Free Doctor In The Swim by Richard Gordon Page B

egg, he struck me.’
    I hadn’t seen Pa Squiffington since I buried him in the sand at Whortleton. Though I’d often thought of the old boy while looking for the racing news in the paper and spotting the item headed ‘City Notes’, which generally says something like, ‘There was much calling for money in Lombard Street today.’ There goes poor old Pa Squiffington, I told myself, up and down the gutter hollering at the open windows, buttonholing chaps in top-hats, trying to touch the copper directing the traffic, ending up on the doorstep with his bowler hung out hopefully.
    I gathered Squiffingtons Bank wasn’t one of the common sort with a counter downstairs, where they take the cash from all comers. According to Squiffy, who’d often prowled the corridors optimistically, they never handled the vulgar stuff at all. Financial wizards – if it was a nice morning and they’d holed all their putts on Saturday – simply told their secretaries to send it round a million. And if Pa Squiffington never saw it being unpacked, Squiffy certainly didn’t see it at all. His father was one of those lean athletic executives, whose idea of a rip-roaring evening, I remembered from Whortleton, was a game of chess and a chocolate biscuit with his Horlicks.
    ‘You know the old man wanted me to be a doctor,’ Squiffy went on, absently cutting another piece of cake, ‘The great-grandad who founded the bank – that’s the one over the fireplace with the face like the underdone steak with side-whiskers – was the son of a doctor in Canada, who got no end of a name stalking about in blizzards patching up people eaten by bears. I was obviously a frightful duffer at business – you remember at school I could never work out what those tedious chaps A, B, and C owed each other after those rather shifty deals in compound interest. But for some reason the medical schools didn’t agree with the old man, so he packed me off to Canada for a year or two. When I came back he announced that I should be a scientist, science being all the thing.’
    ‘They’re even teaching it these days at Eton.’
    ‘I think Dad already saw me stepping up for the Nobel Prize,’ Squiffy went on. ‘But of course one has to make a start somewhere, and after going round a few universities I was finally enrolled up at Mireborough – oddly enough, just after the old man had donated a new boathouse. They were pretty tough towards me at Mireborough, with their northern independence and all that,’ he added morosely. ‘Even after the old man had donated a new library – he rather fancies himself as a pocket Rockefeller, you know. And as he’d recently donated a new chemistry laboratory I really can’t see why they made such a fuss just because I burnt the old one down.’
    Squiffy sprawled in his chair.
    ‘It was the practical exam, and I don’t know what went wrong, quite. They shouldn’t set such damn fool questions, I suppose. The Fire Brigade had hardly cleared up before they told me it would be cheaper for the University all round if I left. Luckily, the old man had just set off for Karachi, but I had to find a job – he never donates anything to me, of course. A bit tricky it was, too, as I wasn’t even a BSc (Mire.). Luckily, a fellow in my year tipped me for one in the middle of Dorset.’
    ‘Not meddling with the Government’s atoms?’ I asked nervously, feeling that next time Squiffy blew anything up he’d do it properly.
    ‘Actually, I’m a stinks beak in a prepper,’ he confessed. ‘A miserable hole it is, too. The Head’s got the outlook of an undertaker with an overdraft – charges for test-tubes and chemicals, and probably for use of force of gravity as well. But that’s only half the trouble.’
    He paused, and having finished all the cake started on his nails.
    ‘You see, Grim – Good lord, is that the time? Squiffy jumped up. ‘I’ll miss my train, and there’ll be the most almighty row if I’m late. What do you