A Family Affair

by Janet Tanner

  ‘I s’pose so.’ Cliff sounded unconvinced. ‘I’d know, though, wouldn’t I, if I was g’waine to be bad? I’d pull over straight away. I bain’t daft.’

  ‘No-one’s suggesting you are, but you must not drive,’ Helen said firmly. ‘It’s not just me saying that – it’s the law. All right?’

  Cliff stared into space for a moment, pulling on his moustache, grey, now, and bushy on a face that had become all planes and hollows.

  ‘What be I s’posed to do? That’s what I’d like you to tell I.’

  ‘Why don’t you retire?’ Helen suggested.

  ‘Retire!’ He sounded shocked.

  ‘Why not? You’re well past retirement age.’

  ‘Don’t go reminding me!’

  ‘So why don’t you take things a bit easier? Most men of your age would be only too glad of the excuse to put their feet up.’

  ‘Not me,’ Cliff said stubbornly. ‘Start putting your feet up and next thing you know you’m pushing up the daisies!’

  Helen hid a smile.

  ‘Why me, that’s what I’d like you to tell I,’ Cliff went on. ‘I’ve always had the best of health, unlike most of’em round here. Always out in the fresh air, not breathing in that filthy muck like them as do work down the pit, don’t drink much – well, only in moderation – never smoked, always ate good fresh vegetables out of me own garden. I just don’t understand it.’

  ‘I can’t give you an explanation, Mr Button. Sometimes these things just happen. What I can do, though, is try to find a treatment that will suit you. Let’s talk about that.’

  But Cliff still looked horribly morose and as he left the surgery she noticed the defeated slope to the shoulders that had previously been of almost military bearing and a grizzled look to the back of his head and neck that had not been apparent to her before. He seemed to have aged ten years in as many minutes, and though she might have smiled inwardly at his reference to pushing up the daisies, in reality there was nothing even remotely amusing about it. Helen had seen it happen in too many cases – men and women who were remarkably good for their age suddenly entering a downward spiral when the cornerstone of their life was abruptly shaken. She hoped fervently that wouldn’t happen to Cliff.

  This was the downside of general practice, as opposed to working in a large city hospital of course; the doctor/patient relationship was so much more personal. You worked hard at building up trust, you got to know the patient and their family and often in the process they came to feel like friends. The sense of responsibility for their welfare was overwhelming too; on more than one occasion Helen had lain awake at night worrying about a diagnosis or treatment, afraid she might have missed something that would have been glaringly obvious to a more experienced eye. If she was really in doubt, of course, she could always talk to Reuben Hobbs, and on occasion she had done so, but it was always a question of justifying the necessity of that to herself. She didn’t want to run to him unnecessarily, undermining his confidence in her, and her confidence in herself.

  Not that her judgement was in doubt in this case. As soon as Cliff Button had walked through the door she’d suspected epilepsy and the tests had proved her right. This time it was just the inability to put things right for him that niggled, the unpleasant feeling that with a few well-chosen words she had destroyed his life.

  Helen packed Cliff’s notes back into their brown envelope, reminding herself that she must avoid becoming emotionally involved. That way led to disaster. But she was emotionally involved, whether she liked it or not, not least because Cliff had been one of the first patients to give her a chance.

  It was strange, Helen thought, that in the middle of the twentieth century people could still be so prejudiced against a woman doctor. Only two of the five women she had qualified with were now practising – one of them in London, where perhaps attitudes were a little more liberal. But here in Hillsbridge the old prejudices remained. Women made excellent nurses, but doctors – doctors should be men, and preferably older men.

  ‘Don’t worry about it – I had just the same sort of problems when I first came here,’ Paul Stephens had said to her when they had adjourned to the best room at the George for a much needed drink after a practice meeting.

  ‘You?’ Helen had said, surprised. ‘You are very obviously not a woman!’

