Doctor in Love Read Online Free PDF

symptoms. Such a help to Miss Jamieson at this time of the year.”
    He then jumped into his car and drove off.
    I had hoped during my convalescence gracefully to introduce the subject of Sally Nightingale. Although I had seen little more of her before leaving hospital – and I was conscious that she had seen me only lying on my back with my mouth wide open – the prospect of perhaps one day marrying her now lay on my mind much more excitingly than the prospect of perhaps one day passing my FRCS examination. It would be equally stimulating to my self-esteem, just as useful to my career, possibly easier, and much more fun.
    With other nurses I had fancied at St Swithin’s my plans never went further than our next outing to the cinema, but with Sally Nightingale I already saw myself looking like an advertisement for an insurance company. My knowledge of marriage, like my knowledge of medicine, was still dangerously theoretical, and I had taken advantage of Tony Benskin’s calling to see me in hospital to ask frankly what it was like. His reply had been, “Magnificent, old man, simply magnificent!”, which I felt was as unreliable as the cry of midwinter bathers, “Come on in, the water’s fine!” This was confirmed immediately by his producing two dozen photographs of John Tristram Benskin, all of which looked to me exactly the same, though the father seemed to find subtle differences in each.
    I now wanted to discuss the whole problem of matrimony with my parents, but it is as awkward a subject for a sensitive young man to work into the conversation as a plea for more cash. Another difficulty was never finding my parents together, or even one of them alone for more than a couple of minutes on end. The days slipped past with walks on the pier and rounds on the golf course, until it was the night before I was to return to St Swithin’s. Then at last I managed to catch my father alone in his consulting-room, where he was telling an anxious mother on the telephone that green nappies in the first month were nothing to be alarmed about.
    “Father,” I began, as he put the instrument down, “I wonder if I could have a word with you?”
    My solemnity surprised him. “Why, of course, Richard. What’s the trouble? Do you want to buy another car?”
    “No, it isn’t that – though of course I’d love one of the new Austin Healeys if you felt you could raise the wind. But as a matter of fact,” I said sheepishly, “I’ve recently been thinking rather seriously about marriage.”
    “Have you really, now? Good Lord! I never saw this note Miss Jamieson left on my desk – there’s a gallstone colic at the Grand Hotel. So you’re thinking of getting married, are you, Richard? What’s her name?”
    “Florence Nightingale.”
    “Come, come, Richard, surely you’ve got beyond childish jokes–”
    “That really is her name, Father. Though everyone calls her Sally.”
    “Is she nice?”
    “Terribly nice! Wonderful, in fact. Of course, I only got to know her in bed.”
    “Good gracious! I know you young people go the pace a bit, but I didn’t think you’d be as brazen about it as that.”
    “I mean while I was having jaundice.”
    “Oh, I see. A nurse, eh? Well, you could do far worse than that. Most of my friends married nurses. I didn’t. I met your mother when she had a Pott’s fracture on my doorstep. However…” He fiddled with the blood-pressure machine on his desk. “Don’t think I’m interfering in your affairs, Richard – damn it all, you’re a registered medical practitioner, and therefore one of the few people legally credited with more sense than the average population – but don’t you feel you ought to get to know this girl a little better before you decide to spend the next half-century in her company? You mean you’ve proposed to her?”
    “Not properly, Father. Nothing as dramatic as that. I was only thinking of matrimony in a… well, a general sort of way. I don’t think Sally