Authors: Malcolm D Welshman
‘If you’d be so good as to wait in the car, I’m sure this won’t take long,’ she said to him, giving Oscar a kiss on the head as she gathered the dog up in her arms, enfolding him in one end of the shawl.
‘If you’d like to come this way,’ I said, resisting the urge to bow and point down the corridor with bent elbow whilst apologising for the lack of a red carpet.
In the consulting room, Francesca Cavendish billowed to a halt in front of the table and ran a finger along its surface, her bottom lip seesawing up and down as she then inspected her finger, rubbing it with her thumb.
‘You can put Oscar down if you wish,’ I said. ‘It’s perfectly safe. He won’t catch anything.’
‘I’d prefer to hold on to him if you don’t mind,’ she replied with a sniff. ‘One can’t be too careful. You hear of MSRA and all that in our hospitals. I dread to think what Oscar could pick up.’ She gave the wrapped bundle a squeeze. She glanced about the room, her eyes alighting on my degree certificate framed on the wall. ‘Yours?’ she queried.
I nodded.
She studied it for a moment. ‘Says you qualified this year.’
I nodded again.
‘So your experience is somewhat limited then.’
Ouch. What could I say? I knew precisely what I would have liked to have said but this one-time pedlar of cat food would certainly not like to hear it. Instead, I cleared my throat softly before speaking. ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘Darling boy … it’s not what you can do for me, but what you can do for Oscar here.’
Wow. I don’t know about beating the clock, but my ticker certainly started beating extra to the minute. It was pounding in my chest. I smiled wanly and leaned across the table, endeavouring to spot the dog, lost in layers of pashmina. I’d heard her tell Beryl that Oscar was a Maltese terrier, five years old, doctored, with a sensitive disposition and wary of men. Great. All I could see was a head – silky white hair tied over it in a blue bow matching the colour of the shawl, button-black eyes, and lips that drew back in a snarl the closer I leaned. The snarl revealed an undershot jaw with a line of yellow teeth like a row of rotting palings just waiting to impale me with their own mix of MRSA. Miss Cavendish seemed oblivious to the dribble seeping into her pashmina.
‘So what seems to be the problem?’ I asked.
‘That’s for you to find out, sweetie,’ she drawled.
Tick, tick went my cardiac clock, ever faster.
‘My usual vet is Mr Scott-Thomas up in Bayswater,’ she went on. ‘Such a nice man …
very
experienced …
very
understanding. His son is a casting director for TV reality shows like
Wenches in the Wilderness
and
Cast Adrift in the South Pacific
– that sort of thing. I’ve been approached, you know.’
Not wishing to rock her boat, I feigned interest while wishing I could cast her off my premises and get her to sail in the direction of Bayswater and Scott-Thomas senior. But as Miss Cavendish pointed out, it was rather a distance to travel and for something so trivial … something she thought a provincial vet should be able to deal with. And if it turned out to be something more serious, then, of course, she’d have no hesitation in breaking her ‘rest’ and taking Oscar back up to London.
Having listened to all this, I reached out to pat Oscar’s head with the vague notion of establishing some sort of rapport, some sort of contact. I certainly got the latter when a mouthful of teeth sunk themselves into my palm. I snatched my hand away half-expecting a shower of broken incisors to follow.
‘There, there …’ cooed Miss Cavendish, ‘did the doctor frighten you? He’s not like our nice Mr Scott-Thomas, is he? Now
there’s
a doctor who knows how to treat us.’
I felt a red glow spread through me, like molten lava welling up. A Mount Vesuvius on the point of erupting. It was only the sudden appearance of Lucy that stopped me from exploding.
‘Sorry to interrupt, Paul, but we’ve got an RTA on our hands. Cynthia Paget’s just rushed in with her chihuahua. He’s been hit by a car.’
