Doctor in Love (3 page)

Romances in hospital, like romances at sea, progress rapidly. This is probably because both patients and passengers have little else to occupy their thoughts between meals. I spent the following days lying strictly in bed trying to read Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
and thinking about Sally Nightingale, and the nights staying awake trying to snatch brief chats as she passed in the romantic twilight of the sleeping ward. Like the addict waiting for his daily dose of morphine, I found myself fretting as the evening dragged through its routine of supper, bedpans, and thermometers towards eight o’clock, when the tousled day staff went off duty and Sally reappeared in her fresh starched wrappings.

“Would you care for a little barley water?” she asked as she came to my corner a few nights later. “I’ve just made some.”

“Barley water? I’d love it, thanks.”

It would have been all the same if she’d offered hemlock.

“And how are you tonight, Richard?”

“Immeasurably better for seeing you.”

“Now, now!” She gave me a playful look. “Don’t you realize you should think of me purely as your nurse?”

“But that’s impossible! Do you know, when I got this beastly disease I thought it was about the unluckiest thing that had happened to me for a long time. But the moment you walked into the ward, Sally… Well, I began to feel that it was the brightest event of my life.”

She laughed as she gave my pillow a professional smoothing. “Pure delirium, doctor.”

“I’m not at all febrile. Just you feel.”

I had often heard the expression about laying cool hands on fevered brows but I had never until then experienced it. It was most satisfying.

“Perhaps for the sake of us both I’d better fetch you an ice-bag.”

Just at this moment I became aware that Hinxman, too, was standing at my bedside.

“Hello,” I said in surprise. “Rather early with your night round this evening, aren’t you?”

He made no reply. Instead, he stared hard and said, “Nurse Nightingale, I should like the night report, if you please.”

“Of course, Dr Hinxman. If you wish.”

Hinxman listened to the report sitting under the green-shaded lamp at Sister’s desk a few feet from my. bed, and afterwards he settled there to write up his notes. He was still working when at last I fell asleep. The next morning I found myself prescribed three-hourly injections of Vitamin C and a diet of soya flour soup.

This rivalry naturally acted as a supercharger to my increasingly powerful feelings about Sally Nightingale. To lose her to such a passionless pachyderm as Hinxman struck me as not only a personal tragedy but a shocking waste. But I was miserably conscious of my present disadvantages in wooing her. I was static, and Hinxman was menacingly mobile; and though I was entitled to enjoy her company all night, Hinxman now stood sentry at Sister’s desk until I joined in the snores of the rest of the ward.

My one advantage came on Thursday nights, when Dr Pennyworth’s firm was on emergency duty and his house physician liable to be called at any time to the casualty room by the main gate. The next Thursday I was delighted to see Hinxman’s combination of lights flash in the indicator above the ward telephone, and he had to pay the penalty of choosing a self-sacrificing profession by taking himself downstairs to see a suspected coronary thrombosis.

“What
are
you doing to poor Roger Hinxman?” asked Sally, appearing almost at once from the sluice room.

I felt a little disappointed that she seemed to find such a serious affair amusing.

“What’s he doing to
me
?” I replied warmly. “Why, the fellow’s breaking his Hippocratic oath every time he picks up my treatment board – that bit about not administering any noxious thing, and so on.”

She laughed. “I suppose I should be gratified. But it’s a rather unusual way for a girl to be fought over.”

“Is he in love with you?” I asked anxiously.

“Oh, of course. Roger’s been in love with me since my first day in hospital. I broke a thermometer and he told Sister he did it. He’s really awfully sweet, you know. But he
does
make me feel like a piece of china in a bull shop sometimes.”

This sounded encouraging. Feeling that the coronary in casualty might easily turn out to be a simple case of indigestion, I immediately asked if she’d like to come out to dinner when I was better.

“That’s a terribly bad principle,” she replied.

“What is?”

“Going out with your convalescent patients. When you see me in a world full of other women you’ll think I’m just like any other banana in the bunch.”

“Not a bit,” I said stoutly. “I’m absolutely certain you’re more beautiful than ever out of uniform.”

“You’ll think I look about four feet tall and sixteen years old. It’s wonderful how this get-up puts years on you, isn’t it? I suppose it’s designed to give girls authority to tell men old enough to be their fathers to get back into bed.”

