by June Gadsby
‘Were those louts whistling at you?’ he asked, his expression darkening into one of jealous anger, though she knew he was too gentle to take anybody to task, even if it meant saving her honour.
‘Oh, they’re just having a bit of fun. Take no notice. I don’t,’ she said with a grin as he bent down to peck her on the cheek: ‘Haven’t you any customers, then?’
‘Nah,’ he replied, rubbing the back of his broad neck. ‘Things have gone from bad to worse since this ruddy war started. Meat’s in short supply these days. And there’s talk of things being rationed, too. Let’s hope it gets sorted out soon.’
Walter had been running the family business since his father’s heart attack two years previously. The only competition in the town was the Co-op and both the shops had recently seen queues forming right down the street. Housewives were stockpiling general groceries as if there was no tomorrow. The fact that it was the coldest winter on record for about half a century didn’t deter the housewives of Felling. They wore extra layers of clothing, woollen headscarves and gloves and stamped their booted feet to keep warm as they waited.
‘They say it’ll get worse before it gets better,’ Mary said and winced, thinking that she sounded just like her mother, who was a bit of a Job’s comforter at the best of times.
‘Aye.’ Walter cast about him, a sure sign that he was about to change the subject. ‘Any chance of you helping out on the deliveries tonight, Mary? Kevin’s joined up, the idiot.’
Kevin was Walter’s delivery boy. He wasn’t highly intelligent, but he was a good worker and his absence would be sorely felt. Mary sighed, wondering just how long it was going to be before towns and villages would be emptied of every male who wasn’t too old or too infirm to fight for his country.
‘As long as I get to drive the van.’ She smiled, dimpling and waiting for the usual frown, for Walter didn’t have much confidence in women drivers, even though she had passed her test a few months ago.
‘Sorry, no chance of that. Not with petrol being rationed.’
Mary blew out her cheeks and pulled a face. ‘I suppose I’ll have to use Kevin’s bike, then.’
‘I don’t know what you want to drive for, anyway,’ he told her grumpily and glowered at her beneath lowered brows. ‘I don’t know any other women, except those Beasley females, who drive. Them and the vicar’s wife.’
‘Oh, there are quite a few of us around these days,’ she said. ‘And you watch what you say about Mrs Beasley and her daughter. They were like family to me when I was growing up.’
It was true. Brigadier and Mrs Beasley had ‘adopted’ Mary as a companion to their daughter, Anne, when the girls were only six years old. They had enjoyed a unique education in the capable hands of a private tutor, Miss Frances Croft who, although English, had been born and raised in France, where her father had been something important at the British Embassy in Paris. It was very rare that a girl like Mary, who came from a very different background, could have such an opportunity, though she wasn’t always happy with the arrangement at the time.
Anne had been a strange girl, quiet and moody and often rebellious. Left alone with her studies, she was lazy and uninterested. With Mary at her side, she became competitive and enthusiastic. Mary’s mother had not been too happy about handing her daughter over to this wealthy, influential family, but could not turn her back on the financial remuneration, and the fact that her youngest daughter might possibly make something of herself at the end of the day.
‘I saw Miss Beasley the other day,’ Walter said, twisting his face and sucking air through his teeth. ‘She came into the shop here and demanded that I keep her a pound of the best steak. I told her, I said, you come and take your chances like everybody else. I don’t go in for keeping things under the counter for customers who think they’re privileged. Aye, that’s what I said to her. She didn’t like it.’
Mary laughed. ‘No, I can imagine the look on her face. Poor Anne.’
‘There’s nowt poor about that family, as you well know.’ Walter stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet. ‘Now, are you going to help me out th’ night or not?’
‘I suppose so,’ Mary said. ‘Look, Walter, I’d better get on. Mr Harper will have one of his tantrums if I’m late again.’
‘You’re heading in the wrong direction, aren’t you?’
Mary shook her head. ‘I’ve got to pick up a prescription for Gran. She’s got bronchitis again and she can’t seem to shift it.’
