A Seaside Practise

by Tom Smith

  He lived in his bedroom, in which was a large four-poster bed complete with its cloth canopy, hanging drapery around the sides and roped curtains around the four corners. He was seated, on that first visit, in an easy chair, one of the leather ones. A small, wiry man, he had a flowing white beard that covered his neck. He was immaculate, with not a button missing or a stain in sight. His clothes were like his furniture, around seventy years out of fashion. A green and yellow embroidered smoking cap complete with tassel covered his balding head. He wore a matching green velvet smoking jacket, with a silk shirt, and a yellow cravat, perfectly tied, round his neck. Moleskin trousers in darker green and soft green slippers completed his dress.

  He apologised for not getting up to greet me: his legs didn’t work as well as they used to. He was glad to see me; he had already heard about me from Agnes, and was looking forward to a chat or two over the weeks to come. Nodding towards a crystal decanter on the sideboard, just within arm’s reach of his chair, he asked me to join him in a glass of port. I could hardly refuse, and poured a generous tot for him and a smaller one for myself. I sat on the side of his bed – the only other suitable place to sit in the room – and we started talking. I didn’t get away for more than an hour.

  Clunie had been the only child of a father who had been killed in the Boer War, and a mother who had died shortly afterwards of a ‘broken heart’. To judge from her collections of crystal decanters and the oil paintings that showed her with a complexion on the yellow side, the broken organ might in fact have been her liver. He had then been brought up by his mother’s sisters, the five maiden aunts, all of them schoolteachers. In those times, he explained, if women teachers got married they had to give up their jobs. They had preferred their careers to any man they might have met, so they stayed single. Consequently, as they died, one by one in old age, their precious belongings had been left to him, their much-loved nephew. Which was how the contents of five Edwardian households had come to be stuffed into his house.

  Clunie was a sentimental man. He didn’t like to throw anything away, especially not mementoes of his beloved aunts. That explained all the furniture and the bric-à-brac, but it didn’t explain the one set of items in the room that was completely out of character. The bed had only three legs. The fourth leg must have broken off many years before, because that corner of the bed was held in place by a pile of extremely thick books. Dust had coated them over the years, but I could see through it that the one in the middle had a bright red cover, with ‘Medical Directory 1888’ in gold letters across its spine. I bent over a little to read the titles of the others, which were of much duller hues, bound as they were in fading leather.

  Clunie noticed my interest and smiled. ‘You are interested in old medical books?’

  I nodded, and screwed my eyes up to read the fading print on the books. ‘Then you can have them when I’m dead,’ he said. ‘I need them for now to hold up my bed.’

  They were an expensive bed support. Apart from the Medical Directory, there were two volumes of the ‘Dictionary of Practical Surgery’ edited by Christopher Heath FRCS, ‘Diseases of the Ear and Naso-Pharynx’ by Hovell, two volumes of ‘The Science and Art of Surgery’ by Erichsen, and ‘Hooper’s Medical Dictionary’, obviously from its binding and print style a much older book. How do I remember them so well? They are on the shelf above my desk as I write. Each book is signed on the fly-leaf by Clunie’s grandfather, H MacPherson, 1887’.

  Hugh MacPherson had qualified in 1875 from Glasgow. He had married young and with a son to care for, he needed a rural practice to make sure that he had good healthy air to breathe. Braehill was perfect. The Medical Directory revealed a population in the three villages of more than ten thousand, compared to the eighteen hundred and fifty in 1965 and the fourteen hundred of 2011. Rural depopulation continues as I write.

  In Dr MacPherson’s time there were enough people in the area to support six doctors – two in Braehill, two in Kilminnel and two in Collintrae. Young Hugh had obviously done his homework. When he arrived in Braehill, an older doctor had died, and the remaining one was keen to grab all the loot that he could.

