Vicious Circle

by Douglas Clark

  But even in its partially completed state, Helewou was a welcoming home and a credit to the industrious young couple who had planned and converted it. Robert Bennett had been right when, on this his first visit, he had suggested that it would be—indeed already was—a property to rouse jealousy in anyone disposed towards living in such a building.

  The upstairs was far from complete. Originally, like many such barns, Helewou had been built with a hayloft which ran half the total length. Adam’s first task, before building the stairs, had been to extend this vast shelf to cover the whole building. This was its upstairs where only one room was fit for habitation. The remainder had not even been partitioned off except the bathroom which had been installed over the kitchen. And there the project hung fire waiting for Adam and Marian to collect a little more money with which to buy materials for building.

  Dr David Whincap, no stranger to his son’s house, and as enthusiastic about its progress as Adam and Marian themselves, hung coat and cap up on the pegs in the hallway and entered the sitting room to a series of welcoming calls and Christmas greetings. Adam handed him a glass of dry sherry and ushered him through to the kitchen.

  “Yes, I must make my apologies to my hostess.”

  “Apologies can wait. Marian wants you to start carving.”

  “In that case . . .” Whincap stopped to take a gulp of the sherry. As he moved on again, he said: “I suppose I’m in hot water all round.”

  “Make yourself useful, dad, and we’ll try to forgive you.”

  “Many apologies, my dear,” said Whincap, setting down his glass of sherry. As he picked up the carving knife and prepared to whet it on the steel he continued: “But you know how it is. As senior partner I’m on duty on Christmas Day.”

  Marian, braving the knife, stood on tiptoe to kiss him and then turned her attention to taking the roast potatoes out of the pan with a fish slice. “I know you have to be available, daddy, but I can’t help feeling it is most inconsiderate of people to fall ill on Christmas Day. Particularly at lunch time.

  “They don’t choose to, sweetheart,” said Adam, putting a stack of dinner plates down close to where his father was tackling the turkey with all the skill of a one-time surgeon.

  “This one did, I fancy.” A thin slice of breast backed by crisp skin was overturned neatly on to the top plate. “I’d like a tablespoon for the stuffing, please, Adam.”

  “Oh? What happened? Or can’t you say?” asked his son, scrabbling among the cooking utensils in a drawer.

  The doctor turned to his daughter-in-law. “It was your grandmother, my dear.”

  “Gran Carlow? She must have called you out deliberately. She knew you were due to come here.”

  “Not a false errand.” Another plate was given its portion of turkey and a well-cooked sausage. “She needed my attention.”

  “Really needed attention? Goodness, she hasn’t done anything . . . anything silly, has she? She’s always getting up to her tricks.”

  “Silly?” The doctor eased out the merrythought so that the breast carving could continue without hindrance. “Silly? Stupid, I’d say. Really stupid and stubborn. That’s what she is.”

  “That’s the umpteenth time I’ve heard her described like that this morning.” Marian turned to her husband. “Get them into the dining room, darling, and then come back to carry the plates in.” As David left to do her bidding, she started to strain the sprouts. “What did gran do, daddy? Are you saying she tried to make herself ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “To commit suicide?”

  “No, poppet. She’s too smart an old witch for that. But she did take a rather large overdose of her medicine.”

  “Isn’t that an attempt to commit suicide? If it wasn’t a mistake?”

  “No mistake, my dear.” Whincap looked over his array of plates, deciding which one could best take a thigh without becoming overloaded. “She’s done it before.”

  “Overdosed herself?”

  “Never to quite the same degree as today . . .”

  “So she was trying to commit suicide, if it wasn’t a mistake. It was a deliberate attempt . . .”

  “Deliberate, certainly. But with no intention of killing herself.” He put the knife and fork down. “I’ve run out of space for laying out the plates. I’ll carry some through. Is everybody sitting anywhere?”

