When I began to look for other lodgings seriously I had been in Hampden Cross almost three months, By then the shadow of the Abbey was falling noticeably earlier across our doorstep, the draughts in the surgery were finding their old corners, the mornings had the evasive chill prodromal of autumn, and the evenings stepped softly up the streets in mist. My resignation to an existence spent handling the small change of medicine had already turned into enthusiasm, and our partnership began to stride along successfully. To the patients, Dr Farquarson was the wise, conservative physician, though possibly rather outdated; I was the young, dashing doctor, though possibly rather dangerous. Life was busy, but it seemed uncomplicated. Until the morning I was called to see Mrs Tadwich.
The address given by Miss Wildewinde turned out to be a flat over a sweetshop near the main street. I now always followed Dr Farquarson’s advice of trying to make the diagnosis before ringing the doorbell, and I stood on the mat deciding from the careless hang of the curtains and the grubby air of the paintwork that I was about to be confronted with an ageing widow with progressive myosis and rheumatoid arthritis. I felt an involuntary spasm of pity and prepared to do my best for her. Then the door was opened by a plump blonde in a pink negligeé.
“Er – Mrs Tadwich?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m the doctor.”
She gave a bright smile. “Come on in, do. I wasn’t expecting you so early in the morning,” she explained, deftly flicking a pair of drying nylons from a string in the untidy sitting-room.
“I usually see my new patients first.”
I followed her through the door beyond, and found myself in the bedroom.
“Do you live here alone?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Mr Tadwich left,” she explained amiably. “There’s a divorce pending. Would you like me on the bed?”
I began to feel alarmed. This was a situation never experienced in the ordered routine of hospital. At St Swithin’s we were strictly forbidden to examine any female patient lower than the clavicles without a nurse as a bedside chaperone, and I saw my career ending prematurely in the bleak chambers of the General Medical Council in London. But I decided that it would look foolish if I simply grabbed my bag and hurried out. Besides, I was under an equal moral obligation to examine her, and if I didn’t I might land just as ignominiously before the local Executive Committee to have my pay stopped like a naughty schoolboy’s pocket-money.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked, hoping that it was some complaint wholly free of ethical dangers, like sinusitis or nits.
“It’s my heart, Doctor.”
My spirits fell lower. But there is fortunately one refuge for the nervous young practitioner – the cold professional manner. This is a psychological defence mechanism, which explains why so many newly qualified men appear brusque and unintelligible to their equally terrified patients. Assuming an air that went out with broughams and Gladstone bags in Harley Street, I gripped my lapels and declared, “The heart, madam? And what are the symptoms?”
“Oh, no symptoms.” She lay back on the pillow, more at home in the situation than I was. “Just the palpitations sometimes, you know. I’ve got a problem heart.”
“Indeed?”
“Leastways, that’s what the specialist said. There’s a funny quiver you can feel in the middle of my chest, just here.”
“No other manifestations of the condition, I presume?”
“Oh, no. They said in hospital it doesn’t mean any harm. Don’t you want to examine me?” She slipped off her nightdress down to the waist.
“An idiopathic condition, eh?” I said steadily. “Umm. Nothing to cause any alarm, then. And now,” I announced with dignity, “Let me palpate this vibration in the cardiac area.” I laid the flat of my hand sharply between her breasts, as though swatting a mosquito. Sticking strictly to clinical terms, I admitted loftily “I certainly feel a distinct thrill.”
“Go on with you, Doctor,” she said, giving me a wink and a poke in the ribs. “We’re all human, aren’t we? How about coming round one evening for a drink?”
“You’d better treat her here in the surgery in future,” said Dr Farquarson, his eyebrows quivering violently. “Or else send me along. That would finish her.”
“But the whole thing was all my fault,” I said bitterly, tossing my stethoscope on to the examination couch. “I should have had more control of the situation.”
“It’s an occupational risk we’ve got to run. A woman gets bored in the afternoons, whether she lives in Canterbury or in Canonbury. And the doctor’s the easiest one she can run after.”
“But it might have led to all sorts of complications with the GMC! I didn’t realize how I had to watch my step.”
