1
‘Dr Grimsdyke,’ announced our pretty little receptionist, ‘there’s a man behaving very strangely in the waiting-room.’
‘Oh, really?’ I glanced from the racing page of the morning paper. ‘What’s he doing? Laughing over the back numbers of Punch?’
‘No, he’s all alone, standing in front of the mirror making faces.’
‘Good Lord!’ I looked alarmed. ‘Not likely to become violent, I hope?’
It was a beastly foggy December afternoon, when you could imagine Jack the Ripper still lurking in the London shadows or Holmes and Watson rattling by in a hansom to Baker Street. There were only ten of those shopping days left until Christmas, the stores were sprinkled with Santas and the pubs festooned with paper chains and the good wishes of the management, and I’d just moved into Park Lane as locum tenens to Dr Erasmus Potter-Phipps.
‘Dear boy, I’m absolutely desperate for a holiday,’ he’d explained when we met a few days before in the locker room at Sunningdale. ‘The practice is really becoming too much for me.’
He idly flicked a driver.
‘You know how one’s female patients do so tend to fall in love with one? It’s perfectly harmless, of course. One needn’t fall in love with them, and it does their nerves the power of good. But this young actress I’ve been treating for mental prostration – you may have noticed in the papers? – has a husband with a positive persecution mania. It’s all terribly tiresome, particularly as I imagined the fellow was climbing the Himalayas. So inconsiderate of him to arrive home without cabling first. The shock quite put the poor dear’s case back several weeks.’
He inspected the head of his putter.
‘Loath as I am to suspend treatment, I thought I might take a little holiday abroad. A few weeks’ ski-ing does one the world of good at this time of the year. But the trouble is finding a suitable locum. You realise, dear boy, that I have a rather special sort of practice?’
I nodded. Razzy Potter-Phipps had in his time diagnosed half Debrett.
‘All the young men are perfectly impossible these days. The hospitals don’t seem to teach them anything but medicine. Why, the last locum I had performed a most embarrassing examination on a duchess. But if you happened yourself to be footloose and fancy free professionally…? ’
‘Rely on me, old lad,’ I’d agreed at once.
I’d a soft spot for Razzy, who’d often obliged with useful jobs, loans or racing tips in the past. Besides, Christmas was coming, and finding the Grimsdyke coffers unseasonably low.
‘Dear boy, I’m eternally grateful. Do move into my flat and draw anything you want from the petty cash. We can settle the details over a decent dinner when I get back in the New Year. So undignified, don’t you think, for gentlemen to discuss money in public?’
But I’d hardly been in Potter-Phipps’ Mayfair apartments long enough to discover which instrument cupboard he kept the sherry in when this maniac appeared. I glanced round the consulting room, which resembled a cross between the Messel suite at the Dorchester and Constance Spry’s showrooms, and felt it would never do having people running berserk in it.
‘What’s the patient look like?’ I asked the little receptionist.
‘Oh, perfectly respectable otherwise, Doctor. He’s about your age, very well dressed.’ She smiled. ‘Quite tall, dark and handsome, in fact.’
‘And making faces in mirrors…?’
A slumbering memory gently creaked the bed of my subconscious.
‘He doesn’t happen to have side-whiskers, suede boots, a red carnation and an Old Harrovian tie?’ I added quickly.
‘How very odd, Doctor! But certainly the side-whiskers and carnation–’
I gave a laugh. ‘Kindly show Mr Basil Beauchamp inside.’
I hadn’t seen Basil Beauchamp – pronounced Beecham – since the days I shared the same digs as a medical student, when I remembered he was always broke and the landlady had to send her daughter to her auntie’s. But anyone who’d ever had the misfortune to live across the same landing could easily diagnose the mirror antics as his normal behaviour – the poor fellow’s trouble was being an actor, and like all actors he somehow could never switch himself off. Very difficult it had been in the evenings, too, trying to learn up all that stuff for the examinations with Othello carrying on in the bedroom next door. And even when I lent him a bob for his gas meter to get a little peace, the next week he was generally Henry V, who, of course, is even noisier.
‘Great heavens!’ Basil himself appeared in the consulting room doorway, looking as usual like a combined effort by Savile Row and the Burlington Arcade. ‘It’s Gaston Grimsdyke!’
‘What ho, old lad,’ I greeted him. ‘It seems a long time since we used to pinch each other’s bathwater.’
He stood staring at me, like Macbeth when Banquo came to dinner.
‘But – but what on earth are you doing here? Where’s Dr Potter-Phipps?’
