New Doctor at Northmoor

by Anne Durham

  ‘Because you are going to be our new R.M.O.’s first patient,’ Sister explained. ‘In fact, I venture to think he’ll have a rather special interest in you, young woman. Your parents will be pleased.’

  ‘Why am I going to be that, Sister?’ Gwenny whispered.

  ‘Because he thinks you have a disease that he’s particularly interested in. It’s too early for the lab. tests to be positive, but I hear that our new R.M.O. is never far wrong in his diagnosis. Oh, yes, you’re a lucky girl all right. And now here come your parents.’

  But the first sight of their faces told Gwenny what she already knew. It seemed an unkind back-kick of fate that the one person who should be so much interested in her state should be that man, of all people, and by the look of them, her parents endorsed this view.

  CHAPTER IV

  Gwenny settled down to her treatment with the thought that at least her father didn’t seem as angry as she had feared.

  It was her mother who worried her.

  Mark Bayfield sat by her bedside the next day and prompted her to tell him a little about it. He looked strange and unfamiliar in his cap, mask and gown, but as he kindly explained, ‘Until we know for sure, it’s the safest thing. You don’t really mind, do you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And you do feel better than yesterday, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. All cool.’

  ‘That’s the injection I gave you. It would help me if you could tell me a little of what’s been going on, to get you in this state.’

  Gwenny sighed, and tried to think. ‘Oh, well, I get tired, and peculiar pains in my joints.’

  ‘Yet you went for long walks and cycle rides?’

  ‘That was between the bad times. I’m not always feeling ghastly. More so lately, though.’

  ‘I see. And are you not happy at home?’

  Gwenny looked alarmed, so he said gently, ‘It wouldn’t be disloyal to your family if you were to tell me of something concerning them which worried you. It would help me get you well, and I’m sure your family would want that.’

  She looked so frustrated at that. ‘Now what’s upsetting you?’ he asked, half smiling. ‘I expected you to say that someone in your family quarrelled with you—it happens, and it can make a person feel more ill if they have this sort of bug.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘You can’t possibly have a family of your own, or you wouldn’t talk like that. You just don’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he countered, and when she snapped open her eyes she found he was smiling in a rather amused fashion. She couldn’t see his mouth, only his eyes, all crinkled up and filled with amusement, and she couldn’t stop looking at them. For a man, they were the most expressive eyes she had ever seen.

  ‘Oh, well, the fact is, we all love each other, but it’s a sort of angry loving that makes us hurt each other, I suppose, and sometimes I get a sort of cold hard lump here,’ she said, tapping her chest, ‘and I can’t think how anyone in a family all living for each other can feel so unhappy.’

  He sat nodding. ‘What else?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think my father feels wretched because he doesn’t make much money,’ she offered.

  ‘What’s money?’ Mark Bayfield asked ruefully.

  Quick as a flash, she snapped back, ‘Something to buy a panacea with, to chase away all the things that make us unhappy.’

  He looked rather taken aback at that. After giving it some thought, he offered: ‘I know quite a lot of rich people who haven’t managed to buy happiness with their money.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she said. ‘You twisted what I said. I meant that people who haven’t got it could do things with it if they had; that rich people wouldn’t know about because they’d always had it. Oh, now you’re laughing at me.’

  ‘It sounded rather funny,’ he admitted. ‘Tell me some more about it next time I come.’

  ‘When will that be?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘When would you like it to be?’ he asked curiously.

  She flushed and closed her eyes, remembering belatedly that this was the man her family disliked so much, the man who had apparently blocked every avenue of escape and endeavour for them. The man who had hurt and embarrassed her sister Priscilla so that Priscilla hated him; the man who had prevented Laurence from getting this job he had wanted so badly, indeed this man had taken the job himself, and surely he couldn’t need it? This man had everything, including the wealth which Gwenny felt in her heart could free them from the tangle of their problems. Even her mother, who amiably grumbled about people but rarely felt so strongly about them, seemed to hate the hospital’s new R.M.O. And her kind, tired, overworked father ... Gwenny felt her throat ache with unshed tears as she thought of him. Daddy had been kind, a long time ago, before he had become too overworked to remember to choose his words or to conceal his impatience.

