noticed it. She took a deep breath and made a heartfelt resolution, and sat
still.
In the hallway of the Doctor’s House the phone shrilled. Upstairs Steven was about to undress, gloomy after his extraordinary evening. Who would have thought that a girl like Jenny Severance was prepared to magnify an aberration on the part of the local parson into a national scandal? It was unworthy of her! Mr Phibson, obviously, needed treatment. How could he be persuaded –?
Just a moment! If the phone was ringing here, instead of in one of the practices at Hatterbridge or Chapminster which provided emergency cover – Steven knew what night duty he himself was committed to, having taken special care to check after a bad experience in London when he found himself on call night after night without relief – it meant that someone was ringing the private number …
Jenny?
Steven rushed downstairs and shouted, ‘Hello!’
But the voice that answered was male, unknown to him, saying: ‘Doctor? This is Paul Ellerford. It’s about my mother. She won’t move. She won’t say anything.’ He was panting, and it dawned on Steven that he must be very young – at oldest, in his teens. ‘We were watching telly and she just passed out!’
A shout in the background, which Steven heard clearly: ‘She isn’t dead! I felt her pulse! She just won’t move!’
Steven heaved a deep sigh, wondering whether he had all the right items in his bag.
‘Very well. Give me your address, and tell me how to get to you …’
After his departure the phone rang again repeatedly. At the local exchange had recently been installed an automatic device to re-route doctors’ calls at prescribed times, referring them from number to number until it struck lucky. Someone, however, had forgotten to instruct it that once a doctor had accepted a call there was a chance he might be out for a considerable while, so it should default to the emergency mode and try someone else.
Instead, it was under the mechanical impression that once a doctor’s phone had been answered that was proof that he would be there until further notice. Tearful and on the verge of hysteria, other people rang, and rang, and rang …
Mr Jacksett nearly did, not so much for himself as for his wife Judy. Right up to closing time people had been either phoning or coming back in person to ask indignantly why their request for canned sardines had been met with tuna, or self-raising flour with wholemeal, or long-life milk with apple-juice. Couldn’t he get anything right, when his prices were already higher than the supermarkets’ in Chapminster and Hatterbridge?
Besides, their kids were fretting dreadfully, because Boyo the dog still had not come home …
What with that, and the prospect of sorting out the returned goods and replacing them on the shelves –
and
reflashing everything with the proper price, for they added a penny or two to the cost of items for home delivery to cover what they paid Peter Lodd, the boy with a bicycle who took them round the village after delivering morning papers –both of them had lost their tempers. Judy had accused her husband, one of the soberest men in Weyharrow, of being drunk because he had taken off a bare half-hour to go to the Marriage where, he said, he hoped to catch and apologize to a few of their regular customers. But it was true that during his absence she had carried on with the job, and he’d stayed out longer than he had promised, and by the time he got back she was ranting about all the food they’d have to eat that would otherwise be spoiled …
Roy Jacksett, being a stolid kind of person, and used to scenes of this sort if not on such a scale, kept trying to calm her throughout the rest of the evening, to such effect that she drank a second cup of the coffee he had brewed from a jar of instant returned by a customer who’d ordered a decaffeinated brand … and then said she couldn’t get to sleep, so he must bring one of the
still.
In the hallway of the Doctor’s House the phone shrilled. Upstairs Steven was about to undress, gloomy after his extraordinary evening. Who would have thought that a girl like Jenny Severance was prepared to magnify an aberration on the part of the local parson into a national scandal? It was unworthy of her! Mr Phibson, obviously, needed treatment. How could he be persuaded –?
Just a moment! If the phone was ringing here, instead of in one of the practices at Hatterbridge or Chapminster which provided emergency cover – Steven knew what night duty he himself was committed to, having taken special care to check after a bad experience in London when he found himself on call night after night without relief – it meant that someone was ringing the private number …
Jenny?
Steven rushed downstairs and shouted, ‘Hello!’
But the voice that answered was male, unknown to him, saying: ‘Doctor? This is Paul Ellerford. It’s about my mother. She won’t move. She won’t say anything.’ He was panting, and it dawned on Steven that he must be very young – at oldest, in his teens. ‘We were watching telly and she just passed out!’
A shout in the background, which Steven heard clearly: ‘She isn’t dead! I felt her pulse! She just won’t move!’
Steven heaved a deep sigh, wondering whether he had all the right items in his bag.
‘Very well. Give me your address, and tell me how to get to you …’
After his departure the phone rang again repeatedly. At the local exchange had recently been installed an automatic device to re-route doctors’ calls at prescribed times, referring them from number to number until it struck lucky. Someone, however, had forgotten to instruct it that once a doctor had accepted a call there was a chance he might be out for a considerable while, so it should default to the emergency mode and try someone else.
Instead, it was under the mechanical impression that once a doctor’s phone had been answered that was proof that he would be there until further notice. Tearful and on the verge of hysteria, other people rang, and rang, and rang …
Mr Jacksett nearly did, not so much for himself as for his wife Judy. Right up to closing time people had been either phoning or coming back in person to ask indignantly why their request for canned sardines had been met with tuna, or self-raising flour with wholemeal, or long-life milk with apple-juice. Couldn’t he get anything right, when his prices were already higher than the supermarkets’ in Chapminster and Hatterbridge?
Besides, their kids were fretting dreadfully, because Boyo the dog still had not come home …
What with that, and the prospect of sorting out the returned goods and replacing them on the shelves –
and
reflashing everything with the proper price, for they added a penny or two to the cost of items for home delivery to cover what they paid Peter Lodd, the boy with a bicycle who took them round the village after delivering morning papers –both of them had lost their tempers. Judy had accused her husband, one of the soberest men in Weyharrow, of being drunk because he had taken off a bare half-hour to go to the Marriage where, he said, he hoped to catch and apologize to a few of their regular customers. But it was true that during his absence she had carried on with the job, and he’d stayed out longer than he had promised, and by the time he got back she was ranting about all the food they’d have to eat that would otherwise be spoiled …
Roy Jacksett, being a stolid kind of person, and used to scenes of this sort if not on such a scale, kept trying to calm her throughout the rest of the evening, to such effect that she drank a second cup of the coffee he had brewed from a jar of instant returned by a customer who’d ordered a decaffeinated brand … and then said she couldn’t get to sleep, so he must bring one of the
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