Practice Makes Perfect Read online

  Practice Makes Perfect

  Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  One

  For the time in which I had been in general practice I seemed to have had an abnormally high turnover both in partners and in secretaries. It was not that I was careless exactly, just that I lost them. It was in my attempt to find replacements that I discovered something that most people know as well as the proverbial backs of their own hands but which seemed somehow to have passed me by – that “times” had changed. Where had I been all my life? Riding for so many years on my perpetual merry-go-round of measles, mumps, whooping-cough, appendices, hernias, boils, bumps, babies, warts, styes, ulcers and carcinomas, not to mention such rare tit-bits as neurosyphilis and Hashimoto’s disease, I had failed to notice that the circus had quietly packed its bags and taken to the road. There was no longer, as there had been when I had first advertised for help in the practice, big-dipper loads of applicants of every race, colour, creed and degree of medical efficiency. Neither were there scores of superhuman Secretary/Receptionists tumbling down the shoot of the crazy house begging for the privilege of dealing with a waiting-room full of people and simultaneously coping with an incessantly ringing telephone (three lines), an uninterrupted flow of inquiries, a search for medical record envelopes and patients becoming faint or otherwise incapacitated on the premises.

  When I first entered general practice myself it had taken me, I remembered, an entire winter, twenty-one interviews and five boxes of notepaper, which I could ill afford, to land any work at all. The boot was now quite emphatically upon the other foot. The Partnerships and Assistantships columns of the Medical Journals were still lengthy, but this time the situations were “offered” and not “wanted”. The inducements, like so many golden carrots, were a tribute both to the guile of the profession and its command of the English language. A hundred fishermen angled for the one fish who was crazy enough to want to go into General Practice, had escaped the brain drain, or had had an untimely fall off the Consultants’ ladder. I studied the advertisements carefully before casting my rod with the rest. Unfortunately there was no luscious morsel I was able to place upon the hook by way of bait.

  The competition was depressing. I could offer no X-ray facilities, maternity beds, sailing or trout-fishing. We had neither Health Centre nor appointment system, rent-free flat nor nursing staff. We were not Market Town nor semi-rural, near beach or West End. I could not, with my hand on my heart, swear there was a light work load and no “nights”. I could not even offer competitive reimbursement and knew that the “Indian Principal in Hornchurch”, the “Five Man Group Practice with Full Rota System”, the “Doctor with a Mind of His Own” and the “Two Progressive Young GPs in Shakespeare’s Country” would skim the cream off the market. I had nothing to offer save reasonable pay for hard work, in which was neither more nor less than a suburb. I grew downhearted about even drawing up my advertisement and almost threw in the sponge to the “Partnership of Two in Hertfordshire” with their full-time ancillary staff including nursing sisters, dispensers, shorthand secretaries and health visitors, no evening surgeries and centrally heated house. I had almost decided to make a fresh start and sell insurance, for I could not manage the practice on my own, when Sylvia, as usual, saved the day.

  “The house,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “Sell it.”

  I looked at her with what I hoped was pity.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Could she be joking? I picked out from the bookshelves a dossier at the very least four inches thick containing details of every house within a reasonable radius which had come on the market during the past three years, a good two-thirds of which Sylvia herself had inspected, and of which at least one third I had seen with my own eyes if only cursorily and from the outside. By the skin only of our teeth we had been saved from “minstrels’ galleries”, “ornamental lily ponds”, “views over London”, “highest point in Middlesex”, “walled gardens”, “paddocks”, Master Suites the size of Baronial Halls, “billiards rooms”, “twenty-two acres”, “pigs and chickens – going concern”.

  “I thought we had decided,” I said carefully, but unfortunately dropping the dossier whose hundreds of missives from hundreds of estate agents slid gracefully to the floor, “to stay where we are. I was under the most distinct impression that we had agreed we liked nothing that we had seen, besides which we simply cannot afford to move to a larger house.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking of a larger house, Sweetie. I thought perhaps something not so big.”

  I sat down, placing what remained of the dossier on the desk.

  “Sylvia. Angel. Last time we looked at houses we had only two children. Now we have three.”

  “I can count.”

  “Well, if this house was too small for the four of us plus one occasional au pair, how is it that it has suddenly become too large for five of us plus ditto?”

  “It isn’t a question of size,” Sylvia said. “It’s a question of age.”

  “You cannot mean,” I said, the tiniest suspicion beginning to form at the back of my tiny mind, “that you contemplate our moving into one of those pint-sized abortions of terraced cardboard boxes apportioned into ‘area’ instead of rooms which the speculators have the effrontery to call ‘Town Houses’!”

  Judging by the silence and the way she was looking at me I knew that that was exactly what she did mean.

  “Out of the question,” I said. “I wouldn’t even consider it. Added to which I refuse.”

  She came up behind me and put her arms round my neck. I now began to get nervous.

