Shortly before one o’clock that lunchtime, Pip took off his brown coat, threw it over his shoulder, and stepped into the residents’ bar. As he expected, his two old friends were leaning with pint mugs in their usual corner.
‘Come to collect the empties?’ called Tony Havens at once, grinning.
‘Seen the dean yet?’ asked Hugo Raffles eagerly.
‘I’ve hardly seen anyone at all. You’d be amazed at life below stairs in this hospital. Do you know exactly what I do? Sit on my backside all day with about a hundred other porters, down in the basement. Doing absolutely nothing all day long, except taking tea breaks.’
‘The theatre porters will be demanding tea breaks during operations next,’ Tony suggested. ‘I can just hear Sir Lancelot saying, “Scalpel,” then the hooter blowing and everyone walking out, leaving the patient all alone connected to the automatic respirator.’
‘But it’s really quite a scandalous system,’ Pip insisted. ‘It’s a terrible waste of money for the Health Service, and it’s definitely bad for staff morale.’
‘The Government possesses unlimited money, dear boy, and the porters possess unlimited sloth,’ Hugo told him. ‘So what’s the odds? There are much more worthy things to reform in the hospital. We residents could do with a squash court, for a start.’
‘But portering is an essential hospital service,’ Pip countered earnestly. ‘In the 1963 Report of the King Edward’s Hospital Fund, which I read last night, it stated that the planning and supervision of portering was of fundamental importance, and much overlooked.’
‘When you’re working a hundred hour week as a houseman,’ Tony told him briskly, ‘you’ve more on your mind than the mental health of the hospital porters.’
‘Porters are people,’ Pip murmured. He was disappointed. He had innocently expected them to be spellbound by his experiences.
‘We really must fix this confrontation with the dean,’ Hugo continued. ‘With of course as many of the lads present as possible. Perhaps you could fix wheeling in the patient for his clinical demonstration? That’s in the lecture theatre this afternoon. It would provide a delightfully dramatic setting. Then you can push off and find this lucrative job with a drug company or tin leg maker or whatever.’
‘I’m not so sure that I don’t just want to stay a hospital porter.’
‘Oh, come, a joke’s a joke,’ Tony said.
‘It’s very edifying, seeing hospital work from the underside.’
‘You must be mad,’ Hugo told him. ‘I’d rather be an abortionist’s tout. The rake-off’s better.’
‘Nobody pays any attention at all to the ancillary staff,’ Pip complained. ‘The doctors at St Swithin’s seem to think they’re the only people who matter in the whole place.’
‘You’re right. We are,’ Tony agreed.
‘Why, I might even rise to be head porter in time,’ Pip suggested. ‘You two would be consultants by then, I suppose.’
‘Maybe. But not at St Swithin’s,’ Tony declared. ‘We’re both emigrating.’
Pip looked surprised. ‘When did you decide this?’
‘Over the past five or six months. Hugo and I seem to have talked about nothing else. Have we?’
‘You never mentioned it to me,’ he objected.
‘We rather lost touch with you, Pip, after we qualified last Christmas and you were still a student,’ he explained condescendingly.
‘San Francisco or Sydney, St Tropez or even Sark,’ Hugo speculated. ‘Anywhere to get out of this country, where the shortage of people who actually practise medicine is matched by the abundance of administrators telling us how to do it.’
‘We’re going somewhere doctors are still respected. Instead of finding themselves at the beck and call of a public who’s never had anyone to order about in their lives before, and rather take to the experience.’
‘To lands where money is pumped into medical research, instead of broken-down shipyards and motor-bike factories to keep bone idle workers in overpaid jobs.’
‘Where the patients are obese, and so are the fees.’
‘A nice little surgical clinic in upstate New York would do me,’ Hugo suggested. ‘The Yanks go for English doctors. We apparently have such a cheery way of telling people they’re going to die.’
‘I don’t think I’d care to desert the ship,’ said Pip solemnly. ‘Even though it’s sinking so fast the rats have to swim upwards.’
