Doctor On Toast

by Richard Gordon

  ‘An extremely stupid young man with a duodenal ulcer, which he perforated at an unusually early age, and which I repaired perfectly competently in St Swithin’s,’ Sir Lancelot explained. ‘He also has a mother, who made a frightful nuisance of herself in the ward. I believe them both to be a little touched.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Alphonso looked up. ‘Perhaps you could obtain the written opinion of a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Damn it, Alfie! It’s not the slightest use bringing in psychiatrists, or water-diviners or spiritualists, if it comes to that. If I say a man’s mad, he’s mad, and that’s all there is to it. Surely you’re not suggesting that anyone could doubt my opinions?’

  ‘But he says here in his statement of claim you should never have operated on him at all.’

  ‘I can tell you here and now that if I hadn’t operated on the ungrateful idiot, I ought to have been hanged, not sued.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Alphonso. He took a monocle from his waistcoat pocket and started shifting the papers.

  ‘Possett complains that since the operation he’s suffered from pains in the stomach and blackouts,’ he observed after a bit.

  ‘So do half the population,’ replied Sir Lancelot shortly. ‘Will you please understand, Alfie, that you needn’t bother your head about the obvious medical facts? You just leave all that to me. Your job is simply to put this fellow in his place. Then I assure you I shall be perfectly prepared to forget the whole affair.’

  He made a generous sweep of his hand, knocking over the solicitor’s briefcase.

  ‘Mr Beckwith,’ said Alphonso, who seemed to be tiring rather quickly of his brother’s company. ‘Is this a case of res ipsa loquitur?’

  ‘I hardly think so.’

  He tapped the ash from his cigar. ‘Then it’s not on all fours with Polkinghorne v. Ministry of Health?’

  ‘I feel more likely with Stumley v. Typhoon Feather Pluckers.’

  The barrister screwed in his monocle. ‘But that surely brings us against Heaviside v. Kiddiwinks Toys, Bournemouth Aquarium Intervening?’

  ‘Forgive me, Alfie,’ interrupted Sir Lancelot, ‘but would you kindly tell me what the devil you two are talking about?’

  ‘My dear fellow, I’m afraid it wouldn’t convey anything in the slightest to you if I did. Just leave the worrying to me, there’s a good chap. You content yourself with following my instructions, then I’ll win your case.’

  Sir Lancelot glared. ‘You are surely not suggesting for one second that you won’t?’

  ‘Not at all. Indeed, I will go so far as saying your chances are not unreasonable–’

  ‘Not unreasonable!’ Sir Lancelot thumped the table, raising quite a cloud of dust. ‘But damn it, Alfie! Any fool could tell this Possett’s a screaming neurotic. All these symptoms he’s making a song and dance about are totally hysterical and imaginary. There should be some sort of law against things like this ever coming into court.’

  ‘I suppose you haven’t seriously considered the possibility of settling?’

  ‘Settling?’ Sir Lancelot jumped to his feet. ‘Kindly get this clear, Alfie. I will not lie down and have my rights trampled upon, and I’m damned proud of it. It was exactly the same over that parking summons, when I refused to be dictated to by some inflated greengrocer perched on a magistrate’s bench–’

  ‘I would not be disinclined to advise a settlement.’

  ‘Indeed?’ thundered Sir Lancelot. ‘I suppose you advise all your blackmailed clients simply to pay up and say nothing?’

  ‘I do not handle criminal business,’ replied his brother crisply.

  ‘Settle! By God! Fine fools we’d be to settle, when the case will be laughed into the street–’

  ‘I myself would certainly hesitate to say what might happen to any case whatever in court.’ Alphonso glared through his monocle. ‘You seem extremely disinclined to accept my opinion on anything, Lancelot. But you might at least take my advice that judges are like horses, and liable to jump in perfectly unexpected directions.’

  ‘But Alfie, you fool! Surely you cannot for one instant believe a word of this fantastic accusation?’

  ‘My own opinions are unfortunately entirely without importance in the matter.’

  ‘Alfie, you’re a blackguard.’

  Mr Alphonso Spratt dropped his monocle.