  ‘The story goes,’ said Clunie, ‘that old Dr Kinnaird would have nothing to do with my grandfather. He had objected to him coming and put up all sorts of barriers to him staying. Then one day, my grandfather fell into the river when crossing it to see a patient on a winter’s night. He was injured and cold – what I suppose you might call hypothermia today. Dr Kinnaird refused to treat him, despite my grandmother’s pleading, and my grandfather died the next day. He was just thirty-seven, with a fourteen-year old son – my father. My grandmother was heartbroken, but stayed on in Braehill, with sympathy from everyone. The villagers rallied round, and all Dr Kinnaird’s patients left him for one of the Kilminnel doctors. So he had to leave Braehill shortly afterwards.’

  ‘My father joined the army and married the girl next door. Within a year I was born, and within another year, they were both dead – him in South Africa, her here. My grandmother and my mother’s sisters brought me up. I went from one aunt to the next, and as they were all schoolteachers, I learned a lot from them. I taught classics at university for a while, but when my grandmother took ill, I applied for the post of teacher at Braehill School, and have been here ever since.’

  ‘You never married?’ I ventured, wondering if I was overstepping the mark and prying too deeply into what was then a very private area for any man, especially an Edwardian one.

  ‘I was never really interested in women,’ he said, then added with a laugh, ‘and not in men, either, if that’s what you are hinting at.’ He was in his late sixties, and I remember thinking how much older than that he looked.

  ‘So how are you?’ I asked, remembering why I was there. ‘Have you any problems?’

  ‘It’s just a wee problem with my legs,’ he answered. I had noticed when I saw him first that his ankles were a little swollen, and had wondered about his heart: his cheeks were more of a dusky blue than a country red. I helped him take his slippers off, and with a sinking heart saw that his swollen feet were nearer black than blue. They weren’t painful – not a good sign. Nor was the fact that when I pressed a finger into the top of his foot, the depression it made stayed like a dimple in the skin. He was in heart failure, and the circulation in the legs was blocked. It wouldn’t be long before they were gangrenous.

  Clunie was dying of the complications of poorly controlled diabetes. He had never been able to follow a diet or curb his fondness for good port and wine, or his meerschaum pipe filled several times a day with thick black tobacco. Now he was paying the price.

  He must have seen my face as I sat up.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, Doc. I’m not stupid. But I want to stay here for as long as I can.’

  I promised that I would help as much as I could. Jane Forrest, the Braehill district nurse, Flora’s counterpart in this end of the practice, would come in more often, and we would do what we could to make him comfortable. There were plenty of volunteer ladies in the village, most of them ex-pupils, who would gladly give their time to keeping him company and comfortable.

  He passed away in his sleep, three weeks later, as far as I knew with no distress. He must have been aware that his death was imminent, however, because he had left a note on the pillow beside his head.

  ‘The State can have my effects,’ it read, ‘but the medical books under my bed are to go to Dr Smith.’ Which is why I have them now, still in front of me, beside my twenty-first century state of the art computer, just to remind me of a really nice man and his grandfather.

  But that’s not the end of Clunie’s story. In Scotland, when someone dies with no relatives and no will, a lawyer is appointed to hold a sale of his possessions, the proceeds going to the Crown. Mairi and I, still starting out in our married life, and about to move into our first substantial home in Collintrae, were interested
in some of the furniture, and perhaps one of the grandmother clocks. So we decided to go to the sale.

  It was run by Wallace Brundell, senior partner of E, J and R Brundell and Sons, lawyers. E, J and R had died years before, leaving Wallace, a grandson of E and son of J, as sole lawyer. R had been an uncle. Their law practice was based in Darley, a small mining town around six miles to the east of Girvan. I phoned the office to find the date, time and place of the sale. Asking for Mr Brundell, I was told by a lady clerk that there was no need to speak to the man himself: a notice would be in the local paper shortly. She sounded snooty to say the least. I mentioned the note about the books, and was sharply informed that it did not have any standing in law, and that I would have to bid for them like anyone else. The phone was put down abruptly: clearly I had no business taking up her precious time.