‘Come off it, Pip,’ Tony scoffed. ‘What’s a house job in a British hospital these days? It’s a perch, before flying off to fresh woods and pastures new. There’s no point staying at home longer than to learn the surgical ropes. And British doctors are not the only ones on the move. We shall be replaced by the equally great migration from the medical schools of the East.’
‘You know, I think it’s an entirely natural phenomenon,’ said Hugo thoughtfully. ‘This global east to west movement of doctors across the northern hemisphere. Do you suppose it’s something to do with the Trade Winds?’
‘So in the end everybody’s happy,’ Tony decided. ‘We British doctors are happy, because we finish up with enormous cars and swimming pools and stupendous life insurance. The Eastern doctors are happy, because Cricklewood is altogether less crowded and smelly than Calcutta. So please don’t make cracks about rats, Pip. Though to my mind, the rats were obviously the most intelligent beings on board.’
‘But what about the welfare of the patients?’ Pip asked.
‘Screw the patients,’ said Hugo.
Tony Havens ordered two more beers.
‘What about me?’ complained Pip. ‘I haven’t had a drink at all yet.’
The other two exchanged glances.
‘Pip, dear boy,’ said Hugo, ‘Tony and I were discussing this very matter before you came in. As you know, this bar is a club. That’s some technicality to do with the liquor licence, I believe. It’s restricted to the medical staff and the medical students. Not the porters. Sorry about that.’
‘Don’t talk such balls,’ Pip objected crossly. ‘You know we’ve had all sorts in here. Policemen, firemen, newspaper reporters, peculiar people from television –’
‘Signed in as guests,’ said Tony.
‘Then why can’t I be signed in as a guest? I’ll pay for my own drinks, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’
There was another silence. ‘Look, Pip,’ Tony continued. ‘We’d love to buy you unlimited drinks. But they’ll have to be in the pub down the road. You see, you
are
a porter. And if we let you come and drink here, all the other porters will want to.’
‘We’ve had this trouble before,’ Hugo added. ‘Some dreadful little oik down there in the basement had the ruddy nerve to ask old Clapper why he and his fellow-workers couldn’t come in here and booze away to their hearts’ content. I’m sure you see the fundamental pathology? No one would object to the odd porter coming in for a pint. But with the workers, it’s not only a case of one-out-all-out, it’s of one-in-all-in. If we let you put a foot in the door, those bloody-minded barrack-room lawyers downstairs would cash in. You must know their “I’m all right, Doc,” attitude, better than I do. The residents would be paying for your breaching the dyke long after you’d gone off to find yourself a decent job.’
‘What was the name of that horrible piece of work?’ Tony frowned. ‘Sapworth, that’s it. Some arrogant little sod to do with the union.’
Pip drew himself up. ‘Mr Harold Sapworth is
not
an arrogant little sod. Or even a horrible piece of work. He is suffering from a somewhat disorganized home life, which would drive anyone of less resilient personality to suicide, or possibly murder. He enjoys instead a healthy mental attitude and a sound grasp on the essentials of life. Also, he loves his mother. And further, he happens to be one of my personal friends. Not to mention one of my close colleagues in the trade union movement.’
‘You haven’t joined ACHE?’ they both asked in horror.
‘I am the shop steward,’ Pip told them with dignity.
‘Pip, you’re suffering from illusions,’ Tony said anxiously. ‘How about you and me taking a little stroll to see Dr Bonaccord?’
‘On the contrary, for the first time I am beginning to see life clearly. I shall seek our Mr Sapworth and take him for a beer in the nearest public bar. Where we shall plot how to speed up the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system, as prognosticated by the clear-sighted if somewhat excitable K. Marx in the British Museum Reading Room. Workers of the world, unite.’ He raised his clenched fist. ‘You have nothing to pull but your chains. Sending you lot down the plughole,’ he directed enthusiastically at his friends.
