‘I trust you had a pleasant holiday in the company of my young brother George,’ said Sir Lancelot Spratt. ‘No doubt the rest and tranquillity traditionally associated with ocean voyages has done you the world of good.’
As I’d just taken my first pint for three weeks, and my first step on land for six, I didn’t know what to reply.
‘I happened to hear at a City dinner the other week that he had been obliged to find his sea-legs again.’ The surgeon paused, standing before the fire. ‘It is perhaps sometimes difficult fully to appreciate the company of my brother.’
I agreed heartily myself.
‘He has this nauseating habit of cramming his cranial sinuses with snuff. I warned him years ago it would play the very devil with his mucous membrane, but it wasn’t the slightest use.’ Sir Lancelot snapped open his gold watch. ‘I see it is six o’clock. Perhaps you would join me in a glass of sherry?’
He touched a bell beside the fireplace.
I’d gone straight to his Harley Street home to report progress of the memoirs, which had occupied my sober attention all the way home from Rio. I’d got on rather well with them, the only compensation for a voyage which I personally thought the greatest maritime disaster since the
Titanic
.
‘I am particularly pleased you have returned at this precise moment, Grimsdyke,’ continued Sir Lancelot. ‘Because I am anxious for you to witness – and naturally to record in the book – an event imminent in my life which, in its way, may prove its crowning achievement.’
I sat up. ‘Good Lord, sir, you’re not being ennobled?’
‘On the contrary, I am being sued.’
I looked puzzled. I’d had a few nasty letters from tailors’ solicitors and the like in my time, and this didn’t strike me as much of a feat.
‘It is a depressing sign of the age,’ Sir Lancelot went on regretfully. ‘Patients aren’t grateful any more. In the old days you could half kill a man, and he’d still send you a box of cigars for Christmas. Now they’ve no sooner finished their free treatment in hospital than they’re round the corner getting free legal aid and sue the doctor. But I suppose we can expect nothing less, with the monstrous remarks that are being made in the courts. You’ve seen the morning’s
Times
?’
I nodded, a bunch of newspapers having appeared with the Thames pilot.
‘You mean the case of some unfortunate doctor getting it in the neck for professional negligence, sir?’
‘Exactly.’ Sir Lancelot hitched up his coat. ‘That a judge, who knows nothing whatever about medicine except what he reads in the bed-time drink advertisements in the newspapers, can have the temerity to instruct us in public how to perform our own job, is to my mind a gross abuse of constitutional authority.’
He rang the bell again.
I tried hard to remember something particularly juicy the beak had said, but could recall only a few remarks about doctors never telling patients what’s wrong with them, which, of course, is perfectly true, anyway.
‘I suppose learned judges rather get into the habit of laying down the law, sir.’
‘Mr Justice Fishwick is about as learned as my left femur. I roomed with the feller when he was reading for the Bar, and he was always coming down to cadge cigarettes and blotting-paper. Weedy little man with nasty teeth, and everything he ate brought him out in rather unpleasant rashes. Now I come to think of it, he borrowed my fountain-pen for the Bar finals, and as far as I remember never returned it.’
Sir Lancelot gave the bell another push.
‘I would write to
The Times
myself,’ he added, ‘except that it is one of my principles never to write letters to the newspapers. It is in the worst possible taste to inflict your opinions on total strangers over breakfast. Besides, you never get paid for them.’
Sir Lancelot then opened the drawing-room door and called ‘Maria!’ several times in a loud voice.
‘What on earth’s all that commotion?’ demanded his wife outside.
‘I am merely requesting a glass of sherry for myself and my guest, my dear.’ He shouted ‘Maria!’ a bit more. ‘Where the devil has the girl got to?’
‘Why, good evening, Gaston.’ Lady Spratt appeared. ‘We don’t seem to have seen you for quite a time. Have you been away? It won’t do the slightest good shouting like that, Lancelot. Maria has left.’
‘Left?’ Sir Lancelot looked insulted. ‘What do you mean, “Left”? I thought she was so happy with us?’
‘And I expect she will be even happier with the American airman she’s going to marry.’
‘But damnation! Who’s going to look after the house? Surely you’ve engaged someone else?’
‘Please remember, dear, this is your home and not your hospital. You cannot simply clap your hands and get someone running to do all the dirty work.’
