Doctor On The Ball Read online

  We stared. He was usually as bland as a sago pudding.

  ‘Indeed, served with clove-studded onions, a dish of charming naivety,’ Adam conceded.

  Rosemary dropped her glance into the fonds d’artichauts farcis à la niçoise. She gave a sob as gentle as a simmering court-bouillon. We sat in silence. Then we started sporadically munching, as people drift away from the scene of an accident. I had a sickening feeling. I was witnessing two men fighting for a woman with a leg of mutton.

  Any dinner party is for the anxious hostess like a theatrical first night with the audience the cast. The Haymasons’ ended undramatically, with the strawberry sorbet (‘Entirely right – that delicious frosted pink of a Renoir nude’). We left early. Adam cornered me in the hall, slipped a card in my hand and murmured, ‘If you’re in the market for antiques, I’m competitive with anybody.’

  That weekend was busy, on call for the practice. Early on Monday, Tim telephoned me at home. He wanted a consultation – in private. The epicurean Haymasons differed from the thespian Vaughans and the randy Watsons, who like many moneyed families in Churchford happily let their fellow-taxpayers fee their GP and give them each day their daily drugs. The National Health Service originated mercifully to provide the poor with an alternative to the grave. It now conveniently provides the middle classes with the alternative to a new car.

  Tim appeared at the surgery that evening. He had bellyache.

  ‘Like wolves gnawing my inside,’ he explained nervously.

  ‘For how long?’ I asked.

  ‘About a month, since Rosemary’s foie gras trip.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m a complicated case. It could wreck my marriage.’

  ‘Oh, tut,’ I objected. ‘I’ve seen marriages ruined by alcoholism but never by indigestion.’

  ‘Don’t you realize, doctor? The first thing that attracted me to Rosemary was Katie Stewart’s family cooking.’ He looked dreamy, still holding his stomach. ‘How I remember, we honeymooned on Elizabeth David’s French provincial! I’ve cherished Rosemary through all her moods – Delia Smith, Constance Spry, Robert Carrier, even Fanny Craddock. But if I can’t digest – say, her braised guinea-fowl with figs, her lambs’ tongues casseroled in cider, her goat-cheese rarebit – she’ll soon find someone else who can,’ he ended miserably.

  ‘Oh, come come!’ I remonstrated. ‘Oh, pooh pooh! There’s more to marriage than four bare legs in bed or two pairs of knives and forks on a table.’

  He shifted uneasily in the patient’s chair. ‘I know, the basic recipe is love, sympathy, companionship, all that. But marriages are made in Heaven with some special ingredient. Maybe a mutual interest, anything from the garden to the children. Rosemary’s never managed to get a bun in the oven, so cookery’s a big slice of her life.’ He asked diffidently, ‘Do you suppose I could have a second opinion?’

  With a gastroenterologist or a psychiatrist? I wondered. I recommended Gerry Gravelston at the General. ‘He knows more about the gut than the tapeworm,’ I assured the patient.

  10

  Tim’s appointment with the stomach consultant came the following Monday. I was finishing evening surgery when he telephoned Mrs Jenkins asking me to call urgently. This was worrying. I had made my diagnosis – dyspepsia caused by his worry over Rosemary fancying Adam. Had Gerry Gravelston found something more sinister? A peptic ulcer? An acute gallbladder? Had I mishandled the case? Had I eaten Tim’s salt only to rub it into his wounds?

  Tim greeted me gravely at the front door. On the peony-patterned four-seater settee with frilled valence in the elegant lounge sat Rosemary and Adam, looking serious.

  ‘Well!’ I rubbed my hands. Nobody spoke. ‘Well, well! And how was our consultation?’

  ‘I am dying,’ Tim announced.

  ‘What? Why? How? You?’ I exclaimed. ‘Did Dr Gravelston announce thus?’

  ‘No,’ said Tim.

  ‘Then what the hell gave you the bright idea?’ I demanded.

  ‘I could see it in his eyes.’

  ‘Really!’ I lost patience. ‘Don’t be barmy. That’s his bedside manner. He’s known throughout the trade as “Graveyard” Gravelston. He’d look exactly the same if he heard he’d won the pools during a weekend with Bo Derek in Bali.’

  Tim stuck his hands in his pockets and walked the Afghan rug. ‘It’s only a matter of time before someone pushes the button on me in the crematorium.’