He strode from the bar.
Pip had left Harold Sapworth lying on a bench in the porters’ pool, reading a girlie magazine and munching beetroot sandwiches. He supposed that his fellow porter would be remaining there until the next tea break. He was surprised on entering the tiled basement corridor to find Harold behind a vast bouquet wrapped with cellophane and trailing coloured ribbon.
‘They got me a job to do,’ he explained gloomily. ‘Bunch of flowers to deliver to that bird Brenda Bristols.’
‘What, the actress?’ Pip said spiritedly. ‘Lucky man. I wouldn’t mind the chance of meeting her. Particularly sitting up in bed.’
‘Go on?’ Harold sucked the top of his thumb. ‘You can help me out, then. I said I’d nip down to the betting shop for the lads before the first race. Wouldn’t like to be late. They’d get proper stroppy if one of them was on a winner.’
‘Which ward’s she in?’ Pip asked, taking the flowers.
‘She’s not in St Swithin’s actual. Not the likes of her. She’s ritzing it in the Bertie Bunn Wing. You’ll know your way around.’
‘I’ve never been inside the Bertie Bunn in my life,’ Pip told him.
No student had. Unlike the National Health patients in St Swithin’s, private ones were not liable to be abruptly set upon by twenty or thirty young men and women in white coats, prodding and pummelling and discussing what was wrong between themselves as though the object of their attention had already succumbed to the death which he now gathered was swiftly inevitable.
‘Go on? It’s got colour telly and that, and they has their veg served separate.’
‘But hasn’t it got porters of its own?’
‘Suppose not. They don’t have doctors and nurses of their own, do they? It’s all worked out somewhere under the National Health.’
‘But don’t you object, taking flowers to private patients?’
‘Never thought about it, really. I must get on and place them bets.’
‘Perhaps you’d join me for a drink this evening after work, Harold?’ Pip remembered. ‘In the local. I expect you’d really prefer the residents’ bar?’ he added pointedly.
‘Wouldn’t go near that place. I hear the beer’s gnat’s piss and the prices is shocking.’
Pip looked puzzled. ‘But surely, you headed a campaign to have porters allowed in it?’
‘That was only a matter of principle.’
‘I see.’ Pip nodded several times. ‘Like not dropping your guard in boxing? Or to be more exact, aiming a crafty punch where it would hurt most?’
‘That’s right, mate. You’re learning fast,’ said Harold admiringly. ‘Give a big kiss from me to Brenda Bristols.’
As Pip started out with her flowers from the basement of St Swithin’s, Brenda Bristols was sitting up in bed against a bank of pillows, in a plunging transparent nightie, sipping a vodka martini and reading
Private Eye
while waiting for her lunch. The door of her room flew open, revealing a short pink man in glasses, dressed in a plain white nightshirt reaching half-way down his lumpy thighs, crying, ‘Help me!’
Brenda Bristols looked at him over her magazine. A career enlivened with sex-obsessed actors, wild-eyed directors, passionate playwrights and groping millionaires in nightclubs all over the world had left her unconcerned with life’s sexual vicissitudes. ‘Hello,’ she said amiably.
‘Help me,’ repeated her visitor.
‘Would you like me to buzz for a nurse?’ Or has your telly gone wrong?’
‘Dear lady! Please help me. May I come in?’
He slammed the door behind him, trotting across the thick apricot-coloured carpet to the high white bed designed by earnest and ingenious Swedes, with buttons and handles jutting all over it for placing patients instantly in a dozen different positions, all of them uncomfortable. He looked round wildly. ‘Where can I hide?’
‘There’s my bathroom.’ She nodded towards a second door. ‘It’s a little clammy.’
‘You don’t lead to the fire escape?’ he asked desperately, eyes falling on the sunlit balcony. ‘Or perhaps I could make a rope of sheets?’
‘I don’t really think I can spare the ones I’m using.’
