‘Oh, I’ll be comfortable all right. I’m used to sleeping in the middle of St Paul’s.’
‘Foller me!’ Ernest insisted.
Number three was on the first floor, but my room appeared to be at the far end of the latest extension to the building, several of which had been added with floors at different levels.
‘Don’t know why she put you up here,’ Ernest grumbled, pausing for breath halfway up a narrow staircase. ‘There ain’t been no one in ninety-four since the Farmers’ Union.’
Number ninety-four was immediately under the roof, a narrow, cold, low, damp room, with a bed, a commode, and a washstand topped with a marble slab that reminded me of the post-mortem room. I gave Ernest a shilling, which he looked at carefully before saying, ‘Good night!’ and disappearing. I sat heavily on the bed. If this was romance, I could understand why Casanovas flourished only in warm climates.
I reached the ground floor before Nurse Macpherson. As the hotel had resumed the sullen silence with which it had greeted us, I decided to explore the door marked ‘Lounge.’ This led to a small room with some furniture arranged haphazardly, like the bodies of mountaineers frozen to death where they stood. There were three or four more palms, and in the corner was an iron grate, bare of fire irons, in which a tiny fire blushed with shame.
I was now feeling really ill and I needed a drink desperately. There was a bell by the fireplace labelled ‘Service,’ but knowing the hotel I supplemented a ring on this by opening the door and shouting, ‘Hoy!’ several times loudly.
From the coffee room, which was now lighted as a preparation for dinner, came a thin, dark, short young man in a tail-suit that stretched almost to his heels.
‘What’ll you be wanting?’ he asked, with the amiability of citizens of the Irish Republic.
‘I want a drink.’
‘Sure, you can have a drink if you want to.’
‘What have you got?’
‘Oh, anything at all,’ he told me expansively. ‘There’s gin, whisky, rum, Guinness, crème de menthe, port, egg nogg–’
‘I’ll have whisky. Two doubles, in one glass. And have you any aspirin?’
‘Wouldn’t you be feeling well?’
‘I’d be feeling bloody awful. And please hurry up.’
By the time Nurse Macpherson appeared I had downed my quadruple whisky and twenty grains of aspirin, while the waiter found some coal and brought the poker from the office. ‘We have to be careful over the fires,’ he explained to me. ‘Some of them commercial gentlemen pile it up as though they were stoking the
Queen Mary
.’
‘Nan, my dear,’ I greeted her more cheerfully. ‘You’re looking very beautiful.’
‘My God, I could do with a drink, too. That room up there’s absolutely freezing.’
‘That would be number three?’ asked the waiter sympathetically. ‘Oh, that’s a terrible room that is. It’s a wonder they put humans in it at all. I’d rather sleep in the tent of a circus, that I would.’
‘We want some more drinks.’
‘Would the lady like a cocktail, now? I could do her a good cocktail, and very reasonable.’
‘Two large whiskies will do.’
As he left and we sat down on each side of the fire I began to feel better. ‘It’s a pity about the single rooms,’ I said, looking shiftily to see if the door was shut. ‘That old buzzard in the office quite put me off my stride.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘You can creep down as soon as everyone goes to bed. It saves a lot of bother in the long run.’
‘You’ve had some experience of this – this sort of thing?’ I asked.
‘Really, darling, I wasn’t born yesterday.’ She glanced round her. ‘What a bloody hole you’ve taken me to, if you don’t mind my saying so. This place looks like a waiting-room got up for the wake of a dead stationmaster.’
‘I’m sorry. Really I am.’ I reached for her hand. ‘But I’ve never done anything like this before. And – and I did so much want to do it with you, Nan.’
She smiled, and squeezed my fingers. ‘You’re really very, very sweet.’
The waiter then returned with the drinks.
‘I was looking you up in the visitors’ book, and I see you’re from London,’ he said. ‘What sort of line of business would you be in, now?’
‘I’m a doctor.’
I bit my lip; it was my second idiotic slip. Apart from the danger of discovery by confessing my profession, I was now the target for everyone’s intimacies.
‘Are you now? And that’s very interesting.’ The waiter settled himself, leaning on his up-ended tray. ‘I’ve a great admiration for the medical profession myself, Doctor. It must be a great work, a great work. I had a brother, now, and he started off to be a doctor, but he had some sort of trouble with the authorities. Now he’s an oyster-opener in one of the big hotels in O’Connell Street. Oh, he would have been a fine doctor, he would, a lovely pair of hands he had on him. And the lady wouldn’t be a nurse, would she?’
