Rotting Hill (16 page)

    Finally, Dr. Paul Eldred belonged to the not inconsiderable number of more or less learned Englishmen who choose to believe that they are Dr. Johnson. A corollary was that some people saw him as that, regarded the dry comments on men and things, in a thudding delivery, as authentically Johnsonian.

    “Once,” the visitor said, “I was in a bladder and kidney hospital, in a room, not a ward.”

    “Indeed? How disagreeable.”

    “Yes. An unpleasant world, the bladder and kidney world. However the night nurse, knowing I was just a bladder case and not interested in kidneys, spoke with a minimum of reticence about the surgeon whose patient I was. I had said sleepily, “Mr. Bingham does not do kidney work, does he, Sister?” Whereupon she told me that he was not allowed to remove kidneys any more. Too many of his patients did not recover from their encounter with him in the operating theatre. He had attempted to bump me off, I may say, in mere high-spirits. He kept me under an anaesthetic for two hours and a half, afterwards informing me that a visiting Swedish doctor who had watched the proceedings had observed ‘how brave he was’. And he really
felt
brave, too.”

    “Well!” Eldred enjoyed chatter about doctors just then and looked approvingly at his visitor.

    “That particular doctor,” the visitor proceeded, “began as a bladder quack in Harley Street, helping a big quack. But he had repented and gone back to orthodox surgery. Straight bladder surgery is plain sailing. It was essential, however, for him to get practice in removing kidneys which is within the speciality of the bladderman.”

    “I know nothing about it,” Eldred said, “but do they not acquire the necessary skill by practising on the cadaver? I understand that is how innovations in surgery are arrived at. But this perhaps is different.”

    “I don’t know either,” the visitor answered. “Only the use of the living cadaver, so to speak, provides a man, I would think, with the necessary confidence to take on a patient and charge him two or three hundred guineas.”

    “Is it really possible that in a great London hospital such homicide could be tolerated!”

    “This was not a great London hospital. It was small.”

    “Ah. You advise a very large hospital!” Eldred summed up.

    “Probably it is a bit safer, yes. Personality is a great factor in doctoring. A big muscular high-spirited surgeon should be avoided like the plague.”

    Eldred emitted a belly-jeer, of three vibrations.

    “Mine,” he said, “was a little runt of a man.”

    “A redhead?”

    “No, he had once been black.”

    “Then perhaps you may survive. Bingham, the one I was speaking of, was big and muscular. He had been a rugger international and dodged about as he spoke to you as though dodging a tackle. He had all the qualifications for a popular surgeon, devil-may-care, a merry twinkle in his cold grey eye, his humour irrepressible for was he not a broth of a boy. His high-pitched boyish laugh charmed his victims and made them feel as safe as houses with him.”

    “However did you manage to escape him!”

    “With women he was not such a success as one would have expected and I suppose the nurse who gossiped about him put me on my guard. No nurse liked him, he would treat a nurse as a piece of hospital furniture. He was cold and tough beneath the blarney and the smiling charm was only for the patient.”

    An appreciative spasm of belly-jeers broke forth, which Eldred rattled about upon a bed of phlegm; applause at the story of the bladderman, and mockery and insults for Bingham.

    “Your hairbreadth escapes among the surgeons and the physicians, Evan, trouble me.”

    “What is your doctor’s name, Paul?”

    “Shaw-Vaughan,” Eldred answered. “They are very partial, I have noticed, to double-barrelled names.”

    “Just for identification purposes,” Evan Jones told him indifferently.

    “The same problem which eternally confronts the Joneses!”

    Lazily Eldred rolled a little towards his visitor, to deliver a friendly belly-jeer or two: to dimple his cheeks, archly to insert his mischievous mask into a thick ring of double-chin like a bird pushed into too tight a nest. This was a habitual disarming social gymnastic, when “saying it with a smile” (
it
being some barbed remark), or when being “well-bred” merely. Evan Jones was unable to decide whether Eldred actually believed him to suffer acutely because he was a
Jones,
or, on the other hand, whether he hoped to induce painful sensitiveness, and to score an advantage over him, by his smiles and dimples, the arching of his vulpine beak, and the fat insult of his double chin.