‘I suppose it
is
seven storeys down. I should have to borrow dozens of them. And that would of course attract attention.’
‘Don’t you think it might also attract attention,’ Brenda Bristols mentioned, ‘even these informal days, running through the City of London in your little nightie?’
‘Perhaps you could lend me something?’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I could effect my escape in what they call drag. Yes, like Bonnie Prince Charlie with Flora Macdonald.’
‘I don’t think anything of mine would fit you terribly well, darling. But where are your own?’
‘They hid them. Last night. When they stuck me in the room across the corridor. I wanted to get out. My chauffeur was waiting. He probably still is.’
Brenda Bristols tossed aside her
Private Eye
. ‘But they can’t
keep
you in here, sweetie. Unless you can’t pay your bill. Then I suppose they make you wash up the bedpans, or something.’
‘Oh yes, they can.’ He grabbed her hand with both of his. ‘I’m a computer case.’
She sipped her martini in the other hand. ‘I do hope it’s not painful?’
‘It’s a terrible thing to suffer,’ he told her, cheeks shaking. ‘The computer downstairs diagnosed me as an acute schizophrenic with hay fever and pregnancy.’
‘You don’t look noticeably pregnant to me,’ she decided, inspecting him. ‘But I suppose you’re only a few weeks gone?’
‘I’m only repeating what the computer said,’ he told her miserably, still clutching her hand. ‘And I
knew
I had hay fever. I didn’t need any beastly computer to rub it in. I’ve suffered horribly from it for years. Then it decided for some reason of its own that I was pregnant.’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘So it decided that I must be suffering from delusions. That I was off my head. The computer never decided that it was off
its
head. Oh, no! It’s too arrogant, self-opinionated, ruthless and utterly inhuman. It’s got a personality exactly like both my former wives,’ he ended bitterly.
‘But surely,’ she pointed out calmly, ‘you can just tell one of the doctors that some slight computerized error has been made? Like with your gas bill?’
‘You can’t. That’s the basic trouble,’ he said frantically. ‘Apparently, once you start with the computer finding what’s wrong with you, the ordinary human doctor simply can’t interfere. If the computer makes a mistake, it’s supposed to sort itself out. The doctor would have to start from scratch, plodding away to find what you’ve got. When you quite likely haven’t got anything at all. I shall just have to stay until the computer has the common decency to admit it’s wrong. I shall probably spend the rest of my life here.’
‘It’s deliciously comfortable.’
‘But the expense! It makes Claridge’s look like Butlin’s.’
‘Have a drink. The ice is in the fridge under the telly.’
He poured himself half a tumbler of vodka from the bottle at her bedside and gulped it down. ‘Surely we’ve met before?’ he asked more calmly.
‘I’m Brenda Bristols. You’ve probably seen me on the box.’
‘Of course. I caught you in
This Is Your Life
. Tell me, did you know that compère fellow was disguised as a cow when you thought you were opening The Dairy Show?’
He sat on the edge of the high bed, glass in one hand, demurely tugging down the edge of his nightshirt across his hairy thighs with the other. ‘I’m Lord Hopcroft. You’ve probably seen me in the financial pages,’ he said modestly. ‘I own hotels.’
‘But how nice. Fix me another drink, sweetie, will you? Lunch seems late.’
‘Complain to the
maître d’hôtel
,’ he counselled, pouring her a martini. ‘Or I suppose it would be the
maître d’hôpital
? I imagine this is all in order?’ he asked doubtfully, opening the refrigerator for the ice, his original agitation subsiding. ‘I mean, here am I, a member of the House of Lords, well respected in City circles, trotting about a strange woman’s bedroom wearing only a nightshirt apparently designed for hospitalized dwarfs. If it got in the newspapers –’
‘But we’re sickly, not sexy,’ she pointed out.
‘You know what newspapers can make of the most innocent situation,’ he said, returning with the glass.
