Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  ‘That was dreadful,’ Philip said, crouching at Harry’s feet. ‘But you mustn’t take it personally, Harry. He’s been hell ever since his kid came in, you know that The man never came to terms with the leukaemia diagnosis or with the way he used to treat the child as he was growing up. Once he heard Kevin had told you he — well, that was all part of it. He meant no real harm. It was just the misery and the guilt and — and because you had looked after the boy, and knew his history, you got the brunt of it I’m so sorry. We should have realized he’d go like that…’

  ‘Not your fault, Philip,’ Harry said, his voice thick and shaky at the same time. ‘Not your fault, but Christ, it gets to you when they hate you that much!’ He rubbed a trembling hand over his face, which was now sweating profusely. ‘I get used to some of the sideways sort, but that direct hatred … Christ.’

  ‘You’d better go off to rest,’ George said. ‘You’re shocked. Sister Collinson, where is Dr Kydd? She’ll want him to go off, too, I imagine, and —’

  Harry looked up at her. ‘Did you come to see me so soon? A phone call would have done perfectly well. I’m not even absolutely sure —’ And then, to his own obvious amazement and discomfiture, his eyes filled with tears which thickened and increased at a great rate, streaking down his face to leave glistening snail tracks behind.

  ‘Come on,’ Philip said and helped him to his feet. I’ll take you to your room to lie down. Sister?’

  Sister Collinson nodded. I’ll see to it that Dr Kydd knows. She’s down in the far cubicle with the Kennedy child, fixing the dressings on his thigh. There’s no way she’ll stop till that’s completely finished. Nurse Coulter?’ She turned to one of the nurses who were still hovering, ‘Go and tell her Dr Rajabani’s been taken ill and I’ll be along in a minute. And Harry —’ She turned back to him as Philip, with one arm round Harry protectively, led him to the double doors and the Disney corridor. I’ll talk to security about what happens next, don’t worry.’

  And she went bustling back to her desk, leaving George with nothing to do but go back to her own department. Which she did, feeling a great deal worse over what she had seen than she would have thought possible.

  11

  There was an urgent PM waiting for her when George got back to her department and she realized with considerable guilt that she hadn’t switched on her bleep that morning. Sheila was in a scolding mood in consequence.

  ‘If I don’t know what you’re up to then I can’t tell any decent lies, can I?’ she said. ‘I’ve had Danny nagging from the mortuary, and the phone’s been blistering all morning and all I could say was I’d give you messages. It’s not right, Dr B., really it isn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ George said and slid into her chair. ‘Who called?’

  ‘Oh, the cardiologists about that graph you did them for their prothrombins —’

  ‘But that’s perfect! They can’t have any complaints about that, for God’s sake!’

  ‘They haven’t. They wanted to thank you. He called himself, Mr Agnew Byford, it was.’ Sheila preened a little. ‘Talked to me for quite a while instead.’

  ‘Well, that was nice for you.’ George found it easier now she was sitting. The episode with Harry had left her shaky. ‘What else?’

  ‘Oh, someone from Fertility. It seems you left a notebook there. I said I’d tell you but then someone said to her — I heard it down the phone — that you’d been seen going to Paediatrics and they’d catch up with you there. Did they?’

  ‘Did who?’

  ‘I don’t know — someone from Fertility it was. Didn’t say who.’

  ‘No.’ George looked puzzled. ‘No one from Fertility spoke to me when I got to Barrie Ward. Oh damn.’ She had reached into her pocket. ‘If it hadn’t been for all that fuss in Paediatrics I’d have realized I’d left it on the desk and gone back to get it on my way here. Will you send one of the juniors for it? I don’t like to leave it lying around. Very important stuff in it.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have put it on someone else’s desk,’ Sheila said self-righteously. Then her passion for gossip overcame her. ‘What happened in Paediatrics?’ she demanded. ‘What fuss?’

  Probably because she was still so upset, and needed to get it out of her system, George told her, even though everyone knew that any piece of information given to Sheila Keen always spread itself all over the hospital within a matter of minutes. Not that it was likely to remain a secret; too many other people had been there to see what happened and they’d be sure to talk too.

