Practically Perfect

by Caroline Anderson

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. It needs the right kind of socket for the transmitter, but most televisions these days have them. If it’s a newish set you should be all right.’

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ Mrs Pike said enthusiastically. ‘Come and see her, anyway. She’s looking good.’

  They followed the sound of the chat-show host’s voice up the hall and into the elderly lady’s room. She was sitting in her chair, haranguing the unsuspecting host and his guest, and she jumped when she saw them.

  ‘Ann, you’ve got to stop creeping up on me like that!’ she said crossly. ‘You’ll give me a heart attack one day. And why are you here, young man? Come to tell me I’m going to be crippled, have you?’

  Ann Pike turned off the television and Patrick’s ears sighed with relief. ‘Not at all. Your daughter-in-law tells me you’re doing really well. How do you feel?’

  ‘Oh—well, up and down. I’m not sure they’ve done it right, you know. They said I can’t turn and I can’t cross my legs and I can’t bend over and I can’t do this and that—I reckon they know they’ve made a mistake and they’re just hoping I’ll die before I find out!’

  Patrick chuckled. ‘It’s just to give the muscles time to recover and grow strong again, so they hold the new joint properly in position,’ he yelled. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’

  He examined her quickly, found everything to be well and then sat down next to her and took her hand. ‘Mrs Pike, I’m going to ask the community physiotherapist to come and see you, and give you some exercises to do with her and with your daughter-in-law, and then I think you’ll find you’ll be back to normal and right as rain in no time. Now the other thing is, have you ever thought of having a hearing aid?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A hearing aid,’ he yelled.

  She flapped her hand. ‘Why would I want one of them? I can hear perfectly well!’

  Patrick stood up. He knew when he was beaten. ‘I’ll get the physio to call,’ he told her, and turned to Ann. ‘I’ll let myself out. Give me a ring if you’ve got any problems.’

  He did a few more visits, then went back to the surgery, found the professional journal with the Devon practice advert in it, and dialled the number. Within ten minutes he’d set up an interview at the weekend, got directions and arranged for someone else to cover the out-of-hours commitment he had on Sunday afternoon. That would give him nearly thirty-six hours to drive down, meet them, look around and get back.

  All he had to do now was ask Connie to have Edward.

  ‘Sure.’ Connie tried to smile, but—Devon! It was so far. It seemed further than Yorkshire, because London was in the way and it meant grappling with the M25. Of course, once she was back in London it was only the M4 and M5 so it wouldn’t be quite so bad, but it was still too far. Oh, Lord, she thought, I’m going to have to say goodbye to them both, and she swallowed a lump in her throat.

  ‘I want to get away the minute I can after surgery on Saturday—probably about ten-thirty, if I can manage it—and I’ll try and get back before you go to bed on Sunday so I can tell you all about it.’

  Connie wasn’t at all sure she wanted to hear. Unless, of course, it was hopeless, like the one in Yorkshire. That would be all right.

  ‘Don’t rush,’ she advised him. ‘Make sure you’ve seen everything you need to see.’

  All the pitfalls, the nooks and crannies, the skeletons in the closet. With any luck the wife will hate you and the husband is so besotted he won’t be able to deny her.

  Fat chance. Nobody was going to hate him. Oh, damn and blast.

  ‘Can we let the kittens out?’ Edward asked, tugging at her sleeve. She latched onto the distraction like a drowning man clutching at straws. Anything rather than think about Patrick going.

  ‘No, sweetheart, not for a few more days. They need to feel safe in the house before they go out, or they might not come back if they get frightened, and we wouldn’t want to lose any of them, would we?’

  He looked crestfallen. ‘I tell you what,’ she suggested brightly. ‘After we’ve all had lunch, why don’t you take them up to your bedroom for a little while? They could play up there, and as long as we take up the litter tray, we shouldn’t have any little accidents. Now, what shall we have for lunch?’

  ‘Chocolate crispy cakes,’ Edward said promptly.