“You know the working rule, of course? ‘It’s all right to make your mistress into one of your patients, but it certainly isn’t all right to make your patient into one of your mistresses.’” He scratched his cheek with the tip of a pair of forceps. “If I had my way, that would be engraved in stone over medical school doorways. It’s much more useful than ‘The Art Is Long’, not to say much less depressing. But speaking as a comfortable widower, Richard my lad, the best deterrent is a wife of your own in the background.”
I considered this. “But don’t you think that marriage isn’t to be tackled as an emergency operation?”
“That’s true,” Dr Farquarson agreed. “Take your time. But not for ever.”
I sat down in the patients’ chair. “Anyway, who could I marry? I don’t know any girls.”
“Come, Richard! Even to my old eyes the streets of Hampden Cross seem full of them.”
“But they’re all on other men’s arms or the backs of other men’s motor-bikes. I don’t seem to know any girls these days. Besides, how do I know I’d choose the right one?”
“I’d say pick the one with the nicest legs. It’s as reasonable a way of choosing a wife as any.”
I persuaded Mrs Tadwich to let me continue her cardiac investigation in the surgery, where she appeared in a tight black dress, three-inch heels, and two-inch nails. Hitching up her skirt, she started every consultation by discussing her absconded husband in tones suggesting that an intimate bond now existed between us.
“We didn’t see
that
type of patient in Dr McBurney’s day,” declared Miss Wildewinde, pointedly opening the surgery windows afterwards.
It was only a day or two after meeting Mrs Tadwich that I first made acquaintance with the family at “Capri”. This was one of the houses known as “Tudor style semi-det.”, for which British builders developed such a distressing addiction between the wars. I had been called to examine a Miss Porson, and as I approached through a garden of crushing neatness I diagnosed either a middle-aged housewife with an obsessional neurosis, or an under-occupied elderly spinster putting on weight through idleness, chocolates, and gin. But the door was opened by a classical gall-bladder case, a fair, fat, fertile female of fifty, who was wearing a tweed skirt and a pink blouse.
“Miss Porson?” I asked, speculating when she last had her attack of gallstone colic.
“Why, you’re Dr Gordon!”
“That’s right.”
“I’d have known it the moment I set eyes on you.” I looked surprised, and she added, “You’re so like your father. He looked after my little girl when we were down with the Rotarians only this year.”
“Really? That’s most interesting.”
“My husband knew your father from the days when he was studying engineering in London, you know. They had lots and lots of mutual friends among the students.” Knowing the company my father had kept at St Swithin’s, this didn’t seem much of a recommendation. “It’s my little Cynthia you’ve come to see,” Mrs Porson went on. “The poor child’s so
very
delicate.”
I followed her upstairs anxiously. My family’s clinical honour was clearly at stake, and I wasn’t at all well up in children’s medicine. “Cynthia’s a very highly strung child,” Mrs Porson whispered outside the bedroom door. “You will make allowances, Dr Gordon, won’t you? Here’s the doctor, dear,” she announced, entering. “Let Mummy do your pillows and make you comfy, now.”
Cynthia turned out to be a pale, dark, subdued, but pretty girl, sitting up in bed in a flowered nightie, and aged about twenty.
“Good morning,” I said, trying not to look surprised. “And what’s the trouble?”
“She’s got one of her feverish bouts, doctor,” said Mother, behind me. “I took her temperature this morning and it was ninety-nine point six. So I said ‘Off to bed you go, my girl, and we’ll get the doctor.’”
“Quite. Well, Miss Porson, Have you any particular symptoms?”
“She had a headache just above her eyes and buzzing in her ears,” said Mother.
“And do you often get such attacks?” I asked the patient.
“Yes, doctor,” replied Mother immediately. “About every six weeks. She’s
very
delicate, aren’t you, dear?”
“I’m not,” murmured Cynthia, her lower lip protruding almost imperceptibly.
“Yes you are, dear,” Mother wagged her finger, with fairly playful reproach. “Mother knows, dear.”
“There’s nothing physically wrong with Cynthia,” I said to Mrs Porson, accepting a cup of coffee downstairs afterwards. “Her temperature’s quite normal by my thermometer.”
“But I know how careful one has to be. Cynthia’s so delicate, particularly now the nights are turning chilly.”
“Quite. Has she any job?”
“Oh, no, Doctor! She’s such a help to me in the house.”