  ‘There was a man in Paediatrics who shouted racial abuse at Dr Rajabani,’ she said. ‘Attacked him.’

  Sheila frowned. ‘Dr Rajabani?’ she said, reaching into her pocket. ‘Oh. He phoned here too, wanting to talk to you.’

  ‘Well, I saw him,’ George said, ‘poor devil,’ and went on to tell Sheila all that had happened. Sheila stood there, her eyes round with interest, and when George had finished, shook her head.

  ‘It’s terrible the way people go on around here. It’s not just those people who’re picketing, you know, there’re a few of these racists in among them too. It’s all over the place. I’ve heard them shouting like that in the street, over at the market when I go to get my vegetables. Only the other day it was, a whole lot of them, nasty characters with haircuts like lavatory brushes, yelling the sort of —’

  ‘I know,’ George said grimly, remembering what had happened at Gus’s fish shop. ‘Me too. I just never thought to hear it at Old East, I suppose.’

  ‘I can’t see why,’ Sheila said. ‘It’s the same people who’re our patients, after all.’

  ‘I suppose so. Anyway, it was horrible.’

  ‘I’m sure it was,’ Sheila was at last sympathetic. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’ And this time George was glad to have it, over strong though it was as usual.

  As she sat and sipped it she was very aware of the little light glowing redly on her phone, a sure sign that Sheila had settled down to spread the word about nasty goings on in Barrie Ward. She ought to be told to stop and get on with her work, but George couldn’t face a sulky Sheila for the rest of the day, which she’d have to if she did that, and anyway, it never seemed to make any difference to the amount or high quality of the work she turned out. She just seemed to need to get and pass on gossip the way other people needed to breathe.

  George picked up the phone herself to call Gus. She flicked her own line on, dialled and waited. She hadn’t found out very much, after all, but it would be comforting to hear those gruff cockney tones in her ear; and she was startled at how bitterly disappointed she was when at last she got through to Ratcliffe Street Station and was told that the Detective Chief Inspector was out, and could she leave a message?

  ‘I’ll call back,’ she said. She cradled the phone, then rested her elbows on the desk and her chin on her hands and thought.

  Why was she so upset at what had happened to Harry? Unpleasant people who shouted and spat at staff were far from unusual at Old East. She personally had rarely suffered it, though she knew that sometimes the Accident and Emergency staff got a certain amount of abuse from drunks and druggies; but did they get the real hatred that this man had heaped on Harry’s unfortunate head? She doubted it, and thought: I’ll talk to Hattie. She’ll help me see it more clearly.

  But when she phoned Hattie, she too was unavailable, since she was working a different shift this week. ‘I’ll give her a message,’ promised the distant voice, but George told her not to bother. She’d try again.

  She went downstairs to the mortuary to get the PM out of the way. There was little else she could do. Getting down to opening a cadaver would at least occupy her mind.

  She finished the PM just before lunch and dictated her report at once, since the coroner’s office was in a hurry for it, then went plodding upstairs. The morning’s episode had been so very disagreeable that it had drained her of energy. Or filled her with disgust. Whatever it was she was not her usual happy self.<
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  Until she reached her office and found Gus sitting in her chair which he had tilted back on its rear legs in a precarious pose, with the desk in front of him spread with a picnic lunch.

  ‘Wotcha,’ he said, and brought the chair down to four legs with a little crash that made her tense with expectation of disaster. ‘I thought we ought to have a conference.’

  ‘Oh?’ She came over to her desk and indicated with her chin. He made a face at her and got out of her chair, and went and plonked himself down on the one facing it on the other side. ‘Conference on what?’

  ‘Our case so far. I thought I’d go all New York for you today. I got here some of Bloom’s best bagels, and smoked salmon and a bit of cream cheese. Oh, and a nice mild onion from down the market. Mind you, it still made me weep, cuttin’ it up. Bit like you, really. Supposed to be sweet and mild, but can still bring the tears to your eyes.’ George ignored that, so he grinned at her and went on. ‘The coffee’s in that flask there — I didn’t feel up to Sheila’s brew. It should see us nicely. I’ve even got a bit of cheesecake to finish up with. How’s that, then?’

