The share was awarded to me through the good offices of Tony Benskin, who lived there with four other students. There was John Bottle, the man who liked dancing and dogs; Mike Kelly, now Captain of the first fifteen; and a youth known about the hospital as Moronic Maurice, who had surprised the teaching staff and himself by finally passing his qualifying exams, and had gone off to practise the art, to the publicly expressed horror of the Dean, as house-surgeon to a small hospital in the country.
These four were really sub-tenants. The flat was leased by a final-year student, a pleasant fellow called Archie Broome, who had lived there during most of his time at St. Swithin's and took his friends as lodgers to help out with the rent.
'We're pretty free and easy there,' he explained to me in the King George. 'I hope you're not terribly particular about the time you have your meals or go to bed and that sort of thing?'
As I had found unpunctuality for meals was taken by landladies as a personal outrage and sitting up to midnight regarded as sinful, I told my prospective landlord warmly I didn't give a damn for such formalities.
'That's good,' Archie said. 'We usually kick in together for the groceries and beer and so forth, if that's all right with you. Here's the key, and you can move in when you like.'
I shifted the following afternoon. The flat was in a large, old, grimy block just by the Park, up a dark flight of stairs. I dropped my suitcases on the landing outside the door and fumbled for the key. While I was doing so the door opened.
Standing in the hallway was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was a tall blonde with a figure like a model in a dress-shop window. She wore slacks and a sweater, which sharply defined her slight curves. Taking her cigarette out with a long graceful hand, she said with great friendliness, 'Hello, Richard. Come on in and make yourself at home.'
'I'm afraid…' I began. 'I mean, I was looking for a fellow called Broome, you know…'
'That's right,' she said. She had a slight, attractive, and unplaceable accent. 'The boys are all at the hospital at.the moment, but just come in anyway. Would you like a cup of tea? My name's Vera.'
'How do you do,' I said politely. I picked up my cases and entered hesitantly. After conditioning myself to living with four coarse men being greeted by a delicate girl was puzzling.
'This is the sitting-room,' Vera continued. 'How about the tea?'
'No thanks. Very kind of you, but I've had some.'
'That's good, because I've got to go and change anyway. If you do want anything the kitchen's through there. Just look round as you please.'
The girl slipped through a door leading off the hall, leaving me in the centre of the sitting-room feeling like a participant in the opening scene of a bedroom farce. I had learnt since being at St. Swithin's that the best way to treat anything unusual was to ignore it, so I directed attention towards my new home.
The furniture in the sitting-room had an original touch which reflected the profession of the occupants. Like Axel Munthe's room in the Hфtel de l'Avenir, there were books everywhere. A row of them stood along the mantelpiece, from which the names of distinguished consultants could stare at the students in gold lettering from red and black bindings, rebuking their loose activities like a row of church elders. In the window an uneven line of thick volumes ran along the ledge like battlements. There were books on the floor, dropped carelessly behind chairs or lost between pieces of furniture and the wall. They were scattered over the table like litter on a beach, mixed up with jam-pots, pieces of bread, tobacco, newspapers, and beer bottles. There was Price's famous
A microscope stood in the corner, conveniently tilted to take the eye, with an open wooden box of glass slides beside it. The articulated bones of a hand lay on the table, mixed up with everything else. From the top of a cupboard in one corner a skull grinned down and provided a stand for a green hat with white cord round it that Benskin was sometimes moved to wear.
As well as this academic litter the room contained pieces of sports kit-rugger boots, woollen socks, a couple of cricket bats, and a dart-board on a splintered plywood backing. The occupants' leisure activities were also represented by a collection of signs, notices, and minor pieces of civic decoration that had from time to time been immorally carried off as trophies. It was a bad habit of St. Swithin's rugby team when playing away from home to pick up souvenirs of their visit before leaving, and in the course of seasons these had grown to a sizeable collection. There was a thirty-miles-limit sign in the corner and an orange beacon next to the skull on the cupboard. From a hook in the wall hung a policeman's helmet with the badge of the Cornwall Constabulary that had been carried off in a burst of vandalism at the end of a successful tour of the West Country. Below it a framed notice declared that the passing of betting slips was illegal, and on the opposite wall a board announcing the opening and closing times of the park. I discovered a little later that the bathroom door bore a metal notice saying 'Nurses Only,' and inside, at the appropriate place, was a small printed request not to use the adjacent apparatus while the train was standing at a station.
My inspection was interrupted by the reappearance of Vera. She was in her stockinged feet and wore only a skirt and a brassiere which she was holding on with her hands.
'Richard, please do my bra up for me,' she asked. 'This damn fastener's gone wrong.'
She turned her slender shoulders.
'Thanks so much,' she said casually. She strolled back into her room and shut the door. I shrugged my shoulders and decided the only thing was to wait until the male members of the household arrived and guardedly discover Vera's precise function.
Vera, it turned out, was Archie's mistress. She was an Austrian girl, with an ensnaring personality and the ability to conduct herself towards her four sub-tenants with such graceful, impartial sisterliness that none of us would have thought of making advances towards her more than we could have contemplated committing incest. Besides, she did all the cooking and most of the little feminine odd jobs about the flat. This was appreciated as highly as her decorative qualities, for our own abilities in the kitchen did not go beyond baked beans and we were able to mend socks only by running a surgical purse-string suture round the hole and pulling it tight. Floor-scrubbing, fire-making, and the coarser domestic tasks were done by the men on a rough rota; but it was Vera who thought of buying a new shade for the lamp, ordering the coal, or telling one of us it was time to change his collar or have his hair cut.
Vera unfortunately had a bad habit of periodically upsetting the smooth running of the place by having sudden fierce quarrels with Archie which always ended by her packing up and leaving. Where she went to in these absences none of us knew. She had no relatives and no money, and Archie was so horrified at his own suspicion of how she maintained herself while she was away that he never dared to ask her outright. The flat would become untidy and unscrubbed. The boiler would go out for lack of coal, and the five of us would nightly sit down to a progressively repellent supper of orange-coloured beans. In a week or so she would reappear, as beautiful, as graceful, as sisterly as ever, throw herself into an orgy of reconciliation with Archie, and continue her household duties as if nothing had happened.
I floated contentedly into the drift of life in the flat. My companions treated the time-table of domestic life with contempt. They took meals when they were hungry, and if they felt like it sat up all night. Archie lived with Vera in a bed-sitting-room, and as they were an uninhibited couple this afforded them sufficient privacy. His guests had the run of the rest of the place. We all shared the bathroom and, as we had to put shillings in the geyser, quite often the bath water as well. It was in connection with the bathroom that Vera became her most sisterly. She would walk in and start cleaning her teeth unruffled by a hairy male in the bath attempting to retain his modesty with the loofah. Although we were all far too gentlemanly knowingly to intrude while she was in the bath herself she was never worried by anyone bursting in. 'After all,' she would say flatteringly, 'you are all doctors.'
