New Doctor at Northmoor Read online

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she gasped. ‘Is it Mrs. Walker? Is she ill?’

  ‘You know her?’ He frowned thoughtfully. Now that the girl was closer to him, she didn’t seem quite such a schoolgirl. He studied the delicate features and the great blue eyes and he felt very much the same as Mrs. Yeedon had done not so long ago, except that Mrs. Yeedon had been anxious from affection for Gwenny, whereas he felt no more than a clinical interest in what appeared to be the vague and teasing symptom of a disease he had wanted to specialize in since he had first qualified.

  ‘Oh, yes, Mrs. Walker’s a friend of mine,’ Gwenny said. ‘Are you a doctor?’ He looked like a doctor, he talked like a doctor; he was exactly how Gwenny privately thought a doctor should look. Not like her handsome, frivolous brother Laurence, not like her stout, balding, often tetchy father, but tall, strong, dark in a clever sort of way, terribly responsible and sure of himself, and indicating a strong interest in any ill person who might place themselves in his hands. Gwenny, who often felt not quite well, decided that this was just the sort of doctor she would like.

  He said shortly, ‘I am, but not in my official capacity. It happens that Mrs. Walker is no longer here. She has gone to stay with some friends, where she will be taken proper care of.’

  ‘Then if you don’t mind, who are you, and what are you doing here?’ Gwenny said faintly. Quite suddenly she was oddly afraid.

  He was silent for a moment. She thought he wasn’t going to answer her. There was that queer haze coming up from the ground again, and her hands felt like cotton wool, yet she must hang on to the handlebars or the bike would fall over. It was no place to think of such a thing, but it occurred to her then that it would be rather uncomfortable if she suddenly felt this now familiar sensation, when she was riding the bike, especially in traffic.

  She got a grip on herself and heard him saying ‘... and I suppose as you might well be connected with some of my future neighbours, there is no harm in telling you that I have every right to be here, as in point of fact, I am intending to complete the purchase of Fairmead and I shall soon be moving in. ‘

  ‘Moving in?’ Gwenny whispered. She heard herself whisper that, then the roaring came in her ears and somehow the bike took off and plunged into some nearby bushes, and the ground came up and hit her smartly in the face.

  CHAPTER II

  When she opened her eyes again, she found she was on the purple velvet couch in the second-best sitting—room. The curtains—purple with gilt tassels—looked much more dusty than when she had last seen them, and one of the pictures was slightly askew.

  ‘Hadn’t you better straighten the Judge?’ she asked weakly. ‘He’s Mrs. Walker’s great-uncle—or are you going to buy him too?’

  ‘You’d better just lie quietly,’ the dark young man suggested.

  ‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ she reminded him. ‘I can’t say “Oy” or “You”, and it so happens I’ve several things I want to say to you.’

  ‘Drink this, and be quiet,’ he told her.

  ‘What is it? I’m not supposed to drink any old thing that someone else gives me. My father will skin me as it is, when he finds out Mrs. Yeedon made me drink a tisane she’d made.’

  ‘Who is Mrs. Yeedon, and why should your father feel so strongly about what you do?’

  ‘Mrs. Yeedon lives in one of the cottages, and she makes herb teas and she used to cure people, and my father doesn’t like that, naturally.’

  ‘Well, never mind your father’s likes and dislikes. Drink this up and tell me a few things about yourself—unless you’d rather I drove you to your own doctor. It must be one or the other, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why must it?’ Gwenn asked in surprise. ‘Don’t be silly, I’m all right now. And I’m telling you, aren’t I? My father is looking after me.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he is, but who is your doctor?’ he asked her.

  ‘My father is,’ Gwenny told him, with over-emphasized patience. And then she remembered to tell him who her father was. ‘He is Dr. Kinglake and he practises in Bittleby and we live in Queen’s Heath—that’s the nearest village. My, you are a stranger to these parts!’

  ‘So it would seem,’ he said rather grimly, but he was surprised, too, she noticed, and rather bothered.