  ‘It isn’t for me to say, Dr. Bayfield,’ she said at last, in a frosty little voice. ‘I’m just a patient, aren’t I?’

  He left her with a very wry smile. He thought he could guess at what made this change of front. There was nothing more he could do today. It was a matter of tests, tests and more tests—and endless patience.

  Later that day old Mrs. Yeedon came to see Gwenny. She looked strange and unfamiliar in the protective clothing, but if Gwenny could have seen her before the mask and gown had gone on, she would have found the old woman looked even more peculiar, for Mrs. Yeedon had donned her Sunday best, a stiff outfit of rusty black which she re-trimmed season by season, and at the moment the old black hat was resplendent with artificial fruit, and there were new coloured buttons on the tight black coat.

  ‘I never expected you! How lovely!’ Gwenny cried.

  Mark Bayfield had specially said Mrs. Yeedon could come. The old woman knew how to keep infection away, and she would be such a tonic for Gwenny, he thought.

  Mrs. Yeedon said, ‘Dearie me, lovey, how comfortable you do look, in this nice little room. I never thought they let you have a little room to yourself in hospital. That’s what comes of having a doctor for a father, I’m thinking.’

  ‘No, it’s because I might be infectious,’ Gwenny told her. ‘Aren’t you afraid of catching it from me?’

  ‘Not me, my lamb. Now, is there aught you would want me to bring you, before we get down to a nice old chat?’

  ‘Not a thing, but I’ve got lots I want to ask you. What about Clem?’

  ‘That nincompoop!’ the old woman said wrathfully. ‘I gave him a piece of my mind, and that’s a fact. He should have— Oh, well, what’s the use? What’s done is done. What happened about your parents when they found out?’

  ‘It wasn’t very nice,’ Gwenny admitted, in that new spent little voice that tore at the old woman’s heart. ‘Mother was so angry, because she didn’t know I’d been being ill, and that Mark Bayfield had been the one to discover it.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell her what I told you—that it was me who called him in?’

  ‘Well, you know my mother—I didn’t get much chance to say anything. Daddy was furious, too. A thing called professional pride, if you know what that means. He felt he ought to have been treating me all this time, and called in a specialist of his own choice. He asked me how I thought he felt, not having known about it. Well,’ said Gwenny, her face crumpling, ‘how can you get through to people? He doesn’t know what I’m thinking and I don’t know what he’s thinking, and there’s a gap that’s growing wider and wider, and nothing I can do will make it close up. I have tried to tell him, lots of times, but things always seem to happen to stop him from being able to hear me.’

  The old woman had her own ideas about the Kinglake family, but she wasn’t going to voice them. It would only hurt Gwenny. She looked so alarmingly frail, with those blue smudges under her eyes. The old woman tried to persuade herself that fair people started out with a frailish look sometimes, but she wasn’t being successful. Gwenny was, she felt, slipping away from
them.

  ‘They all love you so much, lovey, and affection for someone in the family takes a funny direction sometimes, and a body ends up hurting the other person more than helping them. Don’t you fret—they’re most like all kicking themselves for not having looked after you better while you were in their care.’

  Gwenny shook her head. ‘It’s so much more than that, you see. It’s not knowing what I’ve got, and Mark Bayfield seems to think he does. Daddy hated that. And there’s the thing about my sister Priscilla. She’s so angry about him, yet she wants to know all about him and I’m wondering if she and Mark Bayfield were in love and then quarrelled. Do you think that’s likely?’

  Mrs. Yeedon hoped devotedly that such was not the case. She personally couldn’t stand the sight of Gwenny’s sister Priscilla, who was what the old woman called, in her mind, a ‘hard piece.’

