Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  George frowned. It wasn’t a play that was showing. It was a fairly commonplace Channel Four documentary of somewhat dour aspect about the history of women, with several of them talking about their past lives which had clearly been far from joyous. Did her mother really think she was watching a play, or was she just not paying attention to the screen? She must still be tired after all, despite the sleep she’d had during the day. Jet lag did strange things to people.

  ‘If you’re not all that interested, we could turn it off and just talk,’ George said and again Vanny produced that sweet peaceable smile.

  ‘If you like.’ She watched as George reached for the remote control and switched off. The room slipped into a silence broken only by the faint hiss of the gas flames leaping so prettily in the grate, and the distant sounds of traffic beyond the curtained windows.

  ‘How’s Uncle Nat, Ma?’ she said after a short silence, and her mother looked puzzled for a moment.

  ‘Uncle Nat,’ she said in a ruminative fashion. ‘Oh, yes, Uncle Nat,’ and smiled.

  The silence stretched, and George said again, ‘How is he, Ma?’

  ‘Who, George?’

  ‘Uncle Nat’

  ‘Oh, my, yes, Uncle Nat.’ Vanny looked thoughtful. ‘Is he here?’

  George began to feel cold. ‘No, darling, of course not. This is London. How could Uncle Nat be here in London?’

  ‘He lives in Boston,’ Vanny said with, once more, the ineffable smile.

  This time George was suddenly angry. It was so inane a look and she leaned forwards and snapped at her mother: ‘Ma, what is it with you? Of course he lives in Boston. He aways has!’

  ‘That’s right,’ Vanny agreed. ‘He always has. He’s getting old, I guess. Me too. I’m almost seventy, George, isn’t that awful? Almost seventy. I feel seventeen inside, of course. Still, I’m not so bad as Nat. He’ll be seventy-seven soon.’ She laughed and this time it was like the old days, when Vanny would shoot out spiteful little barbs about her stuffy brother-in-law and make everyone laugh.

  George relaxed a little. It was just jet lag, she told herself. That’s all. Or is it? Could it be more? She could bear the uncertainty no longer and decided to go in bald-headed.

  ‘Ma, Bridget wrote me that you weren’t entirely well. Said she was worried about you. What was she talking about? She didn’t say.’

  Her mother was silent, staring at the flames, and then stirred and looked at George with a wide limpid gaze. ‘Oh, she’s just fussing. You know Bridget. Carries on like the world’s going to end on account of there’s a fly in the buttermilk.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t,’ George said. She leaned over and set her hand on her mother’s. It felt dry and cool, and she stroked it gently. ‘One of the things you like about Bridget is that she doesn’t fuss. You couldn’t have been friends for so long if she did.’

  Vanny lifted her chin and glanced at George briefly and then away. And shrugged. ‘Well, I can’t say.’ Now she sounded a little sulky.

  ‘I think you can,’ George said, her anxiety fierce once more. ‘What is it, Ma? Are you having symptoms you haven’t told me about? Are you sick in some way?’

  Vanny laughed, a sound that rippled with pleasure, and pulled her hand away from George’s so that she could clap. ‘Hey, hey, get my daughter the doctor!’ she crowed. ‘Ain’t she somethin’?’

  George reddened and protested and then laughed too. ‘Oh, to hell with it, Ma. I’m not playing doctors with you! This is George, you’re Ma, and I want to know why it is that Bridget’s getting herself all fired up over you. She is, you know. You’d better tell me. I’ll not leave you in peace till you do.’

  ‘I could kill Bridget,’ Vanny said, but there was no malice in her tone. It was almost absent-minded. She sighed sharply, then looked hopefully at George. ‘I think she thinks I’m getting a bit weak in the attic, you know?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ George was sharp.

  ‘I forget things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh, the date and what I’d planned for supper and so forth.’

  George lifted her brows. ‘We all do that’

  ‘And the way home from the store on the corner.’ Vanny was looking away from her. ‘The one I’ve been using this past twenty years or more.’

  This time it was George who held the silence. Then she said carefully, ‘How often does that happen?’