  ‘Damn you, Lancelot! Have you no respect for the law?’

  ‘I have the utmost respect for the law. But I have no respect whatever for lawyers. As it is quite obvious that my presence here is totally unnecessary, I shall return to my hospital and perform some useful work. Come, Grimsdyke. Good afternoon.’

  We left. The seedy-looking chaps listening outside looked like the passengers in the Veranda Bar when I appeared with Basil.

  ‘I fancy Sir Lancelot didn’t like it much being the patient for a change,’ I suggested, describing all this to Miles over a whisky and soda that night.

  My cousin made a little impatient noise.

  ‘I do wish he would be sensible and let himself be persuaded to settle the matter out of court. He doesn’t give a thought to the most damaging effect of the publicity on St Swithin’s.’

  I agreed. ‘Always a pretty nasty business, washing dirty hospital linen in public.’

  ‘Not to mention risking a severe financial loss. And there would be little chance of our seeing him as next President of the Royal College of Surgeons.’

  I agreed with that, too. If Sir Lancelot lost his case, making him a President would be like promoting a Captain who’d just lost his ship.

  ‘Besides,’ continued Miles moodily, ‘he never considers for a moment how the affair might reflect on myself. I must be extremely circumspect these days. Not to mention our most worthy Chairman, the Bishop of Wincanton. I believe you’ve met him. A charming man. It’s remarkable how active he remains in spite of such indifferent health. Being under the same roof, he finds Sir Lancelot’s behaviour at times most upsetting.

  ‘I made a rather interesting calculation today,’ Miles went on. ‘Do you realise in the few nights you have spent here, you have consumed quite two-thirds of a bottle of whisky?’ He gave a dry little laugh. ‘I shall have to add it to your weekly bill.’

  I gave a dry little laugh, too.

  ‘Quite a joke, Gaston, if I presented you with an account for board and lodging every Friday?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, old lad,’ I told him, ‘I was planning to leave tomorrow morning.’

  I wasn’t, of course, but it’s remarkable how sensitive I am even to the subtlest of hints.

  ‘Stay as long as you wish, naturally,’ added Miles quickly, looking greatly relieved. ‘We are all delighted to have you, particularly young Bartholomew. Though what exactly,’ he asked after a pause, ‘are you intending to do?’

  ‘Take a quiet room, finish Sir Lancelot’s memoirs, and start my new novel.’ I reached for one of his cigarettes. ‘Which rather brings me to the point. You know under the old grandpa’s will, just before he was eaten by that tiger, he left you some cash for me when I reach a highly mature age? I just wondered if you’d mind slipping across a little on account.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s completely out of the question.’

  ‘But dash it! It’s just to pay the rent and grocery bills while I do the novel for this new lot of publishers.’

  Miles gave one of the looks I suppose he used frequently on the Royal Commission.

  ‘Please do not think me censorious, but I feel it would more likely be dissipated on the entertainment of some young woman.’

  ‘That’s a jolly unsporting accusation–’

  ‘Not in the least. Will you kindly recall your last visit here, at Christmas? You then confessed yourself seriously in love with a lady whom you wished to marry. I don’t seem to have heard you mention the project since.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said. Odd how quickly one forgets such things. ‘It was simply that I made a slight mistake in the diagnosis.’

  ‘Then I ce
rtainly don’t intend encouraging you to make similar ones. You may rest assured that if you ever do marry a suitable girl I shall advance you the money – at the conclusion of the ceremony. Meanwhile, you should be delighted to know you have such a nest-egg.’

  ‘Which will be pretty addled by the time I have my hands on it,’ I told him shortly.

  Knowing that getting cash out of Miles was like trying to get blood out of a thrombosed varicose vein, I was prepared to let the subject drop. But he went on:

  ‘I do implore you to take up serious medical work again instead of this stupid novel writing. You know I could easily arrange for you to have a resident post at the Tooting Temperance Hospital–’

  ‘My dear old lad! When will you get it into your head that I’m really not cut out to be a doctor?’