  ‘What comes to my mind, lovey, is that when she was at her hospital and he was there, he likely rapped her over the knuckles for speaking out of turn, and her ladyship didn’t care for it. And now he’s got the job your brother wanted, her ladyship has discovered some sisterly love for young Laurence which will let her hate Dr. Bayfield a mite more.’

  Gwenny giggled, briefly, at the thought of Priscilla discovering sisterly love for Laurence. Those two had scrapped with depressing regularity ever since Gwenny could remember.

  ‘I wish Mummy could be more jolly and less wrought up over those committees of hers,’ Gwenny sighed. ‘It’s all rather uncomfortable.’

  ‘Yes, well, she’s at a funny age,’ the old woman said sagely. ‘It’ll all work out, my lamb, I’m sure. Now I’ve got other things to tell you. I have to tell you while they’re in my mind because I shan’t be coming much to see you, seeing as I don’t go out overmuch.’

  ‘Who’s looking after your cottage?’ Gwenny asked, at once alarmed. She couldn’t remember the cottage having been left empty before, now she came to think of it.

  ‘That Clem said he’d stay there. Leastways, he nodded when I told him he’d better look after it for me. I’d best not stay away too long. He’s such a fool. I left him poking about in that engine of his—any one’d think there was something wrong with it, the way he’s always wiping it here and poking at it there.’

  ‘He loves it,’ Gwenny said, with a small smile. ‘It’s all he’s got to love, isn’t it? Funny, how we have to have someone or something to love? You and your cottage, and Clem and his van: Mrs. Taylor and her cat, and that poor old man at Church Terrace, with his birds.’

  ‘You and those folk in the village,’ Mrs. Yeedon scolded; ‘I wonder your father allows you to go poking around Church Terrace. They’re mighty poor holes, when all’s said and done, and the folk there could do with a good scrub ‘

  ‘Oh, that’s not so,’ Gwenny protested.

  ‘—and they’ve got bad drains,’ Mrs. Yeedon added for good measure.

  ‘You haven’t got any drains at all,’ Gwenny pointed out reasonably.

  ‘No, that I haven’t, but I’ve got what I have at the bottom of my garden where it should be, a comfortable way from where a body lives, and it’s clean and well attended to, and I don’t live shoulder to shoulder with a lot of other bodies, and no long gardens to separate it from the house, so don’t you talk, miss! Ah, there now, I didn’t mean to scold you, ill as you are, but you worry me so, the things you do and the company you keep. That old man with his horrible birds—what was his name, now?’

  ‘I never knew it. They call him Jock,’ Gwenny said. ‘And they’re very interesting birds. His son brought them home as presents when he came off his ship, and now his son has died, and these birds are all he has. And he’s training one of them to talk.’

  Horrible,’ Mrs. Yeedon said wrathfully. ‘Against nature.’

  Gwenny considered her, Mrs. Yeedon lived as close to nature as could be imagined, but when it came to criticizing other people, that was different.

  Mrs. Taylor’s cats are interesting, too,’ Gwenny said. ‘I wish they’d have let me keep cats at home—and kittens. I adore kittens. But Mother always said—’

  ‘I never knew a doctor’s house with a lot of animals prowling around,’ Mrs. Yeedon said roundly. ‘Wouldn’t be right. Now, my lamb, I’ve brought you some honey from my own bees, and some crab-apple jelly which I made myself from a secret recipe, and if I can’t come again, I’ll get that Clem to bring you in a few things.’ Gwenny did seem brighter after the old woman had gone, Mark Bayfield considered. There was a mischievous glint in her eyes as she said, ‘Sister took all Granny Yeedon’s things away. I think Sister believes she’s a witch.’

  Mark Bayfield’s lips twitched. ‘A good many people are of the same opinion, I believe, but personally I find her an extremely interesting person,’ and he talked hard about the elderly countrywomen he had known, while he gave Gwenny an injection that sent her under for what seemed a very long time.

