After Effects (2 page)

‘Dr Beaumont'll soon sort it out,' said Shirley confidently as the telephone connection was made. She liked him. Dr Beaumont dressed properly and was always polite to switchboard operators, too. ‘Whatever it is.'

‘Something to do with one of Dr Byville's patients,' responded Tracy, taking this as a question. ‘He's gone over to Calleford for one of those funny Region Committee meetings this morning and can't be reached.'

‘I think that'll be where Dr Meggie must be too,' murmured Shirley, who didn't like not to know what was going on and who wasn't above pretending that she did when she didn't. ‘He's not in yet today either.'

‘Well, old Merrylegs is certainly not over here,' declared Tracy with spirit. ‘Our Colin's been trying to get hold of him on the phone ever since he came in this morning.' She giggled. ‘I said to him did he want me to try the “him and her” florists—without letting on to Bunty.'

‘Dr Meggie told us he wouldn't be in,' said Shirley Partridge repressively. It was well known that Paul Meggie, made a widower a couple of years ago, was squiring a good-looking widow—and that his daughter, Bunty, wasn't happy about it. ‘I'm surprised he didn't let your Dr Hulbert know, too.' She thoroughly disapproved of the use of either nicknames or the Christian names of the medical staff by anyone who wasn't a doctor and never encouraged it in others.

‘At least he's not over at the Golden Nugget then,' said Tracy disrespectfully.

‘Sorry, Tracy,' said Shirley, pursing her lips. ‘I've got another call coming up.' The Golden Nugget was the non-medical staff's name for the clinic where all the local private medical and surgical work was done. ‘Hello, caller … St Ninian's Hospital … Hatcher Ward? Hold the line, please …'

Holding the line was exactly what Dr Edwin Beaumont was trying to do at this moment. That he was trying to do it over the telephone did not help.

‘What is the patient like now?' he asked with a professional calm that was intended to be both exemplary and reassuring.

‘Breathless, disorientated, and with a marked cyanosis,' said the young housewoman at the other end of the telephone line. Dilys Chomel knew perfectly well that she should have said ‘dyspnoeic' instead of ‘breathless' but to tell the truth she was feeling a bit short of breath on her own part just at this moment.

‘I see.'

‘I'm very sorry troubling you, sir, but I can't get hold of Dr Meggie either.' She consciously steadied herself against the desk in Sister Pocock's office. After all, she told herself firmly, she'd have to deal with her first death on the ward sometime if she was ever going to make the grade as a doctor. She just hadn't quite expected it to be this morning, that was all. ‘It's a Mrs Muriel Galloway,' she said, ‘and I've put her on oxygen and set up a saline drip just in case we need a line.'

‘Good,' said Dr Beaumont in normal, everyday tones, also meant as an example of correct medical behaviour in times of stress.

‘I didn't like her staring eyes,' hurried on the young housewoman, who in the heat of the moment had completely forgotten the medical synonym for that sign in a patient. She gulped and added naïvely, ‘Or the way she's plucking at the bedclothes.'

‘Floccilation,' said Dr Beaumont, who took his teaching duties towards the newly qualified more seriously than did the absent Dr Byville, who was something of a cold fish.

‘Oh …' Dilys Chomel remembered with surprise that she'd learned that that action by a patient was often a precursor of death not at medical college at all but at school in her English Literature lessons. ‘Of course …'

Now she came to think about it, she realized that it had been William Shakespeare's description of the death of Sir John Falstaff which had been with her on the Women's Medical Ward while she regarded her own dying patient, not those stark clinical notes in her student textbooks. The poet and playwright had described the nose of the moribund Falstaff ‘as sharp as a pen' and the ‘smile upon his fingers' end' more memorably than any medical writer. ‘Of course, sir, of course.'

‘What is she on?' asked Dr Beaumont, who was only on call for Dr Byville and Dr Meggie while they were away from the two hospitals and naturally didn't have the Immortal Bard in his mind at this moment.

The housewoman reeled off a long list of medicaments.

