‘Are you perfectly sure you’ve completely recovered from your operation, Gaston?’ asked my cousin, Miles Grimsdyke, FRCS, the surgeon.
We were sitting in a couple of paper hats over the remains of the Christmas dinner, his wife Connie having retired to wipe more of it from the face of their two-year-old son.
Miles helped himself to more port. ‘Last year you were quite the life and soul of the party–’
‘And this one I’ve been sitting about uttering sighs deep enough to blow the pudding out,’ I agreed.
‘You have seemed far from your usual self, I must say. I think young Bartholomew was quite disappointed.’
I lit one of his cigars. ‘Fact is, old lad, I find myself at the moment in a position of some embarrassment.’
‘Indeed? I am sorry to hear it.’ Miles pushed across the decanter. ‘But as much as I should like to assist you, you must remember I have now a child to support. Believe me, the frightful cost of human reproduction–’
‘My condition, alas, for once cannot be eased by the mere application of cash.’
He looked startled. ‘You haven’t done anything awful, have you? I mean, being drunk and disorderly? Or – Good heavens! – you haven’t taken drugs?’
‘I am in love.’
‘Oh, is that all?’
‘Well may you take the blasé view,’ I admitted with a sigh. ‘Of course, I’ve trifled with an affection or two in the past, in those jolly days when I used to push nurses home over the St Swithin’s mortuary gate. But that was mere emotional chicken-pox. This is the acute full-blown complaint, with all complications.’
‘H’m. What’s the lucky lady’s name?’
‘Ah, yes.’ I cracked a nut. ‘I’m afraid I’m not just now at liberty to tell you. You see,’ I explained, ‘she happens to be engaged to somebody else.’
‘And will you be invited to the wedding?’
I hadn’t even taken the trouble of discovering Ophelia’s telephone number. I’d taken a laboratory specimen from Basil in Razzy’s consulting room that afternoon, and as he was catching the midnight train to rehearse in Blackport he suggested I rang his fiancée with the result. The following morning Ophelia and I became rather chatty on the wire, so I asked her out for a Yuletide drink, and the day after it was lunch, and the next evening dinner, and soon we were tooting round the night-clubs, and now I worshipped the very ground she dug her spiked heels into.
And all the time Basil was popping through trap doors saying, ‘Fe fi fo fum!’ No wonder I felt a bit of a cad.
‘It was perhaps not very kind of me to make that last remark,’ Miles relented. ‘Particularly in view of the season.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I conceded. ‘After all, we Grimsdykes have our honour. Even our old grandpa who had such trouble with the servant problem, what with chasing all the housemaids round the attics.’
I could see Miles thought me a bit of a cad, too, and I could hardly blame him. My cousin was a severe little bristly chap, openly admitted in the family to have inherited my share of the brain-producing genes as well, and our relationship had been rather brittle since the day he caned me at school for filling his cricket boots with treacle. Though admittedly he’d become chummier since reaching the St Swithin’s consultant staff and assuming all the trappings of a rising young London surgeon – a new Alvis, a plate in Welbeck Street, a nice wife, a blotter on half-a-dozen committee tables, and even a faintly disgusting disease named after him.
‘At least I’ve managed so far to keep the family escutcheon as unspotted as a polar bear in a snowstorm,’ I added a little defensively.
‘That is true enough, Gaston. And certainly no one would be happier than Connie and myself if you did manage to settle down in a home of your own.’ Miles reached for the port again. ‘Particularly in view of the Prime Minister’s letter to me last week.’
I looked up. ‘Good Lord! He doesn’t want you to stand for Parliament, or anything?’
‘Oh, tut!’ said Miles, though not seeming displeased at the idea. ‘But he
does
want me to join the Wincanton commission in the New Year.’
I wondered quickly if that was the one enquiring into conditions in the Stock Exchange or conditions in prisons.
‘The Royal Commission on the State of Public Morality,’ Miles explained, looking smug under his paper hat. ‘I’m sure even you will appreciate this is a great honour. Though I fear it will be hard work. We shall be obliged to investigate nude spectacles, to mix with women of the lowest morals, and penetrate some of the foulest drinking dens in London.’
It all sounded jolly good fun to me, but remembering how seriously Miles took his welfare work even as a medical student, I simply congratulated him.
‘I particularly wish to make a success of the appointment,’ Miles continued, half to himself. ‘For who knows where it might lead? One might become Dean of the Hospital…Vice-Chancellor of the University…a Fellow of All Souls…a Life Peer…’
The chap was full of port, of course.
‘I gather you are undertaking Sir Lancelot Spratt’s biography?’ he added, remembering himself.
‘As a matter of fact, I’m going round tomorrow to start sorting the stuff. He’s such a busy fellow it seems Boxing Day’s the only time he has to spare.’
