by Angela Arney
‘Probably wasting my time with the breakfast, though,’ Emmy muttered as she prepared the food. A widow, living alone, she was used to talking to herself and no one answering her. In fact, she much preferred it that way. Her late husband had the irritating habit of interrupting the flow of her monologues. Not that Emmy thought it a monologue. She called it conversation. Looking on the black side of life was second nature to her. Not content with having an unexpected guest out of season she was now wishing that Mrs Smithson were a man; they ate more, but Emmy didn’t mind that. She always puffed out her rather meagre bosom with pride at the sight of someone tucking into whatever she’d cooked. A man always did justice to the food and appreciated her cooked breakfasts, whereas women were usually too worried about their weight. She took a sugared grapefruit half, a selection of mini packets of cereal, and some milk through to the dining room, setting them out on the table before straightening the damask napkin in its wooden ring. No one could ever say she was mean with food. The visitors’ book in the House on the Hard contained many flattering comments about the food written by previous guests. She was justly proud of that.
Mrs Smithson came into the dining room just as Emmy was leaving through the door into the kitchen. The dining room had a polished wooden floor and the sound of her shoes clacking on the surface alerted Emmy. She turned, glad to see her. ‘Ah, Mrs Smithson, I was wondering whether or not you wanted a full English breakfast.’
‘Yes, please.’ Mrs Smithson took her seat. A tall, thin, lonely figure in the empty dining room. She looked around. ‘Do you have any other guests at the moment?’
Emmy shook her head. ‘No one at the moment.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Smithson.
Emmy thought she sounded almost pleased. ‘But as I told you yesterday I have the Walsh family booked in next week until after Christmas, although they’ll only be taking breakfast here. The rest of the time they’ll be with Mr Walsh’s parents, who have a small flat down by the quay. Until then I’m empty. Not many people come to Stibbington in the winter. Will you be wanting to stay over Christmas?’
‘Probably not. I hope to finish what I came to do by then.’ The woman bent her head and concentrated on the grapefruit in front of her. A clear dismissal.
But Emmy, never one to take a hint, was not to be so easily dismissed. She liked to know about people. Gossiping with her fellow landladies about her guests was the only thing worth talking about in Stibbington. ‘The taxi driver told me you’re a writer.’
‘Yes.’ Mrs Smithson’s tone was not friendly, but Emmy didn’t notice. ‘And for that reason I like to be left alone. I need to concentrate.’
‘Of course,’ said Emmy, brightly impervious. ‘You just let me know if there’s anything you want, and I’ll make sure you get it.’
‘There is something.’
‘Yes?’ Emmy took a step back into the centre of the dining room, eager to please.
‘I shall be keeping the key to my room with me, and I should be glad if you would not go in and disturb anything.’
Emmy tossed her head back with a little smile. The woman couldn’t be serious, surely. ‘Now don’t you worry about me disturbing anything. I shall be very careful when I make the bed and dust, and I shall—’
But Mrs Smithson was serious. Very serious. ‘I would prefer it if you did not make the bed.’ Her voice was quite harsh. ‘Please stay away from my room.’
To say Emmy was astonished was putting it mildly. She was an old-fashioned seaside landlady, and, although anxious to make her guests comfortable, ran her guesthouse with an iron rod. She was used to her guests acquiescing to her suggestions, not giving her instructions. No one had ever done that before.
‘But I can’t leave you in a dirty room,’ she spluttered. ‘What about changing the sheets?’
A spoon clattered loudly into the grapefruit bowl. That Mrs Smithson was exasperated, in fact, very annoyed, finally penetrated Emmy’s consciousness. ‘You may change the sheets when I tell you, Mrs Matthews. Not on any other day. And you may do a little light cleaning at the same time. But until I give you permission please leave my room and everything in it alone. I shall have piles of paper everywhere, and I really cannot tolerate any interference with my things. If this is not convenient, then I’m afraid I shall have to find other lodgings for my stay in Stibbington.’
