The Real Fantasy

by Caroline Anderson

  Matthew looked at her carefully, then glanced at the photograph. ‘Yes, it is.’

  She put the picture down with great care and stared around her at the spacious but lonely bedroom. Evidence of Mr Roland’s late wife was all around—pictures, a tapestry she had done, even a favourite cardigan folded on a chair, gathering dust.

  ‘I’ve never seen their homes,’ she said, and she sounded a little awed and somewhat sad. ‘They came from out of nowhere, and we sent them back without any idea of whether they could cope and what their conditions were like.’

  Matthew snorted. ‘Tell me about it. We had one chap who had a prostate operation as a day case and was sent home with bladder irrigation for the first forty-eight hours! And who was supposed to do it? Me and the district nurse.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  He sighed. ‘I admitted him to the cottage hospital and he was properly looked after. I expect they knew we’d do that. Anyway, I wrote with some—ah, suggestions, and they’ve since changed their procedures.’

  Linsey met his eyes and returned his smile. ‘I’ll bet,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll just bet.’

  He dragged his eyes away from hers and cleared his throat. ‘Right, two more calls and then we can pop in at the hospital on our way back for lunch.’

  They paused for a quick chat with the neighbour, did a post-op follow-up and another visit to a sick child with tonsillitis, and then popped into the cottage hospital.

  A between-the-wars structure, it was on two floors, with two small wards and a tiny casualty unit for very minor problems, which doubled as an out-patient clinic for minor-surgery techniques by those GPs who didn’t have their own facilities, Matthew explained. There were thirty beds altogether in the two wards, both mixed, although the patients were ‘zoned’ to give them a little more privacy.

  The lady they were to check on was in the ground-floor ward at the far end, and she was lying chatting happily with the lady in the next bed.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Simms,’ Matthew said cheerfully.

  ‘Oh, Doctor! Hello. Oh, my goodness, I wasn’t expecting you—let me put my teeth in.’

  She fumbled in the pot by the bed, and then gave them a toothy grin and shuffled up the bed a little. ‘There. That’s better. How are you?’

  Matthew grinned and winked at the neighbour. ‘I thought that was my line.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, well—it is! And I’m much better, but I shouldn’t tell you that or you’ll send me home,’ she confided with a wheezy giggle. Her eyes flicked to Linsey. ‘Who’s your girlfriend, Dr Jarvis?’

  Matthew felt the colour threaten and could have strangled the old dear for her choice of words. ‘I should be so lucky,’ he said lightly. ‘This is Dr Wheeler, who’s been working in hospitals until now and is spending a year with us in general practice.’

  She patted his arm. ‘A whole year, eh? I expect you’ll manage to charm her in that time, dear, don’t you?’

  She gave another wheezy cackle and Matthew found his smile was slipping a little. Linsey, bless her, moved up beside him and shook Mrs Simms’s hand, relieving him of the necessity for a reply. Her words, though, did nothing to soothe him.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mrs Simms,’ she said with a smile. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing quite a bit of you one way and another, and I’ll keep you in touch with his progress—although I must say he’s been a bit lacking on the charm front recently. Perhaps we’ll have to give him some lessons.’

  He thought the old duck was going to be pushing up daisies, she laughed so much. He glared at Linsey, who simply smiled innocently and stepped back out of his way, eyes sparkling with mischief.

  He arched a brow at her disapprovingly, ignored her tiny giggle of defiance and whipped his stethoscope out of his pocket. ‘Right, Mrs Simms, let’s have a listen to this old chest of yours and see if it’s a bit clearer.’ He turned to Linsey. ‘She had a touch of right-sided failure and a bit of oedema, so we’re keeping an eye on the chest, and her legs are supposed to be up to aid her venous return and get the oedema down. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘If you say so, Doctor. Do you want my nightie up?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I can hear through the material if you’ll stop cracking jokes with my colleague,’ he growled gently.

