Richard Gordon - A QUESTION OF GUILT

At a green-baize covered table with telephone, typewriter, and pair of spikes bristling with paper, sat a good-looking woman in her mid-twenties, short, slim, pale, with big grey eyes, a longish straight nose and flat eyebrows. Her light brown hair was pinned high, she wore a navy serge dress. Eliot recognized her as Miss Le Neve from the tobacconist's description. He thought her mouth as sensual as a Hogarthian slut's.

With a subdued, deliberate air she apologized that Dr Crippen was at his other practice, Aural Remedies round the corner at Craven House. He saw dental patients at ten-thirty. Eliot and Nancy sat on wooden chairs, whose ragged copies of _John Bull_ and _Tit-Bits_ betokened the uneasy wait for terrors beyond a further glass-panelled door.

Dr Crippen appeared in a black frock coat befitting his profession, with a bright blue shirt and a blue-spotted yellow tie in his high starched collar. A tiepin of chiseled glass the size of a schoolboy's marble optimistically passed for a diamond. His shoes were patent leather frosted with cracks, he threw out his feet as he walked, putting Eliot in mind of some music-hall comedian. He spoke quietly, with the tatters of a mid-Western accent, generously showing teeth which were a shining credit to the establishment. Eliot noticed that the bulging eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses were grey, like his typist's.

He affably invited them through the inner door. Another to the right, painted _Dr Rylance, _emitted a steady, chilling gurgle of softly-running water. A door marked 'No 91' faced them. Number 58 to their left led into a small ochre-washed room, its decorations oilcloth depictions in vivid scarlet, blue and yellow of a man with his head sliced across, a vast ear with its exposed inner workings of linked little bones, and the complete set of human teeth in a shining ring, like a grotesque galaxy.

A wooden cabinet stood in the corner, beside a marble-topped washstand on which Eliot recognized a conical measuring-glass and a medicine drop-bottle, ear speculas like confectioners' icing-cones, an angled metal tongue-depressor and a U-shaped spring for looking up noses. He saw no bowl nor bottle of disinfectant, nor even soap and water. The metal ear-syringe struck him as large enough to stop a fire. Crippen politely invited Nancy to sit in his dental chair. There was nowhere else.

'So you're from New York, Miss Grange? Well, well! I hail from Coldwater, Michigan, myself. Though I've practiced all over the States-Detroit two years, Santiago, Salt Lake City, St Louis, Philadelphia, up in Toronto.' He asked Eliot, 'You practice in London?'

'I practice nowhere at the moment, though I live near you, by the cattle market.'

'You do? Cora-my wife-so often complains of the noise from the bullock lairs at night, and the sheep driven through the streets from the country. She's from New York as well,' he informed Nancy, adding proudly, 'She's on the stage, you know. Belle Elmore. You'll have heard of her.'

'Dr Crippen, I have a sister in Switzerland sick with the phthisis.' Nancy was impatient. Looking at him steadily, she explained, 'I've come to you because I hear you've a preparation called Tuberculozyne.'

'How strange you should mention it. Why, I was prescribing it only the other day. The patient suffered from scrufulous laryngitis, complicated by catarrhal pharyngitis and chronic rhinitis.' Eliot noticed a glibness with impressive, if meaningless, medical terms. 'She is now well on the way to recovery, I'm glad to say.'

'I want some,' Nancy demanded.

'Very unfortunately, that was my last sample.'

'As one medical man to another, what is Tuberculozyne?' Eliot asked bluntly.

'I can't keep these formulas in my head,' he lamented. 'It has a basis of morphia. I perfected it from the prescription of a homoeopathic doctor I knew-he practises in Michigan, at Kalamazoo. I was trained at the Homoeopathic Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, you know. Back in '84. Though I studied in London a while. The Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Insane. London's the greatest medical centre in the whole world, isn't it? Now my line's ear, nose and throat. I possess a diploma in the subject from the New York City Ophthalmic Hospital,' he ended in self-assertion. Eliot countered it by mentioning the Drouet Institute.

