Rich Girl, Poor Girl

by Eileen Ramsay

  Lucy looked up into twinkling brown eyes.

  ‘This is an honour, Doctor Graham,’ said Colin Dryden, with a very slight but noticeable stress on the title. ‘My aunt, Mrs Dryden, is anxious to become your first patient. I have the keys, Uncle,’ he said and held out his hand to help Lucy from the deep leather seat.

  ‘You must be the second Dryden of Dryden, MacDonald and Dryden?’ asked Lucy as they walked down the great stone staircase.

  ‘Good heavens, no. That’s my Uncle Ian. I appear nowhere at all on the family escutcheon and, if Uncle Alistair has anything to do with it, I never shall.’

  ‘Oh, why not?’ asked Lucy. She looked at him carefully as he handed her into a cab that had been waiting patiently, and liked what she saw. Only of middle height, so that she stood eye to eye with him, there was an engaging frankness about his roundish face.

  ‘For one thing, I advocate the rights of women. Uncle Alistair thinks women should be in the . . . kitchen.’

  ‘And your aunt?’

  ‘Stays out of the kitchen . . . and everywhere else, as much as possible. She says, “Yes, dear,” regularly and does exactly as she chooses. Seriously, she will make every effort to wear the accolade, Doctor Graham’s first patient.’

  ‘I have already had hundreds of patients, Mr Dryden,’ said Lucy acidly. Medicine was not a joke. She softened, for he was so very anxious to please. ‘Is there something wrong with her?’

  ‘My dear Doctor Graham. What has that to do with anything? You are the social event of the season.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mean pariah?’ Lucy interrupted.

  The eyes twinkled at her again. ‘The old biddies will be lining up in the street. There will be dowagers, young women from the upper echelon of society, female lecturers, students, maids.’ The eyes became serious and Mr Dryden frowned. ‘The men won’t come.’

  ‘Will they let their wives come, their children?’

  ‘Some. Well, what do you think?’ They had reached No.4, a tall, narrow white house with wrought-iron railings around the windows on the first floor. There was a slight air of neglect.

  ‘The door needs a lick of paint,’ said the young lawyer as if he could read her mind.

  They walked up the outside steps and he put the key in the door. Inside, light spilled into the hall from a stained-glass window and danced around the black and white tiled floor.

  It was the most extraordinary feeling but Lucy, who had spent most of her life travelling around the world, immediately felt at home. The house welcomed her. Mentally she shook herself, for she did not approve of people who accorded human values to inanimate objects.

  She wandered around, seeing her mother’s furniture arranged in the living areas, deciding where cabinets and tables and chairs should go in the offices. There was no doubt at all that she would buy the house.

  ‘The kitchen is a joy, is it not? That range is very up-to-the-minute. See, it’s an Eagle, and has the latest in flue construction, lifting fire and’ – he kept the best till last – ‘a reversing damper. Your cook will adore it.’

  Lucy, who knew next to nothing about kitchens and even less of the mysteries of ranges, agreed with him but did not award him the satisfaction of telling him so.

  ‘I shall have to see what my housekeeper thinks of it, but I believe we can come to an arrangement about the house, Mr Dryden. The location is certainly excellent, and no doubt the garden is quite pleasant.’

  ‘Do you have a gardener, doctor? If not, we will be delighted to advertise for you. See, we can go out here through these French windows and the balcony of the main bedchamber also looks out over the gardens.’

  Lucy looked in dismay at the overgrown flowerbeds and the barely recognizable vegetable garden. Originally, the gardens had met the needs of a large family.

  ‘I may not be able to afford a full-time gardener,’ she said with a frankness that almost made Colin Dryden wish he had the time and talent to care for it for her. ‘Until I build up a practice—’

  ‘A few hours each week should keep it under control. Do you need to see any of the rooms again today, or shall we return to the office?’

  ‘I would like to show the house to Annie, my housekeeper. She has been with me almost all my life and deserves the courtesy.’

  He understood. He bowed and, after he had carefully locked up, took her back to the cab.

  *

  Annie, who was staying with her sister in her home village of Cupar, refused to visit the house.