I looked at Miss Cavendish. ‘Do you mind taking a seat a moment? I must check this out.’ I didn’t wait for a reply but dashed out behind Lucy and ran down to the theatre where I found Mandy who had Chico lying prostrate on the ops table, his pale little body looking lost on the vast expanse of the white surface. She’d a drip already set up, the needle waiting to be inserted. But as I skidded to a halt, Chico’s breathing was coming in rattling gasps and a trickle of blood oozed from his mouth. I lifted a lip, noted the blanched gums. The pupils of his eyes were widely dilated and fixed. As I lifted my stethoscope to listen to his chest, there was one final sigh and his ribcage dropped. A tremor twitched through his legs … his flanks quivered, then … stillness. Chico was dead.
A wave of sadness swept through me. Despite the little chap’s habit of going for my ankles, he’d been a good companion for Mrs Paget. She was going to miss him terribly.
‘Do you want me to tell her?’ volunteered Mandy.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I think I should.’
I found Mrs Paget sitting in reception, Beryl’s arm round her. She looked up, eyes red and swollen, her face streaked with tears, a handkerchief balled in her fist.
‘He’s gone, hasn’t he?’ she whispered.
I nodded. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘There was nothing we could do to save him.’
Mrs Paget let out another heart-wrenching sob. ‘Can I see him, please?’
It was Beryl who intervened. ‘Yes, of course, Cynthia. You just wait here a minute.’ She got up, her eyes also glistening with tears. ‘I’ll see to it, Paul. You’ve got that actress woman still to deal with.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes, sure. Go on,’ she insisted, giving me a slight push in the direction of the consulting room.
Francesca Cavendish rose to her feet as I entered. ‘Darling, how dreadful,’ was her response when I told her of Chico’s demise. Did I detect some sympathy there? But that soon evaporated when I instructed her to put Oscar on the table. Take one … scene one … Action!
‘You sure it’s clean, darling? I don’t want Oscar catching a nasty bug.’ Cut.
‘It’s disinfected between each consultation. Please put him on the table.’ Take two, and … Action!
‘The disinfectant could harm his paws. He’s got very sensitive feet you know.’ Cut.
I pointed. ‘On the table. Please.’ Take three, and … Action!
‘He might slip and slide about.’ Cut.
I clicked my fingers. ‘On the table.’ Take four.
Yes. This time it was in the can. Oscar was unpeeled from the pashmina and lowered on to the table. He was not a pretty sight. No film or TV role would ever be offered to this undersized specimen of a Maltese terrier with his lumpy, matted coat and pink skin, confetti-scattered with scurf. He immediately started bucking about the table like a pantomime horse on speed. Miss Cavendish swept him up into her pashmina again and said, ‘You’ll have to manage with me holding him.’
‘Let’s start again then, shall we? What seems to be the problem?’
This time a straight answer was given. ‘He can’t walk properly.’
‘He’s lame?’
‘That’s my idea of someone who can’t walk, sweetie.’
Oh dear. We were off again. Must be the artistic temperament. Or just plain rudeness. Whatever, I chose to ignore it. ‘So which leg’s he lame on?’
There was a theatrical shrug of the shoulders. ‘I’m no vet.’
Keep calm, Paul, keep calm. I walked round the side of the table and held out my hand. ‘May I?’ I said indicating the pashmina with the yellow teeth sticking out of it.
‘If you insist.’
‘I do.’
‘Very well then.’
There was a snarl – one that emanated from Oscar rather than Francesca Cavendish – as I slid my hand into the folds of the shawl and eased out Oscar’s front paws. ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I murmured.
‘My dear, he doesn’t know that,’ she said as I gingerly began palpating each of Oscar’s toes. He fidgeted and squirmed but didn’t cry out. I eased myself round the actress and levered out his hind legs from behind her elbow. The dog whimpered as I felt his right back paw.
‘Oh, my sweetheart. Is he hurting you?’ exclaimed Miss Cavendish with a toss of her turbaned head.
But at least I had located the problem. A dew claw, grossly overgrown, had curled round on itself to dig into the pad. No wonder Oscar was lame; it must have been like walking on a needle. There followed a tussle between nail clippers, Maltese terrier, fingers, folds of pashmina and loose incisors as I delved into the folds of the shawl to extract paws and, one by one, cut nails and prise out the worst of fur balls between toes. It was a masterful performance, itself worthy of an Oscar nomination if not the statuette itself.