  She pulled a mock-guilty face, breathed in and out obediently and showed him her legs. He passed the stethoscope to Linsey. ‘There’s a little congestion still in the lower left lobe of her lungs. Otherwise she seems clear. Have a listen.’

  She did so, frowning as she handed him back the instrument. He shook his head slightly in warning and tucked Mrs Simms back up in the bed. ‘Right, my dear, I think you can go home if you promise to wear your support tights and take your water tablets. Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘Oh, it’s been so warm to wear tights, and I forget the pills—’

  ‘I can always send you to Southampton,’ he said mildly, folding up the stethoscope and returning it to his pocket..

  ‘No—no, I’ll do it. I really will, I promise!’

  He smiled at her and patted her hand. ‘All right. You can go home just as soon as someone can get you some food in and give you a lift, all right? How about your son?’

  ‘I’ll ask him. He’s in this afternoon—could I go then?’

  ‘Yes, if he can sort it out. I’ll sign your forms and they can get your pills ready, OK? And I’ll come and see you at home in a few days.’

  He ushered Linsey out and made sure they were well out of earshot before he let her speak. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Her heart’s a bit rough, isn’t it?’

  He smiled. ‘Just a bit. I don’t think she has any idea how irregular the beat is or how weak. I don’t want her to know, either. She’s a sweet old thing and she’s near the end—I don’t want her to have to worry every minute.’

  He did the necessary paperwork in the sister’s office on the way out, and then whipped the professional journal that Linsey had picked up off the desk from her hand and ushered her out of the door.

  ‘Lunchtime,’ he said succinctly. They reached the car and he unlocked it, and the blast of heat from the inside nearly choked him. Their eyes met over the roof. ‘How about picking up a sandwich and eating it in the park over the road? Maybe we can find a patch of shade.’

  She looked doubtful. ‘Have we got time?’

  ‘Just about.’

  He shut the car door again, but as he did so a woman ran from the hospital entrance. ‘Dr Jarvis? Wait!’

  He turned towards her. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Call from the surgery—would you please go straight back there—there’s an emergency come in and no one’s there. Someone’s collapsed with the heat and the receptionist said another patient was resuscitating her.’

  He unlocked the car, jumped in, regardless of the temperature and gunned the engine, pulling away in a squeal of tyres. He just hoped Linsey was in, because there wasn’t time to worry about her. He shot her a quick glance. ‘OK? Sorry about that.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s medicine for you. One minute you’re planning lunch in the park, the next you’re flying along at fifty in a thirty-mile-an-hour limit to save someone’s life. It’s about time it hotted up—it’s been a bit tame really so far.’

  He laughed. ‘Tame? That’s general practice for you, Linsey. Old dears and tonsils.’

  He swung into the surgery car park, cut the engine and ran, leaving the door hanging open. He didn’t wait for Linsey. There wasn’t time.

  They needn’t have hurried. The woman, in her late fifties and heavily obese, had succumbed to the heat and nothing and no one could bring her back. They had no idea who she was, except that she wasn’t local. She had been dropped off at the gate by someone, Linsey gathered—possibly a taxi. She was wearing a wedding ring round her neck, but whether because she was divorced or because her fingers had become so swollen that she could no longer get it on they had no idea.

  ‘No ID at all,’ Matt
hew said in disgust. ‘Oh, well, she’d better go to Lymington Hospital mortuary.’

  ‘Don’t you have a mortuary here?’ Linsey asked.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not chilled, and in this heat—’ He shrugged. ‘We may have to keep her body some time before we can identify her, and she’ll need a postmortem, even though the cause of death is fairly obvious. That has to be done at Lymington. And in the meantime, we have to wait for someone to notice that she’s missing.’

  ‘Poor old thing,’ Linsey said. ‘Fancy dying like that, all alone. Do you suppose she’s here on holiday?’

  ‘Could be. We won’t know, will we? I’ll notify the police.’

  He disappeared, leaving Linsey with the dead woman, and she searched the body yet again for any clues. There was only one—the label on the blouse was not mass-produced, nor was the garment, and it declared that the blouse was made in Sussex by Christine Cleary.