  ‘I’ll second that.’

  Connie shook her head in despair. ‘I thought you were supposed to set a nutritional example to your son and your patients?’ she said with a laugh. ‘How about beans on toast, and yoghurt for pudding?’

  ‘Can I have strawberry?’

  She ruffled Edward’s hair. ‘I expect so, if there’s one left.’

  She didn’t have to struggle with the can opener because the baked beans had a ring-pull, but that was difficult enough. Patrick put in the toast, Edward laid the table with the knives and forks the wrong way round, and Connie stirred the beans vigorously and thought how much she was going to miss them.

  ‘Are you supposed to be mashing them?’ Patrick asked softly in her ear, and his arms came round her, one hand taking the handle of the pan, the other the wooden spoon, trapping her against the edge of the cooker.

  His body was lean and hard against hers, and he groaned softly under his breath and nudged his hips against her.

  Oh, Lord.

  She grabbed the spoon back. ‘They’re sticking on the pan,’ she said, pushing him out of the way with her bottom. Unfortunately it brought her firmly up against him, and he groaned again.

  ‘I love your sassy little bottom,’ he murmured in her ear, so softly she could hardly hear it but just loud enough to make her heart go loopy.

  ‘Patrick,’ she warned under her breath, and he laughed and moved away.

  ‘OK, sport, shall we get some glasses of water?’ he said to Edward, and then held him up at the sink while he turned the tap on full and drenched them both.

  ‘That’ll cool you off,’ Connie said cheerfully, and wondered if they’d think she was completely mad if she stuck her head under the tap!

  It was a long way to Devon. Patrick followed the A12, the M25, the M4, the M5 and then turned off just after Taunton to head along the north Devon coast road. It took five hours to the last motorway junction, and another hour along the winding minor roads to the practice itself.

  The scenery, though, was spectacular for the last hour, and Patrick knew he would like living there. At least, until he’d met Connie, he would have liked it.

  Now it just seemed a very long way from her.

  He pulled up outside the practice at four-thirty, and was met by a cheerful man in his late thirties, with slightly receding hair and sparkling blue eyes. ‘Good to see you—how was the journey?’ he asked, pumping Patrick’s hand, and led him into the surgery.

  ‘Cup of tea? Cloakroom? Guided tour?’

  Patrick laughed. ‘All of them. I’ll start with the cloakroom.’

  It was an interesting afternoon. He spent two hours at the practice talking to Mike Bryant, then went back to the Bryants’ house and met Jane, already visibly pregnant and struggling with another youngster. They had supper, and when Patrick said he thought he ought to go and find a local hostelry for the night, they wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘But surely you’re staying!’ Jane exclaimed. ‘You can’t come all that way and not stay the night with us! Besides, you might have all sorts of awful habits and we need a chance to find out about them.’

  ‘So you want to interview me in my sleep?’ he said with a laugh, and gave in. ‘Thank you. That would be very kind, if you really mean it.’

  ‘Then tomorrow if you’ve got time you can come on some calls with me and see the area,’ Mike suggested. ‘I have to pop into the cottage hospital now—you can come and do that as well, if you like. See the set-up and so forth.’

  So he went to the hospital, run by the local GPs and staffed by a fleet of cheerful nurses who knew most of the patients, and helped with a young
lad who’d discovered booze and was somewhat the worse for wear, and then they went back to the house to find that Mike had another call to go on.

  ‘You stay here and get your head down,’ Mike advised. ‘You’ve got a long drive tomorrow. Jane’ll make you a drink, won’t you, darling?’

  ‘Of course. Go on, I can manage. I can tell him all the horror stories.’

  She did no such thing, but it was clear they’d found both of them working covering the on-call very demanding of their personal time, and she would be happy to sit back now and be a mother.

  He went to bed convinced that they were both lovely people, probably people he could work with, and almost convinced that if they offered him the partnership he would take it.

