In the club house, Mr Piper, handlebar moustache bristling, was trying to get things organised.
“Aha!” he said merrily when he saw me. “Good afternoon, Doctor, and a lovely afternoon it is too. I hope you know everybody here.”
I opened my mouth to answer when I saw his gaze slip behind me.
“Aha!” he said, walking towards the latest arrival. “Good afternoon, Doctor. I hope you know everybody here.”
I looked round the little group. There were one or two GPs I knew only by sight, the pædiatrician from the local hospital, and the Medical Officer of Health. These last two, being not only lady doctors, but lady golfing doctors, were visions to behold. They may have been experts with the syringe and pretty nifty with their drivers, but I doubted if either of them would have known what to do with a lipstick. One was dressed in a suit, square-shouldered and looking as if it had survived at least one war, and had her greying hair pulled back into a tight bun, while the other had a full, blanket-like tweed skirt and heavy-knit jumper which did nothing for her already vast proportions, and to save herself the trouble of deciding what to do with her mousy hair she had cut it all off to within half an inch of her head. On acquaintance, both these ladies turned out to be utterly charming. They were not only sparkling conversationalists but played down to single figures. It was easy to forget their sartorial deficiencies.
In the corner of the lounge where we stood about diffidently, waiting for the latecomers, was a phone booth. Through the glass, I saw a young man lolling lankily against the door as he held the receiver to his ear. His back looked familiar. His front was even more so.
“Musgrove!” I shouted, going over to meet him as he came out. In spite of our well-meant promises, we hadn’t contacted each other since Edinburgh. His glasses were still perched precariously on the end of his nose.
We shook hands. “I saw you come in,” he said. “I was just phoning my stockbroker.”
“Stockbroker?” I said. “Have you come into money?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m hoping to. The market looks fairly bright and I had a tip from one of my patients. It’s a dead cert. And very hush-hush. I’ve just bought some shares and with a bit of luck I should have cleaned up a hundred pounds by the end of the week.”
“Good luck to you,” I said. “If I had any spare cash I might have a bash myself.”
“My dear boy,” Musgrove put his arm round my shoulders, “that’s the whole beauty of it. You don’t need a sou. You buy them on the account and sell them before the account has ended. That’s if you’ve good reason to believe that they’re going to go up in that time.”
“Suppose they go down?”
“That’s a chance you’ve got to take. This patient of mine who gave me the tip has made a fortune on the Stock Exchange. I wouldn’t just buy any old thing. That would be asking for trouble.”
“Have you made anything before by this method?”
“I could have made a tenner a few weeks ago but I hung on too long and then Eisenhower got a cold.”
“Eisenhower?” I said. “What’s he got to do with it?”
Musgrove looked pained at my ignorance. “Wall Street,” he said, “dropped like a stone!”
“I see,” I said, although I didn’t really see at all.
“Anyway,” Musgrove said, “I had to try something. We’re expecting an increase in the family.”
“So are we,” I said.
“Oh!” Musgrove said despondently. “So you know all about that pram and nappies lark?”
“And cots and baby baths.”
“And bootees,” Musgrove said. “As a matter of fact, my wife’s meeting me here later. It’s my half-day.”
“You must come and have dinner,” I said rashly. “Sylvia will be delighted. I’ve been going to ask you for ages. This is a splendid opportunity.”
“You’d better ask your wife first,” Musgrove said. “You can’t just appear with us. It might be chops, and that can be embarrassing. It happened to us once.”
“Wait there!” I said. “I’ll ring Sylvia.”
“You’d better hurry. We seem to be nearly ready to start. They’re all going in to get changed.”
Iris answered the phone. I told her to tell Sylvia that I was bringing two guests home for dinner and that she should put on one of her specialities. Through the half-open door of the booth I heard Mr Piper say: “Come along, ladies and gentlemen, please!” He was looking anxiously at his watch.
Iris was mumbling something about the dinner.