  ‘I really should have given up some time ago, Miss Lucy, but I can’t go on working. I promised your mother that I would look after you in Edinburgh . . .’

  Lucy looked at the woman who had been with her for so many years in so many places. She saw a thin, wrinkled elderly lady: someone who had certainly earned the right to stop working.

  ‘Oh, Annie, how selfish of me. Of course you must retire.’ Lucy’s mind was working feverishly. How would Annie live? She must see her way to making her a monthly payment. But from where was this largesse to come? ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘Here, with my sister and her man. I’ll still see you, Miss Lucy, but it’s time you got a young woman. I’ll be all right here. I have the one hundred pounds your mother left me invested and . . .’

  Lucy was about to protest, to say ‘That was for your old age,’ but this was Annie’s old age. I have taken her toil so much for granted she thought, and my parents. My poor mother . . . She could not bear to think about her mother, who had not even had the satisfaction of seeing her unsatisfactory daughter graduate.

  ‘I’ll see that you are all right, Annie,’ she said. ‘You’ll never want for anything.’

  She took a fond and tearful farewell of the woman who had laboured conscientiously for years and years, in hot climates and cold, to see that her life ran smoothly. Clothes were soiled: Annie washed them. Food was ready whenever Lucy chose to eat. Not a particle of dust was allowed to lie unchallenged. An evening dress, thrown carelessly over a chair after a night’s dancing, was returned, cleaned and pressed, to the wardrobe, ready to be worn again.

  Lucy caught the train back to Dundee and her mind went in tandem with the click-clack of the wheels.

  I have no housekeeper: more importantly, I have no patients. My grandmother’s money will furnish my office and Mother’s money will keep me until Christmas. I must make Annie an allowance. I must get a gardener or my weeds will upset all my neighbours. So first I must place an advertisement in the Courier and Journal.

  *

  ‘An announcement that Doctor Lucille Graham etc. etc. is now practising at 4 Shore Terrace will probably be more helpful in the first instance than a request for a maid-of-all-work.’ Colin Dryden made the suggestion as Lucy sat in his book-littered office and drank coffee.

  ‘This cubby-hole, dare I call it an office, reminds me of my childhood,’ said Lucy lightly, so at ease with the young solicitor did she feel. ‘All it needs is tobacco smoke.’

  ‘Filthy habit,’ said Colin Dryden dismissively. ‘My father smoked constantly and I’m sure it contributed to his early death. Don’t you agree – or are you encouraging me to buy a pipe?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about it, but a Professor Potts did find a marked incidence of . . .’ – she stopped the word ‘scrotal’ just in time – ‘. . .  a cancer among chimney sweeps. The carbon, he thought.’

  He smiled. ‘Well done, a doctor who listens. Usually medical men are so dismissive. Now, shall we send the announcement and the advertisement?’

  Lucy decided to ignore his sweeping judgement of the medical profession. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘And will you dine with me this evening? The ladies’ dining room of my uncle’s club is suitable.’

  Lucy had often dined with groups of other students during her years of study, but perhaps because most of the men were too hard up, or perhaps because they were all working too hard, she had not made any intimate friendships. Even w
hen she had gone to a ball or a party with Kier, it had been as part of a group. She felt as nervous as she had done on the day she put her hair up. But it did not occur to her to decline.

  ‘I would like that,’ she said simply.

  ‘Good. I shall brave Mrs O’Brien at half-past seven. In the meantime I shall place these advertisements.’

  Lucy’s thoughts as she walked swiftly back to her boarding-house were not of her career or the size and upkeep of the house she had so rashly bought, but of what to wear. The late summer evenings were still warm and so an Indian shawl for her shoulders would be nice, but which dress? In the end, there was no decision to make. Most of her clothes were packed in trunks and the only evening gown she had with her was a half-mourning gown she had had made after her mother’s death. It was lilac, and she congratulated herself for the colour suited her. The neckline was not very . . . not too low.

  ‘If I remove that little satin frill around the neckline and sew it very neatly . . . and then Mother’s little gold chain with the amethyst teardrop . . .’

