Doctor On The Ball Read online

  I next encountered Dr Lonelyhearts on a pouring afternoon leaving the Perfect Gent, our smart outfitters near Robbins Modes in Churchford High Street.

  ‘Kitting myself with tropical gear for Chanca,’ he greeted me heartily. ‘Where the cheese comes from.’

  ‘The political situation seems defused out there,’ I said, staring enviously under my umbrella.

  ‘Indeed. But the British government has in addition to egg on its face thousands of tons of Sana cheese on its hands. So we’re shipping it out to Chanca, as Commonwealth Aid. I believe there’s enough to feed the population with every meal for a generation. That’ll teach the buggers to flirt with the Russians. I’ve landed the contract for the promotion,’ he disclosed proudly. ‘Which shouldn’t be difficult, as they can’t send the muck back. So at last I’ve got that six weeks in the sun without telephone or wife, to write one of the world’s great novels. Pity I’ll miss the Cup Final. Care for a couple of seats? I was sent them by a drug company. Who knows, it may stop raining?’

  I thanked him. People like Dr Lonelyhearts always win. They pick opponents who continue to score own goals.

  7

  ‘April is the cruellest month,’ I informed Sandra over breakfast on the 1st.

  ‘It isn’t, it’s the Oh, to be in England month.’

  ‘There’s ample differential diagnosis in poetry. Death can be easeful or a fell sergeant. Woman can be the name of frailty or uncertain, coy and hard to please. Love conquers all, or is a malady without a cure.’

  ‘Why was Eliot so beastly to April?’

  ‘Because it mixes memory and desire. Perhaps he just meant the brighter days make people reflect it’s a long time since they had it? It’s been proved to work with pigeons.’ I mused, thinking of patients’ family upsets, ‘He’s right, the spring rain stirs our dull roots.’

  ‘Yes, I’m thinking of taking a job,’ she announced.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘After all, I don’t want to be another of those bored suburban housewives.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I concurred readily. ‘But don’t the Friends of the General provide a pleasant occupation?’

  ‘Not since they’ve all fallen out.’

  ‘What employment had you in mind?’

  ‘Nursing, naturally. It’s sheer laziness for a woman to let maternity wreck her career or her figure.’

  ‘The St Boniface Twilight Home would welcome another oar in the lifeboat,’ I suggested encouragingly. ‘Yes, it’s ridiculous that rearing children should blow a hole in a useful job. Which is going to be Jilly’s problem. The NHS has estimably unsexist views on maternity leave, but equality will hit the surgical profession only when the rising young men are forced to take nine months’ holiday two or three years in succession.’

  ‘But there’s no satisfaction like the primeval one of bringing up a family.’

  I agreed. ‘Though I can’t actually remember doing anything to bring up Andy and Jilly. I was so busy getting the practice going, I don’t fancy I took much notice of either until they were old enough to stand me half a pint in a pub. Child-rearing is anyway largely the instilling of parental prejudices. Luckily, whatever you do, they shoot up like asparagus.’

  I promised her to tout for work.

  My first patient that pleasant spring morning was Gwen Watson, in the stylish Oxford-blue uniform of St Ursula’s. Churchford’s independent girls’ school flourishes academically and financially under the forthright headmistresship of Mrs Rosalie Charrington, who each speech day distributes with irrepressible pride the glittering prizes to an age still uninstructed how easily these become tarnished.

  St Ursula’s credit belongs more fairly to the genes of thrusting entrepreneurs from the mean and leafless city streets, settled amid the patios and barbecues of our desirable residences. No leap up the gnarled branches of British society exacts more ability and ambition than lower-middle to middle-middle class. Clogs may revert to clogs in three generations, but Gwen’s generation was well-heeled in sharp-witted spikes.

  ‘I’ve got my bike,’ she responded breathlessly to my concern at her missing assembly. She dropped her crammed satchel on the consulting-room floor. ‘And Miss Brownlow, who’s in charge of religious knowledge and the Yamaha, is always late.’

  ‘How’s Mum and Dad?’

  ‘All right.’

  Sandra and I regularly took Sunday morning drinks in their Neo-Georgian home, where the windows were darkened by vast shiny green plants and the garden floodlit at night. The Watsons were young, active, unimaginatively comfortable, conventionally hedonistic, fastidiously genteel, unaffectedly tasteless and innocently smug. They were like everyone’s neighbours in Churchford.