  After a lengthy pause, he said, ‘Do you often have these attacks?’

  ‘It wasn’t an attack. I just felt a little woozy, and if I told my father that, he’d skin me and say I was pulling his leg. You leave me alone! I shall be all right. I cycled here and I can cycle back. Oh, what a shame—I’ve just remembered. If you’re going to buy this place, I shan’t be able to come here any more, unless you let me come and say hallo to all the old ladies. ‘

  ‘Old ladies?’ That really startled him. ‘What old ladies?’

  ‘The ones who will come and live in the home, of course. Everyone says this is only fit for an old people’s home. That’s why my— I say, you are going to turn it into a home, aren’t you?’ she finished rather anxiously.

  ‘Indeed I am not,’ he said quite definitely. ‘I intend to have it redecorated and come and live here.’

  She swayed a little, at that. He took her by the arms and he said, ‘Look here, you’re not well. Do you understand? You simply must tell your father or go to the hospital. Northmoor isn’t all that far away, and it’s good enough.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell my father how you feel about it, then?’ She felt rather hysterical at the thought. She could just see her father looking impatiently over the top of his glasses at her, and demanding to know what tomfoolery she had been up to now. She could well imagine what her mother would have to say about it. Bad enough when Mummy heard about Fairmead being sold to someone who just wanted to live there, but what about Mummy’s old people’s home?

  The doctor snorted at the idea of his telling Dr. Kinglake about his daughter. ‘I hardly think the information would come well from me,’ he told Gwenny severely.

  He was a very forceful young man. He had her in his car before she could blink. She had the feeling that if she hadn’t consented to walk out, he would have just swung her up into his arms and carried her. Such a thought made her feel quite peculiar. She watched him collect the bike and put it in the boot, then he carefully shut the front door of his domain and drove round to the back. So he knew that way in, did he? For some reason, she had been aching to see if he would try and go down the drive and what he would do when he got to the bits that were overgrown. With anyone else, she would have never entertained such a thought; she would have been quick to warn the stranger. But this man, now that she had time to consider it, aroused the most unfamiliar feeling of antagonism in her. All her first feelings about him had fled. She just wanted to fight him now.

  He seemed to know the way to Queen’s Heath all right and he also seemed to know where Old Square was. He drove unerringly to it, but once there, he said curtly, ‘You’d better tell me which house the doctor’s is, for I don’t see the usual signs. Shouldn’t there be a plate outside, or a lamp with the word “surgery” on it?’

  That put her back up at once. ‘The plate came unstuck and fell off, and it didn’t seem worth putting it back because everyone knows where we live. And the lamp got smashed when Bobby Barker hit a six with his new cricket bat, and we’re too hard up to replace things that really aren’t necessary.’

  She didn’t catch what he said, but gathered from his rather grim expression that he considered it disgracefully irregular.

  ‘Well, which house is it and I’ll pull up outside and get the bike out for you, but I won’t come in.’

  She might have said it wasn’t worth his while to do so because no one was likely to be at home, but she restrained herself. Why tell him anything? she asked herself angrily.

  He did everything with speed and precision, she thought resentfully, as she watched him prop the bike against the front hedge, which incidentally badly needed clipping. She supposed he was looking at that fact, too, and disapprov
ing.

  She got out, found she could stand without the ground behaving oddly, and she walked sedately towards him.

  ‘Thank you very much, and goodbye, Dr.? Oh, you didn’t tell me your name, did you?’

  ‘You’ll know it soon enough,’ he said grimly. ‘Meantime, concentrate on what really matters—getting yourself into good medical care at once. You do understand me, don’t you?’

  Gwenny went into the house and stood at the end of the silent hall and looked around her. In the quiet of the square she heard his car purr to life and depart. Like himself that car was rather splendid-looking and efficient but aroused antagonism in her. What right had this supercilious stranger to come in his splendid car and make their own look more shabby than before? What right had he to buy Fairmead from under her mother’s nose, to live in—live in! That great big house for one man! And goodness knows how much money it would take to put it right again!