‘Really, Maud! You should have informed me first–’
‘Don’t get so excited, dear. Of course I’ve asked the agency to send another girl. Meanwhile, if you want the sherry you’ll find it on the dining-room sideboard as usual.’
‘When this legal affair started I didn’t know if it were laughable or contemptible,’ continued Sir Lancelot, reappearing with a decanter and glasses. ‘My first instinct was to ignore the whole business, but your cousin Miles kept nagging me to see my solicitors. He has become rather sanctimonious since joining this Immorality Commission. “The peculiar repulsiveness of those who dabble their fingers self-approvingly in the stuff of other’s souls,”’ he growled. ‘You know your Virginia Woolf? Have some sherry.’
‘Perhaps the case will never come to court, sir,’ I suggested to cheer them up. ‘I gather a good many never get beyond the slanging stage.’
‘Preposterous as it may seem, it
is
coming to court. Just as I was congratulating myself on keeping clear of the legal fraternity, since all that fuss over the idiotic magistrate who thought I’d parked on the wrong side of Harley Street. Though how any judge with more than half his wits and less than half asleep can possibly fail to throw my case straight out again is totally beyond my comprehension.’
I must say I felt a little cagey over this, having once had no end of trouble about some errand boy who rode his bicycle under my Bentley. But I supposed at least they couldn’t send the old boy to clink, or even endorse his licence.
Lady Spratt reached for a cigarette. ‘Did you hear any more from the Medical Legal Insurance, dear?’
Sir Lancelot grunted. ‘All I got out of that lily-livered bunch were orders to settle out of court. However, I insist on fighting the case and risking the costs from my own pocket. I shall, of course, be represented by my elder brother, who will cut down somewhat on the expenses.’
‘Your elder brother?’ I looked surprised.
‘Yes, he has made quite a thing of it at the Bar.’
I’d often read in the papers of Mr Alphonso Spratt, QC, who was always appearing in complicated cases arising from City wizards doing the dirty on each other. I supposed he was the one referred to briefly in Sir Lancelot’s papers as ‘Ugly Alfie.’
‘You will kindly attend a conference on the case in my brother’s chambers in the Temple on Wednesday afternoon at three, Grimsdyke. We can meet just beforehand at my solicitors’. I wish you to document most carefully every word of these proceedings. They will not only, of course, provide me with total vindication. They may well have the same importance for our profession as the case of John Hampden and the ship-money for our nation.’ He swallowed his sherry. ‘Where are you staying in Town? I’m afraid it is quite impossible for me to put you up, in view of our domestic disorganisation.’
‘I’m lodging for a bit with Miles, sir.’
‘We’d love to have you,’ agreed Lady Spratt. ‘But I’m afraid one guest is as much as we can manage just now.’
Sir Lancelot looked up. ‘Guest? What guest?’
‘Didn’t I tell you, dear? My brother will be arriving this evening. You know how he has to come up to London, now he’s Chairman of the Royal Commission.’
Sir Lancelot kicked the fender. ‘Maud, this is absolutely outrageous! Good God! These Royal Commissions sit for ever, and I’ll be dead and buried for years before you get the blasted fellow out of the house. Even fully staffed life becomes utterly impossible in his presence–’
‘Lancelot, there’s really no need to become so dramatic.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m perfectly prepared to put the fellow up at the Savoy at my own expense–’
‘You know that’s out of the question. Besides, he must have his home comforts.’
‘My home comforts, you mean.’
Sir Lancelot turned pink. I must say, I could sympathise with the old boy. After all that trouble to free the house of bishops, here they were creeping back again with the warmer weather.
‘I suppose this time he’s coming alone?’ he asked shortly. ‘I know how I’ll tackle the feller. I shall render him a bill every Saturday morning for professional advice tendered during the week.’ He paused, breathing heavily. ‘I think, Grimsdyke, you had better leave us. I wish to go to my study and sit for a moment in peace, while that is still possible.’
I said goodbye, strolled up the Marylebone Road, and took a bus across London to Miles’ house in South Kensington. And a pretty thoughtful sixpennyworth it was, too.
