Richard Gordon: DOCTOR AT LARGE

'If you're looking for the lady,' said the waiter, 'she's gone out for a walk with the Major.'

Nurse Macpherson and I said little on the journey home. When we were nearing the Zoo again she began to laugh.

'I don't really see there's anything very funny in it,' I told her sourly. 'I've been extremely, unwell all the time, I've got a roaring temperature, and how did I know what the bloody place was like?'

'I'm not blaming you about the hotel I was just thinking what a laugh the girls will get in the Nurses' Home.'

'You wouldn't tell them?' I asked anxiously.

'Why not? A nurse's life is a dull one. It can always do with brightening up.'

'If you breathe a word about this to your friends,' I said savagely, 'I'll spill it all round the Residency.'

She laughed again. 'You wouldn't dare.'

'I damn well would.'

But I knew she was right.

Nurse Plumtree never spoke to me again. Two weeks later Nurse Macpherson became engaged to Bingham.

'It was hard luck, old lad,' Grimsdyke said sympathetically. 'Still, it might have been worse. There was one fellow I knew who took a girl away for a week-end to Torquay. Best hotel, no expense spared and so on. They'd just got to their room and he'd opened the windows to have a breath of sea air, when what do you think he saw? Her whole bloody family arriving for their summer holidays at the front door, ma, pa, and several small sisters and brothers. Phew!'

We were sitting in his room some time later. I stared gloomily at my drink in his toothglass; my throat was better, but my pride would wear its scars for a lifetime.

'My trouble', I said solemnly, 'is women.'

'Come, come, Richard! A less flighty citizen than you would be hard to discover. Disregarding the pocket harem you were running until this disaster, I've never thought, of you as one of nature's bottom-pinchers.'

'I don't go chasing women right and left, I admit. But ever since I qualified I seem to keep getting involved with them just the same. First it was the shocking female married to Hockett. Then there was that smooth piece of goods in Park Lane. Next Plumtree. Then that frightful nympho Macpherson.'

'Personally, I'm all for getting in the clutches of unscrupulous women now and then,' Grimsdyke said cheerfully. 'Rather fun.'

'But it was never like this when we were students!'

'You underestimate the fatal allure of a medical qualification, old lad. In a quiet way, it's about ten times as powerful as any uniform.'

'You think so?'

'Sure of it. Look at all these chaps that get hauled in front of the G.M.C. Why do you suppose every textbook starts by telling you to have a nurse handy when examining any female from nine to ninety? Then look at the medical profession as a whole. A more pug-ugly collection of badly-dressed social misfits would be difficult to find.'

'True,' I admitted.

'Allure, old lad. Remember it. Have another drink.'

'The unpleasant truth', I said, 'is that I've shirked the responsibility of my ambitions. I'm not saying I've been a good-time Charlie, but now it's a year since I qualified and I haven't gone far towards becoming a surgeon.'

'You've learnt a lot about men and women, as opposed to male and female patients, though.'

'Unfortunately that cuts no ice with the Fellowship examiners. There's no easy way out. I'll have to buckle down to the books again.'

'How about a job?'

I sighed. My appointment at St Swithin's had only another week to run. 'I'll have to start on those beastly interviews again, I suppose. This time, I'll address the committee "Dear Sir or Madam".'

The next few days were sad ones. I would be sorry to lose the companionship of the Residency, and to leave at last the hospital that had been the centre of my life for seven years. But there was no alternative: under the hospital rules I had to make way for the junior men just qualified, and I could never gain promotion to become a registrar like Hatrick without my Fellowship. I could only say good-bye to St Swithin's as cheerfully as possible, turn again to the back pages of the B.M.J., and mark the date of the next reunion dinner in my diary.

Then hope appeared, outlandishly embodied in the Professor of Surgery.

I had gone to his laboratory behind the surgical block to fetch the notes of one of our patients, when he unexpectedly appeared from his office.

'Gordon!'

'Sir?'

'Will you step inside a minute?'

Licking my lips nervously, I followed him into his tiny room, which was filled with ungainly physiological apparatus, pickled things in pots, piles of text-books, journals in several languages, and the forbidding photographs of his predecessors in the Chair.

'Sit down,' he commanded.

I gingerly took the edge of a packing-case marked RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL, while he sat in his swivel chair and pulled his white coat tightly round him. I wondered what was coming. I had carefully avoided the Professor since my return, but every time I caught his eye I had felt him mentally signing my Certificate of Lunacy.

'I had lunch with my friend Mr Justice Hopcroft today,' he began.

I said nothing.

'We recalled that incident when you were my Casualty H.S.'

'I had hoped, sir, he might have forgotten it.'

'On the contrary, we laughed about it heartily. Most amusing in retrospect. Hopcroft has a lively sense of humour, you know. Some of his remarks when passing sentence have caused many a chuckle in the Bar.'

"I'm sure they have, sir.'

There was silence, while the Professor stared hard at a pair of kidneys mounted in a glass jar.

'I was perhaps rather hasty with you, Gordon,' he confessed.

'It's kind of you to say so, sir.'

'Unfair, even.'

'Not at all, sir.' The interview was developing more comfortably than I had imagined. 'I deserved it,' I added indulgently.

'I might say it has worried me somewhat since. If one's judgement once becomes clouded by one's emotions, there's no telling where it will end.' There was another silence.

'Bingham' said the Professor.

'Yes, sir?'

A friend of yours?'

'Hardly a close one, sir.'

'I will confess, Gordon-in confidence-that Bingham has been something of a disappointment to me. The young man has ability, I'm not denying it, But I sometimes have a little difficulty in the operating theatre deciding which of us is the Professor of Surgery.'

'Quite so, sir,' I said.

'I gather he is not one of the most popular members of the Residency?'

'Not the most popular, sir.'

'A job on the Unit here has come up unexpectedly,' the Professor went on. 'The resident pathologist-Shiradee-has had to return to Bombay. It's a fairly leisurely job, which would give a man plenty of time to work for his Fellowship. Some minor research would be expected, of course. The appointment will be made with the others at the Committee on Wednesday evening-naturally it's my duty to support Bingham for the job. But I can't answer for the rest of the Committee. And in the present state of my relations with Bingham I assure you it would not take a great deal to make me change my mind. In short, Gordon, if you agree, I'd like to make up for my somewhat high-handed treatment of you earlier in your career by at least offering you a chance of the job. Will you apply on the usual form?'

I was so excited that I was almost unable to sleep for the rest of the week. In the operating theatre, where I now approached the table with the confidence of Robert Liston in his prime, I began fumbling so badly that Hatrick declared wearily that I was again in love.

Every time I saw Bingham approaching I avoided him indeed, I had hardly spoken to him at all since his engagement, apart from stumbling out my congratulations with the rest. But on the evening before the meeting I was forced to seek his company. I was sitting in my room after dinner writing up my case notes, when I became aware of an unpleasant smell. As I sniffed, it grew stronger. From a whiff of the Southend mudflats it rapidly turned into the odour of a faulty sewage farm, and within a few minutes it appeared that some large animal was decomposing in the room next door. Holding my handkerchief over my nose,. I banged on Bingham's door.