  “I don’t know,” she said, biting my left ear, “if they’d give me back my deposit.”

  I led her to the sofa and insisted we sit at opposite ends. I put on my sternest look and waited for the floodgates to open. They emitted a tidal wave. She was fed up with living in a large, ungainly suburban villa with its gables, butler’s pantry and general air of Victoriana. She was fed up with nooks and crannies, the upstairs attics, the inadequate heating. She was fed up with the high ceilings, the impossible kitchen, the parquet floors. She was fed up, above all, with living with the practice, or as she so crudely put it “over the shop”. She had therefore, with the advance on her first novel which was to be published in a few months’ time, paid the deposit on a “town house” to be built a few miles from where we lived. They had knocked down a beautiful old priory and, in addition to a block of council flats, were erecting a row of these dolls’ houses in the grounds. One could have wept.

  “How many floors?” I said.

  “Well, on the ground floor, it’s not really the ground floor but it’s where you come in, there’s a lavatory and a place to hang your coats…”

  “How many floors?”

  “…then you go up to what’s really the ground floor where the kitchen…”

  “How many floors?”

  “If you wait a minute! The kitchen and the breakfast area…”

  “Area! I told you. How many floors?”

  “Then after that…”

  “Sylvia!”

  Sh
e looked me in the eye. “Five.”

  “Five.”

  “Five.” She put up her hand. “If you say five again I shall scream.”

  “My dear girl, you can scream as much as you like but I can assure you that to my dying day I shall not live in one of those papier-mâché jokes where you yell for your clean shirt and the woman next door tells you where it is.”

  I fought to the last ditch but the gods, for some incomprehensible reason, were not on my side. I could not see myself in a five-storeyed box by whose front door two bay trees in tubs stood sentinel, discreetly hiding the dustbin. They apparently could. I inserted no less than three advertisements and received not one reply; to the fourth I added “large house available”. It did not bring the avalanche of eager assistants Sylvia had visualised. It brought Dr Perfect. Not that I believed for one moment in his existence. He wrote on purple notepaper in green ink and the whole thing, from the signature upwards, smelled highly unlikely. It was not so unlikely, however, as Dr Perfect himself. Totally immersed in my work for what seemed now an alarming number of years, I had, I knew, been largely unaware of the passage of time, but not entirely of the changes it had wrought within the profession. Consultants of the new school favoured the duffle coat rather than the winged collar; in general the sartorial image of the profession had suffered a severe setback, notwithstanding the fact that at my own hospital on Open Day all medical staff, from the most junior officer to the Dean himself, were obliged to appear in morning coat with buttonholes of red carnations. None of this, however, prepared me for Dr Perfect. Perhaps the psychedelic quality of his letter should have warned me; from its appearance I merely doubted that he would materialise at all on the appointed date at the appointed time. To my amazement he was absolutely punctual. I opened the door myself and from his appearance judged him to be a student collecting for rag-week and was about to tell him not to waste my time when he said:

  “Perfect. Hi!”

  Sylvia would have known what to do. He was wearing a floral shirt over purple slacks, no tie and sandals. He had a “Viva Zapata” moustache, sideboards a good inch beneath his ears and hair almost but not quite to his shoulders. He seemed to have arrived in a purple taxi; I guessed that purple was his favourite colour and with the same guess that at least we shouldn’t now have to move from our comfortable home to the shanty with the two bay trees.

  What did one say? Sorry, I’m suited. It sounded like a domestic servant. Awfully sorry old chap I’ve decided to emigrate after all – my wife has a cousin in… I never was much good at lying. Perhaps I should tell him outright, did they not say honesty was the best policy? My dear fellow, you simply will not do. I never had liked hurting people’s feelings, not that this apparition looked as if it had very many.

  I was still dithering when Sylvia came round the corner in her Mini and parked with her bumper against that of the purple taxi which she hadn’t happened to notice until it was almost too late. We watched her get out of the car; Dr Perfect with admiration and I with relief.

  “Touch me there again, you’ll have to marry me,” he said as she came with her bag of groceries up the garden path.

  “You look too switched on for Ian Fleming,” Sylvia said. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Aren’t you going to ask Dr Perfect to come in?” Sylvia said. “I’ll make you both some coffee.”

  She had, it was true, been a fashion-model before our marriage but now was almost old enough to be his mother, well not quite but… I suppose she had worn pretty well despite the trials and tribulations she had experienced as my wife. Her hair was still naturally blonde, her eyes of course as captivating as ever, and the current fashion for short skirts could have been decreed for her devastating legs. Like a zombie Dr Perfect followed her into the house and the sitting-room. I stopped for a moment in the hall and examined my baggy, shiny, conventional suit with its too wide lapels, and my short back and sides, before following them.

  He was leaning his six foot plus against the mantelpiece and examining the room.

  “Man,” he said, “this is quite a pad.”

