Secrets to Keep (4 page)

After thoroughly cleaning the wound with boracic
acid, then a thick layer of sulphur ointment as an antiseptic, Ty set to work with his needle and cat gut to close it up. However neat he was in his stitching, William Bates was going to be left with a terrible scar. It took twenty sutures to complete the closure, and despite Ty’s low opinion of the man, he did admire the fact that throughout the procedure he sat stiff backed and unflinching, when Ty knew he must be in agony.

William Bates was preparing to take his leave. Ty made to inform him of his fee when the man pre-empted him by announcing, ‘As soon as me arm lets me, I’ll be around to do whatever jobs yer need attending to around the house.’

Ty eyed him closely. ‘You obviously haven’t seen the notice I put up in the waiting room, Mr Bates, informing all patients that payment in such a way is no longer acceptable.’

He looked bemused. ‘Well, it wa’ good enough for Doctor Mac …’

‘I’m not Doctor McHinney and …’

Narrowing his eyes and giving Ty a look of disdain, William Bates interjected, ‘No, yer definitely not, are yer? Proper doctor he was, not some kid wet behind the ears who looks down his nose at his patients ’cos they obviously ain’t good enough for the likes of
him
. Don’t worry, Doctor, you’ll get yer fee.’

With not a flicker of emotion crossing his face at
the insulting comparison to the late James McHinney, Ty hurriedly jotted down the amount payable on a piece of paper and held it out to Bates, saying matter-of-factly, ‘I’d appreciate payment as soon as you can.’

Both men jumped in surprise then as the door unexpectedly burst open and a young woman dashed into the surgery. She was in her mid-twenties or thereabouts, her light brown hair cut fashionably to chin-length, her shapely figure dressed in a floral, belted work dress that would have looked dowdy on any other woman but, the way she wore it, was very fetching on her. She wasn’t beautiful, but good looking enough to stand out in a crowd, and she had a confident air about her.

It wasn’t her physical attributes that were making Ty take notice of her now, though. This woman could have been the most beautiful in the world and he still wouldn’t have noticed; the emotional damage that had been done to him in the past had seen to that. Instead he was angered by the fact that she had had the audacity to barge rudely into his inner sanctum uninvited while he was actually in consultation with a patient.

He opened his mouth to make his feelings known to her, but she forestalled him by crying out, ‘You’ve got to come quick, Doc, it’s me mam!’

The fact that she was addressing him with what he saw as disrespect didn’t go down well with Ty. He
snapped back, ‘It’s
Doctor Strathmore
. As you can see, I’m busy with a patient. Now, please wait your turn like everyone else is in the waiting room. I’ll attend to you as soon as I can.’

His reprimand about her informal way of addressing him was obviously lost on her. In a frenzied state, she cried, ‘But this can’t wait, Doc. Me mam’s bad … real bad.’

William Bates took this chance to make his departure. Without a word, he skirted around the young woman and hurried out.

She demanded again, ‘You’ve got to come
now
. Me mam’s collapsed on the kitchen floor and her lips are all blue … I’ve tried all I can think of to get her to come round but nothing worked. She don’t look good, Doc. She don’t look good at all.’

The condition of this young woman’s mother didn’t sound good to Ty either. From what she had informed him, he was already fearing what he’d find. He made to grab his bag then thought he had better take a look at her notes first, to familiarise himself with her past medical history in case it affected the medication he prescribed for her now.

‘Name?’ he demanded.

The woman looked at him dumbstruck. ‘There’s no time for that.
Will you just come now
?’

She was indeed infuriating. ‘Name?’ he snapped again.

She shot back, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, if you must have it … Aidy.’

While she waited impatiently, he twisted around in his seat and pulled out the drawers labelled A to C, praying that for once James McHinney had filed a patient’s records in the correct location. He hurriedly flicked through all the As, then the Bs and Cs for good measure, but could find no sign of a Mrs Aidy at all. Swivelling back round he said to the young woman, ‘Has your mother ever visited this surgery? Only I can’t find a trace of a patient with the surname Aidy.’