After opening and closing her mouth for a moment, but saying nothing, Emmy began to retreat. The last thing she wanted was to lose a paying guest, even if she was rather strange, and logic told her she shouldn’t complain; no housework meant an easier life. But she couldn’t leave without saying something. ‘I shall change the sheets as you wish,’ she said in a businesslike fashion. This statement was met with stony silence and Emmy began backing into the kitchen. ‘I’ll start cooking the breakfast. Do you want fried mushrooms or tomatoes?’
‘Both,’ came the reply in an uncompromising tone of voice.
In the kitchen, Emmy put on the bacon, sausage, tomatoes, and mushrooms to fry, and poured herself a cup of tea. The little contretemps with her guest had left her feeling bothered and bewildered, not least because of the uneasy feeling she had about Mrs Smithson. Someone more sensitive than Emmy Matthews would perhaps have tried to pin the feeling down to something positive, but Emmy fell back on her ‘catch-all’ solution. It was her stomach. Something had made her feel bad. Upset her stomach, in fact. She was very prone to stomach upsets. And if she felt that way, or bad, as she always described it, there was only one thing to do, and that was to go to the doctor. Emmy had implicit faith in the doctor. Especially Dr Jamieson. He was a wonderful man. He always knew which pills to prescribe, and she always felt better after a visit because he set her mind at rest. Yes, an appointment with Dr Jamieson was just what was needed and she’d organize that the minute she’d delivered Mrs Smithson’s breakfast.
Carefully scooping out the now cooked bacon, sausage, tomatoes, and mushrooms, she eased a slice of bread and some slices of black pudding into the sizzling fat. She’d show Mrs Smithson what a real cooked breakfast was like. No one would ever be able to point a finger at her and say she didn’t look after her guests. Even if some of them were a bit strange.
‘Honeywell Health Centre.’ Tara Murphy balanced the phone between one ear and her shoulder while her hands shuffled and sorted a pile of repeat prescriptions.
‘Mrs Matthews here. I want to see Dr Jamieson. And I want to see him this morning,’ said Emmy fiercely, anticipating opposition. That uppity Tara Murphy, who seemed to think she was there to keep patients away from doctors, might push other people around but she was not one of them. What right had that girl to be so snooty anyway? Her father had arrived in Stibbington only twenty-five years ago, an Irish labourer with not a penny to his name. Just because he could charm the birds from the trees, and had married the local garage owner’s daughter, eventually inheriting the business, didn’t make the Murphy family special. Tara Murphy had nothing to shout about.
‘I’m afraid Dr Jamieson is fully booked,’ said Tara firmly. ‘All day.’ There was a moment’s silence while Emmy digested this, then Tara said, ‘I can book you in for next week if you like.’
Emmy thought Tara sounded very uncaring. Doctors’ receptionists, in her view, ought to worry about patients. What use was next week? She felt bad now. ‘I could die in the meantime,’ she sniffed.
‘If it’s urgent you can see Dr Browne. She’s new to the practice. She’s taken the place of Dr Burton, who is now retired.’
‘I know.’ At first, Emmy was not happy, but then she cheered up; it would be an opportunity to see what the new lady doctor was like. Not that she had much faith in women doing what she considered to be men’s work. That was another thing she didn’t approve of. These days young women seemed to be doing everything and anything. Doctors, priests, lorry drivers. Emmy disapproved of them all. ‘All right. I’ll see this Dr Browne. About eleven will be convenient for me.’
‘Half past eleven is convenie
nt for Dr Browne. I’ll put you in the computer.’ The phone clicked dead leaving Mrs Matthews glaring and impotent. That Tara Murphy was much too big for her boots.
Morning surgery had finally finished and Lizzie was running late. Emmy Matthews had taken much more of her time than the ten minute slot she’d been allocated. Hastily grabbing a cup of coffee she popped her head into the senior partner’s office.
