An Academic Death by J.M. Gregson

Author:J.M. Gregson [Gregson, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The doctor was young. She looked about eighteen to Lambert’s jaded eye, but he knew she must be at least twenty-four. He had asked for the earliest possible appointment and said any doctor would do. So it was his own fault that he was stripping off his clothes at eight o’clock in a surgery which was only just warming up.

The girl did not make any conversation whilst he was behind the screen. In a moment he stood awkwardly before her, stripped to the waist, trying not to think how much younger she looked than either of his own daughters. He flinched and giggled nervously at the coldness of her stethoscope as she sounded his chest and back; her serious air, which made him wonder how often she had done this before, how many other ageing bodies she had observed in their decline.

‘Breathe in and hold it, please,’ she said sharply, and he took the deepest breath he could, straining like a schoolboy to expand the chest beneath these slim, asexual fingers.

She tapped his chest and his back and listened to her stethoscope, asked him questions about his diet, nodded her approval when he said he had given up smoking ten years and more ago. She took his blood pressure and muttered that it was satisfactory, almost as if that was a disappointment to her.

Then she asked for a lot of detail about the severity of the pain and the exact times when it had occurred. She asked if his job involved him in a lot of stress and whether he sat behind a desk all day: he said no to both and she nodded several times. Then she looked at him with her head on one side for a second, like a bird assessing a not very attractive worm. He was torn between admiration of her thoroughness and a nagging fear that she might already be certain that this was something serious.

John Lambert wasn’t used to being ill. It was a long time since he had presented himself to any doctor, and he realised that he had unconsciously been expecting some reassuring, dark-suited man of at least his own age. When she finally allowed him to get dressed, he fell to wondering whether this pretty, serious girl was nerving herself to tell him something awful when he emerged from behind the screen. The thought meant that he had difficulty fastening the buttons of his shirt.

The doctor was writing at her desk when he emerged fully clothed and sat down on the chair opposite her. This was what people must feel like when he interviewed them, he thought, as he speculated nervously about what would come next. She had put on a pair of glasses with small round lenses to write, but they didn’t make her look any older. He waited a second or two, watching the small hand scribbling furiously. Almost against his will, he said anxiously, ‘I expect it’s nothing serious. Bit of a waste of your time

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