Doctor On The Ball (9 page)

‘The General’s in trouble again,’ Mrs Jenkins greeted me when I arrived at the surgery two mornings later. ‘Worse than that time the old operating-theatre ceiling caved in.’

She passed me Britain’s most popular paper, with SCANNER SCANDAL! on the front page. Outraged, it recounted a miracle machine presented to the government by saintly citizens, only to be lost by the National Health Service as casually as a commuter’s umbrella. The paper expressed little wonder at doctors continually cutting off the wrong arms and legs and leaving the cutlery inside.

I painfully feigned amused detachment. The case of the misplaced scanner was hardly my responsibility, but I had the feeling of not wishing to encounter Syd Farthingale again any more than Her Majesty might welcome intruders in her bedroom.

He appeared at evening surgery.

‘What about putting it back?’ I started sternly.

‘But doctor, I
have
put it back,’ he replied nervously. ‘Every bleeding bit of it, it’s all round the hospital, everywhere from the consultants’ toilet to the mortuary. Been there all week, but nobody seems to notice,’ he complained indignantly. ‘It’s amazing! People are blind. I suppose there’s always bits and pieces hanging about hospitals, you know, sort of wheelchairs, laundry bins, cardiac-arrest trolleys, everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job to shift them. It’s on my conscience, doctor, something terrible.’

‘So it should be,’ I told him harshly.

‘I mean, all this in the papers, kids giving up their pocket money and that.’

‘I’m glad you feel the extent of your heartlessness.’

‘Also, Mr Applebee the administrator – no pal of mine, I’m telling you – is beginning to ask questions like, Have I got anything that dropped off the back of an ambulance? Pure victimization. And furthermore,’ he admitted miserably, ‘the lads ain’t all that solid on police harassment; in fact, if they saw the police harassing me they’d probably all fall about. I dunno, the old spirit’s gone since those days when you’d get Mr Applebee on bended knee asking me please to turn the water on again. I just don’t know what to do next.’

‘Let me make it crystal clear, Mr Farthingale, that I utterly refuse to become involved with this sordid affair further.’

‘But you got to help me, doctor,’ he insisted.

I gave the look of Dr Arnold at Rugby selecting the right birch for the stroke. ‘Go to Mr Applebee first thing tomorrow and make a clean breast of it.’

‘I’d like to, doctor. But what about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Well, it’s you what suggested it,’ he said slyly. ‘We’re in this together, ain’t we?’

I was aghast. ‘You…you own up at once,’ I proposed weakly.

‘Then there’s these other things.’

‘What other things?’

‘Well, sort of pyjamas, sets of operating instruments, towels, dressings, soap, crates of sugar and tea, few washing machines, typewriters, beds, gowns, gloves, sets of canteen trays, speculums, sigmoidoscopes, packs of razors, anaesthetic machines, cornflakes; the wife’s for ever complaining there’s hardly room to swing a cat, and that’s come from the General, too.’

‘You must take it all back,’ I told him, flustered. ‘At once. Rent a van. An articulated lorry, if necessary.’

‘Supposing there was a spot of bother with the Old Bill?’ He eyed me like Napoleon observing the Imperial Guard charge an unexpected breech in the enemy’s lines. ‘They’d feel real puzzled you never grassed, wouldn’t they? So’s they could call on me early one morning and make a nice clean job of it. They got shockingly suspicious minds, the police. That’s perverting the course of justice, innit? Funny thing,’ he reminisced, ‘a pal of mine got done for just that last Whitsun. Matter of getting a witness to suffer what you doctors call loss of memory. Got six years. Mind, the judge was a silly old moo, got the idea in his head that witnesses tell the truth actual. Come to think of it,’ he speculated knowledgeably, ‘the law might have you and me for conspiracy, then there’s no limit to the sentence, not so’s you notice it.’

Mr Farthingale,’ I said. ‘If you are ill, I shall be delighted to see you any time of the day or night. If you are not, I never want to see you again. Ever. Good evening.’

I drove to the General as soon as surgery was over. Jilly was finishing an operating list. She emerged from the theatre in pale blue operating dress, paper hat and white clogs, clipboard of patient’s notes under her arm.

