Gerald Durrell - Fillets of Plaice

“There,” he said. “That should fix it.”

I lifted my savagely aching head off the pillow and surveyed Veraswami.

“Has anyone ever suggested to you, Doctor, that you gave up trying to heal the sick and took up taxidermy?” I asked.

“No, no one,” said Dr Veraswami, puzzled.

I eased myself off the bed and started putting on my clothes.

“Well, I should try it,” I said. “In taxidermy you get no complaints from your patients.”

Veraswami had watched me dressing with increasing alarm. “But, vere are you going?” he asked. “You can’t leave. Not now. Supposing your nose started the bleeding again, I vould be left vith the can.”

“Take your forceps to a quiet corner and sit on them,” I advised tiredly. “I’m going back to Abbotsford.”

I found a taxi and drove back in it, thinking evil thoughts about the medical profession in general and Dr Veraswami in particular. I remembered that even in the 1920s if you took a short course in medicine in France, you were not allowed to practise medicine there but your papers were marked “Suitable for the Orient”. I wondered whether this was the Orient’s revenge.

Then I remembered the story, probably apocryphal, about the Indian who wanted above all else to get his BSc. He sat exams year after year and failed. At last, in desperation, the authorites suggested that he gave up trying to get a degree and turned his talents elsewhere. So he became an adviser on how to obtain the BSc, and to prove his worth he had cards printed which read “Mr Ram Sing, BSc (failed)”. Obviously, I thought, nursing my aching head, Veraswami (whose Christian name was probably Chipati) was what was known in the profession as Chipati Veraswami, MD (failed).

I arrived back at Abbotsford and Pimmie took a swift look at me.

“Did they fix it?” she asked.

“Don’t touch me,” I said. “They butchered me and I’m one gigantic exposed nerve ending. Offer me euthanasia and I’ll be your friend for life.”

“Into bed wit yer,” said Pimmie. “I’ll be back in a moment.” Tiredly, I removed my clothing and flopped into bed. Anything, even death, I thought, would be preferable to the pain I was now experiencing. I remembered, somewhat wryly, that I had come to Abbotsford for peace and quiet.

Pimmie entered the room with a hypodermic.

“Give me yer behind,” she commanded. “Morphine. Doctor’s orders.”

She administered the drug deftly and then peered at my face with great earnestness. I was not a prepossessing sight. My right eye was swollen and half closed, my nostril spread wide like a boxer’s by the preponderance of bandage, my beard and moustache an unlovely filigree of matted blood. She drew in her breath sharply and frowned.

“Sure and if I had them here I’d give them a bit of me mind,” she said with sudden savagery.

“It’s sweet of you to care,” I said drowsily. “I didn’t know you worried about me.”

Pimmie drew herself up sharply.

“Worry about you?” she asked witheringly. “I’m not worried about you. It’s all the extra work they’ve given me. That’s what worries me. You go to sleep now and stop yer blarney.”

She went to the door.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” she said, “and don’t let me find you awake.”

Chipati Veraswami, I thought, soothed on a cushion of morphia, MD (failed). Pimmie could teach him a thing or two. She passed.

BETWEEN the ages of sixteen and twenty-two quite a number of personable young ladies drifted in and out of my life and none of them made a very deep impression upon me with the exception of Ursula Pendragon White. She popped in and out of my life for a number of years with monotonous regularity, like a cuckoo out of a clock, and of all the girlfriends I had I found that she was the only one who could arouse feeling in me that ranged from alarm and despondency to breathless admiration and sheer horror.

Ursula first came to my attention on the top of a number 27 bus that was progressing in a stately fashion through the streets of Bournemouth, that most salubrious of seaside resorts, where I then lived. I occupied the back seat of the bus while Ursula and her escort were at the front. It is possible that my attention would not have been attracted to her if it had not been for her voice which was melodious and as penetrating and all-pervading as the song of a roller canary. Looking around to find the source of these dulcet Roedean accents I caught sight of Ursula’s profile and was immediately riveted.

She had dark, naturally curly hair, which she wore short, in a sort of dusky halo round her head and it framed a face that was both beautiful and remarkable. Her eyes were enormous and of that deep blue, almost violet colour, that forget-me-nots got in the sun, fringed with very dark, long lashes and set under very dark, permanently raised eyebrows. Her mouth was of the texture and quality that should never, under any circumstances, be used for eating kippers or frogs’ legs or black pudding, and her teeth were white and even.

But it was her nose that was breath-taking. I had never seen a nose like it. It was long, but not too long, and combined three separate styles. It started off by being Grecian in the strict classical sense, but at the end the most extraordinary things happened to it. It suddenly tip-tilted like the nose of a very elegant pekinese and then it was as though somebody had delicately sliced off the tip of the tilt to make it flat. Written down badly like this it sounds most unattractive, but I can assure you the effect was enchanting. Young men took one look at Ursula’s nose and fell deeply and blindingly in love with it. It was a nose so charming and so unique that you could not wait to get on more intimate terms with it.

So entranced was I by her nose that it was some moments before I came to and started eavesdropping on her conversation. It was then that I discovered another of Ursula’s charms, and that was her grim, determined, unremitting battle with the English language. Where other people meekly speak their mother tongue in the way that it is taught them, Ursula adopted a more militant and Boadicea-like approach. She seized the English language by the scruff of the neck, shook it thoroughly, turned it inside out, and forced words and phrases to do her bidding, making them express things they were never meant to express. Now she leant forward to her companion and said, apropos of something they had been discussing when I had got on the bus:

“And Daddy says it’s a half a dozen of one and a dozen of the other, but I don’t think so. There’s fire without smoke and I think somebody ought to tell her. Don’t you?”

The young man, who looked like a dyspeptic bloodhound, seemed as confused at this statement as I was.

“Dunno,” he said. “Ticklish situation, eh?”

“There’s nothing funny about it, darling. It’s serious.”

“Some people,” said the young man with the air of a Greek philosopher vouchsafing a pearl of wisdom, “some people never let their right hand know what their left hand is doing.”

“My dear!” said Ursula, shocked. “I never let either of my hands know what I’m doing, but that’s not the point. What I say is... Ooooo! This is where we get off. Darling, hurry up.”

I watched her as they threaded their way down the bus. She was tall, carelessly but elegantly dressed, with one of those willowy, coltish figures that turn young men’s thoughts to lechery, and she had long and beautifully shaped legs. I watched her get down onto the pavement and then, still talking animatedly to her companion, disappear among the crowds of shoppers and holiday-makers.

I sighed. She was such a lovely girl that it seemed cruel of fate to have given me a tantalising glimpse of her and then to whisk her out of my life. But I was wrong, for within three days Ursula had been whisked back into my life where she remained, intermittently, for the next five years.