No Love Lost (3 page)

‘Nerves?' I suggested. That was the usual story.

‘It may be more than that.'

‘Alcoholism?'

He threw out his stiff hands. ‘I do not know. It is possible, anything is possible. All I can tell you is that I have to go to fetch her with an ambulance and to bring her here.'

I felt my eyebrows go up. I was beginning to learn that there is absolutely no depth of human folly to which the most unlikely patient will suddenly descend, but I was still green enough to venture a protest.

‘It sounds a very tall order,' I began cautiously.

‘Does it? It is all I can do.' He spoke with a queer obstinacy. ‘I promised Maurice as he died that if there was ever anything I could do for Louise, I would. Now the moment has come and I must have her here.'

‘It's a great responsibility.'

He turned on me. ‘Please don't think I do not know. I have thought it out from every angle. For a week I have been deciding, but I know in my heart that I must bring her home. Radek and Grethe will look after her, and you, if you please, will come to see her and advise me. Then I shall know I have done what I could.'

He watched me to see if I was impressed, and I was, of course. I was glad to see him taking so much interest in a fellow human being. I had not thought there was so much kindness or duty left in him. I only hoped he knew what he was in for.

‘I can order an ambulance for you,' I said gently. ‘It only seems odd that her present doctor does not arrange it.'

‘Ah, I was afraid you would notice that.' He smiled at me
awkwardly. ‘She has quarrelled with him, of course. There is nobody to look after her except the landlady, who says I must arrive with the ambulance. You will come with me, won't you, Doctor? You go to London on Saturdays.'

There I put my foot down. I was gentle, I hope, but firm. I could just see Percy's face if the ‘foreigner' and I went gallivanting off to London in the local bone-wagon. Besides, he was asking too much. My Saturday trips to the capital were the week's one escape from Mapleford, and I felt my sanity depended on them. I was mildly surprised that he knew so much about my habits.

I could not dissuade him. ‘But you could see her in London before she leaves.' He pleaded as though his life depended upon it, urgent as a child, his eyes two dusky holes in his head.

I weakened. I knew it was silly, but I did, and I turned to the open bureau in the corner to find a scrap of paper to write the address on. He nearly wept with gratitude as he dictated it to me.

I am certain I should never have noticed the scrap of blue tissue protruding from one of the tiny drawers which lined the desk if I had not heard his sudden intake of breath and looked up just as he leaned past me to thrust the thing out of sight. As it was, I hardly saw it at all. I caught a glimpse of something which looked vaguely familiar and then there was nothing there save his twisted and stiffened hand, which was shaking violently.

When I glanced up at him in astonishment he was trying to laugh, but his eyes were anxious, I thought.

‘It is a pigsty of a desk. That is what you are thinking, aren't you? Let me see what you have written. Yes, that's right. The name is Louise Maurice, the address 14 Barton Square, West 2.'

I was still rather surprised. I had plenty of patients who might have thrown a fit if I had lighted on an unpaid gas bill or an overdue demand for rates. Mapleford was full of them. But I did not think Gastineau was quite the type. I was fairly certain he had been genuinely alarmed, and I wished I had seen the blue slip more closely. It had suggested something so familiar that I just could not place it.

My puzzled expression seemed to delight Peter Gastineau.
He became quite lighthearted, suddenly, and insisted on seeing me to the car.

‘I think I am a most brilliant judge of character,' he remarked unexpectedly as we shook hands in the drive. ‘You are kind but you are also very practical, aren't you, and you have a great sense of what is expedient.'

‘I should be a menace as a doctor if I hadn't,' I said lightly and climbed into the car.

‘And you are not forgiving?' He had to raise his voice, since my foot was on the starter, and the effect was to make the question sound anxious and important. At the same moment I saw the clock on my dashboard and let in the clutch.

‘I have a heart of flint,' I shouted over my shoulder as I shot away. It was only as I was waving to Miss Luffkin, who, as I had expected, was waiting in the dusk to see me go by, that it occurred to me that it was a most extraordinary remark for him to have made.

