Doctor In the Nest by Richard Gordon

Author:Richard Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Stratus

Chapter Twelve

‘What’s for dinner, darling?’ Freddie Bisham came into the lounge at Apricot Avenue, throwing his white coat over the straw donkey. It was the following Monday, and he had just finished his evening surgery.

‘I’m giving you my goulash à I’hongroise, lovey,’ said Eva.

‘Oh, great. Your stews were always delicious.’ Freddie kissed his fingertips. ‘The ultimate in savoury glutinosity.’

‘How kind you always are,’ Eva smiled.

‘How long do you suppose it’s going to take us, getting rid of one hundred thousand “Save St Sepulchre’s” car-stickers?’ he asked doubtfully, kicking the brown paper packets piled in front of the indoor plants.

‘And a quarter of a million leaflets in the garage,’ she recalled.

‘Hello, darling,’ Freddie said, as Dawn pushed through the beads in the Moorish arch.

‘Hello, dear. How was surgery?’

‘Bloody. The whole of Spratt’s Bottom suffers from only three diseases. Indigestion, headaches and sexual fantasies. Oh, and enlarged prostates. There was a programme about it on TV last night. This morning, everyone had it. It was particularly rife among the women.’

‘Remember that documentary on VD last Friday?’ Pip followed Freddie through the surgery door, throwing his white coat on the plastic-topped coffee-table. ‘You’d have been surprised on Saturday morning at the number of ladies, of high respectability and even of advanced age, who sat down in the surgery, leaned across the desk and started in guilty whispers.’ He broke off to Eva, ‘What’s for dinner, dear?’

‘Goulash, dear. What’s the matter?’ she asked, seeing him wrinkle his nose.

‘Too much like Dawn’s moussaka.’ Pip threw himself on the black plastic recliner.

‘What’s wrong with my moussaka, darling?’ Dawn asked, sounding hurt.

‘I never really liked it.’

‘And you never told me!’

‘I suppose I was afraid you might produce something worse.’ Pip reached for that morning’s Times.

‘This time round, darling, I’ll make quite certain you’ll never even smell moussaka. I think I’ll try turning myself into a good cook. You’ll give me some lessons, Eva dear, won’t you?’

‘Of course I will, Dawn dear.’

‘Suburban general practice!’ Freddie had been busy at the repro-Jacobean cabinet. ‘It has as little connection with medicine as a parish jumble-sale to religion.’

‘Perhaps it’s our fault?’ Pip suggested thoughtfully. ‘We keen young doctors. We do rather view our patients as a do-it-yourself assembly kit of human organs. I suppose that only about … what? One patient in six, goes to their GP because they’re ill.’

‘The others go for the reassurance that they’re not,’ agreed Freddie, adding to four gin-and-tonics ice from a plastic pineapple. ‘I always say, “There’s a lot of it about this time of the year”. Which is very comforting whether you’ve got tenesmus or tetanus.’

‘If everyone in Spratt’s Bottom was as ill as they thought they were,’ observed Pip turning the pages of the paper, ‘it would make the Black Death look like a flu epidemic.’

‘But think of all those lonely old ladies,’ said Dawn charitably, sitting next to Eva on a pink pouffe and taking a glass from Freddie’s tray with the hunting scenes. ‘They’ve absolutely no one in the world with the patience to listen to them, except the milkman and the doctor.

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