‘Enjoying a well earned Christmas holiday at St Moritz,’ I explained. ‘I’m obliging as his locum tenens.’
‘What? You mean you actually became a qualified doctor in the end?’ He gave a loud laugh. ‘Well, well! How extraordinary.’
I felt slightly nettled at this remark, but remembering that actors have a peculiar sense of humour waved him to a chair affably enough.
‘How about you, Basil?’ I offered Potter-Phipps’ silver cigarette-box. ‘Abandoned those big dreams of fame and fortune on the boards?’
Come to think of it, I hadn’t even heard of the chap since he had a frightful row with the gas-man over the shillings and suddenly left the digs, when all the time I’d been looking forward to seeing his name up in lights and getting free tickets for the London theatres.
‘Of course I haven’t given up the stage.’ It was Basil’s turn to be annoyed. ‘Why, I’m turning down unsuitable parts every week.’
‘Oh, sorry–’
‘Not to mention opening in a new show immediately after Christmas.’
‘Then rely on me to come along and clap you to the echo,’ I told him, still thinking of those free seats.
‘It – er, isn’t in the West End, of course.’ Basil shifted slightly. ‘You’ve heard of Blackport-under-Tyne? Busy little place up north. Actually, it’s pantomime. I’m the Demon King.’
‘Pantomime?’
It seemed odd that the chap who could get halfway through Coriolanus in his bath on Sunday mornings should go scouring the country being demon kings.
‘Yes, all very jolly and seasonable, you know. A chappie I met in a King’s Road pub recommended Potter-Phipps,’ he went on, changing the subject, ‘though I must say I didn’t expect anything quite so grand.’ Basil stared round the consulting room. ‘I suppose all your patients must be frightfully wealthy?’
‘Not after they’ve paid the bills.’
‘Well, it certainly does the heart good, dear chappie,’ he continued, expanding rather, ‘to meet you again in such prosperous surroundings.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I think Razzy only gave me the job because he thought I’d go nicely with his furniture.’
‘Ah! You were always so modest.’
‘Come, come–’
‘Yes, so modest. And so generous.’
He flicked ash over the Chippendale consulting desk.
‘The dear old digs!’ Basil blew a chain of smoke rings. ‘We were great pals in those happy days, weren’t we, Grim? Do you remember how I lent you my dress suit? And came down to let you in when you threw stones at my window?’
I agreed politely, though pretty sure I was the one with the dress suit. And as Basil slept like a churchyard, anyway, you wouldn’t have got him down by throwing a brick at his window.
‘In respect for this old friendship of ours,’ he continued, ‘I shall now be perfectly frank with you.’
‘Oh, yes?’
Basil hesitated. ‘Dear chappie, when I mentioned just then I was turning down parts every week, I was exaggerating rather. In fact, since we last met the parts I’ve been offered have kept up a steady average – between damn few and damn all. Believe me, Grim,’ he added sombrely, ‘I used to think the poor starving actor was just a comic character you met in books. Now I can assure you I know better.’
‘I say, what tough luck.’
I felt genuinely sorry for the chap, particularly remembering how he used to angle for a second helping of pudding and swipe all the marmalade.
‘Why else,’ Basil demanded, jumping up and starting to pace Potter-Phipps’ peach-coloured carpet, ‘do you imagine I would descend to buffooning before a bunch of bilious brats? In a theatre whose usual entertainment consists in the disrobing of gangs of superannuated barmaids? Sheer necessity, dear chappie, that’s why! Though mind you,’ he added warmly, ‘one still has one’s professional pride. I’m going to play this Demon King as he’s never been played before. You’ve heard of “The Method”? One lives one’s part, day and night, awake and asleep. I’ve been feeling positively satanic for weeks.’
‘Well, you’ve scared the life out of our receptionist for a start,’ I consoled him.
‘Meanwhile, of course, one must live.’ He helped himself to another cigarette. ‘One isn’t paid by this stinking management for rehearsals. So I was wondering, on the strength of our long-standing chumminess, if you could advance me some small sum – say a hundred pounds…?’
I gave a laugh.
‘Basil, you idiot! Don’t you see I’m only the locum here? The understudy,’ I explained, as he was standing with his mouth open. ‘All I get is a modest salary when Razzy Potter-Phipps gets fed up jumping off Swiss mountains. As a matter of fact,’ I added, ‘you looked so jolly smart when you showed up, and what with all my Christmas shopping to do, I’d half a mind to touch you for a bit yourself.’
‘Me? Good God!’
He fell into his chair, looking shocked.