  Lucy Graham banished Dr Graham and set out to be frivolous.

  What an amusing companion Colin Dryden turned out to be. He had a fund of stories about his student days and his early years in his uncle’s office. Perhaps they were so endearing because he was laughing at himself, never ever at anyone else.

  ‘My aunt, by the way,’ he said as they sat in the lounge waiting for their after-dinner coffee, ‘says that she feels the most dreadful migraines approaching Dundee from the south-west. They should arrive just about the time your office opens.’

  ‘Is she as frivolous as you, Mr Dryden?’

  ‘Oh, eminently more so. If she likes you, and I know she will,’ he added with a look that caused Lucy to turn her head away from the intensity of his gaze, ‘she will have everyone who is anyone rushing to sign on Doctor Graham’s list.’

  ‘I want to take care of the sick, Mr Dryden, not overfed, underworked matrons who are suffering from ennui.’

  ‘Oh, they will adore to be cured of ennui. It will be the disease of the century.’

  ‘A Doctor Rehn in Frankfurt has just sutured a heart wound. Do you realize what that means?’ Lucy asked him seriously and, at once sober and serious, he shook his head.

  ‘Doctors will begin to operate on the heart itself. The bounds of medicine will soon know no limits. In Italy they have found that if a substance called chlorine . . .’

  She stopped as he looked puzzled, and blushed with embarrassment. As always she had the bit between her teeth. ‘I’m sorry. This must be boring for you.’

  ‘No, not at all. Your face lights up with enthusiasm; your eyes flash; even your hands speak.’ He stopped as she looked away again. ‘Sorry. What is chlorine? I’ve never heard of it.’

  She laughed and they were at ease again. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that: I’m not too sure myself. It’s a gas, one of the halogens, smells terrible but if, according to the Italian research, it is added to water – and don’t ask me how – it kills germs. Just think. Typhoid wiped out all over the world, literally overnight. What next? Dysentery? Cholera?’

  ‘How good is it at hunger and poverty?’

  ‘So there is more to you than laughter?’

  He looked pained. ‘Sometimes laughter is the only pill that works, doctor.’ He reached across and grasped her hands and she did not pull away. ‘There are sick people here in Dundee, Lucy. Don’t think about Germany and Italy; we need you here.’

  He was so young, so sincere, and yes, it was very pleasant to be admired.

  ‘Your law firm has just sold me a house that cost me a king’s ransom. I must stay in Dundee to pay for it . . . but I need patients.’

  He smiled at her. ‘They’ll come.’

  But they did not come. Day after day Lucy sat in her newly decorated and furnished consulting room and waited. She visited the hospitals and introduced herself to the various heads of department; she was known to many of them already from her years at Dundee Medical School.

  ‘Our patients are sent by their own doctors, Doctor Graham, or they are too poor to afford one. We will recommend . . . should the opportunity arise.’

  Opportunity. She found herself almost hoping for an accident in the street so that she could rush to the aid of the injured and thus make herself known. Kier’s mother invited her to lunch and to dinner several times and, in this way, she met many prominent and wealthy people, but they did not rush to her rooms.

  The attitudes of several of the women she met in this way were interesting and sometimes ambivalent. They thought her terribly clever and brave to have spent so many years fighting her way into the closed world of medicine but, oh no, they could not possibly consult her themselves.

  ‘Why did you want to study medicine, Miss Graham?’ was an often asked question, and the answer was always the same.

  ‘I want to help the sick.’

  ‘There is great discussion in Dundee, and I’m sure elsewhere, about the advisablity of having only fully trained nurses in hospitals,’ said Mr MacDonald of Dryden, MacDonald and Dryden, who, in this small world of society, was well-known to the Anderson-Howards. ‘Is that not women’s place in medicine, Doctor?’

  At least he awarded her her hard-won title.

  ‘It is a place, Mr MacDonald, but there is a very special place for a woman doctor, a unique place. Women bring special skills to medicine . . .’

  ‘To nursing, surely. Their God-given role of nurturing, caring?’

