A Few Green Leaves (3 page)

Going out of the surgery, clutching her bit of paper, a prescription for
something
, at least, Daphne felt that Martin, the ‘new doctor’ as he was called in the village, had done her good. He had listened, he had been sympathetic and she felt decidedly better. Much better than she would have felt if she’d gone to Dr G. –
he
never even bothered to take your blood pressure.

The other surgery was a larger room, superior to the one where Martin Shrubsole officiated, but Dr Gellibrand still regretted the old days when he had seen patients in the more gracious surroundings of his own home. Now he was cheerfully confirming the pregnancy of a young village woman obviously destined to be the mother of many fine children. She was short and stocky, with massive thighs fully revealed by the unfashionably short skirt she was wearing. It seemed entirely appropriate that Dr G., now in his late sixties, should deal with the young, while Martin, with his interest in geriatrics, should be responsible for the elderly. Dr G. did not much like the elderly but he loved the whole idea of life burgeoning and going on. It had been a relief to him to be able to off-load some of his older patients – a young cheerful face, and Martin certainly had that, would do them the world of good. For Dr G., although well liked and respected in the village, wasn’t exactly cheerful-looking – people often said that he looked more like a clergyman than the rector did, but that wasn’t surprising because he was the son of a clergyman and his younger brother was the vicar of a London parish.

When the young pregnant woman had gone there was a pause and the receptionist brought in coffee. Dr G.’s thoughts now were not so much on his patients as on the visit he had paid to his brother at the weekend. ‘A change is as good as a rest’ was one of his favourite sayings and he could always benefit from this himself, getting away occasionally from his bossy wife Christabel. The place where his brother was vicar was seedy and run-down, ‘immigrants living in tenements’, he had thought, somewhat inaccurately, but although the church was not a particularly flourishing one he had been impressed and a little envious of the ‘show’ his brother Harry had put on for High Mass. It reminded him of the days, getting on for fifty years ago now, when he himself had toyed with the idea of taking Holy Orders. He had pictured himself officiating at various festivals of the church, preaching splendid sermons and leading magnificent processions, but had remembered in time all the other duties that went with being a parish priest, not forgetting the innumerable cups of sweet tea and biscuits, as his brother never tired of reminding him. Then, perhaps because he had been christened Luke, he had seen himself as a distinguished physician or surgeon, performing dramatically successful operations, the sort of thing that one now saw on medical television programmes imported from the U.S.A. In the end, of course, it had been general practice, the much-loved physician, the old family doctor,
Dr Finlay’s Casebook
rather than the more highly coloured series….

His receptionist was at the door. Had Dr G. dozed off over his coffee? The next patient was waiting and he had not pressed his buzzer. Brisk and kindly she addressed him, ‘Are you ready for the next one, Dr G.? It’s Miss Grundy,’ she added, as if tempting him with some choice dish.

But he knew in advance that Miss Grundy would probably be very much like his other elderly female patients, unmarried women of uncertain age, the sort of patients he was glad to hand over to Martin Shrubsole. The rector’s sister appeared to have handed herself over, he thought with satisfaction.

Emma, buying a loaf from Mrs Bland at the shop, wondered what was going on in the building next to the village hall on this particular Monday.

‘Why, it’s the surgery – Mondays and Thursdays,’ she was told.

‘Are people in the village ill then?’ Emma asked in her innocence.

Mrs Bland seemed nonplussed, almost indignant, at the question, so Emma did not press it. Of course people were ill, always and everywhere.

Peering through the half-open doors of the surgery, she was tempted to join in what seemed like an enjoyable occasion from which she was being excluded. But remembering her role as an anthropologist and observer – the necessity of being on the outside looking in – she crept away, meditating on what she had observed. There was obviously material for a note here.

‘August 1678,’ Tom Dagnall read in the diaries of Anthony à Wood. ‘The act for burying in woollen commences the first of this month.’