‘Be a love and let down the end of my bed while you’re passing. The young little doctor-man seemed to want my feet in the air. But it’ll turn into an enormous armchair for eating. You press that red knob just underneath,’ she indicated.
‘This?’
Lord Hopcroft touched the red button. With an obedient purr, the bed see-sawed its foot steadily into the air, tipping on the apricot carpet the bank of pillows, the vodka martini and
Private
Eye
. ‘How dreadfully clumsy of me,’ remarked Lord Hopcroft, as these contents were followed by Brenda Bristols.
‘Worse accidents happen in hospitals, I suppose,’ she said philosophically. She sat on the floor beside him, as the bed halted almost vertically.
‘What amazing telescopic legs,’ he murmured, as they both peered underneath. ‘I always thought my second wife possessed those. She managed to keep a remarkably sharp eye on my activities at cocktail parties. Shall I press this yellow button?’
There was another whirr. The bed tipped sharply sideways on top of them. ‘We’re trapped!’ he exclaimed, struggling to escape. ‘This hospital is absolutely dominated by its mechanical devices.’
‘Can’t you reach the other button with your toes?’ Brenda Bristols asked irritably, as they lay pressed together like two flowers in a book.
‘I don’t think I can. I really must apologize if I’m rather warm. It’s a very hot day.’ There was a knock on the door. Lord Hopcroft cried with alarm, ‘Nobody must see us like this.’
‘It’s only the girl with my lunch,’ she said impatiently. ‘And
some
body’s got to get us out, haven’t they?
Please
come in,’ she called.
Pip entered in his brown coat, bearing the flowers.
A man’s opinions are formed less by events than the mood in which he discovers them. Karl Marx might have concurred about capitalism with John D. Rockefeller, had his theory not been conceived in the arid leathery womb of the British Museum Reading Room. Pip had that afternoon noticed for the first time the lines of Rolls-Royces parked outside the Bertram Bunn Wing, discovered its expensive shop, eyed its extravagant interior decoration, heard the soft music and felt the soft carpeting, jostled against the hurrying trays of savoury-smelling food and expensive bottles in baskets or dewy buckets. Three days before, it would all have brought hardly a shrug to his narrow shoulders. Now he saw everywhere pampering rather than nursing, comfort overlying cure, money before medicine. In the mood which had glowed and flamed within him that morning, he found it shockingly unjust that human beings with exactly the same diseases, undergoing exactly the same treatment in exactly the same hospital, should enjoy conditions as different as Dingley Dell from Dotheboys Hall.
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. Further, private patients indulged in frolics certainly not to be countenanced by a St Swithin’s ward sister. ‘May I leave the flowers?’
‘My gentleman friend and myself are not, in fact, enjoying ourselves very much.’
‘We’re trapped in the jaws of this bed,’ Lord Hopcroft told him.
‘Could you be awfully useful and summon some assistance?’
Pip’s mind had been trained as a medical student in the wards of St Swithin’s to dissect and assess the elements of all alarming situations, then to take swift remedial action. He dropped the flowers and pushed a button on the wall, set in a red ring marked EMERGENCY. At once a light flashed and a bell shrilled outside the open door. He stood looking down sympathetically, waiting for someone to appear. Nobody did.
‘Can’t you make a rather more active sort of effort?’ Brenda Bristols complained.
Pip strolled round to the other side of the bed. ‘There’s a handle,’ he announced, starting to crank it. As the pair struggled free, a female voice came crossly from the corridor, ‘
Why
do patients keep pushing the emergency button by mistake? Anyone would think the nursing staff had nothing to do all day.’
‘The bathroom!’ exclaimed Lord Hopcroft, leaping in and shutting the door.
‘What
are
you doing, Porter?’ demanded the blue-uniformed matron, hurrying into the private room with cap streamers flying and flicking off the alarm. ‘And what are
you
doing, Miss Bristols? I don’t remember giving you permission to get out of bed. Oh, let me attend to it, you clumsy fool,’ she continued impatiently, seizing the handle from Pip. ‘Look what you’ve done to this patient. You might easily have fractured several of her vertebrae. You porters must not meddle with these beds, which need a certain amount of intelligence to operate. There, see how quickly
I
’ve got it straight –’ She stared and blinked. ‘Pip! What are you doing in this room? In that coat?’