‘Why, Daddy,’ she greeted me cheerfully. ‘Seeing a patient?’

‘Do you know a man called Farthingale?’

Jilly nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, one of the theatre porters, and cheeky with it. I’ve a vague feeling he may not be completely honest.’

‘Something terrible has happened.’ I grasped her bare forearm. ‘I see myself struck off the register, disgraced, dishonoured, disowned, arrested, tried. I hear the clang of prison doors. I shall have to resign from the golf club.’

‘Golly,’ said Jilly.

‘I must talk.’

‘Well,
I
must see a patient in recovery. Look, go down to the mess. I’ll come and buy you a drink,’ she suggested charitably.

And what would Dr Quaggy say? I wondered. That I was Churchford’s answer to Dr Crippen?

I put the case to her in the residents’ bar.

‘But why don’t you run and tell a policeman?’ she asked, mystified. ‘There’s always plenty of them hanging about accident and emergency.’

I explained desperately. ‘That would be simply clapping my own handcuffs, as the ghastly little ponce’s accomplice.’

‘But the police would always accept your word for what happened.’

‘They didn’t when I drove into that milk float.’

‘I know! Turn Queen’s evidence. Then you can lay it on as thick as you like.’

‘There’s more than legal quibbles,’ I explained in martyred tones. ‘He can sneak on me, but I can’t on him. Unethical, you see. Professional secrecy. I learned about the scanner only as the cause of his psychological disturbance. It would be exactly the same if he’d asked me to treat a gunshot wound, or bellyache from gulping a handful of diamonds before going through Customs. Hippocrates really does choose the most awkward times to come whispering in your ear.’

‘Oh, come off it, Daddy. All you’d get from the GMC would be a round of applause. Why, hello, Dr Windrush.’

I grabbed him by the lapels. He was too alarmed even for his usual humourless remark about rich GPs buying penniless pathologists a drink. I repeated my evidence. He gave a low whistle. ‘Well, breaking stones every day in broad arrows is a jolly sight healthier exercise than jogging in a sexy tracksuit–’

‘You’ve got to help me.’

‘Don’t worry, they’ll probably give you a cushy job in the library, with the stockbrokers and defrocked clergymen–’

‘You have got to help my father,’ said Jilly fiercely.

He looked startled. ‘Sorry. I only came to collect a specimen from a houseman, but I’ll have a gin and ton. Perhaps we should send Applebee an anonymous letter saying where the bits of scanner are, like a treasure hunt? He’s a dreadful creep, of course, no more than a frustrated VAT inspector, but this affair has dropped him so deep in the droppings, he’d be too grateful to fuss how the thing came to be scattered under his nose. He can organize search parties, issue a statement to the press that the scanner was merely mislaid, something that’s always happening in government departments. I mean, the Foreign Office is for ever leaving top-secret papers in bistros, the Army litters Dorset with unexploded shells, and the Exchequer loses millions of quid every time it tries to add up.’

‘Without mentioning that king-sized kleptomaniac Farthingale?’ I asked.

‘No need. I’ll say it came to me in a dream.’

A ray of sunlight fell between the iron-studded gates. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Farthingale get his just deserts,’ I reflected warmly. ‘Preferably stuffed up somewhere uncomfortable.’

‘Leave it to me,’ said Windrush, sipping thoughtfully.

That night I could barely sleep. I kept listening for the Old Bill sledge-hammering down my front door. After morning surgery, I missed lunch and drove to the General.

I bleeped Jilly. She was with Mr Applebee, and would I come up? I took the lift to the administration floor. Approaching down the corridor was Windrush.

‘Richard! I’ve fixed that one-man Mafia, Farthingale,’ he greeted me cheerfully. ‘Grabbed him in the porters’ rest room – where he earns his pay playing pontoon – said he’d been shopped, demanded to know where the loot was stashed, and said I’d see he collected ten years unless he resigned as shop steward of ACHE. I got really tough, made Judge Jeffreys look like a social worker. Don’t you see? This’ll instantly reopen the children’s ward, closed because of his row with the shop steward of OUCH about who’ll screw in the light bulbs, or something. I’m just bearing the good news to Applebee. He’ll be over the moon, won’t think of asking nasty questions. By the way, your Jilly’s been scavenging. Oh, Applebee’s having a wonderful morning.’

