Indeed, on subsequent days Frances Lawrence was usually present at the time of his visit, helping with his exacting, wilful patient, ready to see an improvement in Toppy, insistent that she continue with the treatment, asking when they might expect his next call.
Grateful to Mrs Lawrence, he was still diffident enough to feel it strange that this patrician, self-admittedly selective person whom, before he came to see her photographs in the illustrated weeklies, he knew to be exclusive, should have even this mild interest in him. Her wide and rather sulky mouth usually expressed hostility towards people who were not her intimates, yet for some reason she was never hostile to him. He had an extraordinary desire, greater than curiosity, to fathom her character, her personality. He seemed to know nothing of the real Mrs Lawrence. It was a delight to watch the controlled actions of her limbs, as she moved about the room. She was always at ease, watchful in everything she did with a mind behind her friendly guarded eyes, despite the graceful casualness of her speech.
He hardly realised that the suggestion was hers yet – though he said nothing to Christine, who still contentedly balanced her housekeeping budget in shillings and pence – he began to ask himself impatiently how any doctor could develop a high-class practice without a smart car? It was ridiculous to think of him stepping along Green Street, carrying his own bag, with dust on his shoes, facing the slightly superior manservant without a car. He had the brick garage at the back of his house, which would considerably reduce the cost of upkeep and there were firms who specialised in supplying cars to doctors, admirable firms who did not mind graciously deferring the terms of payment.
Three weeks later a brown folding-roof coupé, brand new and darkly glittering, drew up at 9 Chesborough Terrace. Easing himself from the driving-seat Andrew ran up the stairs of his house.
‘Christine!’ he called out, trying to suppress the gloating excitement in his voice. ‘Christine! Come and see something!’
He had meant to stagger her. And he succeeded.
‘Goodness!’ She clutched his arm. ‘Is it ours? Oh! what a beauty!’
‘Isn’t she! Look out, dear, don’t handle the paintwork! It’s – it’s liable to mark the varnish!’ He smiled at her in quite his old way. ‘Pretty good surprise, eh, Chris? Me getting it and licensing it and everything and never saying a word to you. Different from the old Morris. Step in, lady, and I’ll demonstrate. She goes like a bird.’
She could not admire the little car enough as he took her, bare-headed, on an easy spin round the Square. Four minutes later they were back, standing on the pavement, while he still feasted his eyes upon the treasure. Their moments of intimacy, of understanding and happiness together, were so rare now that she was loath to relinquish this one. She murmured:
‘It’ll be so easy for you to get about now, dear.’ Then, again, diffidently, ‘And if we could get out a little bit into the country, say on Sundays, into the woods – oh, it would be wonderful.’
‘Of course,’ he answered absently. ‘But it’s really for the practice. We can’t go gadding about, getting mud all over it!’ He was thinking of the effect this dashing little coupé would have upon his patients.
The main effect, however, was beyond his expectation. On Thursday of the following week as he came out of the heavy glass and iron-grilled door of 17a Green Street he ran straight into Freddie Hamson.
‘Hello, Hamson,’ he said casually. He could not repress a thrill of satisfaction at the sight of Hamson’s face. At first Hamson had barely recognised him, and as he did so, his expression, falling through various degrees of surprise, was still frankly nonplussed.
‘Why, hello!’ said Freddie. ‘ What are you doing here?’
‘Patient,’ Andrew answered, jerking his head backwards in the direction of 17a. ‘I’ve got Joe le Roy’s daughter on my hands.’
‘Joe le Roy!’
That exclamation alone was worth much to Manson. He put a proprietary hand on the floor of his beautiful new coupé.
‘Which way are you going? Can I drop you anywhere?’
Freddie recovered himself quickly. He was seldom at a loss, and never for any length of time. Indeed, in thirty seconds, his opinion of Manson, his whole idea of Manson’s usefulness to him, had undergone a swift and unexpected revolution.
‘Yes,’ he smiled companionably. ‘I was going along to Bentinck Street – to Ida Sherrington’s Home. Walking to keep the old figure down. But step in with you.’