‘But cheer up,’ I went on, after a pause. ‘You’re always reading in the papers of stars being discovered overnight. And I bet all those posh actors with titles in London were demon kings themselves once. Or mere broker’s men, if it comes to that.’
But Basil said nothing. He just sat shaking his head, looking as forlorn as a burnt-out firework.
‘Alas, dear chappie,’ he managed to say at last. ‘Success is never as simple as that. It all comes back to this beastly business of money. If only I could afford to live at the right address! To be seen in the right places, to take the right people out to lunch at the right restaurants… About my talent, of course, there is no doubt.’
‘Of course not.’ Knowing how he could expand on this topic, I added quickly, ‘But what’s the trouble that brings you here today?’
‘I was almost forgetting.’ Basil roused himself. ‘I should like a complete physical examination, please. Can you oblige?’
‘Naturally. But to what object? Life insurance? Emigration? Being a demon king all day wearing you out?’
‘Neither.’ He gave a little sniff at his carnation. ‘I am going to be married.’
‘Married? Congratulations.’
‘I read somewhere that a medical examination was advisable in those contemplating matrimony, so here I am.’
I remembered he was also a shocking hypochondriac, always sneaking into my room to catch something new from Conybeare’s Medicine.
‘Though I suppose matrimony is about the most damn stupid thing I possibly could contemplate,’ Basil continued gloomily. ‘My entire worldly goods fitting comfortably into a couple of suitcases under the bed in my digs. You were perfectly right just now, Grim – I should have turned in the stage years ago for some nice steady lucrative job, like selling encyclopaedias at the door. But you know how it goes. No true actor ever gives his final performance until it’s accompanied by flowers and slow music. Meanwhile, my hand has been accepted by the sweetest and most delightful person in the whole world – Ophelia O’Brien. You know her, of course.’
‘I don’t think I’ve had the honour–’
‘She’s the girl in the detergent advertisements on the sides of all the buses.’
‘Ah, yes. The one with the snow-white whatsits.’
‘But dear chappie, you shall meet her.’ Basil suddenly brightened up. ‘She’s coming round in ten minutes to collect me.’
‘In that case you’d better go behind the screen in the corner and take your shirt off,’ I directed. ‘And by the way, you needn’t bother about the bill. You can have this one on the house.’
‘How terribly good of you–’
‘Regard it as a wedding present,’ I told him.
I wasn’t over-enthusiastic about meeting Basil’s prospective missus. I’ve known a few models in my time, and though they look pretty smashing showing off tartan jodhpurs or whatever in Vogue, they generally turn out to be skinny girls with loud voices who keep borrowing fourpence off you to telephone their agents. It was therefore a nice surprise a few minutes later to be shaking hands with the most beautiful little blonde I had ever seen in my life.
2
‘Are you perfectly sure you’ve completely recovered from your operation, Gaston?’ asked my cousin, Miles Grimsdyke, FRCS, the surgeon.
We were sitting in a couple of paper hats over the remains of the Christmas dinner, his wife Connie having retired to wipe more of it from the face of their two-year-old son.
Miles helped himself to more port. ‘Last year you were quite the life and soul of the party–’
‘And this one I’ve been sitting about uttering sighs deep enough to blow the pudding out,’ I agreed.
‘You have seemed far from your usual self, I must say. I think young Bartholomew was quite disappointed.’
I lit one of his cigars. ‘Fact is, old lad, I find myself at the moment in a position of some embarrassment.’
‘Indeed? I am sorry to hear it.’ Miles pushed across the decanter. ‘But as much as I should like to assist you, you must remember I have now a child to support. Believe me, the frightful cost of human reproduction–’
‘My condition, alas, for once cannot be eased by the mere application of cash.’
He looked startled. ‘You haven’t done anything awful, have you? I mean, being drunk and disorderly? Or – Good heavens! – you haven’t taken drugs?’
‘I am in love.’
‘Oh, is that all?’
‘Well may you take the blasé view,’ I admitted with a sigh. ‘Of course, I’ve trifled with an affection or two in the past, in those jolly days when I used to push nurses home over the St Swithin’s mortuary gate. But that was mere emotional chicken-pox. This is the acute full-blown complaint, with all complications.’
‘H’m. What’s the lucky lady’s name?’
‘Ah, yes.’ I cracked a nut. ‘I’m afraid I’m not just now at liberty to tell you. You see,’ I explained, ‘she happens to be engaged to somebody else.’
‘And will you be invited to the wedding?’