Jilly was in the office amid a bodyscanner assembly kit. Applebee was a small man with thick dark hair, thick dark-rimmed glasses and a well-pressed dark suit. He was standing behind his desk beating his brow with the palm of his hand and shouting hysterically, ‘This is the end!’

Jilly gave a little wave. ‘You know our Mr Applebee?’

‘The end!’ he repeated.

‘Something the matter?’ murmured Windrush.

‘Look at this!’ Applebee flourished a flimsy. ‘The scanner I indented from the Department of Health five years ago. It’s arrived. This morning. It’s in crates, down in the storeroom. I still cannot afford to run one scanner. What the hell am I going to do with two?’

‘Send it back,’ Windrush pointed out.

Applebee gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘Send it back? Impossible! You know what they’d do? Dock my budget. Then I’d have to close another operating theatre. I think I shall resign,’ he ended miserably.

‘The administration of the National Health Service presents many difficulties, certainly,’ I agreed.

‘I know!’ suggested Jilly. ‘Take the new one to London, and distribute it in bits round the Department headquarters at the Elephant and Castle.’

But Applebee did not seem to possess even a VAT man’s sense of humour. His voice broke. ‘I never want to see another hospital. I’m going to tear up my kidney donor card.’

I laughed loudly.

Everyone stared.

‘I’ve just remembered! The colonel commanding that ammunition depot ended up with fifty-one machine guns. Dreadfully embarrassing. Took years to get rid of the extra one again.’

‘What machine guns?’ asked Applebee sharply.

‘Oh, the colonel in the story. The one that gave me the idea of telling Syd Farthingale to put the scanner back on the sly, when he confessed to me in the surgery two weeks ago that he’d stolen it.’

‘What’s all this?’ glared Applebee.

‘Oh, Daddy,’ sighed Jilly.

‘Oh, Daddy!’ grinned Windrush.

‘Mr Applebee,’ said Jilly. ‘You’ve had a trying time. Let’s go down to the residents’ bar, shall we, where my father will stand us all drinks.’

Windrush telephoned during breakfast.

‘Syd Farthingale?’ I said at once. ‘Applebee’s had him arrested? Or had the sense to give him a job? Equipment procurement officer, the most economical one in the Health Service.’

‘I am calling to congratulate you.’

I asked on what.

‘Your election as president of the Churchford Cricket Club.’

I was stumped.

‘It was decided last night at the club’s annual general meeting, after dinner at the Blue Boar.’

I pointed out, ‘But I’m not a member of the Churchford Cricket Club.’

‘Then the greater the honour.’

‘But it’s ridiculous! I don’t know anything about cricket. I’ve only been to Lord’s once, and it rained all day. Everyone got terribly drunk.’

‘The consensus of the meeting was to bestow the distinction on a widely respected, indeed beloved, GP. You’re not being very gracious, nitpicking like this.’

Windrush can be overbearing, I suppose through his job as a pathologist of continually facing fellow-doctors with their mistakes.

He added emolliently, ‘All the president does is sit in a deckchair in the sun while the batting side keep bringing him pints of hitter. And you know who you’re replacing?’ I warily recognized his wily voice, in which he made helpful suggestions when we played golf. ‘The biggest cricket buff in Churchford. Bill Ightam, your daughter Jilly’s chief at the General.’

I hesitated. Surgical eminence is like sainthood achieved through finite steps of increasing radiance. Jilly had risen from houseman to Bill Ightam’s registrar. Her ascent to senior registrar depended on the sort of reference he wrote her.

‘Good, you’ve accepted!’ said Windrush forcefully. ‘Congratulations. I’ll drop into your house, to present you with your club tie.’

‘Aren’t you a little senior for schoolboy games?’ Sandra suggested, when I explained this at the kitchen breakfast table.

‘It’s more than a game, it’s a national institution,’ I corrected her. ‘The Men of Hambledon are as much a part of our history as the Tolpuddle Martyrs. They played cricket in Dickens – Dingley Dell
v
. the All-Muggletons – and surely you remember there’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight, play up! play up! play up! and play the game! Why, the most famous cricketer who ever went to the crease was a doctor.’

