New Doctor at Northmoor Read online

  ‘Do you hate him?’ Gwenny asked her sister.

  ‘I loathe him,’ Priscilla muttered between her teeth.

  Gwenny watched her saunter away, and wondered. If Priscilla really felt so strongly about Dr. Bayfield, why ask so many questions about him? It was all very queer. It was borne in on her then that everyone in her family had something against one man, a man who she herself hadn’t even realized existed until yesterday.

  She thought about it, and realized he had put her back up, but that quite curiously she didn’t feel she wanted to range herself on the side of her family. Instead, she wanted to keep it a private battle. She decided she’d go over to Fairmead again that day. If he really was moving in, it might be rather fun to watch.

  She knew better than to try to cycle over. She walked, slowly and carefully, as far as the bus stop, and waited for Clem.

  Clem was a friend of Gwenny’s. He was forty and had an appalling stutter, which had successfully prevented him from getting a decent job or a career. Nothing daunted, Clem had saved up and got himself a dilapidated van, which he had mended and persuaded the engine to run sweetly, and he hired out himself and his van to any local shopkeeper who couldn’t afford to run a van. Clem worked all hours and went any distance, and he wasn’t above giving people like Gwenny a lift if they wanted it. Clem loved people, and Gwenny’s friendly manner was a sweet gift to a man who couldn’t rely on anyone having the patience to stay near him long enough to unravel one single remark he tried to make.

  Clem pulled up for her that morning, and to save his effort, she told him where she wanted to go and why she wasn’t using her bike.

  ‘I suppose it’s the heat, but I come over all peculiar. I fainted yesterday.’

  Clem tried to register horror, so Gwenny said, ‘Oh, not to worry. The new owner of Fairmead is a doctor and he took me home and said I was to lie down in the cool and I’d be all right. If a doctor isn’t worried, why should you be?’ so Clem sat back, relieved, and didn’t bother to press Gwenny further for details.

  There was a heat haze shimmering over the trees. A rabbit scuttled away under the hedge and the fascinated Gwenny saw that it had two tails and four back legs, and that the hole it had gone into was now a double hole. Everything slowly and alarmingly blacked out, then came up again in brilliant vision. She shut her eyes and told herself it was just the sunshine catching the much polished metal on the bonnet of Clem’s van. She tried again to see, and told herself she must pull herself together because this was the start of the track up to Fairmead.

  Clem didn’t like leaving her there. He struggled to tell her so, and she listened attentively.

  ‘I know you don’t like it, Clem, but honestly, not to worry. Well, all right, then, if you’re going to worry, you’d better drive me all round the back and drop me at the house, then I can find somewhere to sit down.’

  Clem made convulsive gulps, so Gwenny kindly interpreted : ‘What do I want to go there on a hot day like this for? Well, I’ll tell you. They’re moving in today—at least, this Dr. Bayfield is. I want to watch them move in. I adore watching moving vans, don’t you?’

  Clem didn’t. He shook his head violently and made more noises, but Gwenny couldn’t be persuaded to make further effort to translate. She said instead, ‘You’re getting like my family for trying to stop me doing something I want to. Are you going to drive me round the back or will I get off here and walk up the drive?’

  Clem drove on. The road to the back of the estate was bumpy and rutted, and it hadn’t been improved by the arrival of the removal vans. They blocked the entrance anyway. They were big ones. Although the new owner had bought everything, lock, stock and barrel, much of the older stuff was either being taken away to store or to be cleaned and renovated, and he had accumulated a great deal of stuff of his own. And they were all very busy indeed—too busy to be bothered with poor Clem, who was almost frantic with anxiety at what he had on the floor of his cabin.

  Mark Bayfield, in jodhpurs and a turtle-necked sweater, came out and asked the men what the trouble was.

  ‘Some local bloke who can’t talk properly,’ was the laconic answer.

  Clem recognized a doctor when he saw one, and hesitated. Long ago he had been told that an operation would cure his stutter, or at least remove part of the impediment, but he couldn’t face it. He couldn’t now, he had never been able to face the thought. He backed out of the arena and drove Gwenny away.

