Doctor On The Ball Read online

  Dr Lonelyhearts warmed the chilly memory with Glenmorangie. He sighed. ‘I could write the great novel, did I not prefer the squalid comforts of life.’

  ‘Doesn’t the Arts Council give grants?’ ventured Sandra.

  ‘God knows why,’ he told her. ‘If a man’s intelligent enough to write a book, he’s intelligent enough to hold a job. I wrote Needleprick between bleeps as a houseman. Oh, I know what Shaw said, “A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work for anything but his art.” But that only tells us what everyone knows, that Shaw was an insensitive egoist. I prefer Evelyn Waugh’s advice – “Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper, and no telephone or wife.”’

  ‘I am not another of your inconveniences,’ said Josephine tartly.

  ‘Got the prezzy?’ He twisted towards her in the armchair beside the fire.

  From a businesslike doctor’s handbag she handed a small plastic bag. He displayed between fingertips a soft greenish cube. ‘The greatest thing since sliced manna,’ he explained proudly. He offered it to Sandra. ‘Taste.’

  She took a nervous nibble. He sat like an angler with a fish nosing the bait.

  ‘Mint sauce,’ she decided. ‘Mixed with seaweed.’

  ‘That’s the wondrous herbal tang,’ he corrected her, ‘suggestive of dew-sparkling dawn pastures, the salutary breezes of spring, the eventide scent of a physic garden. Richard–’ He offered me a bite.

  ‘Some nutty health food?’

  ‘Warmer! This is Sana. From the sano nut. It’s the government’s new cheese.’

  I groaned. ‘Not another Lymeswold, with politicians on television eating it as bravely as their own words?’

  ‘Sana will down-market Lymeswold to mousetraps. It is more than a cheese.’ Dr Lonelyhearts held the remains like a specimen extracted by a difficult operation. ‘It is an international triumph. Remember the island of Chanca? Which the Americans and the Russians were desperate to liberate, whether the inhabitants liked it or not? Outcry in Parliament, because Chanca’s in the Commonwealth and it shouldn’t have been the American President who got angry, it should have been the Queen.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Not that anyone had heard of the place, except kids doing O-levels,’ he continued. ‘Chanca’s economy depends entirely on the sano bean, as the economy of Tanzania depends on cashew nuts and of Ghana on chokkies. That’s colonial independence for you! Swapping the rule of Governors for the whims of suburban hostesses.’

  He shot a severe glance towards our nut bowl.

  ‘We’ve bought the entire sano crop for the next fifty years as Commonwealth Aid,’ he revealed.

  ‘So the British must eat algae-flavoured sponge rubber to help the Americans irritate the Russians?’ I demanded indignantly. ‘Really, Aleyn! Scandalous!’

  ‘Just run-of-the-mill diplomacy,’ Dr Lonelyhearts disagreed airily. ‘The sano bean is but the acorn of a massive political oak,’ he added darkly. ‘In a forest to immortalize our present government as gloriously as the New Forest William the Conqueror. The sano bean is healthy polyunsaturated fat all through, slice it where you will. Absolutely free of those deadly polysaturated fats which the British public gorges in soggy chips, bacon and eggs, buttered crumpets, cheeseburgers and treacle tart, only restrained by the resulting fatal coronary. Sana cheese came under the nose of Sir Arbuthnot Beakspeare, chief medical mandarin in Whitehall–’

  ‘He lectured us local GPs,’ I recalled. ‘Very instructive, if I did rather feel that God had decided to bring down the tablets of stone from the mountain himself.’

  ‘Who wafted it under the nose of the Minister of Health, who charitably decided to bestow on British voters Sana cooking fat, Sana mock-egg, Sana steaks, Sana bangers and for all I know Sana Mars Bars. Then the Prime Minister got a whiff and determined to revolutionize the British diet.’

  ‘There’s a campaign in the paper,’ Sandra interrupted.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I’m writing it. Though I rate the Prime Minister’s chances of separating the British public from cholesterol like Woodrow Wilson’s of separating the American public from alcohol. Come to the doctors’ preview on Tuesday, Richard. Big party in Park Lane.’ As I looked doubtful, he added, ‘You won’t have to eat the revolting stuff, it’s all free-loading champagne and lobster pâtés. I’m running the promotion.’