  She looked at it all and raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Are you trying to stuff me like the rest of the Christmas turkeys? You’ve got enough here for an army.’

  “S’right. Me an’ you. Get stuck in.’ He sliced one of the rolls through the middle and shoved it at her together with the tub of cream cheese, and she capitulated. Compared with whatever there would be to offer over at the hospital canteen, this was Lucullan fare.

  ‘You still haven’t said what case it is we’re supposed to be conferring about.’ She spread the cheese thickly, added a layer of glistening pink salmon and topped it with one of his rounds of sliced onion. Her mouth began to water at the smell.

  ‘Dead babies, ducky. It’s all gettin’ to be a case, don’t you reckon? I’m not sayin’ we’ve got evidence that all of them are dicey, but there is certainly one that is — the Oberlander one, we’ll call it for want of a better label — and the others sort of cluster round like kids round an ice-cream van.’

  ‘Not a very nice simile,’ she said and bit into her bagel, which tasted as good as it looked. She licked an errant smear of cream cheese from her upper lip. ‘It’s bad enough when adults are killed. Much worse when it’s babies.’

  ‘That’s sentimentality of the silliest sort,’ Gus said and for a moment looked harsh. ‘I don’t care if it’s a kid of nine months or an old girl of ninety, a life’s a life. No one’s got any right to interfere with people like that. I won’t have it on my patch. And I won’t have anyone ever thinking that I’d put one case in front of another on account of age, or anything else come to that.’

  She reddened and then nodded. ‘Fair enough. I apologize.’

  ‘So I should think,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Get on with it. There’s another bagel here waitin’ for you.’

  ‘Have it for your supper. One’s enough for me. Have you got anything new?’

  He lifted his chin to indicate the letter rack on the right-hand side of her desk. ‘On the top there. I’ve brought in the report on that child Dr Choopani was attacked over.’

  ‘Oh?’ She reached for it eagerly and began to read, holding it clear of the desk with one hand so that bagel crumbs couldn’t drop on it. He leaned over and poured coffee from the flask while she read, not interrupting her.

  ‘Well,’ she said at length when she’d put the report back in the rack. ‘Not much there to get our teeth into.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Straightforward enough.’

  She nodded. ‘With that sort of heart anomaly the baby could have died any time. As it was, a little bronchitis and there you were. A pity it wasn’t diagnosed earlier, mind you, while the child was alive.’

  ‘I’ve talked to him about that,’ Gus said. ‘The mother refused to bring the child in for check-ups, seemingly. It was born somewhere outside the patch — he never could find out where because she wouldn’t say, and she only fetched it to him to get some sort of certificate she needed for a benefit. He’d never have seen the child at all otherwise, he reckons. Said some nasty things about her, he did, but I have to say they sounded justified to me.’

  ‘What sort of nasty things?’

  ‘That she was a neglectful mother, that people smoked around the kid so much it probably hardly ever breathed clean air, and that he thought she abused the kid. Not enough to make a case, you understand, but enough to contribute to an early death.’

  ‘Did he say that to anyone else, I wonder?’ George said and Gus looked at her sharply.

  ‘Got it in one, haven’t you? Seemingly he did. Talked to the Health Visitor who went in to the flat and got a right bollocking for her pains, and also talked to anyone who’d listen to him. He complained a lot about the mother — it was all over the place that the doctor wasn’t impressed by her — so I dare say the father’s attack on him—’

  ‘Makes a certain amount of sense. Yes, I can see that. He’s a rough-tongued fella, Dr Choopani.’ She shook her head reminiscently. ‘I could have sloshed him for ten cents, but for all that I sort of liked the guy. Straight as they come, I’d say, but has one hell of an attitude problem.’

