When the consumptive buzzer sounded again, the receptionist had to call “Mrs Grope, please!” twice before there was any reaction from the stumpy, sad-looking woman with very dark eyes who sat opposite Miss Teatime. At the second, louder, summons, Mrs Grope jumped, looked round inquiringly at everybody in turn, then hurried to the wrong door. A woman with a thickly bandaged foot caught her sleeve and motioned her to the other.
So that, Miss Teatime reflected, was the partner of the poet of Blackfriars’ Court. No wonder she had an air of chronic bewilderment.
Dr Bruce’s sign was the next to light up. The bandaged woman hobbled into his consulting room. He disposed of her and three more patients before the senior partner’s buzzer signified that he was no longer occupied with the woes of Mrs Grope.
“Mrs McCreavy. Will you go in now, please.”
Miss Teatime sneaked a look at Mrs McCreavy from behind an elderly copy of the
Mrs McCreavy paused at the door of Dr Meadow’s room, tightened her scarlet bird-mouth into a secret smile, and squeezed through the doorway out of sight, as if to a scandalous assignation.
Dr Bruce continued his brisk dispatch of the ailing. His buzzer sounded five times in as many minutes. The waiting room had begun to look depopulated. Between calls, a typewriter clattered in the receptionist’s office. She doubled as secretary, apparently.
Somewhere a clock struck the half hour. The girl left her typing in order to lock the surgery entrance against late arrivals. She smiled at Miss Teatime as she passed and gave a little shrug of mock weariness.
A schoolboy with his arm in a sling and a look of Napoleonic fortitude was next to disappear. There remained only Miss Teatime, a middle-aged man in a smart grey suit, and a girl of about twenty who kept her arms tightly folded across her chest and studied her shoes for most of the time.
Miss Teatime suppressed a yawn. She wondered what encyclopaedic symptoms lay beneath Mrs McCreavy’s black silk. Ten minutes. Quarter of an hour. The man had had time to examine her intestines inch by inch and get them all back again by now.
“Excuse me...”
She started.
“Excuse me, but if you like...”
It was the gentleman in the grey suit, and he was leaning forward, talking to her.
“If you like, you can go in and see the doctor before I do. I am in no hurry.”
“That is remarkably kind of you.”
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I am not a patient.”
Miss Teatime was tempted to say, Nor am I, but she turned it to “No, I must say you look far too healthy to be consulting doctors.”
And so he did. His rather square face had the long-established tan of the widely travelled. It was a calm, controlled face, with a hint in the jaw muscles of considerable strength. His small moustache—military. Miss Teatime dubbed it, instinctively—was impeccably trimmed and almost white. The eyes, which she decided with regret to be humourless, were of very pale blue; they looked as if they had never been closed since early childhood.
The man had on the seat beside him a capacious brief case of heavy leather, highly polished. Its flap was unlocked and the man had taken from it a sheaf of papers, which he held now on his knee. They looked like brochures or leaflets of some kind.
Ah, a salesman, Miss Teatime told herself. One thing about these pharmaceutical people, though—they had an air of distinction, of being concerned with higher things than mere money, that you never found in a groceries rep or a hawker of hardware.
She tried to confirm her guess by reading the bigger type on the topmost leaflet, but she was hampered by its being upside-down. Only one word could she make out without going nearer and putting on her glasses (and she could imagine no pretext for anything so brash as that). It was ELIXON. Not much help. She withdrew again behind her
A buzz proclaimed that Dr Bruce was free once more, but no one made a move. After a while, his consulting-room door opened and there appeared a tall, slightly bewildered looking man of about thirty-five, with thin, untidy hair and long hands that kept wrestling with each other. He gazed challengingly at the three people who were still waiting, shrugged, and went back into his room. Miss Teatime heard water begin to run. Dr Bruce doubtless was washing his hands of them all.
“Oh, by the way, Mr Brennan...”
The receptionist was leaning out of her hatch. The man in the grey suit looked up.
“Did you manage to see the doctor earlier on?” she asked him.
“No, I didn’t, actually. There’s no hurry. I shall wait now until he has finished surgery.”
There was some quality in his voice that Miss Teatime had detected before without being able quite to define it. Now she knew what it was: a slight lisp—not an affectation, but the kind of speech flaw that could have resulted from an injury.
“I just wondered,” the girl went on, “because there was something I think he wanted to show you. It’s a copy of that article he rang you about yesterday, and I’ve only just finished typing it.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take it with me when I go in, shall I?...” He put aside the leaflets and stood up.
The girl left the hatch and reappeared holding a long buff-coloured envelope which she handed to Brennan. He slipped it into an inside pocket and resumed his seat after thanking her and taking a casual glimpse of the desk where she had been typing.
