Read Online Doctor in Love by Richard Gordon - Free Book Online Page A

drink?”
    “You’d better treat her here in the surgery in future,” said Dr Farquarson, his eyebrows quivering violently. “Or else send me along. That would finish her.”
    “But the whole thing was all my fault,” I said bitterly, tossing my stethoscope on to the examination couch. “I should have had more control of the situation.”
    “It’s an occupational risk we’ve got to run. A woman gets bored in the afternoons, whether she lives in Canterbury or in Canonbury. And the doctor’s the easiest one she can run after.”
    “But it might have led to all sorts of complications with the GMC! I didn’t realize how I had to watch my step.”
    “You know the working rule, of course? ‘It’s all right to make your mistress into one of your patients, but it certainly isn’t all right to make your patient into one of your mistresses.’” He scratched his cheek with the tip of a pair of forceps. “If I had my way, that would be engraved in stone over medical school doorways. It’s much more useful than ‘The Art Is Long’, not to say much less depressing. But speaking as a comfortable widower, Richard my lad, the best deterrent is a wife of your own in the background.”
    I considered this. “But don’t you think that marriage isn’t to be tackled as an emergency operation?”
    “That’s true,” Dr Farquarson agreed. “Take your time. But not for ever.”
    I sat down in the patients’ chair. “Anyway, who could I marry? I don’t know any girls.”
    “Come, Richard! Even to my old eyes the streets of Hampden Cross seem full of them.”
    “But they’re all on other men’s arms or the backs of other men’s motor-bikes. I don’t seem to know any girls these days. Besides, how do I know I’d choose the right one?”
    “I’d say pick the one with the nicest legs. It’s as reasonable a way of choosing a wife as any.”
    I persuaded Mrs Tadwich to let me continue her cardiac investigation in the surgery, where she appeared in a tight black dress, three-inch heels, and two-inch nails. Hitching up her skirt, she started every consultation by discussing her absconded husband in tones suggesting that an intimate bond now existed between us.
    “We didn’t see that type of patient in Dr McBurney’s day,” declared Miss Wildewinde, pointedly opening the surgery windows afterwards.
    It was only a day or two after meeting Mrs Tadwich that I first made acquaintance with the family at “Capri”. This was one of the houses known as “Tudor style semi-det.”, for which British builders developed such a distressing addiction between the wars. I had been called to examine a Miss Porson, and as I approached through a garden of crushing neatness I diagnosed either a middle-aged housewife with an obsessional neurosis, or an under-occupied elderly spinster putting on weight through idleness, chocolates, and gin. But the door was opened by a classical gall-bladder case, a fair, fat, fertile female of fifty, who was wearing a tweed skirt and a pink blouse.
    “Miss Porson?” I asked, speculating when she last had her attack of gallstone colic.
    “Why, you’re Dr Gordon!”
    “That’s right.”
    “I’d have known it the moment I set eyes on you.” I looked surprised, and she added, “You’re so like your father. He looked after my little girl when we were down with the Rotarians only this year.”
    “Really? That’s most interesting.”
    “My husband knew your father from the days when he was studying engineering in London, you know. They had lots and lots of mutual friends among the students.” Knowing the company my father had kept at St Swithin’s, this didn’t seem much of a recommendation. “It’s my little Cynthia you’ve come to see,” Mrs Porson went on. “The poor child’s so very delicate.”
    I followed her upstairs anxiously. My family’s clinical honour was clearly at stake, and I wasn’t at all well up in children’s medicine. “Cynthia’s a very highly strung child,”