“I can’t stop now, Iris. We’re going to play off. Just give my wife the message.”
I joined the others in the changing-rooms and quickly got into my golf things. My golf trousers, which I never remembered to remove from my bag and which were permanently crumpled-looking, were now, in addition, spattered with white paint from the nursery walls. I tried to scrape some of it off, but since everyone seemed to be moving out, gave it up as a bad job and, pulling down my windcheater as low as possible in an attempt at disguise, followed them.
With the help of Mr Piper we made ourselves up into fours and started off. My first drive into the wind went straight as a die some two hundred yards and landed smack in the middle of the fairway. My mood set, I stepped jauntily off over the springy turf, holding my face up to the sun. For the first five holes I couldn’t do a thing wrong. I cleared the hazards with an expertise wonderful to behold, and my chip shots on to the green were sheer poetry. On the sixth, which was a dog-leg, my ego was deflated. I sliced my drive and it landed in a patch of rough which lay by the side of the fourteenth green. Leaving the others on the fairway, I walked over to find it. It was just the wrong side of a prickly gorse bush. I had just made up my mind as to the best way to tackle it, and was taking my number eight iron out of my bag, when a voice behind me said:
“Oy!”
I looked round. A surly-looking greenkeeper was sweeping the fourteenth with his long besom.
“You’ll ’ave to wait,” he said, looking at my crumpled, paint-spattered trousers. “There’s a tournyment playing. A doctors’ tournyment.” There was admiration in his voice. “You’d best let them play through.”
Ignoring him, my pride wounded, I addressed the ball. I missed it completely and had difficulty in disentangling my number eight iron from the gorse bush.
The rest of my game was only compensated for by the slap-up tea they provided back at the club house. Credo-Medicals did us proud with sandwiches, toast and jam and a large variety of cakes. Mr Piper made a little speech during which he said that he was sure the experiment had created much good-will for his firm, and that he would do his best to see that it was repeated. He presented cash prizes to the winners of the tournament – a small GP with a large tummy from Ealing, and the lady Medical Officer of Health – and to the rest of us he gave consolation prizes of golf balls bearing the name Credo-Medicals, lest we should forget. All in all, it was a most enjoyable afternoon.
Musgrove and his wife, a short, jolly, dark-haired girl, followed me home in the car. We had spent so long over our tea and talking to the boys in the clubhouse, that it was dinner-time when we pulled up outside my house behind a taxi. Out of the taxi, stepping carefully, came Sylvia. I remembered with horror that she had told me she was spending the afternoon with her mother and would be back late. In my mirror I watched Musgrove and his wife in their car behind me, looking forward expectantly, I was sure, since I had sung Sylvia’s praises all through tea, to an exceptionally fine dinner. I was afraid they were going to be disappointed, but I had reckoned without Iris.
Lately we had noticed a change in Iris. She was still as cheerful and as willing as ever, but as the days grew longer and the weather warmer, we were reminded more and more frequently of Bridget. Iris let the milk boil over, the toast burn, and twice had sent me on visits to the wrong addresses. She blushed whenever she was spoken to, polished the red step with Brasso and forgot to unlock the waiting-room door until a large que
ue had formed down the garden path.
We were now to see that in spite of the recent extremely odd behaviour, she was still quite a girl.
When she let us all into the hall she was pink-cheeked and bubbling over with excitement. She wouldn’t let Sylvia into the kitchen but said that dinner would be served in ten minutes. Since the most ambitious cooking she had done for us was to fry bacon or sausages or at the most put a joint in the oven, following Sylvia’s precise instructions, we were both apprehensive and mystified. Iris was as adamant as she was excited, though, so we decided to let her get on with whatever she was doing.
The first surprise came before we even started to eat. Iris had set the table with our best mats and glasses and all the finery we kept for special occasions. Nothing had been forgotten and she had even lit two scarlet candles as she had seen Sylvia do.
