The Invisible Victory by Richard Gordon

Author:Richard Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-11-04T10:26:36+00:00

20

‘Jim, it was awfully good of you to waste your time with Elizabeth last night.’

Sir Edward Tiplady came hurrying into my laboratory. I had risen in the Harley Street house from basement to attic. After Lady Tip bolted he had turned the whole place into consulting rooms, which he let profitably.

It was simply a doctors’ shop. Our basement was now full of files and rubbish, I tested blood and urine samples in the room where I had fathered Clare. My mother had gone as cook to a small hotel in Eastbourne. My father had died shortly after the old King, knocked down by a taxi outside a pub. The house itself then had barely eighteen months to live, before being blown to bits early in the blitz.

‘I know that underneath she’s terribly impressed meeting someone like Lord Meddish,’ he continued. ‘Who’s always getting himself into the newspapers.’

‘We were delighted to see her. She livens us all up.’ Sir Edward always placed me in an avuncular relationship to Elizabeth. It seemed sage not to rectify his impression.

‘I’m sure she didn’t. She bored you terribly, I expect.’ He was moving restlessly as ever round the white-painted, sloping-roofed room. He was growing grey, but his figure was still spare and the lines round his blue eyes no deeper. His happiness had much improved since shedding his wife. ‘I really do find it hard work, chatting to bright young things these days.

They don’t even call themselves “bright young things” any more, do they?

There seems such an enormous gap in our ideas, in the way we look at the world. And of course, Elizabeth is really very naughty, playing the enfant 149

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terrible. She’s really too old for that sort of prankish behaviour. Have you done Mrs Cockburn’s blood urea?’

‘Yes, it’s normal.’

‘Good, the old thing’s kidneys are all right after all. But I think I’ll play her along. She needs a doctor to relieve her inner tensions by listening to her troubles. Her family got sick to death of them years ago. And she always pays on the nail.’

Encouraged and financed by Sir Edward, I had started a one-man biochemical and bacteriological service for neighbouring consulting rooms and the private nursing homes and clinics then multiplying in London. Mine were the coming sciences. There had been little point in identifying the germs infecting the patient, or the deficiencies of his blood and other body fluids, when the doctor could do little to rectify either misfortune. I was doing prosperously. I dressed better, I wore bow ties like Alexander Fleming. Much of my work – like Mrs Cockburn’s blood urea

– was to save the doctor’s conscience rather than the patient’s life. Cronin’s The Citadel had been published a couple of years, and there were still plenty of physicians in Harley Street unscrupulous about treating an imaginary illness or overrating a real one, and plenty of zealous surgeons who had to cut to earn their living. It was Domagk’s sulphonamide which opened an age when so many

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