by Colin Watson
“Do you compose much verse, Mr Grope?” Miss Teatime inquired, sensible of the perils of the question, but eager to please still further.
“A fair bit. It doesn’t come so easy now, though. Not since I finished at the pictures.”
“You were an artist?”
“I was a commissionaire.” Mr Grope flicked an imaginary speck of dust from his splendid sleeve. “It’s an occupation that leaves the mind free for a lot of the time. I used to think up most of my In-Memoriams while I was keeping an eye on the queue at the Rialto.”
“Did you, indeed.”
“For the paper, you know. There was one used to go: Of all the mothers she was the best—She’s gone to where she can get a good rest.”
“Lovely,” murmured Miss Teatime.
“Then there was: A dear one’s passed, but though we’re sad—We know it now is heaven for Dad. I remember the week I made that one up. It was Gold Diggers of 1933.”
“Films like that will not come our way again, Mr Grope.”
She sighed, then looked at the little silver dress watch that she wore.
“Dear me! The Ministry does not employ me to chatter about old times, I fear. I really must complete these little inquiries of mine and return to the office. Now then, do you by happy chance know the name of the medicine that Dr Meadow had been prescribing for you?”
She took a thin silver propelling pencil from her handbag.
Mr Grope shook his head. For some time, his gaze had been fixed on Miss Teatime’s knees.
“I could make a poem about you, if you like,” he said suddenly.
“You cannot remember?”
“The prescription, you mean? Oh, it was just a squiggle. I couldn’t make it out.”
“Oh, dear.”
Mr Grope swallowed. He appeared to be working out some kind of a problem. Hopefully, Miss Teatime waited.
“When beauty like yours I see, my memory...”
He looked at the ceiling, his lips moving silently.
“No, wait a minute... When on your looks I dwell, my eye-sight flickers...A Voice I hear: She is your dear—Be bold, take off her knickers.”
So sternly reproving was Miss Teatime’s immediate “Mister Grope! You will kindly remember to whom you are speaking!” that Grope jumped and knocked the side of his head against the carved case of a wall clock. He looked hurt, bewildered, and quite harmless. Miss Teatime felt sorry for having startled him.
“You must not bring discredit on that beautiful uniform, you know,” she said kindly.
Grope recovered a little. “You like it?”
“Very much.”
Proudly, “It was a retirement present.”
Miss Teatime glanced once more at her watch and stood up. She hoped that Mr Grope’s amorous urge had subsided. It would not be dignified to take part in an obstacle race through all that furniture.
Mr Grope took off the big peaked hat with RIALTO embroidered upon it in gold. He scratched his head.
“About what you were asking,” he said. “I’ve had a thought.”
Not another erotic rhyme, prayed Miss Teatime.
But Grope had lumbered from the room. She heard his boots on the stair. Taking her opportunity, she slipped out into the corridor and stood close to the street door after making sure that it would open easily.
When he came downstairs again, he was holding something in his hand.
“I’ve been keeping one by,” he said. “I meant to go to another doctor if Meadow didn’t change his mind about stopping them. I’d have to have one to show, you see.”
He handed her a small brown-tinted bottle. On its label, headed AMIS & JEFFREY, CHEMISTS, EASTGATE, FLAXBOROUGH, was the instruction: ‘One to be taken, three times a day, after food.’
Miss Teatime unscrewed the cap and tipped on to her palm the single tablet that the bottle contained. It was octagonal in shape and pale green. One face was stamped with the letters E.D.G.S.
“You can borrow it, if you like,” said Mr Grope. “Promise to bring it back, though, won’t you?”
“I shall, indeed. As soon as my department has identified this tablet—how pretty it is, by the way—and corrected its prescription records, I shall deliver it back to you personally. You have been most helpful, Mr Grope.”
She slid the octagon into the bottle. Grope leaned over her, watching the bottle disappear in her handbag.
“Marvellous pick-me-up, are those—They’d warm the blood of Eski-mos.”
Miss Teatime reached smartly for the latch and pulled open the door.
“If you happen not to be in when I return,” she said, “I shall put it through the letter-box.”
“Until you come, my brain will burn—with thoughts of you without your frocks!”
Eluding the hand that sought to favour her posterior with a farewell squeeze, Miss Teatime hastened down the steps and made for her car.
She drove at once to Eastgate and parked as close as she could to the shop of Amis and Jeffrey. Before leaving the car, she transferred Mr Grope’s tablet from its bottle to an envelope.
“I should like,” said Miss Teatime to one of two girls behind the counter, “to speak to your chief dispenser, please.”
There appeared, after an interval of discussion at the back of the shop as to what so flattering a description as ‘chief dispenser’ might portend, a wary-looking young man who said he was the manager and could he be of any assistance, Mrs, er...?
“Miss,” she corrected sweetly. “Yes, I do have a small problem, but I am sure it can be resolved very quickly with your help.