  Gwenny fretted about who he could be. He was a doctor, yet she hadn’t heard about him, and they had a grapevine which they called a jungle telegraph in Queen’s Heath, which operated through the string of small shops, the cottages (carried by the children doing errands) and the adults (the postman and the travelling shop) and the patients in her father’s own surgery, to say nothing about her mother’s whist drives and women’s meetings. It put any hospital grapevine to shame, but still it hadn’t picked up this essential bit of information about this stranger who had such an unsettling effect on Gwenny.

  She hated him. She hated him for discovering with such apparent ease that all was not well with Gwenny Kinglake, a thing she had successfully hidden from everyone so far except the perspicacious Mrs. Yeedon, who was, on her own admission, half a witch. She also hated the stranger for making everything seem different all of a sudden. Home seemed different, for a start, and it had seemed to begin with the fact that there was no plate outside and the hedge needed cutting.

  Well, she could remedy that, she thought angrily. For a start, she could go and get a pair of shears from the tool shed and clip the worst bits off, even if she didn’t feel she could finish the job. (If only she didn’t get so beastly tired and terrifyingly hot, every time she tried to do a reasonable job lately!) But on investigating the tool shed, she found she couldn’t get the door open. One hinge had broken, and someone had tried to yank the door open, but it now hung drunkenly and had jammed. Gwenny couldn’t move it. Frustrated, she looked in the window, and in a space in the middle of the film of cobwebs she could see that the shears were broken, anyway.

  The two halves lay where they had been flung, on a pile of sacks in a corner.

  Well, that was that. She could do nothing about the hedge, she supposed, but she could do something about the house. Mrs. Otts would be out for two hours. Gwenny could do a lightning rip-through, tidying the place. Mrs. Otts often said that cook she could, and straight-clean she would, but more than that she would not bring herself to do, which meant, in clear uncluttered English, that Mrs. Otts didn’t consider it her duty to make beds and tidy the place when there were at least five able-bodied people in the family to do their individual share.

  There was reason in that, Gwenny supposed. Her father didn’t pay Mrs. Otts as much as she would have got in a town, doing a similar job, but on the other hand, it suited Mrs. Otts, whose family was scattered about the village. Mrs. Otts, since her husband had died, now had no home of her own, and on her nights off she descended on her various relatives in turn, but the rest of her life was spent safely under the doctor’s roof. Mrs. Otts, they all considered, had very little to grumble about.

  Gwenny went slowly upstairs. Mounting the stairs did peculiar things to her, too. Her head went tight and she could see flashing little lights. She rested half way, then went up the rest, rather cross with herself. Anyone would think she could cope with a bit of liver trouble, wouldn’t they, without going all to pieces like this? Daddy had already recommended a glass of hot water sipped slowly, but Gwenny never had the patience to try it out.

  Upstairs, she was disheartened at once. Her mother, to be sure, made her own bed rather beautifully, but the doctor’s bed was merely covered. Mrs. Kinglake always said it wasn’t worth making it. He was in and out half the night bringing babies into the world at inconvenient times, and he lay down on it during the day whenever he got a chance, when other men were mowing the lawn or pruning the trees. So the doctor’s bed was permanently untidy.

  Laundry was scattered around the room. Mrs. Otts’ sister-in-law obliged with the washing and should have collected it all today and taken it away, but Gwenny knew for a fact that Mrs. Otts’ sister-in-law had one of her ‘attacks.’ The screws, it was called, and she did appear to be in pain, and the only thing that ever reduced the pain was a trip into Uxmarket on the two-thirty bus every Wednesday for Bingo at the old cinema in Market Street.

  Priscilla’s room was a mess and smelt horribly of stale make-up. There wasn’t much Gwenny could do about it without risking an awful row when her sister came home for forty-eight hours, and she was due almost any moment. Gwenny wandered into her brother’s room and, disheartened by now, began to gather up his papers into a neat pile to put on his desk. In the end, she bundled everything into the desk and pushed the flap up, then got a duster and went over the place. It looked a lot better, but was unfamiliar enough for her to have a prick of doubt. It wasn’t a very nice room. The wall of the next door house blocked the view of the Green, and he needed new curtains and bed cover, but as he wasn’t home very often, Gwenny supposed her mother didn’t consider it worth the expense.

