Doctor in Love (10 page)

I covered my face.

“You must think me an absolute horror,” I said miserably. “You see, I hadn’t the slightest idea you’d be a woman. I know it’s ridiculous, but somehow you always think of a doctor as a man – at least, I do. Oh, God! Why can’t they have some term like doctortrix, or something? This is quite the worst thing that’s happened to me for years.” I groaned. It seemed the climax of all my troubles. “How can I ask you to forgive me? Or do you want to walk straight out again?”

But Dr Barrington now seemed to find the situation comfortably amusing.

“Don’t worry, Dr Gordon. It’s a mistake that’s always happening. When I first went to the General I was put down for a rugger trial and a Lodge meeting.”

“I shall never really be able to look you in the face again.”

“I hope you will. Otherwise it’s going to make the practice rather difficult isn’t it? I’ve never done any GP before, and I’m hoping to learn a lot.”

“I don’t know if I can teach you much. Have you failed the Primary yet? Or haven’t you taken it?”

“Oh, I got my Primary when I finished my pre-clinical work at Oxford.” This ripped another fragment from my tattered self-esteem.

“When would you like to start work?” I asked humbly.

“Any time you like.”

“This afternoon? We’re rather pressed.”

“Just give me time to change. I only put this on to impress you – I thought you might be a rather overwhelming old man.”

“You know,” I said apologetically, “I shall never forget this meeting until my dying day.”

I was right.

Living professionally with a woman is an unusual relationship. There were women students, women housemen, and even women registrars at St Swithin’s, but like most of the big London teaching hospitals it was a traditionally anti-feminist institution. It had refused to take females at all until obliged to by the grant-paying Government at the onset of the National Health Service, and the novelty was greeted with gloom from all sections of the staff. The consultants objected because they felt it was another expression of the general degeneration of things (particularly when some well-intentioned official from the Ministry pointed out that the bulk of the medical profession is feminine in Soviet Russia). The medical school objected, because such frivolous objects as women would be as out of place in our leathery tobacco-drenched common room as in the Athenaeum. The patients objected because they didn’t like the idea of being “mucked about by young girls”. The housemen objected because they would have to behave in the Residency. And the nurses objected because their noses would be put out of joint.

Obstacles were strewn thickly in the new students’ path. Would they need chaperones to examine patients in the male wards? (No.) Where would they have their lavatories? (In the old fives court.) Could they join the students’ clubs? (They soon ran most of them.) Wouldn’t they all get married and have babies before they’d finished the course? (They didn’t at RADA.) The first batch arrived, without ceremony, at the start of the new session, and were watched with eager indifference by their established classmates. These were divided into the gloomy ones expecting thick tweeds and thick spectacles, and the even more unbalanced hopeful ones looking for a bunch of smashers. In the end the new students turned out like any other collection of middle-class young women, and within a week no one took particular notice of them. Meanwhile, we had at least the compensation of knowing that the School of Medicine for Women in Gray’s Inn Road was now obliged to admit men.

When I left St Swithin’s for good there were still occasional arguments whether women make as good doctors as men. There were certainly no doubts about Nichola Barrington, whose usual name appeared to be Nikki. She was academically sound and clinically practical; she had the knack of managing patients old enough to be her grandfather or young enough to be her boy-friend; and she had a flair for sick children, which pleased me particularly because I have long held that this branch of medicine is the equivalent of veterinary science, and could never join in the mother’s delight when the little patient tries to eat the doctor’s tie and pukes down his shirt front. My paediatric consultations generally ended in struggles and screams, doubtless laying the foundations of several awkward neuroses in later life, and I was delighted to hand all patients arriving in prams over to my new assistant.

“You seem to be making quite a hit in Hampden Cross,” I told Nikki a few days after her arrival. “Why, twice today I’ve been met with disappointed looks and a demand to ‘see the other doctor’.”

“It’ll wear off,” she said modestly. “At the moment they just want to see the freak.”

“I’d hardly call you a freak, Nikki. But I must say I’m delighted you’re getting on so well. Some of the patients can be pretty difficult at first, especially in the New Town. They think it’s asserting the rights of citizenship to be rude to the doctor.”

