Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

As the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece tinged half past six, Sir Edward Tiplady came in. He was always punctual, always preoccupied, but with the doctor's knack of concentrating upon you his limitless attention for the strictly circumscribed time allowed in his presence.

'You're a rotten correspondent,' he said at once. His hands were full of open letters accumulated during his holiday.

'I'm sorry. I find writing such an effort I keep putting it off. Then it seems too late to bother.'

'You sound like one of my patients excusing his failure to break his bad habits.'

He went to the mantelpiece, taking a cigarette from a silver box amid a forest of shiny white cards inscribed with copperplate, seeking his attendance at social or medical gatherings. I never remembered the mantelpiece without them. He could have accepted barely a fraction, but I suppose stuck them up from vanity, or for self-assurance or because he thought it churlish to chuck them newly opened into the wastepaper basket.

'You look five years older, Jim. When did you get back?'

'Christmas Eve.'

'You knew they'd made Tommy Horder a lord?'

'Yes, that was last year, just after I left England.'

'God knows why. Pal of Ramsay Mac's, I suppose. Tommy hasn't done anything in particular since attending the last King and discovering sugar in the Royal wee.'

He was famously jealous of unpretentious, sarcastic Thomas Horder, twenty years his senior and living down the road at No 141. Horder had made his way without pushing too violently the doors of the many anterooms to medical success. Tiplady was a deft manipulator of men and their favours, and had no doubt whatever that he was a physician fit for a King. Perhaps he saw the truth which everyone whispered, that Lord Horder was the better doctor.

'Did you see this year's Honours List? Morris of the Morris Oxford now Lord Nuffield! Neither Rolls nor Royce managed that.'

Sir Edward lit the cigarette with his gold petrol lighter and threw himself into a brocade armchair, sheaf of letters on his lap. He was tall and lean, handsome, fair-haired and smooth-cheeked, in his early forties. He had as usual plunged from holiday into consultations already arranged by his secretary Mrs Packer, and wore his professional uniform of black jacket and striped trousers. He seldom changed for dinner like everyone else, his evenings always busy with patients or meetings. I noticed that he now sported a large pearl pin through his grey silk tie, and a dashing lavender waistcoat. He still wore spats, though he had abandoned the wing collar during the past twelve-month. He always had a clinical smell about him, a faint tangy odour of antiseptic. Or perhaps he only suggested it.

He sat smiling, wrinkling the fine lines round his pale blue eyes, looking at me quizzically but fondly. He always treated me in a humorously easygoing way. He was always unsparingly kind to me and effortlessly generous. I think he found our relationship less complicated than any other which he was obliged to make in the house. Of course, it was a Platonic homosexual one. This streak in Tiplady was then unmentionable, tacitly unrecognizable, and believed to nurture the seeds of collapse of the British Empire as of the Roman.

'So you're not going back to Germany?' I shook my head. He continued, 'I suppose every young man's entitled to one voyage of adventure, even if it ends in shipwreck. You're far more self-assured,' he decided. 'Meet any nice girls there?'

'Only Dr Dieffenbach's daughter.'

'What's-her-name…yes, Gerda. She must be very grown up. She was a little thing of seven or eight when I finally got Otto out of the clutches of our military people. What's he think of our friend Hitler?'

'He's one of his most fervent supporters.'

Sir Edward looked shocked. 'I just don't believe you. A man of Otto's social position and intelligence falling for all that ranting and raving-'

'You don't understand how it is over there-' I stopped. It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain Germany in secure, easygoing, respectable, comfortable, unexcitable, insular, fogbound England. 'People like the Dieffenbachs see Hitler as their saviour against the Communists. And the man to put Germany back on the map, the map which they remember from 1914. The Nazis sit round camp fires singing patriotic songs, and the next morning batter to death anyone who disagrees with them.'

'But that's all exaggerated, surely?' Sir Edward looked pained that I should regale him with travellers' tales. 'It was exactly the same during the War, our newspapers running a serial of frightfulness by the Hun, babies on bayonets and all that. I never believed a word of it, neither did anyone else with a brain. It was all a ruse of Northcliffe's to whip up morale on the Home Front. Well, he got his Viscountancy out of it.' A large, fluffy, pale ginger cat leapt into Sir Edward's lap, its claws scratching the bundle of letters. I had not been aware of an animal in the room, but cats seem able to materialize themselves at will. He sat stroking it restlessly. 'I utterly refuse to take a single word that Hitler utters seriously.'

I did not feel that I could contradict him. Men believe what they want to believe, or dare not disbelieve. That was Hitler's secret weapon from the start. I only repeated what I had told my father, of Germany already a nation of marching armies.

'Well, we won't be able to reintroduce conscription here,' he said cheerfully, abruptly standing up and turfing off the cat. He always seemed to be moving. 'MacDonald and the Labour Party would have fits. We'll have to rely on the Territorials and the Officers Training Corps in the public schools to keep us out of the soup. I wager everyone will have forgotten Hitler in five years. Their Chancellors come and go like the turns in a music hall show, surely?' He pushed the bell beside the fireplace. 'I say, weren't you ill over there? Otto wrote something last summer about a lymphangitis of the arm. That must have been most unpleasant for you.'

This was the moment for me to produce, like the prize of the Saladin's talisman from the Crusades, the phial of tablets which I had stolen from Domagk's room.

'What's this stuff?' He stood with legs apart before the fire, turning the phial in his fingers without opening it.

'It's the drug Dr Dieffenbach cured my arm with. It goes by the name of "Streptozon".'

'Proprietary names mean nothing,' he interrupted impatiently. 'You can name a drug like a new sort of chocolate.'

'Chemically, it's para-amino sulphonamide. I G Farben have been making it for years, as a red dye for carpets and curtains and all that. For some reason or other they decided to try it against streptococcal infections. I've even had a look at the lab report on their infected mice.'

'How did you come by this?'

'It's a sample given me by Professor Domagk.'

'Professor who?'

I repeated the name. 'He's the fellow who did all the work on it.'

'Never heard of him, I'm afraid.' To my amazement, I had my trophy handed back.

'But aren't you interested in it?'

'Not particularly. Chemotherapy is an exclusively German fetish, because they are better at handling molecules than handling people, and they have no compunction about slaughtering droves of mice to prove some obscure and often impractical chemical point. I suppose I was a bad research worker when I was younger, because I became too friendly with my guinea-pigs.' He sat at the mahogany bureau by the window, spreading out his letters and uncapping his fountain-pen. 'Leonard Colebrook is at this very moment trying to cure ordinary puerperal fever by injecting his mothers with arsenicals-the arsenicals which Ehrlich invented against the spirochaete. With utter lack of success.'

I had not imagined this rebuff. 'It worked on my arm,' I objected.