  The sight of her slumped on the floor of his van bothered him dreadfully, but he didn’t know what to do. He had wild thoughts of taking her to the hospital and dumping her outside, but he was afraid of the porters. When he had deliveries to make at any hospital or doctor’s house he usually pretended to have a cold and to have lost his voice. But he had to do something about Gwenny.

  Finally he remembered Mrs. Yeedon, and drove Gwenny back there, but by then she had come to, and was sitting up, looking very ill.

  Mrs. Yeedon scolded Clem shrilly. She, like Gwenny, could understand him when he tried to talk. Clem told her why he had brought Gwenny back, but instead of Mrs. Yeedon thinking it a clever idea, she was furious.

  ‘You’re a nincompoop, Clem, and that’s the truth I There was a fine opportunity for you to deliver that poor child into the hands of a real doctor, and what do you do? You bring her back to me, you fathead! Oh, get along with you, do!’

  ‘Don’t scold him,’ Gwenny pleaded weakly from Mrs. Yeedon’s best couch. ‘He insisted on driving me right up to the house. If he hadn’t, I might still be lying somewhere half-way along a drive that no one ever uses. I might have been there for hours and no one would have known! It’s me you ought to scold, for going there in the first place.’

  Clem flashed her a brilliant smile of gratitude, but Mrs. Yeedon chased him back to his van before coming back to ask Gwenny to tell her all that again.

  Gwenny did, and at last, having finished, she lay looking at Mrs. Yeedon with eyes so large and dark-ringed that the old woman was almost brought to the point of walking down to the main road and the callbox, and ringing up Gwenny’s own father to come and collect her.

  Only the thought of what Gwenny herself would have to say to such a course stopped her.

  ‘What beats me,’ she said at last, in extreme exasperation, ‘was why you wanted to go over there at all. A sensible girl like you should know that the young gentleman wouldn’t want callers before he’d even moved in.’

  ‘I wanted to ask him something, that’s all,’ Gwenny said faintly.

  ‘Dear life, what would you have the nerve to ask the man, bless us, in the middle of having his home shifted into a strange place?’

  ‘It was important to know, if it was true.’

  ‘I may be an old woman, but I’m not all that stupid, though folks might think so, for I’m sure I can’t see, even if I had fifty pairs of eyes, what it is you want the truth of, miss.’

  ‘Darling, darling Mrs. Yeedon, my family—all of them—are saying he’s done things to them. Awful things! I just can’t, I won’t believe it!’

  Mrs. Yeedon sat down. ‘Lovey, you’re not well. Why should you think your family believe bad things of a man they don’t even know yet? He’s a stranger to the district.’

  ‘I know. That’s what’s so awful about it,’ Gwenny muttered, turning her head from side to side.

  Mrs. Yeedon felt her head and her face. Both were very hot and her face decidedly damp. ‘I must get us a cold compress,’ she muttered to herself, and got some ice-cold water from the well to wring out a towel in.

  When Dr. Bayfield arrived, he saw Gwenny lying on the couch with a towel twisted round her head, and her eyes shut in her dead-white face. The old woman was crouching over the fire brewing herbs.

  She looked so much like a witch that Gwenny, opening her eyes at the sound of his footsteps, was moved to say as quickly as she was able, ‘She isn’t a witch really. She just likes to look like one, and she’s good to me.’ She closed her eyes again. Mark Bayfi
eld came over and looked down at her, then turned to Mrs. Yeedon and introduced himself.

  ‘Mark Bayfield—I’m a doctor, at Northmoor Hospital, as from next Monday. Your new neighbour.’

  Mrs. Yeedon appreciated his height and good looks and that clipped manner of his. She almost but not quite curtseyed. It was like going back to her extreme youth when the old squire, then a young man, had come to her cottage.

  ‘I’m honoured to have you visit me, doctor,’ she said, but she couldn’t resist adding dryly, ‘though I mind you’ve likely come to see the young lady. She tells me she called in the middle of your removal.’

  ‘Did she?’ He seemed quite surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Yeedon said tartly, ‘but you wouldn’t have seen her, on account of her being on the floor of the driver’s cabin of a van. She’s poorly, proper poorly.’