'Yes, I am a little deaf myself,' Crippen replied without concern. Eliot had noticed he inclined his head to hear. 'Now I must ask your pardon. I have patients waiting.'

The doorbell had been ringing repeatedly. Eliot's grudging acceptance that this was truth, not an excuse to be rid of them, was strengthened by Crippen continuing genially. 'But say, doctor-if you and the good lady are free, why not step across and take pot luck tonight? No 39 Hilldrop Crescent. That's off the main road, towards Holloway Jail. My wife would just love to meet a fellow-countrywoman. Eight o'clock?'

'Yes,' said Eliot shortly.

'You must be crazy,' said Nancy as they descended the stairs.

'I want to find more about Tuberculozyne. If it's got morphia, it could be dangerous rather than merely useless,' he told her sternly.

She sighed. 'Well I guess our Dr Crippen's just a fraud.'

'One so transparent, it amounts to shining honesty. You must be disappointed for Baby?'

'Not really. I believed what you said about him all along. I had to see with my own eyes. There's my father to convince.'

They reached busy Oxford Street.

'Besides, his wife sounds worth the trouble of meeting,' Eliot suggested.

'I bet he's henpecked.'

'Perhaps he enjoys it? Sometimes the male dominance in marriage is pleasurably reversed. He becomes passive, like the well-bred Englishwoman in sexual intercourse. Man-masochist mated to woman-sadist. There's a streak of both within all of us, like surliness and good humour, one or the other coming to the surface.'

'Oh, Eliot! I do wish you wouldn't speak to me as though I was a lecture room.'

Hilldrop Crescent made a broad sweep from Camden Road, at the crest of a hill which rose from the Midland Railway cuttings. The houses were mirror-image pairs, three storeys high, pale yellow brick, with a shallow slate roof, sharing the stack of a dozen chimney-pots. Number 39 was a left-hand house in the middle. Its low brick wall was topped with black iron railings caging a privet hedge. An oak gate between square brick pillars led to a front garden five or six paces long, shared with the neighbours and containing four London planes which were starting to turn.

Ten stone steps, flanked by a pair of cement urns sprouting marigolds, led to a portico six feet wide which shaded the brown-stained front door. Eliot was amused by the architect's embellishments to his cheap suburban villa. The tall window beside the front door had an ornamental balcony, those above were edged with elaborate moulding in cement. The next pair of houses were only a couple of yards away, a narrow passage leading past the tradesmen's entrance to the back garden.

Nancy wore an accordion-pleated navy skirt with a lace blouse, Eliot a blue serge suit and white shirt. Pot-luck in Holloway did not seem to invoke dressing. The bell instantly brought footsteps. To Eliot's surprise Crippen himself answered the door. A professional man practising even as a dubious dentist should afford a servant.

'Well, how nice! Belle will be so delighted you could make it.' Crippen's affable greeting slid into the hushed remark, 'Mr and Mrs Martinetti have just arrived, the famous music-hall comic singing act, you know. Retired now, and he's not altogether A1.' His voice dropped further in professional confidence. 'He has to be regularly dilated.'

A narrow hallway with a well-varnished staircase and a hat-stand led to the parlour. It was all pink. Pink wallpaper, pink plush furniture, pink shades to the gas lamps, pink frames to the photographs on the piano, pink silk bows on the corners of the pictures and round the necks of the china cats on the pink-draped mantelpiece. At one side of the throatily roaring gas-fire sat a birdlike, bright-eyed woman in purple. Beside her stood a pale, grey, gloomy man, the comedian. Posed with one hand on a round, pink-draped table-which held a fan of theatre programmes, folded copies of the theatrical weekly Era, and a silver-framed picture of herself signed by Hana the theatrical photographer-was she to whom the room made a fitting compliment.