  I glanced at Gwen’s card. Time’s winged chariot was supersonic. ‘Fifteen last birthday?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, young lady. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I want to go on the pill.’

  ‘Ah.’

  We assessed each other.

  As Caliban with Miranda, I realized suddenly she was no longer a child. I viewed her with some boyfriend’s eye of love. She had brown hair, bright cheeks, lovely legs in black tights, green eyes as soft as peeled grapes, lips as inviting as first strawberries, and tits like ripening melons (Charentais). She was as sexually mature as any mother of five. Once a girl’s endocrine glands take off at puberty, they woosh like an airliner’s jets until landing on the sunset-flowing tarmac of the menopause, barring equally unfortunate accidents.

  ‘It’s perfectly legal, isn’t it?’ She was steeling herself for heart-wrenching disappointment. ‘My friend Sally Siddons at school, she’s terribly sophisticated, her dad’s in television, told me there wasn’t a law against it.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Well, no,’ I said.

  She laughed nervously. ‘It’s silly, but I haven’t even seen the pill, I mean, is it like the saccharins Mrs Charrington puts in her coffee at break, or the things Libby Parrish showed us that she gives her horses?’

  ‘Do your parents know about this?’

  She gasped. ‘Oh, no! My mother would kill me.’

  She had open-ended apprehension that I might deliver pills like a bubblegum machine or as easily grass to Mrs Charrington, lecture her like Mr Podsnap (more truthfully Mr Pecksniff), pray for her soul or box her ears. My urge was to bang the desk, tear my wisps of hair and shout, ‘You stupid little twit! Why do you want to raise appalling medico-socio-legal problems? Can’t you wait till after breakfast on your sixteenth birthday?’

  Instead, I said, ‘The Queen in Parliament has every right to keep you off sex, but you have every right to keep me to my Hippocratic Oath. All this remains our big secret. Do you want the pill today?’ A remarkable aspect of sexual activity is the immediate urgency with which it is approached. ‘Or is it blanket cover, if I may so put it?’

  ‘I’d never do it with anyone but Edgar,’ she replied solemnly. ‘He’s really lovely, like Jimmy Connors but heaps younger. I met him playing hockey in the Christmas hols.’

  ‘How do you rate your chances with A-levels?’

  She was startled at such prosaic irrelevance. ‘Mrs Charrington says three A-grades, if I apply myself diligently. Which would be brill.’

  ‘Right. You’re an intelligent young woman. We can discuss your predicament with the sense it seldom attracts. Middle-aged ladies sing in their delightful hot bubble baths of indignation about wicked doctors overriding the sacred rights of parents. Judges shudder in their wigs at reckless medical men handing girls a season ticket to promiscuity – which is far worse, because it outrages the law. But sex regrettably happens whether Mummy likes it or not. Otherwise, there would be no teenage pregnancies to prevent, would there?’

  She nodded. I continued the lecture, ‘Of all contraceptives, pregnophobia – understand? – is easily the least effective. Pregnancy is not in the forefront of the mind at the time. If you’re using contraceptives or toothpaste, you might as well u
se the most efficient one. Right? Hence the pill. The most telling argument against is randy teenagers forgetting to take it.’

  ‘I’d remember,’ she assured me. ‘Mummy always taught me to take a spoonful of Petrolagar regularly on Saturday night.’

  ‘Unlike lawyers, who – as a hockey player, you’ll appreciate – love the rules more than the game, we doctors have to work in a real world. And deceitful daughters, my dear Gwen, are as bothersome in it as shocked mothers.’

  She looked abashed. I said, ‘Let’s soften the hard corners of family life. I advise you to risk the parental frown of disapproval and tell Mum.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure I should, really,’ she agreed. ‘But, well, I don’t know, Mummy seems more terrified at me having sex than the dog getting run over.’

  ‘And Daddy?’

  She giggled. ‘He seems to think my virginity is somehow a reflection on himself, like his golf handicap.’

  ‘Take heart, two out of three girls who slip into the doctor’s like you tell Mum in the end, even in families as quarrelsome as the United Nations. You’d better be peddling along. Miss Brownlow will be warming up on the Yamaha.’