“But uniform suits you wonderfully, too. It makes you look like a sort of clinical Joan of Arc.”

She tucked in my bedclothes. “I’m afraid the only resemblance is that a lot of people would like to see me burnt alive. I’ve got to watch my step with matron’s office just now. I’m due for my second-year report, and I don’t really want to be thrown out.”

I saw Hinxman’s silhouette appear beyond the double glass doors of the ward.

“Will you come, Sally?” I whispered. “I know an awfully cosy little place in Soho.”

“All right,” she whispered back. “Slip a note into the nurses’ home when you’re in circulation.”

Then she laughed and disappeared, to pretend she was fixing an intravenous drip.

Hinxman did nothing to my treatment board that night. But the crisis came three nights later, when he arrived to find Sally carrying out standing instructions for patients on full bed-rest by giving me a blanket bath. The next morning I found myself written up for a turpentine enema.

“It certainly
is
strange treatment,” said Sister, when I complained angrily. “It’s possible Dr Hinxman made a mistake.”

“I’m quite certain he didn’t make any mistake at all. And I absolutely and completely refuse to have it, Sister. I’ll discharge myself from hospital first.”

“Perhaps you’d better have a word with him yourself,” she suggested tactfully. Like all St Swithin’s sisters, she knew much more that went on in the ward than her nurses gave her credit for. “I’ll get him to come over from the residency.”

My interview with Hinxman was fortunately held behind screens, which had been put round my bed in anticipation of his sentence being carried out.

“What’s all this damn nonsense about enemas?” I demanded.

In reply, he clenched and unclenched his fists. “You rotter,” he said.

“That’s a fine way to speak to a colleague, I must say.”

‘I love Sally more than anything else in the world.”

“Oh, do you? And so, it happens, do I.”

“I intend to marry her.”

“And so do I.”

It was the first time I had decided on the fact, and I think the answer surprised me as much as him.

He stood breathing heavily. “I’ve known her for more than two years.”

“I’ve known her for less than two weeks. And I’ve made more progress.”

“Look here, Gordon! I’m not up to all these fancy tricks. I’m no…blasted Casanova. I’m an ordinary simple chap, and I love her. If you try to…to…” But words were beyond him. He crashed one fist into another, then silently pushed his way through the screens and disappeared.

“I’m not having the enema,” I called after him. “I’ll complain to Pennyworth tomorrow.”

When Dr Pennyworth reached my bedside on his ward-round the following afternoon Hinxman seemed strangely composed. I supposed that was because he had already countermanded the enema, and thought that I had nothing to complain about.

“How are you getting on?” whispered Dr Pennyworth, peering at me through his pince-nez.

“He’s sleeping very badly,” cut in Hinxman, before I could say anything. “We’ve tried him on all the usual narcotics of course, sir. But he seems to be one of these resistant cases.”

“Very interesting.”

“So I thought, sir, as he’s desperate, you could prescribe him an effective dosage.”

“Sleep,” murmured Dr Pennyworth as I tried to protest, “is the physician’s greatest friend. ‘Oh Sleep! It is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole?’ Eh?” He then prescribed with his own pen a dose of barbiturate that would have kept a woodful of owls quiet.

“You’ll have to swallow them all,” said Sister, handing me the scarlet capsules that evening. “It’s Doctor Pennyworth’s own orders, you know.”

I slept twelve hours a night solidly for a week, when to the relief of both Hinxman and myself Dr Pennyworth officially discharged me for convalescence at home.

My father, Dr Gregory Gordon, MB, BChir, had a general practice in a popular South Coast town, where we had lived as long as I could remember in an over-large Edwardian villa looking across the roofs of innumerable boarding-houses towards the sea. He too was a St Swithin’s man, having qualified there about thirty years before I did. Since then he had been occupied in building a prosperous practice, and was now beginning to suffer success. The hourly ringing of doorbell and telephone were as natural a part of my childhood as the chiming of the grandfather clock below the stairs; but in those days my father still had time to read textbooks and occasionally take me to the County ground, while now that his patients included not only the Mayor but most of the Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce as well, he had barely a moment to sit down with the
Lancet
or glance at the cricket scores. Even as I arrived home the next afternoon I met him dashing from the front door with his bag.

