How many more were there to be? There was Leech, for a start. Yvonne, by inclination and training, was uncomfortable with loose arrangements, and she had tried months ago to explain to Dr Golightly that this casual set-up at the allotment, with that beggar Leech just turning up, squatting in the shed and practically being taken on, was dangerously loose. Anybody with any sense could see that he was a homeless down-and-out through choice. But Dr Golightly had been very firm. There was, he had said, nothing loose or dangerous about it, but a simple equilibrium. He was disappointed that Yvonne could not see it. Leech was not a beggar; he was damaged and in need. He had sought shelter in their shed. He had been made welcome and comfortable by Hilary, and now he repaid the favour with his labour in the garden. Ivan needed the help. Leech maintained his dignity. Hilary was happy because Ivan was under less pressure. Oh well, if
Hilary’s
happy, she had said, and Dr Golightly had smiled in agreement. But Yvonne had gone on thinking that Hilary’s handling of father and son over the matter of Leech had been disturbingly neat. And now it meant that they all had to put up with Leech sometimes rolling up in the van with
Ivan to deliver the fruit and veg, and probably giving the patients the creeps, any who might be up and about, anyway.
Yvonne, still watching the younger dark-haired woman struggle with baggage, dog and the old duck in the rain outside, swallowed. Her insides felt milky, soothed, and her feelings softened. It wasn’t Dr Golightly’s fault. He might even be right about Leech and, seen another way, Hilary was just another lame duck herself. The doctor was practically a saint and the trouble with saints was they sometimes needed saving from themselves. It was a further trouble to someone like Yvonne that they seldom knew this, and so she admitted that it rankled, Hilary’s way of going to him at any old time of the morning or night with any trivial little thing she liked, using up his time.
She
never knocked and waited at his door, as everyone else had been instructed to, Yvonne had noticed. She was never asked to come back later, as others were, but was treated as if her bloody mucking about with clay and paint were of supreme importance.
Yvonne checked her anger just as it reached the dangerous stage of being transferred to Dr Golightly, territory on to which she would never stray. No, he was not perfect. Perhaps rather easily taken in but practically a saint, and a wonderful doctor. He was just being kind to Leech and to Hilary, too, and the only reason for that was because at the root of everything lay the matter of Ivan. Yvonne had heard enough about Ivan’s past to understand why Dr Golightly took such pains to see that he remained well. She had seen the scars on Ivan’s arms. And to give Hilary her due, she obviously cared about Ivan’s health too, but honestly, as if art therapy mattered. Nobody in
the place except perhaps that mad Bunny would give a celery stick for it.
Yvonne took several deep breaths to settle a new attack of dyspeptic belching. This place was bad for a person’s health. It was ironic that she spent all day doing massages and whatnot to get people to relax, while the way that Hilary wound nice, gentle Ivan and his father round her little finger got her mad enough to explode. Yvonne clicked another two Rennies out of the foil packet and crunched them so loudly in her jaw that she hardly heard the door open and close behind her, and it was more the change in the room’s atmosphere brought by an unwelcome presence that made her turn and acknowledge that Hilary had come back, as annoyingly sure of herself as before.
‘I’ve just been up again. She’s still asleep,’ Hilary whispered, caringly.
‘I don’t want you disturbing my patients.’
‘I’ve been down to the kitchen and told Ivan about our little talk earlier. And I’d like you to know that he’s reassured me. He’s very calm about it. He thinks if she’s fallen asleep then sleep is what she needs. And so I said if he’s happy I am, and we wouldn’t call Stephen in to look at her.’
‘Oh, so now she’s
Ivan’s
patient?’
Hilary folded her arms, then dropped them. ‘Yvonne, I don’t wish to be confrontational but we’re supposed to work as a team. Anyway, of course she’s
Stephen’s
patient. You’re a nurse.’ She did not have to say ‘only’; her tone inflicted the word’s wound as surely as if she had. Yvonne realised that she hated not just everything Hilary said, but even her actual voice, that puddingy Yorkshire accent that made everything sound so smug and complacent. ‘In my
opinion, she is ill,’ Hilary insisted, stepping forward and joining her at the window. ‘But I always listen to Ivan.’
