Doctor On The Ball Read online

  ‘Gwen discussed her embarrassing problem, did she?’

  Pam stared admiringly. ‘You doctors! Real mind readers. But of course! You were clever and noticed the first signs.’

  ‘God! She’s pregnant.’

  ‘I should hope not!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s her allergy.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Absolutely everything,’ Pam said forthrightly. ‘You know. This total allergy syndrome. It’s always getting in the newspapers. At least, I suppose that’s what Gwen was going on about,’ she continued uncertainly. ‘You know how coy young girls are about their bodies? So I said, Gwen, darling, it’s total allergy, but don’t worry, Mummy will look after you, as Mummy always does, Mummy will go to the doctor about it first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she come to the doctor about it herself?’ I demanded briskly.

  ‘But she has to go to school.’

  ‘She’s got a bike. She could slip in before assembly and Miss Brownlow on the Yamaha.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Pam vaguely. ‘Is there a pill or something you can give her?’

  ‘I cannot prescribe without examining the patient. Hippocratic Oath.’

  ‘Oh, well, perhaps Gwen will be all right if nature takes its course. She didn’t seem desperately ill with it, I must say.’ Pam fidgeted. ‘Anyway, I wanted to consult you this morning, because there’s something else.’

  ‘About Gwen?’

  ‘No. About me.’ She crossed her legs. ‘Richard–’ She crossed them again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You know I’m not on the pill? It’s Bill, remember? He was terribly scared about it clotting the blood, you keep seeing it in the papers. Awfully sweet and considerate of him, really.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Now I’ve this lovely new job in Mayfair, naturally there’s a lot of social duties involved, you wouldn’t believe the cocktail parties, I mean, absolutely no expense spared, but of course all to create business, Japanese and that, and honestly, some of the sales personnel are really quite nice, you know, our sort of class, and it would be more convenient if I was on the pill, but if Bill found out he would kill me.’

  She looked at me nervously, like Gwen.

  ‘Fine!’ I rubbed my hands. ‘Splendid. No problem. Your husband will never know. My Hippocratic Oath. Just one thing–’

  ‘Yes?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Are you over sixteen?’

  She exploded into hearty laughter, in which I joined.

  I saw her to the surgery front door. Returning, I muttered, ‘I know about family planning, but this is ridiculous.’

  Mrs Jenkins was confused.

  I imagined the Watsons gathered each evening at the television set brooding during the commercial breaks on their unspeakable secrets, their hearts blacker with guilt against the radiant innocence of the others’. How a prescription for the pill could flutter as emotively as Desdemona’s handkerchief! Was I handling the case correctly? It might be unethical, but altogether kindlier, and possibly preclude them suffocating each other with their pillows, if I invited Bill, Pam and Gwen next Sunday for drinks, disclosed all and passed it off as a huge joke.

  I decided even Hippocrates could not get away with this. Nor Oscar Wilde. Nor the three Marx Brothers.

  On the Friday evening Bill Watson appeared at the surgery, too agitated even to start about golf.

  ‘There’s been a hiccup with Maria. That’s Mrs Lamboni.’ He fiddled with the gold buckle of his personalized leather belt. ‘Maria’s a sincere person. She was educated at a convent.’

  I nodded approval.

  ‘She’s a thinking person, too,’ he disclosed. ‘She won’t take as gospel what anyone tells her, not even the Pope. She’s religious, mass and that, goes quite often I believe, but she doesn’t think it’s any more wicked to swallow the pill than haddock on Friday.’

  ‘But her doctor in Balham’s a Catholic, too’

  ‘Clairvoyance again,’ murmured Bill admiringly. ‘He doesn’t take such an easygoing view of sin and so on. Called her a loose woman. Much worse, in fact. I’d like a word or two with him, but I suppose I must respect his holy feelings. He utterly refused to give Mrs Lamboni the pill without Mr Lamboni’s say-so. Mrs Lamboni refuses to take risks with me without it. OK. So what do I do?’

  ‘How irksome that religion should become mixed with reproduction,’ I mused. ‘Quite as vexing as politics with sport. It gives the authorities of our present existence, and of our one hereafter, the chance to emphasize their importance through two activities which so valuably divert human minds from either.’

  He did not seem to heed. ‘Do you suppose this Balham doctor will let on?’

  ‘It depends if he applies his Hippocratic Oath to the case as seriously as I have.’