  ‘I know.’ He sounded vexed. ‘Have you spoken to your father, young woman?’ he demanded of Gwenny.

  She raised her eyes, and he was shocked to see the change in her. It was too quick, much too quick. ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Wanted to,’ she muttered. ‘Tried to. Couldn’t. Too many people there. All talking.’

  He glanced at Mrs. Yeedon, his brows raised.

  She said, in an undertone which he caught but Gwenny didn’t (because of the roaring in her ears): ‘The sister’s home, and the brother. Folks are saying hereabouts that when those two are home together, there’s trouble in it somewhere.’

  ‘I see.’ He looked at the pot the old woman was holding, and nodded. ‘Very good for our fevers, but not the one she’s got. Don’t give it to her, please.’

  She sighed. ‘I thought as much. Felt helpless all along, I did. Can you do aught for the child, sir?’

  He motioned to the doorway where he could talk more freely. When they were well beyond Gwenny’s range of hearing, he asked bluntly, ‘Her father—difficult?’

  Mrs. Yeedon’s face was expressive, though she said dutifully, as became a sometime (if unofficial) midwife and one who had worked with doctors, ‘He’s a good man, though he has his little ways.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Mark Bayfield. He appreciated her choice of words. To one who knew both Dr. Kinglake’s son and daughter as well as he did, it was a nice brevity of words about a man whose children clearly took after him. Both Laurence and Priscilla no doubt meant well, but they certainly had their little ways.

  ‘It is not, in your considered opinion, likely to make things any easier for Gwenny Kinglake if I take her at once into hospital?’

  Mrs. Yeedon gave it serious thought, then she pronounced, ‘No, sir, it would not make things easier. How would it be if you was to take her into hospital on my behalf? Seeing as I’m screaming to anyone who’ll listen to remove the young lady from my little cottage because I’m of the belief she’s contagious? You couldn’t swear to it that she wasn’t, could you, sir?’

  ‘I could not,’ he gravely informed her. ‘But I might feel I ought to drive her home, to her own father, considering I’m not officially in office until next week.’

  ‘Ah, but then, sir, you see, that wouldn’t answer, because I can tell you, seeing as I know, that there’ll not be a body in that house. Not even the housekeeper, fat lot of good she’d be anyway.’

  ‘Oh? Can you be sure of that?’

  ‘So sure I can tell you where everyone will be! Mrs. Kinglake at her meeting, Dr. Kinglake fishing, Master Laurence over at Whitegates Farm to look at Dick’s finger but mostly to see Dick’s sister, the hussy, and the other daughter went to Uxmarket shopping.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’ Mark Bayfield asked softly. Clearly it would be wise to be on the right side of this old woman, who was such a staunch friend of young Gwenny Kinglake.

  ‘Mrs. Kinglake’s taken the small car—saw it go by myself. The doctor telephoned the farm where he was going—Joe told me when he brought the milk, and he told me about young Laurence, too. Mrs. Trippett saw Joe in the lane and told him about the others and he told me. I don’t go out much,’ she finished with dignity, ‘so folks keep me posted as to what’s going on.’

  ‘I see. Well, it does alter things, doesn’t it? It’s the hospital, I think. I must do some telephoning.’

  ‘I’ve not got one,’ she said regretfully, but she told him where the nearest callbox was, and watched him go very thoughtfully indeed.

  Gwenny was looking at her in a questioning sort of way when she went back.

  ‘Dear lamb, can’t you say a word, then?’ the old woman crooned. ‘He’s a very nice man, your new man at Fairmead,’ she assured Gwenny. ‘He’ll take care of you. He knows more magic than your old Yeedon does. There now, don’t fret. Just you do as he tells you, my lamb. I can feel it in my bones: it’s going to be all right.’

  ‘It’s like a fire inside me, consuming me,’ Gwenny said unexpectedly, but her voice was cracked, not like her own at all. ‘Can he put the fire out?’