Sylvia and I were practically dumb with astonishment as she served us with a dinner of Oeufs en cocotte, chicken marengo and lemon soufflé. It was Sylvia’s favourite menu, but she couldn’t have done it better herself. The Musgroves were most impressed. Mrs Musgrove talked babies with Sylvia and Musgrove initiated me into the mysteries of the stock-market.
They left at midnight, having admired my surgery and waiting-room, the matinée coats Sylvia had knitted and the bunnies I had stuck on the nursery wall.
In the kitchen Iris, tired but happy, was drying the last of the coffee cups.
“Where did you get the chicken?” Sylvia demanded; “we didn’t have a thing in the house.”
“You said you could only fry!” I said accusingly.
“We only had three cocotte dishes left,” Sylvia said, “and you produced four.” She sat down.
“Out with it, Iris!” I said. “What’s been going on?”
“Nothing really, Doctor,” she said. “Nothing at all. Only when you phoned I tried to tell you there was only me in but you weren’t listening. Well, I couldn’t let you bring your friends home to cold beef from yesterday, with bubble and squeak. There wasn’t enough, anyway. So I borrowed Hodge’s bike and nipped down to the butcher’s and bought a chicken, and they matched up the little dish at the china shop, and the lemons and the vegetables I brought in with me, and then I did it out of the book. I knew what it ought to look like, from watching.”
“What did you use for money?” Sylvia said.
“Oh! I drew out of my post office book. I was going to do that sweet with fresh pineapple we have sometimes, but they wanted ten and six for them. I told them it was a liberty, and took the lemons instead. It was all right?” she said anxiously.
Sylvia stood up and kissed her.
“Yes, Iris,” she said. “It was more than all right. It was perfect.”
Seventeen
I discovered the reason for Iris’ increasingly odd behaviour several weeks later, and in the public library.
The summer was now well advanced, the grass yellowing in patches from lack of rain, and Sylvia was getting near the end of her pregnancy. She found it very difficult to get about, was having frequent headaches, and spent much of her time resting. Iris took the double load of work, and the extra phone-answering, since Sylvia could not keep jumping up, willingly. She never complained, took wonderful care of Sylvia, and was very excited about the baby.
One Wednesday afternoon I called at the public library to borrow a book on the British countryside, a subject I had become interested in through driving through the glorious Surrey landscapes to visit Tessa Brindley in her country home. At one of the round tables in the Reference section, all dressed up in her “half-day” clothes, sat Iris. She was reading a volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica, opened, I saw by looking over her shoulder, at a treatise on forestry.
I didn’t disturb her but looked around for an explanation. Perched on the top of a ladder where he was putting away some books, I saw my patient, the good-looking Mr Westbeech, gazing down at the mop of red hair. I remembered his slipped disc, which Irish had helped me replace. Mr Westbeech noticed me looking at him and nearly fell off the ladder.
That night Iris came in as I was locking up.
“I didn’t know you were interested in forestry,” I said casually.
She stopped dead, her key still in the door.
“In what?”
“Forestry,” I repeated. “You were reading about it in the library.”
At the word library she turned scarlet.
“Oh!” she said.
“What’s going on with you and Mr Westbeech?”
“We’re going to get married!” Her voice was moony.
I was amazed.
“Mr Westbeech has asked you to marry him?”
Iris nodded dreamily.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Ever since we met in the surgery.”
“Love at first sight?” I said.
“Love at first sight.”
“I thought you didn’t want to get married because you didn’t like to settle in one place. Itchy feet or something.”
“They’ve stopped itching.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I hope you’ll be very happy.” A thought suddenly occurred to me. “I suppose that means you’ll be leaving us soon?”
Iris looked hurt. “Not soon,” she said. “I told you I’d stay until after the baby. We shan’t be getting married for a year, anyway.”
There seemed nothing more to say, so I said goodnight.
Iris heaved a contented sigh and started up the stairs.