There was a pause for a few minutes while they ran across Bond Street. Hamson was thinking hard. He had welcomed Andrew effusively to London because he hoped Manson’s practice might occasionally provide him with a three guinea consultation at Queen Anne Street. But now the change in his old classmate, the car, and above all the mention of Joe le Roy – the name had for him infinitely more worldly significance than it had for Andrew – showed him his mistake. There were Manson’s ideal qualifications too, useful, extremely useful. Looking astutely ahead, Freddie saw a better, an altogether more profitable basis for co-operation between. Andrew and himself. He would go carefully, of course, for Manson was a touchy, uncertain devil. He said:
‘Why don’t you come in with me and meet Ida? She’s a useful person to know, though she keeps the worst nursing-home in London. Oh! I don’t know! She’s probably as good as the rest of them. And she certainly charges more.’
‘Yes?’
‘Come in with me and see my patient. She’s harmless – old Mrs Raeburn. Ivory and I are doing a few tests on her. You’re strong on lungs, aren’t you? Come along and examine her chest. It’ll please her enormously. And it’ll be five guineas for you.’
‘What! – you mean –? But what’s the matter with her chest?’
‘Nothing much,’ Freddie smiled. ‘Don’t look so stricken! She’s probably got a touch of senile bronchitis! And she’d love to see you! That’s how we do it here, Ivory and Deedman and I. You really ought to be in on it, Manson. We won’t talk about it now – yes, round that first corner there! – but it would amaze you how it works out.’
Andrew drew up the car at the house indicated by Hamson, an ordinary town dwelling-house, tall and narrow, which had obviously never been intended for its present purpose. Indeed, gazing at the busy street, along which the traffic racketed and hooted, it was difficult to imagine how any sick person could find peace here. It looked precisely the place to provoke rather than to cure a nervous breakdown. Andrew mentioned this to Hamson as they mounted the steps to the front door.
‘I know, my dear fellow,’ Freddie agreed with ready cordiality. ‘But they’re all the same. This little bit of the West End is jammed with them. You see, we must have them convenient to ourselves.’ He grinned. ‘Ideal if they were out somewhere quiet, but – for instance – what surgeon would drive ten miles every day to see his case for five minutes! Oh! You’ll get to know about our little West End sick bays in due course.’ He drew up in the narrow hall into which they passed. ‘They’ve all got three smells, you observe – anaesthetics, cooking and excreta – logical sequence – forgive me, old man! And now meet Ida.’
With the air of a man who knows his way about, he led the way into a constricted office on the ground floor, where a little woman in a mauve uniform and a stiff white headdress sat at a small desk.
‘Morning, Ida,’ Freddie exclaimed between flattery and familiarity. ‘Doing your sums?’
She raised her eyes, saw him, and smiled good-naturedly. She was short, stout and extremely full blooded. But her bright red face was so thickly covered with powder the result was a mauve complexion almost the colour of her uniform. She had a look of coarse bustling vitality, of knowing humour, of pluck. Her teeth were false and ill-fitting. Her hair was grizzled. Somehow, it was easy to suspect her of a strong vocabulary, to imagine her performing admirably as the keeper of a second-rate night club.
Yet Ida Sherrington’s nursing-home was the most fashionable in London. Half the peerage had been to Ida, society women, racing men, fa
mous barristers and diplomats. You had only to pick up the morning paper to read that yet another bright young person famous on stage or screen had left her appendix safely in Ida’s motherly hands. She dressed all her nurses in a delicate shade of mauve, paid her wine butler two hundred pounds and her chef twice that sum a year. The prices which she charged her patients were fantastic. Forty guineas for a room each week was not an uncommon figure. And on top of that came extras, the chemist’s bill – often a matter of pounds – the special night nurse, the theatre fee. But when argued with, Ida had one answer which she often adorned with a free and easy adjective. She had her own worries, with cuts and percentages to be paid out, and often she felt it was she who was being bled.
