Doctor On The Ball Read online

  How rare is the satisfaction in general practice of successfully treating single-handed an intricate and unusual case! Even Mrs Jenkins had to say grudgingly, ‘He looked a lot happier when he left.’

  ‘After twenty-five years as a GP, I may have acquired nothing but a profound knowledge of human nature,’ I told her modestly.

  I believe I heard her mutter, ‘Or of single malt whiskies.’ Perhaps it was time we bettered an offer of a rest with one of retirement. Perhaps I should refer her to Dr Quaggy.

  When I got home I opened a bottle of Talisker.

  ‘Any interesting cases, darling?’ asked Sandra.

  ‘Oh, the usual domestic difficulties,’ I told her.

  4

  It is remarkable in medicine how one rare case brings another. See a case of fibrocystic disease, which occurs in only one of 2000 people, and another suspected case appears at the next surgery. Thursday morning produced Mrs Wilberforce. She is dark, snub-nosed, pleasant, with two young children, a part-time schoolteacher with asthma. She always retains the coolness of standing chalk-in-hand at the blackboard.

  ‘Doctor, I have a personal problem’ she began. ‘I know it’s not really your job, but I’d prefer putting it to you.’

  ‘Please do,’ I invited. ‘Everyone else does.’

  She bit her full lower lip. ‘My husband seems to be making us into a one-parent family.’

  ‘Tut,’ I sympathized.

  ‘As perhaps you know, my Herbert is a self-employed do-it-yourself double-glazing salesman. So he’s not at home weekends. That’s the only time he can be sure of finding people in their own home and persuade them to double-glaze it.’

  I acknowledged the logic.

  ‘But this week he hasn’t put in his usual appearance Monday–Friday.’

  I suggested at once, ‘He’s wandering about the country suffering loss of memory. We doctors see many such cases.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Herbert’s never had a day’s illness in his life, physical, mental or imaginary.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t recall ever setting eyes on your husband,’ I agreed. ‘Have you suffered any domestic difficulties that he might wish to escape from?’

  ‘Funny you should say that, doctor.’ She was impressed. ‘I think it’s all to do with another woman.’

  ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘Long blonde hairs.’

  ‘On his collar?’

  ‘In his Y-fronts.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Actually, we had a blazing row about it last Friday morning, and I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Why not inform the police? They’ll increase their list of missing persons by one.’

  ‘I don’t think Herbert would care for that at all,’ she objected. ‘Not finding himself in the company of dropouts, drug addicts and such. Rather a snobbish person, my Herbert. Keeps very much to himself. It’s quite a job getting him out of the house. I often say when I come home from work at the Beowulf Comprehensive, how about leaving Tim and Anna with Gran and having a Chinky meal at the Ho Ho Ho!, but he always says, what’s wrong with their takeaway, you only get people staring at you in restaurants.’

  I could suggest only an advert in the papers on the lines Come Home All Is Forgiven. I added, ‘I’ll let you know at once if he phones me. Patients who lose their memory generally find their doctor’s telephone number in their diaries and ring for help. How’s the asthma? Good! Not much of it about this time of the year.’

  The week passed without the reappearance of Charlie-Fred. I assumed he was busily digging up the past in Mrs Ackroid’s bosom. But late on Saturday morning, Mrs Jenkins announced, ‘If you think you’re rid of that amnesiac, forget it. He’s outside.’

  I greeted him cheerfully in the consulting room. ‘Everything coming back? The recorded highlights of your existence? Do you remember, do you remember, the house where you were born? The happiest days of your life at school? Your blissful wedding morn? But of course, you’re not married.

  He said nervously, ‘That’s the trouble, doctor, I think I am. As far as I can recollect, to a Mrs Cranshaw.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘If I am one of your patients, doctor,’ he continued uneasily, ‘it follows that she’d be too, doesn’t it? I wondered if you could oblige with my address.’

  I buzzed Mrs Jenkins. After a couple of minutes she buzzed back. We had no Mrs Cranshaw.

  ‘Possibly you left her somewhere around the North Sea,’ I suggested to the patient.

  He looked more uncomfortable. ‘That’s another worry, doctor. I do not apparently work in the North Sea.’

  ‘Really? Mrs Ackroid thinks you do.’