  The notice eventually appeared two days before the sale. It was to be held in Mr Brundell’s own warehouse, all the effects having been removed from Clunie’s house to it a few days before. There had been little opportunity for anyone to browse around.

  Mairi and I arrived an hour before the start. We were astonished to find just a few pieces of furniture, sad and worn in an almost empty hall. The busts, pictures, desks, tables, vases, musical instruments, chairs, lamps, ornaments and all the valuable items that Clunie had cared for so lovingly were nowhere to be seen. Where could they be?

  I asked the auctioneer, a tall, sombre man in a dark suit and plain tie. He had sleeked-down black hair, and a thin face with pince-nez tightly gripping his aquiline nose. He brushed my question aside. He did not understand how I could have thought that Mr MacPherson had a house full of treasures. These few things were all that had been taken out of the house. He was well-known to be a recluse, and he could hardly have had much, being just a village schoolmaster. Now could he get on with the auction, please?

  I got the message. Someone was on the take, and it would be impossible to prove who that person was. I was sure the auctioneer was in on it, but had no evidence to make any accusation. The little pile of medical books was there – but none of the others. I got the feeling that after my conversation with the clerk in Brundell’s office, she had told the boss that they had better be in the auction. I bid a pound for them. No one else made a bid, so I picked up my books, handed over the pound, and Mairi and I left, disappointed not just because we hadn’t had the chance to buy something really worthwhile, but also because we thought that Clunie and his ancestors had in some way been cheated.

  A week later, just before midnight on Thursday, the Girvan police called me. Could I come at once to a house in Darley? There had been a sudden death. Here I must explain that the Collintrae and Darley doctors had an arrangement. Darley was a mining town, with a single-handed doctor, Arthur Thomson, running a busy mixed practice of farming and mining families. Arthur and I had one night a week off-duty. I took Wednesday off, Arthur took Thursday. We stood in for each other on those nights, so that one night a week we looked after two practices. To balance the one busy night, we could guarantee at least one night a week in which we wouldn’t be disturbed. We really appreciated that, and thought the double duty was worth it.

  So I was happy to drive the fifteen miles to Darley, but puzzled by the call. When I had asked how the patient had died, the policeman had said that I would see when I got there. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I had heard a laugh in the background when he said it. I couldn’t think how laughter could be appropriate when dealing with a sudden death, although even now I can’t help a wry smile when I think about it.

  I drove up the drive of the most imposing house. In small towns like this such a house was either the minister’s or the doctor’s. I knew it wasn’t the doctor’s. Arthur and his wife Eve lived in a modest house next to the surgery beside the council estate, and this one was at the posher end of the town. It wasn’t the manse, either, as the church was several streets away. I was told later that it had been built many years before by the mine owner, whose fortune and interest in the village had evaporated when the mines were nationalised.

  It dawned on me as the policeman at the door let me in that it must be the house of the only other person of note in any small town – the lawyer. I walked along the hall, passing the open door of the front room, where a woman in a white nightdress was being comforted by the minister. Hearing her voice, I recognised it as that of the ‘clerk’ on the lawyer’s phone.

  I was shown upstairs into a bedroom. Fortunately for the woman, the couple slept in twin beds. The bedclothes on the nearer one were thrown back, the sheet rumpled as if someone had been in bed and got out in a hurry. The second bed was still occupied. The man was lying on his back. I could see his face, calm and peaceful as is every dead person’s face, no matter how he or she has died. I get impatient with those detective stories in which the victims’ faces are distorted in terror after death. The muscles of the face relax after death, so that it is expressionless. The eyes remain open, so that it is different from sleep, but there is never a hint in the face of whether the person felt pain or surprise when they breathed their last.

  Which is why the man in the bed didn’t show surprise or alarm or pain, even with two grandfather clocks, a large bust of Clunie’s Aunt Ethel and a marble pillar on top of him. His eyes were fixed on the gaping hole in the ceiling through which they had fallen, but whether he had had time to see them fall is impossible to say.

