The Doctors of Downlands

by Claire Rayner

  I turned to Fiona.

  “Fiona,” and I spoke as gently as I could. “Fiona, are you a healthy person? Have you any diseases that you know of?”

  She shook her head.

  “Ever had any psychological problems? A nervous breakdown?”

  Again that dumb negative.

  I turned back to David, who was now standing with his hands dangling at his sides staring at Fiona with a baffled look on his young face.

  “Then, David, I will not only refuse your highly improper request - and I’m speaking now as a doctor, and not as your over-permissive big sister - I’ll also forget you ever asked me.”

  I walked round my desk and sat down, pulling a piece of paper towards me.

  “What is more to the point now is to make the right arrangements for your care, Fiona. Now - “

  But suddenly Fiona was on her feet and staring at me, leaning over the desk, and leaning on her clenched fists.

  “You won’t?” and she spoke through gritted teeth.

  “No, I won’t,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry, Fiona, but I couldn’t. Not possibly. It wouldn’t be right for you, it wouldn’t be right for the baby and anyway - I couldn’t bring myself to - to destroy a child who would be my own niece or nephew. I pity you very deeply, and I’ll help you all I can - but not that way.”

  She whirled then, and stared at David, her head held in a challenging sort of way.

  “And what about you, David? How do you feel now? I told you how I feel, but you - you didn’t want to know. You’re as bad as my parents, you know that? You’ve said enough about them, about their stuffy middle-class morality, but you’re cut out of the same piece of cloth. Never mind how I felt. Never mind what I wanted. Never mind - never mind the way I loved you once. When it happened. Because, believe me, David Fenwick, I don’t love you now, any more than you love me - any more than you ever did. You’ve only ever loved yourself, and I was bloody fool enough to delude myself into believing you could care for me, and could love me properly. You - you make me sick!”

  I stood up then, and stared at both of them.

  “Fiona! Are you trying to say - do you mean that your parents want you to have an abortion too? And that you don’t want to?”

  She turned then and spoke softly, and very directly.

  “That’s just it. The first thing he said when I told him - “ and she indicated the silent David with a toss of her head, “the first thing he said was ‘how can we get rid of it?’ Rid of it! I loved him - loved him enough to make love to him, and when I knew about the baby, I was glad, do you know that? I was glad. A love-child, I thought - a beautiful thing to be. A love-child. And then he - he said ‘get rid of it’. I think that was when I started to hate him - “

  David moved sharply then, his face twisted with pain, but she turned on him with such anger that he shrank back.

  “Yes - hated you!” and she nearly spat the words at him. “I haven’t said it to you before because you were too busy working out your own little sordid ideas to pay any attention to what I wanted, or how I was feeling. And then when my parents said the same thing, it seemed to me that - oh, I don’t know. There was nothing else to do but go with the wind. So I let him bring me here. He swore you’d see us right - that was how he put it. You’d see us right, he said. And with so many people thinking it was the right thing to do - I don’t know. I thought maybe I was crazy to want the baby, to want to stay pregnant and give birth to a child of my own.”

  Quite suddenly, she sat down again on the edge of my desk, and the colour that had filled her pale cheeks with a delicate peachlike flush faded and left her looking more washed out than ever.

  I moved then to come round the table to sit beside her, but she jumped up and ran to the door.

  “No - don’t come near me, any of you. I know what’s going to happen - what always happens with David. He’ll wheedle and cajole and persuade you to do it. And then you’ll start on me, and you’ll tell me, like my parents did, that I’m stupid to want to keep a baby, that it’ll ruin my career, and that I’ll never get my degree, and that it just isn’t worth it, and I can have lots of babies later on if I want them - oh, I know how it’ll be - and I want no part of it!”

  “It won’t be like that, I promise you, Fiona. I truly promise you. He won’t cajole me this time. He can always get money out of me because that isn’t all that important, but this time he’ll find I can’t be budged. It matters too much, you see. Far too much. You can trust me, Fiona. Let me look after you, please?”

  But she shook her head, leaning there against the door, her pale face gleaming against the dark wood, for the room was rapidly getting darker now, as the sun finally disappeared behind the trees in the garden outside the window.

  “No. It’s too late now. A love-child means a child who is loved - not only one that’s conceived in love. This baby, even if I have it, won’t be a true love-child, because its own father will hate it and wish it had never been born, and so will its grandparents. So what’s the use? I’ll do as they want - your brother, and my parents. I’ll do as they want, but I’ll do it my way, with my own money.”

  She lifted her chin and looked at David then.

  “You didn’t know that, David, did you? That I had some money of my own, all tucked away safely, where you couldn’t get at it? Well, I have, I - I was saving it for the baby.”

  Her voice cracked suddenly, and she took a deep breath before she went on.

  “I was saving it to live on during the last months, when I couldn’t manage to work anymore, because I was going to leave the University and take a job. And I was saving it for things like prams and nappies and sleeping suits - “

  And now tears were streaming down her face, and I felt tears of sympathy in my own eyes as I looked at her, distraught as she was, and clearly not really able to think clearly.