  He nodded. ‘When she got home from the burgers last Monday evening, she said she was real concerned I wasn’t at work, I’d got to make the effort, pull myself together, all that. On Tuesday morning she cuts me some meat-loaf sandwiches and helps me into my overcoat and kisses me goodbye on the doorstep. So I just follow people hurrying down the road and find myself at the station, where I took a train for London, as in the general direction of the North Sea. Then a red-faced bloke with a briefcase gets in the carriage and says breezily, “Hello! Anything wrong yesterday? We missed you after the weekend.” I said quickly I’d been bilious. He said, “Yes, we thought something like that, if Mrs Edlington said you’d looked peaky once she said it a hundred times.”’

  ‘Who’s Mrs Edlington?’ I asked the patient.

  ‘My mum, for all I knew. I was scared of a tricky conversation, but luckily he read the Telegraph until we arrived at Charing Cross terminus, where he said, “It’s a fine frosty morning, let’s walk to the office.” It wasn’t far, big white building on the river, the red-faced bloke talked all the time about projects, schedules, agendas, budgets, could have been talking about elephant-breeding for all I understood. There was a hall with rubber plants and a bloke in a blue uniform, we went up in the lift to a big room where I found a desk, and people kept coming up and asking if I was all right now and telling me to take care of myself.’

  I asked keenly, ‘But you did remember your work?’

  ‘No, but it appeared I was in some government office, and this did not seem to matter. I just sat, and shuffled about some papers, and drank cups of tea, and everyone called me Mr Cranshaw and asked after Mrs Cranshaw.’

  ‘What about the rest of the week?’

  ‘I thought it best to go on being bilious.’

  I suddenly realized this would make a splendid paper for the BMJ, if not the British Journal of Psychiatry or indeed Brain.

  ‘Look, why not bring Mrs Ackroid along at the end of Monday evening surgery? We can discuss the entire problem in depth.’

  He agreed readily. He seemed pitifully relieved at my continuing interest in his case. I assured him that meanwhile I should inquire if anyone local called Cranshaw had lost a husband.

  Leaving after surgery for the golf club, I announced to Mrs Jenkins impressively, ‘Unusual Complications of a Case of Amnesia in General Practice. How’s that as the title of the paper I’m writing for the BMJ on Mr Hemmings? Who as his case unfolds becomes a highly instructive patient, not a scrounging pseud.’

  ‘I implore you, don’t!’ she cried. ‘It’s difficult enough already, explaining to new patients that you’re an eccentric.’

  ‘I am not in the slightest eccentric,’ I said, offended.

  ‘Oh, a perfectly competent eccentric, like Dr Samuel Johnson,’ she assured me.

  I told her stiffly, ‘It will get my name in print and bring the practice considerable credit. Also, it will make the other Churchford GPs dead jealous. Particularly Dr Quaggy.’

  Over the weekend I made a draft of my paper. I thought the case illustrated neatly Freud’s conception of the libido as the high-tension electricity which drives us along our tracks of destiny, if sometimes off the rails. On Monday evening, Mr Hemmings and Mrs Ackroid appeared promptly, holding hands.

  ‘I know all,’ declare
d Mrs Ackroid soberly, as they sat in the consulting room. ‘Charlie has told me about Mrs Cranshaw. It makes no difference. I shall always look upon Charlie as my own.’

  I put my fingertips together. ‘Mrs Cranshaw does not exist.’

  ‘She exists at the office,’ he objected.

  ‘The office does not exist. My dear Mr Hemmings! Your case is perfectly straightforward. You just imagined going to this place. Mrs Cranshaw was just one of your hallucinations, like Norma.’

  ‘Who’s Norma?’ demanded Mrs Ackroid.

  I became aware of an unseemly commotion outside in the waiting room.

  ‘Who’s Norma?’ Mrs Ackroid repeated more warmly.

  An appalling thing happened. Mrs Jenkins threw open my door in the middle of a consultation.

  ‘Mrs Cranshaw,’ announced Mrs Jenkins, flushed. ‘Demanding to see the doctor.’

  I jumped up. ‘This is perfectly outrageous.’

  But Mrs Cranshaw was already in the consulting room, a pretty short-haired blonde with freckles. She pointed at Mr Hemmings a quivering finger. Indeed, she was quivering all over.

  ‘I wants me husband back. One of my friends what comes for the water on her knees spotted him in the waiting room last Monday morning. What are you doing with my Eric, you bitch?’ she demanded of Mrs Ackroid.

  ‘Kindly leave the surgery,’ I directed severely.

