All Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  Next morning at the breakfast table Tristan was in poor shape. He looked very pale, he ate little and at intervals his body was racked by deep coughing spasms.

  Siegfried looked at him quizzically. “I know what’s done this to you. I know why you’re sitting there like a zombie, coughing your lungs up.”

  His brother stiffened in his chair and a tremor crossed his face. “You do?”

  “Yes, I hate to say I told you so, but I did warn you, didn’t I? It’s all those bloody cigarettes!”

  Tristan never did give up smoking but the Raynes ghost was seen no more, and remains an unsolved mystery to this day.

  16

  THIS WAS ONE FOR Granville Bennett. I liked a bit of small animal surgery and was gradually doing more as time went on but this one frightened me. A twelve year old spaniel bitch in the last stages of pyometritis, pus dripping from her vulva on to the surgery table, temperature a hundred and four, panting, trembling, and, as I held my stethoscope against her chest I could hear the classical signs of valvular insufficiency. A dicky heart was just what I needed on top of everything else.

  “Drinking a lot of water, is she?” I asked.

  Old Mrs. Barker twisted the strings of her shopping bag anxiously. “Aye, she never seems to be away from the water bowl. But she won’t eat—hasn’t had a bite for the last four days.”

  “Well I don’t know,” I took off my stethoscope and stuffed it in my pocket. “You should have brought her in long ago. She must have been ill for weeks.”

  “Not rightly ill, but a bit off it. I thought there was nothing to worry about as long as she was eating.”

  I didn’t say anything for a few moments. I had no desire to upset the old girl but she had to be told.

  “I’m afraid this is rather serious, Mrs. Barker. The condition has been building up for a long time. It’s in her womb, you see, a bad infection, and the only cure is an operation.”

  “Well will you do it, please?” The old lady’s lips quivered.

  I came round the table and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I’d like to, but there are snags. She’s in poor shape and twelve years old. Really a poor operation risk. I’d like to take her through to the Veterinary Hospital at Harrington and let Mr. Bennett operate on her.”

  “All right,” she said, nodding eagerly. “I don’t care what it costs.”

  “Oh we’ll keep it down as much as possible.” I walked along the passage with her and showed her out of the door. “Leave her with me—I’ll look after her, don’t worry. What’s her name, by the way?”

  “Dinah,” she replied huskily, still peering past me down the passage.

  I went through and lifted the phone. Thirty years ago country practitioners had to turn to the small animal experts when anything unusual cropped in that line. It is different nowadays when our practices are more mixed. In Darrowby now we have the staff and equipment to tackle any type of small animal surgery but it was different then. I had heard it said that sooner or later every large animal man had to scream for help from Granville Bennett and now it was my turn.

  “Hello, is that Mr. Bennett?”

  “It is indeed.” A big voice, friendly, full of give.

  “Herriot here. I’m with Farnon in Darrowby.”

  “Of course! Heard of you, laddie, heard of you.”

  “Oh…er…thanks. Look, I’ve got a bit of a sticky job here. I wonder if you’d take it on for me.”

  “Delighted, laddie, what is it?”

  “A real stinking pyo.”

  “Oh lovely!”

  “The bitch is twelve years old.”

  “Splendid!”

  “And toxic as hell.”

  “Excellent!”

  “And one of the worst hearts I’ve heard for a long time.”

  “Fine, fine! When are you coming through?”

  “This evening, if it’s O.K. with you. About eight.”

  “Couldn’t be better, laddie. See you.”

  Harrington was a fair sized town—about 200,000 inhabitants—but as I drove into the centre the traffic had thinned and only a few cars rolled past the rows of shop fronts. I hoped my twenty five mile journey had been worth it. Dinah, stretched out on a blanket in the back, looked as if she didn’t care either way. I glanced behind me at the head drooping over the edge of the seat, at the white muzzle and the cataracts in her eyes gleaming palely in the light from the dash. She looked so old! Maybe I was wasting my time, placing too much faith in this man’s reputation.

  There was no doubt Granville Bennett had become something of a legend in northern England. In those days when specialisation was almost unknown he had gone all out for small animal work—never looked at farm stock—and had set a new standard by the modern procedures in his animal hospital which was run as nearly as possible on human lines. It was, in fact, fashionable for veterinary surgeons of that era to belittle dog and cat work; a lot of the older men who had spent their lives among the teeming thousands of draught horses in city and agriculture would sneer “Oh I’ve no time to bother with those damn things.” Bennett had gone dead in the opposite direction.

  I had never met him but I knew he was a young man in his early thirties. I had heard a lot about his skill, his business acumen, and about his reputation as a bon viveur. He was, they said, a dedicated devotee of the work-hard-play-hard school.

  The Veterinary Hospital was a long low building near the top of a busy street I drove into a yard and knocked at a door in the corner. I was looking with some awe at a gleaming Bentley dwarfing my own battered little Austin when the door was opened by a pretty receptionist.

  “Good evening,” she murmured with a dazzling smile which I thought must be worth another half crown on the bill for a start. “Do come in, Mr. Bennett is expecting you.”

  I was shown into a waiting room with magazines and flowers on a corner table and many impressive photographs of dogs and cats on the walls—taken, I learned later, by the principal himself. I was looking closely at a superb study of two white poodles when I heard a footstep behind me. I turned and had my first view of Granville Bennett.

  He seemed to fill the room. Not over tall but of tremendous bulk. Fat, I thought at first, but as he came nearer it seemed to me that the tissue of which he was composed wasn’t distributed like fat. He wasn’t flabby, he didn’t stick out in any particular place, he was just a big, wide, solid, hard-looking man. From the middle of a pleasant blunt-featured face the most magnificent pipe I had ever seen stuck forth shining and glorious, giving out delicious wisps of expensive smoke. It was an enormous pipe, in fact it would have looked downright silly with a smaller man but on him it was a thing of beauty. I had a final impression of a beautifully cut dark suit and sparkling shirt cuffs as he held out a hand.

  “James Herriot!” He said it as somebody else might have said “Winston Churchill”

  “That’s right”

  “Well, this is grand. Jim, is it?”

  “Well yes, usually.”

  “Lovely. We’ve got everything laid on for you, Jim. The girls are waiting in the theatre.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Bennett.”

  “Granville, Granville please!” He put his arm through mine and led me to the operating room.

  Dinah was already there, looking very woebegone. She had had a sedative injection and her head nodded wearily. Bennett went over to her and gave her a swift examination.

  “Mm, yes, let’s get on, then.”

  The two girls went into action like cogs in a smooth machine. Bennett kept a large lay staff and these animal nurses, both attractive, clearly knew what they were about. While one of them pulled up the anaesthetic and instrument trolleys the other seized Dinah’s foreleg expertly above the elbow, raised the radial vein by pressure and quickly dipped and disinfected the area.

  The big man strolled up with a loaded needle and effortlessly supped the needle into the vein.

  “Pentothal,” he said as Dinah slowly col