Percy was not on duty that night, and when I got back there was a crowd at the surgery. The waiting-room was packed and I cursed socialized medicine. To my mind its weakness was elementary, and I felt somebody might have foreseen it. Since everyone was forced to pay a whacking great weekly premium for medical insurance, nearly everybody, not unexpectedly, thought they might as well get something out of it, and, as far as Mapleford was concerned, the three who stood between nearly everybody and the said something-out-of-it were Percy and his two assistants, who had not been exactly idle before.

Percy hired us a secretary, paying her out of the private fortune his wife left him, but she, poor girl, could not sign our names for us or weigh up the merits of a claim, so the stream of importunates demanding free chits to the dentist, free wigs, postal votes, corsets, milk, orange juice, vitamin tablets, pensions, invalid chairs, beds, water-cushions, taxi rides to hospital, crutches, bandages, artificial limbs, and a thousand and one likely or unlikely requirements dogged us wherever we went. As Percy said, it was almost a relief to find someone who just had a pain.

To make matters more difficult, the more ignorant (and less
sick) among the crowds had lost their old respect for our calling, and treated us as if we were officials trying to cheat them out of their rights. However, I was not so dead against it all – except at surgery time – as was Percy. I thought I should probably learn some way of coping with it in the end, and meanwhile I strove to keep my mind clear and to remember at all costs that I was a doctor first and a form-filler second.

That night I worked until I was in a lather. The secretary was close on angry by the time I had finished, and was taking a couple of minutes to listen to poor old Mr Grigson's interminable tale of the strange noises his chest made in the night. He is a retired sea captain, full of years and dignity, and he had walked up to the surgery with his bronchitis because ‘since he was not paying' me any more he did not like to drag me out to his cottage. I wished everyone was as thoughtful, but hoped it had not killed him. In my gratitude and guilt I listened far too long until the recital was ended abruptly by the telephone.

I fully expected the call to be from Rhoda, fuming over a spoiled meal, but I had been too sanguine. The message, uttered in a child's squeaky voice, was brief but explicit. Mrs McFall had ‘begun'. I took down my coat. Once Mrs McFall ‘began' it was time for all men of good will to get out the boats, man the defences, batten down the hatches, and call out the fire brigade, and the fault was not hers, poor fecund lady, but her husband's. Mrs McFall had a fine baby every year, and had been doing so with the beautiful regularity of sunrise or the autumnal equinox for as far back as anyone remembered. But Mike McFall, her lorry-driving husband, had never got himself used to the phenomenon. Each essay into fatherhood came upon him as a new and terrible experience only to be endured with the help of alcohol in such vast quantities that the man was a raving lunatic throughout the whole affair.

Nurse Tooley ministered to the people in that area. She was a woman after my own heart. Her courage made me ashamed of my own and her endurance had to be observed to be credited. But even she felt Mrs McFall's ever recurrent crises were two-woman jobs. I had promised her that if I was above ground the next time Mrs McFall ‘began' I would be there.

‘You deliver the child, Doctor,' she said, ‘and I'll control himself.'

So I had to go.

It was dawn by the time we had finished. As the first cock crew the youngest McFall let out his first furious bellow at the world he had hardly inherited, poor chicken, and soon after a stalwart neighbour and her son agreed to take over the parents.

Nurse and I crept out into the grey light, and because she was if anything more weary than I we loaded her bicycle on to the car and I drove her home. Despite the hour, nothing would content her save that I step in for a cup of tea. Her round red face was full of anxiety.

‘Sure I've got a little word I'd like to be saying to you, Doctor.'

I am easy, of course. Sometimes I hope it is not just weakness of character. I staggered in. The cottage was tiny and neat as a doll's house, and as Nurse Tooley scurried about putting out china I sat in the best chair and felt my eyelids grow sticky with sleep. There was something rather special about this woman, I thought idly as I watched her square energetic form, solid and strong as a cob pony. She was deft and shrewd and loyal, and the idea shot into my mind that when John and I got our children's clinic we should need her. In an instant I had remembered and the furious colour rushed into my face. It was the kind of idiotic trick my subconscious was always liable to play on me whenever I got over-tired.

Nurse handed me a steaming cup and sat down beside me.