  ‘You’re in it too, I bet.’ She rounded on me. ‘Yes, you are, don’t try denying it, I can see the guilt written over your face plainer than Heinz on a tin of beans. I’m going to report you to the National Health, I know my rights, I don’t slave all day giving out tickets at parking meters for nothing, you come home, Eric.’ She grabbed his sleeve.

  ‘You stay right here with me, Charlie,’ ordered Mrs Ackroid, grabbing the other.

  ‘Mrs Jenkins,’ I implored, as the two started shouting at each other. ‘Restore decorum.’

  ‘How?’ she asked, flustered. ‘With dogs they use a bucket of water.’

  ‘Ladies, please!’ I laid a calming hand on the struggling shoulders of both. ‘Unseemly violence has no place in the domestic field, as it has not in the sporting one. Won’t you allow me to blow the whistle and act impartially as referee? Mrs Ackroid, however devoted to Mr Cranshaw, is not married to him. Mrs Cranshaw is. So Mrs Cranshaw can keep him.’

  Charlie-Eric grasped his forehead. ‘Doctor! It’s all coming back! I’m cured!’

  ‘Excellent!’ I congratulated him. ‘At least some good’s come out of this rough house.’

  ‘I remember now! Clear as crystal. I’m not married to her.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ objected Mrs Cranshaw.

  ‘I only promised to marry her. Didn’t I, love?’

  ‘It’s the same thing, as far as the neighbours are concerned,’ said Mrs Cranshaw briskly.

  ‘What about my neighbours?’ demanded Mrs Ackroid threateningly. ‘They were already calling me the Elizabeth Taylor of Rosemary Road when my husband walked out.’

  From the open door, Mrs Wilberforce exclaimed, ‘Herbert! What are you up to? Thank God I’ve found you. The children are asking awkward questions.’

  ‘What’s that woman doing here?’ complained Mrs Cranshaw angrily.

  ‘I came to see the doctor about my asthma. And what’s my husband doing here, may I ask?’

  ‘He’s lost his memory,’ I replied briefly. ‘Just as I diagnosed.’

  ‘And these are two nurses from some institution, I presume?’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that in front of my husband,’ snapped Mrs Ackroid.

  ‘Nor in front of mine,’ added Mrs Cranshaw.

  ‘This is going to complicate your paper for the BMJ,’ murmured Mrs Jenkins. ‘Might I suggest the title A Case of Amnesia Amorosa?’

  ‘Bugger the BMJ,’ I exclaimed. ‘No one would believe it if I sent it to The Guinness Book of Records.’ I demanded impatiently of Charlie-Eric-Herbert, ‘Is this your lawful, as distinct from your other, wedded wives?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve gone blank again. Totally. Sorry.’

  ‘You’d better ask British Airways.’ Mrs Cranshaw suddenly sounded resigned. ‘Eric works for them as a steward.’ She began to cry.

  ‘Charlie! Love! Surely you’d never forget me?’ Mrs Ackroid began to cry.

  ‘It’s really very difficult,’ he protested mildly. ‘But you see, I’ve never set eyes on all three of you in my life.’

  The ice of Mrs Wilberforce’s schoolmistressy sang-froid melted. She began to cry.

  ‘I’ve an urgent call from the St Boniface Twilight Home,’ I announced.

  I dashed through the door. ‘Mrs Jenkins,’ I panted in the waiting room. ‘I apologize. That fellow is no more an invalid than Baron Münchausen was a pillar of truth. Call the police and have him arrested.’

  ‘What for?’ she asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘Living off immoral earnings, I should imagine.’

  ‘Honestly, doctor, I don’t think the poor man’s to blame. He just got into the hands of three selfish women, that’s all.’ Her eyes dropped. ‘Last Saturday when we were alone in the waiting room, he chatted me up a bit. I don’t think him a bad sort of feller at all.’

  ‘Et tu, Jenkins!’ I cried. I slammed the front door. A pretty redhead in jeans stood in my way.

  ‘You the doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You got my Fred inside.’

  ‘Feel free, go in, stake a claim,’ I invited. ‘And the very best of British luck.’

  I jumped in the car. What to do? My professional duty was discharged. I shrugged. I drove off. It would clearly be best to let themselves sort it all out. It was snowing again. ‘Thank God today’s the end of bloody February,’ I muttered.

  But it was leap year. I had forgotten.

  5

  My young friend Dr Lonelyhearts makes a fortune from resolving such intimate perplexities as Is It Normal to Hate My Mother? Or, Would Plastic Surgery Restore My Husband’s Love? Or, Can I Get Pregnant if We Do It Standing Up?