  Vanny glanced at her with a hint of her old sparkle. ‘Isn’t once often enough for you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ George said. ‘Ma, tell me, was it — I mean, were you worried about something? Going over things in your mind and just turned the wrong way without thinking?’

  ‘I wish,’ Vanny said. ‘It’d be easier if I could say that. No, I just went the wrong way and didn’t know where I was or where I was going. Till Bridget came and found me. I was in the park, down by the bus depot. On a bench.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ George whispered, not realizing she’d spoken aloud until Vanny looked at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘It is a bit scary, hmm? Just a bit.’

  ‘Not really.’ George managed to be bright, dragging herself back from the chill that had touched her. ‘I mean, it’s just one lapse. It doesn’t mean that —’

  ‘It does, I think. I’ve thought for years I wasn’t all I might be. Forgetting the names of people I’ve known all my life, for pity’s sake. Forgetting the start of a book before I’ve finished it and having to go back and back. I barely read any more. It’s not worth it. And now this.’

  ‘I’ll fix for you to see a good doctor,’ George said.

  ‘Like hell you will,’ Vanny said with her sweet smile. ‘What can he do but take money from me? There ain’t no pills for Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Oh, Ma, you haven’t got —’

  ‘Let’s be adults, hey, sweetheart?’ Vanny said. ‘I saw your grandmother die this way. I don’t need to be told.’

  Now George could say nothing. She just sat and stared at her mother, feeling her eyes hot and hard in their sockets but, a little to her surprise, tearless. Vanny lifted her head from her contemplation of the flames in the grate and laughed.

  ‘Oh, such a face,’ she said. ‘I’m not so bad, honey!’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ George said, and her voice had thickened oddly. ‘I mean, I can just remember Grandma. She really was —’

  ‘Off her rocker,’ Vanny said as George hesitated. ‘Screwball. Crazy lady.’

  ‘She was sick,’ George said. ‘You don’t seem at all like that. And how old was she when …’

  Vanny nodded very positively. ‘That’s my thinking too. She was younger than me when she passed on. She’d been that way from the time she was — oh, sixty, I guess. If I’m only just starting to lose my marbles, well, maybe by the time they’ve all gone, I’ll be pushing up daisies anyway. I sure as hell hope so.’

  And George couldn’t argue with her.

  But, she thought on Monday morning when she was walking over the bridge to the hospital, it’s helped, knowing. I suspected that was what Bridget meant, of course. Why else was I so unwilling to see Ma? I remember Grandma too, and there can be a family pattern in Alzheimer’s, let’s face it.

  She stopped to lean over the rails on the bridge looking upriver towards the City, with the wind coming up from the estuary behind her biting her ears. She pulled her coat up with clumsy gloved fingers and looked at the mist through which the Tower of London pushed its stubby head and tried to get her own head into some sort of order. There’d been no time yesterday to think; they’d spent the day in a fever of sightseeing; but now she was alone and couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  Ma was right about one thing: if this was Alzheimer’s, and her explanation of what her memory was doing made it seem horribly likely, then it was early days yet. She could take her to see a neurologist but she wasn’t sure there would be much purpose in that. Not unless she was staying here in London. And Vanny had been adamant about that
.

  ‘I’m all American, George. Too old now to be anything else. I like Buffalo and you can’t get more down home than that, can you? No, I’ll go home and live with Bridget who wants to move in with me anyway. She’s more than willing to keep an eye on me, and there’ll be enough money to pay for nurses later on if I need them. As long as I die by the time I’m eighty, the money’ll hold out.’

  That had been when George had wept, bitterly, and for a while it had been like long ago when she was small, when her father had been remote and everyone at school had been on her back and she was just too big to fit into her own body and Ma had been her only source of comfort. It had been a good thing really, she thought now, looking down at the water slapping greasily at the bridge’s piers as a tug fussed busily past; at least her tears had melted the stiffness between them and by the time Bridget emerged from the bathroom in a miasma of steam and scent they had been sitting companionably chattering as though they’d never been parted. By bedtime they’d all agreed a schedule for the coming weeks and had planned how they were to spend Christmas Day (‘It’s on me,’ Bridget had said. ‘And I won’t be talked out of it. I want to go to a real fancy hotel or some such. None of your sweating over a stove here at home. It’s more fun putting on the flash and really stepping out’) and which theatres they would catch and when and where they’d shop (‘Till we drop,’ said Bridget gleefully) and had said not a word about any future beyond that.