“Hello, Richard my boy! Good to see you. Better?”

“Very much better, thanks.”

“What was it you had? Catarrhal jaundice?”

“Yes, except that nowadays they call it infective hepatitis.”

“You’re a bit on the thin side. Sorry I couldn’t get up with your mother to see you. They looked after you all right in St Swithin’s, I hope? Who was your doctor?”

“Old Pennyworth.”

“Good Lord, is he still going? I thought he’d be dead long ago. How are you feeling in yourself?”

“A bit tottery still.”

“You’ll soon get over it. As a matter of fact, I was rather hoping you could help me out with a few surgeries a little later on. Must rush off now – I’ve got a perforation miles away on the other side of the housing estate. Ask Miss Jamieson to make you some tea.”

“Isn’t mother in?”

“Mother? I can’t remember whether it’s her afternoon to help with the Young Conservatives or the Old Contemptibles.” As my mother honoured all the obligations of a successful doctor’s wife, she rarely seemed to meet my father at all between his being called away from breakfast to see a suspected appendix to his coming in at midnight from seeing a suspected drunk-in-charge. “By the way, if any phone calls come in be a good lad and see what you can make of the symptoms. Such a help to Miss Jamieson at this time of the year.”

He then jumped into his car and drove off.

I had hoped during my convalescence gracefully to introduce the subject of Sally Nightingale. Although I had seen little more of her before leaving hospital – and I was conscious that she had seen me only lying on my back with my mouth wide open – the prospect of perhaps one day marrying her now lay on my mind much more excitingly than the prospect of perhaps one day passing my FRCS examination. It would be equally stimulating to my self-esteem, just as useful to my career, possibly easier, and much more fun.

With other nurses I had fancied at St Swithin’s my plans never went further than our next outing to the cinema, but with Sally Nightingale I already saw myself looking like an advertisement for an insurance company. My knowledge of marriage, like my knowledge of medicine, was still dangerously theoretical, and I had taken advantage of Tony Benskin’s calling to see me in hospital to ask frankly what it was like. His reply had been, “Magnificent, old man, simply magnificent!”, which I felt was as unreliable as the cry of midwinter bathers, “Come on in, the water’s fine!” This was confirmed immediately by his producing two dozen photographs of John Tristram Benskin, all of which looked to me exactly the same, though the father seemed to find subtle differences in each.

I now wanted to discuss the whole problem of matrimony with my parents, but it is as awkward a subject for a sensitive young man to work into the conversation as a plea for more cash. Another difficulty was never finding my parents together, or even one of them alone for more than a couple of minutes on end. The days slipped past with walks on the pier and rounds on the golf course, until it was the night before I was to return to St Swithin’s. Then at last I managed to catch my father alone in his consulting-room, where he was telling an anxious mother on the telephone that green nappies in the first month were nothing to be alarmed about.

“Father,” I began, as he put the instrument down, “I wonder if I could have a word with you?”

My solemnity surprised him. “Why, of course, Richard. What’s the trouble? Do you want to buy another car?”

“No, it isn’t that – though of course I’d love one of the new Austin Healeys if you felt you could raise the wind. But as a matter of fact,” I said sheepishly, “I’ve recently been thinking rather seriously about marriage.”

“Have you really, now? Good Lord! I never saw this note Miss Jamieson left on my desk – there’s a gallstone colic at the Grand Hotel. So you’re thinking of getting married, are you, Richard? What’s her name?”

“Florence Nightingale.”

“Come, come, Richard, surely you’ve got beyond childish jokes–”

“That really is her name, Father. Though everyone calls her Sally.”

“Is she nice?”

“Terribly nice! Wonderful, in fact. Of course, I only got to know her in bed.”

“Good gracious! I know you young people go the pace a bit, but I didn’t think you’d be as brazen about it as that.”

“I mean while I was having jaundice.”

“Oh, I see. A nurse, eh? Well, you could do far worse than that. Most of my friends married nurses. I didn’t. I met your mother when she had a Pott’s fracture on my doorstep. However…” He fiddled with the blood-pressure machine on his desk. “Don’t think I’m interfering in your affairs, Richard – damn it all, you’re a registered medical practitioner, and therefore one of the few people legally credited with more sense than the average population – but don’t you feel you ought to get to know this girl a little better before you decide to spend the next half-century in her company? You mean you’ve proposed to her?”