  He is A Harley Street Specialist in the women’s magazines. In the racier dailies he becomes A Doctor Speaks, on items like Blackheads Can Be Beautiful or Understanding Your Piles. In the serious papers he rises to Our Medical Correspondent, expounding authoritatively on such conditions of national importance as Benn’s Legs, Michael’s Foot, Thatcher’s Eye, Steel’s Blues and Princess Preggers.

  The predicament of Britons infected by typhoid in Greece, bitten by mad dogs in Spain, sewn back to their arms and legs, struck by lightning, poisoned by hamburgers, frightened by spiders, he elucidates expertly overnight. He produces equally cheerful paperbacks on keeping fit and being ill. He whips up frothy articles on the latest fashionable diseases while his wife makes his dinner. I believe herpes and AIDS bought his Porsche. He relieves mail-order medicine with zesty, intelligent hospital thrillers like Death in Coma, Lethal Angel and Needleprick. Several other Dr Lonelyhearts share this raffish subculture of medicine, living more skittishly off printer’s ink than patients’ blood. The public consult them by post rather than their own GPs. A paper doctor, like a paper tiger, is less frightening.

  Dr Lonelyhearts is Dr Aleyn Price-Browne BM from Oxford. He is tall, gingery and genial, in costly casual clothes like a rising actor relishing the respectability of success. His wife is pretty Dr Josephine from Guy’s. Like many medical women with small children she works part-time in family planning, and doubtless finds it dispiriting always to play the waitress at the feast of love.

  As the Lonelyhearts live nearby in Churchford, one sunny Sunday morning in March Sandra and I asked them home to the Old Surgery in Foxglove Lane for drinks. We were shortly into fascinating literary talk.

  ‘Inside every bad novelist is a great novel struggling to get out, luckily unavailingly,’ expanded Dr Lonelyhearts, who likes to control an unruly conversation by firing epigrams like rubber bullets,

  ‘But you’re going to write a wonderful novel one day, aren’t you,
darling?’ encouraged Josephine. (Dr Lonelyhearts told me once that all authors’ wives are married to Tolstoy.)

  ‘It might win the Booker Prize,’ suggested Sandra respectfully, offering nuts.

  He laughed heartily. ‘The British aren’t in the slightest interested in authors, but they love a contest. Everything from the Boat Race to the Grand National, the bigger the field, the riskier the odds, the better the fun. The Booker on telly has raised contemporary English literature to the level of championship snooker. I raise my glass.’

  Sandra looked disturbed, sharing Mrs Leo Hunter’s esteem of authors.

  ‘The public buy the lucky winner’s book and feel literary,’ he continued authoritatively. ‘Just like they buy slimming books and feel slim. People seldom read what they buy. Or buy what they read. They get it free from the public library.’

  ‘I must confess, I haven’t bought many books,’ said Sandra, subdued. ‘Since The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.’

  This made him muse, ‘Why does any book catch on? Like the yo-yo, then the hula-hoop, now the home computer, everyone’s got to have one. Good solid British snobbery, of course. There’s royalties in royalty and the titles of the titled. Any publisher would give his eye teeth for the secret, if not his more cherished organs.’

  Attending his glass with Glenmorangie, I ventured a protest. ‘Surely the Booker Prize and suchlike are awarded by intellectuals to mark works of high literary value?’

  ‘How do we know?’ he asked. ‘Until the author obliges by being dead for a hundred years. As my Companion to English Literature begins – with astringent Oxford scholarship – “Contemporary judgement is notoriously fickle and tends to be impassioned.”’ He added amiably, ‘For all publishers’ airs, it’s only the genteel end of showbiz.’

  ‘We were in Norfolk last weekend with ours.’ Josephine shivered. ‘Thermal underwear time.’

  ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen put it, that every London publisher has the ambition to become a country gentleman,’ Dr Lonelyhearts explained. ‘Spending from Friday to Monday poking his pigs instead of screwing his authors. Mine owns an Elizabethan mansion with wall-to-wall draughts, fires which send the heat up the chimney and the smoke into the room, and nothing to do indoors except drink and play scrabble for ruinous stakes. He’d cunningly asked one of those Manhattan publishers who need air-conditioning like premature babies need incubators – who held the rights of some big American novel by some big American master of banality. The guest broke on the Sunday morning. After a tramp with the dogs in the sleet, he was ready to sign absolutely anything for escape to the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair.’