DOCTOR AT LARGE

'I mean, who's the head surgeon in your ward?'

'Why, Dr Gordon,' said the patient in amazement. 'You know-the young feller.'

'Is there any other doctor?'

The patient thought for a time. 'There's another youngish chap called Hatrick what Dr Gordon gets to help him sometimes-'

'Yes, yes, yes! But who else?'

The patient tried to remember. 'No one else except an old man Dr Gordon asks in every so often out of the kindness of his heart. But he's past it, I reckon,' he added confidentially

As the Professor's wards were immediately below mine in the surgical block, I saw a good deal of Bingham. We treated each other with aggressive politeness: Bingham markedly avoided the lift when we went downstairs together, and I pointedly asked his advice, as the senior surgeon by six months, about my difficult cases. Whenever our professional interests conflicted, we drenched each other in courtesy.

'Hello, old chap,' he said, coming to the duty operating theatre one evening. 'Just finished a case?'

'Well, er, no. Actually, I was just going to scrub up for a stitch abscess from the ward. But if you want the theatre first-'

'Not a bit, old chap, not a bit,' he said quickly. 'We are on duty tonight, I admit, and we do have priority in the theatre and all that, but I wouldn't dream of standing in your way. It's only a F.B. in the pop. foss.; and that can wait.'

'No no, my dear Bingham! After all, I'm a septic case, so, you should come first.'

'Well, that's terribly d. of you, old chap, but really-I know,' he announced, his eyes lighting up at the gentlemanly solution to this impasse, 'you shall have our centrifuge all tomorrow afternoon.'

'Really, I couldn't-'

'Yes, old chap. Absolutely insist.'

'That's awfully kind of you, Bingham.'

'Don't mench, old chap.'

A month passed like a fine April day. Then a strange feeling of depression began to creep over me. At first it puzzled me; my career was progressing splendidly, but I had the vague feeling of something missing from my life. I wondered if I were developing some dark psychological complaint, and mentioned this to Grimsdyke one evening over a pint of beer in the King George pub opposite.

'I don't know what it is exactly,' I told him. 'It's a sort of-well, unsatisfied feeling. Lord knows why. I love the work, I really feel I'm learning a bit of surgery at last, it's fun living in the hospital with the boys, and I haven't seen Bingham for two days. What more could I want? Do you think I ought to take an interest in art or music or something?'

Grimsdyke laughed. 'You don't want music, old lad, you want women. Or one woman at least.'

I was surprised. 'Do you really think so?'

'Absolutely certain. Can't miss the diagnosis. We're not run-around students any more, however much we try and pretend we are on Saturday nights. We're worthy citizens, God help us. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' Jane Austen.'

'A wife!' I cried in horror.

'Well, I wouldn't go as far as that,' he added, finishing his beer. 'But you get the idea.'

I thought carefully about Grimsdyke's diagnosis, and decided that he was right. Fortunately, the treatment would be simple. Since returning to St Swithin's as a doctor, I had sensed a different relationship between myself and the hundreds of young women that the place was obliged to employ. Apart from the nurses, there were the buxom dieticians, the cheerful girls in X-ray, the neat secretaries, the occupational therapists in sandals and folk- weave belts, the laboratory assistants, the speech therapists, the child-guidance workers, and the statuesque physiotherapists in the massage department who were known as the 'slap-and-tickle honeys'. As students, these ladies had treated us like well-brought-up Wrens dealing with fresh ratings; but now that we were qualified and therefore pressingly marriageable the iron hand was eased a little from the velvet glove.

The sister of Mr Cambridge's female ward had resigned shortly before I arrived, leaving the patients in charge of the staff nurse until the matron could make another promotion. This was Nurse Plumtree, a pale, thin, dark, snub-nosed girl, passably pretty except for her hair, which appeared to be attended by a gardener in a spare second while occupied with the hedge-clippers. From my first entrance to the ward Nurse Plumtree clearly looked upon me as her own property. This was correct hospital etiquette, for the staff nurse was always allowed first bite at the new houseman; but Nurse Plumtree, perhaps because she was in supreme authority over the others, took pains to make this obvious. I preferred her second-in-command, a bright, red-headed, freckled Scots girl, to whom I chatted if Nurse Plumtree was out of the ward; when she returned she would cross directly to us with an extra briskness in her step, look her professional sister squarely in the eye, and order her to check the laundry. One afternoon, Nurse Plumtree came back from lunch to find the pair of us giggling over a joke in the sluice-room, and afterwards rarely took any time off at all. She insisted that this was through her devotion to duty; but it was clear to everyone else that it was through her devotion to me.

'Have you any socks that need mending?' she asked one morning. 'If you'll bring them up I'll darn them for you. I've nothing else to do in the evenings. I never go out.'.

We were sitting alone in the Sister's private sitting-room, a small apartment fierce with yellow chintz and brassware next to the ward. Every day I was invited there for a cup of milky coffee served timidly by the junior probationer, while Nurse Plumtree took a tin of her own chocolate biscuits from the bureau, put her feet up on the rushwork stool, and lit a cigarette. 'In fact,' she went on, 'I've got an evening off tomorrow. From five o'clock. I don't know what on earth to do with it.'

'Really? Well, er-perhaps something may turn up,' I said warily. 'Who knows?'

She sipped her coffee sorrowfully.

The morning after my talk with Grimsdyke she threw into her conversation, 'I've got a half-day on Wednesday. Starting at twelve o'clock. And I'm due for a late pass till midnight. But I don't expect I shall take them. There just doesn't seem anything to do.'

I already knew this, having sneaked a glance at the nurses' off-duty book kept with the insurance certificates on her desk. I had made up my mind. Nurse Plumtree was presentable and pleasant; besides, there was not the faintest chance of being snubbed.

I coughed.

'If you're really without plans, perhaps you'd like to come to the pictures, or something?'

For an instant her eyes widened. 'I'm not sure if I can really leave the ward. Nurse Macpherson isn't very experienced.'

'Of course not.'

'As well as being a lot too familiar with the patients-'

'So I've noticed.'

'And anyway, she's far too interested in one of the students for the good of her work.'

'Really? Do try and come. I'll see you at six,' I said, rising. 'Outside the dental department.'

15

My romance with Nurse Plumtree caused no more surprise in the hospital than the annual blooming of the geraniums outside the Secretary's office in summer. My colleagues grinned more widely the more I asked them to stand-in for me during the evenings, and Nurse Macpherson once winked at me over a ward screen; but to most people at St Swithin's we were simply another staff nurse and houseman obeying the local laws of biology.

Like many other young couples with no money in London, we sat at the back in the Festival Hall and the Empress Hall, we dined at Lyons, and we drank in the cosy saloon bars of tucked-away pubs, of which my medical education had left me with a more precise knowledge than of human anatomy. Often Nurse Plumtree paid for herself and sometimes she paid for us both. She was an easy girl to entertain, because she was fond of long silences during which she would stare at the opposite wall as if recalling the faces of friends long dead; and her conversation, when it came, was almost wholly about the hospital. As my few former girl friends had all been