Ida had a soft side for the younger members of the profession and she greeted Manson agreeably as Freddie babbled:
‘Take a good look at him. He’ll soon be sending you so many patients you’ll overflow into the Plaza Hotel.’
‘The Plaza overflows into me,’ Ida nodded her headdress meaningly.
‘Ha! Ha!’ Freddie laughed. ‘ That’s pretty good – I must tell old Deedman that one. Paul’ll appreciate it. Come on, Manson. We’ll go up top.’
The cramped lift, just wide enough to hold a wheeled stretcher diagonally, took them to the fourth floor. The passage was narrow, trays stood outside the doors, and vases of flowers wilting in the hot atmosphere. They went into Mrs Raeburn’s room.
She was a woman of over sixty, propped up on her pillows, expectant of the doctor’s visit, holding in her hand a slip of paper on which she had written certain symptoms experienced during the night, together with questions which she wished to ask. Andrew placed her unerringly as the elderly hypochondriac, Charcot’s malade au petit morceau de papier.
Seated on the bed, Freddie talked to her, felt her pulse – no more – listened to her and gaily reassured her. He told her Mr Ivory would be calling with the results of some highly scientific tests in the afternoon. He asked her to allow his colleague, Doctor Manson, whose speciality was lungs, to examine her chest. Mrs Raeburn was flattered. She enjoyed it all very much. It emerged that she had been in Hamson’s hands for two years. She was wealthy, without relatives, and spent her time equally between exclusive private hotels and West End nursing-homes.
‘Lord!’ Freddie exclaimed as they left the room. ‘You’ve no idea what a gold mine that old woman has been to us. We’ve taken nuggets out of her.’
Andrew did not answer. The atmosphere of this place slightly sickened him. There was nothing wrong with the old lady’s lungs and only her touching look of gratitude towards Freddie saved the matter from being downright dishonest. He tried to convince himself. Why should he be such a stickler? He would never make a success of himself if he continued intolerant, opinionative. And Freddie had meant it kindly, giving him the chance to examine this patient.
He shook hands amicably enough with Hamson before stepping into his coupé. And at the end of the month, when he received a neatly written cheque from Mrs Raeburn – with her best thanks – for five guineas, he was able to laugh at his silly scruples. He enjoyed receiving cheques now, and to his extreme satisfaction more and more of them were coming his way.
Chapter Seven
The practice, which had shown a promising increase, now began a rapid, almost electrifying expansion in all directions, the effect of which was to sweep Andrew more swiftly with the stream. In a sense he was the victim of his own intensity. He had always been poor. In the past, his obstinate individualism had brought him nothing but defeat. Now he could justify himself with the amazing proofs of his material success.
Shortly after his emergency call to Laurier’s he had a highly gratifying interview with Mr Winch and thereafter more of the Laurier juniors, and even some of the seniors; came to consult him. They came chiefly for trivial complaints, yet once the girls had visited him it was strange how frequently they reappeared – his manner was so kind, so cheering, so brisk. His surgery receipts soared. Soon he managed to have the front of the house repainted, and with those firms of surgical outfitters – all of them burning to assist young practioners to enlarge their incomes – he was able to refurnish his surgery and consulting-room with a new couch, a padded swing chair, a dinky rubber-tyred trolley, and sundry elegantly scientific cabinets in white enamel and glass.
The manifest prosperity of the freshly cream-painted house, of his car, of this glittering modem equipment, soon traversed the neighbourhood, bringing back many of the ‘good’ patients who had consulted Doctor Foy in the past but had gradually dropped off when the old doctor and his consulting-room became progressively dingy.
The days of waiting, of hanging about, were finished for Andrew. At the evening surgeries it was as much as he could do to keep going, the front bell purring, the surgery door ‘pinging’, patients waiting for him back and front, causing him to dash between the surgery and the consulting-room. The next step came inevitably. He was forced to evolve a scheme to save his time.
