Doctor In The Swim Read Online Free Page A

thing emit the radio news bulletin. I reset the knobs for him, but either I mixed them up or Sir Lancelot couldn’t resist fiddling with the works, because when he called me back ten minutes later the room was so cold he was starting to ice up round the beard.
    ‘Grimsdyke, I think I could do with a drink,’ he announced, blowing on his hands.
    ‘Just the thing for restoring the body temperature, I’m sure, sir,’ I agreed.
    Even the drink didn’t cheer him up. New York may be the brightest spot in the world, but all its bars are dim, guilty little places, staffed by superannuated warders from Alcatraz. I suppose it’s because New Yorkers never bred the prohibition business out of their constitutions. Not for your Madison Avenue chap a leisurely pint with a game of darts and a chat about the crops. He likes to slink in, sink one, and slink out again, regarding drinking as one of those necessary but rather distasteful regular activities, like paring down a painful corn.
    ‘Scotch whisky should never be consumed at a temperature lower than Scottish burn water,’ growled the surgeon, as the Alcatraz chap touched the button of a machine which started voiding ice-cubes like a frozen chicken in good form,
    No New Yorker has tasted a drink in his life, of course, all refreshments being served cold enough immediately to paralyse the taste buds, and the dry martinis arriving at the temperature of liquid oxygen. After that, Sir Lancelot complained about the soft music they pipe everywhere, even in the Gents’, and ended up by demanding who this Mr Rheingold was, whose daughter seemed to be so popular.
    I managed to get the old boy through dinner, in a restaurant with a menu the size of a newspaper which served baked potatoes the size of bolsters and steaks you couldn’t finish unless you’d just spent fourteen days adrift in an open boat,
    ‘Good gracious me,’ was all Sir Lancelot could murmur when the waiter asked if he’d like to finish off with Angel Food as his Mother made it, then he complained about the bill and the coffee and I began to see that nursing him through the complexities of New York life was going to be like driving a T-model Ford up and down Broadway.

4
    Early next day I went to collect Sir Lancelot for the conference and found him in a prickly mood in his braces.
    ‘Good morning, sir,’ I greeted the old boy brightly. ‘According to the telly, it’s going to be a nice hot day by courtesy of Bubblo Soap.’
    He grunted.
    ‘I trust you slept well, sir, on your Pompadour Beautylaze Couch?’
    ‘Archbold,’ muttered the surgeon, ‘who had spent the night flying out to examine a meat packer in Chicago, insisted on discussing the conference agenda over what he described as a “working breakfast”. To my mind, discussing anything whatever over breakfast is perfectly abnormal, Breakfast is not a meal. It is another of those intimate morning rites necessary to equip one for the day.’
    Being one who likes to take a bit of a run at the day myself, I sympathized with him.
    ‘I’m afraid our American chums just feel frustrated they can’t invent a twenty-five-hour day, sir,’ I observed. I hope the breakfast was a decent one?’
    Sir Lancelot shrugged his shoulders. ‘I ordered from the menu some Sunbasked Crushed Vitamin-Chocked Oklahoma Wheat Ears and a Piping Hot Farm-Fresh Present From a Happy Hen. I got a plate of cereal and a boiled egg.’
    I noticed from his tray the management had tried to make up for this by adding a coloured paper cap with Good Morning, Folks ! written on it, a folder of matches with a girl suffering from mammary hypertrophy on the cover, a sheet of black-edged paper headed Your Sixty-Second Sermon for Today , and a plastic box done up with ribbons containing a complimentary pink carnation for the buttonhole.
    ‘No gentleman,’ ended Sir Lancelot sadly, ‘would of course ever contemplate wearing in his buttonhole anything but a red carnation.’
    We slipped down