Free Doctor in Clover by Richard Gordon Page A

front lawn, he’d not only give fewer of those old-fashioned looks whenever I suggested enterprising lines of treatment, but painlessly disgorge my cash on the spot.
    ‘I am certainly glad my brother-in-law is back in his own home, Doctor,’ remarked Amanda Nutbeam. ‘It is only here, I think, that we really understand his best interests.’
    ‘So I’ve noticed,’ I told her. ‘And now for a few weeks of rest and quiet and nourishing food,’ I added confidently, ‘and his Lordship will be dancing the Highland Fling if he wants to.’
    But I should have learned long ago that in the turf and therapeutics it’s disastrous to back a dead certainty.
    For some reason, Lord Nutbeam didn’t want to get better. I’d imagined that once he was home he’d settle down to a nice long read, but instead he sat staring out of time window with cups of beef-tea getting cold at his elbow. Sometimes he picked up The Anatomy of Melancholy , but it didn’t seem to hold him. Sometimes he pushed himself to the piano, but he could manage only a few bars of Valse Triste . To cheer him up, I wheeled him round the garden telling funny stories, but he never seemed to see the point. ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ was the most I could get out of him.
    His Lordship grew steadily feebler and feebler, while everything else in sight was burgeoning wildly in the sunshine. It wasn’t long before I began to grow alarmed about his condition. Modern medicine’s all very well, with antibiotics and heart-lung machines and so on, but once a chap’s decided he doesn’t want to live any more we’re not much better off than the witch-doctors in Central Africa. And my professional problems weren’t made easier by the other Nutbeams, who now the excitement had died down treated me like the man come to mend the drains. Far from his Lordship, they were terrible snobs – particularly the missus, whom everyone knew in the village was only a road-house remnant from Percy Nutbeam’s youth, anyway.
    ‘It would be much more convenient if you could make your daily visit earlier,’ she said, as I limped into Nutbeam Hall one evening after a heavy day’s practice among the pig-sties. ‘We are expecting Lord and Lady Farnborough for dinner any minute, and I should naturally prefer my guests not to be greeted in the hall by the doctor. Perhaps you would also have the goodness to change your shoes before coming to us, Dr Grimsdyke. I realize that you cannot avoid walking through the farmyards during the day, but–’
    I must say, her attitude made me pretty annoyed. Particularly as I felt she wouldn’t have tried it with the old uncle, not with those old-fashioned looks of his. Then, a couple of days later, Lord Nutbeam went off his food and started looking like Socrates eyeing the hemlock.
    ‘We’re all bursting to see you back to normal again,’ I told him, hopefully writing a prescription for another tonic. ‘Here’s something which will have you chirping with the birds in no time.’
    ‘Thank you, Doctor. You are very kind. Indeed, everyone is very, very kind. Especially, of course, my dear brother and his wife.’ He listlessly turned a few pages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall . ‘But I fear my accident had more effect than I imagined. I’ve hardly been out of Nutbeam Hall for many years, you know, on account of my delicate health. Meeting so many people in the hospital was something of a disturbance. You are doubtless familiar with the lines in Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard –’
    Feeling that churchyards were definitely out, I interrupted with the story about the parrot. But I don’t think he got that one either.
    I left him in the library, wondering whether to assemble the family again and confess the old boy wasn’t living up to my prognosis. But I was stopped by Percy Nutbeam himself in the hall.
    ‘Could you spare time for a whisky and soda, Doctor?’
    My professional duties being over for the day, I accepted.
    ‘I’m very worried