  A clue? Possibly. She knew the name, and the firm. She wrote it down and gave the piece of paper to Suzanne. ‘Could you give this to the police? They’re a small local firm specialising in outsize clothes. It might be worth contacting them. My aunt uses them, and they’re very good at remembering her name. Perhaps they’ll know this lady, unless she picked up the blouse at a jumble sale or second-hand shop. They might be worth speaking to.’

  Suzanne took the piece of paper and promised to hand the information on. By this time Matthew had finished with the police on the phone and the ambulance had arrived to move the body.

  He shot a glance at his watch. ‘Looks like lunch will be a quick cup of coffee and yet another packet of biscuits,’ he said with a sigh.

  Linsey needed more than that. Slender she might be, but there was a lot of her, nonetheless. ‘Speak for yourself—I’ m having something out of my fridge.’

  He looked at her as if she held the elixir of life in her hands. ‘Is there enough for two?’ he said hopefully.

  She chuckled. ‘Maybe. I could knock up a cheese salad,’ she offered.

  His eyes lit up. ‘Really? I’m ravenous. I didn’t have time for breakfast,’ he confessed.

  She shook her head disapprovingly and ran upstairs to her flat, Matthew on her heels. They raided the fridge and he grated cheese while she washed and cut up the salad, then they bolted the food down and went back to the kitchen to grab a mug of filter coffee before the antenatal clinic started at two. They hadn’t had time to exchange more than a word or two, but nevertheless, sharing the meal had been cosy in a way, and she hoped it might have softened him up, because there was something she wanted, and he needed to be receptive.

  ‘Can I ask a favour?’ she said, wondering how he would react.

  ‘You give me lunch and already you want a favour?’

  She blushed a little, and he laughed.

  ‘I knew it. What?’

  ‘Can I do your antenatal clinic?’

  ‘No.’

  Fine. That was how he’d react, of course. Why had she expected anything different?

  He leant over and covered her hand with his, and a shiver went up her arm as he squeezed gently and released her. ‘Watch what I do, how I work with the midwife—by all means ask questions and, if the mums don’t mind, examine them, but I want to make sure you do things our way.’ He looked at her, saw the set of her mouth and she could see the conciliatory words forming in his mind.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you.’ She mimicked his voice.

  He grinned sheepishly. ‘It isn’t. You said yourself continuity was important. Just give yourself a few days to settle in and you’ll find you’ve got more than enough to keep you quiet. Rosie’s going on holiday in a fortnight, and Tim is owed time off in a serious way. Don’t worry, Linsey. Just enjoy the rest while it lasts.’

  So she did. Well, in a manner of speaking. While he dealt with one patient, she read through the notes of the next, then observed to see if he followed up the way she would have done.

  He did. She was relieved. After the morning’s episode with the carefully nurtured psyches of his neurotic patients, she had wondered if she was cut out for general practice.

  Halfway through, the phone rang.

  ‘Would you get that, please, Dr Wheeler?’ Matthew asked, continuing to palpate the distended abdomen of his patient.

  She picked up the phone. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could you ask Dr Jarvis to phone Dr Williams at home as soon as possible, Dr Wheeler?’ April, the receptionist, asked her.

  ‘Of course. Any idea what about?’

  ‘He didn’t say, but it sounded urgent.’

  ‘I’ll hand it on,’ she promised.

  As she cradled the receiver Matthew raised one eyebrow at her.

  ‘Phone Dr Williams at home.’

  He nodded, finished the consultation and picked up the phone.

  ‘Rhys? Matthew. What can I do for you?’

  He leant back in the chair, listening for a moment. ‘Sure. What sort of problem?’

  There was a short silence. ‘Judy? What about her?’ Another pause, then Matthew straightened slowly. ‘Gone? Where to?’

  Linsey caught the anxiety in his voice, and turned to him. ‘Problems?’ she mouthed.