‘It happens that we are cousins,’ I told him firmly. ‘Our uncle, who was in the brass business, has unfortunately died suddenly. We are attending his funeral. The reason we are travelling together is that we both work in London, and it is obviously more convenient for us to share the same car. The reason we are in this hotel is that we met a man on the road–’
‘Now it’s a very convenient thing that you should have come tonight, Doctor, because I was having a lot of trouble with my feet, you see, and I was meaning to go to a doctor tomorrow. But now you’re here, it’ll save me the journey. I think that the arches must be dropped, or something, but I get a sort of burning pain along here which sort of moves round and round–’
‘I’ll hear about your feet later, if you really want me to. Will you please get us two more drinks.’
‘But you’ve only just started those.’
‘I know. But we shall have finished them before you can turn round.’
‘I’ve had some trouble with my kidneys, too, I’d like to talk to you about, Doctor.’
‘Yes, yes! Later if you like. But drinks now.’
‘Just as you please, Doctor. I don’t mind at all.’
We had several more drinks, after which Nurse Macpherson became more romantic. The waiter fortunately had to go and serve dinner.
‘How about some food,’ I suggested.
‘Ummm! I’m ravenous. And there’s a good three hours to kill before we can decently disappear.’ I kissed her, and she began to laugh. ‘I wonder how old Plumtree is?’ she asked. Both laughing, we entered the coffee room.
I later decided that the decline of the evening really started with dinner. The coffee room itself instantly damped our spirits. It was a long, cold place, decorated only with pictures of horses in heavy gilt frames. Most of the tables were bare, those laid for dinner being huddled round a small fire in a large grate at one end. Our fellow diners were a pair of old ladies at a table thickly covered with patent-medicine bottles, an elderly couple, a red-faced, fat man with a ginger moustache, and a thin, white-haired man who was drinking soup and reading the paper propped against a bottle of beer. Everyone was silent and eating steadily, as though they were anxious to get back to the unknown corners of the hotel where they lurked.
‘If you please, Doctor, over here, Doctor,’ said the waiter loudly, interrupting his service and clattering a vegetable dish on the table. ‘I’ve put you nice and near the fire, Doctor.’ He crossed to a small table almost in the hearth and began beating the seat of a chair violently with his napkin. ‘There you are, Doctor. And the young lady, too, now, Doctor. Nice and cosy, wouldn’t it be?’
Coming from a land where only the Church and the medical profession are venerated, the waiter had automatically made us his favourites. This was good for the service, but it immediately made everyone in the room fix us with their fiercest attention.
‘And what would you be having, Doctor?’ he continued as we sat down.
I looked at the menu. ‘I’ll have some of the Potage Dubarry,’ I said, trying to appear unaware of the spectators.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t have any of that, Doctor.’
‘Very well,’ I glanced at Nurse Macpherson. ‘We’ll try the steamed plaice with pommes vapeur and cabbage.’
The waiter, who had his order pad in one hand, scratched his head with the butt of his pencil. ‘I wouldn’t touch the fish if I was you, Doctor. Mind, it’s not a thing. I’d tell anybody, but even the cats downstairs are refusing the fish.’
‘How about the casserole de mouton? And we’ll have some wine.’ He looked blank, so I added, ‘You have some wine?’
‘Sure, we’ve got wine. I’ll bring you a bottle.’
‘Red wine,’ I insisted. ‘I’d like to choose a Burgundy, if you’ve got one ready at room temperature.’
‘You just leave it to me, Doctor.’
‘Did I understand, sir,’ said the man with the ginger moustache, ‘that you are a medical man?’
I nodded.
‘My name is Major Porter,’ he continued. ‘If I may effect an introduction to your good self and your lady wife–’
‘I’m a lady, but no wife,’ Nurse Macpherson said tartly.
‘We’re cousins, as it happens,’ I explained. ‘We have an uncle in the lead business in Scotland, who died, and we’ve been to his funeral. So we came together because we both work in London. I mean, we’re going to his funeral. Poor fellow.’ I felt that my whisky before dinner had made the story mildly confused, so to clarify it I added, ‘He wasn’t in the lead business, I mean the brass business.’
I noticed Nurse Macpherson’s mouth harden.
‘I hope you won’t mind my saying so,’ Major Porter continued, ‘but I don’t believe in doctors. I’ve nothing against doctors individually, mind – not a thing. Some of my best friends are doctors. I’ve no faith in the medical profession as a whole.’
‘Neither have I,’ said Nurse Macpherson, with the frankness of the slightly tipsy.
‘Really, madam? I’m interested to hear it. Are you – forgive me if I ask – at all connected with medical work?’
‘Yes, I’m a member of a Sisterhood of Druids. We use a good deal of mistletoe, and aren’t past sacrifice at sunrise. Can I do anything for your warts?’
