Doctor On The Boil

by Richard Gordon

‘Oh, God.’

  The ambulance stopped and reversed.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Terry. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

  ‘Eric Cavendish.’

  ‘E Cavendish. Right. You’ll be quiet, won’t you? The hospital is full of radioactive cases, all seriously ill and a good many of them dying. This way.’

  Eric Cavendish stepped out. He was outside a forbidding-looking hospital building. His escorts hurried him through a small side-door reserved, they explained, for contaminated cases. It led to a plain, long empty corridor with two or three wheel-chairs and trolleys stored in it. Terry opened another door. ‘This is the decontamination room.’ It was a cubicle with only a table, a hard chair and a clinical couch. ‘Now take your clothes off.’

  ‘Clothes? All of them?’

  ‘Of course. They go to the fabric decontamination centre. We will be back to decontaminate you later.’

  ‘But supposing someone else walked in? A nurse, or someone.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll lock the door.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’ It occurred to Eric Cavendish that in the panic he had not expressed gratitude to his saviours. ‘I’m very grateful to you both, for your life-saving action.’

  ‘All part of the day’s work,’ Terry told him cheerfully. ‘By the way, I think we’d better take that corset affair, too.’

  They left him alone. He heard the key turn in the lock. He sat down gingerly on the hard chair and put his elbows on the table. It occurred to him that he had omitted to ask exactly how long they would be. He wished he had a cigarette. He looked round hopefully for something to pass the time. There was a leaflet on the floor in the corner, which he picked up and found to be headed POSTNATAL EXERCISES FOR MOTHERS. It seemed a strange thing to find in such a ghoulish place. He sat down again and shivered.

  21

  At that same moment, Sir Lancelot Spratt was advancing purposefully across the open space behind the main hospital building towards the new surgical block, a gloomy but stern look on his face. This intensified as he noticed his bride-to-be in her uniform, walking through the automatic doors just ahead of him. He stroked his beard and grunted. Then rearranging his features into one of unctuous charm, he lengthened his stride to catch her.

  ‘Hello, Tottie, my dear. What a pleasant surprise! I’m just up to Professor Bingham’s ward to refresh eye and hand with a few of his cases.’

  ‘Hello, Lancelot. I’m on my way up there, too. Sister’s off sick, and the new staff nurse seems to be making rather heavy weather of it.’

  They reached the lift. Sir Lancelot gave a deep sigh. ‘It seems such a waste.’

  ‘I don’t think I follow.’

  He pressed the button for the top floor. ‘You, Tottie, a highly trained and most experienced member of the nursing profession, from tomorrow week will be lost to humanity.’

  ‘But Lancelot, you know how much I shall prefer looking after you.’

  ‘Doubtless, doubtless. But it does seem a tragedy, that’s all.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? Carry on with my job? Lady Spratt, a working wife?’

  ‘No, no. I’d never suggest a thing like that.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d kindly tell me what you are suggesting?’

  ‘You might possibly – bearing in mind the undeniable success of your career and the uncountable benefits it has bestowed – think twice before abandoning it for such a mundane institution as marriage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, the world contains few matrons but many wives.’

  ‘What the hell are you getting at? You’re quite beyond me, Lancelot. First you want the wedding next year, then you agree to a couple of months, then you ring me up to say you can hardly wait and we’ve got to get married next week. Can’t you make up your mind?’

  ‘It is a big step in one’s life, deserving a great deal of thought.’

  They reached the top floor.

  ‘You’re not trying to get out of it again, are you?’

  ‘I? Perish the thought.’

  ‘I should damn well hope so.’ She moved away with a determined step. ‘Because you’re not going to.’

  ‘Sir Lancelot–’ Bingham in his white coat was standing outside the lift. ‘I understand from my house surgeon that you intend to operate this evening on an inguinal hernia from my wards.’

  ‘Quite so. It is a comparatively simple operation, just what I need for flexing my surgical muscles again. The houseman assures me there is a case in, even though the patient happens to have been admitted for something quite different. I suppose you do your hernias these days as out-patients? It will be an unexpected bonus for the man’s stay in hospital.’