  ‘You noticed.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I may not be a woman, but when I joined the practice I was what the old folk round here called “a young whippersnapper”. They were used to Dr Vezey, who was damned near in his dotage even then – and of course Reuben had been here donkey’s years. They didn’t trust me. Particularly the mothers of nubile young girls.’

  Helen was shocked. ‘That is appalling!’

  ‘Understandable, I suppose. We’ve all heard of doctors who want to do a full examination for a sore throat.’

  ‘All the same …’

  ‘They got over it eventually. A few successes and the word got around. And of course, time was my greatest ally. If you wait long enough, there’s nothing surer than young men become old ones.’

  ‘That won’t be much help to me! Ten years from now I’ll still be a woman.’ She sipped her rum and black, looking at him over the rim of her glass. ‘In any case – you’re not old!’

  ‘Older than I was. Which I suppose helps compensate for the fact that I’m still unmarried. That, I’m afraid, is the other cardinal sin. Young and single must equal Lust, with a capital L, for every unclothed female body within a ten-mile radius.’

  ‘Oh, Paul, you’re impossible!’ Helen said, laughing.

  She had revised her opinion of him considerably since that first rather awkward morning. Though on occasions he could be short to the point of rudeness, he could also be very good company with his dry sense of humour, and she knew now she had been wrong to suspect he had not wanted her as the assistant GP. Reuben Hobbs had admitted to her that initially he had been the one to have doubts and Paul who had talked him round, pointing out the advantages of a lady doctor in the practice once the patients got over the first shock and accepted her. When Reuben had said it, Helen had been incredulous, yet now it seemed to fit with the Paul she was getting to know.

  Occasionally she wondered, just as his patients did, why, in his middle thirties, Paul was still unmarried. He was good-looking in a rather rugged way, with a reasonable income and the status that went with being a GP – every matchmaking mother in the district should have had her sights set on him as a prospective son-in-law. But so far it hadn’t happened.

  ‘Because I’ve never yet met a woman I wanted to give up my freedom for,’ Paul said once, and Helen thought that was it in a nutshell. Paul was the sort of man who probably valued his freedom too much to give it up for any woman.

  Helen stacked Cliff Button’s notes on the pile at the back corner of her desk and went to see if there were any other patients waiting. She rather thought Cliff had been the last – for her, at any rate – and soon after she had called him in she had heard Dorothea Hillman, who came in three mornings a week to type up the correspondence and deal with the accounts, stalk along the corridor and lock the door against any latecomers.

  As she had thought, the only patient still waiting was a woman with a small child – a long-term patient of Reuben Hobbs. But someone else was in the corridor too, not sitting patiently on one of the hardbacked chairs, but pacing in the far corner where the passage broadened out into a small lobby, and glancing, at that moment, at the posters and bits and pieces of information that were pinned on to the baize noticeboard. His back was towards her, but she recognised him anyway. She knew every line of those narrow shoulders beneath the natural linen jacket and the thick dark hair speckled through with premature silver only too intimately.

  Shock ran in a hot tide through her veins.

  ‘Guy,’ she said.

  He turned and their eyes met for the first time in more than six months. Dark eyes, flecked with gold; just as his hair was flec
ked with silver. Eyes that had the power to melt her inside, turn her heart over, make her ache with longing.

  But now the quick flash of disbelieving pleasure was shot through with anger. What was he doing here? What right had he to materialise this way as suddenly as an unwelcome apparition in the safe haven of her new world?

  ‘You’d better come through,’ she said. Her voice was very cool, very controlled, masking all those churning emotions.

  ‘See your patients first,’ he said. His voice was cool too – but wasn’t it always? That cool, cool voice that matched his cool, cool hands and could instil confidence in the most nervous patient, calm the panic of an accident victim, restore equilibrium on the most chaotic ward. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

  Helen turned to the young woman with the child, forcing a faint smile.

  ‘I expect you want to see Dr Hobbs, don’t you?’

  ‘I might as well, yes. He knows all about our Celia.’