‘Give her an intramuscular diuretic
statim
,' instructed the senior doctor, more because it would give the girl something positive to do than aid a patient already beyond aid, ‘and see that the relatives have been sent for.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Dilys, adding, still surprised at what she had seen, ‘and, sir, she's grasping at things that aren't there.'

‘Carphology,' said Dr Beaumont briskly. ‘We, on the other hand, my dear, are grasping at straws. Mrs Galloway's dying and you must tell the family so—and that we're very sorry but there's nothing more that we or anyone else can do for her now.'

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.' She paused and then said, ‘Sir—'

‘Yes?'

Dilys Chomel said uncertainly, ‘I'm afraid there's something else, sir.'

‘And what is that?' enquired Dr Beaumont with carefully controlled impatience.

‘I understand that this patient—Mrs Muriel Galloway—was one of those taking part in Dr Meggie's Cardigan Protocol.'

‘Hell and damnation,' said Dr Edwin Beaumont quite unprofessionally and without thinking at all.

CHAPTER TWO

The medical contention is, of course, that a bad doctor is an impossibility.

It wasn't only Dr Byville and Dr Meggie who were not available at their hospitals.

‘No, Dr Teal, I'm afraid Mr Maldonson isn't in yet,' said Shirley Partridge for the third time that morning.

She'd watched the lady doctor pacing up and down the entrance hall of St Ninian's earlier on looking tired and anxious and now she was back on the phone again. It wasn't, Shirley Partridge knew perfectly well, any obstetric emergency that was bringing about all that stress. It was the unkind behaviour of Mr Maldonson, her boss.

‘Oh.' Dr Teal sounded drained. ‘Oh … then I'll have to … would you put me through to this number, please?'

‘Ringing now,' sang Shirley Partridge.

‘And then,' said Marion Teal wearily, ‘I think I'll just come down to the front hall and wait for him to come in. It's not,' she added more to herself than to the telephonist, ‘as if there's anything more I can do here now anyway.'

The Obstetric Registrar, who had been on night duty all the week, was exhausted enough to have subsided on to one of the benches in the front hall and gone to sleep there and then but by now she was much too wound up to have done any such thing. Resting while you could was the action of someone with a quiet mind and Marion Teal's mind was not quiet. What she needed to do was to unload some of the bottled-up anger and irritation she was feeling over Mr Maldonson's blatant misogynism on someone somewhere—and preferably male.

The artist, Adrian Gomm, though admittedly of rather epicene appearance, was the nearest man. He was almost out of reach on a ladder.

‘Do you mind,' she called up to him, ‘if I ask you about your work?' It was more than Mr Maldonson ever did about hers. All he seemed interested in was making her so late going off-duty in the mornings that all her careful arrangements for child care were disrupted.

‘Go ahead.'

‘It's all very symbolic, isn't it?'

‘That,' said Gomm, ‘is the general idea.'

‘That's St Ninian at the top, isn't it?' The figure of a distinctly substantial saint clothed all over in white, complete with halo in gold, was spread across the whole of the upper part of the mural, his arms benevolently encompassing the painting.

‘Top marks.'

Marion Teal flushed. ‘But those other white gowns—the empty ones—'

‘Yes?'

‘I don't quite understand what they're doing in the painting.'

‘Don't suppose you do,' said Adrian Gomm negligently from his perch above her.

‘And they're all different,' persisted Marion. It was stupid to feel so disadvantaged just because she was having to look up at him. He wasn't even setting out to rattle her like Mr Maldonson did. Mr Maldonson did not like women in medicine—well, women in obstetric surgery anyway—and went out of his way to make that clear in every possible way.

‘They are,' said Adrian Gomm laconically.

Marion Teal stepped back and regarded the mural more closely. ‘This one below the saint on the left—that's an operation gown, surely?'

‘It is.'

She frowned. ‘But what I don't see is why its strings lead down to the long white gown lying on its side along the bottom.'

‘Don't you?'

‘More symbolism?' The white gown at the bottom of the mural was the opposite—almost a mirror image—of the saint's one at the top of the mural. Whereas, though the arms of the saint stretched out and down, those of the gown down below stuck upwards in a stiff imploring fashion as if beseeching help.

‘The underneath one's a shroud,' said Adrian Gomm, applying his brush to the wall.