While the idea of being buried in woollen in August seemed decidedly stuffy, it gave one a more comfortable feeling on this uncertain spring morning in the chilly study looking out on to the tumbled gravestones. Daphne had placed a paraffin heater at his side but it gave out smell rather than warmth. How many of his parishioners, Tom wondered, had been buried in woollen? Not too difficult to find that out from the dates in the registers, of course. It was the kind of job he could put on to one of his eager helpers, women from the next village, or even Miss Lee and Miss Grundy, a nice little ‘project’. Nowadays, of course, it couldn’t apply – one was probably buried in some man-made fibre – Acrilan, Courtelle, Terylene or nylon, never in plain cotton or wool. One might make a comparison here. Then he remembered Miss Lickerish digging a grave for a dead hedgehog and wrapping its body in a hand-knitted woollen jumper she had bought at a jumble sale, and at that moment his sister came into the room with coffee, telling him that she had seen Miss Lickerish at the surgery that morning.

Why had Daphne gone to the doctor? he wondered idly. Ought he to have shown brotherly concern? Better not to ask for details in case it was just a woman’s thing and a cause for mutual embarrassment. She had not seemed ill and now appeared perfectly well, going on about the new young doctor and how charming he was.

‘Much better than Dr G.,’ she added.

‘Oh, surely not
better
,’ Tom protested. He was prepared to allow the old doctor his privileged position in the village as a kind of leader of the community equal to or even above that of his own.

‘Dr Shrubsole asked me if I’d like tranquillisers,’ Daphne said proudly.

‘And what did you answer?’

‘Oh, I can’t possibly tell you that. Consultation between doctor and patient is a confidential matter. Like the confessional.’

‘Of course – I’m sorry I asked.’ Tom,”as younger brother, had been put in his place, and that dig about the confessional was a reminder of the time when Tom had wanted to introduce that kind of thing – most unsuitably – into the village.

Daphne was a poor substitute for his wife Laura, but they had been married such a short time, it had been like a dream. He hardly thought about her now, was even uncertain what colour her eyes had been. He now realised that he ought to have married again after Laura died, but before he could even think what he was going to do, in his bereft and helpless state, Daphne had come running, as it were, determined to do her duty. She had tried to organise the parish, to leave him free to pursue his studies which had turned out to be no more than dabblings. He could have walked with Laura in the woods, hardly noticing or caring about the remains of the deserted medieval village, the D.M.V…. Now he was alone, with the feeling that he had blighted Daphne’s life, for, although she would take her annual holiday in Greece, she would never leave him now.

‘He took my blood pressure,’ Daphne went on.

‘Oh?’ Tom was uncertain whether he ought to express concern or whether the taking of blood pressure was a matter for congratulation, for it was not Dr G.’s custom to take it.

There was a clattering sound outside the study door. Mrs Dyer, the daily woman, was indicating displeasure about something. Dyer by name and dire by nature, Tom thought, nerving himself for her entry.

Mrs Dyer came into the room. She was a grim-looking woman wearing trousers and a hat which was never removed except for the occasional social event in the village hall or – one presumed – when she went to sleep, or under the stress of some strong emotion. Tom felt that there was something subtly wrong in wearing a hat with trousers, or at least her particular type of hat, but he could not have said what it was.

‘Good morning, Mrs Dyer,’ he greeted her, in what he hoped was a pleasant, encouraging tone of voice. ‘I’ve just been reading here about how people had to be buried in woollen in the old days.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she declared. ‘
I
never heard of it.’

‘Well, no, it was in the seventeenth century, the
late
seventeenth century,’ Tom emended, ‘Anthony à Wood has it here.’

She glanced suspiciously at the volume on Tom’s desk.

‘If you’re ready, Mrs Dyer,’ Daphne said, ‘I’ll help you move these things.’ She resented the way Tom wasted Mrs Dyer’s time, and his own too, for it
was
a waste of time, trying to get her to talk about the old days, even to set up a tape-recorder in the hope that something might emerge from her pronouncements and babblings. For quite often Mrs Dyer did pronounce and even hold forth – inaccuracies poured from her lips about the ‘old days’ and how things were then. But her ‘old days’ went back no farther than the late nineteen thirties, and that wasn’t quite what Tom wanted.

‘You remember we’re spring-cleaning this room today, Tom,’ said Daphne patiently. ‘I did tell you it was to be today.’