  The matter rested there. The food was carried through and all the jollity of the meal drove the business of Mrs Carlow from their minds. Crackers were pulled and paper hats were worn. The cooking was pronounced to be first class and Robert Bennett proposed a humorous toast to host and hostess. But as soon as the lunch had been cleared away and most of the party were reclining, half-asleep, in the sitting room, waiting for the Queen’s speech, Marian recalled the earlier conversation. She was washing up at the time. Adam and his father were helping her, the latter—in his own words—paying penance for delaying the party earlier.

  “Daddy, would you say or did you mean that Gran Carlow is one of those cases we’re always hearing about nowadays? Somebody who is crying out for help and attracting attention?”

  “By a bit of suicidal brinkmanship?” added Adam.

  “That’s a bit—that’s pitching it a bit high, darling.”

  “It’s true,” expostulated her husband, taking up a handful of wet forks from the draining board and proceeding to dry them one by one. “As I understand it, there are more suicides attempted with the intention of failing than of being successful. Isn’t that so, dad?”

  Dr Whincap, who was putting away the tableware, replied: “So we’re told.”

  “That’s pretty non-committal.”

  Whincap turned to face the two young people. “This isn’t the first time Elke Carlow has played this little trick on me.”

  “She’s done it before? We didn’t know,” said Marian, pushing a stray strand of hair back with the gauntlet of one of her rubber gloves. “At least we knew she had played pranks, but not that she’d gone to these lengths.”

  “The trouble is,” said the doctor, “I can’t decide whether she is playing the game Adam has just described, or . . .”

  “Or what, daddy?” asked Marian, turning on the hot tap to rinse a Pyrex dish.

  “I shouldn’t really be telling you all this,” said Whincap. “It’s probably the sherry and table wine talking, but as you, Marian and, therefore, your parents and grandmother are, in a certain sense, a part of the family now, I don’t think I ought to hide the fact that from a family doctor’s point of view, Gran Carlow is a self-willed, arrogant old girl . . .”

  “You can say that again, dad,” interrupted Adam with great feeling.

  “. . . who thinks she can decide for herself how much of her prescribed medicine she can take and when.”

  “Silly old fool,” grunted Adam.

  “As you must know, she has a heart condition for which I prescribe digoxin—better known to you perhaps as digitalis. She’s in the habit of deciding that she won’t take any for a few days—if she’s feeling fairly well—then, when she thinks she’s a bit off-colour, she takes all those she has missed in the preceding few days.” Whincap picked up the Pyrex dish which Adam had by now dried and laid aside. “In other words, she’s often in the habit of overdosing herself. And that, with her particular medicine, is tantamount to poisoning herself.”

  “Does she make herself sick?”

  “Literally—otherwise she wouldn’t still be with us. Luckily she gets rid of a good part of it.”

  “And that was what you were called out for this morning?” asked Marian.

  “Your great-aunt Mimi rang me—as usual.”

  “You said that, dad,” accused Adam, “as though you suspected there was some sort of ulterior motive behind the call . . . and the incident.”

  “Not on Mimi’s part. She’s a decent old dear. But . . . yes . . . I think Elke was playing up. She wouldn’t come here, today, would she, because Josef Kisiel had agreed to come?”

/>   “Oh, dear,” sighed Marian. “And I tried so hard to be diplomatic and to ask Gran before Josef and Alice. But she asked if any of the Kisiel family would be here and I had to say that Gwen and Tony had been invited. After all, Gwen is Adam’s sister.”

  “Just as I thought,” said the doctor. “Elke refused so you had no qualms about asking Josef and Alice.”

  “It’s Marian’s house and party,” said Adam. “She can ask whom she likes, and if Elke doesn’t like the guest list, that’s just too bad.”

  Whincap nodded his agreement. “On no account must you young people allow family squabbles to interfere with your lives. But actually, old Elke wanted to come, according to Mimi. Mimi herself told me she too wanted to be here. She has no feud with the Kisiels, and tried to persuade her sister, without any luck. Elke dug her toes in.”

  “A typical case of cutting off your nose,” said Marian.

  “So I believe.”