The young woman gawped at him. ‘Eh? Oh, me mam’s not called Aidy – that’s my name. Aidy Nelson. You should have made it clear whose name you wanted. Hers is Jessie … Jessica Greenwood.’

Why on earth had she thought he’d be asking for
her
name when it was her mother that was in need of him? Ty refrained from telling the young woman how stupid he thought her for wasting precious time in this situation. Swivelling back in his chair to face the drawers again, he yanked open the one marked G to I and, lo and behold, found Jessica Greenwood’s record card filed where he would have expected it to be. From quickly scanning the spidery writings, it appeared that Jessica Greenwood, like his previous patient, was only an infrequent visitor to the surgery. The last time she had sought the help of a doctor
had been twelve years ago, in 1918, for glandular fever.

Jumping up from his seat, Ty grabbed his bag, saying to Aidy. ‘I’ll just inform those in the waiting room I have an emergency to attend, then you can take me to your mother.’

She ran him through several miserable terrace streets until she turned down an alleyway to enter the back yard of a dilapidated three-bedroomed house, set in a long row of equally decrepit two- and three-bedroomed abodes.

As he followed her into the kitchen, he couldn’t fail to notice the pungent smell that hit him as soon as he stepped over the threshold. Something had been cooked earlier, but it wasn’t food. What exactly it was he hadn’t time to work out. Like other houses he had been inside since arriving in his new post, it was evident this was a lower-class dwelling. But unlike most of the others he’d visited, this one was spotlessly clean and tidy. He noticed it only fleetingly, though.

As soon as he clapped eyes on Jessica Greenwood, Ty knew she was dead. Regardless, he went through the process of checking thoroughly for any vital signs.

Finally he stood up and addressed Aidy. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this but there is nothing more I can do for your mother.’

She blurted out, ‘What do you mean, there’s
nothing you can do for her? You’re a doctor! If you can’t then … Oh, we need to get her to the hospital, is that it? They’ll make her better, won’t they? You’ll be wanting to hurry back off to yer surgery to telephone for an ambulance, won’t you? You will tell them to come quick …’

She made to cross to her mother’s side, fully expecting him to dash off and summon the ambulance, but he stopped her. ‘I’m afraid you misunderstand. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I or anyone else can do for your mother. She’s dead.’

She stared at him, befuddled. Her mam, that vibrant women who had faced and dealt with more than her fair share of terrible traumas, couldn’t just be dead. In an accusing tone she declared, ‘You’ve made a mistake! My mam’s not dead. You haven’t even
tried
to do anything for her. Some bloody doctor you are!’

Incensed that she should dare question his medical skills, he responded coolly. ‘I’m afraid there’s no mistake. She was already dead when I got here.’

Aidy stared at him for several long moments before, bottom lip trembling, she uttered, ‘But she can’t be ’cos … ’cos … she’s our mam. We can’t do without her.’ Then she beseeched him, ‘Please,
please
, just try to do something for her? Please, Doc, please?’

The look he returned told her she was wasting her time. Jessica Greenwood was beyond help.

Aidy’s whole body sagged and she stepped back to
slump against the wall as she tried to take this in. Then, with a look of horror filling her face, she wailed, ‘How the hell am I going to tell my sisters and brother that our mam is dead? And my gran too … This’ll kill her, I know it will. She worshipped her daughter. How could Mam die just like that, Doc? She wasn’t ill. Got the stamina of an ox, she used to tell us. We could all be down with colds and she’d never catch them off us.’

‘So she hadn’t been complaining of any pains in her chest or feeling more tired than usual recently?’ he asked.

Aidy shook her head. ‘Not to me. The only ailment I knew she suffered from was a bad back which used to give her gyp now and again, though Mam wasn’t a complainer. But anyway, Gran would have noticed if she wasn’t well and told me. She lives here with Mam, me brother and two sisters. Gran’s the sort who’s got eyes in the back of her head. She misses nothing.’

