Doctor On The Brain Read Free

the walled rear garden, which had a tiny close-cropped lawn, orderly pink and white rose bushes, and variously coloured stocks arranged as neatly as chocolates in a box. He stood in the middle of the study floor, still in his dressing-gown, reading the first of his letters through half-moon glasses. He slowly stroked his beard for some moments in thought. He raised his thick gingery eyebrows. He reached his decision. With a sigh he sat at his desk, which was separated from the dean’s by only a few inches of brickwork.
    ‘I suppose one has one’s duty. Even if it is sometimes a depressing and possibly a painful one.’ Sir Lancelot uncapped his fountain-pen and reached for a pad of lined foolscap. ‘Might as well get on with it here and now, I suppose.’
    In bold, flowing hand Sir Lancelot began:
     
    The tragic death yesterday of Sir Lionel Lychfield FRCP, dean of St Swithin’s, was an event of more importance to his small circle of friends than to the world at large.
     
    Sir Lancelot grunted. No, that wouldn’t do. He crossed out the words and tried again.
     
    The tragic death yesterday of Sir Lionel Lychfield FRCP, dean of St Swithin’s, will grieve the many who admired him only through reputation even more than the few privileged to know him personally.
     
    His pen scratched on powerfully. He had always felt a talent for that sort of prose.

2
    The main courtyard of St Swithin’s Hospital was separated from a busy north London shopping street of stereotyped ugliness by a line of tall, stout, spiked iron railings, from which the students occasionally suspended banners announcing rag week or their objection to aspects of the political situation, or unpopular members of their own fraternity by their trousers. Inside were half a dozen venerable plane-trees and a pair of statues in memory of the hospital’s distinguished Victorian sons – Lord Larrymore, a physician like the dean, who claimed to have discovered the cause of tuberculosis had he not been forestalled by a bunch of damn foreigners like Robert Koch. And Sir Benjamin Bone, a surgeon like Sir Lancelot Spratt, who would have been appointed to Her Majesty’s household had the Queen not found his bluff, jolly bedside manner not at all amusing.
    The ascetic-looking Lord Larrymore sat in academic robes with an expression of querulousness, left hand forever extended, as though arguing some arcane clinical point across the courtyard with Sir Benjamin. They had not in fact spoken during the final twenty years of their lives, following some complicated quarrel of which they and everyone else had forgotten the cause, communicating with bleakly polite notes transmitted by a hospital porter employed expressly for the purpose. Sir Benjamin stood in full-skirted frock-coat, a cocked head and quizzical expression as he eyed the skull in his huge hand suggesting an aging Hamlet with difficulty in hearing the prompter. Few of the busy hospital passers-by spared them a glance or a thought. Only the London pigeons continued to give them generous attention.
    Even the patch of sickly-looking grass between them had now gone, cars and ambulances jamming the broad arena where once consultants clattered over the cobbles behind livened coachmen in their broughams and victorias, and their patients arrived less obtrusively, borne by the neighbours on a window-shutter. The dean hurried up the flight of stone steps to the plate-glass front doors leading to the main hall, briefly nodded good-morning to Harry the porter in his glass box, then made briskly towards his office along the wide, rubber-floored main corridor. Day and night this was always busy with hospital staff, patients on stretchers and wheelchairs, cylinders of oxygen, containers of food, trollies carrying everything from bottles of blood to the morning papers, and emitting a faint, ineradicable smell of phenol and distant long-stewing greens, to old St Swithin’s men as hauntingly nostalgic as the perfume of some