“You see, an uncle of mine arrived last night to take a short holiday with me here in Flaxborough. He is a fairly elderly gentleman—quite spry, you understand, but getting on in years—and for some time he has been taking tablets prescribed by his doctor. Three every day, I believe. They probably are a simple tonic, but the Dean—my uncle, that is—does feel they are important to him.”
The manager, whose black, back-brushed hair and ebony-framed spectacles seemed to have been fashioned as a single headpiece to cap his sharp, sallow face, regarded her solemnly and without a trace of sympathy. Miss Teatime gave a little cough and persevered.
“He was most upset, as you may imagine, on discovering when he arrived that the box containing a week’s supply of his tablets had burst during the journey. All but one of the tablets had shaken down and been lost through a hole in his pocket.
“Fortunately,”—she took the envelope from her handbag—“there was, as I say, this one survivor. You will see that it is distinctive in shape and colour. I should be most grateful if you could identify it so that my uncle may go to a doctor here in Flaxborough and obtain a repeat prescription.”
The manager was by now pouting very disagreeably. He glanced into the envelope, nodded, sniffed.
“Oh, yes. I know what that is.”
“Splendid!” she said. “I was sure you would be able to help.”
“I said”—he handed back the envelope—“that I know what it is. I did not say that I could tell you.”
“Oh, but surely...”
“We are not allowed to divulge the names of drugs to members of the public. I’m sorry, madam. All I can suggest is that the gentleman consults a local doctor. Then, if the doctor cares to identify that tablet and to issue the appropriate prescription, we shall be pleased to dispense it.”
Miss Teatime had been looking at the manager’s tie. It was fastened in the tightest, most diminutive knot she had ever seen.
“You’ll appreciate that we cannot break the rules,” she heard him add. (Unctuous sod, you’d not break wind if you thought it might oblige somebody.)
“Naturally not. I shall tell the Dean what you advise.” She turned, paused, faced him again. “Oh, by the way...” She was looking her most demure.
“Yes, madam?”
“You will think this unforgivably inquisitive of me, but I do have a reason for asking. Tell me, in what year were you born?”<
br />
The irrelevance, the sheer impertinence of the question startled him so much that he answered it at once and without thinking.
“Nineteen thirty-six.” Then he scowled. “Why?”
Miss Teatime looked him up and down appraisingly.
“Nineteen thirty-six...ah, yes. Quite a year for unsuccessful abortions, they tell me.”
Chapter Twelve
Dr Meadow’s surgery was a compact, single-storeyed building at the end of a short path leading off from the main drive to his house. It had been a carriage-house and stables in the earlier days of his father’s practice. Where once had stood old Dr Ambrose Meadow’s high-wheeled gig, there was now a three-litre Lagonda. The rest of the building had been reconstructed to form two consulting rooms, a small dispensary and receptionist’s office, and a waiting-room with doors to the other three.
Miss Teatime arrived in the waiting-room a few minutes before six o’clock, which a printed notice on the wall proclaimed to be the time of evening surgery.
In her handbag was Mr Grope’s green octagon.
In her head, daintily inclined in greeting to the group of people who were already assembled, was a story about the mislaying of a prescription provided by her London specialist and her hope that Dr Meadow would be able to identify the last of her present supply of tablets and give her a fresh order.
Miss Teatime, beckoned by a pretty, auburn-haired girl in a white coat, who had appeared at the hatch of her small office, gave her name and a London address.
“Are you a new patient?” the receptionist asked.
“You could say that I am a visitor. I have not yet chosen a regular doctor in Flaxborough.”
“Do you want to see Dr Bruce or Dr Meadow?”
“Oh, Dr Meadow, I think. He is the senior partner?”
“That’s right.” The girl slipped the sheet of paper on which she had written Miss Teatime’s name and address beneath a pile of three or four cards.
Miss Teatime took a seat and began unobtrusively to observe her fellow patients and to speculate upon their ills. They, equally unobtrusively, did the same to her.
A buzzer sounded weakly and a little glass panel above one of the doors flickered red.
The receptionist glanced at her top card.
“Mr Leadbetter.”
She handed the card to a florid, thick-set man who had risen to his feet with an air of grim determination. He stomped to the consulting room door and shut it firmly behind him.
A man with a grievance, Miss Teatime diagnosed.
She listened. So did everyone else. All that reached them of Mr Leadbetter’s complaint was a prolonged muffled boom. Then came the gentle rise and fall of a sweetly reasoned remonstration by the golden-voiced Dr Meadow. More booming followed, but at a much reduced level and for a shorter time. Again the doctor’s persuasive lilt. A pause. The lilt once more, livelier this time and crested with amusement. The boom—now friendly, responsive to the joke. An outside door clicked shut. Silence.
