The old man, frail and breathing with difficulty, sat propped up in his bed.
“Sorry…to call…you out…doctor…terrible…pains…” He clutched his chest. “…would…have…come…to…the… surgery…”
He would too, when he was well, having more energy than many of those half his age. Besides he liked to flirt with Lulu.
“Told…Mrs Riggs…”
I never discovered what Grandpa Tolley had told Mrs Riggs for at that moment he lost consciousness. He collapsed against the pillows, his face blue.
“Quick, help me put him on the floor, Mrs Riggs!”
“On the floor, Doctor?” Mrs Riggs said, not moving.
“I want to massage his heart.”
“Wouldn’t he be better off where he is? He’s ninety-five you know and there’s a shocking draught comes under that door.”
There was no time to lose. I managed to get him onto the floor. Despite his age he was no light weight and I had to take a moment’s rest before I began closed heart massage.
“You sure that’s good for him?” Mrs Riggs said disapprovingly, watching me depress the sternum.
After what seemed an hour, but could not have been more than three minutes, his colour became worse and he was pulseless. Mrs Riggs had on an “I told you so” face.
“Pass my case!” I snapped.
Frightened by my tone of voice, Mrs Riggs did so. Fortunately I had my small airway with me. I inserted it into his mouth and gently blew air into the collapsed lungs. His colour improved very slightly and now the pulse, although feeble, was detectable. I took off my coat and continued with the massage. Mrs Riggs chattered all the while but I had no breath with which to answer her. Although Grandpa Tolley was an old man I could not leave him to die. More endless minutes passed and I was becoming exhausted. I felt for his pulse once more, but this time was unable to find it. If I did not succeed in resuscitating him almost at once I would have to give up as irreversible brain damage would occur. I set to work intently. Perhaps because of the expression on my face Mrs Riggs stopped talking. I continued with the massage, at intervals checking for signs of life. After a while I stood up.
“He’s gone,” Mrs Riggs said superfluously.
I nodded. He would flirt no more with Lulu.
“Not going to leave ’im there, are you?” she said with the lack of emotion of which only the very old seem possessed.
I put on my coat. Put away my stethoscope and airway, did up my case. With my last ounce of strength I lifted Grandpa Tolley up onto his bed.
The old woman nodded with approval and tucked him in as if he was a small child.
“Can I use your telephone?” I said. “I have to arrange with the Coroner’s Officer to send an ambulance.”
“Bit late, i’nt it?”
“They have to take him to the mortuary,” I explained, “and if you don’t mind I’m in rather a hurry.”
From Mrs Riggs’ cottage, in addition to the Coroner’s Officer, I rang Lulu to explain what had happened, asked her to keep the patients at bay and set off across London to see Faraday.
The traffic was phenomenal. Had I had lights to flash, bells to ring, I would have fared no better. Crossing London at midday was enough to try anyone’s patience, let alone mine at that moment.
It was forty minutes later that I pushed the open front door of the chi-chi house in Chelsea.
There was something about the silence and the sight of Hank sitting on the stairs as if he were carved from stone that chilled me from top to toe.
“I tried to come,” I said to Caroline in the bedroom. “I really tried.”
She put her head on my shoulder. “Bubbles wouldn’t have known. He was in a coma. Dr Nicholls has just left.”
I looked upon death for the second time that morning and for the last time at Faraday, just a shadow of his former self and tried to make myself believe that there would be no more jokes, no more wise-cracks, no more friend. I had heard from patients how they felt when their contemporaries died. For the first time I really understood.
“I should have been here.”
“There was nothing, I told you.”
“He was my friend.”
“He was my husband. He was so good about dying.”
“He was good about everything. Those corny phrases about leaving holes in people’s lives…”
“They aren’t corny, honey,” Caroline said, clinging to me. “Not any more.”
There was a noise downstairs.
“It’s my neighbour,” Caroline said flatly. “She just left for a bit to see to her kids. Don’t bother to stay.”
I thought of the patients, waiting. “I’ll come back later. Caroline…?”
She put a hand over my mouth. “Please. I know how it was with you and Bubbles. There’s no need to say anything at all.”
Drained of strength and feeling that part of myself had died I would rather have gone home. I set off, however, for the surgery. The purple taxi was outside so I gathered Fred had returned from the Magistrates’ court.
The waiting-room was deserted. I went through to the house. A smart young man in a pin-striped suit with a rose in his buttonhole was walking through the hall. Accustomed to seeing strangers around I said:
“Have you by any chance seen Fred?”
“In my mirror this morning, man!”
I gasped in horror. “Fred?”
“Who else, man?”
It was quite uncanny. With his hair cut and out of his weirdie clothes I would have walked by him in the street. There had been too many shocks for one day. I was about to ask what had happened then I remembered his court case and it suddenly came to me.
“You’re going to prison?”
“What would I want to do that for, man?”
“Drugs. You’ve been found guilty.”
“Man,” he said looking at me reproachfully for harbouring such thoughts, “in that carving was nothing but old pipe tobacco. Must have been there since I bought it.”
