After Nathan had finished his morning surgery, he went to the kitchen at the back of the house and plugged in the electric kettle. The resident caretaker usually made coffee before the doctors set off on their rounds, but she had slipped out to do her shopping.
There were still some patients in the waiting room. Nathan could hear their voices drifting along the corridor and his partners had not yet emerged from their consulting rooms.
Once, he and Lou Benjamin could almost have set their watches by what time surgery would end, he recalled whilst spooning Nescafé into three blue beakers. Well, give or take the seasonal flu epidemics and the odd emergency. But those days were over and had been since doctors became paid servants of the Welfare State. The citizens who footed the bill made sure they got their money’s worth. Even a common cold would bring them running to the surgery. Only a handful of the patients Nathan had just seen required medical attention and it was the same every day.
His nephew entered as the kettle reached boiling point. “My stack of mail was a mile high this morning, Uncle Nat,” he said, pouring water into two of the beakers. “But I’ve stopped having nightmares about being buried alive beneath a ton of forms, now we’ve got clerical help,” he grinned.
“Me too,” Nathan said gratefully. The escalating paperwork created by the National Health Scheme had made it necessary to employ a secretary. But she could not cope with all of it and there were still times when he felt more like an administrator than a doctor.
Ronald was leaning against the sink, drinking his coffee, his long-legged, broad-shouldered frame dwarfing his uncle’s short, slight one.
His figure is like David’s was at his age, Nathan thought. But that was the only trait Ronald shared with his father. Had he taken after David in nature, the rapport that existed between Nathan and him would not have been possible. For the same reasons that prohibited friendship between Nathan and David. They maintained a superficial, brotherly relationship for their mother’s sake, but were poles apart in every respect and had never got on.
Nathan watched Ronald set his beaker on the draining board and run a hand through his blue-black mane. His own hair had once been that colour but was now entirely silver – though he wasn’t yet forty-six. In keeping with the premature lines on my face, he reflected wryly.
Ronald cut into his introspection. “We must get someone in to paint this room,” he said, glancing at the jaded blue walls and taking a notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket, to scribble a reminder.
“You’re a paragon of efficiency,” Nathan smiled.
“And I often wonder how you and Uncle Lou managed before I qualified and joined you!”
Lou Benjamin was not a blood relative but had always been an honorary uncle to Nathan’s nephews and nieces.
“So do we,” Nathan replied. If he had had a son, he would have wanted him to be just like Ronald. Cheerful and practical, with the kind of mind that pounced upon the crux of a matter immediately. In the latter respect, Ronald would have made a fine lawyer, Nathan reflected. But he had chosen medicine and it was Nathan’s daughter, Leona, who had elected to study law.
“Me, I don’t have time to stand around day-dreaming!” Ronald grinned noting his contemplative expression.
Which doctor does? Nathan thought, watching Ronald stride briskly from the room. Before Ronald joined the practice, Nathan and Lou had not paused for a morning break. But he had told them this was carrying professional dedication too far and had gone out, there and then, to buy the electric kettle, so their coffee could be made in double-quick time.
Last week Ronald had mentioned the possibility of instituting an appointments system for the patients, to allow the doctors to schedule their working day, and Nathan had no doubt that his nephew would soon put his idea into operation.
Lou had said, privately, that he wished he had thought of it. But practising medicine in a businesslike way would not have occurred to their generation of practitioners, Nathan reflected now. Would the time ever come when the whole profession functioned on those lines? he wondered. When the British Medical Association would be the equivalent of a trade union protecting its members’ interests? Nathan doubted it. Those who dealt in life and death could not expect the ordered routine others enjoyed.
Lou entered, polishing his spectacles. “We need a forty-eight-hour day to get through all our work,” he grumbled, echoing Nathan’s thoughts. “What the hell did we want to be doctors for, Nat?” he demanded, plonking the glasses on his beaky nose.
Talk of this kind was commonplace between them but, this morning, for Nathan it rang a distant bell. “You seem to have forgotten that I didn’t,” he replied. “That I have my eldest brother to thank for my lot!”
In truth, it had been his mother’s decision, when he was still a child, that medicine would be his profession. Having a doctor in the family lent prestige which couldn’t be easily acquired any other way, he thought with the acrimony these recollections invariably aroused in him. But it had been David who had made sure Nathan wasn’t allowed to forget how his kith and kin had sacrificed to educate him – made him toe the line so Sarah would get her wish.
“And a lot of good it’s done you to go on harping about it,” Lou declaimed censoriously.
Nathan left him making his coffee and went to collect his bag and list of house calls. Lou was his closest friend, but there were and always had been levels on which they were unable to commune. Lou hadn’t hoped to be a Classics scholar and ended up taking people’s blood pressure; medicine was what he had wanted. And nobody had shaped his life in other respects. They hadn’t needed to. Lou had never been a dreamer. His feet were planted firmly upon the ground.
