Mrs Morris cast a rueful eye around the cramped sitting room. ‘I simply wouldn’t have had room for a steriliser and all the bottles, even if I’d wanted to!’ she told them. ‘We’re hoping to move to a cottage on the outskirts of Purbrook soon. It’s very basic but there’s room to build on—my husband is a builder, you know—and it’s got a huge garden!’
‘Plenty of room for young Daniel to run around, then,’ said Callum, with an approving nod.
‘That was the general idea,’ agreed Mrs Morris, staring lovingly down at her baby’s bald head.
Their next port of call was to a small, sheltered housing complex for the elderly. ‘I want to pop in on an old lady named Ethel Waters and take her blood pressure—it’s been all over the place lately,’ explained Callum, as the car drew up in the well-tended grounds.
‘Can’t she get out to the surgery, then?’ queried Nancy.
He pulled a face. ‘She can, but she’s fairly immobile due to arthritis. I tend to think that it’s not much of an outing for a lady in pain to have to get down to the doctor’s surgery!’
Nancy smiled with delight at his level of understanding and consideration. ‘That’s very sweet of you,’ she told him.
‘Why, thank you, Nancy,’ he responded, but the mock gravity in his voice couldn’t disguise the unaccountable pleasure he took in her praise.
They were drinking a cup of tea with the old lady, whose blood pressure was reassuringly low, when Callum’s bleeper went off.
‘May I use your telephone, please, Mrs Waters?’ he enquired putting his empty teacup down in the saucer.
‘Course you can, Doctor!’
The call was urgent, and they drove to it as quickly as the law would allow. ‘What’s up?’ asked Nancy, as he roared past a picturesque grey church.
‘An elderly lady is wandering around her garden naked?’ he replied calmly.
‘Who?’ cried Nancy in alarm.
‘Mrs Dolly Anderson,’ said Callum. ‘She’s an elderly patient with dementia, and she copes well enough with the assistance of the home help and Meals-on-Wheels.’
‘And has she ever done anything like this before?’ asked Nancy.
‘Never.’
‘Then I wonder what’s changed,’ said Nancy thoughtfully.
Callum’s eyes gleamed at her perceptiveness. ‘Precisely,’ he observed, his voice equally thoughtful.
Their answer came soon enough. Once Mrs Anderson had been gently persuaded into the house and into a dressing-gown Callum was able to assess his patient properly.
Only when he had concluded his examination did Callum turn to Nancy. ‘Mrs Anderson is wheezy and has a slight cough and temperature. Do you want to have a shot at a diagnosis?’
‘Could it be a chest infection?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘Which would make her more than usually confused?’
He nodded. ‘I think so. I’m going to admit her to the medical ward at St Saviour’s—that’s if they have a bed!’
They did, although Callum had to sweet-talk the admitting team into allocating them one.
‘Hospital beds are like gold dust these days,’ he complained as he talked Nancy through the admission procedure, before setting off for the surgery.
A moment’s peace and quiet seemed equally elusive, thought Nancy with a touch of amusement.
‘Coping OK so far?’ he asked her, as they buckled themselves back into the car.
‘So far,’ she grinned, wondering what had caused his grumpiness earlier but then dismissing the thought because when he was being sunny and helpful like this she could have stuck to his side like glue all day.
THE house was in darkness, and it was seven forty-five before Nancy finally fumbled around in her briefcase for her house keys. She pushed open the front door of the modern glass and steel townhouse she called home and listened for the sound of her husband.
Silence.
She felt a moment’s disloyalty for the rush of relief she experienced as she closed the door behind her and switched on the light.
‘Steve?’ she called, more out of habit than anything else, as a soft light illuminated the spacious hall.
She checked the answerphone but there were no messages so she went upstairs and changed out of the rather formal navy suit, which Steve had bought for her, into jeans and a big, floppy sweater. Then she came back down, made some tea and sat at the kitchen table, drinking it, while she decided whether it was worth cooking supper.
Steve was so unpredictable, that was the trouble. Sometimes—usually when she had pulled all the stops out with an exotic new recipe and bought candles and flowers—he would moan that he had eaten an enormous business lunch and that he simply wasn’t hungry.
At other times—and this always seemed to coincide with Nancy being too dog-tired from working to even think about food—he would complain that she never seemed able to provide the same creature comforts as the wives of his partners. Women who, from Steve’s glowing descriptions, seemed to embody all the qualities which made up the ideal wife. They cooked, they cleaned, they sewed and they gardened, and—apparently—achieved a blissful state of contentment from all these activities.
In other words, thought Nancy, trying to subdue a trace of bitterness as she slipped at her tea, wives without children who did no work outside the home.
She yawned as she thought back over her first afternoon in practice. It had been hard work. Non-stop, in fact. After visits and a baby clinic, which had run over time, they’d had what had seemed like an endless evening surgery, composed mostly of patients complaining of sore throats.
Then the medical registrar from St Saviour’s had rung to say that a chest X-ray on Mrs Anderson had confirmed Nancy’s and Callum’s diagnosis of a chest infection, and that they were going to start her on a regime of intravenous antibiotics.
It was after one of the receptionists had rung through to ask if Callum could squeeze an extra patient onto the end of his already long evening surgery that Nancy had turned on him and said, half in amusement and half in exasperation, ‘Is it always like this?’
He’d looked up from scrubbing his hands, which the last patient—a baby—had been sick over. ‘Like what?’
‘Busy!’
‘Busy?’ He’d pulled an expressive face as he’d dried his hands on a paper towel and thought back to how it had been just before Christmas. ‘This is a doddle, Nancy. Just you wait until a flu bug sweeps the community and then you’ll understand the meaning of busy!’
‘I can’t wait,’ Nancy had said faintly, but his remark had brought home to her that, contrary to what their hospital colleagues might have imagined, general practice was certainly not a relaxed way to idle away the day!
Nancy leaned her elbows dreamily on the table as her mind drifted over everything they had accomplished during that busy afternoon. Because, despite the unaccustomedly frantic pace, it had also been one of the most interesting days of her medical career so far.
Or was that simply because Callum Hughes was such an astute and sympathetic teacher... ?
She opened up the textbook which Callum had loaned her and began to read about red eye in general practice, becoming