  But Bridget had come out of their bedroom just as George was falling asleep, on the pretext of seeking a glass of water, and told George not to fret.

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ she said softly. ‘She’s the dearest friend I have. But I just wanted you should know how the land lay, you understand me? It’s not right you shouldn’t know. Visit as often as you can and she’ll be fine. Don’t break away from your career here, honey, I’d say. I thought you should, but now, well, I can see it’d make no nevermind. There’d be no sense in that.’

  Looking down at the Thames, George wasn’t sure. She’d need to do some considerable thinking yet about that. To go back to Buffalo to work and live would be … But no. Bridget had told her not to think about that, and it was wise advice. She wouldn’t. And she straightened her back and sighed and set out to complete her journey to the hospital.

  Some of the preliminary results on the child in Paediatrics had come through. George lifted her brows as she checked them and decided to go over to the ward to talk to Prudence Jennings. She had a right to know how correct her guess had been. But first George locked the results in the safe. No need for any risks at this stage.

  Prudence wasn’t in the end cubicle when George got there. Neither was the baby. George frowned as she looked around the room, at the crib which had been stripped of not only its linen but its mattress, and at the piled-up gear in the corner, and went out to find someone who could tell her what was happening.

  She found Sister Collinson in her usual place at the nurses’ station (I wonder if she ever gives any hands-on care, for pity’s sake? George asked herself) and she looked disgusted at George’s question.

  ‘Dr Rajabani dealt with that one. A really nasty gastroenteritis, I gather. I didn’t have anything to do with the child and only one of the nurses did. Prue handed the case over to Harry — Dr Rajabani — and he spent most of the night with it. Told me Prue said the nurses weren’t to get involved. So bugger her — and him! — I thought, and we didn’t. She went off about midnight, I gather. Harry was here all night and then this morning the parents turned up and took the child away and Harry said to fumigate the room. It needs a new paint-job anyway. So, I’ve managed to wangle it out of the budget. Harry? Gawd knows where he is. Try the canteen. He’s been up all night, after all, and probably went looking for some grub.’

  George found him at a corner table, a large, good-looking Asian with a darker than average skin and an unusually wide and friendly smile. She’d only seen him a couple of times before; he was, she had gathered, a recent appointment. Now he sat a little slumped over an untouched plate of rather leathery scrambled eggs, and she slid in beside him, her own coffee cup in her hand.

  ‘Harry Rajabani? I’m George Barnabas from Path. I was doing some tests on the baby you specialled last night. How come he’s gone? He’s a very ill child, you know.’

  ‘Of course I know!’ he said. ‘I told them not to take him, but they insisted. I tried to call Prue, but she’d just vanished. I didn’t know what to do. They flatly refused to wait till I got it all sorted out. Very nasty they were.’

  ‘Nasty?’ George opened her eyes wide. ‘How? And why?’

  ‘Ask — ask the damned hall porter or someone! He knows as much as I do. They — the parents — just turned up, didn’t want to hear another word from me or anyone, not the results of the tests Prue had ordered or anything. I told them we’d have some through soon but they just said they had to take the child away and apologised for any trouble. And went! They wouldn’t say another word to me about anything.’

  George frowned. ‘I’d like to talk to them,’ she said. ‘There are things about the tests —’

  ‘I wish I could tell you how much I’d like to talk to them too,’ Harry said bitterly. ‘I’ve got to explain to Prue — even to Miss Kydd, God help me, and I don’t fancy that — but if they refuse to co-operate to the point of giving a false address and phone number …’

  ‘What?’ George said, blinking.