  ‘How’s the pain?’ I inquired.

  ‘Now it’s like hungry jackals feeding.’

  ‘I bet Dr Gravelston’s official report says your stomach would be the envy of a flock of ostriches,’ I encouraged him.

  ‘I want you to know something, doctor,’ Tim pronounced. ‘After the unfortunate event of my death, Adam has – most considerately – agreed to take care of Rosemary.’

  I was puzzled. ‘You mean, by executing your will?’

  He raised a smile as insubstantial as a plate of profiteroles. ‘In the fullest sense. I cannot bear to think of anyone as wonderful as Rosemary alone in the world.’

  Adam and Rosemary exchanged reverent glances. They slowly reached out and held hands.

  ‘She is so charming, so modest, so defenceless,’ Tim continued in a low voice. ‘Yet with her heavenly gifts! For an art respected everywhere from palaces to prisons.’

  ‘Gasterea is the tenth Muse,’ Adam recited solemnly. ‘The delights of taste are her domain. The whole world would be hers if she wished to claim it. For the world is nothing without life, and all that lives takes nourishment. Brillat-Savarin,’ he enlightened us. I thought him decent to give it in translation.

  ‘I can die in peace, knowing that with Adam she will be absolutely fulfilled in all departments,’ Tim declared.

  ‘But you’re going to live,’ I insisted, ‘to consume countless steaks unborn and vintages yet uncrushed.’

  ‘I am but a common property dealer,’ he confessed miserably. ‘I have no pretensions to be arty or intellectual. I simply enjoy things with my body – food, pictures, music, the spring flowers, and the, you know, doctor. But Rosemary is more sensitive. Her emotions have an aesthetic dimension. Adam was saying so when you came in.’

  Adam rose. He gripped Tim’s hands. ‘It is a trust comparable with custody of the Holy Grail.’

  Rosemary rose. She kissed Adam lightly on the cheek. She kissed Tim lightly on the cheek. She burst into tears. She sobbed on Adam’s shoulder, then on Tim’s. I wished to leave. They were all nutters.

  ‘I have an urgent call to the St Boniface Twilight Home,’ I announced.

  Rosemary damply transferred herself to me. ‘Do stay,’ she choked, ‘and enjoy my poussin.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got enough for anyone who fancies a slice,’ I thanked her. ‘But I’ve my own boiled beef and carrots at home. I implore you – roll up the blueprint until I’ve heard from Dr Gravelston. Good evening.’

  His letter was in the surgery three mornings later. I telephoned Tim at once.

  ‘Caught you over the croissants?’ I greeted him cheerfully. ‘Good news! No organic cause for your dyspepsia.’

  ‘My what?’ He appeared puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean that tummy upset? I’d almost forgotten about it, I must say. Kind of you to take such trouble.’

  He was a changed man. I was mystified. I asked how he felt.

  ‘Absolutely fine! Super! Terrific. I could eat anything – curry, haggis, hot lobster, stewed biltong. Bring your dear lady to dinner this evening.’

  I demurred. He insisted. I agreed. It would be interesting to observe the cure. And a man can never enjoy too many birthdays or good dinners. Also, I remembered it was cottage-pie night at home.

  Sandra and I drove to the Haymasons.

  I rang Tim’s bell with the salivating expectation of Bertie Wooster arriving at Brinkley Court to browse at the trough of Aunt Dahlia, employer of chef Anatole, that superb master of the roasts and hashes (her dyspeptic husband once insanely tried swapping him for an eighteenth-century cow-creamer).

>   It was not Rosemary who opened the door, but Deirdre.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  With a cheerful shout, Tim bounded in in a butcher’s apron from the kitchen, wooden spoon in one hand, fish slice in the other. ‘The Krug’s on ice,’ he announced heartily.

  ‘Rosemary would seem to have thrown in the dishcloth,’ observed Sandra, as the cork popped in the lounge.

  ‘Rosemary?’ Tim seemed to have forgotten her like his bellyache. ‘You remember, doctor, how Adam was to comfort Rosemary after my death? As everything was cut and dried, there seemed no point in awaiting my blast-off to Heaven. So Rosemary’s moved in with Adam.’ He poured the champagne. ‘Which left Deirdre at a loose end. So she came along to pass the time with me. You can correct authors’ syntax anywhere. Deirdre, love, there’s a peculiar smell from the kitchen, would you take a look? If anything’s on fire, there’s an extinguisher in the garage.’