  Despite my pre-historic origins I did on occasions go to the cinema. I was also au fait with the popular press. The term he had used referred, I was convinced, to some vast bachelor apartment furnished with vinyl inflatable furniture, Op or Pop on the walls, two televisions coloured and plain, hi-fi and stereo, which switched themselves on at the drop of a hat, king-sized beds and bottomless bars, and not to our homely sitting-room with its chintz-covered furniture, the bowls of flowers Sylvia loved to have around and books and medical journals all over the place.

  “This is not St James’s,” I said, just to make quite sure he was correctly orientated. “Nor Chelsea.”

  He nodded understandingly.

  “Took me one hour from Earls Court, man.”

  I wished he’d stop calling me man and decided that the first and best thing to do was to ask to see his references, thereby calling his bluff and getting rid of him as quickly as possible. I had work to do.

  He was not perhaps as stupid as he looked. A large envelope appeared in his hand, apparently from nowhere.

  “You’ll be needing these, man.”

  I took it from him. “Look, why don’t you sit down.” He was making me feel awkward.

  “Prefer to stand,” he said, not budging, “or lie.”

  I decided to let him stand.

  Sylvia came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits.

  He merely said: “Nosh!” and I left them to it while I had a look at the contents of the envelope he had given me.

  I had become accustomed to believe in soft-landings on the moon, renal and heart transplants, resuscitation of patients who died a dozen times. That the references I read applied to this floral ragbag I was totally unable to believe. According to them he had been an outstanding student, a tireless and quick-thinking casualty officer and a credit to my very own hospital as a house physician. This latter testimonial was signed by my old chief and could very easily be checked up on. The references were certainly not forged. I had a sudden thought. How did I know that they applied to him? He produced a driving licence, clean as far as I could see, and to my further astonishment a Diners Club Card. Each was endorsed “Fred Perfect”. The plot thickened. I could think of a house-decorator, a postman, a rodent operator, but not one amongst a host of medical colleagues who answered to the name of “Fred”.

  “Dr Perfect,” I said, handing him back his envelope.

  “Fred, man.”

  I swallowed. “Fred.”

  Two

  When he had gone Penny said: “What a dolly doctor!”

  “How do you know he was a doctor?”

  “He had a BMA badge on his taxi and a flashing green light on top,” she sighed. “Is he going to come?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “I really hope so,” she said with misty eyes. “I genuinely do.”

  Feeling old as Methuselah, I went inside to sit down, having no palate at the moment for my work.

  “What’s the matter?” Sylvia said, as she cleared away the coffee cups.

  “I have an acute attack of the ‘back numbers’.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  I scratched my head. “Fred. The Bay Tree House…”

  “What a fantastic name!”

  I looked at her. “…You.”

  “What have Idone?”

  “Kept up with the times.”

  She put down the tray and came to sit beside me. “I had the same complaint not long ago,” she said, “do you remember ? Old skirts and jumpers and tied to the kitchen and those dreadful glasses. It passes; if you make an effort. It really does.”

  “But I don’t want to make an effort. I’m perfectly happy as I am.”

  “Then, as Robin would have said, why are you complaining?”

  Her reference to my last partner, who had committed suicide, depressed me even more. I wished that he were s
till alive. Fred!

  “I’m sure that everything will work out perfectly,” Sylvia said briskly and picked up the tray again. “Now I really must get on with some work.”

  I gazed after her wishing I could share her optimism. Since she had taken to writing she had less and less time for me.

  I thought, trying to believe the past hour had not been a figment of my not usually very fertile imagination, about Fred.

  Before we really got down to brass tacks I had asked him why, in view of his first-class hospital references and obviously promising career, he had opted for general practice.

  “Shouldn’t you really stay on in hospitals?”

  “Not enough love, man.”

  I must have looked astonished.

  “Can’t get close enough in hospital, man. A bird in a bed only she can’t talk to you because there isn’t time, only to some switched-off Sister or case notes, man. I want to get close. No nurses, ancillaries…”

  I hoped he wasn’t another Dr Fouracre, my temporary successor to Robin who had insisted on doing absolutely everything in the way of minor surgery himself. He assured me he was not.

  “What about remuneration?” I asked. “This practice is a good one but you must have seen better ones advertised.”

  “Who wants to make money from love?”

  “Aren’t you interested in higher qualifications?”

  “I don’t dig all the fury over Memberships, Fellowships, Diplomas. They read all those books, man, and before you can say gallstones they’ve turned into plastic people. Nothing counts except the qualify of affection. I’m dropping out, man.”

  Looking at his weird garb a sudden thought struck me.

  “Are you married…or anything?”

  He was more perspicacious than I had given him credit for.

  “I’m not gay, man. The female I was grooving with is on a trip…permanent. There’s just Fred, man.”

  “Man… I mean Dr Perfect,” I said giving myself a mental kick, “would you diagnose an acute appendicitis in the absence of pyrexia?”

  He came back like a shot.