  ‘I know. It’s a very strange thing, is it not? I went to the notes as soon as I failed to get hold of Prue and they started to get the child ready to leave, and I tried to call the GP whose name they’d given but it turned out there was no such GP. So then — trying to be logical, you understand — I rang Directory Enquiries for their phone number. It’s a good way of confirming, you know, a sort of double check. And they’re not listed! No such address seemingly, and the number they’d given turned out to be a dead line. By the time I had found all this out they’d gone, child and all. So all I can do is wait for Prue and Susan Kydd to get back and hope she will not kill me for this.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. I’ll tell them that if you like.’

  ‘Yes please,’ Harry said promptly. ‘I very much would like. Miss Kydd does not quite like me anyway, I think. I wasn’t appointed by her, you understand, but by the Dean, when she was away, so I’m not her choice.’ His smooth young face wrinkled a little. ‘I don’t say she objects to my race, but — Well, if you’ll support me, I am grateful.’

  ‘I will,’ George promised. ‘What an odd business.’ She sighed and got to her feet. ‘I suppose I might as well forget about it all. Though I’ll be curious to know what’s going on, if you do find out. Give me a call, will you?’

  ‘Oh, indeed, yes,’ Harry said fervently. He looked down at his eggs. ‘I suppose I had better eat this, though it’s not too palatable. But it would be better than falling over with a blood sugar on the floor, I imagine.’

  ‘Indeed it would,’ George said. ‘Bon appétit.’

  She went back up to her department and, having decided there was nothing more she could do, and therefore that there was no point in wasting any more time over the matter, gave little more thought to the baby with AIDS.

  Until his body was found on a patch of waste ground on the other side of Watney Street Market a week later and brought in to her for a post-mortem.

  She recognized the infant as soon as she saw him; and also recognized very quickly and without any difficulty that this child hadn’t died of his disease. He’d been smothered by the use of a small plastic bag over his head. His face was otherwise pale and unmarked, and there were no signs in the lungs or anywhere else that his death had been deliberately inflicted. If whoever had done the killing had taken the bag away, no one would ever have known it was a murder; as it was there could be no doubt.

  So once again, Gus arrived in her mortuary.

  9

  ‘Well, well,’ Gus said with relish. ‘Here’s a pretty kettle o
’ fish!’

  ‘It’s not seemly to be so excited,’ George said, and he roared with laughter.

  ‘Not seemly? Jesus, where’d you get that sort of talk? Why not?’

  ‘Dead babies aren’t funny,’ she said and bent her head again to her work. The post-mortem was showing nothing she hadn’t expected to find, but all the same it had to be done with pernickety attention to detail. This case, she felt at a deeply intuitive level, could turn out to be a very complicated one.

  ‘Whoever said I thought it funny? I just meant it’s interesting. And don’t come the sensitive little flower with me. I’ve watched you at work too often, kiddo. You forget they’re people too. You get so excited by the details and the search for facts you could as well be chopping up a Martian.’

  She couldn’t deny that, but worked on in silence as Gus watched over her shoulder, his eyes glittering with interest. Then she stretched her back, finished her dictation into the microphone that hung over the table — an expensive new addition to her department — and nodded at Danny to start preparing the closure.

  ‘Well?’ Gus demanded. ‘What have we got there?’

  ‘We’ve got what you saw,’ she said. ‘A baby smothered by a plastic bag over its face.’

  ‘Is that enough? I mean the bag wasn’t tied at the neck or fixed in any way, was it?’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t have to be. The breathing attracts the polythene so that it sticks to the mouth and nostrils. That’s all it takes. It’d be a matter of minutes after that. If not less.’

  ‘No other signs or symptoms?’

  ‘There can’t be symptoms. They’re what are reported by living patients, signs are what the clinician can see.’

  ‘So spare me the lecture. No other signs apart from smothering, then.’

  ‘There weren’t even signs of smothering. It doesn’t show, as I say. Except for the plastic bag, we’d never have known.’

  ‘Oh.’ he said. ‘It’s like the guy was in a hell of a hurry, and didn’t have time to remove the evidence of what he’d done.’