“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?”
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.