Free Doctor On The Boil by Richard Gordon Page A

the gent’s snuffed it. Very embarrassing.’
    ‘Oh, no! Now you’re trying to scare me.’
    Grimsdyke shook his head sapiently. ‘I’m not. Just think how the blood pressure goes up – the respiration rate, the pulse, the lot. Imagine the arteries taking the strain. Why, it’s worse than running for a bus.’
    ‘Okay, okay, Doc. I’ll ease up on the dollies for a while. But that’s a negative approach, if you’ll pardon me. Look at it this way – if your automobile can’t make it up and down hills any more, what do you do? Take it to a garage. Not leave off driving. Can’t you give me something, Doc? Some pill or something?’
    Grimsdyke eyed the bottles and cartons on the bedside table. ‘I don’t believe there’re any you aren’t taking already.’
    ‘What I need, Doc, is not stagnation but–’ He made a flourish with his arms. ‘Rejuvenation!’
    Grimsdyke looked doubtful. ‘If you got yourself rejuvenated you’d be snatching little girls from their push-chairs.’
    ‘I’ll make a new rule. No girl more than ten years younger than I am.’
    ‘No grannie would be safe – I mean, well, it can be done, of course. But it would take time.’
    ‘What’s that, compared with the pleasures of a lifetime?’
    ‘And money.’
    ‘Speak to Ted.’
    ‘All right–’ Grimsdyke moved up the bed and lowered his voice. ‘I do happen to know of somewhere–’
    Eric Cavendish swung back the bedclothes. ‘Great. When do we go?’
    ‘Patience, patience! I’ll have to speak to the medical superintendent first. Luckily, he happens to be a friend of mine.’
    ‘What’s the place called?’
    ‘Dr de Hoot’s Analeptic Clinic,’ Grimsdyke told him. ‘A pleasant spot, actually. It’s in the middle of Kent. Extensive views, own farm produce, gravel soil, and main drainage.’

10
    Four o’clock the following afternoon, which was a Friday, found Sir Lancelot Spratt leaning on the westward parapet of newly-built London Bridge, gazing soulfully downstream across the Pool. The only ships alongside the wharves were small, nondescript domestic-looking vessels with the names of unpronounceable Baltic ports painted on their sterns, washing flapping from the afterdeck and scruffy-looking sailors loafing on the rails. But the lower Thames always stirred Sir Lancelot powerfully. Perhaps the sea was in his blood, he wondered. After all, his younger brother was the captain of a liner, which he commanded in much the same spirit as he had run his own operating theatre.
    As he watched, the twin bascules of Tower Bridge rose slowly into the air. They looked more enticing than the arms of any woman. The water below his feet was the oily threshold of seven oceans, and there was nothing – absolutely nothing at all – between himself and far-off seas where the sun burnt its way across an empty sky before setting in an explosion of magenta, where dolphins trundled beside the ship’s bows and flying-fish skipped across the ripples thicker than the cabbage-whites in his garden at midsummer, and where there was an island or two with palm-trees and various trouble-free horticultural products, where a man could lie in the sun with his head cradled in the lap of a dusky girl, who smiled and stroked his brow and never even once disagreed with his opinions.
    ‘That’s the way to end your days,’ Sir Lancelot said out loud. He felt for his handkerchief and coughed. ‘Curse this Asian bug! There’s lots more of the world I should like to see. Well, I suppose I might have got myself run over by a taxi years ago, or stabbed by some dissatisfied patient with my own scalpel. That’s the only way to look at it.’
    Giving a last envious glance to the seagulls squawking and wheeling overhead, he stepped firmly towards the north shore of the Thames and the City of London.
    He passed through Billingsgate fish market, skirted the Monument and went into a tall block of offices in Eastcheap.
    ‘Spratt for Wormsley,’ he told the girl