  “Anyway, I shan’t want it any more for that. Because I’m going to find someone who will get rid of it for you - for you, not me, but for you, its father. Remember that. You’re the father and you’re making me kill it because you don’t love me or the baby you made. That’s what I’m going to do, all on my own, and I don’t care what happens to me, or you or anyone - “

  And then she moved with an incredible speed, and had wrenched the door open and run across the hall before we knew what had happened.

  It was a moment before either of us came to properly, and then we were both running full tilt after her, out through the front door which she’d left swinging open, and out into the garden.

  I saw her disappear round the corner of the drive, her long legs twinkling as she ran, and I pelted after her, with David just behind me.

  “Fiona,” I screamed. “Fiona - come back!”

  We had reached the main road as I cried out her name, and she was half-way across it. It must have been the sound of my voice that did it, for she halted momentarily in her headlong run and turned her head to look over her shoulder, and then recovered her speed and ran on.

  But not fast enough. Round the curve of the road I saw it coming as though in some slow-motion nightmare, a huge lumbering furniture lorry. I stood there, in what seemed like time held still, and saw the lorry moving inexorably towards her, saw her long legs moving with what seemed like interminable slowness, saw the big offside wing catch her and send her sprawling like a crumpled toy to lie beneath its wheels. And then I heard the high shriek of the brakes, the loud shouts of the driver, and saw a blur as David shot past me towards Fiona. And everything seemed to swing and lurch as the evening sky came swooping towards me, and the pavement came up to meet me in a blur.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I think it was the shock of realizing that I had contributed so heavily to Fiona’s accident that made me faint - something I’d never done in my life before. Certainly it was this realization that made me sit huddled, sick and miserable, over my desk long after Fiona had been taken to hospital in an ambulance with a pale and distraught David beside her.

/>   For however I looked at it, the accident had been largely my fault. I had mishandled that interview so badly - so criminally badly. I should have remembered that a girl in the early days of a pregnancy, and an illegitimate pregnancy at that, is in a highly emotional state, liable to do anything. This poor child had been bombarded with advice to get rid of her baby, advice given by people she loved, none of whom seemed to realize she wanted the baby. And I, to whom she and my brother had turned for advice, had presented a rigid holier-than-thou sort of face that must have made her feel worse than ever.

  And then, when she had gone careering off like that, I had shouted at her as she crossed the road - and as a result she was now in hospital, in heaven knew what sort of condition.

  Quite suddenly, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to know what was going on at Fenbridge hospital, what was likely to happen to Fiona - and to her baby. I’d had to stay at Downlands when David went off with the ambulance, because there was no one else to take emergency calls, since Max hadn’t yet returned from his visit. But I couldn’t sit there in the silent house waiting and wondering any longer.

  I left a note for Max beside the phone, telling him I’d gone to Fenbridge to see about an accident case - there seemed no point in giving him further details. Then, I called the telephone exchange and asked the Supervisor to handle any calls that came through for Downlands.

  “Certainly I will, doctor,” she said cheerfully. “And if there seems to be anything really urgent, I’ll call you at the hospital - drive carefully, now!”

  And I did, because I had to. It was incredible how shaky I still felt, how much delayed reaction Fiona’s accident had left in me. As I manoeuvred the car along the now dark roads through the warmth of the summer night, my thoughts chased each other round my head like a squirrel in a cage.

  I seemed to have made such a mess of everything - my own career to start with. If I’d thought about it, there must have been some other way of getting over the financial problems created by Dad’s death. And David - hadn’t I spoiled him outrageously? Oh, of course it wasn’t my fault the boy was quite as wild as he was - even in my self-accusatory mood I had more sense than to blame myself for intrinsic personality traits such as David’s. But I hadn’t helped him develop any sense of personal responsibility, dishing out money so freely, laughing so indulgently at his weaknesses.

  And having made the decision for David’s sake and come here to Tetherdown, look at the mess I’d made of that. Running afoul of Max Lester on the very first day, and never getting our relationship on an even keel - and it was clearly as much my fault as his that we hadn’t got on. That night of the thunderstorm had shown me a different side to his character, had shown me that he was in fact a basically kind man. His patients loved him, his other colleagues respected him - it must be a fault in me that made us such bad friends.

  And when I thought about it, there had been so many things I had done so wrong - the Higgins’ case, the Jeremy episode, even the business with diabetic Jennifer - hadn’t I mismanaged them all woefully badly? Really, I’d made an awful mess of everything. By the time I reached Fenbridge hospital I was in a very miserable frame of mind indeed, and it was only the effort of will that I used to avoid thinking about the disastrous business with Charles that stopped me from feeling positively suicidal.

  I found Fiona still in the Casualty department when I had parked the car and gone hurrying on to the main block. David was sitting hunched unhappily on one of the benches in the waiting room, and he raised a tear-stained face to me as I came over and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Flip,” he said huskily. “Hello, Flip. Are you all right now?”

  And then his face crumpled, and he was crying for all the world like the little boy he had been so short a time ago, it seemed to me. I sat beside him and cradled his head in my arms and let him have his cry out as I stroked his shaking shoulders. A man who can cry, who isn’t ashamed to let his natural emotion show, is lucky, and I knew better than to try to stop his tears.