  Ah, the pill! I reflected. Like the television set, a vehicle of mass entertainment and few people know how it works. Simple, reliable, invisible, cheap – and toxic – the pill is a manufactured mixture of hormones naturally secreted by the ovary. They suppress the expulsion of the egg, a sensitive and regulated mechanism in all mammals. They operate by negative feedback on the body’s power pack, round the tiny pituitary gland at the base of the brain.

  The morning-after pill, like the intrauterine coil, works by preventing implantation of the fertilized egg in the wall of the womb. Minds shuttered with prejudice, or dimmed by the light of stained glass, accuse it of abortion, not contraception. But it was cleared by our lawyers, whose amazing knowledge of the interior of the human uterus I sometimes feel rivals the sperm’s.

  The following morning, I was myself struck with open-ended apprehension. Bill Watson strode into the consulting room.

  Gwen’s father was big, handsome, fair, wearing a tailored suit with a bright tie and matching handkerchief frothing from his pocket, a monogrammed shirt and a watch which could unexpectedly burst into bleeps. He made a fortune from saunas, solarias and jacuzzis. His combined model had the public paying eagerly for the sensation of sitting up to its neck in a swirling river at noon in the steamy tropics.

  ‘How’s the golf, Richard?’ he started, always betokening embarrassment.

  ‘Fine. How’s the family?’

  ‘We have our little problems.’ He fixed me with an aggressive eye. ‘I’ve come on a bit of delicate business.’

  Had Gwen followed my advice? Was her father concealing a horsewhip? Or an automatic? Churchford had rumours of his own father being a timorously respected Hackney gangster.

  I struck pre-emptively. ‘The pill?’

  He gasped. ‘Honest! You doctors! Actual clairvoyants. I wish I’d half the gift with my customers.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be for you,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But it is!’ He gave a laugh, then looked solemn. ‘Mrs Lamboni, my secretary, is a woman in a million.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There’s a very sensitive bond between us.’ He became even graver. ‘We vibrate together, quite amazingly.’ He looked funereal.

  ‘Good,’ I remarked.

  ‘So you see, Richard, I’d like a prescription for the pill. Though not a word all round,’ he added hastily. ‘Otherwise Mr Lamboni, not to mention Mrs Watson, might feel emotionally disturbed.’

  I asked stiffly, ‘Mrs Lamboni, I presume, has her own doctor?’

  ‘I suppose so, down Balham way, where she lives.’

  ‘I must enlighten you, Bill, about the Hippocratic Oath. Prescribing for other doctors’ patients is a worse sin than poking other men’s wives.’

  He looked nervous. ‘But if Mrs Lamboni went to her own GP, maybe her husband would find out. He’d kill her. And I do not use figures of speech. He’s a Sicilian. In the cooked-meat trade, Italian sausage and that.’

  ‘I don’t want to be an accessory to a crime passionnel, but you must take my point.’

  He nodded dejectedly. ‘No pill?’

  ‘Not from me. How’s young Gwen?’ I inquired.

  His face lit as instantly as a striking match.

  ‘Wonderful! Nothing but hockey, out practising dribbling on the patio before breakfast. Mad on it! Isn’t it lovely, the age of innocence before tormenting sex problems? Come to think of it,’ he added sombrely, rising and shaking hands, ‘I believe that Mr Lamboni would probably kill me, too.’

  Settled in our Victorian villa in Foxglove Lane with a glass of Macallan at my elbow after my day’s work, I reached for the ringing telephone.

  ‘Richard? Pam Watson here.’

  Open-ended apprehension. Did she suspect Bill’s keen interest in Mrs Lamboni’s reproductive cycle? That Gwen’s hockey fetish romped on a sexual field? Would she too apply a blowlamp to assay the precious metal of my Hippocratic Oath? But she was only asking us to Sunday drinks.

  As Sandra was visiting Mother, I suggested enlivening Jilly’s day off from the General. Lovely! They’d asked Mrs Henderson, who would adore to tell Jilly about her terribly interesting gallbladder.

  Jilly drove me in her Metro. The Watsons had a Rolls, Volvo and Suzuki, televisions and videos, microwaves and computers, players and recorders, the compact electronics with which the successful inhabitants of Churchford embellish their homes, as those of Amazonia once with the shrunken heads of their enemies.