  That became the pattern of life at the hospital for Gwenny. Long periods of blissful oblivion, and long periods when tiresome tests were made, and Mark Bayfield came to sit by her to ask her apparently innocent questions about her background, which she afterwards resented, when she had had time to think about them.

  Priscilla and Laurence went back to London to their hospitals, and Mrs. Kinglake took up with renewed vigour the question of another large property which she hoped to buy for her old people’s home, and Dr. Kinglake returned to chasing his own tail, trying to keep up an ever-increasing practice. He came sometimes to see her, and Gwenny noticed how wistfully he half-listened to the sounds of hospital while he talked to her.

  One day he said to her, ‘No use asking you why you didn’t tell me when you first began to feel unwell, I suppose?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter any more, does it, Daddy? You’re always so busy.’

  ‘No, I suppose it doesn’t,’ he sighed. ‘Tell me, when you were at home, did Priscilla tell you anything about her life at her hospital?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me anything. I’m just the kid sister, remember?’ she smiled.

  ‘Oh. I thought’ she might have,’ he said, and stared at Gwenny. He wanted to tell her he would never forgive himself for not seeing this coming on, but he felt too strongly that he would not have known what it was if he had noticed how unwell she was. He might have treated her for something else. He was no Mark Bayfield. That smarted horribly and made him forget that he had come here today with the express intention of making Gwenny see, somehow, that he loved her more than she dreamed. There was a dreadful ache inside of him, driving him to make her see how much she meant to him. But he had no way of showing her, and he got up to go with the depressed feeling that there was so little time in the course of the day and he always felt so driven by his work to be anything else but impatient, and so how could he manage to show her he cared? You couldn’t just announce that someone meant so much to you. It had to be a long process of showing the other person what a big place in your thoughts they occupied. Like old Mrs. Yeedon, who had the time to be kind; perhaps the gift of being kind, too. He felt, wretchedly, that all he had was the capacity to be an adequate G.P. and he was so busy doing just that, in every waking moment, that slinging kindness around was something that never occurred to him.

  He had even lost the art of smoothing her hair back, as he had done once. He started to raise his hand to touch that bright hair, and then he turned away sharply, his emotions overriding the action, and making his throat constrict. This beloved child might never come out of this hospital, if someone like Mark Bayfield couldn’t work what still seemed a small miracle.

  Gwenny watched him leave her room, with mixed feelings. To her it seemed that he was regarding her as the young one of the family, the tiresome one that everyone had to keep thinking about, in case she was getting into trouble. She wondered what he would say if he ever found out how much time she spent in the cottages in Church Terrace, for instance. Or how much time she had spent with the grubby children of Maudie Trice,
who earned her living by mopping out the shops in the village. There were people who said that Maudie’s own cottage could do with a mop out, but Maudie was too tired to do anything when she got home. Her old mother made some fearful concoction in a stewpan for them to eat. People said it was the sort of stew gypsies made, with hedgehogs and stolen chickens and rabbits. Whatever it was, it smelt good, and sometimes Gwenny had it with them, while she played with the little ones, who were fat and brown and barefoot, and almost always happy. Happiness was an elusive thing that fascinated Gwenny when she found it in other people. You had to look for it in places like the Trice cottage, the cottages in Church Terrace, in Clem with his stutter and his beloved van, in Granny Yeedon’s cottage, among her herbs and concoctions. Not in the Kinglake house.

  Gwenny lay and thought about all that, when she wasn’t ‘under ‘, as she called it, but she couldn’t tell her favourite nurse about it. Nurse Cosgrove’s eyes danced over the top of her mask as she regaled Gwenny with hospital activities, but Gwenny had little to tell her in return, without voicing the personal and private things that troubled her.

  ‘Well, what do you do with your time?’ Nurse Cosgrove asked her one day. ‘Help your father in surgery? No? Help your mother with her committees? Oh, yes, we know all about your mother—she even had a brush with Sir Giles Faraday’s wife who is on your mother’s committee and the entertainments committee here, so you see, we feel the repercussions. Wouldn’t think so, would you?’