“I see.” The diagnosis was now becoming clear. As Dr Farquarson sometimes put it, it isn’t only the obstetricians who have the privilege of cutting the umbilical cord.
“You know, I think you’d find her general health would benefit from some outside interests.”
“But she’s such a shy girl, the poor dear.”
“Has she any boy friends?”
Her mother looked surprised. “Why…no, Doctor. No, none at all.” She added quickly, “It’s not that she isn’t interested in the opposite sex, of course.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that for a moment,” I said with a smile. “I’ll come and see her tomorrow, if I may.”
“You really must have supper with us one evening, Dr Gordon,” Mrs Porson invited from the front door. “How about next week?”
I wasn’t anxious to be involved in the private lives of my patients, but I accepted – partly because of the family connexion, and partly because it would be an evening away from the Crypt and Mr Tuppy. I hoped meanwhile that Cynthia would find some presentable youth to take her to the pictures, because girls who have regular dates with young men don’t develop regular headaches.
The supper was a dismal meal. Mr Porson, who seemed to be some sort of iron merchant, talked only about business. Mrs Porson talked only about her daughter’s health. Cynthia talked about nothing at all.
After the meal I suddenly found myself alone with her in the sitting-room. She seemed a pleasant girl, though she appeared to lack all the things mentioned in the advertisements. She hadn’t anything to chat about except her symptoms, until she sighed and said, “I often wish I could go away. For a long, long sea voyage, for instance. I’m sure it would do me ever so much good.”
“Well – why don’t you have a try? You might get a job as a stewardess?”
“I’ve thought of that. But I couldn’t really leave Mummy.”
“Perhaps one day the time will come when you’ll have to,” I said, as she looked so miserable. “You know – starting a home of your own.”
She gave one of her rare smiles and began talking about the garden.
“You’ve done absolute wonders for Cynthia,” whispered Mrs Porson as I left. “She’s
quite
a different girl since you’ve taken her in hand.”
“I’ll tell my father next time I see him,” I smiled back. “Oh, Dr Gordon,” she breathed. “Do you really mean it?” I thought this an odd remark, but returned to the Crypt satisfied with my evening’s treatment.
“There’s another call for Miss Porson,” said Miss Wildewinde the next day. “We never had anything like so much trouble from that family when Dr McBurney was here.”
This time Cynthia had vague stomach ache. A couple of days later it was vague headache, and three days after that vague earache. Every time Mother took her temperature, packed her off to bed, and picked up the telephone. My work in the New Town was now increasing daily, the influenza virus was jubilantly starting the open season for human beings, and I decided that I must take a firm line. Besides, far from benefiting from my advice, the poor girl was becoming a flourishing neurotic.
After I had examined Cynthia a few days later for a vague backache, I called Mother into the sitting-room and announced as weightily as possible, “Mrs Porson – I want to have a serious talk with you.”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“About your daughter.”
“But of course, Doctor.” She gave me a smile.
“Mrs Porson, you may think me perhaps rather young and inexperienced–”
“No, no, not at all!” she interrupted. “Not a
bit
too young. Why, these days young people make up their minds ever so much earlier, don’t they?”
“I mean, you may think me rather young to speak to you like this.”
“Say
exactly
what’s on your mind, Doctor. I know
just
how you feel.”
“Thank you. Naturally I wanted to mention it to you before saying anything to Cynthia herself.”
“But how terribly, terribly sweet of you! And they say the younger generation are so inconsiderate.”
“To be blunt, Cynthia needs marriage.”
She threw her arms round me and burst into tears. “Oh, Doctor! Now
you
can call me mother, too!”
My departure was a blur of Mrs Porson’s face, the chintz curtains in the hall, the gnomes in the garden, the white wicket gate… The rest of my rounds passed in a daze.
“But how can the beastly woman possibly have got hold of the idea that I personally wanted to save her blasted daughter from the psychological scrap-heap?” I complained angrily to Dr Farquarson as soon as I got in.
“A doctor’s a bit of a catch for any fond mother,” he said, trying to keep his eyebrows under control. “Though I must admit it’s an awkward situation for a young man.”
“But what on earth can I do? And what a fool I’ve been! I thought even the Porsons couldn’t expect me to swallow the medicine as well as prescribe it.”