‘Sorry, Dick.’ She gulped back the hot coffee. ‘But I’ll have to tell Mabel, I’ll catch up with my letters this evening. I’ll do them myself. I don’t want them to be late.’ It hadn’t taken Lizzie long to find out that Mabel was always late with the typing no matter what time of day it was given to her. If she wanted something done the same day it was quicker to do it herself on the computer.
Dick Jamieson regarded Lizzie with fatherly exasperation. ‘Drink your coffee, girl, and have a sandwich before you go off on your visits.’ Glad of the excuse Lizzie obediently sat down and took the sandwich Dick proffered. ‘I should have warned you about Mrs Matthews,’ he said mildly. ‘I assume she is the cause of you running late.’
Dick exuded an air of tranquility about him; nothing appeared to faze him, and Lizzie began to relax. She pulled a face and agreed. ‘Yes, Mrs Matthews is the reason. What a woman. As soon as I thought I’d got her sorted out she presented me with another symptom. Headache, earache, stomach upset, and—’
‘Bowels,’ interrupted Dick, and roared with laughter. ‘That woman is healthier than either you or me,’ he said. ‘Give her a prescription for a laxative of some kind and she’ll go away happy.’
‘I’m afraid I suggested something different,’ said Lizzie, who didn’t agree with prescribing things just to keep patients happy. ‘It seems that the last prescription you gave her isn’t working. To use Mrs Matthews’ exact words, “A sachet after breakfast fails to produce anything”.’
Dick raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘So what did you give her?’
‘Nothing,’ said Lizzie, biting decisively into the sandwich. A mistake. The sandwich, made by Tara’s mother at the garage shop, filled with tuna and sweetcorn, splattered its contents in all directions. After mopping up the errant sweetcorn she continued. ‘I told her to get plenty of exercise, drink more water and eat apples and broccoli.’
‘And no prescription?’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘No prescription,’ she said firmly. ‘I told her that I believed in nature being given a chance.’
Dick’s eyebrows went even higher. ‘Watch it. She’ll be telling all and sundry that you are into complementary medicine or some such nonsense.’
‘Dick,’ said Lizzie severely. ‘Good diet and exercise is usually the best medicine. You know that.’
‘Ah yes, of course I do. But you know as well as I do that some patients prefer a prescription, and Emmy Matthews is one of them. It’s something tangible she can hold in her hand. That piece of paper on its own can make them feel better.’ Dick leaned forward and regarded Lizzie with a quizzical expression. ‘You’ve got a piece of sweetcorn on your cheek.’ Lizzie hastily wiped it away with a paper serviette. Dick grinned, ‘Did you recommend diet and exercise to your London patients?’
Lizzie, regaining her sense of humour, grinned back, and throwing the serviette in the wastepaper basket shook her head. ‘Point taken. No I didn’t because most were too poor to buy fresh fruit and vegetables even if they had access to them. And when they did have money, burger and fries were the cheapest option, and the one they all preferred. And as for exercise! Well, pounding the streets of Whitechapel is not only dangerous, it’s enough to send anyone into deepest depression. I never recommended it. But it’s different here. People are not so poverty-stricken.’
‘We have our poor too,’ said Dick. ‘You’ll meet them soon enough.’
Lizzie finished her coffee just as Tara Murphy came in with a pile of patients’ notes in their brown cardboard envelopes, which she put down in front of her. ‘I’ve taken another two calls for you, Dr Browne,’ she said. ‘That makes ten visits in all.’
‘Thanks, Tara.’ Lizzie took the notes and stuffed them into her leather bag. ‘With luck I’ll finish these calls in time for evening surgery. I’m sure one day I’m going to get lost around here. I’ll have to programme the satnav with all these addresses.’
Dick tutted, but Tara beamed. ‘I’m trying to persuade everyone to go electronic,’ she said. She looked at Dick Jamieson, ‘You will have to soon, as soon as we have the new system installed. You’ll have all your visits programmed on to your laptops – no more old brown folders.’
Dick groaned and Lizzie disappeared clutching her brimming black bag. She couldn’t wait for the new laptops.
