Doctor at Large

I managed to push her away and said desperately, 'Let me go! Let me go! Haven't I got enough to worry about as it is? Damn it-if you'll only leave me alone and go back to bed I'll-I'll give you some nembutal.'

She hesitated. 'You really will?'

'Yes, I really will,' I wiped my face with my handkerchief. 'In fact,' I went on breathlessly, 'I wish I could give you the whole ruddy bottle. But only if you'll go to bed at once and stay there like a good girl. Thus preventing both of us being cut up in the bath by tomorrow morning.'

She thought for a moment, weighing up the alternative delights of me and nembutal.

'O.K.,' she decided. 'It's a deal.'

'Run along then. I'll get it from the surgery and bring it up.'

As she disappeared upstairs I opened the drug cupboard and nervously flashed my torch inside. It was filled with several hundred small bottles of samples, which rattled like Haemorrhagic Hilda going downhill as they began to tumble on to the floor all round me. I grabbed the nembutal bottle, pushed the others back, locked the cupboard, and made for the stairs.

On the landing I hesitated. Jasmine had gone back to her room. Her door was shut. Was I in honour bound to keep my side of the bargain? Perhaps I could sneak back to bed and barricade the door. She might come after me, but Hockett would be back before she could make much more trouble…I heard a creak inside the room: she was impatiently getting out of bed. Her bare footsteps crossed the floor. I grabbed the door-handle and pulled.

'Ere!' she called., 'What's the big idea?'

'The idea is that you stay inside, my good woman.'

'Oh, is it-'

Together we pulled at the handle, one on each side of the door. As I had the nembutal bottle in one hand, I had a struggle to keep it closed. I didn't hear the front door shut, and as Hockett had returned to the house silently on his bicycle the first I knew of it was finding myself standing in the light of his torch.

'Lord Almighty!' I cried. Immediately it struck me how the situation would appear to him. 'It's all right, I said urgently. 'Your wife couldn't sleep. I was just going to fix her up with some of this.'

I waved the bottle in my hand. Then I saw it wasn't nembutal, but Dr Farrer's Famous Female Fertility Foods.

8

'Back so soon, Doctor?' asked Mr Pycraft.

'Yes. Dr Hockett 'and I had a difference of opinion about a difficult case.'

'You did, did you, Doctor?' Pycraft looked different from our last interview. He seemed twenty years younger, his sugary benevolence had hardened like the icing on a cheap wedding-cake, his side-whiskers had receded, his spectacles had enlarged, his clothes were cleaner, and his hands were cured of their arthritis. 'Well, now. Surely you won't let a little thing like that come between you and your career? We have gone to great trouble providing you with a start, in a magnificent practice-'

'Magnificent practice! The only thing magnificent about it is old Hockett's minginess. Why don't you give it to one of your medical missionaries? It would suit a chap who could live on a handful of rice a week and take the temptations of women in his stride.'

'I hardly find it a cause for levity, Doctor.'

'If you'd been working there for thirty-six hours like I have, you'd find it even less. I want another practice please, and damn quick.'

'But, Doctor-' He picked up a steel pen and slowly tapped his cheek with it. 'I'm afraid we have no more on our books just at the moment. It's a bad time for inexperienced young men like yourself. Your only course is to return to Dr Hockett immediately, apologize, and continue your career.'

I banged his desk. 'I'd rather work tearing up the bloody road!'

'As you well might, Doctor,' he said calmly, 'Under the agreement you signed with Wilson, Willowick, and Wellbeloved-which I have in the safe there-you agreed to pay us thirty-three and one-third per cent of your salary monthly for twelve months, or the equivalent amount should you through any reason leave your post beforehand. That comes to fourteen pounds _per mensem,_ which incidentally is payable in advance. We should like the first instalment now, Doctor, and if the rest is not forthcoming I assure you we shall have no hesitation in taking out a summons. Then there is the interest on the loan, of course. The publicity, Doctor-most undesirable, don't you agree? Especially at the very beginning of a career. The General Medical Council take an extremely grave view-'

'Oh, go to hell!' I said. I strode from the office, slammed the door, and clattered down the stairs.

I stood in the street for a minute, breathing hard and wondering what the recent floods of adrenalin were doing to my arteries. Then I dived into the pub for a drink.

Over a pint, I assessed my position in the medical profession. I had a diploma, a car, a new suit shrunk in the service of Mrs Wilkins, no spare cash, a debt of a hundred pounds, and the legal obligation to pay one hundred and sixty-eight pounds in the next twelve months to Wilson, Willowick, and Wellbeloved. I wanted a job and money-and unless I was prepared to make Haemorrhagic Hilda my home I wanted them at once. I was gloomily turning over these problems when I thought of Grimsdyke: although I gravely doubted that he could pay back my ten pounds, it would be pleasant to look at someone who owed money to me.

The address on his card was in Ladbrokes Grove, and I drew up Haemorrhagic Hilda a little later that morning before a row of tall frowsy houses by the gasworks. Grimsdyke's apartments were in the basement. I rang a bell beside a blistered brown door under the area stairs, which after several minutes was gingerly opened.

'Yes?' said a woman's voice.

'I'd like to see Dr Grimsdyke, please.'

'He's gone away.'

'I'm a particular friend of his. Tell him it's Dr Gordon, and I've just had a row with Wilson, Willowick, and Wellbeloved.'

Just a minute.'

She shut the door, and returned a few seconds later to let me in. I saw that she was about nineteen, dressed in a dirty pink satin housecoat, and wore a rather vacant look. Inside the door was a small hall full of rubbish, and beyond that a large room with a window just below the ceiling. This contained a bed, a gas-stove, a washstand, and a table covered with dirty plates and empty Guinness bottles. Grimsdyke was in his pyjamas, with his hair dangling over his face.

'I thought you'd gone up north, old lad,' he said in surprise.

'So I had. Now I'm back again.'

'Forgive this squalor-' He waved a hand round the room. 'Fact is, I took these rooms-there's a lot more at the back-to oblige some friends, rather messy people-'

'I wondered if you could let me have my ten quid back?'

Grimsdyke sat on the edge of the bed suddenly. 'Surely you can't have spent the other ninety? In two days?

That's certainly some going! You must have had a hell of a good time.'

'I bought a car.'

'What, that ruddy great thing that's blocking out the daylight? I thought the coal had arrived. A bit on the posh side, isn't it?'

'I felt a big car would be a good investment-to impress the patients.'

He nodded. 'It's the only way the blasted public chooses its doctors. Did I tell you about a pal of mine called Rushleigh? Good scout, he qualified right at the end of the war, when you couldn't get cars for love, money, or blackmail. Unless you were a doctor, of course. So he filled in the forms, and got a nice new little family bus for about three hundred quid. He'd happened to pal up with a Free French bloke who'd been in the orthopaedic wards, and when this fellow went home with a couple of bone grafts Rushleigh got an invitation to stay at his place down at Nice, buckshee. So he set off in his car, but he'd only got as far as Rouen when it conked out. You know what cars were like after the war. He went to a French garage, where they mumbled a bit about spare parts and so forth, and told him it would take at least a month to get anything to patch it up. However, the British being considered good chaps in France at the time, they sportingly offered to lend him a very old aristocratic English car they had in the back, which hadn't been used for seven years and then only for funerals.