“Iris!”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“You’ve left your key in the door.”
She certainly had it badly.
In the night, Sylvia had her first false labour pains. The conversation, the first of many similar ones we were to have during the next couple of weeks, went something like this:
Sylvia: “Ooh!”
Sylvia, a few minutes later: “Ouch!”
Me: “What is it, darling?”
Sylvia: “Pains.”
Me: “Where?”
Sylvia: “In my back.”
Me: “Do they go round to the front?”
Sylvia: “Ooh! Yes.”
Me: “Bad?”
Sylvia: “Yes. I think I’m going to have the baby.”
Me (sleepily): “It’s too early.”
Sylvia: “Ouch!”
Me: “Are they getting worse?”
Sylvia: “No. The same.”
Me: “Well, try and go to sleep. Wake me up if they get any worse.”
Sylvia (drowsily): “OK.”
The next thing I was aware of was the morning light streaming through the windows and Sylvia peacefully asleep at my side.
That day I was due to appear as an expert witness at the trial of Andrew Melrose for the murder of his two children. I hung about all day at the Old Bailey waiting for the case to come on, and then was not required: Andrew Melrose was found unfit to plead owing to insanity, and was sent to a criminal lunatic asylum.
Coming home in the car, I felt glad that he hadn’t been found guilty and sentenced to hanging. It was true that his two small daughters were dead but nothing that now happened to their father could bring them back to life.
I had once visited a criminal lunatic asylum, having had special permission from the Home Secretary to accompany a psychiatrist friend of mine, and knew something of the life that lay ahead for Andrew Melrose.
I recalled the pleasant countryside we had driven through to get there and the stark forbiddingness of the high brick wall we found surrounding the place when we arrived.
The building was divided into blocks and each block was built round a central courtyard where the “patients,” as they were now called, were exercised at various times of the day.
The worst cases were housed in what was known as the Refractory Block. Here the patients were kept under constant close observation, often in padded cells, and the “nurses,” as the warders were now called, walked only in pairs.
There w
ere lesser precautions in the Parole Block where the patients had opportunities to play billiards, watch television and even, once a year, to dance with the women inmates.
Everywhere we went, though, throughout the whole institution, there was the grim ceremony of unlocking every door we passed through and having it locked again immediately behind us. We trod softly down endless highly polished corridors in which there was no sound to be heard, no speck of dust to be seen, and completely bare of chairs or other furnishings.
The superintendent, a courteous old-school-tie type, strolled casually amongst the dangerous psychotic murderers, rapists, and child-killers, calling some by name and giving others a friendly nod and a smile. We asked him what this man’s crime had been, and that one, and the man in the corner, but curiously enough the superintendent had forgotten. He now knew them only as his patients and they were all equal, not treated according to the severity of their crimes.
For the most part the patients took no notice of us. Some, lost souls, were walking tirelessly up and down, so many paces one way and exactly the same number the other; others shadow- boxed, and some passed away the days with endless skipping. These were the schizophrenics living in worlds of their own and completely out of touch with reality.
One seedy, pathetic-looking man approached us and asked us to smuggle a note to the Home Secretary asking for his release; another old man, knowing that we were doctors, introduced himself as a famous surgeon and rambled on about the hospitals he had worked in, mentioning the names of physicians and surgeons who had been well known but were long since dead.
It had been an interesting afternoon but we had both been glad when, outside at last, we headed for home through the sweet, free countryside. That tiny glimpse of life behind those high brick walls was something neither of us would easily forget. The grimness and the pathos left ineradicable imprints upon the memory.
To such an existence Andrew Melrose had now been committed.
Mental illness, even in its mildest form, is still, in the minds of the general public, a disgrace and a stigma, or at least a confession of moral weakness. Even in our enlightened day and age the patient and, even more strikingly, his relatives believe that admission to a mental hospital or even attendance at a psychiatric clinic is a fate to be avoided at all costs.
Love on My List Page 15