  In the morning Mike showed him more of the glorious Devon countryside, cheerfully confessing that it was a deliberate ploy to sell the area to him, and Patrick had to admit it worked. In the mid-October sunshine, with the autumn leaves turning gold in the combes and the ponies grazing on the moorland, it was a very special place.

  They went back to the house after his calls, and as Patrick was about to leave, Mike said, ‘I want to take a week to think about it, and I want you to as well. Then we’ll talk, but I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.’

  Patrick nodded. ‘Yes, I agree. It’s a beautiful place. It’s the sort of place I could bring up my son without a qualm. It’s all the other things that need considering. It’s a big step—it has to be the right one for all of us.’

  Mike smiled and stuck out his hand. ‘I agree. Let’s hope we all come to the same conclusion. Safe journey.’

  ‘Thanks. And thank Jane for me again, would you, for her hospitality?’ Patrick released Mike’s hand, got into the car and drove off. As he glanced in the rearview mirror, Mike lifted his hand in a wave.

  Such friendly, decent people. A practice set-up he could work with and understand. A little community hospital, albeit under threat, but still there, a wonderful resource for the patients and doctors alike.

  Oh, yes, it had everything.

  Except Connie.

  There was an accident on the motorway on the way home, and Patrick stopped to help. It was a multiple pile-up in perfectly reasonable weather conditions, caused because people just simply had to drive too close together and too fast to take avoiding action.

  The accident had only just happened, and Patrick’s first clue was a police car flying past, with lights and siren going. Then there was another one, and the traffic started to slow. After ten minutes of queueing, he arrived at the scene and pulled over without hesitation.

  A policeman tried to wave him on, but he took his bag out of the car and ran towards the crashed vehicles. The policeman gave him the thumbs-up, and he spoke to the man’s colleague beside the cars.

  ‘I’m a doctor—do you need me?’

  The policeman’s face cleared. ‘Do we ever, Doc. There’s a young couple in the first car, but I don’t think they’re badly hurt. They had a blow-out. The next car’s got a young family in it, and I think some of them need attention. The third car seems OK, just shaken up, and then the rest I haven’t had time to check.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll do some triage and see what I can do.’

  He ran first to the front car, but the policeman had been right. The couple were whiplashed, and he advised them to stay there until the ambulance arrived and put collars on them. ‘Don’t move too much,’ he instructed.

  Then he ran to the second car, and found the father’s legs wedged under the crumpled dash, blood oozing from his thigh and from cuts on his face from impacting the steering-wheel. The mother was frantically trying to keep calm, but the children were in hysterics in the back and she was rapidly joining in.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m a doctor,’ he told her, and she dissolved into tears.

  ‘Oh, thank God. You’ve got to help him. He’s going to die.’

  ‘No, he isn’t. He’s going to hurt for a while, but he’ll be all right,’ Patrick assured her, checking the man’s pulse as he spoke.

  ‘Where do you hurt?’ he asked him.

  ‘Leg, head, shoulder,’ he mumbled. ‘My leg especially.’

  ‘Can you move them at all?’

  He stirred, moaning softly, and Patrick told him to keep still and the ambulance men would be with him shortly. The children seemed all right but, like toddlers everywhere, they were too small to explain anything to and too old to not notice.

  ‘Why don’t you get in the back with them?’ Patrick suggested to the woman. ‘Your husband will be all right. I think the children need you, if you’re OK.’

  She nodded and crawled through the space between the seats. Immediately the children started to settle, and after checking them quickly, Patrick moved on, hailing a policeman and asking him to get the fire brigade to cut the driver out.

  In the next car the driver was just shocked, and in the fourth there were no injuries. He was just about to check the next when a policeman hailed him.

  ‘Here, Doc! Casualties for you.’

  The last car seemed to have hit the others with more force and, of the two occupants, he found one already dead, the other bleeding copiously from a head wound. On examination he found the skull compressed, and he didn’t hold out much hope.

  An ambulance arrived, and he sent them straight to the last car for the surviving occupant. There was nothing Patrick himself could do. The man needed urgent skull decompression in hospital, scans, brain-stem tests, transfusions.