  My smouldering unease burst into panic. ‘You’re cooking dinner?’

  Tim nodded enthusiastically. ‘Nothing to it. I’m amazed how Rosemary could make a meal into something like raising the Titanic. Living with a skillet expert, Deirdre hasn’t brandished a loaded saucepan for months,’ he explained. ‘Not that I believe she was ever your actual Mrs Beeton, she was more into hamburgers and Yorkie bars. Was anything burning?’ he asked, as she slipped back like a chilly shadow.

  ‘It was only the fat again.’

  ‘I’m giving you my moussaka,’ Tim announced proudly. It tasted like Irish stew made with engine oil. I pushed the nauseous mess round my plate. Sandra picked at the accompanying baked beans. Deirdre busied herself with the packet of sliced bread and packet of butter. Tim scoffed his with the horrifying avidity of Moloch getting through a nursery school. Luckily, he had opened several bottles of the Gevry-Chambertin ’72. Once Deirdre had yawned and said vibrantly. ‘Bedtime,’ we left.

  ‘Food,’ I mused, as Sandra drove home. ‘How more significant than nutrition! Gluttony is dignified as a cardinal sin. Starvation is cruelty without scars. Food has its diseases – anorexia from eating too little, bulimia from eating too much. The ageless fear of hunger has been replaced by the terror of obesity. People waste money on food which they hope will make them healthy, even on oysters which they hope will make someone else randy. Food can inspire magnificent art, particularly among Dutchmen.’

  ‘You’re rambling,’ said Sandra.

  ‘Did you know that André Maurois once wrote a story about food? Among his imaginary Erophagi hunger replaced sex, with all its passions and taboos. Couples ate secretly, but invited friends to come and make love as we invite them to dinner. It makes my Freudian point.’

  ‘This stew is nothing but old-fashioned wife-swapping,’ said Sandra firmly. ‘It’s always happening in Churchford, men taking a fancy to housewives all tarted up and tanked up at dinner parties. Fairly pointless, I’d say – they all behave with exactly the same lack of originality across the tablecloth as they doubtless do between the sheets.’

  ‘I wonder if we’ve the end of that veal and ham pie left in the fridge?’ I speculated.

  The following Monday evening, Rosemary appeared in my consulting room.

  ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ she began miserably.

  ‘Adam? Gone sour?’

  ‘He won’t let me into his kitchen.’

  ‘When George Sand moved in with Chopin, he probably wouldn’t let her touch his piano,’ I suggested consolingly.

  ‘But cooking is my whole life,’ she said anguishedly. ‘And he won’t even allow me to make the tea.’

  ‘But surely you can enjoy his own beautiful cooking? Only someone like you can appreciate it profoundly. Great critics are honoured as much as the great artists they admire,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Ug!’ She shuddered. ‘He’s going through his Russian phase. All coulibiaca and bilini. Fish pie and pancakes. I’ve nothing to do all day except sit in his nasty Battersea flat filled with out-of-date furniture – not a bit what I’m used to, Tim insisted I went to the Ideal Home Exhibition every year – and Adam’s incredibly fussy about scratches and rings, he says everything has to go back to the shop. I can’t even enjoy cookery books, it’s like reading travel guides in jail. Do you know how I really feel?’ She looked at me wide-eyed. ‘Like a respectable wife seduced from a good, decent, adoring husband by a glamorous lover who turns out to be a useless, unresponsive homosexual.’

  ‘Why not drive straight home, go into the kitchen and start knocking up an entrecôte à la bérnaise for Tim’s dinner?’

  ‘What, with that dreadful woman there?’ she exclaimed in horror. ‘You can’t imagine some of the peculiar things she’s left behind in Battersea.’

  I sighed. The setting of fractured marriages are tricky cases for GPs. But I promised tactful overtures to Tim. Anything to avoid the possibility of more moussaka.

  Two mornings later he appeared unannounced in the surgery, as miserable as Rosemary.

  ‘The pain, doctor.’

  ‘Worse?’

  He clutched his midriff. ‘I might have been eating barbed-wire bolognese.’

  ‘You’re still doing the cooking?’

  He shook his head. ‘Deirdre complained it was inedible. So she took over the kitchen, but can’t produce anything except egg, chips and peas. They don’t seem to agree with me. I just sit at the table remembering the lovely meals Rosemary used to lavish on me.’