  The spare room wasn’t made up, but Gwenny could and did remove the thick layer of dust on everything, and she did get out the carpet sweeper and go over the strip of worn carpet along the landing, but after that she felt like doing nothing else but lying flat on her back on her own narrow bed and wonder what was to become of her.

  Something wasn’t right, but it was so nebulous that she wouldn’t know how to explain it to her father. Unless she fainted at his feet, he wouldn’t think anything was wrong with her. There had been an occasion when that had happened, and he had seemed concerned, but there had been a telephone call. She had been put on a couch in the dining-room and he had gone to the telephone, but it had been Mr. Wilkes up at Overberry Farm, who had caught his hand in the combine harvester, and there was no arguing round that one. Gwenny had heard her father bark some instructions into the telephone, things about stopping the flow of blood and getting the ambulance, then he had belted out to the garage because Mr. Wilkes’ wife was almost ready to start a baby and she had gone to pieces. A little thing like Gwenny fainting was soon forgotten.

  True, her father had seemed concerned about her when he had got back, but it was four hours later, and her mother had said, ‘Oh, don’t fuss, dear. She’s all right now. I expect it was the heat,’ and there the matter had rested.

  Yet something ought to be done. She made up sentences of explanation, such as, ‘You know that time I fainted, Father, when Mr. Wilkes caught his hand in the combine harvester—’ but of course, that was too long a sentence. Her father would either be called out again or discover it was time for surgery or have to finish writing out some bills, and would beg her to tell him some other time. That was always the way.

  She could, of course, say, ‘I feel rotten!’ but then he would look alarmed, take her into the surgery, get out his stethoscope and ask all the horrid personal routine questions he asked his patients, and quite suddenly Gwenny found she didn’t want to have to answer her father. It wasn’t so bad when she was a child, but not now. She was adult, and he would accept that. He wouldn’t accept it in any number of ways, like giving her an allowance or letting her get a job. He still insisted on giving her pocket money—a very small amount at that!

  She fell asleep wondering drearily if all the daughters of country doctors had the same problem, and she dreamed of the young doctor who was buying Fairmead taking her into his surgery and telling her that he cou
ld tell, just by looking at her, that she was going to die, and very soon, and that nothing and no one could save her.

  She awoke feeling tight all over and very scared. It was dusk and there were a lot of voices in the house. Her mother’s voice, raised in argument with Mrs. Otts.

  Mrs. Otts was saying, ‘I never saw the place like it before, no, I never! No, I’m not saying it’s as burglars getting in—what’s here to steal, that’s what I’d like to know!’

  ‘Don’t be impertinent, Mrs. Otts!’ Oh, dear, Gwenny thought, as she heard her mother say that: she’s in one of those moods.

  She dragged herself to her feet and went to the stairhead to look down at them. Mummy must have had a bad day at her meeting. Gwenny struggled to remember which one it was, but she couldn’t. She called down, ‘If you’re talking about the place being tidied up, I did it. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Well, I never! Saucebox!’ Mrs. Otts observed. ‘It’s my job, and I’ll thank you, young lady, not to get out my carpet sweeper and leave it on the landing for honest folks to fall over, and like as not break it so I get the blame.’

  ‘Did I leave it out? I’m sorry. I went to lie down.’

  ‘Worn out, I daresay, by the unaccustomed bit of trying to do housework, I suppose,’ Mrs. Otts said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘It’s my job to do the house, and I won’t have interference or else I leave.’

  ‘There’s no question of your leaving, Mrs. Otts!’ Mrs. Kinglake said distractedly. ‘Why do you have to be such a nuisance, Gwenny?’

  ‘I thought I was helping. I’ve removed some dust—’

  ‘If you’re saying, miss, as I’m dirty—’ Mrs. Otts shrilled indignantly.