It was all very fine and large Sir Lancelot roping me in for his court case, but knowing the legal boys regarded time the same way as the Spanish peasants, I felt it might take months sorting out. And here I was going about with the great novel busting inside me, like a new tube of toothpaste. Besides, I couldn’t sponge on Miles for ever, and the episode of Ophelia had left me suffering acutely from the old complaint of anaemia of the exchequer. In fact, I reckoned as we turned Hyde Park Corner, if I didn’t buckle to the new book soon for my fresh bunch of publishers, I should be facing poverty – the real grinding stuff. But I remembered if it hadn’t been for Sir Lancelot removing my appendix I should have been some mute inglorious Grimsdyke, and a fat lot of good that would have done anybody.
Miles hit on the same problem in his own little way as he stood me a whisky and soda that night before I retired, rather looking forward to his spare bed instead of the cradle of the deep.
‘After that unfortunate experience with your publishers, Gaston,’ he remarked, ‘I wonder you don’t abandon this adventure of novel writing for good. Why can’t you simply return to the serious practice of medicine?’
‘That might be difficult,’ I hedged. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t open an abdomen with a rusty scalpel.’
‘I could easily arrange a refresher course with my own students at St Swithin’s.’
‘But as old Trollope put it, “It is difficult for a man to go back to the verdure and malleability of pupildom, who has once escaped from the necessary humility of its conditions.”’
This seemed to floor him for a bit, then he went on, ‘I don’t want to seem at all uncharitable your first night home in England, but I will make no secret of its being a great relief to me if you settled in a more orderly way of life. I will be frank. Any other existence might reflect on my position as a Royal Commissioner. The honour has come to me unexpectedly early – admittedly I have published many useful papers on moral problems – and you know how I wish to make a success of it.’
The same dear old Miles, I thought, always expecting everybody to stop what they were doing and attend to his own little problems first. It was just the same at school, whenever anyone pinched his marbles.
‘I’ll give it some thought,’ I promised, helping myself to another whisky. ‘Meanwhile,’ I asked, to get off the subject, ‘perhaps you can give me the low-down on how the law and Sir Lancelot collided?’
It had all started in Sir Lancelot’s Thursday morning Out-patients’, which at St Swithin’s is a ceremony rather than a clinic. The affair is held in a long room with white-tiled walls, which strike you as cold and formal as an old-fashioned boiled shirt-front. At one end is the consultant’s desk, with a big brass inkpot and one of those little bells you use to call the barmaid in country pubs. At the other is a laboratory bench with a Bunsen burner, and a blackboard for Sir Lancelot to draw interesting bits of people’s insides in coloured chalks. The space between is filled with rows of wooden benches apparently bought second-hand from railway stations, on which the chaps crowd to watch the niceties.
That morning Sir Lancelot appeared as usual, the buzz of conversation stopping like a swatted fly.
‘Mr Harris.’
He fixed his eye on the nearest student.
‘Sir?’
‘Where can we discover a classical case of under-functioning of the pituitary gland?’
The student quaked a bit, naturally.
‘The endocrine clinic, sir?’
‘The public library. The Fat Boy in
Pickwick Papers
presents all the clinical features, though neither Dickens nor anyone else at the time had ever heard the slightest mention of the endocrine glands. Observation, ladies and gentlemen! That is ninety per cent of medicine. The other ten per cent is common sense. So you may console yourselves that lack of brains is no bar to professional advancement. The first patient, Sister, if you please.’
The Out-patient sisters usher them in and out with the practised briskness of Old Bailey wardresses, and the first that morning was a woman with gallstones, which Sir Lancelot drew several feet across on the blackboard.
‘Cholelithiasis, madam, a long Greek word which won’t convey anything to you in the slightest,’ he explained as usual, when she had the temerity to ask what was the matter with her. The old boy regarded any patient asking the diagnosis as taking a morbid interest in themselves. ‘So don’t worry your head about it – I’m the one who does the worrying from now on, and there’s nothing for you to bother about except doing exactly what I tell you and getting better. Next patient, please.’
A weedy chap in a blue suit appeared, clutching a bowler hat.
‘Mr Harris, what do you observe?’ Sir Lancelot demanded. ‘Why, the boots, man, the boots! Note the worn inner surface – a clear case of flat feet. How long have you suffered from this distressing condition, my good man?’
‘Sir Lancelot Spratt?’