  I put my fingertips together. ‘I suspect your trouble, Tim, is not what you’re getting your teeth into.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean…? Well, yes, in fact you’re right.’ He looked relieved. ‘Deirdre’s a lovely girl, very cultured, she knows an awful lot about syntax, but frankly, I thought she was a bombe surprise when she’s only a portion of bone stew.’

  ‘The old story,’ I remarked consolingly. ‘The spinach is always greener on the other man’s plate.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’ he asked pathetically. ‘Consult the Marriage Guidance Council or the Good Food Guide?’

  ‘Leave it to your doctor,’ I said smugly. ‘I think I can arrange to put you all back to square one, or to the hors d’oeuvres if you prefer it.’

  He was touchingly grateful. ‘Particularly,’ he added, shaking hands, ‘as Deirdre has some very strange habits about the house.’

  The piecrust was broken, the birds could begin to sing. I make a telephone call to Battersea. The following week, the Haymasons invited us to dinner.

  ‘I’ve cooked up a brilliant idea to solve our emotional difficulties,’ Tim announced happily, upending the second empty Bollinger into the ice bucket as we sat at the table. ‘Rosemary’s unbelievable talents are just being wasted, with only me at home to enjoy them. No wonder she’s so frustrated. But I’ve got my hands on a bit of property in South Ken, and she’s opening a restaurant,’ he revealed proudly.

  ‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ asked Rosemary, bright-eyed. ‘For years I’ve been giving such pleasure to my friends for free. Why not take it up professionally?’

  I agreed heartily. I did not mention that exactly the same argument applied to prostitution.

  Freud and I were right. Cookery absorbs a housewife’s sex urge as devotion a nun’s, power a politician’s, contemplation a mystic’s and football a schoolboy’s. A woman steaming only over a hot stove contributes admirably to the stability of family life and our national morality. For what we are about to receive, I reflected, starting my oeufs en gelée à l’estragon, the Lord may be truly thankful.

  The dinner was superb.

  If food be the music of love, give me excess of it.

  11

  My privilege of saving their lives is restricted to the 12½ per cent of my patients who suffer from acute major illness. (I did not work this out. The Department of Health and Social Security have men to do it at the Elephant and Castle, set tunefully in London between the Old Kent Road and the Lambeth Walk.)

  Twenty-five per cent have chronic illness.
I help carry their kit as they soldier on through life.

  The rest the Department labels ‘minor illnesses’ – though there are neither minor illnesses nor minor operations to a patient. Every man is of supreme importance to himself, as I expect Dr Johnson said.

  Five per cent come with ‘emotional disorders’. If I am criticized for countering these with drugs, I am responding in the way I was trained to a condition I should not be treating. This is pastoral medicine, better handled by the vicar. But the Church has sadly lost the clinical touch since its splendid work in the Black Death. The nation floats on a sea of tranquillity, preferring chemical to spiritual relief as speedier and risking neither censure of its sins nor the necessity to stop committing them.

  When Syd Farthingale appeared in the surgery one early summer morning, I suspected the emotional was masked by the physical. Patients often offer one disability as an excuse for introducing another – girls with palpitations are pregnant, stockbrokers have not constipation but clap.

  ‘I find absolutely no sign of these rheumatics you’re complaining of, Mr Farthingale,’ I assured him weightily.

  He folded his arms reflectively. He was short, fat, pale and puffy, sparse dark hair arranged economically across his scalp. He was a man of Napoleonic power. At the General Hospital he was shop steward for the Association of Confederated Health Employees (ACHE), whose complicated disagreement with his rival shop stewards for General Ancillary Services Personnel (GASP) and the Organization for Unqualified Co-operatives in Health (OUCH) over deploying the new electrical floor cleaners had earlier kept the General’s brand-new Elizabeth Wing empty and idle for months.

  Once, Syd Farthingale decided which patients might be admitted, when surgeons might operate, whether the wards might have hot dinners and the beds clean sheets, whether dirty refuse or dead humans were properly disposed of. He had cowed the Royal College of Nursing, ignored the TUC, infuriated the BMA and exasperated the government. But the national climate had cyclically softened from its winters of discontent. Syd Farthingale had not met his Waterloo, but he was taking a sabbatical on St Helena.