a smile of pleasure.
‘Don’t bully her.’
‘You have an inflated idea of your own importance. You stay away for years at a time, then the moment you come home you presume to interfere between your mother and me.’
My heart began to pound. ‘One of the reasons I don’t come home is because I hate seeing you being so … so horrible to Dimpsie.’
‘Really?’ His tone was sarcastic. His eyes behind the rimless lenses were keen with enjoyment. He cracked the joints of his long white fingers, as though preparing to pluck out an inflamed appendix. I knew he had once operated on that very kitchen table and saved a boy’s life when bad weather had prevented even a helicopter from reaching the village. ‘Let me put that intermittently troubled conscience at rest. Dimpsie, do you have any complaints about the way I treat you?’
‘Oh no, Tom!’ My mother paused in the process of chopping parsnips to send him a placatory glance. ‘Of course not. You see, darling,’ she looked at me, ‘when people have been married as long as we have, we don’t need to observe ordinary courtesies. Besides, all that sort of thing’s rather conventional, isn’t it, really? Our relationship is different.’
I recalled with acute pain the image of my mother stretched out on the sofa with the empty bottle beside her. But if the princess doesn’t want to be rescued, it is absolutely no good bolting on armour and taking up one’s sword. There was a ghastly familiarity about the argument. We had had something like it each time I came home. And always my father, with my mother’s collaboration, won.
‘If you really give a damn about your mother,’ my father looked down at his newspaper, ‘you might think of standing in for her at the surgery. It doesn’t require a university degree or even a superior intelligence to answer the telephone and make appointments.’
‘All right.’ I knew it was game, set and match to him. ‘I will.’
It may not have needed a degree, but conducting an orderly surgery was much more complicated than I could have imagined.
Dimpsie took me the next morning to the house in the high street where my father had his practice. We arrived half an hour before the first appointment so I could find out where everything was. There was already a queue of four people waiting outside. I could hear the telephone ringing inside as Dimpsie tried each key in turn of a large bunch. When she found it, the rush to get inside almost knocked me off my crutches.
‘This is the appointments book,’ Dimpsie explained as I seated myself behind the desk. ‘Ten minutes each. Emergencies to be fitted into cancellations or at the end.’
‘How do I know if it’s an emergency?’
‘Well …’ My mother made eyes at me and lowered her voice. She had her back to the four early birds who had already taken their seats and were picking over the pile of tattered magazines on the table as though they were desirable worms. ‘You’ve got to use your judgement. If it’s someone very young or very old, better be on the safe side and fit them in anyway. Otherwise ask a few questions. Use a little psychology.’
‘I don’t think I know any.’
‘Here’s where you make the list of house calls.’ She indicated a pad already covered with incomprehensible messages in her own flamboyant writing with its Greek ‘e’s and circles over the ‘i’s instead of dots. ‘Remember Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are hospital afternoons. Dr Chatterji takes surgery on those evenings.’
‘Dr Chatterji?’
‘Dr Nichols retired last year. Poor fellow, none of the patients would see him. They insisted on waiting until Tom was free.’ Dimpsie sounded gratified by this mark of confidence in my father’s proficiency, but actually Dr Nichols had been blind, deaf and on two sticks when I had last met him four years ago. ‘They won’t see Dr Chatterji either. It’s very embarrassing.’
‘Is he blind, deaf and lame too?’
‘No, he’s young and healthy. It’s a communication problem. And I have to admit people round here are absurdly prejudiced against anyone … you know, different. He’s Indian. Poor chap, he finds the English winter awfully trying. The patients complain that they can’t understand anything he says and they’re convinced he’s going to prescribe snake juice instead of antibiotics. But no one else wanted to come all the way up here so your father had to take him.’ Dimpsie looked harassed. ‘See if you can persuade some of them to see Dr Chatterji. I’m afraid he must feel awfully rejected.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘Anyway, this cabinet has the medical records. You have to find the relevant folders and put them on Tom’s desk before each surgery begins. They’re alphabetical. More or less.’
Less proved to be the case. We hunted through every drawer for Mrs Wagstaffe’s notes, she being the first patient, and found them among the Bs. Mrs Copthorne’s were in the S’s and Mr Darwin’s were in the downstairs lavatory.
‘Sorry,’ said Dimpsie, returning with them in her hand. ‘I remember now I was sorting the notes yesterday afternoon, trying to get ahead, and then I dashed to the loo.’
The telephone had been ringing nonstop while we hunted, and already I was feeling hot and flustered. Dimpsie picked up the receiver. ‘Surgery,’ she said crisply, then, ‘Oh hello, Brenda. How are you? I was meaning to ring you. Must be telepathy … how are the peg-bags getting on? We ought to have, say half a dozen … oh, I think the patchwork … they seem to be the most popular.’
Brenda replied at length and wittily, judging by Dimpsie’s peals of laughter, while I slowly built up a pile of folders. I imagined small children, who had accidentally run shards of glass into their necks, bleeding to death while the peg-bag question was resolved. Old ladies with heart attacks lying beside the telephone, their lives ebbing away, just able to tap in the doctor’s number with a feeble forefinger only to hear the engaged signal. Just as I discovered the file for the last patient on the list, which had slipped down behind the cabinet, my father came in.
‘I’ve been trying to ring in for ten minutes,’ he said angrily.
I handed him the heap of folders while Dimpsie, looking guilty, put the receiver back on its rest. Immediately it shrilled with what seemed to me bloodcurdling urgency.
‘Deal with that,’ he snapped at me, ‘then ring the nurse on duty and tell her to go to this address.’ He put a slip of paper down in front of me. ‘It’s an oh-two. I’ve put in a morphine pump, tell her. She’ll see what else needs to be done.’ He picked up the armful of files. ‘Coffee on my desk in five minutes with the first patient.’
He went into his consulting room.
‘I think the nurses’ roster is in this drawer.’ Dimpsie burrowed, making a terrible mess.
‘Could this be it?’ I pointed to a torn scrap of paper lying by the telephone entitled Duty Nurse Tel Nos. ‘It says,’ I tried to make sense of the several crossings out, ‘Tuesday – Rita Bunker.’
I rang Nurse Bunker, explained that I was the new receptionist and that Dr Savage