  ‘If even a hint got back to Mr Lamboni, it could be very embarrassing. Mr Lamboni is not one of your operatic Italians. No. He is a big fellow, with a big black moustache. I’ve seen him in the back of his shop in his white suit, slicing up a Parma ham like riffling the leaves of a book. I do not care for salami,’ Bill remarked feelingly, ‘and I do not wish to become one.’

  ‘Try seeing his point of view,’ I suggested reasonably. ‘If fathers refuse daughters the pill to discourage promiscuity, the argument gathers force when applied to their wives, who also have free use of the car.’

  Gwen carried the added handicap of sex not being allowed for in the scheme of any schoolchild’s life. But she had a bicycle.

  Bill looked shifty. ‘There’s something in that, I suppose. I’d never have Pam on the pill. For the same reason as the hot-blooded Mr Lamboni, doubtless. Can’t you suggest anything?’

  ‘Take a rather extensive shave one morning and slip out for a slick vasectomy.’

  He was not enthusiastic. Men like Bill Watson imbue their vas deferens with the sanctity of Samson’s hair.

  That Saturday afternoon I drove to our popular Greenfinger Garden Centre, for compost-maker to mulch the autumn leaves. As I wandered among the delightful shelves of trowels, twine, secateurs, pest-killers, bird-scarers and dog-constipators, I encountered Pam Watson gazing soulfully at the Gro-bags.

  After a cheerful interchange about chrysanthemums, I dropped my voice and asked discreetly, ‘I hope the prescription is a success?’

  She compressed her lips. ‘I’ve torn it up,’ she informed me. ‘Yes! Torn it up. You wouldn’t believe what swine some of those executives can be. If they spent their evenings watching video nasties, I shouldn’t be in the slightest surprised.’ She shuddered. ‘Things certainly have changed since the days when Bill and I were courting, believe you me, I mean, permissiveness, well, I’m as broadminded as anyone, but perversion, really, no thank you. It’s a great mistake to expose respectable married women to such employment.’

  I commiserated with her return to bored suburban housewife.

  ‘Not a bit,’ she disclosed. ‘Fortunately, I’ve effected a transfer to a better job. Personal assistant to the chairman, who is pushing seventy.’

  Had I seen the last of the Watsons? If Gwen burst out her confession, they would both be too bored with the pill to take any notice. On Monday morning, I was startled to find my first patients all three of them. Gwen was in school uniform with her crammed satchel. They sat and stared at me big-eyed.

  ‘Richard,’ began Bill solemnly. ‘All weekend we’ve been having an ongoing discussion in depth about ourselves.’

  Open-ended apprehension! They had been lifting the skirts of their souls. Who now knew what I had said to whom? Who resented what I had not said to them about which? I kept safely silent.

  ‘As you’re our old friend, as well as our GP–’ Bill fidgeted with his gold identity bracelet. ‘We’d like you to know that our marriage is going through a tricky phase.’

  ‘Just getting bored with each other, I suppose.’ Pam was staring into the far corner.

  Bill nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, that�
�s the problem. Looking round our lovely home in Churchford I feel that God has been good to me, though mind you, I reckon I met him halfway. But even a Rolls doesn’t make you happy, does it?’

  ‘The only happy drivers seem teenagers on rowdy motorbikes.’

  ‘Frankly, the fuse had burned right down under us,’ he confessed. ‘But we decided to make a fresh start, to stick together.’ He added proudly, ‘Because of young Gwen here.’

  ‘She has a brilliant future,’ declared Pam earnestly. ‘Mrs Charrington told us.’

  ‘Wonderful A-levels coming up,’ agreed Bill. ‘I’m learning. I always thought Garibaldi was a biscuit and Bunyan something you got on your foot.’

  ‘I decided it was the insecurity giving her total allergy symptoms.’ Pam squeezed her daughter. ‘Didn’t Mummy, darling?’

  ‘Now that everybody’s going to live happily ever after,’ I said briskly, ‘I’d like a word with Gwen about this allergy. Alone.’

  The parents looked at each other.

  ‘After all, it’s her illness, not yours,’ I pointed out. ‘And under-sixteens are fully entitled to confidential consultations. Stop any lawyer and ask.’

  Bill rose. He gripped Pam’s shoulder. ‘Come, my love, It is time we faced something – Gwen isn’t going to be a child for ever.’