‘Oh, my goodness….’ Tom felt himself becoming quite ludicrously agitated, like a comic parson or absent-minded professor in a stage farce, as he shuffled the papers on his desk, dropping several sheets in an attempt to gather them together. ‘Today, is it? I must get out then.’

‘Yes, I think you must – unless you want to sit with a dust-sheet over you. You could go out, couldn’t you? Do a bit of visiting or something?’

‘In the morning?’ Tom hesitated, for visiting was difficult enough at the best of times. In the morning it would seem to be impossible, though there was less likely to be television to contend with.

‘You could go and call on Miss Howick, couldn’t you? She doesn’t work,’ said Daphne impatiently, anxious to get her brother out of the room.

‘She does do some kind of research,’ Tom said doubtfully. ‘I expect she works in the morning, writes, perhaps….’

‘If you can call it work,’ said Daphne scornfully. ‘What about the people in Apple Tree Cottage then?’ There was a note of challenge in her voice and Tom knew exactly what had put it there. The people in Apple Tree Cottage, a youngish academic couple who had recently moved there, were very much an unknown quantity. ‘Bohemian’-looking, with a neglected garden, often in the pub at lunch-time, never seen in church…. Tom marshalled such facts as he knew about them and decided that perhaps a morning visit might not be a good idea.

‘All right then,’ he said, getting up from his desk. ‘I’ll go out.’ He, the rector, would be seen walking in the village, strolling down the main street.

Adam Prince, the food inspector, returning from an unusually arduous tour of duty, took up the pint of milk from his doorstep. At least the milkman had got the message this time, though – a shade of displeasure crossed his face – he had not left the Jersey milk, only the ‘white top’, as they called it, which had less cream. Then there were one or two niggling uncertainties in his mind about the restaurants he had just visited and on which he must now write his report. That celery, cleverly disguised in a rich sauce,
had
it come out of a tin? And the mayonnaise with the first course, served in an attractive Portuguese pottery bowl, was it
really
homemade? The fillet of veal, marinaded in Pernod and served with mushrooms, almonds and pineapple in a cream sauce, had been on the rich side and he was now beginning to regret having chosen it. But so often in this work one
had
no choice – it was all in the course of duty. And now what? Too late for coffee, too early for a drink – though when was it ever too early for a glass of Tio Pepe, slightly chilled? And now the rector was approaching, so Adam’s thoughts turned to Madeira and possibly a piece of seed cake or a Bath Oliver biscuit. Good plain English food, apart from the drink.

‘Good morning!’ he called out to Tom. ‘Come in and join me in a glass of Madeira.’

Tom was startled, not seeing at first who had addressed him, but he caught the words ‘a glass of Madeira’ and then he guessed that it must be Adam Prince who was inviting him in. There was a slight awkwardness here, Tom felt, for he could not help being conscious of the fact that Adam had once been a Church of England clergyman before his doubting of the validity of Anglican Orders had sent him over to Rome. This meant that he was sometimes apt to put forward suggestions on parish matters, what he might have done or would do, in a way that seemed to Tom both embarrassing and impertinent. Then, too, his knowledge and appreciation of gourmet eating seemed inappropriate and made Tom feel ill at ease. So the acceptance of Adam’s invitation at this moment was not at all what he had intended when he was about to nerve himself to do some parish visiting. All the same, it was infinitely more agreeable to sit in Adam’s carefully furnished ‘drawing-room’ with a drink at his side than to carry out his parochial duties. There was even a certain enjoyment in listening to Adam going on about the places he had just visited – the over-rich or ill-cooked dishes he had tried to eat, the wines served at the wrong temperatures he had been obliged to sample.

‘Tonight,’ he was saying, ‘all I shall be capable of eating is a plate of
spaghetti
’ – he gave it an exaggeratedly Italian pronunciation – ‘perfectly
aI dente
, you understand – exactly twelve and a half minutes, in my opinion – with a sprinkling of Parmesan and a knob of butter.’

‘Ah, butter,’ said Tom, seizing on something he had heard of. ‘What kind of butter?’ he was inspired to ask, for he knew that there was a great variety of butters.

‘I prefer Danish for
spaghetti
, otherwise Normandy, of course.’

‘And what will you drink?’ Tom asked, thinking of tea-bag tea, instant coffee or West Oxfordshire water.