  Leaving, Dr Lonelyhearts lowered his voice. ‘Got any Panacea Drug shares?’ I said no, after deliberation to give an impression of assets outside the building society. ‘Lucky you! Their new wonder drug has been found to rot the kidneys. I heard last week at a conference in Miami. The shares will fall like the temperature of a corpse.’

  ‘Isn’t it appalling that people make money from human disasters?’ I chided. ‘Fleming spurned a penny from penicillin.’

  ‘Only because the fool hadn’t the nous to patent it. Just run-of-the-mill business,’ he ended, zipping up his Barbour. ‘Want a couple of stalls for Covent Garden? A drug company sent them, but I’ve a dinner at Claridge’s.’

  I acquainted Sandra with my acceptance of Dr Lonelyhearts’ invitation.

  ‘Don’t let him lead you astray,’ she said.

  ‘Good God!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s like telling the Devil not to sell his soul to Faust.’

  ‘You’re only a humdrum GP of totally unsophisticated tastes,’ she informed me. ‘He’s intimate with television people and politicians, and you’ve only got to read the papers.’

  I poured myself another Glenmorangie.

  ‘Though come to think of it,’ I mused, ‘what would anyone give for a battered, grimy old soul like mine?’

  6

  I attended the Park Lane party from curiosity, not debauchery. I was fascinated by the heady, chancy, expense-account career of young Dr Lonelyhearts, playing his hand of credit cards, flaunting his mastery of airline timetables, enjoying through the (equally tax-deductible) liberality of drug companies the life of itinerant extravagance once led by the sons of dukes dispatched upon the Grand Tour.

  The hotel ballroom was already full of middle-aged, dowdyish men and women chattering light-heartedly and drinking purposefully, the medical profession with its bleep switched off. I recognized lean, tall Sir Arbuthnot Beakspeare conversing with Sir Rollo Basingstoke, my contemporary at St Swithin’s, who disguised his shock at seeing me in such powerful professional company with the suavity befitting a Surgeon to the Queen.

  On a dais with lights and microphones, Dr Lonelyhearts talked forcefully to a scruffy, restless group, the press. Cheerful, elegant black gentlemen sat round a table with the pink Chancan flag, enjoying a windfall from the British taxpayer more lavish than bestowed by their Caribbean hurricanes. I sipped Bollinger until Dr Lonelyhearts began through a microphone, ‘My Lords, ladies and gentlemen.

  ‘This occasion, I venture to say,’ he continued solemnly, ‘will compare in history to that day in 1587 when Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the fields of Virginia to our shores the homely, invaluable, beloved potato.’

  Nobody laughed. It was his champagne.

  Dr Lonelyhearts humbly preferred not wasting the time of his distinguished audience with a sadly inexpert dissertation on the wondrous new food shortly to satisfy our appetites and tickle our palates, while conferring a benefit upon the health of the nation, he ventured to say, comparable with that performed upon the health of the Royal Navy by the brilliant Edinburgh physician James Lind in 1753, with his miraculous introduction of lemon juice to cure scurvy at sea.

  Dr Lonelyhearts paused impressively.

  ‘I should prefer leaving that to another Scotsman of genius, Andrew McGoggin, Professor of Nutrition at Scone University. Sana,’ he ended with hushed reverence, ‘is his brainchild.’

  To applause led enthusiastically by Dr Lonelyhearts, there arose a slight man resembling a skull wearing skin a size too small. It appeared through an accent as thick as a Highlander’s plaid that the
professor passed his leisure shinning up and down the Cairngorms on a grated carrot, a pinch of oatmeal, a bite of honeycomb. He hated food as Daniel hated lions, the Ancient Mariner the albatross, Prometheus eagles. Eating was a pleasure as idiotic as playing Russian roulette, the arts of cookery as repulsive as the temptations of Jezebel, food writers viler than pornographers, restaurants gastric brothels. We should be rigorously educated to regard food only as the body’s diesel oil.

  Suddenly the room was full of pretty girls in white with piled trays of Sana cheese. Sir Arbuthnot gobbled his ration like a seal leaping for sprats. Sir Rollo stealthily dropped his among the daffodils. I found Dr Lonelyhearts beside me.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t have the chance for a chat,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Wasn’t much fun, was it? Come to the big Guildhall national launch in a fortnight, it’ll make this look like a school dinner. Yes, you must,’ he insisted. ‘The Minister’s appearing himself. That dreadful hookworm Quaggy was wriggling after an invitation only yesterday.’