  He nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  He put the phone down, grabbed his jacket and rummaged for the car keys. ‘You get your wish. Could you finish my antenatal clinic, please? And you might find you get twice as lucky and end up doing Rhys’s surgery this evening, if not for the rest of the week. His wife’s just left him.’

  As a parting shot, Linsey thought, it was superb. The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of activity, and as she tried desperately to do things as Matthew would have done without compromising her own judgement she found her mind straying to the big, genial man who had shown her such kindness on the day of her interview.

  What kind of personal hell was he going through now? Why had his wife left him? He seemed such a genuinely decent man. Was it all a sham? Perhaps he beat her. Maybe he drank—plenty of doctors did, given the stress of the job.

  The last antenatal patient came and went, and Linsey went out to Reception with the bundle of notes and spoke to Suzanne. ‘Any news from Dr Williams or Dr Jarvis?’

  ‘Yes—can you please do Rhys’s evening surgery? He’s on call tonight but Matthew says Tim’ll do that. Will you be able to manage?’

  ‘Of course. Where are the notes? Perhaps I should look through them first and see if there’s anything I should be aware of.’

  She was handed a stack of patient envelopes and went into her consulting room. Her name was on the door, she noticed, and it all looked very professional. She was qualified, her last stint had been in A and E and she’d had more than enough responsibility there.

  So why were her hands clammy and her knees knocking and why was her heart beating nineteen to the dozen? All day she’d been frustrated by the lack of responsibility. So why the sudden stage fright?

  Oh, well, perhaps the adrenalin would help her to concentrate and do things right. At least she was computer-literate! So many of her hospital colleagues hadn’t been.

  She flicked on the monitor, tapped buttons and brought the notes of the first patient up on the screen. An elderly lady with apparently very good health, she had no immediate history that Linsey thought could be troubling her. So, no clues. Oh, well.

  She checked the second patient, and the third, with the same result, and finally decided that the way to handle it was to scan the notes just before the patient came in. She could hear Matthew’s voice, and was reassured to know he was just the other side of the wall and could be summoned in the event of any difficulty.

  That was the difference, of course. In hospital there was always another person on the next rung of the ladder who could be referred to at a moment’s notice. A GP had to make all the decisions and carry the can totally alone. It was a lonely life, she realised, and could be stressful not only because of the pressure but the tedium and very autono
my of it.

  The rewards, on the other hand, were more readily visible than in hospital. Children cared for from an early stage of pregnancy would stay in the practice and become adults, and would in turn bring their children in. Family doctoring at its best.

  And she was just about to taste it for the first time...

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MATTHEW was waiting for her in the kitchen when she finished her surgery just after six-thirty. He didn’t say a word, just pushed a mug of coffee across the table towards her and watched in silence as she sipped it gratefully, wriggled her feet out of her shoes and sighed.

  ‘Manage OK?’ he asked at last.

  She nodded.

  ‘Any problems?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  He looked almost disappointed, she thought, and nearly smiled. Then she remembered why she had been doing the surgery in the first place, and the urge to smile vanished.

  ‘How’s Rhys?’ she asked softly.

  Matthew’s face darkened. ‘Shattered. Can we go up to your flat?’

  ‘Sure.’ She drained her coffee, picked up her shoes and led the way upstairs. The sun was dipping in the sky, glinting on the distant sea, and she stood in the window and breathed in the cooler evening air. Finally she turned to him as he sprawled in the big armchair that she guessed had always been his favourite.

  ‘So, tell me about Rhys.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t—not all of it. He’ll have to tell you himself. I’ll tell you what I can, but it’s not much. Judy’s gone—walked out this morning, leaving a note. The kids were with a child-minder.’

  How dreadful, to come home and find that, she thought. She perched on the edge of the sofa near him. ‘No warning?’ she asked.

  Matthew shrugged. ‘Things hadn’t been wonderful for a while. I don’t think he made any secret of that, but no, there was no warning that she was going, certainly not like this, without saying anything or leaving an address.’

  Linsey’s eyes widened. ‘But what about the children? Will she come back? Is it just a temporary escape from a difficult situation?’