Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

In the land to which I returned, like the land which I had left, the political party system was suspended. Britain had a 'National' Government, created in 1931 under the threat of imminent national bankruptcy and continued until 1945 under the threat of imminent national extinction. Ramsay MacDonald had won his last election by asking for 'A Doctor's Mandate', a slogan suggested by Sir Edward Tiplady's _bete noire_ Sir Thomas Horder, who breakfasted _tкte-а-tкte_ every Tuesday with this self-doubting, self-despairing Prime Minister. Meanwhile, King George the Fifth gazed upon his subjects in or out of work with unfathomable benignity, the Prince of Wales cut a dash round the Empire and Cambridge continued to win the Boat Race.

The wages of unemployment was boredom. I was imprisoned in the basement, irritated by the ringing of the patients' doorbell to which my father continually ministered. I read books from the library and spent afternoons in art galleries and museums, obtaining a cultural education denied the usual biochemist. As summer came I tramped London from Parliament Hill to the Crystal Palace, patching the soles of my shoes with scraps of leather my father bought at a penny a bag from a kindly cobbler.

One early June evening, I was idling away watching my father cleaning the silver in his butler's pantry, which was hardly more than a large cupboard off the basement kitchen. He sat in shirt-sleeves and green baize apron, an emaciated hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.

'Got your eye on young Miss Elizabeth, ain't you?' he remarked abruptly.

I coloured at the discovery of a deadly and guilty secret. When she came home from boarding school I always contrived to glimpse her round corners and through the cracks of doors, or more delightfully skipping past our high window. I could only romance about her, but our fantasies are always more solidly satisfying than our realities. As I was incapable of reply, my father added casually, while polishing a silver flower bowl, 'She's not his, you know.'

I was equally shocked and intrigued. 'What makes you think that?' I asked sceptically. I had often romanticized my own true parentage, but I bore a frustrating resemblance to my father.

'I hear things,' He continued polishing in silence. 'Fact, there's precious little about the family what I don't know. When I goes into a room and they clam up tight, I says to myself, "'Ullo, something fishy here". It doesn't take much to overhear a thing or two if you're careful, though often it's not worth the bother, just a row about who they're having to dinner.'

Such duplicity increased my respect for my father. He was not entirely the simpleton I took him for. 'But whose child is she? Do you know?'

'Remember Dr Ross? Sir Ronald Ross, I should say, him of "Malaria Day"? He died a couple of years back.'

'Surely not Ross!' I exclaimed. I remembered Sir Ronald calling regularly at the house the summer we had moved in, eight years previously. He was then nearing seventy, bull necked and square jawed, wearing a grey moustache with spiked ends as might have decorated a sergeant-major. On August 20, 1897, in a small laboratory facing Queen Victoria's statue in Calcutta, Ross had discovered the parasite which caused malaria, in the stomach of the spotted-winged anopheles mosquito. This was the last link in the casual chain of a fever which had baffled man since it had speeded the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The day was celebrated by annual oratorical lunches at the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases at Putney. But Ross was mostly proud of his four novels and his poetry (which Osbert Sitwell mysteriously found of unforgettable beauty). Men always flatter themselves at doing at all what they do badly, rather than easily and well. He gave me one of his books and asked when I was going to join the Army.

'Nah, not him,' said my father contemptuously. 'There was an Italian doctor what came with him, and what had bin aht to India and China and such places.' He knocked a spike of ash with his little fingernail into the cracked saucer which passed as an ashtray. I remembered a tall, thin, sallow lank-haired younger visitor in Ross' shadow. 'When Sir Edward was still a doctor in the Army, Lady Tip was having an affair. It was during the flu, what killed so many people.' He continued steadily applying silver powder dissolved in methylated spirits from another cracked saucer.

'Lady Tip didn't catch the flu. She caught something what's more common all the year round.'

My amazement was followed by a pleasant feeling of conspiracy in lиse-majestй, and the desanctification of the goddess Elizabeth. 'They still sees each other to this day. And he still gets a bit of tail of her, for all I know. Bloody good thing, keeps the bitch in a better temper. Shouldn't think she gets even half an inch out of Sir Edward. He's a sissy, you know, written all over him.'

My father dropped his voice. The pantry door was open, and from the clatter in the kitchen it seemed Rosie was laying the trays for tomorrow's early morning teas. She always seemed to create undue noise, whatever she did.

'Why doesn't Sir Edward divorce Lady Tip?' I asked simply.

'Don't be barmy. The King's physician? A divorce would be the end of him at the Palace, that's for sure. And in a lot of other respectable houses as well. He'd never live down the scandal.' The bell rang. My father cursed, pinched out his cigarette, took off his baize apron and put on his tail coat. 'Lady Tip wants her booze, I suppose. Polish that, Jim, there's a good lad.' He tossed me the chamois leather. I started clearing the film of powder from the silver bowl, ruminating on our sensational conversation. I have refrained from giving the Italian doctor's name, because it is perpetuated in a laboratory dye for bacteria, and is familiar to the meanest medical student.

I did not anticipate being alone for long.

'Give us a kiss.'

Rosie appeared at the pantry door, red-faced, bright eyed, lips pursed invitingly. She was in her black art silk afternoon dress-it was rough brown calico for the morning's cleaning-but she had taken off her lace apron and her collar and cuffs, her dark curls tossed free of a cap, giving her an excitingly undressed look. I grabbed her, she pressed hard against me, seeming to exhale the heat of the glowing fires which she was continually reviving. 'When are you going to take me to the pictures?' she asked pertly.

'I can't afford it. I'm on the dole.'

'Go on! I'll pay.'

'That would never do.'

'Why not? Lots of girls stand treat these days.' She rubbed her rough, square nailed fingers against my cheek. As I smiled, without conceding to her, she said, 'Regular toff, ain't you?'

'I'm one of the servants, same as you are.'

'You speaks like a toff.' She slowly and voluptuously cradled my neck in her raw red arms. She had 'set her cap' at me, as they said in the paper-covered novels on greyish pages which she read beside the basement stove. I was drawn into her soft embraces like a bee into a summer flower. In common with Gerda, she never used perfume. She couldn't afford even Woolworth's. But unlike Gerda, her body had that heady tang which the Italians call _odure di donna._ She whispered, 'If you came upstairs one night, I wouldn't mind.'

'I'd wake the whole house up,' I objected.

'No you wouldn't. Not if you went careful, up the back stairs.'

'Supposing Lady Tip found out? You'd lose your position.'

Rosie wrinkled her nose, but made no reply. I had already planned the route of a tiptoe Romeo, but had refused to let myself risk it. Not through chancing Rosie the sack. But because life was humiliating enough, without taking a housemaid as a mistress. I should be letting down the toffs.

We leapt apart. The green baize door leading down to the basement creaked on its spring. Rosie was clattering at her trays again when my mother came in. She wore her best black overcoat and her black hat with a bow and black gloves. She had been to weekday evensong at Holy Trinity Church by Regent's Park, Sunday matins being precluded by the Tipladys' lunch. She stood looking through the pantry door, taking off her gloves. I was busy polishing the silver with my leather.