Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'I try not to be. Good linguists are disreputable in England, where only amateurism is trustworthy. We believe, like Aristotle, that a gentleman should be able to play the flute-but not too well.'

'Don't Englishwomen speak French?'

'To their milliners.' He ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon 1900 without bothering to take the wine list from the somelier.

'Why is it called the Clinique Laлnnec?' It had puzzled her since leaving New York.' Is there a Dr Laлnnec?'

'Dr Rene Theopile Hyacinthe Laлnnec,' he explained. 'He invented the stethoscope. He rolled up a quire of paper and listened to the patient's chest. Which saved embarrassment, applying his ear to the breastbones of plump young gentlewomen, and his hair from lice in hospital. He died a hundred years ago. From phthisis.'

'Why can't my sister have a pneumothorax, like Lady Pledge?'

'Her case is not suitable.'

The waiter served their _consommй а la Cйlestine,_ clear soup with scraps of savoury pancake.

'Is there no operation which might allow her to go home the earlier?'

'There's thoracoplasty, collapsing the chest by snipping away the cage of ribs. It's the invention of George Fowler, an American surgeon. I should have needed several months under his tuition before risking performing it. As he died three years ago, that's impossible. '

'Yet you despise the remedy invented by Dr Crippen?' she accused him.

'If it works, I should buy a vat of it. In London, I intend achieving my two ambitions. First, to start a free clinic,' he revealed. 'Fashionable doctors learn their medicine on the poor in hospitals, and expend the knowledge on the rich. I'm reversing the process. Secondly, I'm standing for Parliament. Candidate for Holloway, in London. Labour, of course. There's bound to be an election soon. Our Mr Asquith's ministry has been creaking far too long.'

'Wouldn't you be a little young as a member of Parliament, Dr Beckett?'

'Mr Pitt was a younger one.'

'My father believes that the only value of politicians is the amount necessary to bribe them.'

Eliot fell silent. He was prouder than of his degrees of his selection by a committee mostly of railwaymen and the slaughtermen from the Metropolitan Cattle Market in north London.

He had applauded since schooldays a line from the forgotten Victorian author, Anthony Trollope-'It is the highest and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters M P written after his name.' He was disappointed the disclosure left Nancy undazzled. His bristliness was a frightened hedgehog's. He wondered if she despised him, as common.

'I'm going to London, and I'm going to find Dr Crippen,' Nancy resumed. 'I must do all I can for my sister.'

'You've already done much. So irresponsible a patient wouldn't have survived the journey without your watchfulness.'

'I know you take me for a woman who satisfies her conscience by dropping a dime every year into the Salvation Army Christmas Kettle. But you know who I admire? Your Miss Florence Nightingale.'

'You could pay a call when you're seeking Dr Crippen,' Eliot suggested lightly. 'She's ninety, but still has people to tea.'

'Hers is a life I would trade for mine.'

'How singularly unfortunate for you, that the United States is not at the moment engaged in a war.'

'You don't take me seriously.'

'I hope you're not cross?'

'I refuse to be. Men never take women seriously. Because men wear vanity as dogs fur. Which makes life less bothersome, because we get exactly what we want by stroking it.'

The five-piece hotel orchestra struck up _Wine, Women and Song._ They could barely hear each other across the table. They talked about trivial things. Both were becoming exhausted trying to impress the other.

'The whole thing's a frightful bore,' said Lady Sarah Pledge. 'Like sitting for one's photograph in Bond Street. When I was presented at Court last year, I seemed to spend the entire summer wearing ball gowns in the afternoon and standing in horribly uncomfortable poses while little men kept disappearing under baize cloths like parrots.'

'I heard it's a witches' cavern, flashes of lightning, everything crackling and sizzling like green wood in the stove.' Baby was zestful-particularly as everyone told her it did not hurt in the slightest. 'Gee, I could do with some coffee,' she complained.

Patients for x-ray went breakfastless, to prevent bubbles in the stomach, Nurse Dove explained.

The pair sat with Nancy in the waiting-room of the x-ray laboratory, next to the patients' writing room with its four identical ormolu-scrolled imitation Louis Quatorze desks, refurbished daily with spotless blotters and thick white stationery. Like all rooms unlet to patients, it faced the profitless north. The last door of the ground floor corridor lay just beyond. It opened on a secret flight of steps to the basement-white-tiled, like the kitchen with its _chef de cuisine_ who could have earned as much in a luxury hotel.

In the basement the bodies were stored, and sometimes anatomized, if Dr Pasquier assessed them more interesting dead than alive and the relatives could be persuaded to agree. The mortuary was reached by a broad corridor running the building's length, equally unknown to the patients. Bodies were brought down the lifts at night on rubber-wheeled trolleys by stealthy porters. Nobody seemed to die in the Clinique Laлnnec, they simply disappeared. There was a death every two or three days.

The x-ray waiting room was cramped. It had red plush chairs and offered worn copies of _Punch _and _Gil Bias, _its starkness brightened by a framed Toulouse-Lautrec poster of Jane Avril shaking a calf at the Jardin de Paris, which Nancy thought vulgar. Opposite waited a pale, thin young Frenchman with an old-fashioned imperial, whose loose blue suit insinuated severe loss of weight. Another spitoon stood on its shelf. It was past ten, the morning after Nancy dined with Eliot. They had arrived early, but appointments were meaningless where time did not exist.

'You're not scared Dr Beckett's going to electrocute me?' Baby looked slyly at her sister.

'What a bitter man he is,' interrupted Lady Sarah, who knew nothing of the dinner. 'Talking to him's like biting an unripe lemon.'

'Surely Englishmen are all scared of showing their emotions?' suggested Nancy charitably.

'I suppose so,' Lady Sarah agreed. 'That would reduce them to appearing like ordinary members of the human race.'

A nurse summoned through an inner door the Frenchman, who returned after fifteen minutes, bowing politely. Next was Lady Sarah, who reappeared smiling. 'Just a quick glance, not a prolonged scrutiny, which means good news.' She was experienced in the Rontgen rays.

Nancy accompanied Baby. The cramped room was filled with grotesque machinery on stout wooden tables, gleaming brass festooned with white dials sprouting black wires. In the middle was a tight-stretched canvas on stout wooden legs, reminding Nancy of a circus acrobat's trampoline. Below was an electric bulb the size of a goldfish bowl, another was suspended above by wires and pulleys. It was a room of perpetual night, the windows blacked with paint, the light from a cluster of electric bulbs in shades like glass tulips. It had the dry, pungent smell which Nancy had noticed gusting from subway stations, making her wonder what it was like down there.

Eliot had shed his Norfolk jacket for a long red apron, and wore heavy gauntlets. 'This useful little invention we owe to William Rцntgen from the Rhineland.' He had the pride of a man showing off a motor-car. 'He was a dreamy sort of fellow, but one November afternoon while experimenting with cathode rays, he noticed they produced a gleam on a sensitive platino-cyanide plate across the room-_with solid objects in between._ You see? A scientist does not need genius, he needs luck.' Eliot's manner gave no indication to Nancy that they had ever met outside the sanatorium. 'This is the latest coil set, with mercury interrupter, which produces excellent snapshots.'