I found myself writing Sir Lancelot’s biography through having recently published a novel, which enjoyed modest success among all those people who can’t yet afford television sets. Basil hadn’t heard of it, of course, but then no actors ever read books. And apart from unexpected emergencies presented by train smashes or Razzy’s love life, I had – like Drs Anton Chekhov and John Keats before me – abandoned the healing art for the literary life.
Being a literary gent certainly has its advantages, such as not needing to shave before starting work in the mornings and all the literary luncheons sitting at the top table, which has the flowers and the buckshee booze. But there are snags. First of all, of course, you have to write more ruddy books. Then what with rubbing shoulders with the latest angry young chaps, or signing copies of the Works in bookshops, and holding forth over the cheese at those luncheons, you tend to develop the well-known clinical condition of
megalocrania acuta
. It’s just the same the day you pass your finals and qualify, and go charging round the hospital in the biggest stethoscope out of John Bell and Croyden’s, trying to get everybody to call you ‘Doctor’.
In hospital you’re fortunately cured pretty smartly by the ward sisters, who can deflate young doctors as easily as a kid popping soap-bubbles. But in the literary life Fate is left with the job. It was a pretty bumptious Grimsdyke who returned from a trip to New York on his proceeds, when Fate neatly stuck a foot in his path. I arrived in London to find the publishers’ shutters up and the beastly chaps gone bankrupt, which was particularly awkward as I’d asked the air hostess out to lunch, and all I had in the world was one of those little cellophane bags of airsick barley-sugar.
I’d managed to scrape up enough to take a houseboat off Chelsea and start another novel, which I didn’t expect would knock spots off Tolstoy, but might cheer up some of the fierce gents who go sniping through the literary jungle on Sunday mornings. But Fate, not having the advantage of an English education, doesn’t recognise the code of never kicking a man when he’s down. I hadn’t got further with the novel than cleaning all the letters in my typewriter with a pin, when I was carted into St Swithin’s with a pretty nasty appendix. As usual among doctors, everyone misdiagnosed the case, and if they hadn’t finally sent for Sir Lancelot Spratt I’d have been having a pretty chilly Christmas of it, perched on the edge of a cloud fooling about with a harp.
‘I trust you are being a satisfactory patient, Grimsdyke?’ Sir Lancelot had said, appearing in the ward a few days after the operation to inspect his handiwork. ‘They say that doctors invariably make the worst ones.’
‘I’m learning all sorts of things about hospitals I never knew before, sir,’ I replied, lying among the grapes and chrysanthemums.
He nodded. ‘You have discovered the only way. It would, for instance, do the Bar a power of good if more barristers than at present served a spell in jail. Sister,’ he added, as she replaced my bedclothes, ‘I believe I left my notebook in your office. Would you have the kindness to fetch it?’
The surgeon stood for a moment stroking his beard.
‘Now we have a few seconds alone, young man,’ he went on, ‘I have the chance to ask your help in a matter of some delicacy.’
‘Mine, sir?’
I stared at him. In the days when I was one of his students, I suppose Sir Lancelot had thrown at me practically everything nasty that came conveniently to hand in his operating theatre. I now felt he was like Bobby Locke asking his caddy to drive off for him in the Open.
‘I should like you to be my ghost.’
‘Your what, sir?’
‘I believe that is the technical term? But we must be brief. Your cousin Miles and my colleagues in the hospital are pressing me to write my memoirs. I have had a not uninteresting life, and they imagine the publication might in some way raise the present lamentable standing of our profession in the eyes of the British public. We are, alas, no longer tin gods. And we are very far from being the gold-plated tin gods of our American colleagues. Be that as it may. I could, of course, perfectly well write the book myself if I had the time. But these days I have no longer the leisure even to send up my cases to the
Lancet
, particularly as I have recently been appointed consultant to the Police Welfare Club.’
‘Congratulations, sir,’ I remarked.
‘Thank you, Grimsdyke. The duties are arduous and rather unexciting – policemen for some reason run largely to varicose veins and hernias – but it throws me a good deal with our own famous pathologist. Dr McFiggie is, of course, the President. He very courteously allowed me to see the Bayswater victim in the mortuary this morning. I must confess,’ Sir Lancelot added, noticing my paperback mystery from the ward library, ‘I find the study of homicide utterly fascinating. I should write a book about that, too, if only I had the time.’ He sighed briefly. ‘“The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise”. You are familiar with Ecclesiasticus? In short, I should be much obliged if you would accept the task of my biography. There will of course be a small honorarium – shall we say fifty guineas?’