    “Jones is not a name,” Evan Jones said dryly and contemptuously. “It is like an algebraic symbol. You are wrong. Jones presents no problems. The anonymity is acceptable. No Jones worth talking about wants a name.”

    “Of course he doesn’t,” Eldred said soothingly and woundingly. “I am sorry old chap. I often wish I had not got a name. People sicken me by their name-snobbery.”

    Here he was rubbing in his fame, and a smile flickered in Jones’s face. Annoyed at the smile, Eldred was just going to rub an extra dose of salt into the wound, when Evan Jones proceeded, didactic and unruffled.

    “Is a man adequately described by a name—until he makes it mean something himself, like Napoleon, or shall we say Montgomery? And then what happens? Montgomery, as a Field-Marshal, becomes ‘Monty’. Napoleon Bonaparte becomes ‘Bony’, or, in France still more simply, ‘Lui’. Names that have been brought to life by their owners always get simplified. They are emptied of their pointless weightiness. Such men are often referred to by letters merely, like H.G. or G.B.S. On the other hand the Joneses start with those abstract advantages. And in my own case no one can pretend that my first name,
Evan,
adds to my identity.”

    “No. That is true enough. No one would say
that.
Yours is an almost perfect incognito.”

    Evan looked at his friend as youth gazes with scorn at corrupt, irresponsible, slothful age. Only a few years separated their birth-years in the same decade many decades ago, and the difference was in favour of Paul, not Evan. But for very long now Evan had had this attitude. Eldred lay dramatically haggard, a smile of deliberate derision on his face, which he affected to attempt to hide. (He wished to give the other the sensation of being underneath—rather ridiculously so, and felt cheated of something because apparently this sensation was not produced.) His hands were clasped upon his stomach. Out of the grey face stuck the acquisitively-hooked nose (stupidly acquisitive, Evan would have said) and the massive brow was the brain-trust in the service of the acquisitive will. Evan remembered when this thin man had first begun to feel like Dr. Johnson and when the appetite for petty pomp first showed itself. The shadow of the great lexicographer had fallen on him as he began to taste success, though his manner had been assumed with a cautious self-ridicule at the outset.

    But now suddenly the visitor caught sight of a new feature in this room; on the wall on either side of the door was suspended what looked like a green matting.

    “What is that? A tapestry?” he enquired.

    “That,” Eldred told him, a little aggressively he thought, “is in order to prevent the sound of the telephone in my secretary’s office from disturbing me while I am working. They make it I believe from seaweed.”

    “Ah.”

    But Evan felt that evidence that his was a busy line would hardly be disagreeable to him. ROT 5959 was music in his ears, of that Evan felt sure. It must, on the contrary, be the long periods during which the telephone did
not
ring which depressed him. This seemed, as a first hypothesis only of course, the most likely explanation.

    Eldred stretched out, with grandeur and languor, a bony hand, and pressed an electric button.

    “You say you want a letter to Henri Meritrois. Why do you want a letter? Why not send your card up?”

    Evan Jones did not answer. (“Your name weighs more than mine,” or something, his friend
hoped
he would say, of course. He reckoned without the pride of the Joneses.)

    Eldred’s secretary appeared in the doorway.

    “But you would rather have a letter. Miss Cosway, will you please…”

    He stopped as through the open door a peremptory knock was heard. “That must be Dr. McLachlan,” he observed.

    Jones got to his feet. “Send me the letter will you?” he muttered as he moved resolutely towards the door, Miss Cosway moving out of his way with a smile he did not like.

    Eldred sat up and in place of the belly-jeers reserved for male intimates there was an otherwordly unreadiness, an almost appealing weariness, as he seemingly attempted to gather his wits together in order to cope with a practical matter. The world sought him out in his seclusion with its importunities. Miss Cosway was his go-between—his considerate and sympathetic buffer. Miss Cosway knew quite well that he was never too busy to see some foreigner of no account; she played up, as the efficient secretary she was, to the dramatic resignation with which he consented. She looked tired and resigned herself. It would have been impossible for her not to realize that he took every step in his power to augment the number of these importunities and to swell his daily mail to the point where eighty per cent of it had to be dealt with by her, on occasion practically all. Into her epistolary style had crept the weariness of a longsuffering recluse, and she relished greatly mirroring his pomposity. She could not otherwise have acquitted herself with such efficiency as the secretary of this celebrated recluse, who required at times two secretaries to sustain his correspondence.