  ‘I’ve gone back to work,’ Pam Watson imparted at once. She was pretty like Gwen, except the melons were Honeydew.

  ‘I’ve started with Pangloss Enterprises in Mayfair,’ she continued eagerly. ‘You know, they do absolutely everything. I’m reception hostess.’

  I congratulated her, sipping my Glenlivet by the double-glazing overlooking the lily pond and garden statuary.

  ‘Did you know I was Bill’s secretary when he started in business?’ She simpered. ‘He used to say I was a woman in a million. Yes, it’s quite a challenge. But now Gwen’s young brothers are both at boarding school, I mustn’t be just another bored suburban housewife, must I?’

  I nodded towards Gwen, prim in white blouse and check skirt, distributing the Twiglets. ‘She’s ever so happy these days,’ said Pam, ‘now she’s getting it regularly.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Hockey,’ she explained. ‘Keeps her wonderfully fit, she wouldn’t even look at a drink, not like some of those dreadful teenagers in the lovely homes round here, you wouldn’t believe. Gwen would never overdo it because she knows that Mummy wouldn’t like it, but it’s terrifying the influences going against parents’ wishes in our hard-nosed society.’

  I had a word with Gwen under the pretence of requiring Twiglets. ‘You’ve said nothing?’ I murmured.

  ‘No, but I’m going to soon,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not something you can just bring up, like saying you want to go on a diet. Can I fetch you another drink? Daddy expected you’d finish the bottle, but there’s lots to go.’

  I discussed the Watson ethics trap with Jilly driving home. As she was my colleague as well as my daughter, the Oath was switched off.

  Jilly asked, ‘Who do you think would outrage Pam Watson more, secretly seeking the pill? Her husband or her daughter?’

  ‘Her daughter,’ I answered readily. ‘Some parents demand from their children an obedience and devotion which they know would be utterly impossible to demand from their spouses.’

  ‘Who are big enough to walk out.’

  ‘It’s parental insecurity,’ I decided. ‘Perhaps they realize they’re not really worthy of such burning love? You know, it always amazes me how few parents try to make friends of their children.’

  ‘Or sometimes of their spouses,’ sighed Jilly.

  I continued warmly, ‘Those excitable, indeed hysteri
cal, self-assured, self-satisfied moralizing pressure groups give us doctors the blame for inciting the young to have sex all over the shop, never the credit for keeping an unfortunate third party out of these conflicts – the unborn baby.’

  ‘Oh, it’s doctors’ own fault. Pretending we’re more than mere cutters and purgers.’ Jilly has the surgical mentality.

  I repeated what the family had heard often enough. ‘Medicine became mixed with morals once the public transferred its faith from the man in the surplice to the man in the white coat.’

  We were passing St Alphege’s parish church, Kentish ragstone amid yew-shaded acres embedded with tombstones, to emphasize the value of virtue when the prospect of Heaven was as real as that of next summer’s holidays.

  I observed sombrely, ‘Which would never have happened had Freud been a rabbi, Darwin a bishop and Bertrand Russell a doctor.’

  ‘Come off it, Daddy,’ said Jilly.

  8

  Sandra had found her St Swithin’s uniform in a trunk at her mother’s. On Monday morning she donned it in our bedroom. A flattering fit. Her white dress, blue belt and black stockings mixed memory with desire.

  ‘I heard there’s a part-time job going at The Downs Private Clinic,’ I told her. ‘Good money.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll bother,’ she said vaguely, twirling. ‘If you’re shortly going to retire.’

  ‘You know I’m not going to retire,’ I objected crossly. ‘Lord Lister was looking after Queen Victoria years older than me.’

  ‘It’s just what I hear all over Churchford.’ She was admiring herself in the mirror.

  ‘Bloody Quaggy,’ I muttered.

  I left for the surgery. More open-handed apprehension. Pam Watson arrived, with her shopping.

  ‘Richard–’ She leaned forward earnestly in her chair. ‘It’s about our daughter. Something came out after the party.’

  So Gwen had spoken up. That Sunday afternoon, both her parents with a hangover, too. Did Pam regard me as the gravest menace to teenage children since Fagin?