I hadn’t even taken the trouble of discovering Ophelia’s telephone number. I’d taken a laboratory specimen from Basil in Razzy’s consulting room that afternoon, and as he was catching the midnight train to rehearse in Blackport he suggested I rang his fiancée with the result. The following morning Ophelia and I became rather chatty on the wire, so I asked her out for a Yuletide drink, and the day after it was lunch, and the next evening dinner, and soon we were tooting round the night-clubs, and now I worshipped the very ground she dug her spiked heels into.
And all the time Basil was popping through trap doors saying, ‘Fe fi fo fum!’ No wonder I felt a bit of a cad.
‘It was perhaps not very kind of me to make that last remark,’ Miles relented. ‘Particularly in view of the season.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I conceded. ‘After all, we Grimsdykes have our honour. Even our old grandpa who had such trouble with the servant problem, what with chasing all the housemaids round the attics.’
I could see Miles thought me a bit of a cad, too, and I could hardly blame him. My cousin was a severe little bristly chap, openly admitted in the family to have inherited my share of the brain-producing genes as well, and our relationship had been rather brittle since the day he caned me at school for filling his cricket boots with treacle. Though admittedly he’d become chummier since reaching the St Swithin’s consultant staff and assuming all the trappings of a rising young London surgeon – a new Alvis, a plate in Welbeck Street, a nice wife, a blotter on half-a-dozen committee tables, and even a faintly disgusting disease named after him.
‘At least I’ve managed so far to keep the family escutcheon as unspotted as a polar bear in a snowstorm,’ I added a little defensively.
‘That is true enough, Gaston. And certainly no one would be happier than Connie and myself if you did manage to settle down in a home of your own.’ Miles reached for the port again. ‘Particularly in view of the Prime Minister’s letter to me last week.’
I looked up. ‘Good Lord! He doesn’t want you to stand for Parliament, or anything?’
‘Oh, tut!’ said Miles, though not seeming displeased at the idea. ‘But he does want me to join the Wincanton commission in the New Year.’
I wondered quickly if that was the one enquiring into conditions in the Stock Exchange or conditions in prisons.
‘The Royal Commission on the State of Public Morality,’ Miles explained, looking smug under his paper hat. ‘I’m sure even you will appreciate this is a great honour. Though I fear it will be hard work. We shall be obliged to investigate nude spectacles, to mix with women of the lowest morals, and penetrate some of the foulest drinking dens in London.’
It all sounded jolly good fun to me, but remembering how seriously Miles took his welfare work even as a medical student, I simply congratulated him.
‘I particularly wish to make a success of the appointment,’ Miles continued, half to himself. ‘For who knows where it might lead? One might become Dean of the Hospital…Vice-Chancellor of the University…a Fellow of All Souls…a Life Peer…’
The chap was full of port, of course.
‘I gather you are undertaking Sir Lancelot Spratt’s biography?’ he added, remembering himself.
‘As a matter of fact, I’m going round tomorrow to start sorting the stuff. He’s such a busy fellow it seems Boxing Day’s the only time he has to spare.’
I found myself writing Sir Lancelot’s biography through having recently published a novel, which enjoyed modest success among all those people who can’t yet afford television sets. Basil hadn’t heard of it, of course, but then no actors ever read books. And apart from unexpected emergencies presented by train smashes or Razzy’s love life, I had – like Drs Anton Chekhov and John Keats before me – abandoned the healing art for the literary life.
Being a literary gent certainly has its advantages, such as not needing to shave before starting work in the mornings and all the literary luncheons sitting at the top table, which has the flowers and the buckshee booze. But there are snags. First of all, of course, you have to write more ruddy books. Then what with rubbing shoulders with the latest angry young chaps, or signing copies of the Works in bookshops, and holding forth over the cheese at those luncheons, you tend to develop the well-known clinical condition of megalocrania acuta. It’s just the same the day you pass your finals and qualify, and go charging round the hospital in the biggest stethoscope out of John Bell and Croyden’s, trying to get everybody to call you ‘Doctor’.
In hospital you’re fortunately cured pretty smartly by the ward sisters, who can deflate young doctors as easily as a kid popping soap-bubbles. But in the literary life Fate is left with the job. It was a pretty bumptious Grimsdyke who returned from a trip to New York on his proceeds, when Fate neatly stuck a foot in his path. I arrived in London to find the publishers’ shutters up and the beastly chaps gone bankrupt, which was particularly awkward as I’d asked the air hostess out to lunch, and all I had in the world was one of those little cellophane bags of airsick barley-sugar.