    Eldred got to his feet, a ham act showing a patriarchal invalid dragging himself up, his iron will alone enabling him to do so. He stood bowed, gazing up sideways from under what should have been shaggy brows, at the visitor’s back.

    “It shall be sent on to you, Evan. Goodbye, good-bye!” (To Miss Cosway.) “Mr. Jones feels about doctors as some people do about cats.”

    Miss Cosway and her master exchanged polite gleams. For not only was she never allowed to hear his belly-jeers, but if he shared with her some highly innocuous mirth, the gleam he gave would be one of otherworldly tolerance and compassion, like a man looking back magnanimously from the gates of paradise upon the worldly scene. He had once, by inadvertence, given vent to a belly-jeer of scornful defiance in Miss Cosway’s presence. He blushed and fell into an alarming fit of coughing, pretending of course that the unseemly sounds which had escaped him had been a novel prelude to a violent catarrhal convulsion.

    The doctor entered, a maidservant appearing for a moment behind him. Dr. McLachlan was a Scot, who, trained at a famous London hospital, had learned in England to appear to forget that anything is serious, which certainly is most agreeable for all concerned. His attitude to his patients’ complaints was that they were well-bred jokes. He spoke snobbishly in his throat without a trace of Scottish accent. Eldred’s intellectual attainments he knew how to value, as no English doctor would have done: he accorded to his position a dignified deference which the Englishman because he felt “independent” would refuse, even if paid to look impressed. As a physician Eldred had a high opinion of him. Indeed, he regarded him as unique. Dr. McLachlan’s reckless frankness astonished him at times. He would discuss a specialist’s findings without fear and warn his patient if a diagnosis had a fishy look to him. There was only one class of specialists he was unsafe with, namely those belonging to the great hospital where he had been trained. Where they were concerned he became an orthodox general practitioner.

    “Well,” said Dr. McLachlan with his frosty professional smile, “how are you?”

    Stiffly he seated himself. He was perhaps forty-five, Eldred thought, but his movements were studied and circumspect, like those of an elderly man. He sat down, as if his behind were made of glass and crossed his legs as though they were china legs. His version of the behaviour of a man of the world seemed to emanate from a book of etiquette. Such was the personality this doctor had evolved, though there was one other feature: the population of Rotting Hill probably would identify him most readily with his neckwear. There always appeared to be a lot of white collar about him. It was Eldred’s theory that the collar served to conceal post-adolescent carbuncles, traces of which our doctor had been unable to banish from his face. Upon the completion of his training McLachlan had set up shop in Rotting Hill as general practitioner: he had built from zero a brilliant practice but his health had been the price he had had to pay. So, a still comparatively youthful wreck, there he sat frostily smiling with a somewhat startling levity at that most theatrical of wrecks, his haggard patient, as if to say “health to a gentleman is highly ridiculous”.

    However, he had something more concrete to say than that and he came immediately to the point.

    “If,” he said, “you care to rough it a little, Dr. Eldred, I can get you a bed in a small nursing-home tomorrow. But I promised to let the Matron know at once. They are nuns, it is non-profit-making, so it has the advantage of being cheap. Most of these places are, of course, extortionate today.”

    Eldred looked at him with his heavy judicial eye, weighing this proposition dubiously. Dr. McLachlan was a Catholic. Eldred believed it was a Catholic dentist McLachlan had sent him to, as he had seen some nuns at his surgery while his name was O’Toole. To Catholics he had no objection: but the Catholic community in England is small, and it is therefore unlikely that the best dentists, anaesthetists, nurses, radiologists, specialists, etc., are
all
Catholics even if the best G. P. was that.