Yvonne continued to stare out, with her jaws locked. ‘And in my clinical judgment, there is no reason to disturb Dr Golightly. At this stage, my patient’s condition is perfectly manageable with nursing care. And whether you like it or not, my judgment goes.’
‘Well, I feel sure that what Stephen would want—Oh! Who’s that out there? That must be the new music lady. She’s getting ever so wet.’
Yvonne turned and said, trying to hide her surprise with acidic courtesy, ‘The new what?’
‘The old one. With the cello case and the dog. She’s the new music therapist. Stephen said she’s moving in today, she’s having the same room as what’s-her-name had, Alex.’ With a regretful smile which didn’t fool Yvonne for a second she added, ‘Aww. Hasn’t Stephen told you?’
Stephen had not. He was practically a saint but at times a forgetful one. ‘After all,’ Hilary said graciously, ‘I thought you and he made the clinical decisions. I’m very surprised he hasn’t told you. He certainly told me.’
Yvonne could have punched her. ‘We had other, more important things to discuss this morning. We don’t deal with staffing trivia,’ she said, tightly. ‘And as I now have to attend to my patient, I’ll leave you to your new colleague.’
‘My
new colleague? Ours, surely. We’re a committed, multi-skilled therapeutic team, supposed to be, aren’t we?’
‘I’m clinical staff. You’re support staff. And so’s she, so you can deal with her. It’s nothing to do with me, her being here.’
‘Well, clearly. Since Stephen doesn’t seem to have told you.’
‘I suppose you persuaded him to have her. It’s bad enough, having your creepy Leech around the place. Now we’ve got to have
her
.’
‘I had nothing to do with it. I’ve never even set eyes on the woman. And Leech is not creepy. He’s just quiet, and Ivan needs the help, and I don’t want pressure building up on him. You try running a three-acre smallholding and a kitchen practically single-handed.’
‘It’s not single-handed! There are two chefs and three catering assistants!’
‘They need managing. Ivan supervises the menus personally. And he makes the bread.’
‘The chefs do the cooking and the assistants help to serve and clear up, and Dr Golightly advises …’
‘That’s not the point. Ivan’s permanently exhausted, and all you have to do is stick people in hot and cold baths and run sprays over them and hand them their towels …’
‘I’m a qualified nurse! I assist the osteopaths and acupuncturist as well as the doctor.’ Yvonne began to count off on her fingers. ‘I do the infra-red lamp, the hot packs, the inhalations
and
massages
and
general care. AND I’m nearly qualified to do stress counselling. And all you do is hand out paint brushes and clay and bang on about responding to colours!’
Most of the new woman’s belongings were now on the tarmac of the car park. Hilary had read books on how to handle hostility and said mildly, ‘Leech could help with that sort of thing. We need a porter-cum-handyman. He could be out there with an umbrella.’ Hilary waved a hand
in the direction of Sara, struggling to the door with boxes and making her way back to the car for the next load.
‘Oh no, you don’t. It’s bad enough him working in the garden. You may think you’ve got Dr Golightly round your little finger but I’m going to speak to him again about Leech. He’s off-putting.’
‘You won’t get anywhere. Stephen knows that Ivan needs the help. And I don’t see it’s any of your business anyway. Leech just pops in occasionally with the produce and goes away again. He’s hardly ever out of that garden.’
‘That’s another thing! He shouldn’t be allowed to sleep in that shed …’
Yvonne was interrupted by the clang of the front door bell. ‘I’ll go. I’m in charge.’
‘Oh, no. I think I should. After all, I’m the owner’s daughter-in-law.’
‘I’m senior nursing staff.’
‘I’m senior art therapist, and family. And this is a family-run establishment.’
‘It’s a professional establishment. Or
should
be.’
‘With a family atmosphere.’
The bell clanged again, insistently, and the two women pasted on smiles and went together.
