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.
‘Hel
lo
,’ 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. ‘Bed
time
,’ 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.
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.
I wondered if this slow puncture of the ego was affecting his psychological suspension. ‘Any other reason for your feeling tense, anxious, nervous?’
He announced, ‘Well, actually, I got this bodyscanner.’
I suggested, ‘Perhaps we have our terminology in a twist? A bodyscanner is a machine, not a complaint.’
‘I mean this bodyscanner what I got in my front room.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘What an extraordinary article to have about the house! Surely they don’t put them in those mail-order catalogues, like the sandwich toasters?’
He glanced round furtively. ‘Look, doctor. This is all between four walls, innit?’
I raised my right hand and informed him smugly, ‘“Whatever I see or hear, professionally or privately, which ought not to be divulged, I will keep secret and tell no one.” Hippocratic Oath. Looked it up again only yesterday.’ (Crossword clue.)
Syd Farthingale asked warily, ‘I mean, the Old Bill ain’t arriving to copy my medical file into their notebooks?’
‘Even if the Lord Chancellor blew in, he wouldn’t get a butcher’s.’
Folding his arms again, he remarked, ‘You know what hospitals are these days, doctor. Everything disposable.’
I nodded. ‘Cheaper than washing up.’
‘So there’s a lot of stuff lying around. Stands to reason. Paper operating hats, used needles, old scalpels, plastic razors, rubber gloves, wipes. Doing them a favour, arni?’
I was puzzled. ‘How?’
‘Carting it all away, o’course,’ he explained patiently. ‘Why, I’m probably saving the Health Service thousands a year in refuse collection. Do I get thanks for it? No, I do not! And the way the government’s carrying on about pinching every penny, I ask you. These crates were lying about in the stores a couple of years, no one seemed to want them, so I disposed of them.’
‘Crates? What crates?’
‘The ones in the stores,’ he spelt out. ‘We used my mate Len’s van what delivers the patients’ flowers. Get them home, find they contain a bodyscanner. Diabolical.’
‘I see. You’re worried at stealing an essential piece of hospital equipment.’
‘Not thieving, doctor, if you don’t mind,’ he replied indignantly, ‘just saving space. It’s shocking the General couldn’t put to merciful use this scanner, saving human lives and that. No, they say, we have no money to pay staff to work it, similar with six wards and a new block of operating theatres. The government don’t give a monkey’s if people die in the streets.’
‘The financing of the National Health Service presents many difficulties, certainly,’ I agreed.
‘But I meantersay, what can I do with a bleeding bodyscanner?’ Syd Farthingale dropped political arguments. ‘I cannot flog it in a pub, like a load of syringes – all disposed-of ones, of course, doctor. I cannot sell it for scrap, like them obsolescent operating tables what they got hanging about the stores last year. I cannot get rid of it through the trade, like five thousand gallons of paint what was ordered the wrong colour. Nobody’s got the welfare of the General nearer their heart than me, doctor, I don’t mind clearing away their unwanted goods, but who’d work for nothing? Can you help a bloke?’ he ended, as miserably as Napoleon performing a U-turn at Moscow.
‘Mr Farthingale, I cannot approve of your business methods, but I should like to see the scanner back at the General on the off chance that one day somebody might possibly use it,’ I told him primly. ‘Surely the simplest remedy for a complex piece of scientific apparatus in your parlour, doubtless dreadfully awkward when you have friends round for a jar, is to replace it in the flower van, back up to the door of the storeroom, and put it back?’
‘There’s a snag, doctor. You see, Len’s doing a bit of porridge. It was a misunderstanding. Someone was using his credit card.’
‘Nothing criminal in that,’ I objected, mystified.
‘And vice versa,’ he explained. ‘You see, we nicked this bodyscanner at Christmas. No one at the General’s noticed yet. Mind, I reckon they’ll take as long to start wanting it back as them Greeks with the Elgin marbles what we borrowed. But you never know, some people are always inquisitive,’ he mused. ‘Though mind you, if the fuzz sledge-hammered down my front door looking for things, I’d have the lads out at the General in a pig’s whisper. Bring the healing process to a grinding halt, police harassment, innit? The same with spares going missing from British Leyland, you name it, meantersay, the law has no place in industrial relations, right?’
‘I have a brilliant idea.’
He sat up and stared like Napoleon at Marshal Ney clearing his throat at the council table.
