'Ah, yes,' he sighed. 'My investments.'
'Have you got a job?'
'I'm a sort of chronic _locum tenens._ Life really got difficult when I fell into the hands of the crooks next door. You must have been pretty hard put to it, ending up with those financial fiends?'
'I was. The cash was running pretty low. I had to get work somewhere, and I was lured by their advertisements.'
He nodded. 'How much is the job paying?'
'Ten guineas a week.'
'You ought to have stuck out for sixteen, at least. I suppose you've never been in practice before?'
I shook my head.
'Then watch out. It's not the doctors who are the trouble-it's their wives. Remember that, old lad, if nothing else. By the way, can you lend me some money? My investments take practically every penny these days.'
'Of course! My small resources are at your disposal.'
'I suppose Wilson, Willowick, and Wellbeloved pressed a hundred quid on you? A tenner will do me. Here's my card, though I hope you won't have to remind me. I may be poor, but I'm still honest. Thanks, old lad. Do you want any tips for the market? No? Then your very good health.'
Before going to my practice I had two essential purchases to make.
I went to a ready-made tailor's in Oxford Street and gingerly walked through the chromium halls looking at the dummies, which demonstrated that the suits fitted all right if you were in the grip of _rigor mortis._ I was sneaking towards the door when a salesman sprang at me from a thicket of Shaftesbury Avenue tweed, and within a minute was helping me off with my clothes in a cubicle.
'I want something for-er, business. Pretty dark and dignified, you know.'
'But you don't want to look like an undertaker's clerk, sir, do you?'
'No, I certainly don't want to look like an undertaker's clerk.'
'How about this, sir?' he said, briskly producing a suit with the air of a _maitre d'hфtel_ offering something exceptionally choice from the kitchen. It was a blue tweed, with a pronounced herring-bone, a mauve check overlay, and a faint red stripe. 'Wears like tin plate, sir. Just feel. Lovely bit of cloth. Magnificent quality. You won't be seeing anything like this again, sir.'
The suit certainly looked good value; but the pink lights and rosy mirrors in the shop would have sold out a stock of sackcloth and ashes.
'The sleeves are a bit long,' I said dubiously.
'They'll work up in no time, sir. Never fear.'
'All right, I'll take it.'
'I'm sure you'll be very satisfied, sir,' he said, immediately wrapping it up. He winked. 'You'll be cutting quite a dash with this at the Palais on Saturday nights, eh, sir?'
My next necessity was a car. A G.P. without a car is as useless as a postman without legs, but I had less than seventy pounds left with which to buy one. I looked wistfully in the manufacturers' showrooms in Piccadilly, where brand-new cars were displayed as carefully as the cigarette-cases in the jewellers next door, but even the second- hand ones in Euston Road garages were beyond my means. I finally arrived at a bomb-site in Camden Town where a line of cars with prices whitewashed on their windscreens stood under a banner saying HONEST PERCY PICK.
'Lovely job, this one,' said Percy Pick, kicking a tyre affectionately. He managed his business without moving his hands from his pockets, his hat from his head, or his cigarette from his mouth. 'Good for another fifty thou., easy.'
'The price is a bit steep for me, I'm afraid.'
He snorted. 'Garn! Don't expect me to give it away, do yer? I'll come down to a 'undred.'
I shook my head.
'How about this?' He slapped a bonnet in a row of cars waiting pathetically to be bought like puppies in a dog's home. 'Only one owner.'
'He must have died a very old man.'
'How about a mo'bike if you're so broke?'
'How much is that one over there?' In the corner of the site was a large, black, heavy, hearse-like car which looked as immobile as a chicken-coop. Percy Pick seemed surprised to see it.
'You can have it for fifty,' he said quickly.
'Does it go?'
'Go? Of course it goes. All my cars go.'
'Very well,' I said. 'Let's see.'
The next morning I set off to my practice, wearing my new suit and driving my new car, reflecting that I had already learnt much of the sordid world outside the over-protective walls of St Swithin's.
5
The journey north was exciting, for neither the car-which I had christened 'Haemorrhagic Hilda'-nor I had been on the road for some, time. Hilda was originally an expensive limousine, but now she was constructed of so many spare parts that I thought of her fondly as the bastard of some noble line. Her vertical windscreen, which opened horizontally across the middle, was colourful with rainbows and bright with stars; there was worm in the dashboard, where all the dials pointed to zero except the engine temperature, which was stuck at boiling; her furnishings had been replaced by a former owner, and now consisted of a pair of bucket seats from an old baby Austin perched on a fruit-box in front, and an ordinary small domestic horsehair sofa in the back. Behind the sofa were pieces of sacking, some old gnawed bones, a yo-yo, and scraps of newspaper prophesying the fall of Ramsay MacDonald's government. The front windows would not open, and the back windows would not shut. Birds had nested under the roof, and mice under the floorboards.
The mechanical part of Haemorrhagic Hilda aroused my clinician's interest rather than my alarm. The engine produced more rales, sibili, and rhonchi than a ward of asthmatics, and the steering gear, which had a wheel fit for a London bus, was afflicted with a severe type of _locomotor ataxia._ The only pleasant surprise was the horn. This was a long silver trumpet creeping from the windscreen to coil comfortably over the bonnet and front mudguard, which in squeezing the rubber bulb sounded like feeding-time in the seal pool. Hilda's other surprisingly good point was her brakes, which I shortly had a chance of demonstrating.
Outside Stony Stratford a police car waved me to the roadside.
'You the owner of this vehicle?' the policeman demanded, taking my licence.
'And proud of it,' I said cheerfully.
'I suppose you know there are regulations concerning the roadworthiness of motor vehicles?' he said in the tone used by Customs officers asking you to open the other suitcase. 'Is the vehicle equipped with an efficient braking system?'
'Brakes? Absolutely wonderful, officer. She can pull up on a postage stamp.'
'I am going to test the truth of your statement. Proceed along the highway at a reasonable speed. I will follow, and when I blow my horn apply your brakes.'
'Right-ho,' I said bravely.
I swung the engine, wondering what was going to happen: if the police decided to hound Hilda off the road, I would not only arrive late but lose the greater part of my working capital as well.
After I had travelled a few hundred yards my thoughts were interrupted by the urgent blast of a horn behind me. As I drove the brake-pedal into the floorboards I realized that it was not the policeman but a Bentley sweeping past our procession at eighty. There was a crash behind, and my windscreen fell on to the bonnet. As Haemorrhagic Hilda had been built in the same spirit as the Pyramids, she suffered only another dent in the rear mudguard; but
