would play with him. By the way, Lancelot’s gone commercial.’
‘I don’t think I entirely follow,’ Josephine said, pouring out two glasses of sherry.
‘You heard the telephone just now? It was from Lord Hopcroft. The man who owns those outrageously expensive hotels. He charged me extra for coffee, if I remember. Quite outrageous. I always understood coffee to be an integral part of a gentleman’s dinner –’
‘Lord Hopcroft,’ she interrupted. ‘What did he say, dear?’
‘Oh, yes. He’s full of some idea about starting a luxurious private hospital in a converted hotel. He wants a medical council to take charge, on which Lancelot has already agreed to serve – naturally, the emoluments being somewhat hefty.’
His wife looked puzzled. ‘Then why did you refuse, dear?’
The dean tapped his nose. ‘I can be crafty. A place like that will never attract the same custom as the genuine article. By that I mean the Bertram Bunn Wing of St Swithin’s Hospital, which I am now confidently going to enlarge and stick up the prices. The union will never dare risk making a fool of itself again for years and years. Old Dimchurch will wangle in some compliant shop steward, and we doctors can get away with murder. Good evening, Faith,’ he added, as his daughter entered, looking solemn. ‘Have some sherry. Its the cuvée Butler, which is to my mind superior even to the cuvée Heathcoat Amory, though that’s a year with many interesting little features.’
‘Daddy, I want you to reinstate Pip in the medical school.’
The dean jumped in his chair, accompanied by a roll of thunder. ‘That snotty-nosed Stalin? That lecherous Lenin? Not, as his friend Mr Sapworth would say, on my bleeding nelly.’
‘Daddy, you must try and be cerebral about this,’ she advised.
‘Pip’s an awfully good student really, terribly intelligent and by nature enormously hardworking. He promised me to slave at his books, and he’s sure to sail through the exam in December. Particularly if there aren’t any one-eyed patients.’
The dean’s hand quivered, holding out his empty glass to Josephine for a refill. ‘Chipps
himself put you up to this, didn’t he? You are unhappily completely and disastrously in his power. Though what a girl like you can see in that hirsute Hitler, I can’t imagine.’
‘No, Daddy. I am asking only from my sense of fairness. Pip no longer means anything to me.’
‘Kindly pull the other one, with the bells on.’
‘Honestly. We’ve split up. For a while, at any rate. We decided this afternoon that our personalities are too powerful for each other. They seem to set off a chain reaction, like the atomic bomb.’
‘I don’t know what they set off last Monday night,’ he told her severely, sipping his sherry.
‘Last Monday night nothing happened.’
The dean gave a laugh, sounding like a stepped-on terrier. ‘When a young man shacks up with a young woman, even if the shack in question happens to be a geriatric unit –’
‘But poor Pip.’ She paused. ‘He was too ham-fisted. Besides, there wasn’t much room.’
The dean grunted.
‘A St Swithin’s student and his evening’s dancing companion,’ murmured the dean’s wife gently, ‘have been known to sleep the rest of the night in the same bed perfectly innocently.’
‘I was simply too drunk,’ commented the dean. ‘I mean… But what about Tuesday night? Not to mention Wednesday, Thursday and Friday?’ he demanded.
‘We were far too busy, organizing his porters’ scheme and then the strike.’
The dean gave a snort.
There was another crash of thunder. ‘Oh, very well, very well. I know I can believe my own daughter. Thank God, I brought you up with a proper sense of values. Tell him to report to the wards on Monday and keep entirely out of my sight until Christmas.’
‘Thank you, Daddy.’ Faith clasped her hands together, eyes sparkling. ‘I knew you’d have no victimization.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t use those awful trade union phrases. I hope that you will now take life seriously again, and do your proper duty to the world you live in.’
Doctor On The Job Page 17