  Helen nodded. The corridor felt overpoweringly hot suddenly; hot, airless and claustrophobic. She wondered how patients could bear to wait here, sometimes for hours on end. She must speak to Reuben about it, see if they could get some kind of fan installed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said to Guy. ‘Come through.’

  He followed her along the passage. She could smell his aftershave hanging in that hot, still air. It excited another treacherous wave of longing, a stirring of nostalgic memories. Delights she had worked so hard at forgetting.

  She went into her consulting room and he followed, closing the door after him and looking around, appraising, critical.

  ‘So this is where you spend your days now.’

  ‘Well, part of them – yes.’

  ‘Somewhat different to what you’ve been used to.’

  He meant the paucity of it, she imagined, the lack of all the up-to-the-minute paraphernalia of a busy modern hospital.

  ‘I like it,’ she said defensively.

  ‘Good. You never were a town mouse.’

  ‘I was never a mouse – town or otherwise.’

  He smiled briefly, that slow smile that lit his eyes and was gone.

  ‘I miss you, Helen.’

  She chuckled, a mite bitterly.

  ‘I thought that was the general idea. Why are you here, Guy?’

  ‘I just said. I miss you.’

  ‘Oh, Guy!’ She turned away, not wanting to look at him, pressing her fingers to her lips. ‘You can’t do this to me. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Life isn’t fair though, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s not fair that you and I can’t be together.’

  She swung round then, eyes blazing.

  ‘We could have been, Guy. If you’d been prepared to leave Marian. But you wouldn’t. You wanted it both ways.’

  ‘I wanted you.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t leave her. Five years I waited, Guy. Five bloody years. All wasted.’

  ‘Well, if you think they were wasted …’

  ‘All right. Not wasted the way you mean, but where did they get me? I’m thirty-one years old and I’m on my own. If I’d known in the beginning how things would turn out … I never set out with the intention of being the eternal mistress, Guy. In the beginning …’

  ‘We fell in love.’

  ‘All right – we fell in love. Or I fell in love. I’m not sure about you.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ he demanded, interrupting. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  Her anger died again, quite suddenly, leaving her feeling tired and defeated.

  ‘Yes. You’re here, all right. My point is that if you’d felt the way I did you wouldn’t have let anything stop us being together. I’d have crossed oceans for you, Guy. Literally. And I certainly couldn’t have continued to live in a sham of a marriage.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Helen, do we have to go over all that old ground again? The children …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We do have to. Unless something has changed. Has it, Guy? Has anything changed?’ He was silent and she sighed. ‘I thought not. You’ll never leave her. I know that now. And all this business about the children is just an excuse and you know it.’

  ‘It is not an excuse, Helen. They are ten and eleven years old. I can’t leave them. I’d destroy their world. When they’re older …’

  ‘You think? When they’re older, Guy, there’ll be another reason – perfectly good, perfectly sound, perfectly … plausible … a very comfortable life with the daughter of a top surgeon for a wife and all the goodies that spring from the cornucopia of Daddy’s generosity. If you left Marian for me you’d have to leave the house – that grand monstrosity with an address in Bristol 8 – and you’d have to forego the sort of lifestyle that goes with it. All the consultants’ jollies, all the port-soaked dinners, all the little white-aproned catering staff who come in and fluff around when you entertain. You wouldn’t even be entertaining, Guy. Not if you were with me. There’d be a chorus of outrage and disapproval in all the circles that count with you. It would probably even affect your career. Have you thought of that? Oh yes, I bet you have!’

  His head was bowed; he raised it to look up at her.

  ‘Have you quite finished?’

  ‘Oh, Guy …’ Suddenly she wanted to cry. ‘Why the hell did you have to come here? Why start it off all over again?’

  He shook his head, splayed one hand helplessly.

  ‘I suppose I hoped …’

  ‘That I might have changed my mind? Gone soft?’

  ‘If you put it like that.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. Five years, I gave you, Guy. Surely to God you can’t expect me to give you more, without anything in return?’

  ‘Nothing in return. What about this?’