Nathan quelled the sense of injustice his partner’s words had engendered. He hadn’t bothered telling Lou that these days he did not harp on the past. As you grew older, you learned the futility of brooding about things you could do nothing about.
He had left the surgery and was getting into his car when Lou rushed to his side.
“Thank goodness I caught you, Nat! Bridie just phoned, in a panic.”
“What has she done? Set fire to the chip pan?” Nathan snapped, though he could not imagine his capable Irish housemaid doing any such thing.
“I’m coming home with you and we can talk on the way,” Lou answered. “Let’s get a move on,” he added brusquely.
Bridie sat by the bedside, gazing at her mistress’s face. So lovely and peaceful herself looked. As if sleep had drawn a curtain to shut out the bitterness that curled her lips in her waking hours.
Before Mrs. Sandberg began taking the little pink pills she kept in the bathroom cabinet, Bridie had often heard her walking the floor at night and had wondered if himself could hear it, too. How could he not, when his room was next door to his wife’s? But Bridie had never known him get up and go to her. An’ why wud he? she thought now. A man had his pride an’ oh what a pretty pass things had cum to between them!
After Doctor had returned from the war, but not to his marriage bed, Bridie had been terribly distressed. A body couldn’t live under their roof without knowing they didn’t get on, but she hadn’t let herself think it was that bad.
They’d been newly-weds when she came to be their maid – and her heart had been warmed by their love and laughter, she remembered. But something, Bridie knew not what, had happened to spoil everything, like an overnight blight destroying the bloom on a beautiful young tree. ’Tis the rot that set in then that’s led to this, Bridie thought, surveying Rebecca with sorrow. An’ a wunder it’s taken this long, if the truth be told!
She rose from her chair and went to look out of the window, to see if Dr Benjamin’s car was approaching. It seemed like an hour since she telephoned the surgery, but the bedside clock told her it wasn’t more than a few minutes.
Her mistress was still breathing, she noted thankfully. And with not a tangle in her lovely black hair, as though she had not stirred since closing her eyes. But the breathing was shallow, her chest, beneath one of the creamy satin nightdresses she always wore, scarcely rising and falling.
Bridie took one of Rebecca’s smooth, slim hands in her own large, work-roughened paws. Dear sweet Jesu, please don’t let her die. P’rhaps it was wrong to pray to the Saviour for a Jewess, who had no faith in Him. But He’d been Jewish, too. And had many times answered Bridie’s call.
Nathan and Lou were travelling up Bury New Road, as fast as the traffic would allow.
“Rebecca must’ve been hit by a virus,” Nathan said.
Lou gave him a sidelong glance. He had shown no emotion, as if they were en route to a patient’s bedside, not his wife’s, and Lou, though he knew there was no love lost between Nathan and Rebecca, was shocked.
“I can think of a more likely reason why Bridie can’t waken her,” Lou answered tersely. “Those damned sleeping pills.” He observed Nathan’s change of expression. “And why you’re surprised to hear me say so, I can’t imagine. For someone whose side-line is psychoanalysis, you’d make a good mechanic when it comes to understanding your wife! You’ve never been able to cope with her problems the way you do so successfully with your patients.”
“Possibly because, in her eyes, I’m responsible for them,” Nathan retorted.
“That I can’t argue with. But she’s my patient, not yours. And it wasn’t with my approval that you let her have the pills.”
Nathan bristled. “What would you do if your wife became a chronic insomniac?”
“With Cora there’s no danger. It’s a wonder I’m not one, from the way she snores!”
“So, it’s fine for you to be smug about my set-up.”
“Your set-up was on the cards before you even entered into it,” Lou snorted. “Which doesn’t mean I’m not sorry for you. But I’m sorry for Rebecca, too. From the moment your mother showed you the shadchan’s photograph of her you resented her.” Lou declared, harking back to their student days.
“Unlike you, when the matchmaker approached your parents about Cora,” Nathan countered cynically.
Lou shrugged. “So, the first time I met Cora I gazed into her eyes and saw the practice her bank balance was going to buy me,” he admitted. “Afterwards, I loved her for herself.”
“You weren’t burdened with my handicaps, Lou. The idea of marrying for material reasons wasn’t anathema to you. Nor were you already involved with someone else.”
“But if I had been, she’d have been Jewish. I’d have had more sense than to get mixed up with a shiksah. Like you did, Nat.”
Nathan had not thought of Mary Dennis for years and did not allow his mind to dwell upon her now. He turned the car into the leafy avenue in which he lived and paled when he saw an ambulance parked outside his house.
“I took the precaution of calling the emergency service,” Lou said as they walked up the garden path.
Nathan fumbled in his pocket for his latchkey. “You’re convinced Rebecca’s tried to end it all, aren’t you, Lou?” he said savagely. “And you blame me.”
Lou took the key from his trembling fingers and inserted it in the lock. “I’m not in the business of blame, Nat. That’s your speciality. And Rebecca’s. At the moment I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she’ll be all right and that you’ll come to your senses and make something of your marriage.”
“What makes you think I haven’t tried?”