“Well, I might tell you I was as nervous as a kitten when I started.”

“Of the patients?”

“No. Of you.”

“Of me! Whatever for?”

“In my long clinical career – now stretching over the best part of twelve whole months – I’ve found that whatever they say about it, men really think they’re rather superior to women at medicine and driving cars. But you’ve been absolutely sweet.”

I laughed. “By the way, talking of driving…” I started playing with a syringe on the surgery desk. “I wondered if you’d like to run out to the country tonight for a spot of dinner? We could try the Bull – it’s the local beauty spot, you know, horse-brasses round the fire, draughts under the doors, and waiters with arthritis. You don’t get a bad meal there. We could ask old Rogers to be on for us both.”

She looked doubtful.

“I thought it would give me a chance to put you wise about the practice,” I continued. “You know, over the relaxed atmosphere of the dinner-table. Difficult to think of everything in the rush-and-tumble of the surgery.”

“All right,” she agreed. “Though I must say, when I left the General I didn’t expect to be out to dinner again for months.”

Under the mellowing influence of the Bull’s roast beef and Yorkshire we talked a good deal. Over the soup I had started by describing the local arrangements for disposing of people going mad in the middle of the night, but we soon started chatting generally about hospitals and housemen, students and sisters, patients and parties.

“What’s it like being a woman doctor?” I asked, when the old waiter had gone puffing away over the cheese board.

“My heavens! That’s a big question.”

“Or is it a question at all? It’s just like being any other doctor, I suppose.”

“Well, it leads to complications sometimes.”

“Please spare me the memory,” I said, blushing. She laughed. “I’d quite forgotten about my arrival. But I think everyone usually falls over backwards to be fair to female doctors. Sometimes you find examiners who are a bit fierce with you, but that’s only because they’re so worried they’re being prejudiced in the opposite direction. People make life too easy for us, really. Which is gratifying when you consider what our prototypes were like.”

“You mean Sophia Jex-Blake and her friends, who made such nuisances of themselves in Edinburgh?”

“That’s right. Isn’t it a pity that there’s nothing quite so unfeminine as a feminist?”

“I’ve certainly known a few qualified battle-axes,” I admitted. “But you don’t look the chained-to-the-railings type yourself.”

“Well, I’m going to stand up for women’s rights now. I’m paying for half the dinner.”

“What? Nonsense!”

“There you are – wounded masculine pride. Now you can see what we women are up against all the time.”

“It’s not masculine pride,” I insisted. “It’s good manners.”

“Which is often an excuse for the same thing. Women doctors enjoy equal pay, so it serves them right to suffer equal expenses. After all, we only had dinner to discuss the practice.”

I admitted this.

“Then there’s another thing, Richard – we want to keep our relationship on a strictly professional basis, don’t we?”

I admitted this too.

“I mean, it wouldn’t do at all if we didn’t?”

“No, not for a minute. Bad for the patients and all that.”

“Good,” she said, reaching for her handbag. “But if you like I’ll let you pay for the tip.”

I realized that Nikki was instinctively right in setting an austerely businesslike stamp on our relationship from the start. Anyway, I asked myself the next morning, what right had I to force my company on such a delightful girl just through the accident of her coming to work in the same place? It occurred to me as I started on my rounds that Nikki had been mixing on equal terms with men since she tore up her gym tunics for dusters, and must by now have collected the cream of the country’s manhood in her train. I was no more than a passer-by in the road of life, and in future it was only fair to approach her exclusively on clinical matters.

I happened that evening to get a set of electrocardiograms from the hospital that I particularly wanted to interpret. I always had as much difficulty over the squiggles of the P-Q-R-S-T waves set up by the heartbeat as over the evasive shadows on X-rays, and all I could remember about them from my teaching was the old cardiologists’ joke about “Always getting a premature P after T”. I sat puzzling over the spiky lines in the deserted surgery until it occurred to me that Nikki might know more about the subject than I did. It was clearly my duty to the patient to call in a second opinion.

“I do hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said as I rang at the door of Dr Farquarson’s flat, where I had insisted she lived.

