Doctor On The Job Read Free Page B

in the right mood to blackmail.’
    ‘I play golf with the President of ACHE,’ reflected Sir Lancelot, but the dean was too distracted to hear.
    ‘I wish the stupid twerp had mentioned his little legal difficulties. I’ve several good friends among the judges. And what’s a touch of indecency, when one can’t walk more than half a mile about London at night without getting one’s face smashed in?’
    Sir Lancelot looked puzzled. ‘But if I never had any dealings with this Pince person, I don’t see why any other members of the medical staff should.’
    ‘You nevertheless enjoyed the benefit. If we hadn’t kept him sweet, he’d have started interfering with the hospital’s private beds.’ The dean embraced his surroundings with a quick glance. ‘That doesn’t seem to worry you?’
    ‘Not particularly.’
    ‘But surely you must be in favour of private practice?’ the dean asked impatiently.
    Sir Lancelot sat back to meditate on this question. ‘In principle, yes. I think people should be allowed to pay, to avoid dying among people they would not usually be seen dead with. Also to perform their bodily functions in solitude and switch off the television when they feel like it. And doubtless we must condone the snobbery of the Shires, by keeping their daughters from aborting in public beds. It also occurs to me that private beds could richly subsidize the free ones. But raising the standards of the lowest towards the highest, instead of vice versa, would go against the cherished principles of the British people.’
    Ignoring the lecture, the dean stared resentfully at the news item. ‘We shan’t have the luck to be landed again in the power of an immature youth who combines sex and kleptomania. Those union bosses knew perfectly well that something fishy was going on at St Swithin’s. They’ll see our members of ACHE elect a really tough egg as the new SS man.’
    ‘I deplore hospitals becoming a circus for trade union power politics, like every other institution in the country,’ observed Sir Lancelot loftily, as his lunch arrived. ‘But that is a trivial activity, compared with getting the patients on their feet. How unappreciated are the minor miracles of modern science,’ he remarked, holding up his glass. ‘This fresh orange juice is transported in little drums in a state of unrelenting iciness from the steamy groves of Florida, Dipping through the Tropics by the palmgreen shores , as Masefield put it, just to satisfy my passing whim in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. Wonderful. Sir Bertram Bunn himself could never have foreseen it.’
    The dean shot him a narrow glance. Everyone at St Swithin’s was saying how Sir Lancelot had mellowed since his wife died. He wondered if it was really softening of the brain.

3
    Sir Lancelot Spratt finished his sandwiches, glanced at his watch and excused himself to the dean. He had to see a new patient.
    As he stepped from the escalator which led to the ground floor, he saw that she had already arrived. The pair of brown-coated porters and the girl in the white overall behind the plastic desk were grinning and nudging each other and whispering animatedly, ‘It’s Brenda Bristols, just look.’
    Brenda Bristols was not a great actress who could awe her public. She had instead the valuable knack of making everyone feel that one of their girl friends had stepped on to the stage or screen and was fooling about. She was immensely popular. Her Up Your –– series of films was apparently unending. And she was unlike so many of her contemporaries, who offstage lounged about in frayed jeans and a crumpled T-shirt, looking as if they had been obliged to extract themselves hurriedly from a blazing bedroom. Brenda Bristols invoked the disciplined traditions of the 1930s, when film stars dressed to colour the drab lives of a depressed world. She had appeared in the Bertram Bunn Wing wearing a scarlet straw hat three feet across, and a long dress of green sequins