Richard Gordon - DOCTOR AT LARGE

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'Number three!' Ernest interrupted, as though announcing the winner of a raffle. He threw open the door and switched on the light. We found ourselves in an apartment the size of a billiard-room, lined with dark-brown wallpaper and containing a pair of marble-topped tables, a bowl of waxed fruit, a dressing-table ornamented with cherubs, a wash-stand with a mauve jug and basin, and sufficient solid wardrobes to lock up a gang of burglars. In the centre of the room was a large knob-garnished brass bedstead.

Nurse Macpherson, who had said nothing since signing the register, drew in her breath.

'I don't believe it,' she muttered.

'Foller me,' Ernest repeated.

'I'll see you downstairs in five minutes for a drink,' I said. 'Hope you'll be comfortable.'

'Oh, I'll be comfortable all right. I'm used to sleeping in the middle of St Paul's.'

'Foller me!' Ernest insisted.

Number three was on the first floor, but my room appeared to be at the far end of the latest extension to the building, several of which had been added with floors at different levels.

'Don't know why she put you up here,' Ernest grumbled, pausing for breath half-way up a narrow staircase. 'There ain't been no one in ninety-four since the Farmers' Union.'

Number ninety-four was immediately under the roof, a narrow, cold, low, damp room, with a bed, a commode, and a wash-stand topped with a marble slab that reminded me of the post-mortem room. I gave Ernest a shilling, which he looked at carefully before saying, 'Goodnight!' and disappearing. I sat heavily on the bed. If this was romance, I could understand why Casanovas flourished only in warm climates.

20

I reached the ground floor before Nurse Macpherson. As the hotel had resumed the sullen silence with which it had greeted us, I decided to explore the door marked 'Lounge'. This led to a small room with some furniture arranged haphazardly, like the bodies of mountaineers frozen to death where they stood. There were three or four more palms, and in the corner was an iron grate, bare of fire irons, in which a tiny fire blushed with shame.

I was now feeling really ill and I needed a drink desperately. There was a bell by the fireplace labelled 'Service', but knowing the hotel I supplemented a ring on this by opening the door and shouting, 'Hoy!' several times loudly.

From the coffee-room, which was now lighted as a preparation for dinner, came a thin, dark, short young man in a tail-suit that stretched almost to his heels. 'What'll you be wanting?' he asked, with the amiability of citizens of the Irish Republic.

'I want a drink.'

'Sure, you can have a drink if you want to.'

'What have you got?'

'Oh, anything at all,' he told me expansively.' There's gin, whisky, rum, Guinness, crиme de menthe, port, egg nogg-'

'I'll have whisky. Two doubles, in one glass. And have you any aspirin?'

'Wouldn't you be feeling well?'

'I'd be feeling bloody awful. And please hurry up.'

By the time Nurse Macpherson appeared I had downed my quadruple whisky and twenty grains of aspirin, while the waiter found some coal and brought the poker from the office. 'We have to be careful over the fires,' he explained to me. 'Some of them commercial gentlemen pile it up as though they were stoking the _Queen Mary.'_

'Nan, my dear,' I greeted her more cheerfully. 'You're looking very beautiful.'

'My God, I could do with a drink, too. That room up there's absolutely freezing.'

'That would be number three?' asked the waiter sympathetically. 'Oh, that's a terrible room that is. It's a wonder they put humans in it at all. I'd rather sleep in the tent of a circus, that I would.'

'We want some more drinks.'

'Would the lady like a cocktail, now? I could do her a good cocktail, and very reasonable.'

'Two large whiskies will do.'

As he left and we sat down on each side of the fire I began to feel better. 'It's a pity about the single rooms,' I said, looking shiftily to see if the door was shut. 'That old buzzard in the office quite put me off my stride.'

'It doesn't matter,' she said, lighting a cigarette. 'You can creep down as soon as everyone goes to bed. It saves a lot of bother in the long run.'

'You've had some experience of this-this sort of thing?' I asked.

'Really, darling, I wasn't born yesterday.' She glanced round her. 'What a bloody hole you've taken me to, if you don't mind my saying so. This place looks like a waiting-room got up for the wake of a dead stationmaster.'

'I'm sorry. Really I am.' I reached for her hand. 'But I've never done anything like this before. And-and I did so much want to do it with you, Nan.'

She smiled, and squeezed my fingers. 'You're really very, very sweet.'

The waiter then returned with the drinks.

'I was looking you up in the visitors book, and I see you're from London,' he said. 'What sort of line of business would you be in, now?'

'I'm a doctor.'

I bit my lip; it was my second idiotic slip. Apart from the danger of discovery by confessing my profession, I was now the target for everyone's intimacies.

'Are you now? And that's very interesting.' The waiter settled himself, leaning on his up-ended tray. 'I've a great admiration for the medical profession myself, Doctor. It must be a great work, a great work. I had a brother, now, and he started off to be a doctor, but he had some sort of trouble with the authorities. Now he's an oyster-opener in one of the big hotels in O'Connell Street. Oh, he would have been a fine doctor, he would, a lovely pair of hands he had on him. And the lady wouldn't be a nurse, would she?'

'It happens that we are cousins,' I told him firmly. 'Our uncle, who was in the brass business, has unfortunately died suddenly. We are attending his funeral. The reason we are travelling together is that we both work in London, and it is obviously more convenient for us to share the same car. The reason we are in this hotel is that we met a man on the road-'

'Now it's a very convenient thing that you should have come tonight, Doctor, because I was having a lot of trouble with my feet, you see, and I was meaning to go to a doctor tomorrow. But now you're here, it'll save me the journey. I think that the arches must be dropped, or something, but I get a sort of burning pain along here which sort of moves round and round-'

'I'll hear about your feet later, if you really want me to. Will you please get us two more drinks.'

'But you've only just started those.'

'I know. But we shall have finished them before you can turn round.'

'I've had some trouble with my kidneys, too, I'd like to talk to you about, Doctor.'

'Yes, yes! Later if you like. But drinks now.'

'Just as you please, Doctor. I don't mind at all.'

We had several more drinks, after which Nurse Macpherson became more romantic. The waiter fortunately had to go and serve dinner.

'How about some food,' I suggested.

'Ummm! I'm ravenous. And there's a good three hours to kill before we can decently disappear.' I kissed her, and she began to laugh. 'I wonder how old Plumtree is?' she asked. Both laughing, we entered the coffee-room.

***

I later decided that the decline of the evening really started with dinner. The coffee-room itself instantly damped our spirits. It was a long, cold place, decorated only with pictures of horses in heavy gilt frames. Most of the tables were bare, those laid for dinner being huddled round a small fire in a large grate at one end. Our fellow diners were a pair of old ladies at a table thickly covered with patent-medicine bottles, an elderly couple, a red-faced, fat man with a ginger moustache, and a thin, white-haired man who was drinking soup and reading the paper propped against a bottle of beer. Everyone was silent and eating steadily, as though they were anxious to get back to the unknown corners of the hotel where they lurked.

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