Doctor On The Brain Read Free Page B

floor was slightly ajar. She had left it so the previous afternoon.
    Muriel glanced right and left. The dim, bleak, green-painted passage was empty. She walked to a frosted-glass door at the end, marked in red CLINICAL PATHOLOGY. She tapped.
    ‘Come in.’
    She opened it. Mr Winterflood, pipe clamped between his teeth, tartan scarf round his neck, was just taking off his fawn raincoat. Her timing had been superb, Muriel thought. As efficient as everything else she did – well, almost everything else, she supposed, in the circumstances.
    ‘Well! It’s Miss Lychfield. And how’s the dean keeping?’
    ‘He seems very well, thank you, Mr Winterflood. I’m sorry to catch you just as you’ve arrived.’
    ‘Wait a sec. I’ll get my white coat on.’ He unwound the scarf. ‘Got to wrap up well, you know. Some of these bright mornings are treacherous. I mean, for a man with all my complaints. “A walking pathological museum”, the dean once called me. Though I expect he can hardly wait to get me downstairs on the post-mortem table. Eh?’
    He gave a laugh, and taking a match from the pocket of his thick woollen khaki cardigan filled the small, untidy laboratory with smoke. The chief technician was a small fat man with a thick insanitary-looking moustache and abnormally bright red cheeks. He had been a patient of St Swithin’s since childhood, and if he had succeeded in rising from the severely-drilled ranks in the wards to the hospital staff itself, this was less through his abilities than his doctors’ concern to keep track of him until they could discover exactly what the devil had been going on in his inside.
    ‘I’ve got a specimen.’ Muriel opened her bag as he pulled on his white coat. ‘I thought I’d bring it up myself.’
    ‘From one of your patients, is it?’
    ‘Well, yes. Or rather, well, no. That is, it’s from a friend.’ She produced from her bag a small screw-capped hospital specimen bottle filled with straw-coloured fluid.
    ‘What’s it for?’ Mr Winterflood held the bottle to the light with a knowing eye. ‘Sugar and albumen?’
    ‘Well, er, no. Pregnancy.’
    ‘Ah.’ He put the bottle with a flourish on the laboratory workbench. ‘That simple little specimen, it’s like a bomb, isn’t it? Could change the shape of two people’s lives overnight. I’m a philosophical chap. I often think about that. Some of the ladies, they go into tears of joy knowing that they’re at last going to have a little one. Others…a terrible state they get into. Threaten suicide maybe. Do it sometimes, for all I know. Not so much these days, of course, when such matters can be rectified through the proper channels. But it still puts a fair cat among the pigeons. Strange, isn’t it? Same event, different reaction. As I always say about this life, it’s not what happens to you, it’s the way you look at it. Now, if the Prime Minister took my advice–’
    ‘When will you have the result?’
    ‘This evening do you?’
    ‘I’ll come up.’
    ‘Don’t bother, Miss. I’ll phone your friend.’
    ‘She’s not on the telephone.’
    ‘Oh. Married, is she?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Ah. I see. Might be awkward, leaving a message. She thinks she’s in the pudding club, then?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Far gone?’
    ‘Not very. In fact, she’s not really sure. That’s why she sent the specimen.’
    ‘Nothing like it for making a girl proper impatient, eh?’ He lit his pipe again.
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘What’s the naughty little lady’s name?’
    ‘Smith.’
    ‘Come on!’
    ‘Must you really have her name? She’s a…very old friend.’
    ‘I must, Miss. Lab regulations. All specimens must be clearly labelled with the patient’s name, age and ward. What would happen if the professor came in and found the bottle? Could get me in the cart good and proper. Or he might easily decide to do this very test himself, to demonstrate to the students. He’d have to read out the patient’s name–’
    Already