I already felt the dignity of office.

I finished my tomato omelette with grilled tomatoes. It was a Thursday morning in June, when my long evenings were spent in the greenhouse. This was set against the southern wall of our Victorian villa, facing St Alphege’s (vicar low church and low back pain). It was a Christmas present from Sandra, as a tranquillizer. Like my patients, it had endured a winter battle against infection – mealy bug, leaf miner, thrips, wireworms – which I similarly treated with powerful chemicals until it was more sterile than the operating theatres at the General, where Jilly tells me the problem of cross-infection is worse than that of surgical egos.

In June the greenhouse became as rewarding as the end of a multiple pregnancy, cucumbers dangling as plump as green salami, aubergines as burstingly purple as nasty bruises, tomatoes pressing against the panes like commuters crammed into rush-hour trains. That morning, I had proudly presented Sandra with my first trug of Ailsa Craigs.

My shrewdness in accepting the presidency was emphasized during the day by my partner Dr Elaine Spondeck, who recounted that Dr Quaggy was desperate for the honour.

‘Local prestige, you know, which he confuses with personal advancement,’ I told Sandra that evening. ‘One in the eye for him, eh?’

I set two piled trugs on the kitchen table, where she was making our spaghetti
al pomodoro.

‘Tomatoes,’ she murmured.

‘Yes, I’m going to need a machete to hack my way in soon,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘I think it’s transfusing the Gro-bags with stale blood. Tomatoes just love getting their roots into juicy human haemoglobin.’

‘Perhaps I can do stuffed tomatoes for tomorrow’s lunch,’ she said doubtfully. ‘And tomatoes
à la parisienne
for dinner. I suppose it’s always nice to lay down a shelf of tomato chutney.’

The doorbell rang. It was Windrush, flourishing my tie. I thanked him, remarking that the purple and pink stripes went surprisingly well with the primrose.

‘Did I mention on the phone yesterday about the donation?’

‘Of course, I should be delighted.’ I generously mooted a sum.

‘Come off it, Richard,’ he complained ungratefully. ‘This isn’t a kid’s playgroup. It’s our long-standing tradition that the president donates heftily. As we’re badly in the red, I’d rather appreciate the cheque here and now. And you might make a note in your diary of the club’s annual dinner,’ he directed. ‘First Saturday in October, Blue Boar, big do. We always get some first-class cricketer for the speech, maybe Botham, Mike Brearley, Geoff Boycott. To the president falls the honour of introducing him – you don’t mind?’

‘Charmed.’

‘Also of paying his fee, hotel and travelling expenses.’

‘Fine! While we’re at it, why not invite Lillee or Rod Marsh across from Australia?’

But Windrush is as insensitive to irony as traffic wardens to imprecation.

‘You’re attending our local Derby on Saturday
v.
Beagle Hill?’

‘I assure you, I take my duties quite as seriously as the world’s other presidents.’

‘Good! We’re so short you can umpire.’

‘But I don’t know the rules!’

He dismissed the objection. ‘The charm of cricket is in the rules being simply an extension of civilized behaviour.’ I handed him the cheque. ‘I say! Thank you, Richard! We were only expecting about half that. While you’ve got your chequebook out, perhaps you’d write one for the tie? Price on the ticket, sorry it’s rather stiff, but they’re hand-made to order.’

First thing next morning, I found the greenhouse thicker with tomatoes than the Chinese New Year with scarlet lanterns. I brought a plastic sack of them into the kitchen, where Sandra was preparing our breakfast of tomato sausages and devilled tomatoes.

‘For chrissake! What am I supposed to do with these?’ she inquired.

‘Tomato sauce?’ I suggested uneasily. ‘Much more wholesome than that slimy stuff in bottles. I know it sounds stupid, but I don’t seem able to pick fast enough to catch up with them.’

She said faintly, ‘I seem to remember an old Mrs Beeton recipe for tomato marmalade.’

‘I expect it’s jolly exciting on hot buttered toast.’