  ‘I mind me I was thinking at the door a while ago that one could do anything he set his heart on, given time. But don’t you go crossing him, now. He’s not one to take sauce from a little wench. He’s all man, that one! I’ve not seen the like of him for many a year. Wisht I was young again, lovey, that I do. I’d get him for myself. And he’d be worth getting!’ But Gwenny had drifted off again and didn’t hear much of that.

  She opened her eyes again to a different scene. For a moment blind panic filled her. What, she asked herself, was that peculiar smell? And why was everything white, for goodness’ sake?

  She closed her eyes again, and heard the squeak of rubber soles on polished floor, and it came to her then that she was in hospital. She wasn’t a doctor’s daughter for nothing. Just by lying there with her eyes closed, she could hear sounds that her father talked of in acute irritation almost every day of his life. He was always popping into hospital to see one or other of his patients. Hospital was, he would have everyone know, one of those places designed to thwart the best efforts of any honest G.P. Gwenny had always secretly cherished the thought that her father would have given the world to be back in hospital again, working with a degree of safety and order, far removed from the domestic scene which continually intruded.

  Only Gwenny, in the whole family, guessed how much Dr. Kinglake had enjoyed his hospital days when young. Only Gwenny guessed how much Mrs. Kinglake worried the doctor, with her eternal panics and jubilations over her committees and the little local affairs he deplored so much.

  And now Gwenny herself was here. She opened her eyes again, hoping to see a familiar face, but there was no one. The nurse looked friendly, sitting there by the bedside, but Gwenny could only hear the sounds of the ward: she wasn’t in it. She was in a side ward, and the nurse was wearing a mask and a gown.

  ‘What am I being barrier-nursed for?’ she asked at once.

  The girl’s face, what there was of it to be seen above the mask, ran through the gamut of emotions. Her brows shot up in surprise, then her eyes crinkled up in sheer laughter. ‘Oh, yes, they said you were a doctor’s daughter so we won’t be able to fool you,’ she said. ‘It’s only a precaution till we can find out what your particular bug is. Not to worry.’

  She got up. Gwenny said, ‘What are you going to call Sister for?’

  ‘Because I’ve been told to, the minute you woke up,’ the nurse said primly, and took off her mask and gown and hung it up on a peg.

  Then came a procession of people, two at a time, and each donned mask and gown for entry into the little room. Sister, the R.M.O. (the retiring one, Gwenny supposed, remembering that Mark Bayfield would be coming here in his shoes), and she decided she liked Mark Bayfield best. One or two consultants looked in and professed interest, then someone said that Gwenny’s father would be coming.

  That settled her. If Daddy came, then she would be all right. She wondered if Laurence would come, too, and decided he wouldn’t. He’d hate being here since he hadn’t managed to snaffle that posit
ion! And then she snapped her eyes open as she thought, of course! R.M.O.—no wonder Laurence had been so mad keen to get it! Who wouldn’t be? And nicely near home!

  Considering Laurence was not a person who loved his home all that much, Gwenny had never been quite clear about why he wanted to work near home, but he had, and now he couldn’t, and suddenly she didn’t want her father to come here because he would be angry, too.

  One consolation occurred to her. At least her father wouldn’t run into Mark Bayfield, since he wasn’t taking up his new job until next week, and would presumably not come here until then.

  When her father did come, her mother was with him. Gwenny wished her father had come alone, because there were things she would have liked to explain, such as how she had started to be ill, and how it was that she had never seemed to have the chance to tell him. At least he would have kept quiet and listened, but with her mother there that wouldn’t be possible.

  But before they came, Sister came in and smiled at her. ‘Well, aren’t you a lucky girl?’ she said.

  Gwenny thought for a moment that Sister Hubbard was being sarcastic. What was lucky in being in this state?

  Sister Hubbard, who was red-faced and round and almost always had her sleeves rolled up and her cuffs off, was naturally, and quite irreverently, called by her nurses behind her back, Old Mother Hubbard. It was a natural reflex action. Gwenny, who didn’t yet know that, found herself mentally repeating the old nursery rhyme to herself. She couldn’t think for long on any subject, but silly things like nursery rhymes popped into her head, and that one most of all.

  ‘Why am I lucky?’ she managed.