  ‘But damnation, Gaston! The waste of your education–’

  ‘Not at all.’ I eyed him a bit. ‘Somerset Maugham said he couldn’t imagine better training for a writer than a few years in the medical profession. And he ought to know. After all, he’s a doctor, too.’

  Miles snorted. ‘To my mind they should pass a law to erase non-practising physicians from the Medical Register.’

  ‘Some hope of that,’ I told him. ‘The House of Commons is full of them.’

  After that he stood up and bad-temperedly announced he was going to bed. I stayed behind, and just for the fun of it finished the rest of his bottle of whisky.

  18

  ‘Dr Grimsdyke,’ announced the pretty little receptionist, ‘that man’s behaving strangely in the waiting-room again.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ I looked up from the doctors’ motoring column in the British Medical Journal. ‘Surely not the one with the faces – ?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m afraid he’s getting worse. This time he seems to be making love to his hat.’

  I rose briskly from the Chippendale consulting desk.

  ‘Oh, he is, is he? Right! You just show the perisher inside. No, wait a minute – hide the scalpels from the suture tray first.’

  It was a couple of months later, spring had been switched on, the parks were lightly covered with bright new flowers and the girls lightly covered with bright new dresses, and I was back in Razzy Potter-Phipps’ Mayfair consulting-room again.

  It had been a pretty miserable couple of months, too, since that row with Miles, when I’d moved into a beastly basement somewhere in Paddington. I hadn’t expected to hear any more of Sir Lancelot’s case for a bit, knowing how the wheels of the law make the works in a grandfather clock look like an Aston Martin gearbox, so I’d settled down at last to start the great novel.

  But writing a novel, like setting a fracture, is rather more tricky than appears from the finished result. Whether it was the subterranean atmosphere, the filthy weather we were having, the after-effects of Sir Lancelot’s massed speeches, or all the trains fussing about across the road, I never seemed to get further than fiddling with those interesting little screws they stick here and there over typewriters. Acute poverty set in. I put the grandpa’s cufflinks up the spout, having long ago flogged the dear old 1930 Bentley. If the wolf kept from the door, it was only because of a pretty unappetising Grimsdyke reared on baked beans and weak tea inside. I was tempted more than once to invite myself round to Miles’ for a meal, top it off with a portion of humble pie, and take that job in Tooting. But I resisted. I remembered that Dostoyevsky only really struck form after five years in Siberia.

  Taking a stroll to raise my spirits and vitamin-D level in the first April sunshine, I’d noticed it glinting on Razzy’s town Jaguar parked outside a block of flats in Berkeley Square. A moment later the chap came hurrying out himself, followed by a chauffeur carrying the special vibrator he used for shaking up sluggish millionaires.

  ‘Dear boy, what a stroke of luck!’ Razzy exclaimed at once. ‘I thought you were miles and miles away on the high seas. And how wonderfully slim you look! I really must try and take off some weight myself. Cigarette?’

  I accepted gratefully.

  ‘I suppose,’ he added, after a bit of chat about the prospects for the racing season, ‘you couldn’t possibly find time to hold the fort for me on odd afternoons, could you?’

  I looked doubtful. ‘I’m getting a bit rusty for any serious medicine–’

  ‘Dear boy, it isn’t the medicine in my practice that’s serious. After all, you can always call in a specialist for that sort of thing. It’s the patients who are the worry. Perhaps you’ve noticed in the press about this Italian prima donna I’ve been treating for temperamental nervousness?’

  I nodded. ‘You mean, you want the afternoons free to nip round to Covent Garden and soothe her down before the performance?’

  Razzy gave a cough. ‘It isn’t quite that, dear boy. In point of fact, it’s simpler all round to attend to her case after the show at night. But I’m afraid…well, the treatment seems to be taking such a terrible lot out of me, I really could do with a few hours’ rest and recuperation between whiles. Do you…do you think that you could possibly start straight away this afternoon?’ he ended anxiously.

  So I moved back to Park Lane, and jolly pleasant it was too, particularly as Razzy threw in lunch. And now my peace was disturbed by the flutter of chickens coming home to roost.

  ‘My dear chappie!’ Basil stood in the consulting room doorway with a great idiotic grin on his face. ‘You’ve got your old part back.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Beauchamp.’ My tone indicated that the milk of human kindness was in the deep freeze.