  ‘I’ll be brief,’ I promised. ‘Miss Brownlow must be fingering the Yamaha.’ As the door shut, I asked, ‘What about the pill, then?’

  ‘Oh, that?’ Gwen exclaimed in surprise. ‘I’m off all that absolutely. Didn’t you know? I heard last week I’d got a county hockey trial. Brill, isn’t it?’ She looked far more pleased than at the prospect of unfettered copulation. ‘But of course, I can’t risk any sort of emotional upset, can I? Not to mention draining my strength. Mrs Charrington says the whole of St Ursula’s is proud of me, it’s a terrif achievement, but I mustn’t chance the slightest thing putting me off my game, not even catching a cold.’

  I had the urge to bang my desk, tear my wisps of hair and shout, ‘You stupid little twit! Don’t you see my life’s already exhausting enough, handling everyone’s sore feet and arthritic hips and chronic sinuses and septic fingers and stiff necks and loose bowels? Why must you work out your sexual fantasies in my valuable time?’

  Instead, I said, ‘Very wise. I’m sure at your age you can get just as much fun from a vigorous bully-off.’

  Amid all the changes and chances of twenty-five centuries, wrote Edwardian physician Sir William Osler, the medical profession has never lacked men who have lived up to the Greek ideals.

  I felt faintly grateful to the Watsons. Any man enjoys awarding himself a medal for a battle in which nobody finally got hurt.

  9

  As Julius Caesar disliked the svelte, Sir Clifford Chatterley gamekeepers, and Ruth the alien corn, I dislike dinner parties.

  ‘You’re abnormal,’ complained Sandra, putting down the telephone. ‘Antisocial. Puritanical. Paranoic.’

  I objected calmly, ‘My own friends are enough trouble when they’re pissed. I don’t see why I should put up with other people’s.’

  ‘Well, I’ve accepted, anyway.’

  ‘You haven’t told me who it is?’

  ‘The Haymasons.’

  ‘Oh, that’s completely different.’

  It is as vulgar to discuss the food at a dinner party as the corpse at a funeral. This is a valuable social convention. For twenty-five years, Churchford has fed me a menu of prawns soaped with mayonnaise in an avocado hip bath, duck which has never taken to water and inelegant memorials to Pavlova. But Mrs Haymason’s dishes opened such polite inhibitions like a deft oysterman’s knife. Her dinner table expressed its delighted admiration of her cookery as uncontrollably as once the gallery at Drury Lane with Mrs Siddons’ beauty.

  ‘Cookery is part of the female erotic drive,’ I reflected. I sat in our open-windowed living room with a glass of Talisker early on a warm May evening. ‘Those fancy recipes in the Sunday supplements might make a man’s mouth water, but Freud only suck his teeth. Those beautifully seductive photographs of goulash and gâteaux are quite as shameless as the pictures in multipostural sex manuals. It’s the only way a woman can yield voluptuously to coarse male desires, now that sex is a rigorously equal activity, like a boxing match. And Mrs Haymason,’ I reflected fondly, ‘has a talent for the oven as Madame Pompadour for the bed.’

  Rosemary Haymason was in her twenties, a softly bulging blonde, like a well-risen cheese soufflé.

  ‘Any woman can become a culinary athlete by buying enough cookery books,’ Sandra disagreed. ‘There’s almost as many in the shops as books on dieting.’

  ‘No,’ I mused. ‘There’s coquetry in tickling a man’s palate as his other bits.’ The clock struck. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Steak and kidney pud.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘Any more of that and you won’t get any,’ said Sandra.

  The Haymasons’ lovely home stood in the costliest part of Churchford. The dinner party was Friday week, another sunny evening when its rowan-punctured avenues, prim with privet and tangy with lawn fertilizer, were lively with popping motor mowers, the teeth-gnashing of hedge clippers, the teasing chatter of cocktails on the patio.

  Tim Haymason opened his front door, small, tidy, quiet, a property dealer, far richer in his thirties than I shall be in my dotage. His live-in Escoffier flitted in Habitat apron from her traditional rustic oak farmhouse kitchen, fully fitted with Neff ovens, microwaves and infrareds, spits and skillets, freezers and fish kettles, moulins and mandolines, herbarium and hachoir, whisks and woks.

  As Rosemary tightly squeezed my arm, she whispered in my ear, ‘Tonight you shall enjoy my gigot!’ I felt it proved my point. She could have been referring to another part of her anatomy.