  ‘I’m afraid you are mistaken. The theatre is not available for you.’

  ‘On the contrary, Bingham, I have told the theatre sister to prepare for the case in ten minutes. I shall examine the patient pre-operatively in the anaesthetic room.’

  ‘I have countermanded your orders.’

  ‘How dare you! You know perfectly well my rights under the terms of the charter.’

  ‘The charter doesn’t give you any right to upset everybody in the hospital. Not only the staff and the nurses, who can take it. But the patients, who can’t. On their behalf, I ask you to get out of my wards at once.’

  ‘You do, do you? Well, if you’re acting only for high-minded humanitarian reasons, I shall accede. At a price.’

  ‘What price?’

  ‘My fifty thousand quid.’

  ‘I refuse to submit to blackmail.’

  ‘Blackmail! When every single penny piece of it’s my own?’

  ‘You will leave my wards, and without a single condition–’

  They were interrupted by the lift door opening. It emitted the dean, Harry the porter, and a fat man in a blue uniform and chauffeur’s cap.

  ‘Bingham! Thank God. Something terrible has happened–’

  ‘If you’ll forgive me,’ said Sir Lancelot loftily, moving away, ‘I shall be about my duties.’

  ‘Yes, please, Lancelot, leave us,’ said the dean distractedly. ‘It’s the students, Bingham.’

  ‘What are you getting excited about? It’s Rag Week,’ Bingham said impatiently.

  ‘In the usual way, I wouldn’t be excited, no. A joke’s a joke, and I’m the first to laugh. But this time…I’ll explain. Do you know a film actor called Eric Chatterley?’

  ‘Eric Cavendish,’ the chauffeur corrected him.

  ‘Exactly. He was driven away from somewhere in Chelsea in an ambulance. It was very strange. He hadn’t been ill or had an accident or anything.’

  ‘I thought I’d better follow up, sir,’ said the chauffeur. ‘The poor gentleman might want his relatives informed.’

  ‘And there’s not so much as a smell of him in the hospital, sir,’ added Harry.

  ‘You’ve checked in casualty?’ asked Bingham.

  ‘Twice, sir.’

  ‘You see, it’s the students,’ said the dean. ‘Kidnapping. Dear me, dear me! If anything happened to the fellow, there’d be the devil to pay. He must be valued in millions of dollars.’

  ‘Summerbee and Kerrberry.’ Bingham stopped the two students trying to sidle unseen into the lift. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir.’

  ‘But you’re on the Rag Week committee, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But we decided this year just to put a live alligator in the Serpentine.’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better search the hospital, Dean.’

  ‘Now you mention it, sir, I do seem to remember some of the boys whispering about nabbing someone or other,’ Ken Kerrberry said. ‘They were planning to hide him in the place they store the gas and oxygen cylinders.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The dean nodded briskly. ‘I’ll remember your helpfulness later, Mr Kerrberry.’

  All six went down in the lift together.

  At the door of the surgical block, the two students walked slowly away in t
he opposite direction towards the maternity department. Once out of sight, they broke into a run towards the empty ante-natal clinic on the ground floor. As they hurried along the corridor, banging and shouting came from the room in which Eric Cavendish was imprisoned.

  ‘Let me out! I’m dying of cold in here. Doctor, Doctor! I’d rather die of radiation sickness than cold. At least it takes longer–’

  ‘Relax, Mr Cavendish, relax, everything’s going splendidly,’ Terry shouted cheerfully through the door. He added to Ken in a whisper, ‘I suppose we’d better release him?’

  ‘You heard the dean. He’d really have it in for us.’

  ‘The bloke himself might turn nasty.’

  ‘But remember what Grimsdyke said. He’s got a terrific sense of humour. He’ll probably roar his guts out.’

  ‘I hope so–’ Terry paused, key in his hand. ‘His clothes!’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘That was your bloody stupid idea, hiding them among the patients’ gear up in the ward cupboard.’