‘You're done up. You look flushed,' she observed with concern. ‘I ought not to have kept you out of your bed but I did want to speak to you. You're in trouble with the police, I hear.'

I blinked at her. ‘I sent Sergeant Archer home with a chip on his shoulder after that accident on Castle Hill last week, if that's what you mean,' I said. ‘He infuriated me. Fancy trying to get me to estimate if the dead driver had been drunk, there and then in the roadway! Especially as his hip flask had burst all over him.'

She shook her kind old head at my indignation.

‘It's excited he was,' she said. ‘But he's a bad enemy, Doctor, and you don't want enemies in the force, though God knows it's not my place to be mentioning it to you. No, I was wanting to inquire about this dangerous drug.'

That woke me up. I could just see what was happening now that Percy had decided to shut the stable door well after the horses had been stolen. I did my best to explain whilst keeping the irritation in my voice to a minimum.

‘Dormital. Yes, I wrote it in my book as soon as Inspector Brush mentioned it to me.' Her Irish brogue was warm and deeply apologetic. ‘He told me to keep it under my hat but to keep my eyes open for it just the same. You'll not have had it stolen, Doctor, not in Mapleford, for it's not at all useful. If it had been a nice sizeable packet of cascara, now, I wouldn't have trusted some of them. No, you've let it slip out of the car and someone has upped and slung it over the hedge. Could you tell me what it was like at all, for if it's found the chances are I shall be having it brought to me?'

I had described my loss carefully to the Inspector and I had no need to visualize it again.

‘Why, yes, I can,' I said. ‘It was a white carton with some blue round the edges – a narrow band, I think. There was printing on the outside, just the usual details and guarantees. The carton had been opened and it held a two-ounce capsule bottle with the seal unbroken. Oh yes, and there was the ordinary literature inside, a flimsy, tightly printed blue paper …'

My voice dried suddenly as I heard my own words. A
blue
paper, tightly printed!

‘What's the matter, Doctor?'

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing of importance.' I managed to sound normal and to say good-bye and to get myself back into the car, but as I sped home through the half-awake streets it went through my mind like a little warning bell that perhaps I was making a silly mistake in being so sorry for Gastineau and so ready to oblige him. The dreadful thing was that I could not be sure, yet it could have happened. I had not called at Peacocks Hall on the day I missed the Dormital, but I had seen Peter Gastineau. It was just after I had been to call on Miss Luffkin.
I had left her safely in the house, for once, gargling her sore throat in the bathroom, and I came out to the car to find Gastineau standing beside it. I assumed he had just arrived after one of his little saunters down the road which were all the exercise he was able to take, but of course he might have been there much longer.…

I was thinking about it as I reached my bed and fell asleep, and it was still in my mind when I woke a few hours later. The more I thought about it the more awkward it became, but at the same time my conviction that the blue paper was the same blue paper grew alarmingly. I half considered going to old Percy, and I think I would have done in the end had I not been so impossibly busy. As it was, the only immediate effect of the whole incident was that I forgot to order the ambulance until I was in the midst of a strenuous afternoon at the Friday Welfare Clinic. I had to make the call from the phone on the desk, and I remember thinking at the time that it was the most public telephone conversation I had ever had. Every mother and half the babies listened to me as if I was ordering a charabanc for an outing. There is not a lot of free entertainment in Mapleford, and people certainly make the best of what there is. By nightfall everyone in the place would know of Gastineau's visitor, her name, and where she came from and the exciting fact that I would see her in London, that fabulous city.

I don't know why it was, but I felt it was dangerous then.

Altogether it was a heavy week, and on Saturday morning it was a thrill to put away my solid tweeds and climb into a silk suit and a squirrel cape, to put on a silly hat which made me look twenty again, and to drive off to the metropolis fifty miles away.

I had lunch at the Mirabelle with Edith Gower, an old buddy of mine. We had heavenly food and one of those gossips which are good for the soul. Afterwards we went to an exhibition of modern art and met two of her friends who had pictures there, so just for a little while I wallowed in a world as far away from Mapleford as it was possible to imagine. It did me no end of good.