Read Online MAMista by Len Deighton - Free Book Online

but he needed the wider horizons that a job in England would provide. Once there he fell in love with a pretty Scottish nurse and got married. He got a job in the Webley–Hockley research laboratory in London. The Director of Research engaged him. He thought a Vietnam veteran would know about tropical medicine. But that medical experience had been almost entirely of trauma and of attendant traumatic neuroses. ‘Men, not test-tubes,’ as he said in one outburst. He was hopeless at laboratory work and his unhappiness showed in eruptions of bad temper. Under other circumstances his marriage might have held together, but the cramped apartment, and small salary, became too much for him when the baby came. It was a miserable time. His wife took their tiny daughter to live with her mother in Edinburgh. Two days after she left, Lucas got the phone call from his sister. Dad had died.
    Lucas would have gone back to Australia except for the occasional visits to see his daughter, and the friendship he struck up with an elderly laboratory assistant named Fred Dunstable. Fred was a natural engineer, a widower whospent his spare time repairing broken household machines brought to him by his neighbours. It was in Fred’s garage workshop that the two men perfected the design of the Lucas bag, and designed the aseptic assembly process that was needed for bulk manufacture.
    Armed with a prototype Lucas bag, and that fluent Aussie charm to which even the most sceptical Pom is vulnerable, Lucas persuaded the board of the Webley–Hockley Medical Foundation to provide enough cash to manufacture a trial run of one thousand bags. They sent them to hospital casualty departments. The device came at a time when traumatic wounds and emergency outdoor transfusions were on the rise. Plane crashes, earthquakes and wars brought the Lucas bag into use throughout the world. The Foundation got their investment back and more. The tiny royalty he split with his partner soon provided Fred with a comfortable retirement and Lucas with enough money to bring his sister over from Australia, and send his daughter to a good private school.
    His daughter had done a lot to encourage the wonderful reconciliation. With his ex-wife, Lucas found happiness he’d never before known. He did all those things they’d talked about so long ago. They bought an old house and a new car and went to Kashmir on a second honeymoon. It was in the Vale of Kashmir that she died. A motor accident brought seven wonderful months to a ghastly end. He’d never stopped reproaching himself; not only for the accident but also for all those wasted years.
    It was during that first terrible time of grieving that Ralph Lucas was invited to advise the Webley–Hockley Foundation. During almost eighty years of charitable work it had fed the tropical starving, housed the tropical homeless and financed a body of tropical research. The research achievements were outshone by other bodies, such as the Wellcome, but the Webley–Hockley had done more than any other European charity for ‘preventive medicine in tropical regions’.
    Ralph’s invention and the nominal contribution it made to the Foundation’s funds did not make him eligible for full membership of the Board. He was described as its ‘medical adviser’ but he’d been told to speak at parity with the august board. It was a privilege of which he availed himself to the utmost. ‘Find just one,’ he said in response to a careless remark by a board member. ‘Find just one completely healthy native in the whole of Spanish Guiana and then come back and argue.’
    Through the window he could see the afternoon sunlight on the trees of Lincoln’s Inn. London provided the gentlest of climates; it was difficult to recall Vietnam and the sort of tropical jungle of which they spoke. His words had been chosen to annoy. Now he felt the ripple of irritation from everyone round the