‘Does she still sleep in the back yard?’ Walter rolled his eyes. ‘Can’t you persuade her that yon Adolph Hitler isn’t coming to bomb her out of her bed?’
‘You know my gran,’ Mary said with a laugh, picturing her grandmother wrapped in eiderdowns and with a woolly hat pulled over her eyes and ears, down in the reinforced concrete shelter, which was how she had been every night since war had been declared. No wonder she had bronchitis.
Mary glanced from side to side and, pleased that there was no one looking, stepped up to Walter and gave him a quick kiss. ‘I’m off. See you later?’
She hurried away, knowing that Walter’s wistful eyes would follow her all the way up the High Street. But she dared not linger. Time was ticking on. Over at Harper’s Drapery Store she could picture the boss keeping a mean eye on his watch.
And there lay the biggest problem in Mary’s life. Mr Harper lived up to his reputation of being a slave-driver and a lecherous individual, who went through his female employees like a hot knife through butter. Mary longed for the day when she could say goodbye to brassières, corsets and camisole knickers, though her mother liked her daughter serving fancy underwear to the more genteel ladies of the town. It was better than Woolworth’s, or slaving all day in a factory like so many of her school chums had ended up doing. Still, she was prepared to wait until something more stimulating came along.
Dr Gordon’s surgery was packed with coughs, streaming noses and fretful children. Mary’s heart sank. If she had to wait more than five minutes she really would be late getting back to her post. Mr Harper would take great pleasure out of hauling her over the coals and he was still smarting from a blow she had orchestrated to his tender regions with the aid of the metal cash register drawer. He had been a little too free with his hands under cover of the counter. With a surreptitious press of the right key, the drawer had shot out and found its mark, bringing tears to the poor man’s eyes and great satisfaction to Mary’s heart, though she went through the motions of being “dreadfully sorry” for her carelessness.
Mary’s thoughts of Mr Harper and the cash register were interrupted by the loud discordant whirring of the practice bell, indicating that Dr Gordon was ready to see the next patient. There was a bit of a scuffle between two women as they argued over whose turn it was. By the time they had calmed down, a man with a flat cap pulled over his eyes, a white silk muffler about his throat, and a cigarette attached to his bottom lip as if it had been glued there, had taken advantage of the situatin. He muttered something about ruddy women as he left the green-painted walls of the waiting-room and entered the brown-painted walls of the passage leading to the consulting-rooms.
Mary glanced anxiously at her watch and decided to leave, but the doorbell gave a sharp jangle and everyone looked up, surprised to see Dr Gordon himself step in from the street. He looked flustered and red-faced from hurrying, as he squeezed through the crowded room, pushing his black doctor’s bag before him.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ he said to the mournful eyes and curious glances that followed him. ‘Today’s my day for emergencies.’
‘If I have to wait here any longer,’ said one fat woman whom Mary could smell across the room, ‘I’ll be a bliddy emergency.’
She set off cackling with toothless laughter. Some of the other patients joined in. Others looked more embarrassed than amused.
‘Och, Mary,’ Dr Gordon said, getting his eye on her, for she was standing directly in his path. ‘What are you doing here? You’re
not ill, are you?’
‘No, Dr Gordon. It’s not me …’
‘Well, you soon will be ill if you wait here with all these germs being breathed into the atmosphere. What is it? Your grandmother again?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. She needs a new prescription to get her over the weekend. She’s not worse, but she’s no better.’
‘Aye, it’s this blessed cold spell we’ve been having that does it. I’ll give you something stronger for her. Come on through.’
‘Oh, but….’
Mary’s voice was drowned out by protests about her jumping the queue. Dr Gordon held up his hand and addressed them all with a soothing voice and a winning smile.
‘No need to get upset,’ he said. ‘We have two doctors dealing with your needs now. I’ll just write a prescription for this lassie’s poor old grandma and then we’ll go through you all like a dose of salts.’
‘If you’re not in the surgery, Doctor, who is?’ asked one heavily pregnant woman with her arm in a sling. Two small children clung to her coat with sticky fingers, emanating a sickly sweet aroma of raspberry gum-drops and minty black bullets.
