Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'What did you do with these bones?' Eliot asked, horrified.

'They all went in the boiler,' Bill told him amiably.

'"Poupart's Piccadilly Potted Meat",' observed Nancy, when Eliot hurried back to the Savoy. '"Londoners Love It".'

'Well, Belle always wanted them to, didn't she?' Eliot pointed out.

On Tuesday, February 5, 1952, the ailing King George VI went shooting at Sandringham, and the next morning was found by his valet dead in bed from a coronary thrombosis. His daughter learned that she had become Queen Elizabeth II, at the Outspan Hotel near Nyeri, on the outer slopes of Mount Kenya. 'In his last months, the King walked with death as an acquaintance whom he did not fear, in the end death came as a friend,' said Winston Churchill.

The Coronation was Tuesday, June 2, 1953. Eliot and Nancy were driven home from Westminster Abbey in their postwar Rolls-Royce.

'I told you we did this sort of thing rather well,' said Eliot.

'Darling, after 45 years I am still amazed by the British flair for ceremony and understatement.'

'Did you notice the beautifully dressed old gentleman with the duty of holding a pole of the canopy? He was a patient, when I still practiced. Urinary incompetence. Dreadfully embarrassing at a party, not to mention a Coronation. He telephoned last week for advice. Down his velvet breeches was an invaluable rubber device called a Why-Be-Wet.'

They wore scarlet robes, Eliot's ermine caped, Nancy's ermine trimmed. She had a close-fitting dress of silver lame, the bodice embroidered with rhinestones and sequins. Eliot's coronet was in a leather box at his feet. Nancy preferred a cap of state. Eliot was 71. Too old to rejoin the army, he had run London's medical services from the start of the blitz. Nancy was an American citizen who had become the best-known Englishwoman. She had organized the wartime evacuation of children from city to country. She shared the cover of Life with Wendell Willkie, when he wore a tin hat in London air-raid shelters trying to stop Roosevelt's third term in 1940.

After 1941, Nancy turned her energy to keeping American forces and the British on the best terms possible-the relationships between allies in any war being only slightly worse than with the enemy. 'If by hazard the venom of Herr Hitler strikes me down,' Churchill had told a House of Commons in smiling mood shortly before D-Day, 'I am tempted to think that we can continue to go forward with the war organized by Lady Beckett.'

'We don't see much of Winnie since he became prime minister,' Eliot observed, as they drove home among the Coronation crowds.

'Or became so wonky.'

'Or so gaga. Charles Moran told me last week that Winnie's already had three strokes. The first was in Monte Carlo in 1949, the last under a year ago.'

'I suppose he'll soon hand over to Anthony?'

'If the British will accept a divorced prime minister. Any news of Margaret's romance, by the way?'

'I heard nothing at the Mountbattens.'

'Who's coming tonight?'

'Beaverbrook and the Lunts-did I tell you they were across for the Coronation? I hope to get Willie Maugham, but Evelyn Waugh definitely not. Perhaps that's good. Actors always seem to get on well together, writers never.'

'Actors make their living by submerging their feelings, writers by exposing them.'

It was a cold rainy day. Eliot stared for some time at the people on the pavements. 'How lucky they are!' he exclaimed. A Coronation concentrates memories. 'Do they know it? The germs which prowled for most of my professional life as dangerously as hungry tigers have been killed by Domagk, Fleming and Florey. Now Waksman's won the Nobel for streptomycin, and tuberculosis-what we used to call phthisis-has followed its victims to the grave. Did you hear, the Swiss sanitoria are changing themselves into hotels? They'll go bust otherwise. I actually saw a brochure from the Clinique Laлnnec, renamed the Hotel Sporting de Champette. It advertises the spacious sunny balconies. I wonder if the guests realize how many people died on them?'

'I'd like to see the clinic again. It would be like walking over the Somme. A violent old battlefield, turned impotent with the passage of time.'

'Like us,' said Eliot.

Their town house was among the embassies in Belgrave Square. Eliot's secretary was at the door. 'Lord Beckett, we had a telephone call from Mrs Stanley Smith-'

'Urgent?'

'The doctor in Addiscombe says she's in heart failure. And she particularly wants you to see her.'

'Tell Chevons to keep the car. Though I must divest myself of these glad rags. They might raise an eyebrow in suburban Parkview Road.'

'Surely you're not going, Eliot?' Nancy scolded him. 'You'll need a good rest before dinner.'

'I have retained few patients. Mrs Stanley Smith is the most important.'

'Really, Eliot. I can't understand why you're still obsessed with the Crippen case.'

'Because I still don't think he did it. But I suppose any doctor who prescribes the wrong dose deserves hanging.'

'I think he killed her in cold blood.'

Did he?

Or didn't he?

Mrs Stanley Smith, who was Miss Ethel Le Neve, died aged 84 of cardiac failure on August 8, 1967, at Dulwich Hospital in South London. In 1955, Eliot suffered a fatal coronary thrombosis in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, when on his way to give a lecture at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. While this book was being written, Nancy was still living, at Shiplake Castle in Kent.