  ‘Meet Adam and Deirdre.’ Tim led us into his tasteful lounge.

  It is intimidating, that first encounter with those you will sit among in conversational confinement as long as the Inter-City from London to Newcastle, and without the thematic diversion of the passing scenery. Adam was tall, fresh-faced, with curly brown hair and matching jacket. He wore sunglasses indoors. Deirdre was pale, skinny, her hair lank and dark. She said throatily, ‘Hello.’

  Tim announced respectfully, ‘Adam knows absolutely everything about antiques.’

  I embraced the couple with a smile. ‘How pleasant for your wife, living with so many beautiful objects.’

  ‘I can’t answer for the beauty of the objects my wife lives with,’ replied Adam, ‘having just divorced her.’

  ‘Ah!’ Tim pressed a glass of Bruicladdich into my hand. ‘And where do you live?’ I asked Deirdre.

  She seemed surprised. ‘With Adam.’

  I tried again. ‘I don’t expect you know this, but Rosemary’s a fantastic cook.’

  ‘Indeed, I do,’ Adam replied weightily. ‘I interviewed her for the gourmet column I write in Home and Beauty.’

  ‘You’re an expert on chips as well as Chippendale?’

  He seemed puzzled. ‘I don’t think I follow?’

  ‘Remarkably warm for May, isn’t it?’ said Sandra.

  I suspected already that the evening might not be a success.

  Adam’s shop off the King’s Road in Chelsea was called Lovely Things. He had met Rosemary the previous month, on a gourmet weekend organized by Home and Beauty at Périgueux (‘The local confit d’oie is, of course, essential tasting, one relishes its earthiness like the robust charm of Le Nain’s peasants one sees in the Louvre’).

  Deirdre worked at home for a Mayfair publisher, correcting authors’ syntax (‘Perfectly illiterate some of them’). This intellectual onslaught clearly fascinated and frightened Tim. His only artistic exercise was the imaginative descriptions of houses he hoped to sell for more than they were worth.

  ‘Rien ne dispose mieux l’esprit humain à des transactions amicales, qu’un dîner bien conçu et artistement préparé.’ Adam rubbed his podgy hands and t
ucked his napkin into his red check shirt as we sat round the sparkling dinner table. ‘Telles réunions sont le berceau des bonnes moers et de la jovialité, comme la débauche est le tombeau de la moralité. You see what I mean?’ he invited all round.

  Starters was raw monkfish marinated in vodka and red pepper.

  ‘Those were, of course, the words of the famous Alexis Soyer,’ Adam revealed.

  ‘Florence Nightingale’s chef at Scutari in the Crimean War,’ I was able to contribute, but he took no notice.

  ‘Original.’ Adam inclined towards Rosemary after a forkful.

  ‘Oh! You really think so?’ she responded breathlessly.

  ‘It inevitably recalls the Japanese sushi. But that must always be served with fresh seaweed. Home-made?’ he inquired, cracking the crisp, eggshell-crusted brown roll.

  Rosemary nodded eagerly. He savoured it, pursing his fleshy lips.

  ‘Yes, you’ve got this just about right,’ he conceded. ‘It is the simple dishes one eats, barely noticing them, which express the fundamental skill of the cook. The analogy is Hepplewhite’s joinery, you’ll agree? Take the creation of the perfect omelette. The pan should be not only hot, but smoking.’

  He expanded on the relative merits of Dijon and Meaux mustard, spaghetti v. macaroni, pigs’ trotters or cow-heel, pickled onions and pappadums. Nobody else said anything except pass the butter.

  The gigot appeared.

  Adam took a mouthful and stared at the ceiling. ‘Almost perfect.’

  Rosemary gave a little squeal. ‘You like it?’

  He nodded gravely. She clapped her hands together. I noticed that Tim seemed off his food.

  Adam expressed an opinion of gigot d’agneau à la bonne femme being superior to à la bordelaise, definitely to à la boulangère, and most certainly to à la bretonne. Deirdre seemed the quiet sort. I was preoccupied with the emetic properties of raw fish. Tim pushed his gigot aimlessly round his Limoges. Rosemary sat sparkle-eyed as Adam extended into gigot persillé‚ and poêlé. They might have been dining tête-à-tête in the candlelight. Then something frightful happened.

  Tim thumped the table, rattling the Chambolle-Musigny ’76. ‘What’s wrong with good old à l’anglaise?’ he demanded.