  All he could do by the side of the road was assess and direct, and put on sticking plasters, effectively. However, at least it saved time when the crews arrived. There was only one other car, the one he hadn’t checked, so he went to look inside.

  A young woman with a baby in the back seat was slumped unconscious over the wheel. The baby was crying vigorously, probably unharmed, but there was a dog howling in the back and when Patrick looked in he found it had been horribly injured.

  ‘We need a vet—dog here needs urgent attention,’ he told the policeman. ‘And this woman needs to get to hospital fast. She’s unconscious with a head injury—it might be minor, but I doubt it. Oh, and the baby in the back looks fine.’

  He stayed until the rescue looked well under way and there was nothing further he could do, and then he set off again after a two hour delay. He rang Connie, told her he’d been held up and not to wait up, and arrived home—strange, how he thought of it as home—at ten-thirty.

  Connie, however, opened the door and he walked straight into her arms.

  ‘I cooked supper for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Thanks for waiting up. There were loads of casualties, I had to help,’ he said, burying his face in her hair and inhaling the gorgeous, wicked perfume that seemed to go with her everywhere. ‘God, you smell good.’

  ‘You don’t. You smell of blood and traffic fumes, but it’s good to see you,’ she said with a laugh. Tipping back her head, she stretched up and kissed him.

  It was like a blow to the solar plexus, and nearly felled him.

  ‘Connie,’ he groaned, and went to hold her closer, but she wriggled out of his arms, grabbed his hand and towed him into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s only soup—my mother calls it Saturday soup. Fancy some?’

  She lifted the lid and he peered in—thick, chunky vegetables and little strips of bacon, and the barest minimum of liquid so that it could be called soup. It smelt fantastic.

  ‘Wow. Give me five to wash and change, and I’ll be back.’

  He ran upstairs, pulled off his clothes, shot through the shower and went back down in a dressing-gown, just as Connie put the second bowl of steaming broth down on the table.

  ‘Perfect timing,’ she said with a smile, and he felt warm to the bottom of his soul.

  Strange, how that should hurt.

  Connie had waited all day for word, and by eight o’clock she’d been convinced Patrick must arrive at any minute. When he’d phoned to say there’d been an acciden
t on the motorway, her first thought had been that he’d been injured or involved in some way.

  Her relief when he’d said he was helping with the injured startled her. So much relief? So much concern?

  She’d had a little of the soup because she was starving, but even though he’d told her not to wait up she still didn’t go to bed. She hadn’t seen him since the morning before, and it seemed light years ago. There was no way she was missing him tonight!

  And then he went and showered, and came down all wet and half-dressed, bare legs sticking out the bottom of his dressing-gown, the neck falling open to reveal his chest, and it was too much for her sanity.

  She began to talk rubbish, then asked him how he’d got on and shut up. And he told her all about Devon, and how wonderful the other practice was, and how nice Mike and Jane Bryant were, and she went from giddy euphoria to hideous reality in seconds.

  Oh, my God, she thought, he really is going to leave, and she had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out loud.

  ‘So, do you think you’ll take the partnership if they offer it to you?’ she asked as casually as she could.

  He looked at her. She could feel his eyes, but she couldn’t look up—not now, with her eyes full of tears.

  ‘I think so,’ he said quietly. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said honestly.

  ‘I’ll miss you, too, Connie, but I have to do what’s right for us.’

  She nodded. ‘I know.’

  She stood up, clearing the bowls into the dishwasher, and after a few seconds he rose and took the plates out of her hands and turned her into his arms.

  ‘I’ve missed you this weekend,’ he murmured.

  A sob caught in her throat, but she stifled it. He tilted her chin and kissed her, and she slid her arms round inside the dressing gown and pressed herself against his chest. Her hands traced the damp column of his spine, flattened over his shoulder blades, feeling the tension in him from the drive. He needed a massage, but there was no way she could dare to risk it.