This was a bit of a poser. If I pottered through Sir Lancelot’s memoirs for a mere fifty quid, not only would the world have to resign itself to waiting for the novel but the landlord of the houseboat would have to do the same about his rent. I stared for a moment through the ward windows, where the last leaves on the dusty plane trees in the courtyard were gold-plated by the afternoon autumn sun. Soon everything would be fairy-lights and mistletoe, then it would be daffodils and the Boat Race and asparagus and cricket, and in no time summer and Ascot and strawberries and cream again, and if life looked pretty good I remembered it now came with the compliments of Sir Lancelot Spratt.
‘It would be an honour, sir,’ I said.
‘Excellent. I suggest you start work about Christmas time, when I can supply you at my house with all the necessary papers. I really must apologise,’ he added, as Sister hurried up, ‘I seem to have my notebook in my pocket all the while.’
It was when first trying out Sir Lancelot’s stitches that I ran into Razzy, then of course I met Ophelia, and Christmas found me mooching through the general jollity in Miles’ house thinking less of Sir Lancelot’s life than the way the little soft hairs curled at the base of her neck.
‘I sincerely hope your affair with this lady does not end discreditably,’ observed Miles across the table, after chatting for a while about the memoirs and I fancy trying to drop the hint I might include a few words about himself.
‘The situation has happened to chaps before now, of course,’ I told him. ‘Romeo, for instance.’
‘I certainly hope it won’t finish as disastrously as that.’ Miles looked a bit alarmed. ‘Perhaps,’ he added, with one of his looks, ‘on the strength of my long experience in welfare work among broken homes you will allow me to offer you a little sensible advice–’
But at that moment Connie came in, and we both had to go out and be bears.
The following afternoon I drove the 1930 Bentley across the empty streets of London, while the population lay recovering from its annual twenty-four hours’ attempt at committing mass digestive suicide.
I’d spent Boxing Day morning in Park Lane treating the first post-festive dyspepsias, though the practice was pretty slack because Razzy’s patients were mostly hurtling down Swiss slopes themselves or floundering in goggles round Jamaica pretending they were fish. I’d plenty of time to think about Ophelia, and pretty miserable it made me, too – come to think of it, the old passion is far from a light-hearted matter of a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino. In its more virulent form it can make you feel pretty rotten, like the flu. Particularly as Ophelia had disappeared for a whole week to the dear old people miles away in the country, and all I’d got left was her photograph showing off latest creations in the waiting-room magazines, for some odd reason always slap in the middle of the Piccadilly traffic or surrounded by lots of empty milk bottles and dustmen. As for Basil, I reflected sourly as I drove round Marble Arch, the chap was at that very moment sticking on his forked tail and whiskers and preparing to shoot into the public eye through his trapdoor up in Blackport.
Sir Lancelot seemed to live in some style. A pretty Italian maid in a frilly apron took my overcoat, and he appeared himself to lead me upstairs to the study of his Harley Street house. These days you don’t expect to find consultants living in Harley Street, of course, any more than you expect to find bankers dossing down in the City. In fact, from the brass plates clustered round the doorposts like cottage roses you can tell that those tall elegant consulting rooms and tall elegant receptionists are all shared among several chaps. But Sir Lancelot maintained that no surgeon could possibly remain a gentleman and live in Wimbledon, though not mentioning quite so often that he’d bought up the mews behind his house years ago, and was making a packet letting it out as garages.
His study was furnished in the style popular among Victorian headmasters, and the leather-topped desk covered with bundles of yellow papers and stacks of faded photographs, which struck me as having no interest to anybody except the St Marylebone Refuse Department.
‘You will forgive me for leaving you,’ Sir Lancelot apologised, ‘but I have an important speech to prepare for the Royal College of Surgeons downstairs. Just leaf your way through my papers. You will no doubt discover a skeleton or two in my cupboard, but I can assure you that the cupboards of many colleagues at St Swithin’s resemble osteological museums.’
I hadn’t got further with the job than trying to spot whether Sir Lancelot was the pimply chap holding the ball in the picture of the local football team, when the door opened and Lady Spratt appeared.
‘My dear Gaston! We did so miss you at the hoop-la this year.’
‘What ho, there,’ I greeted her, ‘I missed it myself. Just when I was getting my eye in for those little china dogs, too.’
‘I’ve brought you a nice cup of tea,’ she announced. ‘I’m sure you’ll need it after all your hard work.’
Anyone at St Swithin’s would have imagined that Sir Lancelot had a wife resembling Boadicea, but Lady Spratt was a little fluffy thing as vague as the middle of a soufflé. We’d become chummy over the years, running the St Swithin’s winter theatricals or the St Swithin’s summer fête, and jolly useful it had been sometimes to dilute the fire and brimstone Sir Lancelot kept by the bucket for delinquent students.
‘I’m so glad you are writing Lancelot’s life,’ she added, fluttering a bit.