‘Oh, hello, Auntie Florrie,’ he replied mildly. ‘I work here.’
‘I know you do.’ She stamped a stoutly shod foot. ‘Why aren’t you taking your exams?’
‘I failed.’
‘How utterly disgraceful.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘When I specifically instructed Sir Lancelot Spratt to pass you.’
‘Dear Sir Lancelot,’ murmured Brenda Bristols, slipping gracefully back into bed. ‘The bear with the swansdown hug.’
‘You may claim a personal relationship with your surgeon,’ said the matron, ignoring Pip to jerk her patient forward and slam the pillows behind her back. ‘But I should like you to know that it cuts absolutely no ice whatever with me. Nor that you are a national figure, having your photograph with no clothes on displayed in every lorry-driver’s caff up and down the country.’
‘Charming, how you go round cheering up the patients, Matron,’ she said silkily.
‘I regard you simply as another female in my care. Like those of any age, any appearance and any profession in the Bertram Bunn Wing.’ The matron pounded the pillows savagely. ‘All are exactly the same to me. I am a dedicated nurse. Aren’t I, Pip?’
‘Then perhaps you’d hand me my lunch?’ Brenda Bristols nodded towards the green-overalled girl standing uncertainly with a tray in the doorway. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Auntie Florrie –’ began Pip.
‘Shut up,’ the matron told him, plonking the tray on the actress’ knees.
‘Ugh,’ said Brenda Bristols. ‘Cold vichyssoise. Always gives me the gripes.’
‘If you don’t want it, you needn’t have it,’ said the matron furiously. ‘I’ll throw it down the loo.’ She opened the door of the bathroom. ‘What are
you
doing here?’ she demanded, as Lord Hopcroft sidled shyly into the room, both hands holding the hem of his nightshirt tight across the top of his legs.
‘I came to borrow some toothpaste,’ he explained.
‘
Miss
Bristols! Why have you a half-naked man in your room?’
‘He’s my guru.’
‘Auntie Florrie –’
‘Shut up. When were you admitted?’ she demanded of Lord Hopcroft. ‘What’s your diagnosis?’
‘I’m several months in the family way.’
‘My brain is going.’ The matron drew the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘It’s all the sheikhs and their habits. I should have stayed in the National Health wards, where the patients at least do what they’re told.’
‘Auntie Florrie –’
‘Shut up.’
‘Auntie Florrie, I refuse to shut up.’ The determination was so unusual for Pip, she rocked back on her heels. ‘Did I understand you to say that you canvassed Sir Lancelot to pass me in my surgery clinical?’
‘Of course I did,’ she replied shortly. ‘You’d never have got through by your own unaided efforts in a month of very wet Sundays.’
‘Thank you very much,’ he told her sharply. ‘Now I know your opinion of my mental abilities.’
‘Don’t get all dignified, Pip, please,’ she said impatiently. ‘I have tolerated you as an amiable half-wit for years. So has the rest of the family, with the calamitous if understandable exception of your adoring parents. Now look here, Miss Bristols,’ she switched her attention. ‘Your charms may be flaunted in every Underground station, where I might add the public draw on many interesting additions –’
‘Auntie Florrie!’ shouted Pip. ‘I may be a halfwit, but I was dedicated to becoming a doctor. And through my own efforts, if you don’t mind. You have bossed me and my poor parents about quite mercilessly for years.’
‘Pip, you must try and control your vile temper. It only makes you utter insulting falsehoods which you immediately regret. Miss Bristols, you may be meat and drink to Lord Longford and Mrs Mary Whitehouse –’
‘Auntie Florrie, you’re a two-faced prig.’