The satnav proved invaluable. The New Forest around Stibbington was riddled with minor roads. Lizzie found that often patients listed for a visit lived at the end of tracks which were marked on the map by a series of dots, and she suddenly realized, with gratitude, that Dick and the other partners had been giving her an easy ride up until now. Previously, they must have sorted out her visits, giving her all the ones within a confined area of Stibbington so that she didn’t get lost. Today her patients were scattered much further afield.
It started raining again, and the car, its carpets still wet from her encounter with the flood of the night before, now smelled stale. The windscreen steamed up in the dampness and cold rain, and she had difficulty in keeping it clear, finally resorting to periodically wiping the screen with the back of her coat sleeve, the duster in the glove compartment proving useless. It was at times like this that she did wonder at the wisdom of buying an old but snazzy-looking car as opposed to a dull but modern one with air conditioning and other mod cons. But too late. She had the Alfa.
The bare branches overhanging the lanes seemed menacing, dripping great plops of water on to the roof of the car, and Lizzie began to feel uneasy. Would she settle down in the country? It all looked depressingly dark in the rain. And there was so much mud. Mud had never been a problem in Whitechapel. After just five visits her rather elegant black leather shoes looked as if they would never recover and her feet felt cold, damp, and uncomfortable. She made a mental note: waterproof footwear of some kind was an essential item for her shopping list. Was there such a thing as a fashionable Wellington boot?
It had all been so different on the days she’d made the initial reconnaissance trips visiting the practice. Three whole days in Stibbington and every one of them a glorious day. A sharp autumn frost had brushed the bracken and trees with silver, the sky had been a brilliant, sunny blue, and the River Stib and the estuary had glittered cerulean in the clear air. Of course, common sense told her it was bound to rain in Stibbington the same as it did everywhere else. But this seemed more than just ordinary rain; it had the ferocity of a tropical downpour without the heat. Everything was so cold. The rain was freezing, the mud was freezing, she was freezing, and Lizzie, irrational though she knew it to be, felt cheated.
The route to her last patient took her along the hard, past Mrs Matthews – the hypochondriac patient’s – guesthouse, The House on the Hard. It looked almost aggressively well kept, thought Lizzie, and quite different from the run-down bungalow next door. On fine days she could see that the guesthouse must have had a beautiful view, but today the river looked anything but inviting; a great slab of muddy-coloured water surging in the wind against the gravel of the hard. Would it ever stop raining? A motorcyclist passed her. He was too close, and much too fast for comfort, spraying mud all over her windscreen. Using an unladylike epithet, Lizzie stopped, cleared the screen, then started off again, peering out through the gloom, looking for the turning for Candover House, the address of her last patient, Wayne Girling.
She found Candover House at the end of a long track stretching away from the sea, in a small clearing beside a pine plantation. It was such a grand sounding name that Lizzie had expected it to be a Georgian mansion. Instead she found a small farm cottage, overshadowed by dark pines, with a chicken ru
n and coop on one side of the path in the front garden. Some miserable, unhealthy-looking chickens, half their feathers missing, were scratching about in the mud. So much for free range, thought Lizzie. The opposite side of the path was planted with rows of Brussels sprouts and leeks. A long-haired lurcher type dog rushed up the path towards her barking loudly, but following an ear-piercing shriek of ‘Rover!’ rushed back the way he’d come and vanished behind the house. A woman emerged at the side of the house, and then disappeared like the dog, only to reappear at the front door, which opened just as Lizzie put her foot on the doorstep.
‘Mrs Girling?’
The woman nodded. She was tired-looking, and could have been any age between thirty and fifty. But she had a fine-boned face, and Lizzie could see that she must have been beautiful once, although years of neglect had taken their toll. She was wearing a wrap-round pinny over a dress and her feet, complete with slippers, were in a pair of rubber galoshes. She waved Lizzie in and through the hall without a word.
Lizzie found her patient, Wayne Girling, a very small, undernourished-looking little boy of ten, sitting wheezing on the front room settee. It was obviously the best room and rarely used, having the musty chill of a permanently closed place.