I gulped for thinking wicked things about him.
“Case dismissed,” he said.
I looked at his pin-striped suit, in which he looked exceedingly handsome.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve had a terrible morning and I don’t think I can take any more. I’d be awfully glad if you’d explain…” I waved my hand at his appearance.
“Seen the light, man. I’m quitting.”
“Quitting?”
“Soon as you fix up. I’m going back to hospital; take my Membership…”
“What about all that love stuff…?”
“It’s inside you, man. No matter what you do.”
“I still don’t understand. What’s brought all this about?”
A pair of sapphire eyes peeped round the kitchen door.
“Me,” Lulu said, coming out. “He got me pregnant so I wanted to do something for him. I’ve been working on him for months, telling him he was wasting his potential.”
“Thanks!”
“You were fed up with me, anyway,” Fred said. “You said so.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“I don’t blame you, man. I must have been a sore trial.”
“You’re the best partner I’ve ever had.”
“Don’t let’s get maudlin, man.”
“It’s true, Fred. You’re a real doctor.”
“That’s what I told him,” Lulu said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one day they gave him a knighthood!”
I have no recollection of how I got home. So much had happened in so short a time that although my heart was numb from grief my head was reeling.
When I arrived, Sylvia was standing on the doorstep, jumping from one foot to the other with excitement, waving a piece of paper in her hand.
“Sweetie!” she called before I was out of the car.
“Hang on,” I said, “I have to ring the hospital. Maureen Clarke was in premature labour…”
“But, Sweetie…”
She hovered over me as I was eventually informed that Maureen had given birth five minutes previously to a two and a half pound baby, at present alive and in an incubator. Maureen herself was well.
I put down the receiver and said to Sylvia:
“Faraday is dead.”
The smile faded from her face and she sat down quickly. I realised I had been abrupt but was in no fit state for tact.
“I must go to Caroline,” she said.
I took her hand. “Stay here with me. Caroline has her neighbour with her. It’s been a dreadful morning. We’ll go over later on, together.”
After a while I said: “What did you want to tell me?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, the tears rolling down her face.
I realised what a shock I had given her and tried to distract her.
“Please tell me.”
“It seems so unimportant now.” She held out a piece of paper and said miserably: “I’ve had a film offer for my book. Thousands and thousands of pounds…”
“Oh, Sweetie, you’re so clever. I always told you you were clever.” I kissed her. “I’m so terribly pleased.”
“Poor Caroline!”
“I’ve something to tell you, too.” I told her about Fred and his decision.
“Do you realise what that means,” I said. “We can go back to a proper home with a proper garden in a proper road…”
“I don’t think you realise,” Sylvia said, mopping her eyes, “that we’re going to be terribly, terribly rich!”
“Well, I’m not staying here,” I said, “with five flights of stairs and paper walls…”
There was a sudden loud and imperious knocking in the region of the dining-room table.
“Are you aware…” Diana Pilkington’s piercing, upper-class voice said through the partition wall, “…that Sissil has had no lunch!”
I suddenly remembered his Lordship’s sandwiches which she had given me what seemed years ago and which were still on the seat of the car.
We looked at each other in horrified silence then were clinging together and laughing and crying all at once, not only about Faraday and Diana Pilkington, but about Barbara Basildon and Grandpa Tolley and Lulu and Fred and all the things that had happened to us in the past few months.
“Are you aware,” I said to Sylvia, when we had recovered sufficiently to talk, “that I now have two houses and no partner…?”
“I don’t mind moving,” Sylvia said. “Perhaps it is just a wee bit cramped in Church Row after all. But I am not going back there!”
“Well, perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell me,” I said, “exactly where we do go from here?”
“I don’t exactly know,” she said, in a far off voice. She gazed at her thousands of pounds and I could see that there was a look of penthouses and cooks and butlers in her eyes.
About the Author
Rosemary Friedman has published 25 titles including fiction, non-fiction and children’s books, which have been translated into a number of languages and serialized by the BBC, while her short stories have been syndicated worldwide. She has also written and commissioned screenplays and her stage play Home Truths and An Eligible Man toured the UK. She writes for The Guardian, The Times, The TLS and The Author.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ALSO ON EBOOK BY ARCADIA BOOKS
THE COMMONPLACE DAY
AN ELIGIBLE MAN
THE FRATERNITY
THE GENERAL PRACTICE
GOLDEN BOY
INTENSIVE CARE
THE LIFE SITUATION
THE LONG HOT SUMMER
LOVE ON MY LIST
A LOVING MISTRESS
NO WHITE COAT
PATIENTS OF A SAINT
PROOFS OF AFFECTION
ROSE OF JERICHO
A SECOND WIFE
TO LIVE IN PEACE
VINTAGE
WE ALL FALL DOWN
Copyright
Arcadia Books Ltd
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First published in 1960
This Ebook edition published by Arcadia Books 2013
Copyright © Rosemary Friedman 1960, 2001
Rosemary Friedman has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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ISBN 978–1–909807–43–3
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Practice Makes Perfect Page 18