When entangled in the genito-gastric complex of the hedonistic Haymasons, I had recalled a tale about feeding substituting for fornicating, written by the Frenchman André Maurois (who ended up writing the biography of Alexander Fleming). Searching then for the story in the bookshelf, I had discovered it in his
Silence of Colonel Bramble
, a sentimental, sad, sycophantically satirical image of the British in World War One – and so in all wars from the Hundred Years’ to our next one, a nation’s character changing only as slowly as the modulations of Darwinism.
Colonel Bramble
embodied a story about another colonel, who commands an ammunition depot. One morning, he discovers only forty-nine machine guns, not fifty. To spare himself unending trouble with the War Office, perhaps his pay stopped, possibly a court martial, the wily officer indents for the replacement of a broken machine-gun tripod, which is sent without question. The next month for a replacement gun sight, then ammunition feed, recoil plate, trigger assembly, until by his retirement from the Army he had reconstructed an entire machine gun.
I felt the principle could be applied in reverse to the weapons of life.
‘Why not leave the bodyscanner round the hospital in bits?’ I suggested. ‘No one will look twice at you, taking a computer or whatever from the boot of your car, carrying it through the front door and dropping it in the canteen or outpatients’. The law can’t put a finger on you, once you’ve restored the
status quo ante
, even in fragments.’
He was awestruck. ‘I wish I had your brains, doctor.’
I held up a hand again. ‘“Calm deliberation unravels every knot.” Harold Macmillan. He hung it up in Downing Street.’
The bodyscanner vanished from my mind as entirely as from the storeroom. I was confident that a man of Syd Farthingale’s subtlety, who could halt the General’s operating by blacking the laundering of the surgeons’ white trousers, would effortlessly free himself from his electronic incubus.
The following week, we were invited to dinner by the Windrushes. He is a pathologist at the General, a tall, sinewy man whom I tolerate as a golfing companion despite his painful medical-student sense of humour. Over the inescapable roast frozen duck, I inquired idly, ‘Is there much thieving at the hospital?’
He guffawed. ‘You must be joking. Don’t you know, the National Health Service is Britain’s Sin City? Makes Chicago look like Lourdes.’
I had an irrational but irrepressible uneasiness.
‘They nick anything from X-ray films for the silver and oxygen cylinders for the steel, to the patients’ flowers and toffees. Mad, coming into hospital with any money, wristwatch, soap, even clothes. Government sheets, pillowcases, towels, nighties, you could open a branch of Marks and Spencer’s. Detergent, floor polish, it’s all on the invoices, but it’s fairy gold for someone. The canteens lose millions in swiped chicken legs, cheese rolls and suchlike; with the money the government could open half the wards it closed for economy. Did you hear about our bodyscanner?’
I dropped my knife and fork.
‘Didn’t Jilly tell you? Enormous row at the General. It was whipped. Out of the stores. Not even unpacked.’
‘Utterly, appallingly cruel.’ His wife shuddered.
‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’ So did mine.
‘Worse still,’ Windrush continued with relish, ‘it was donated by the Friends of Man, the do-gooder lot, the fruit of people giving themselves coronaries on marathons, diverting good beer money into pub collecting boxes, free-falling from aeroplanes and playing the piano for twenty-four hours, you know the thing. Naturally, they’re making a terrific fuss. Man’s Best Friend was down, enormous bloke in a prickly green suit, beard like a fretful porpentine, pulverizing Applebee the administrator.’ Windrush stared at me. ‘You all right, Richard? You’ve turned white.’
‘Just a touch of the old dyspepsia.’
He grinned. ‘I thought you might have the bodyscanner in your front room, or something.’
‘I do hope you’ll be able to enjoy the Pavlova,’ said Mrs Windrush considerately.
That night I confided to Sandra about Syd Farthingale.
‘I’d have reported him to the police,’ she said firmly.
‘How could I? Professional secrecy. Hippocratic Oath.’
‘Pooh! A man like Farthingale would have stolen Aesculapius’ staff and serpents and sold them as kebabs.’
‘They’ll find the scanner round the hospital,’ I suggested hopefully, ‘decide there was a mix-up with the equipment, and see if anyone’s been trying to make a diagnosis with a canteen toaster. I expect the fuss will die down.’
The fuss had as little chance of dying down as the one about Burke and Hare.