  “And then,” said Adam quietly, “in an effort to spoil the party, she overdosed herself to stop you coming here and to try and get Marian and her mother to drop everything and rush to her bedside. That really would have put paid to our Christmas arrangements, wouldn’t it?”

  “I think that’s what she hoped for, son.”

  “But you stopped her little game, dad?”

  “Yes. I waited there until I was sure there was absolutely no need for Margarethe and Marian to be worried.”

  Marian turned and kissed him.

  “What’s that for?”

  “To say I’m sorry for saying you were a nuisance for being late for lunch.”

  “I see. Very nice, too. But you ought to know, Marian, that your grandmother took far more of her digoxin than she has done on previous occasions. I regard that as proof that she had recognized that she can stage these incidents as a means of playing us all up.”

  Marian had emptied the washing up bowl and mopped down the draining board. Now she stripped off her rubber gloves. “Let’s go through and join the others,” she said wearily. “It’s almost time for the Queen.”

  Her husband put an arm round her. “Come on, sweetheart. Time to be merry. It’s all been great, so far, and you looked smashing in a paper hat.”

  She smiled at him. “Come on then or we shall miss the broadcast.”

  After the royal message, at that time when Christmas seems to hang fire for a while, particularly when there are no children to entertain and the prospects of tea with mince pies and iced cake is vile, and there is no inclination or need to do anything before the jollifications of the evening begin in earnest, Dr David Whincap joined Margarethe Rainford and her husband who were snoozily sharing the large three-seater settee.

  “Your old mum, Margarethe . . .”

  “What about her, David?”

  “She’s a pain in the neck,” murmured her husband sleepily. “Let’s forget her.”

  “I’d like to, but I daren’t,” said Whincap. “I tell you what. You go to sleep, Theo, and dream of lots of nice criminal cases all running smoothly towards convictions while I have a quiet word with your missus.”

  Rainford sat up slowly. “Daren’t forget her? What do you mean? When a bloke like you says he daren’t do something, Dave, my nose begins to twitch.”

  “Like a rabbit’s,” retorted his wife, who was still wearing a paper crown with a large red circle stuck on it. She turned to Whincap. “What’s happened, David?”

  “I was late for lunch because your Aunt Mimi called me . . .” The doctor proceeded to give Margarethe the same account as he had given her daughter earlier. Rainford and his wife listened intently until he had finished.

  “What did you have to do for her?” asked Margarethe.

  “She was vomiting, so that helped. I cleaned her out completely and that, fortunately, seemed to do the trick, though at one time I thought I’d have to call an ambulance and have her admitted.”

  “Why didn’t you?” asked the Chief Superintendent.

  “For several reasons. It would have meant the ruination of this party . . .”

  “Which you think was her prime intention?”

  “Because you would have had to go to the hospital, Margarethe.”

  “She’s my mother, David.”

  “Quite. Theo, here, would have felt it incumbent upon him to go with you and Marian would have felt it her duty to go, too.”

  “And Adam and Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all,” grumbled Rainford. “And you think that’s why she took a bigger overdose today than she ever has done on previous occasions?”

  “I’m certain of it. And besides ruining a party here, it would have ruined a ward party at the hospital—not only for doctors and nurses, but for other patients, too. Then there would have been the scandal . . .”

  “Surely not,” said Theo. “One old woman taking an overdose wouldn’t cause a scandal these days.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of it from Elke’s point of view,” replied Whincap. “But from Margarethe’s and Marian’s. Can’t you just hear the tongues wagging? Daughter and granddaughter having a slap up Christmas party. Gran not there, not invited, obviously. Takes an overdose and tries to kill herself because she feels unwanted.”

  “Come off it, Dave,” said Rainford. “She was invited.”

  “I know, Theo. But others don’t. The story would get about and the mud would stick.”

  “I can see that,” said Margarethe. “So that’s why you didn’t send her to hospital. It was very thoughtful of you, David.”

  “That and the fact that I managed to get her right myself,” grinned Whincap. “Don’t overlook my masterly handling of the case.”