I’d managed to scrape up enough to take a houseboat off Chelsea and start another novel, which I didn’t expect would knock spots off Tolstoy, but might cheer up some of the fierce gents who go sniping through the literary jungle on Sunday mornings. But Fate, not having the advantage of an English education, doesn’t recognise the code of never kicking a man when he’s down. I hadn’t got further with the novel than cleaning all the letters in my typewriter with a pin, when I was carted into St Swithin’s with a pretty nasty appendix. As usual among doctors, everyone misdiagnosed the case, and if they hadn’t finally sent for Sir Lancelot Spratt I’d have been having a pretty chilly Christmas of it, perched on the edge of a cloud fooling about with a harp.
‘I trust you are being a satisfactory patient, Grimsdyke?’ Sir Lancelot had said, appearing in the ward a few days after the operation to inspect his handiwork. ‘They say that doctors invariably make the worst ones.’
‘I’m learning all sorts of things about hospitals I never knew before, sir,’ I replied, lying among the grapes and chrysanthemums.
He nodded. ‘You have discovered the only way. It would, for instance, do the Bar a power of good if more barristers than at present served a spell in jail. Sister,’ he added, as she replaced my bedclothes, ‘I believe I left my notebook in your office. Would you have the kindness to fetch it?’
The surgeon stood for a moment stroking his beard.
‘Now we have a few seconds alone, young man,’ he went on, ‘I have the chance to ask your help in a matter of some delicacy.’
‘Mine, sir?’
I stared at him. In the days when I was one of his students, I suppose Sir Lancelot had thrown at me practically everything nasty that came conveniently to hand in his operating theatre. I now felt he was like Bobby Locke asking his caddy to drive off for him in the Open.
‘I should like you to be my ghost.’
‘Your what, sir?’
‘I believe that is the technical term? But we must be brief. Your cousin Miles and my colleagues in the hospital are pressing me to write my memoirs. I have had a not uninteresting life, and they imagine the publication might in some way raise the present lamentable standing of our profession in the eyes of the British public. We are, alas, no longer tin gods. And we are very far from being the gold-plated tin gods of our American colleagues. Be that as it may. I could, of course, perfectly well write the book myself if I had the time. But these days I have no longer the leisure even to send up my cases to the Lancet, particularly as I have recently been appointed consultant to the Police Welfare Club.’
‘Congratulations, sir,’ I remarked.
‘Thank you, Grimsdyke. The duties are arduous and rather unexciting – policemen for some reason run largely to varicose veins and hernias – but it throws me a good deal with our own famous pathologist. Dr McFiggie is, of course, the President. He very courteously allowed me to see the Bayswater victim in the mortuary this morning. I must confess,’ Sir Lancelot added, noticing my paperback mystery from the ward library, ‘I find the study of homicide utterly fascinating. I should write a book about that, too, if only I had the time.’ He sighed briefly. ‘“The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise”. You are familiar with Ecclesiasticus? In short, I should be much obliged if you would accept the task of my biography. There will of course be a small honorarium – shall we say fifty guineas?’
This was a bit of a poser. If I pottered through Sir Lancelot’s memoirs for a mere fifty quid, not only would the world have to resign itself to waiting for the novel but the landlord of the houseboat would have to do the same about his rent. I stared for a moment through the ward windows, where the last leaves on the dusty plane trees in the courtyard were gold-plated by the afternoon autumn sun. Soon everything would be fairy-lights and mistletoe, then it would be daffodils and the Boat Race and asparagus and cricket, and in no time summer and Ascot and strawberries and cream again, and if life looked pretty good I remembered it now came with the compliments of Sir Lancelot Spratt.
‘It would be an honour, sir,’ I said.
‘Excellent. I suggest you start work about Christmas time, when I can supply you at my house with all the necessary papers. I really must apologise,’ he added, as Sister hurried up, ‘I seem to have my notebook in my pocket all the while.’
It was when first trying out Sir Lancelot’s stitches that I ran into Razzy, then of course I met Ophelia, and Christmas found me mooching through the general jollity in Miles’ house thinking less of Sir Lancelot’s life than the way the little soft hairs curled at the base of her neck.
‘I sincerely hope your affair with this lady does not end discreditably,’ observed Miles across the table, after chatting for a while about the memoirs and I fancy trying to drop the hint I might include a few words about himself.
‘The situation has happened to chaps before now, of course,’ I told him. ‘Romeo, for instance.’
‘I certainly hope it won’t finish as disastrously as that.’ Miles looked a bit alarmed. ‘Perhaps,’ he added, with one of his looks, ‘on the strength of my long experience in welfare work among broken homes you will allow me to offer you a little sensible advice–’
But at that moment Connie came in, and we both had to go out and be bears.