‘Well, if your mother wasn’t suffering from anything you and your grandmother were aware of, then it’s my considered opinion that her heart just gave out. She died from natural causes.’

There was nothing more to be done here. Ty wanted to get back to the surgery or he risked still being there until midnight at this rate, but despite how annoyed he was at what he perceived to be this
woman’s disrespectful attitude towards him, he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave her on her own.

‘Your father ought to be informed,’ he told her. ‘Maybe a neighbour could go and fetch him for you, if you know where he’ll be?’ He thought to himself, Most likely in the pub. That’s where the majority of the men around these streets seem to head straight from work.

There was a flash of anger in her eyes and a harshness to her voice when she responded, ‘Knowing me dad, he’ll be in the pub … but
which
pub is anyone’s guess. We ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since before our Marion was born and she’s eight.’

Ty wasn’t surprised by this information. There seemed to him to be quite a number of absent husbands locally, some admittedly having been forced to seek work further afield, the depression that had started in America now making its ill effects felt in England and jobs being less easy to find. But just as many men had selfishly abandoned their wives to struggle to raise their children alone, merely because they’d better things to go off to. ‘Then your grandmother needs to be summoned back home then. A neighbour will maybe oblige?’

Aidy was fighting hard to comprehend and accept this terrible turn of events. She was hardly listening to Ty but aware that he had said something and automatically muttered, ‘Yes … yes, Doc.’

‘
It’s Doctor Strathmore
,’ he reminded her again. ‘Look, I really need to be getting back to the surgery. If you’ll call in the morning, I’ll have the death certificate ready for you.’ And of course there was the matter of his fee, but it would be very remiss of him to mention it or expect her to in these circumstances. He would bring up the subject when she called to collect the death certificate in the morning.

Picking up his bag, he made to depart but was stopped in his tracks by the back door opening and the arrival of a small elderly woman. She was dressed in a well-worn black coat that came down to just above her ankles, a black dress underneath, black woollen stockings, and sturdy black lace-up shoes on her size two feet. A black felt hat was pulled well down over her iron-grey hair which was cut pudding basin-style just below her ears, the sides gripped behind them. The new arrival’s attention was fully fixed on searching through her capacious handbag for something.

‘Bloody hell! That Vi Jones can’t half talk, our Jessie. I’ve never known anyone with so many ailments, and it’s my opinion all are the making of her own imagination. I ain’t one to refuse a penny or two for me concoctions, as you well know, but this is the third time this week I’ve had to make up summat for her! I’ve other folks that need my services besides her, and I can’t help out me other clients if Vi’s
hypocondriousity is taking up most of me time. If she sends her daughter around again this week, I want you to tell her I’ve gone off on one of me plantcollection jaunts and yer not sure when I’m due back.’

Having given up her search through her bag, Bertha Rider was now taking off her coat. Spotting Aidy out of the corner of her short-sighted eye, she smiled delightedly and said, ‘I thought I’d missed you tonight, gel. Glad I ain’t. It always does me heart good to catch sight of your pretty face. Is your Arch working late? Is that why you ain’t at your own home, getting his dinner?’

While her grandmother had been chuntering away, Aidy had been staring at her blindly. Despite her own devastation, all Aidy’s thoughts now centred on this old lady. Her sixty-eight-year-old gran had taken her husband’s death from septicaemia several years ago very hard. Her grandparents had worshipped each other. There had been worry at the time that Gran would join him herself from a broken heart, but the love and support of her family had pulled her through. She now looked fondly back over the years spent with the love of her life and didn’t burst into tears whenever he came to mind.

Jessie had been the only child out of the four she had given birth to, to survive past infancy. Mother and daughter had always been very close. Losing a husband was bad enough, but losing a a child must
be the worst thing ever. Aidy dreaded to think of how her grandmother was going to react to the death of the daughter she’d doted on. And not just her gran either. Her three younger siblings, who were all obliviously out playing with their friends, would need to be told of their beloved mother’s sudden death. They were all going to be devastated.