  “And that is why you were so late for lunch, I suppose.”

  “Just so. But what I have to tell you, Margarethe—and this is really the object of this conversation—is that I have removed every digoxin tablet from your mother’s house. Mimi and I searched every room.”

  “But won’t mother need her medicine?”

  “To kill herself with?” asked her husband scathingly.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” said Whincap. “It’s quite long-acting stuff so there’ll still be some working away there—a safe amount, I trust. And in any case I should have had to withdraw the digoxin to let the effect of the overdose subside. However, you’re quite right. She will be needing the stuff. I shall have to put her back on it sooner rather than later.”

  “And your worry is you think she’ll do it all again at some time when she feels she can again put a spanner in somebody’s works?”

  David Whincap grimaced. “That’s my worry, certainly. What do I do, knowing the little games she plays? Do I just shrug off the fact that she may go too far and kill herself?”

  Rainford grunted to show he really had no answer and then added: “As a doctor you can’t ignore the fact that you know she is potentially suicidal.”

  “Not only as a doctor. Nobody can just shrug it off. But as a doctor I have to tackle the problem. I daren’t let her have a supply of her tablets, but I can’t write a prescription every day for just one tablet.”

  “Can’t Aunt Mimi keep them?” asked Margarethe.

  “Mimi is no match for her sister. You know your mother dominates her. If I were to entrust the tablets to Mimi, Elke would bully her into letting her have them.”

  “True enough,” agreed Rainford. “Mimi’s a gentle old dear and scared stiff of Elke. So there’s only one thing for it, Dave.”

  “Oh, yes? And what’s that?”

  “You’ll have to send your nurse in every day with just enough digoxin for the daily dose. Nursey sees the old hausfrau knocks it back good and proper, and you can rest assured she’s not laying up a store of trouble for you in the future.”

  Whincap shook his head. “No go, Theo, and you know it. The NHS can’t afford to send my Practice Nurse to your mother-in-law’s house every day just to see she complies with the dosage instructions on a bottle of pills.”

  “It would have to afford it if the
old so-and-so needed an injection every day instead of a tablet.”

  “Daily nursing calls are a short-term expedient. An alternative to being in hospital.”

  “Because it’s cheaper, you mean?”

  “For whatever reason, but usually because the patient prefers being at home and can be satisfactorily maintained there. I’m not going to claim that Elke Carlow should rightly be in hospital, therefore I’m not prepared to provide an alternative for a non-existent need.”

  Rainford said: “That’s good thinking, Dave. Cogent and . . . er . . . economic. I like it. But it hasn’t provided the answer.”

  Whincap looked at Margarethe. “Could you . . .?” he began.

  “Hang on, hang on,” said Rainford. “Are you about to suggest that Maggie should visit her mother daily to give her the pill?”

  “It amounts to that.”

  “That’s playing right into the old girl’s hands,” snorted Rainford. “Talk about managing to upset other people’s lives! What if Margarethe couldn’t go one day? Had a cold or wanted an awayday or something like that?”

  “Probably Marian . . .”

  “She’s overworked as it is.”

  “On the odd occasion?”

  “It’s no good,” expostulated Rainford. “You know Elke. She’ll presume. Her type always does. She’ll sulk if Maggie doesn’t go or if she’s a bit late. Then we’ll have rows, won’t we? And Elke will play burnt-down with poor old Mimi who’ll be given a hell of a time just because the silly old witch won’t obey doctor’s orders.”

  “Couldn’t you . . . isn’t there something else you could give her instead of digoxin?” asked Margarethe.

  “Less dangerous, you mean? No. There are a number of alternatives to digoxin, of course, but we should have to take the same precautions even if I changed her to one of them. They’re all much of a muchness when it comes to hoarding them into doses big enough to be dangerous.”

  “Then I shall have to help,” said Margarethe.

  “Good. But I take Theo’s point about Elke starting to presume. I’m going to suggest that my nurse goes in twice a week—not necessarily on the same days each week. I’m sure Marian will agree to go in once a week.”