  ‘That’s much my own feeling. I liked him a lot. Got passionate, he did, about the way we sweep people like this family under the mat and label them the underclass and then it’s their kids who suffer.’ Gus sounded unusually serious. ‘A few more like him round here wouldn’t do us any harm, even if he does get up a few noses while he’s doing his job.’

  ‘Whose noses in particular?’

  ‘Oh, some of the locals. The ones who’re looking for any excuse to get at a black face. You know them. They’ve been making life tough for all the Asian doctors round here for a couple of months now, one way or another. There’s a new branch of one of those extreme right-wing groups been formed. We’ll give them a hard ride, and sort it out, I’m sure, but, well, it’s unpleasant.’

  ‘Tell me about it!’ she said with heartfelt fervour. She finished the last bite of her bagel and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. He had forgotten nothing they might need for the picnic on her desk. ‘This morning was certainly unpleasant.’

  ‘What was?’ His voice sharpened.

  She told him as succinctly as she could. He listened in silence and then grimaced. ‘Oh, the hell with it. Now we’ve got it in here as well, have we? This child who died — was he a local one? I mean, did he come off the patch or was he referred from further away? They are sometimes, aren’t they, these leukaemia kids?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can find out. Hang on.’

  She reached for the phone and dialled the number of Barrie Ward. It was Sister Collinson who answered.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said in response to George’s question and went away. It was a long time before she came back.

  ‘Sorry about the delay — the notes were being typed up by the typing pool. He lived on the Lansbury Estate. Less than ten minutes’ walk from here, that is.’

  ‘And,’ George said, with a sudden thought, ‘who is the GP? I mean, who referred the child here to Old East in the first place?’

  There was a whispering sound of pages being turned and then Sister Collinson said, ‘Oh,’ in a flat voice. ‘Him.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The one who makes all the fuss all the time. Dr Choopani.’

  George, remembering what Dr Choopani had told her that night in A & E about his last conversation with Sister Collinson, opened her mouth to protest and then thought better of it. She merely thanked her and hung up.

  ‘Like I said, an attitude problem,’ she told Gus after she’d reported the information. ‘Even Sister Collinson says harsh things about him because they just don’t understand each other. This won’t help, I imagine.’

  ‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘It won’t. Unless we’re careful, we’ll have a whole race riot on our hands, with rent-a-mob turning out just to stir the brew and — Oh, shit, I’d bet
ter go and talk to Choopani about this.’

  ‘It’s not his fault, of course.’ George got to her feet ‘What’s the point of talking to him?’

  ‘Warn him,’ Gus said shortly. ‘If it gets out that this father’s blaming another Asian doctor for a child’s death and that Choopani sent the child here, can’t you just see how it’ll be?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ George said. ‘Oh, goddamn it. Why do people here have to pick up the nastier things out of America? Race riots, ye gods.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, see you tomorrow, OK?’

  She stared at him blankly. ‘Tomorrow?’

  He was shrugging on his overcoat. ‘I told you. Dinner for your old ladies and me and you. About sixish, nice’n early, and then a treat. It’s a surprise. I’ll be there with the car at half-five. Be ready!’

  And he left, leaving her with a pile of smoked salmon, cream cheese and bagels, not to speak of cheesecake, to share out among her lab staff (much to the delight of Jerry Swann who jumped at it as though he hadn’t already engulfed a vast quantity of liver and onions and steamed pudding and custard in the hospital canteen) and an uneasy sense of trouble brewing over both Dr Choopani and Dr Rajabani.

  She went back to her office to deal with the day’s inevitable pile-up of paperwork, but she couldn’t settle to it. There was something bothering her and she wriggled in her chair as though there were something there that perturbed her physically; and came to the conclusion that it was all due to the unease in her mind following the scene in Barrie Ward that morning. She tried to concentrate.

  The day dwindled to the inevitable early darkness of December and she stretched her back and looked gloomily at the pile of paper. It seemed as high on the not-yet-done side as on the completed side and she was annoyed at her own slowness. Why on earth should she let this matter get under her skin so much? After all, hostility from patients wasn’t, unfortunately, all that rare. Surely she was overreacting to it?