  ‘Did he mention me?’ I remarked curiously. ‘That they were already stocking up with single malts for my booking at the St Boniface Twilight Home?’

  ‘Oh, he was quite flattering. Said you were Churchford’s answer to Mr Pickwick. Particularly since you’d been putting on weight.’

  The following week Sana hit the British public – like everything else, from royal marriages to the Cup Final, through their TV screens.

  Clean-cut athletes ran like Derby winners, high-jumped weightlessly, swam like torpedoes, then reached for a slice of Sana cheese as goggle-eyed as Billy Bunter reaching into his tuckbox. These commercials conflicted with others depicting slim, sexy girls munching slices of everyday cheeses, eyes half-closed, like the whores of Babylon reaching for aphrodisiacs. I found this confusing.

  Equally perplexing that week was the epidemic of March fever. My patients exhibiting a temperature, vomiting and diarrhoea all claimed they had it. I had never heard of March fever. But doctor! they protested unbelievingly, it’s in all the papers.

  That weekend I was called as GP to the Lonelyhearts’ six-year-old son, who had bellyache. Like all medical parents they suspected appendicitis, peritonitis, or nasty abdominal conditions never seen outside examination papers. After reassuring Dr Lonelyhearts, I inquired over a Laphroaig about the clash of television advertising.

  He replied off-handedly, ‘You can’t expect the butter-and-egg trade to give up without a fight.’

  ‘You mean, the traditional cheesemongers have joined forces to repel invaders of their market?’

  ‘Surely you remember the butter boys’ gruesome adverts depicting margarine as vitaminized axle grease? And the margarine people twisting medical statistics to portray a slice of bread and butter as the mat on a well-polished helter-skelter to the grave?’

  I protested, ‘But what about this healthy revolution in the British diet, so dear to our Prime Minister’s heart?’

  ‘Oh, marketing isn’t interested in health, which has no cash value. Otherwise the big tobacco and booze companies would go into voluntary liquidation tomorrow, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Profits from pathology and dividends from disease strike me as immoral,’ I said forthrightly.

  ‘Only run-of-the-mill big business,’ he responded easily. ‘So young George upstairs is going to live?’

  ‘He’s suffering from nothing worse than March fever,’ I informed him. ‘There’s a lot of it about.’

  To my consternation, Dr Lonelyhearts roared with laughter. I inquired the joke.

  ‘I invented it,’ he explained cheerfully. ‘There’s some sort of gastric flu going round, and my editor wanted a snappy name so the sufferers could say they’d read about it in his paper.’

  ‘I think that’s unethical,’ I remonstrated sternly.

  ‘Just run-of-the-mill journalism. Don’t forget the Guildhall on Wednesday. By the way, I’m on the other side now. Organizing the promotion with those lovely girls eating fatty old Stilton and Camembert and Double Gloucester. More money. Run-of-the-mill PR,’ he ended airily.

  Dr Lonelyhearts’ coterie seemed to embrace the loyalties exhibited by the Roman senate in the last days of Julius Caesar.

  I arrived promptly at the Guildhall, embedded in the City of London. I discovered Dr Lonelyhearts emerging, pale and trembling. I solicitously suggested an attack of March fever. Shaking his head impatiently, he leaned against the civic stonework and exclaimed chokingly, ‘Curried nut roast.’

  ‘Nut what?’

  ‘Your lunch,’ he explained. ‘Also spinach pasties, cucumber and yoghurt salad, rice-stuffed cabbage leaves and toasted sunflower seeds. My gastric mucosa,’ he continued angrily, ‘had its napkin tucked under its chin awaiting turtle soup followed by roast sirloin and Yorkshire pud. My successor,’ he spluttered, ‘has succumbed to the perverted notions of that raving Scots fakir and provided this totally inedible wholefood.’

  I stood aghast.

  ‘Worse–’ Dr Lonelyhearts steadied himself. He added in the voice of Mr Bumble to Oliver Twist, ‘No booze!’

  Medicine teaches you to think on your feet. ‘Let’s find a pub and get prophylactically pissed.’