J
OYCE OPENED THE
door quickly with her Yale key, stepped silently inside and closed it. She would have to see about Pretzel’s claws. The small square stairwell which rose up the height of the house from the main hall, the ‘staff stairs’ as it was called, had a bit of an echo, and while she could creep up without making a sound in the trainers Sara had got for her, Pretzel liked to go up on the bare boards next to the wall where it wasn’t carpeted. His feet as he climbed made a sound like a necklace breaking. The door to Dr Golightly’s flat on the top floor was just six steps further up on the next half-landing and she did not want him appearing and asking what the noise was. Less still did she want any enquiries as to where she had been and what she might have in her handbag. Just inside her door she waited, her heart beating hard from the climb, then turned and peered through the security spyhole that gave her a view of the landing. Nothing. The only other visible door, down a half-flight on the landing below, led into the upper corridor of the main house where the patients’ rooms were. It too was closed, as it had been when Joyce had crept past, locked from the patients’ side with another Yale lock. She imagined that it was seldom used. Only Dr
Golightly might need it, she supposed, to reach a patient quickly from his flat during the night, although Joyce’s impression of the clinic so far was that they did not expect emergencies. Dr Golightly’s own door, just visible on the outer edge of the distorted circular view, remained closed. The strains of music that wafted down to her ears from behind it, presumably the sound that had drowned out Pretzel’s claws on the stairs, floated on.
Safe now, she turned back. The room was at least potentially pleasant, painted uncontroversially in some yellow or other and carpeted in a polite green. It was not large but at least the tiny single bedroom and shower-room were separate. Joyce’s suitcase and boxes stood in a row against one wall, her cello case and lamps beside them. The sofa was dark green and Sara had promised some cushions which would, she had said, make it a bit cosier. And the flowers she had brought from the garden, blowsy roses and aquilegias, were gradually overcoming the choking smells of air freshener and Mr Sheen with which the room had been hastily ‘gone round’ in preparation for her arrival. Actually, those smells would not last long against the perfumed onslaught of warm, live dog, the only consistent smell in Joyce’s life and consequently the smell of home.
Leaning against the door and surveying her new room to try to make it familiar, she listened. Stephen Golightly had not struck her as a music lover, not at any rate a lover of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. Joyce had Stephen Golightly down as more of a doer whose sort of doing—athletic, energetic, practical—seemed to preclude the sort of thinking that she considered not just a prerequisite to a proper appreciation of Bach, but an activity of an altogether
higher order. It was not quite that she despised ‘doing’ per se, but she rather disliked the kind of doers who appeared to take pleasure in merely owning a physical body and to find entertainment in getting it to do things, not an attitude that had been encouraged in Monifieth. Sara and her ridiculous daily running, for example, and whose recording this was now being played. Joyce would know the sound of the Cristiani cello and that under-use of vibrato anywhere. The recognition was enough to move her further into the room where the music was fainter, but at that moment and unnervingly, rather as if she had made it happen, the Bach stopped. A few seconds later, some Beethoven started up. It was the Seven Variations in E flat Major from
Die Zauberflöte
, and it was Selkirk playing again. Joyce smiled. Ah, she wasn’t bad at the wee easy stuff.
Suddenly the music grew louder. Dr Golightly’s door was being opened. Joyce grabbed her handbag and looked round wildly. This little apartment had not been home long enough for her to have worked out her hiding places. But if Dr Golightly was making social calls he wouldn’t go in the bedroom, surely? She shoved the bag into the bedroom and closed the door on it just as the volume of the music subsided again. She darted back to her outer door and opened it. Dr Golightly’s door was closed and from behind it the Beethoven played on. But her eyes travelled down, caught by a movement, to the half-landing below. The door which led into the main house had just silently closed behind whoever had gone through it. What a silly thing to do, Joyce thought, to go out and leave your music playing like that. Dr Golightly hadn’t struck her as a careless man, but it was hard to tell with some people.
She returned and lay on her sofa to wait until she could
be sure that her peace would not be disturbed. She realised that her heart was pounding again, with fear as well as excited, faintly criminal anticipation. The handbag’s contents awaited. But even though she knew that Dr Golightly was not in his room she felt a little too flustered to make a start just yet, and of course the pleasure would be the greater the longer she withheld it from herself. Very few people understood this. Very few people understood that people like her exercised more control in an average day than they would muster in a lifetime dedicated to their sort of mundane self-indulgence. Yet she was flustered, possibly by the sheer proximity of Dr Golightly’s living quarters, and Pretzel seemed to be feeling it too, since he had not made his usual seal-like leap on to the sofa to join her.