  ‘What a delightful surprise!’

  He seemed fairly bursting at the waistcoat buttons with affability. It’s always the same with actors, spitting venom at you one minute and terrific pals the next, just like Miles’ young Bartholomew.

  ‘But I’ve been wondering how to get in touch with you for simply weeks, Grim.’

  ‘Kindly be seated, Beauchamp.’

  I wondered if I’d have the luck to give him an injection with one of those needles Razzy kept for customers getting behind with their bills.

  ‘And what’s the trouble this time?’ I demanded shortly.

  ‘I should like a complete medical examination, please. You see, dear chappie, I am shortly going to be married.’

  ‘What again? You mean to–’

  ‘To a charming widow called Sybil van Barn. But you’ve met, of course.’

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me you’re actually going to marry that old–’

  Basil offered a gold cigarette case.

  ‘I will admit to you, dear chappie, some slight disparity in age and marital experience. But “Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments.” After all, what is the most important thing to be fully shared between husband and wife? A common interest, naturally.’ Basil flicked a lighter with his initials on it in rubies. ‘And Sybil is tremendously interested in the stage. Yes, indeed. Did you know that the first of her defunct husbands owned all the theatres down one side of Broadway? And her second all the ones down the other?’

  I snorted. ‘A pity she didn’t get to know Barnum and Bailey as well.’

  ‘So you can understand, dear chappie, how glad I am that I tore myself away from London to take that cruise.’ Basil twitched his new flannel trousers. ‘An awful bore at the time, of course. But how worth it to find someone like Sybil at the same table.’

  That idiot Basil, I thought, running true to form. He’d quite forgotten he came aboard as Steward Beauchamp, and a pretty rotten one at that.

  ‘My fiancée is arriving from New York next week, and we shall be married in June. St George’s, Hanover Square. You’ll be invited, naturally. We’ve bought one of those charming little manors in Sussex, which are photographed for the American magazines to tempt tourists into our horrible hotels. Sybil’s terribly keen on the real English background, and at week-ends I shall be able to indulge my fondness for country pursuits–’

  ‘So far confined to raising pansies in a box outside you
r window in the digs.’

  Basil adjusted his new pearl tie-pin.

  ‘You can imagine how frightfully busy I am just now arranging everything, not to mention handling all these theatrical managers and film producers who do so keep pestering one. You’ve heard I’m opening as Hamlet this season? Sybil wants to stage an entirely new conception of the Gloomy Dane–’

  ‘Popping through trap doors, I suppose?’ I asked.

  Basil looked hurt. ‘Do I detect, dear chappie,’ he demanded, ‘a certain reserve in your manner this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, you jolly well do. You have the cheek to come barging in here putting on no end of airs, when it wasn’t long since you were cadging bobs off me to cook your Sunday kipper over the gas ring. Not to mention recently trying to dissect me on the hoof.’

  Basil sighed. ‘Our little rift, dear Grim, has been quite troubling me. On the ship I was quite unable to sleep at night.’

  ‘So I noticed. You kept getting me out of bed for sedatives.’

  ‘But All’s Well That Ends Well.’

  ‘It may have done for you, but what ruddy well about me? As far as I’m concerned, it’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.’

  ‘Dear chappie!’ He put out his newly manicured hand. ‘I do so want us to be chums again.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘Please, Grim! Remember the dear old digs.’

  I thought again. After all, I’d been rather a cad towards him. Though I bet there’s not many chaps who could face their Recording Angels – not to mention their wives and their Income Tax Collectors – without admitting they’d been rather a cad regularly twice a week since the age of sixteen.

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ I said.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ smiled Basil. ‘Because there is a certain little matter that can only be discussed in a most friendly way.’ He had a smell at his carnation. ‘I’ve recently been thinking a good deal about little Ophelia.’

  As a matter of fact, I had too. It was difficult to avoid it, as you saw her every time you travelled by Underground, leaping about in the latest in girdles.

  ‘An exceptional girl,’ added Basil. ‘Nature hasn’t provided many such creatures.’