‘Worthy of a Boswell, I assure you.’
‘But first of all–’ Lady Spratt shot a glance towards the door. ‘I wonder if I might ask you a special favour?’ There was a pause. ‘In fact, I am going to ask your help, Gaston, in a matter of great delicacy.’
I felt confused. As far as the Spratts were concerned, Grimsdyke seemed to be turning into everybody’s auntie.
‘But what on earth about?’
‘About this ghastly crime business.’
‘Crime business?’ I wondered if she’d been embezzling the hoop-la takings.
‘My husband,’ she explained. ‘Have you noticed he has been behaving oddly recently?’
Of course, Sir Lancelot had been behaving oddly for years. But some of our greatest surgeons were shocking eccentrics, and though he didn’t measure up to the eighteenth century ones with their gold-headed canes, Sir Lancelot was as unusual among London consultants as a bottle of champagne at breakfast.
‘Ever since he was appointed to that Police Club,’ Lady Spratt continued, ‘he’s been totally unable to talk about anything unconnected with sudden death, which is really quite unhealthy, not to mention extremely boring in the evenings.’
‘He just takes an enthusiastic interest in everything he meets,’ I murmured. After all, chaps must stand together, whoever they are.
‘And don’t I know it.’ She perched on the edge of his desk. ‘Last year it was the ballet, when I was forced to entertain all those peculiar young men and women. The year before it was racehorses, which thank heavens was too expensive to last. Now he follows all the murders like an errand boy, and is quite making himself the laughing stock of St Swithin’s – or so the Professor’s wife troubled to tell me in a loud voice right in the middle of Harrods. It really won’t do, if he wants to be the next President of the Royal College of Surgeons. And worst of all, he’s made a bosom friend of that rude little man with dirty fingernails, McFiggie.’
I could agree that Dr Angus McFiggie was rude. Most pathologists are, probably from never having to make light conversation with their patients. He was a little red-faced Aberdonian with eyebrows like Highland bracken at the end of a hot summer, whom I’d often seen in his long red rubber apron busy in the new St Swithin’s mortuary – which was about the most comfortable spot in the whole hospital, being all air-conditioning, strip lights, and white tiled walls, except for that oversized filing cabinet thing let into the far end.
‘Not to mention keeping me awake half the night reading detective stories,’ Lady Spratt ended. ‘So I was wondering, Gaston, as you’ve known him so long at the hospital, if you could somehow suggest how to divert his energy elsewhere?’
This seemed a tall order. I was dutifully turning over the possibilities of stamp-collecting, country rambles, or a girl-friend, when the door suddenly opened and the surgeon appeared himself.
‘Maud! What the devil have you done with my bedside reading lamp?’ he asked, ignoring me.
‘Your bedside lamp? I’ve moved it to one of the spare rooms.’
Sir Lancelot looked mystified. ‘But what on earth for? You know how I like to read in bed. I was right in the middle of a rollicking good yarn about thugee, too.’
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Lady Spratt fitted a cigarette into her holder. ‘My brother’s arriving this weekend.’
‘Maud, really!’ The surgeon stamped his foot. ‘You know perfectly well how I dislike people in the house. Life will be quite intolerable with the feller continually taking my favourite chair and all the hot water. You should have consulted me first.’
‘Don’t make a fuss, dear,
please
. Of course we have a moral obligation to put them up. Hotels in London are so frightfully expensive.’
‘Them – ? Don’t tell me he’s bringing his blasted missus?’
‘And his family, naturally.’ Lady Spratt flicked her lighter. ‘I thought it would be nice for them to see all the shops and theatres and things during the Christmas holidays.’
Sir Lancelot drew himself up. ‘Then I shall spend the weekend at the club.’
‘Very well dear.’
‘That seems the most convenient solution for everyone,’ he added, with his best bedside dignity.
‘Not really, dear. You see, they will be staying for three weeks.’
‘Three weeks? Good God!’
‘Where are you going to?’ demanded Lady Spratt.
‘To lock up the cellar before I forget.’
‘Really, Lancelot! Don’t be ridiculous. You know my brother is most abstemious.’
‘Rubbish! I’ve never met such a leech for the vintage port.’
‘Which reminds me, I’ve arranged a little dinner party for Saturday–’
‘Maud, this is absolutely preposterous! You’ve known for years how I detest entertaining out of the week–’
‘You will join us, won’t you, Gaston?’ Lady Spratt added calmly. ‘After all, you’re almost one of the family now, aren’t you?’
Ophelia still being away on Saturday, I accepted. ‘I’ve asked Miss Gracie from the BBC, which still leaves me one man short. But I expect you will easily enough find someone interesting from the hospital, won’t you, Lancelot? So glad you can come, Gaston. Black tie.’