‘Oh … oh, I see.' She looked around. ‘Then what about the other gown?'

‘The one on the right?'

‘Yes. Tell me, is that a straitjacket or something?' Dr Teal was hoping one day to become a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist—hence the importance of Mr Maldonson to her career prospects—not a psychiatrist, and hadn't actually ever set eyes on a straitjacket.

‘That's symbolic, too,' said Adrian Gomm from somewhere level with her head. ‘If you look carefully you can see that its strings tie into the saint's robes and the shroud, just like those on the operation gown do on the other side.'

‘But what is it?' asked Marion, interested in spite of herself.

‘Something called a sanbenito.' Gomm hitched up his paint-stained jeans.

‘I've never heard of it,' she said, some of her preoccupation with Mr Maldonson fading.

‘It was a robe worn by heretics,' Gomm informed her, ‘before they were burned at the stake.'

Marion Teal shivered. Perhaps she was getting her own problems out of proportion.

‘Although,' Adrian Gomm tightened his lips cynically, ‘I dare say those in the operating gowns died without blessing often enough, too, don't you?'

‘I wouldn't know about that,' she murmured, drifting back to the front door where she would be able to see Mr Maldonson come in.

If he did.

For Dr Martin Friar, on the other hand, the day was improving.

He had indeed diagnosed something interesting in the medical clinic he was taking for the absent Dr Meggie and, as the Out-Patient Department Sister had been sure he would, had brightened up quite markedly after doing so—and having had his coffee, of course.

‘How long have you been feeling like this, Mrs Allison?' he asked the patient, a stout countrywoman from one of the more rural villages of Calleshire's hinterland.

Her answer confounded him.

‘'Bout since last Michaelmas, Doctor.'

‘I see,' he murmured noncommittally. ‘And then?'

‘Then after Christmas the pain got worse. I was fair winded, too, every time I tried to do anything.'

‘Housework, you mean?'

She stared at him. ‘Well, that and seeing to the hens and geese. Got so that I couldn't bend to get the eggs, see? Not without the pain coming on.' She looked intently into Dr Friar's face, anxious that he should fully understand about her pain. ‘Then, when I come to give m'husband a hand with the farrowing in the night, I came over really queer and we had to have the doctor out. Haven't done that since the children were young.'

‘I see.' He made a note on the clean new record. He'd been brought up in the town himself and didn't really understand the urgencies of rural life.

‘Then there was the shopping, doctor.'

‘What about the shopping?' asked the registrar who didn't really understand that either.

‘Carrying it, of course,' retorted Mrs Allison, for the moment quite forgetting to be over-awed by her surroundings. ‘A week's shopping gets quite heavy, I can tell you. And it's a tidy step from the bus at Great Rooden up the hill to the farm after a morning on your feet at the market at Berebury.'

The registrar reached for his sphygmomanometer while Mrs Allison looked round the clinic, impressed and frightened in equal parts. It wasn't really intended to, but the Out-Patient Clinic sometimes had the same effect on those unfamiliar with it as the Hall of Justice in the Doge's Palace in Venice—walking the length of which was said to have concentrated the minds of those brought to trial there more than somewhat.

Dr Friar said, some of his own aching tiredness gone now, ‘So that was when you got this feeling again, was it, Mrs Allison?'

‘That's right,' she responded absently, her eyes on his hands. ‘What are you going to do with that thing there, then?'

‘Just putting it round your arm, that's all. It won't hurt.' He picked up his stethoscope. ‘And then I'm going to have a listen to your ticker.'

‘'T'aint what it used to be,' she wheezed.

‘No.'

‘And my ankles swell something awful by nighttime.'

‘Yes, I'm sure they do.' Martin Friar glanced down at her bulging ankles and stout, lace-up shoes and made another note in her record. Her blood pressure was sky-high, of course. He didn't like the colour of Mrs Allison's lips either but he did not say so. Instead he asked, ‘What are you like after a rest?'

‘Rest?' She stared at him as if he was speaking another language. Then her face cleared. ‘Oh, you mean Sundays, Doctor …'

He hadn't meant Sundays but he let her go on.