Major Porter seemed surprised, but continued, ‘I’m sure you’ll be interested in my case, Doctor. In fact, I’d like your opinion on it. Not that I expect you to approve of my treatment.’ He looked at me slyly. ‘You fellows stick together, eh? There’s no closed shop like the doctors’ shop, I often say. I mean no offence, of course. Now would you believe it, Doctor,’ he said, drawing back his coat and protruding his abdomen proudly, ‘at the age of five I was given only six months to live?’
I recognized wearily the doctor’s second social blight: worse than the men who insist on telling you about their orthodox illnesses are the people cured by faith, herbs, and osteopathy. Major Porter addressed the coffee room about his miraculous lease of life while we ate our mutton stew and drank our wine, boiling hot from under the stillroom tap. By the time the waiter reverently bore us the porcelain slab with the remains of the cheese, the Major was tugging up his trousers and pointing to the scar of his old tibial osteomyelitis. The white-haired man, who like the Major was a commercial traveller, joined in with the story of the remarkable cure effected by a man in Catford on his sister-in-law who came out all over when she ate strawberries. Then the waiter made himself comfortable leaning against the fireplace and began talking about his kidneys.
‘What you need for your kidneys,’ declared Nurse Macpherson, with slight slurring, ‘is pure water. Flush them. Drink water – several gallons a day.’
‘That’s a damn silly remark,’ I said. I was beginning to have a hangover, my throat was raw, and I was starting to shiver. ‘That treatment went out with pneumonia-jackets and ice-bags. You restrict fluids and give ’em a high protein intake.’
She looked at me steadily. ‘Have you ever nursed a case of nephritis?’ she demanded.
‘You don’t have to know any medicine to be a nurse, my dear. Any more than you have to know dietetics to be a good cook.’
She was about to reply, when the old gentleman said, ‘Doctor and nurse, eh? What brings you to this part of the world?’
‘We met a man on the road who recommended the hotel. You see, we’re cousins. We’re going to the funeral of our uncle in the brass business–’
‘For God’s sake!’ shouted Nurse Macpherson. ‘Not again!’ She stood up. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Bed! I suddenly remembered what we were there for.
‘I’m going in a minute, too,’ I said, as she stalked from the room.
‘It isn’t ten yet,’ said the Major. ‘Let’s have a drink.’
‘No thanks.’ I turned to the waiter, who was rubbing his loins thoughtfully under his coat. ‘Bring me what’s left in the whisky bottle. I’ll take it to my room.’
I sat on the edge of my bed feeling miserable. I wished I were tucked up in a ward at St Swithin’s, with someone bringing me throat lozenges every half-hour. But I would have to go through with it. Nurse Macpherson, the unruffled heroine of a dozen such adventures, would roast me in her contempt if I didn’t. After waiting for the hotel to become silent I slowly undressed and put on my dressing-gown. Carefully I opened the door. I began to creep down the stairs towards the first floor.
The effect of fever, excitement, and alcohol raised my pulse rate alarmingly as I felt my way along the darkened corridor towards room number three. I had carefully memorized my landmarks before dinner, and I remembered that you turned left by the fire extinguisher, went down three steep stairs, and reached the first-floor landing. I was checking my position by feeling for a marble statuette of Britannia when the light went on.
‘Yes?’
Mrs Digby, in hairnet and dressing-gown, stood at her bedroom door.
I tried to smile again. ‘Good evening.’
She said nothing.
‘I was looking for the bathroom.’
‘There’s a bathroom on your floor.’
‘Oh, really? Is there? I didn’t notice it.’
‘It is opposite your room. There is “Bath” written on the door in large white letters.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much. Stupid of me, coming all this way. Should have seen it. All conveniences, what? Good hotel. Capital!’
She made no reply, so I made my way back along the passage. She waited at her open door until I had disappeared, then put the light out. I tried to creep back after shivering on the upper landing for ten minutes, but she opened her door again before I had reached the foot of the stairs.
‘Did you say opposite my room?’ I asked. ‘With “Bath” on it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well. Thanks. Good night to you. A very good night to you.’
I went back to my bedroom and drank the rest of the whisky. It was then eleven-thirty. Clearly I should have to wait another hour, or even two, before repeating my risky sortie. I lay down on top of my bed and picked up the
Lancet
, which I had somehow included in my packing.
When I woke up it was eight-thirty in the morning.
‘God Almighty!’ I said. I already saw myself the laughing stock of St Swithin’s. I dressed quickly, dashed downstairs, and threw open the door of Nurse Macpherson’s room. It was empty, with her pink nightie rumpled on the bed. So was the hall below, and the coffee room.