Free Doctor On The Ball by Richard Gordon

will be warming up on the Yamaha.’
    Ah, the pill! I reflected. Like the television set, a vehicle of mass entertainment and few people know how it works. Simple, reliable, invisible, cheap – and toxic – the pill is a manufactured mixture of hormones naturally secreted by the ovary. They suppress the expulsion of the egg, a sensitive and regulated mechanism in all mammals. They operate by negative feedback on the body’s power pack, round the tiny pituitary gland at the base of the brain.
    The morning-after pill, like the intrauterine coil, works by preventing implantation of the fertilized egg in the wall of the womb. Minds shuttered with prejudice, or dimmed by the light of stained glass, accuse it of abortion, not contraception. But it was cleared by our lawyers, whose amazing knowledge of the interior of the human uterus I sometimes feel rivals the sperm’s.
    The following morning, I was myself struck with open-ended apprehension. Bill Watson strode into the consulting room.
    Gwen’s father was big, handsome, fair, wearing a tailored suit with a bright tie and matching handkerchief frothing from his pocket, a monogrammed shirt and a watch which could unexpectedly burst into bleeps. He made a fortune from saunas, solarias and jacuzzis. His combined model had the public paying eagerly for the sensation of sitting up to its neck in a swirling river at noon in the steamy tropics.
    ‘How’s the golf, Richard?’ he started, always betokening embarrassment.
    ‘Fine. How’s the family?’
    ‘We have our little problems.’ He fixed me with an aggressive eye. ‘I’ve come on a bit of delicate business.’
    Had Gwen followed my advice? Was her father concealing a horsewhip? Or an automatic? Churchford had rumours of his own father being a timorously respected Hackney gangster.
    I struck pre-emptively. ‘The pill?’
    He gasped. ‘Honest! You doctors! Actual clairvoyants. I wish I’d half the gift with my customers.’
    ‘Well, it can’t be for you,’ I pointed out.
    ‘But it is!’ He gave a laugh, then looked solemn. ‘Mrs Lamboni, my secretary, is a woman in a million.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘There’s a very sensitive bond between us.’ He became even graver. ‘We vibrate together, quite amazingly.’ He looked funereal.
    ‘Good,’ I remarked.
    ‘So you see, Richard, I’d like a prescription for the pill. Though not a word all round,’ he added hastily. ‘Otherwise Mr Lamboni, not to mention Mrs Watson, might feel emotionally disturbed.’
    I asked stiffly, ‘Mrs Lamboni, I presume, has her own doctor?’
    ‘I suppose so, down Balham way, where she lives.’
    ‘I must enlighten you, Bill, about the Hippocratic Oath. Prescribing for other doctors’ patients is a worse sin than poking other men’s wives.’
    He looked nervous. ‘But if Mrs Lamboni went to her own GP, maybe her husband would find out. He’d kill her. And I do not use figures of speech. He’s a Sicilian. In the cooked-meat trade, Italian sausage and that.’
    ‘I don’t want to be an accessory to a crime passionnel, but you must take my point.’
    He nodded dejectedly. ‘No pill?’
    ‘Not from me. How’s young Gwen?’ I inquired.
    His face lit as instantly as a striking match.
    ‘Wonderful! Nothing but hockey, out practising dribbling on the patio before breakfast. Mad on it! Isn’t it lovely, the age of innocence before tormenting sex problems? Come to think of it,’ he added sombrely, rising and shaking hands, ‘I believe that Mr Lamboni would probably kill me, too.’
    Settled in our Victorian villa in Foxglove Lane with a glass of Macallan at my elbow after my day’s work, I reached for the ringing telephone.
    ‘Richard? Pam Watson here.’
    Open-ended apprehension. Did she suspect Bill’s keen interest in Mrs Lamboni’s reproductive cycle? That Gwen’s hockey fetish romped on a sexual field? Would she too apply a blowlamp to assay the precious metal of my Hippocratic Oath? But she was only asking us to Sunday