  ‘It was your bloody stupid idea of taking them, anyway.’

  ‘We had to be sure be didn’t escape, hadn’t we? In his movies, he gets out of bloody sight trickier situations than this.’

  Eric Cavendish started banging on the door again. ‘Get one of those trolleys – the one with the blankets,’ Ken commanded.

  The actor was standing in the middle of the floor, shivering and preserving his modesty behind POSTNATAL EXERCISES FOR MOTHERS.

  ‘What’s that trolley for? Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Jump on, Mr Cavendish. No need to worry. We’re just taking you up to the other decontamination room, where your clothes are waiting for you. In a few minutes you’ll be able to walk out of the hospital, perfectly clean and well. We’ve even sent for your chauffeur to collect you.’

  ‘Oh – thank you, Doctor,’ said Eric Cavendish, calming down and climbing gratefully under the blanket.

  With a sense of relief he let himself be wheeled along the corridor, through a door, across an open space, through more doors, and into a lift. He noticed that his doctors had fallen silent, and propelled him at a brisk trot. The lift stopped. They pushed him into another spacious, well-lit corridor.

  ‘You’ve been a devil of a time with that patient of mine. Come along, boy, not that way, the anaesthetic room’s here. Surely you’ve learned at least that in the hospital?’

  ‘I recognize that voice–’ Eric Cavendish raised his head. ‘Well! Fancy meeting you in this charnel house.’

  ‘My dear Cavendish, so you’re the patient? That idiotic houseman never told me it was a private case. I didn’t imagine full-time professors were allowed them, but I suppose everything has lapsed badly since my day. I shall pass the fee to Bingham, anyway. Come along, boy, push him in,’ Sir Lancelot snapped to Terry, dragging the trolley into the small, cream-painted bare anaesthetic room with his own hands. ‘Now let me see, Cavendish, what were you admitted here for? I must say, you never mentioned it when we were sharing a room in that quack’s establishment. I hope it isn’t one of those diseases people feel ashamed of?’

  ‘I was admitted for decontamination, I guess.’

  ‘Really? How extraordinary.’ Sir Lancelot whipped off the blankets. ‘Cough.’

  The actor coughed.

  ‘Again.’

  Sir Lancelot looked puzzled. ‘Which side is it?’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘The hernia.’

  ‘But I haven’t got a hernia.’

  ‘Come, come, man, you can’t get out of an operation because your nerve fails at the last moment. Of course you’ve got a hernia. On the left, I think. Not a large one, but pronounced enough. Right you are. Everything’s ready. I’ll have it sewn up for you in no time.’

  The actor sat bolt upright. ‘What is this? You’re not going to operate on me.’

  ‘And why not, pray? You signed a standard consent form, I presume? It states specifically that you may possibly not have the surgeon of your choice, and that the extent of the procedure is left entirely to his skill and discretion.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Eric Cavendish shouted. ‘And if there was, I wouldn’t let you within five miles of it.’

  ‘Now you’re being insulting.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m being sane. I remember all those spine-chilling tales you told me. About the kidney coming away in your hands. About the blood lapping over the top of your rubber operating boots. About the time you lost your half-hunter watch–’

  ‘Come along, Cavendish, play the man! You may be the neurotic type, but you’ve nothing to fear–’

  ‘I am not going to have an operation!’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I have made my mind up.’

  ‘And so have I. Hold him!’ Sir Lancelot cried to the two students, listening to the exchange with the numb feeling of car-drivers who have precipitated a nasty accident. ‘Go on, jump on him.’

  Eric Cavendish leapt from the trolley. He abandoned even his blanket. He fled through the anaesthetic room doors. Outside was the matron.

  He stopped short. ‘Good God, Charlotte. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Good God, Eric. But what are you doing here?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Like that?’

  22

  ‘Oh the shame!’ cried the dean. ‘The disgrace! The humiliation! That ghastly business of Rag Week was bad enough, capturing that poor actor and getting the hospital on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Thank God Lancelot had the wits to calm him down with an expensive dinner. I thought at the time nothing could possibly be worse. But I was wrong, wrong. Compared with this latest outrage, that was a mere April Fool’s Day practical joke.’