On my way home from surgery for lunch, I stopped in the High Street for a copy of Wisden’s
Cricketers’ Almanack.
I was horrified to find that the game had not rules but laws, all as unintelligible to me as the complex laws of genetics which professors write about in the
BMJ
. I turned the twenty-two closely printed pages of them while eating my tomato soufflé. I had discovered that the bat must not exceed 4½ inches in its widest part and be not more than 38 inches in length when the telephone rang. It was Bill Ightam.

I uttered to the consultant surgeon the same vague, jocular, hopeful remarks about Jilly making satisfactory progress as I had made, with bottled-up fear and fondness, to pedagogues since her finger painting and water play in nursery school.

‘Quite one of the best registrars I’ve ever had.’ Bill Ightam was short, dapper, amiable, blessed with the appellation on every lip of ‘a very decent chap’. Also, I sent him private patients. ‘I bet she gets her Fellowship first shot. Er, Richard. Er, you know my youngest daughter, Thomasina?’ He added in a rush, ‘Do you think she could play in the match tomorrow?’

I made a slight procrastinating noise deep in the larynx. Doubtless the Archbishop of Canterbury does the same when pressed about the ordination of women.

‘As you know,’ Bill Ightam continued, ‘I have three other daughters, Edwina, Roberta and Georgina, but alas! No son.’ He gulped. ‘As I might one day hope to see play at Lord’s. But Thomasina’s a remarkable athlete, and dead keen on cricket. She captained the side at school – naturally, I sent her to the right one – and would absolutely adore turning out for Churchford. Oh, I know women’s lib hasn’t made a big stand at the wicket, they seem only concerned with uninteresting things like lesbianism. I put it to Windrush, and he said it was for the new president to decide.’

‘My dear chap, as far as
I’m
concerned, Churchford can field the entire chorus line from the Palladium.’

‘Thank you,’ he said chokingly. ‘Thank you…thank you…’

I swear I heard a sob as he rang off.

I avoided the greenhouse until that evening after dinner (cold tomato mousse). I was instantly gripped with terror. The structure was in danger of exploding and contaminating the district with tomato fallout. I filled a wheelbarrow and trundled it to the back door.

‘Perhaps we could crush them in the bath,’ I suggested weakly, as Sandra stared in speechless horror. ‘Then buy a crate of vodka and invite our friends to the biggest Bloody Mary in Churchford.’

She muttered something about, God, why did I marry the world’s only case of tomato alcoholism? I pushed the barrow to the vicarage. The vicar slammed the door, mentioning that Harvest Festival was not a moveable feast. I supposed his back was annoying him. I had the bright idea of telephoning Mrs Windrush and suggesting tomato sandwiches for tomorrow’s game’s tea interval, but they already had tomatoes as Job boils. I left them in the garage and hoped for vandals. I dreamed of tomato tendrils creeping upstairs like triffids.

The day of the match dawned grey. I brought Sandra the first trug of aubergines.

‘It’s moussaka time!’ She gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘Or maybe ratatouille with everything? Or aubergines
au gratin à la catalane, portugaise, toulousaine, grec
and
Imam Baldi
, which is fried with onions and currants, and in Turkish means the fainting priest because it smells so overpoweringly delicious, did you know? Did you know?’

She burst into tears. I did not mention the greenhouse containing enough ripe cucumbers to make sandwiches for every repertory production of
The Importance of Being Ernest
since Oscar Wilde got out of Reading Gaol.

The game started at noon. I was glad to leave home at eleven. Sandra was still sniffing, while filling jars of tomato chow-chow.

The Churchford cricket ground was delightful. A row of oaks occupied one side with the unassuming dignity of senior members in the pavilion at Lord’s, the other was shielded by a lofty palisade of poplars. The ripe, unblemished green sloped gently to a spacious white-verandahed pavilion, in which I was pleased to notice white-clothed trestle tables with wives busy among cold chicken and strawberries, and equally so to spot on the bar a firkin of Huntsman’s Double Hop, unadulterated since it moistened the jocular lips of Mr Jorrocks.

Pistol-shot cracks behind the pavilion led me to sinewy Windrush in flannels, practising against a young man’s bowling in the nets with the dedicated air of having been at it since dawn.

‘There’s been a big development,’ he said at once, sticking his bat under his arm and striding from the stumps.