‘Listen, Chris,’ he said one morning. ‘I’ve just struck on something that’s going to help me a lot in these rush hours. You know – when I’ve seen a patient in the surgery I come back into the house to make up the medicine. Takes me five minutes usually. And it’s a shocking waste of time – when I might be using it to polish off one of the “ good” patients waiting to see me in the consulting-room. Well, d’you get my scheme? From now on, you’re my dispenser!’
She looked at him with a startled contraction of her brows.
‘But I don’t know anything about making up medicine.’
He smiled reassuringly.
‘That’s all right, dear. I’ve prepared a couple of nice stock mixtures. All you have to do is to fill the bottles, label and wrap them.’
‘But –’ Christine’s perplexity showed in her eyes. ‘Oh, I want to help you, Andrew – only – do you really believe –’
‘Don’t you see I’ve got to!’ His gaze avoided hers. He drank the rest of his coffee irritably. ‘I know I used to talk a lot of hot air about medicine at Aberalaw. All theories! I’m – I’m a practical physician now. Besides, all these Laurier girls are anaemic. A good iron mixture won’t do them any harm.’ Before she could answer the sound of the surgery bell had pulled him away.
In the old days she would have argued, taken a firm stand. But now, sadly, she reflected on the reversal of their earlier relationships. She no longer influenced, guided him. It was he who drove ahead.
She began to stand in the cubby-hole of the dispensary during those hectic surgery periods, waiting for his tense exclamation, in his rapid transit between ‘good’ and surgery patients: ‘ Iron!’ or ‘Alba’ or ‘Carminative’ or something, when she would protest that the Iron mixture had run out, a strung-up, significant bark: ‘Anything! Damn it! Anything at all!’
Often the surgery was not over until half past nine. Then they made up the book, Doctor Foy’s heavy ledger, which had only been half used when they took over the practice.
‘My God! What a day, Chris!’ he gloated. ‘D’you remember that first measly three and six I took, like a shaky schoolboy. Well, to-day – to-day, we took over eight pounds cash.’
He tucked the money, heavy piles of silver and a few notes, into the little Afrikander tobacco sack which Doctor Foy had used as his money bag and locked it in the middle drawer of the desk. As with the ledger, he kept on using this old bag in order to continue his luck.
Now, indeed, he forgot all about his early doubts and praised his acumen in taking over the practice.
‘We’ve got it absolutely gilt-edged every way, Chris,’ he exulted. ‘A paying surgery and a sound middle-class connection. And on top of that I’m building up a first rate consultant practice on my own. You just watch where we’re going.’
On the 1st of October he was able to tell her to refurnish the house. After his morning surgery he said, with impressive casualness, his new manner:
‘I’d like you to go up West to-day, Chris. Go
to Hudson’s – or to Ostley’s if you like it better. Go to the best place. And get all the new furniture you want. Get a couple of new bedroom suites, drawing-room suite, get everything.’
She glanced at him in silence as he lit a cigarette, smiling.
‘That’s one of the joys of making money, being able to give you everything you want. Don’t think I’m mean. Lord, no! You’ve been a little brick, Chris, the whole way through our bad times. Now we’re just beginning to enjoy our good times.’
‘By ordering expensive shiny furniture – and hair-stuffed three-piece suites from Ostley’s.’
He missed the bitterness in her tone. He laughed.
‘That’s right, dear. It’s high time we got rid of our old Regency junk.’
Tears sprang to her eyes. She flashed:
‘You didn’t think it was junk at Aberalaw. And it isn’t either. Oh! Those were real days, those were happy days!’ With a choking sob she spun round and left the room.
He stared after her in blank surprise. Her moods had been queer recently – uncertain and depressed, with sudden bursts of incomprehensible bitterness. He sensed that they were drifting away from each other, losing that mysterious unity, that hidden bond of comradeship which had always existed between them. Well! It was not his fault. He was doing his best, his utmost. He thought angrily, my getting on means nothing to her, nothing. But he could not dwell upon the unreasonableness, the injustice of her behaviour. He had a full list of calls before him and, since it was Tuesday, his usual visit to the bank.