‘Aye,’ said a fellow with a huge red boil on the back of his neck. ‘I hope it’s a proper doctor you’ve got in there and not one o’ them locum types what don’t know their arse from their elbow.’
‘I think you’ll find that Dr Craig, who happens to be my nephew, is very much a proper doctor, Mr Albertson. All right, Mary. Follow me, my dear.’
As Mary followed the doctor she heard mutters of surprise behind her at the news he had just imparted. She knew that Dr Gordon’s nephew had worked for a while in the infirmary in Newcastle, but she hadn’t heard that he was now in this practice.
The man who had gone before his turn passed them in the narrow corridor, grumbling with heartfelt disdain about newfangled doctors with daft ideas.
‘Something upsetting you, Mr Dobson?’ Dr Gordon called after the patient.
‘Aye, there is. It’s a raw deal when a doctor signs ye off afore ye’re ready,’ Mr Dobson told them. ‘I’d go to another doctor, if there was one.’
‘Come now, Mr Dobson. You know better than that. If Dr Craig thinks you’re ready to go back to work—’
‘I ain’t ready!’
‘Tommy Dobson, you were more than ready last time I saw you, but I gave you an extra week anyway out of the goodness of my heart. However, I hear you’ve been moonlighting, masquerading as a rag-and-bone man. If the authorities catch you, my lad, they’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks and you won’t have a job to go back to.’
‘I won’t anyway when they starts drafting fellas like me into the war. What’ll happen to the wife and bairns then, eh?’
With a look of disgust he marched out of the practice and Dr Gordon shook his head after him, his kindly eyes full of sympathy.
‘He’s right, of course. It’s not just the men who go to war who suffer.’ He gave Mary a wan smile, then ushered her into his consulting-room, just as the other door opened and a youngish doctor appeared in a crisp white surgery coat, a stethoscope around his neck and a brooding expression in his dark eyes.
‘Ah, there you are, Alex,’ Dr Gordon placed an avuncular hand on his nephew’s shoulder and drew him into the room. ‘You look as though you need a break.’
‘Too damned right I do.’
Mary watched closely as the younger man paced the small square of parquet floor in front of her. He looked disgruntled, his bad mood marring what she suspected could be a rather nice face.
‘Mary?’
Mary blinked at Dr Gordon, realizing that she had drifted off into her own private world while the two doctors had a short exchange of words.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘My nephew here will take care of your granny’s prescription while I go and prevent mayhem breaking out in the waiting-room.’
‘Oh, that’s very kind.’ She let her gaze flicker over to Dr Craig, who was already installing himself behind the desk and pulling a prescription pad towards him.
‘Blast!’
The sharp explosive curse erupted from Dr Craig as his uncle left the room. Mary looked at him with raised eyebrows, thinking that it had been a mistake to arrive at what was obviously a bad time for everybody.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause a problem, but Dr Gordon insisted,’ Mary apologized, and a pair of surprisingly intense eyes met hers. ‘Maybe I can come back later, when you’re not so busy?’
‘I wasn’t swearing at you, Miss…?’
‘West … Mary West.’
‘Yes, of course. Sit down … please.’
Mary sat on the hard wooden chair in front of the cluttered desk and watched him search among the jumble of papers and general miscellany that was characteristic of Dr Gordon, who always seemed able to find what he was looking for. Not so his nephew, she thought.
‘Try the vase on the windowsill,’ she suggested, guessing what it was that he was missing.
‘I beg your pardon?’ His eyes were on her again, his forehead creasing deeply.
She indicated the short fat porcelain vase to his left, which sat in front of a tiny window of four opaque glass panes. ‘Pens and pencils. He usually keeps them in there.’
‘Ah!’ He picked up the vase and peered inside. ‘You’re quite right. Other people’s consulting-rooms … Thank you.’