“Not properly, Father. Nothing as dramatic as that. I was only thinking of matrimony in a… well, a general sort of way. I don’t think Sally even knows that I really want to marry her yet.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well, I can only hope it comes as a nice surprise.”

“But I really think I
will
marry her one day,” I continued earnestly. “Of course, I’ve had plenty of girl friends before – we all had at St Swithin’s – but never have I met anyone in which so many delightful feminine qualities have been collected together. You see she’s so–”

The telephone rang.

“One second, Richard. Yes? Speaking. Yes. Right, I’ll be along in five minutes. Fits somewhere behind the station,” he explained. “It’s an old GPI I’ve been nursing along for years. Delighted to hear your plans, Richard, We must have a long chat about them. What’s her name again?”

“Sally.”

“Sally. Look here, we’ll split a bottle over it when I get back from this case. Then you can tell me all about her.”

But after the fits behind the station and the gallstones in the Grand there was an acute retention down the road and a Colles’ fracture at the bus depot, so that my father didn’t arrive home until one-thirty. As the next morning I had to catch an early train, I left home without discussing my theoretical wife with anyone.

The date of my return to work was fixed less by my physical condition than Sally’s impending official three nights off duty, two of which she was dutifully spending with her mother at home in Barnet. As soon as I reached St Swithin’s I sent her a note suggesting a meeting the following evening. Taking advantage of my involuntary saving through lying in bed, I had picked a fashionable restaurant in Soho in which a pair of Sicilian brothers carried on their family tradition of banditry. It was a small place, with tables, waiters, and diners so crowded together that it was difficult to eat the establishment’s famous spaghetti without it becoming entwined with a neighbour’s asparagus. But it had an orchestra of Charing Cross Road gypsies with a fiddler who breathed encouragingly down girls’ necks, and I thought it an excellent place to pursue my suit.

I was sitting in the laboratory that morning thinking excitedly of the hours slipping past, when I was surprised to see Hinxman appear. He had not only refused to talk to me since my return to the hospital, but had pointedly got up and left rooms as I entered them. Now he seemed desperate to start a conversation. After making some distracted comments about glucose tolerance curves until the other pathologists were out of earshot, he exclaimed “She’s gone.”

“Gone? Who’s gone?”

“Sally Nightingale, of course.” I stared at him.

“But gone where?”

“For good.”

“No!”

“She has. She simply packed up this morning and left the hospital. She dropped her resignation in matron’s letter-box as she went past.” He sat down heavily on to a laboratory stool. “I’ve just this minute heard it from the staff nurse on Honesty.”

My first feeling was of bewilderment. “But what on earth did she want to do that for? She seemed so terribly keen on nursing.”

He made a despairing gesture over some samples of stomach contents. “It must have been Godfrey, I suppose.”

“Godfrey? Godfrey who?”

“John Godfrey. That air pilot she specialled when he was in Honesty with virus pneumonia. She’s gone off with him – that’s obvious. What other reason could there be for a girl to disappear? They’re probably half-way to South America by now. It’s either him or that fellow from the BBC who had asthma, or the stockbroker chap in Private Block with the ulcer.”

“But I didn’t know anything about these men!”

“Huh! You didn’t know anything about Sally. Fine monkeys she made of us, I must say.” He rested his elbows wearily among a batch of throat swabs. “There are far too many girls in this hospital who imagine a nurse’s uniform isn’t complete without a couple of housemen’s scalps dangling from the belt. And to think,” he added painfully, “that I actually wanted to marry her.”

I said nothing.

Suddenly Hinxman held out his pink hand. “Richard, we’ve been complete and utter fools. I want to give you my apologies about everything. Particularly the enema.”

“Roger, I accept them with humility.”

We clasped hands across a pile of agar plates growing streptococci.

“You’re a gentleman,” he said. “It’s been a lesson to me, let me tell you. Never again.”

“And I thought she was such a nice girl.”

“The nicer they seem, the deeper they bite.”

But it was only when I left the laboratory after a busy morning’s work that the numbness of my psychological wound wore off and I felt how painful it really was. I found a letter in my room from my mother saying how delighted she was, and asking when I was bringing Sally down to see them.