  His hand shot out, grasping her wrist and taking her completely unawares. With a forcefulness she remembered only too well he held her pinioned like a butterfly against the solid frame of her desk, bending his head to hers. Powerless to resist, emotionally if not physically, she let him kiss her and for all their anger, all their conflicting needs, it was a kiss they both enjoyed, briefly at any rate. It had always been this way, from the very beginning, the chemistry between them could make a nonsense of reason. Had it not been so, the relationship would have ended many times during those five years.

  ‘You see?’ he said, drawing back. ‘You still want me, Helen.’

  ‘I never said I’d stopped wanting you.’

  ‘Why then? Why does it have to be like this? Let me come and see you. I’ll take you to dinner.’

  She could feel the temptation eating away at her defences.

  ‘To dinner.’

  ‘Yes. It would be safe out here. We wouldn’t be likely to bump into anyone I know.’

  And with those few words he undid all the progress of the last moments.

  ‘You see? That, Guy, is what I can’t take! That’s it in a nutshell. Being your guilty secret. I want more! I’m worth more, for God’s sake!’

  ‘I know that, Helen. Don’t be like this, please! I love you. I can’t live without you …’

  ‘Guy – don’t. You shouldn’t have come and I’d like you to leave. Please go.’ Her voice was rising.

  ‘Helen …’

  ‘Go!’ She was shouting now.

  The door opened without so much as a warning knock. Paul stood there, looking like nothing so much as a scrum half in a rugby team – hair rumpled, jacket rumpled, eyes narrow with suspicion. The contrast between him and the smoothly elegant Guy might, under other circumstances, have been almost laughable. But as things were, no-one was laughing.

  ‘Is everything all right here?’ His thick Tyneside accent lent something close to menace to his voice.

  Helen smoothed her hair. She could feel her face flaming scarlet.

  ‘It’s all right thank you, Paul. I’m fine.’

  Paul stood his ground, looking at Guy suspiciously.

  Guy took the initiative.

  ‘Guy Holden.’ He extended his hand
in Paul’s direction. ‘Helen and I are old friends. We used to work together.’

  Paul ignored the outstretched hand.

  ‘And you are?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Paul Stephens. A partner in this practice. If you don’t mind, Mr Holden … I think it might be best if you were to pursue this conversation outside surgery hours.’

  ‘He was just going,’ Helen said. ‘We’ve said all we have to say to one another, haven’t we, Guy?’

  For an uncomfortable moment she thought he was going to argue. Then: ‘You know where to find me if you change your mind, Helen.’ And he was gone.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Paul demanded.

  ‘Just don’t ask.’ Helen felt on the verge of tears, partly as a result of her churning emotions, partly with a wretched, and particularly perverse, longing for Guy. All very well to tell him to get out of her life. That was her head talking. But loving him still made it an incredibly difficult decision to stick with. Pain washed over her and she swallowed at the tight knot in her throat. ‘I apologise for my private life impinging on the professional. That was a totally unexpected visit.’

  ‘So I gathered.’

  ‘I hope it won’t happen again.’

  ‘Helen …’ He touched the sleeve of her jacket. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You don’t look it. Put the kettle on, why don’t you, if you’ve finished your surgery, and we’ll have a cup of tea.’

  ‘No – thanks all the same. I’ve got a big round to do. I really ought to be getting on.’

  To be honest, all she wanted was to get out, to feel the fresh air cooling her hot face, blowing the cobwebs of confused emotions out of her brain. His obvious concern was only making her feel worse. She was embarrassed, too, that he should have overheard at least part of what had been said.

  ‘What about afterwards?’ he said.

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘When we’ve both finished work for the day.’

  ‘You mean I come back here and make a cup of tea for us?’ she said, trying to lighten the mood and regain some of her equilibrium.

  ‘Not quite. By that time I shall want something a bit stronger than a cup of tea. I was thinking more on the lines of a beverage of the alcoholic variety. Something to eat, too, if you like.’