Smooth, thought Miss Teatime. Very smooth. Perhaps she should have asked to see Dr Bruce instead.
When the consumptive buzzer sounded again, the receptionist had to call “Mrs Grope, please!” twice before there was any reaction from the stumpy, sad-looking woman with very dark eyes who sat opposite Miss Teatime. At the second, louder, summons, Mrs Grope jumped, looked round inquiringly at everybody in turn, then hurried to the wrong door. A woman with a thickly bandaged foot caught her sleeve and motioned her to the other.
So that, Miss Teatime reflected, was the partner of the poet of Blackfriars’ Court. No wonder she had an air of chronic bewilderment.
Dr Bruce’s sign was the next to light up. The bandaged woman hobbled into his consulting room. He disposed of her and three more patients before the senior partner’s buzzer signified that he was no longer occupied with the woes of Mrs Grope.
“Mrs McCreavy. Will you go in now, please.”
Miss Teatime sneaked a look at Mrs McCreavy from behind an elderly copy of the New Yorker that she had been surprised to discover among the magazines on the table beside her. She saw a woman of about fifty, plump in black silk and tottery on too-tight shoes, who had the pained, querulous expression conferred by stubborn addiction to youthful make-up.
Mrs McCreavy paused at the door of Dr Meadow’s room, tightened her scarlet bird-mouth into a secret smile, and squeezed through the doorway out of sight, as if to a scandalous assignation.
Dr Bruce continued his brisk dispatch of the ailing. His buzzer sounded five times in as many minutes. The waiting room had begun to look depopulated. Between calls, a typewriter clattered in the receptionist’s office. She doubled as secretary, apparently.
Somewhere a clock struck the half hour. The girl left her typing in order to lock the surgery entrance against late arrivals. She smiled at Miss Teatime as she passed and gave a little shrug of mock weariness.
A schoolboy with his arm in a sling and a look of Napoleonic fortitude was next to disappear. There remained only Miss Teatime, a middle-aged man in a smart grey suit, and a girl of about twenty who kept her arms tightly folded across her chest and studied her shoes for most of the time.
Miss Teatime suppressed a yawn. She wondered what encyclopaedic symptoms lay beneath Mrs McCreavy’s black silk. Ten minutes. Quarter of an hour. The man had had time to examine her intestines inch by inch and get them all back again by now.
“Excuse me...”
She started.
“Excuse me, but if you like...”
It was the gentleman in the grey suit, and he was leaning forward, talking to her.
“If you like, you can go in and see the doctor before I do. I am in no hurry.”
“That is remarkably kind of you.”
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I am not a patient.”
Miss Teatime was tempted to say, Nor am I, but she turned it to “No, I must say you look far too healthy to be consulting doctors.”
And so he did. His rather square face had the long-established tan of the widely travelled. It was a calm, controlled face, with a hint in the jaw muscles of considerable strength. His small moustache—military. Miss Teatime dubbed it, instinctively—was impeccably trimmed and almost white. The eyes, which she decided with regret to be humourless, were of very pale blue; they looked as if they had never been closed since early childhood.
The man had on the seat beside him a capacious brief case of heavy leather, highly polished. Its flap was unlocked and the man had taken from it a sheaf of papers, which he held now on his knee. They looked like brochures or leaflets of some kind.
Ah, a salesman, Miss Teatime told herself. One thing about these pharmaceutical people, though—they had an air of distinction, of being concerned with higher things than mere money, that you never found in a groceries rep or a hawker of hardware.
She tried to confirm her guess by reading the bigger type on the topmost leaflet, but she was hampered by its being upside-down. Only one word could she make out without going nearer and putting on her glasses (and she could imagine no pretext for anything so brash as that). It was ELIXON. Not much help. She withdrew again behind her New Yorker.
A buzz proclaimed that Dr Bruce was free once more, but no one made a move. After a while, his consulting-room door opened and there appeared a tall, slightly bewildered looking man of about thirty-five, with thin, untidy hair and long hands that kept wrestling with each other. He gazed challengingly at the three people who were still waiting, shrugged, and went back into his room. Miss Teatime heard water begin to run. Dr Bruce doubtless was washing his hands of them all.
“Oh, by the way, Mr Brennan...”
The receptionist was leaning out of her hatch. The man in the grey suit looked up.
“Did you manage to see the doctor earlier on?” she asked him.
“No, I didn’t, actually. There’s no hurry. I shall wait now until he has finished surgery.”
There was some quality in his voice that Miss Teat
ime had detected before without being able quite to define it. Now she knew what it was: a slight lisp—not an affectation, but the kind of speech flaw that could have resulted from an injury.
“I just wondered,” the girl went on, “because there was something I think he wanted to show you. It’s a copy of that article he rang you about yesterday, and I’ve only just finished typing it.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take it with me when I go in, shall I?...” He put aside the leaflets and stood up.