  It was the Wednesday morning of the following week. Professor Bingham, sitting in the next chair, pulled his white coat round him tightly. ‘Come, Dean. Don’t take it too much to heart.’

  ‘Too much to heart? You must be mad. I’m the laughing-stock of London. Possibly of the entire medical world. You know how these disgraceful stories get about. It’s really more than flesh and blood can bear.’

  ‘In six months, everyone will have forgotten it.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ said the dean bitterly. ‘Anyway, I shan’t have forgotten it.’

  ‘A pity, I suppose, that your own family was involved in the incident.’

  ‘A pity? That’s the most horrible part of it. A month ago – a week ago – I shouldn’t have thought such a thing remotely possible. Even now, I can’t honestly believe that this “incident” – as you somewhat ridiculously term the greatest disaster of my life since failing my surgery finals – has actually happened.’

  ‘It can hardly be held against your reputation, surely?’

  ‘Of course it can. These things rub off.’ He shook his head miserably. ‘You don’t understand how careful I must be, keeping my nose clean for a month or so. As it is, I very much doubt if I shall ever see a knight–’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If I shall ever see a night fall again.’

  ‘I say, you’re not going to commit suicide, are you?’ asked Bingham in alarm. ‘It can’t be quite as bad as that.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean at all. I mean…that is…oh, I don’t know what I mean,’ the dean ended hopelessly.

  The pair were alone in the big, oblong, dark-panelled committee room at St Swithin’s, its walls decorated with portraits of consultant physicians and surgeons who had followed their patients into eternity. In the centre was a long, stout-legged table at which the dean and the professor sat. Its well-polished surface was covered with sheets of pink blotting-paper, duplicated pages of typescript, and open reference-books. The full disciplinary committee of the hospital had just met.

  This fearsome body, with which the dean had threatened Terry Summerbee, convened only rarely to pronounce on graver misdemeanours by the hospital students or staff. It consisted of senior consultants, and took itself most seriously. Indeed, it could
in a bad mood make the Star Chamber look as harmless as a rent tribunal.

  The dean sat silently for a few moments, bouncing on the edge of his chair. He was naturally a member of the committee, but with a short, dignified speech he had withdrawn from the morning’s proceedings. He had waited outside, pacing up and down, to appear only after the verdict had been pronounced.

  This was necessary because the unfortunate delinquent had been his own son.

  ‘To think – that George actually committed forgery.’

  ‘But only of your own signature.’

  ‘That’s even worse, when he used it to gain admission to the Ministry building. I still can’t imagine how he managed to hide himself there until morning.’

  ‘In the lavatory.’

  ‘What an uncomfortable place to pass a night. Of course, he told me some cock-and-bull story about emergency work at St Swithin’s, which being a trusting and considerate father I believed implicitly. Then for him to be discovered…in the morning…in the Minister’s own room…by the Minister himself…under the Minister’s own desk…’

  ‘But is that really so terrible? These days, nowhere is sacred. The sit-in has become a form of student protest so conventional as to be positively boring.’

  ‘Yes, but not in the nude.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Thank God the quality of mercy was not strained and all’s well that ends well,’ the dean said confusedly.

  ‘We’d really no alternative to leniency. After all, everyone on the committee knew George to be a young man of the highest character and strictest up-bringing. The point was made by several members. It was all so out of character, we could only ascribe it to some acute psychological upset. Hysteria, hypomania, something like that. He’ll attend the psychiatric department for a while, and afterwards he can get on with his work as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it was the strain of study? Overwork?’ Bingham gave a thin smile. ‘I say, Dean, you do push your children hard, eh?’

  ‘But I still can’t for the life of me think how this fantastic idea got into George’s head.’

  ‘In a way, it was a rather humorous one.’

  ‘That’s what Lancelot says. He’s been laughing his head off. Like a hyena. God! I wish the bloody man would leave us in peace.’