  Too late! A black Rover, green-uniformed lady at the wheel, emitted the Minister of Health. He was short, pasty, fat, and puffed inside gripping the arm of his fellow-passenger, lofty Sir Arbuthnot.

  ‘He doesn’t look very well,’ I exclaimed.

  Dr Lonelyhearts agreed. ‘But today’s launch is so essential for his ambitious career, I doubt if he’d have been put off coming even by death.’

  ‘Surely,’ I objected, ‘he’s our famous caring politician, always keeping open threatened little inefficient hospitals, firing the starting pistol for wheelchair marathons, and seeing sick kids are submitted to appallingly dangerous heart operations?’

  ‘I believe every night he thanks God for making his fellow-beings ill, disabled and poor. They’re his parliamentary bread and butter, like other MPs who specialize in rape, paedophilia, hare coursing or the Royal Navy, but easier. In opposition, you accuse the government of cruelty for corking the cornucopias of the NHS. In government, you take credit for everything, including startled women on fertility drugs with septuplets.’ I looked unbelieving. He grinned. ‘Politics is the art of the cynical.’

  The anteroom was full of important-looking people staring into glasses of orange juice with the gloom of those committed to a lunch for rabbits. Dr Lonelyhearts introduced Sir Arbuthnot.

  ‘You GPs really should instruct your patients in healthy, nutritious diets,’ he said with the fearsome condescension of a hearty headmaster. ‘Do far more good than all those tranquillizers you insist on prescribing at the government’s expense. Perfectly easy, only take you half an hour.’

  I explained, ‘If I gave half-hours to all my patients I should be conducting a twenty-four-hour surgery and the waiting room would never get cleaned.’

  But he did not seem to hear. ‘This significant occasion is unfortunately marred by our splendid Minister suffering a little tummy trouble,’ he lamented. ‘Fortunately, I have this in hand. I examined him at the Ministry and diagnosed March fever.’

  ‘Very shrewd,’ murmured Dr Lonelyhearts.

  ‘Yes, sometimes the condition presents difficulties in recognition.’

  Lunch was announced, to faint enthusiasm. A bishop intoned grace, incorporating a nasty crack about the value of fasting. We filled long tables splendid with silver and flowers, munching sullenly until the Queen’s health was drunk in sparkling Malvern water and the toastmaster announced, ‘You may not smoke.’

  Over the decaffeinated coffee with skimmed milk and saccharine arose the Minister.

  Instantly there were lights, television cameras clicking as noisily as roosting starlings, a phallic forest of microphones.

  ‘This magnificent British product,’ the Minister began, ‘the peerless British cheese, shortly to spread nutrition and delight in British homes…’

 
He stopped. He ground his teeth. He took a sip of water. He continued as though overcome with the emotion of his message. I noticed him clutch the lower waistcoat. I frowned. Acute appendicitis? But what was the diagnosis of a humble GP, against a doctor who could direct the health of the nation without taking his elbows from his blotter?

  The peroration implied that Sana cheese was the healthiest substance discovered since fresh air. A gold-frogged man in scarlet stood with a silver salver of it. The Minister raised a chunk to the TV cameras and ate it.

  ‘Delicious,’ he murmured ecstatically.

  Then he belched, gurgled, vomited into the freesias and sank groaning to the floor.

  Pandemonium.

  The bishop nervously inquired if he needed the final blessing, or his brow wiped with a damp napkin? Sir Arbuthnot leaped to his patient complaining this was the first fulminating case of March fever and he would immediately phone the Lancet. Scarlet-coated flunkies bore the moaning Minister to some distant mayoral sofa. Ashen-faced men in striped trousers consulted whisperingly. Police inspectors barked into squawking walkie-talkies for ambulances. The soberly vengeful press recorded each writhe and grimace, before dashing to Fleet Street with the best launching story since Henry VIII’s Mary Rose.

  Dr Lonelyhearts sat quietly beside me.

  ‘The Minister’s freed us for a Glenfiddich before closing time,’ he observed. ‘I suspect his only uncalculated kindness for years.’

  The perforated appendix was removed at nearby Bart’s. The Minister recovered, but not his career. He was shortly shuffled to Transport. The only use Sana achieved was a feed for comics on TV.