Free Smut: Stories by Alan Bennett Page B

was seldom if ever at a loss.
    A new term had begun and since this was the first year Mrs Donaldson scarcely knew any of them and nor was Ballantyne there to help. The initial stages of tuition had always interested him the least. True, the ignorance of the students gave him umpteen opportunities for sarcasm in which he was happy to indulge except that having begun by showing off a good deal he had got the idea (rightly) that this wasn’t a side of him Mrs Donaldson much cared for. So with his self-restraint not always reliable he sometimes, as today, chose to absent himself from these early sessions altogether, which was easier when, as on this particular morning, the SPs were old hands. Terry was here with a strangulated hernia and another outing for his tangerine underpants, Delia with chest pains that might be a heart attack but which would turn out to be indigestion and Mrs Donaldson who had a bunch of indeterminate symptoms with which she regularly presented herself as suffering, she was certain, from cancer.
    Mrs Donaldson wasn’t feeling all that clever herself this morning and just before leaving the house she had been sick. She had taken a couple of tablets but now they were beginning to wear off and with Terry and Delia having been briskly disposed of she found herself lying on a trolley in a hospital gown with two students in attendance and not feeling at all well, even, she discovered as she felt her tummy, in actual pain.
    Without warning Mrs Donaldson suddenly began to shiver uncontrollably and so violently she might have been attached to a machine.
    ‘That’s a “rigor”,’ said the girl.
    ‘How does she do it?’ said the boy. ‘It’s amazing. Look, she’s even sweating.’
    ‘No worries,’ said the girl. ‘She’s the crafty one apparently. Someone in the third year told me. Now dear,’ and she bent over the trolley, ‘what seems to be the trouble?’
    ‘I’m ill,’ said Mrs Donaldson, her teeth chattering. ‘I was sick this morning. Get help. Get Dr Ballantyne.’
    ‘All in good time. We’ll just examine you.’
    The boy fumbled his way round.
    ‘Try and keep still if you can.’
    He laid his hand on her abdomen and pressed at which she screamed out so suddenly he recoiled as if he’d been bitten.
    ‘Bloody hell. No need to overdo it.’
    Mrs Donaldson had left her folder on the chair and thinking to cut short the process the girl sneaks a look at what this quite spectacular bundle of symptoms is meant to represent.
    Light dawned.
    ‘No worries,’ she said. ‘It’s all psychosomatic,’ and suddenly she bawls in Mrs Donaldson’s ear, ‘You’ve not got cancer. This isn’t cancer.’
    ‘I’m so cold,’ whispered the patient. ‘Can I have a blanket? Get help.’
    ‘We are help,’ said the boy. ‘This is what she does apparently. She is brilliant.’ Shivering and shaking and with her belly on fire Mrs Donaldson dimly remembered she had had to present something like this once before and she feebly beckons the girl closer.
    ‘I think…I think it’s acute appendicitis.’
    ‘Really? Well that’s good. At least it isn’t cancer.’
    ‘Help me.’
    ‘Time’s getting on,’ said the boy. ‘I’m supposed to be on a ward round in five minutes. Knock it off now, love. We’ve got the message. Oh God, she’s pretending to be unconscious. Well, we’re going to leave you to it.’
    The students head for the door but as they are going the girl comes back and whispers in Mrs Donaldson’s unconscious ear, ‘It isn’t cancer. Not cancer.’
    Making his leisurely way back through the hospital Ballantyne ran into a distraught Delia who, thinking to collect her friend for coffee, had found her laid out on the trolley unconscious and unattended.
    ‘You’re a victim of your own reputation,’ said Ballantyne visiting her on the ward the next day. ‘But you were quite right. It was appendicitis. The rigor should have told them that, particularly when the pain was in the