“Not a bit, Richard. I was only working through some old surgery notes. Do come in.”

I was surprised to see the change. Dr Farquarson’s tastes in interior decoration ran largely to framed photographs of his old class groups with stamp-paper over the ones who had died, dingy native carvings picked up in his travels, sets of indestructibly-bound classics, and neat piles of the
BMJ
and the
Lancet
. Nikki had put flowers in his pair of presentation tankards and a couple of bright cushions on the sofa, while Ian Aird’s
Companion in Surgical Studies
and Gray’s
Anatomy
lay among scattered sheets of lecture notes on a new coloured table-cloth.

“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your work,” I apologized, “but I’ve a set of ECGs I’d very much like your opinion on, Nikki.”

“Of course, Richard. Though I can’t think my opinion’s any better than yours.”

“I must say,” I added admiringly, “you’ve brightened up old Farquy’s room somewhat. I always thought before it looked like Sherlock Holmes’ study in Baker Street.”

“I haven’t really done much,” she said modestly. “But won’t you sit down?”

“Do you mind a pipe?”

“Heavens, no! I’ve been kippered in tobacco since I first went up to Oxford.”

“I think Farquy’s impregnated the place pretty thoroughly already, anyway. He has some horrible black mixture made up specially in Dundee. It would do excellently for fumigating mattresses.”

“I must say I sometimes itch to redecorate the place.” She looked round her temporary home. “It
could
be absolutely lovely. I’d have all that herbaceous wallpaper off for a start.”

“Yes, and I think that mahogany affair with the mirror in the corner’s a bit of a mistake, don’t you?”

We talked about redecoration for a while, then about fiats in general, and about digs and landladies (which we disliked), and living in London (which we enjoyed), and the Festival Hall and the riverside pubs and the Boat Race and the places you could get a good meal in Soho and Espresso coffee bars and Hyde Park in Springtime. Then I was startled to hear the Abbey clock chime eleven.

“Good Lord!” I said, jumping up. “I’ve wasted your whole evening, Nikki.”

“Of course you haven’t, Richard. I wasn’t really concentrating on surgery. Besides,” she smiled, “wouldn’t it be terrible to start work if you didn’t feel there was a sporting chance of being interrupted?”

I agreed warmly with this, but I felt that I ought to wish her good night.

“By the way,” she said, as I opened the door. “You forgot these.”

“Oh, the electrocardiograms! But how on earth did they slip my memory? I’ll look them up in the book tomorrow, anyway. Good night, Nikki.”

The next evening I had a difficult X-ray which I thought she could help me interpret, and the one after there happened to be a worrying case of diabetes I felt I ought to discuss. The following night I had to ask her opinion about a child I’d seen in the afternoon with suspected mumps, and the next I thought she could advise me about a couple of septic fingers I was treating. Nikki always made some coffee and put some records on her gramophone, and on the whole we were pretty cosy.

It was about this time that I became aware of some peculiar symptoms. I didn’t feel ill – on the contrary, I was in a state known clinically as “euphoria”, in which the subject goes about in an unshakable condition of hearty benevolence. But I was beginning to suffer from anorexia and insomnia – I couldn’t eat or sleep – and I kept finding myself undergoing mild uncinate fits, in which the patient lapses into a brief state of dreaminess instead of attending to the business in front of him. Then there were my bursts of paroxysmal tachycardia. My pulse rate would suddenly shoot up alarmingly, whenever – for instance – I had to find Nikki to discuss some clinical problem. I put this down to nervousness springing from my naturally shy character. But the whole symptom-complex was highly disturbing to a mildly introspective young man.

“You’ve got it bad,” said Kitten Strudwick one morning, between patients.

“I beg your pardon?” I said in surprise. “I’ve got what bad?”

“Go on with you!” She gave me a playful dig with the percussion hammer “I thought Dr Grimsdyke was fast enough. But as they always say, it’s the quiet ones what a girl has to watch.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Miss Strudwick.”

“Well, whatever next? I never thought I’d have to tell a doctor all about the birds and the bees. Who do you want in now? The old duck with the arthritis or the Colonel with the hammer-toes?”