  He recovered fairly soon, and blew his nose vigorously, and dried his face before speaking again.

  “I’ll - I’ll never forgive myself if anything happens to Fiona,” he said, and it was almost a whisper. “I didn’t know how much she mattered to me, Flip, I just didn’t know. I do love her, you know. In my own way, I love her very much.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and put out my hands to push his hair back from his forehead. “Loving someone is - important,” and I tried not to think of my own loveless state.

  “And it’s not only Fiona,” he said, staring over my shoulder into space, talking more to himself than to me. “It’s the baby, too. I thought I didn’t want it - thought the only thing that mattered was to get rid of it, but now - now I want it to be all right. So much. If - Fiona loses the baby, I shall - I don’t know what I’ll do - “

  He looked at me then, his eyes re-focusing as he stared at me.

  “It’s odd, Flip - but it is a person - and more than a person. A part of me, of Fiona and me. No matter what happens, I’ll never be able to forget that. We loved each other, and because of that there is another person. It’s a marvellous, terrifying thought - Flip!” and suddenly his voice was agonized, and he clutched at me, and his eyes dilated with fear. “Flip! Tell me she’ll be all right! Promise me she won’t die - Flip? Promise me!”

  And he sounded just as he had when he’d been small, and his pet mouse had escaped from the cage in which he so lovingly kept it. And I was just as helpless now as I had been then. I couldn’t guarantee the mouse would come back, and I couldn’t offer any reassurance about Fiona, for I didn’t know yet what was happening.

  I did the only thing I could do - opened my arms and let him creep into them for comfort. And after a while, as he sat huddled up to me he spoke again.

  “Flip, can you forgive me? It was a lousy thing for me to have done.”

  “What was?” I asked gently.

  “I was only thinking of myself, you see. Not of - of Fiona or you. It was bad enough to try to force Fiona into an - abortion, bad enough I wanted things to be solved that way. But to ask you to do it! My God, I must have been mad! You could have wrecked your career if you’d done it, couldn’t you?”

  “No - not really. Not today. The law is easier than it was, and if I’d felt it best for Fiona and the baby to abort her, I could have arranged it legally. But I didn’t think it was best. In fact, I don’t believe I thought at all,” I finished bitterly.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Flip,” David sat up and looked at me very earnestly. “You mustn’t. You were absolutely right to say what you did, and you mustn’t blame yourself - “

  Across the waiting room, a door swung open, and a trolley with a nurse propelling one end and a porter the other, came through on silent rubber wheels. The nurse was holding aloft a bottle of ruby red blood, which was connected to the still figure on the trolley by a length of translucent tubing.

  We both jumped up, and as the trolley went smoothly across towards the lift, a doctor came out too, and walked over to us. It was Dr Jefferson, a man I knew slightly from my clinic sessions at the hospital.

  “Hello, Dr Fenwick!” he said cordially. “Now, this girl er - Fiona Matheson - is she your patient?”

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, in a way,” I floundered and he raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m more of a relative,” I said. “That is, this is David Fenwick, my brother - Fiona is his girlfriend.”

  “I see,” he said, and looked very levelly at David. “Then - look, Dr Fenwick, I think I’ll talk to you on your own, if you don’t mind, and then you can talk to your brother afterwards - “ and he took my elbow and propelled me across the waiting room to his small consulting room.

  I looked back at David, and my heart turned over for him. He looked so anxious and bereft, standing there alone. But he looked older too, and I realized in that one fleeting moment that whatever happened, David wasn’t a feckless boy any more. This
whole sorry business had brought him face to face with himself and his own attitudes, and I could only pray that what he saw would make a true man of him.

  Dr Jefferson sat me at his desk, and offered me a cigarette, but I shook my head.

  “Well? What’s her prognosis? How will she do?” I asked directly.

  “She will,” he said. “She’ll be all right. She’s concussed, but there’s no skull fracture. And she’s got a fractured pelvis that’ll take time to put right. But she’ll be fine in herself. However, there is something else - “

  “The pregnancy,” I said.

  “You knew about that?” He looked relieved. “I was afraid you didn’t. It could complicate things, since I gather they’re not married.”

  “They’re both still at University,” I said. “But I know about the pregnancy. They - told me tonight.”

  “Knew,” he said gently. “Past tense, Dr Fenwick. She aborted just after getting here. We’re taking her to theatre now, to make sure all is complete. I’m sorry about it - though maybe it’s all for the best, under the circumstances.”

  I shook my head. “It would have been - a few hours ago. But now, I’m not so sure. She wanted it, you see. And my brother too - since the accident he’s had a chance to think, and he’s realized just what it meant. Poor babies.” And I whispered it. “Poor babies.”

  “You’d better go and talk to him,” Dr Jefferson said. “He’ll need you for a while, I imagine. He can see her soon - she should be back from theatre and round from her anaesthetic in an hour or so - and then she’ll need him. I’m sorry you’re having so much family bother, my dear. Being a doctor isn’t as much help as people think, when illness and trouble hit your own people, is it?”