He continued to stare into the vase and at its contents, but it was obvious that he was not actually seeing anything. There was a faraway look about him that suggested he had more pressing things on his mind than a pen or a pencil, or indeed the prescription she was so urgently waiting for.
‘Gran’s name is Henrietta West and Dr Gordon usually gives her—’
‘What?’ He looked startled, then recovered himself quickly. ‘That’s quite all right, Miss West. I’ll get the details from her notes, if I can find the blessed things …’
‘They’re in the small drawers on top of the filing cabinet,’ Mary said, hoping he wouldn’t bite her head off again for helping him out, but she really couldn’t hang about much longer. ‘The one on the right, at the back – W for West, H for Henrietta.’
He gave her a sharp glance, then got up and went to the drawers indicated.
‘I do know my alphabet,’ he said, then the irritation became an apologetic smile. ‘And you are W for West, M for Mary, I believe.’
‘That’s right.’ She smiled back at him and his eyes lost some of their hardness as he looked at her properly for the first time.
‘Here we are,’ he said, pulling out two buff packages, hers slim, the other, belonging to her grandmother, bulging. ‘Is there anything I can do for you while you’re here?’
‘Not a thing, thank you,’ she told him, suddenly feeling shy and gauche because his stare had been one of appraisal and the light that came into his eyes was full of curiosity and interest, though respectful, unlike the workmen she had encountered in the street a short while ago.
‘By the feel of your notes, you are rarely ill,’ he said, checking the details on the outside of the packet before replacing it in the drawer.
‘I suppose I’m lucky.’
‘You are. Very lucky. And young, of course. Obviously fit. And cheerful, I’d say.’ He said all this, pronouncing these short, snappy phrases, while he inspected her grandmother’s notes and wrote out the necessary prescription. ‘Is there ever a time when you don’t smile, Mary?’
She blinked at the use of her Christian name, but then he was pretty young himself, not above twenty-eight or thirty, she guessed. Of course, his uncle, Dr Gordon, called her Mary, but then he had known her all her life, had even brought her into the world and given her that life-awakening tap on her bottom before handing her over to the midwife.
‘I suppose there must be times when I find things to frown at, but not often,’ she said. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘I would think it’s almost physically impossible for you not to smile,’
he said, handing her the prescription. ‘How lucky for your fiancé.’
She did frown at that remark, for she couldn’t think how he could have known that she was engaged.
‘How did you…?’
His laugh was pleasant and she thought that he too would be better advised to keep a smile on his face, since it transformed him from an apparently discontented person to a rather good-looking young man.
‘I noticed the ring,’ he said and she looked immediately down at Walter’s tiny, diamond-chip engagement-ring, which he had pressed upon her so long ago that she was no longer conscious of wearing it.
‘Oh, that! Yes.’ Was her smile rueful, unenthusiastic? Part of her hoped that it was neither, yet another part of her experienced that sinking sensation that comes with disappointment tinged with guilt.
‘Will the happy day be soon?’
‘No … oh, no!’ Goodness, Mary thought, feeling her cheeks burn as he went on scrutinizing her in a most disturbing fashion. ‘I mean … well, there’s nothing planned, really.’
‘I thought perhaps your fiancé might be going off to enlist in the forces. Such a lot of couples rush into marriage in times of war.’ Dr Craig sighed and tapped his pen methodically against the fingers of the other hand. ‘It’s not the wisest of moves. We already have quite a few very young pregnant ladies left to cope on their own.’
‘That’s sad,’ Mary said, eyeing the door and thinking of the time that was passing, but she didn’t want to leave until he dismissed her and sent for the next patient.
‘Don’t let it happen to you, Mary,’ he said, throwing down the pen as if it offended him. ‘Now, where are you going? I have a call to make so maybe I can give you a lift?’
‘Oh, it’s really no distance …’ she began to say, but he held up a hand and waited for her to tell him where she was headed. ‘Well, actually, it would help. I must try and get Gran’s medicine before I go back to work. She’s really struggling with this last bout of bronchitis. The thing is, I’m already late and my boss is a stickler for punctuality.’