  ‘In the field of medicine for women, Mr MacDonald, a woman is surely better qualified than any man.’ She tried to make her arguments simple, perhaps too simple. ‘Merely by virtue of being a woman, she has empathy and understanding.’

  ‘A properly qualified and trained physician, Doctor Graham, will surely have the same understanding of the more intimate functions of a woman’s body as an unmarried woman.’

  There it was again. Unmarried women should be gentle little flowers. The practice of medicine was indelicate and robbed them of their femininity.

  ‘You do not have to have experienced childbirth to understand it, Mr MacDonald.’

  ‘An unmarried woman should know nothing of these matters, and moreover, Doctor Graham, a decent woman should not want to know of them.’

  There was nothing more to be said but, as luck would have it, that strange unwritten law that allotted twenty minutes to the partner on either side was working and Lucy was able to turn her burning face away from his appalling rudeness. She could hardly concentrate on the conversation of the young man on her other side and he was so tongue-tied that he dried up completely, and each of them sat in misery until the dessert course was brought in and he, at least, could seek solace in a chocolate meringue.

  That her embarrassment had been witnessed by others was made obvious by the solicitude with which Kier’s mother poured her coffee.

  ‘My dear,’ she breathed sympathetically and moved on.

  ‘May I sit down, Doctor Graham?’ The woman who stood before her was expensively if not fashionably dressed in a pale green silk gown that hung on her too-thin frame.

  ‘I am Mrs MacDonald,’ she introduced herself, as if afraid that Lucy would prefer her to sit elsewhere.

  ‘Do please sit down,’ said Lucy and smiled at her.

  The woman still stood, twisting a silk handkerchief in her long thin fingers. ‘Some men find progress . . . difficult, Doctor Graham. Have you found this to be so?’

  ‘Some men, yes,’ Lucy agreed.

  Mrs MacDonald seemed to gather herself together as if she needed courage. ‘It is quite wonderful that you have come to Dundee. I hope you will be very happy and successful,’ she said and, turning on her heel, walked rapidly away.

  The party finished early since so many of the guests had to catch the last ferry across the Tay, and Lucy was glad that she had refused the Anderson-Howards’ offer of hospitality.

  ‘I hope you will be su
ccessful.’ Mrs MacDonald’s words rang in her ears as she watched the shores of Fife slip away.

  ‘I hope so too, Mrs MacDonald, I hope so too,’ she said to herself.

  7

  Dundee

  EXACTLY ONE WEEK after she officially opened her new consulting rooms, Doctor Lucille Graham found a housekeeper, a gardener, and her first patient, and they all came to her through the good offices of Mrs MacDonald.

  The patient came first. The MacDonalds’ nursemaid had a backache and her mistress sent her to see what the new young female doctor would advise.

  ‘The advice is to stop carrying heavy loads, Mhairi,’ said Dr Graham after she had given the young woman a thorough examination. ‘How old is the baby?’

  ‘Well, Archie’s three and then the twins is two and the baby’s six months.’

  ‘No wonder,’ thought Lucy, ‘that Mrs MacDonald is so thin and pale and that her overworked nursemaid has an aching back.’

  ‘The twins must be walking?’

  ‘Oh yes, doctor, but they get jealous if the mistress is feeding the baby, and they want to be babies, and then little Archie wants to be a baby and . . .’

  ‘And you give in to them?’

  ‘Well, it saves yelling. They yell, and the master doesn’t like that and the mistress gets upset and starts to cry, and that’s not good for her milk, is it?’

  ‘No, but neither is it good for you to be carrying heavy children around, children who are perfectly capable of walking for themselves.’

  ‘The mistress thought maybe . . . you being just qualified . . . you would know of some pill . . .’

  Lucy looked at the anxious face. A pill. Everyone was looking for a pill that would cure everything.

  ‘Perhaps, since there are so many small children . . .’ She stopped for a moment, remembering Mrs MacDonald’s age. ‘Are there other, older children?’

  ‘Oh yes, miss, I mean doctor. Margaret is eleven and Alice is nine.’ Mhairi smiled with pride as if she herself was the mother of so many children. ‘I think we’re really pleased that the twins are boys . . . three of each, we have now.’