  I looked carefully at the face. There was the high forehead, the sleeked-back hair, the marks of the pince-nez on the aquiline nose. He looked friendlier in death than when I had last met him at the auction.

  One of the policemen helped me to move the clocks, the bust and the pillar. The auctioneer’s face may have been unmarked, but the rest of him was a mess. This isn’t a medical book, so I won’t go into the gory details, but human ribs and internal organs aren’t built to resist several hundred kilos of hardwood and marble falling from around twelve feet above them.

  I hadn’t realised when I met him at the sale that the auctioneer was in fact the lawyer – Mr Brundell. I had assumed that the lawyer would employ a professional auctioneer to do the selling. In hindsight, of course, it was obvious that he had to do it all himself – get trusted men to pick up the stuff, then store it in as safe a place as possible until he could find a way to sell it on, perhaps at an auction house miles away. Where better could he hide it but in his own roof space? There were stairs into it and he and his wife, with perhaps a helper, could have done it easily.

  He hadn’t taken into account the age of the house and the parsimony of the mine owner who had built it a century before. Never a man to pay his workers well, the mine man had obviously carried that principle into his dealings with his builders. They had responded, probably unknown to him, by skimping on the hidden parts of the house – like the roof timbers and loft flooring. Add a little damp rot over the years, and there was no chance that they could support extra weight. The marble and mahogany were far too much for them to bear. Was it just unfortunate that Mr Brundell had chosen to place his loot directly over his bed, or was it divine retribution?

  The Procurator Fiscal’s Inquiry held a few months later recorded a verdict of accidental death. Auntie Ethel may have had something to do with it. The pathologist found that her bust had broken the ribs on the left side of his chest, rupturing his heart as it did so.

  The police found the rest of Clunie’s treasures in the part of the loft that hadn’t given way. I was asked to identify what I could, as the person who had most recently seen them in situ. They were confiscated as ‘evidence’ and later sold at an auction in Edinburgh, at prices many times those that would have been paid in Darley. Mairi and I don’t have any other Clunie mementoes, but the books are enough.

  Chapter Eight

  A Social Whirl

  Before Collintrae, I was pretty much a stranger to social evenings. There were plenty of reasons for this. Yo
ung doctors then were only really admitted to polite society as they moved up the ladder of medical seniority. And parties in the hospital mess – where the junior doctors met – certainly didn’t train us for the outside world. Our meagre eight pounds a month didn’t stretch to entertaining or being entertained. We were limited to the local beer (or cider – one of our more kindly consultants was from a famous Somerset cider family) generously donated to the mess by nearby breweries.

  Nor were we senior enough for anyone to ask us our opinion on anything, so we were never included in the consultants’ social whirls. As a result our conversation was severely limited, because we knew nothing about anything other than medicine.

  But as soon as doctors hit the registrar grade in hospital or became GPs, the scene changed. We began to be invited to prestigious parties and social evenings where we met, often for the first time since we started our studies, people from other walks of life. It wasn’t easy at first. We had moved in one step from the lowest status of all students - which daughter’s father wants his precious offspring to date a medical student? - to one of the highest. Who doesn’t want his daughter to marry a doctor?

  So several weeks after our arrival, Mairi and I were sent a gold-embossed card from the local titled landowner. Could we grace his home with our presence at a party the following week?

  We were flattered, and on the evening dressed, as we thought, fittingly for such a prestigious event. Naturally I was the only one there wearing a lounge suit. Everyone else, having noted in the corner of the invitation ‘black tie’, was in full dinner regalia. That put me firmly in my place from the start. It dawned on me that the parish minister and I were there as the representatives of our respective callings and our status in country society, not as potential party animals to add to the excitement of the evening. The only purpose of the other guests was, it seemed, to get smashed, preferably as fast as possible.