Nail clippings shot in all directions. Ping – one ricocheted off a steel kidney dish. Ping – another hit a slat of the Venetian blinds. A third sprung away from the clippers and spiralled up to land ping-less in the curl of hair over Francesca Cavendish’s forehead where it hung like some New Age adornment – she was oblivious to its presence.
The struggle to hang on to Oscar as he slithered and slipped out of grasp in the folds of her pashmina took their toll on the actress. By the time I’d finished, her porcelain complexion was as white and shiny as a well-scrubbed washbasin.
‘Goodness,’ she spluttered between gulps of air. ‘I never used to have that sort of struggle with Mr Scott-Thomas.’
I refused to dwell on the image conjured up in my mind – her and him thrashing about on the consulting table. No, definitely not. It didn’t bear contemplating. I wheeled her out as quickly as I could, expressing my wish that all would now be well and that the ‘rest’ of her stay in Westcott would be enjoyable. I didn’t suggest, as I normally did with other clients, that she should return if further problems were encountered. This one-act play with her had been quite enough. No encores were required, thank you very much.
To my surprise, even Beryl, not usually one to pass judgement on clients, seemed to be on my side when she said, ‘Remind me not to buy her brand of cat food.’
It must have been about ten days later when I received the call. It was one of those rare weekends where Lucy and I hadn’t managed to synchronise our time off together. I was on duty, she was off; the phone at Prospect House was manned by Mandy.
‘Sorry, Paul,’ she said, ‘but I’ve had that pussy-ad woman on the phone demanding that her Oscar be seen.’
‘Did she say what the problem was?’
‘’Fraid not.’
I sighed. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better see her then. Ask her to come in.’
‘She won’t.’
‘What?’
‘She’s insisting on a house call.’
‘Some hope. Especially on a weekend.’
‘Maybe you could have a word?’
Minutes later, I was listening to Francesca Cavendish’s dramatic drawl down the line. ‘You really must come out, darling. Oscar’s scratching himself to death.’
‘I’ll certainly see him for you, but you’ll need to bring him up to the hospital.’
There was a sharp intake of breath and the phone went dead.
I shrugged and put it down. ‘Just that actress from the cat ads,’ I said when asked by Lucy who it was. ‘Wants a house call.’
She agreed with me that the woman was unlikely to find any vet in the area prepared to make an out-of-hours visit to a scratching dog.
‘But no doubt she’ll ring round to try and find someone,’ I said.
When the phone rang again half-an-hour later, it was Mandy to tell me that Francesca Cavendish was very sorry that we’d been cut off and what time did I say I could see Oscar?
She arrived at Prospect House before me and was sitting in the waiting room with Oscar clutched to her bosom. There was no sign of her ‘chauffeur’ outside. She leapt to her feet as I walked in.
She gushed, ‘So good of you to see me out of hours.’
I forced a smile. ‘No problem.’
‘It’s why I think so highly of Mr Scott-Thomas. However late at night it might be, he’s always there for me.’
My smile faded.
‘It’s just that I can’t stand it any longer … he’s been going at it all night long. I’m quite exhausted.’
I did a double-take. Had I missed something here? Some all-night hanky-panky with her Mr Scott-Thomas?
She continued, ‘Scratch, scratch, scratch … Oscar simply won’t stop. I just hope you can do something about it.’
Right. Yes. ‘It must be very irritating,’ I said, only aware of the pun I’d made once it had slipped out. Thank goodness Miss Cavendish didn’t notice. She was far more concerned at pointing out the oozing matt of fur over Oscar’s right shoulder.
“Just what might that be?’ she asked.
‘Eczema,’ I replied.
‘ECZEMA?’ she echoed in a tone worthy of Lady Bracknell’s ‘A handbag?’ Had she been practising the part, I wondered.
My turn to take centre stage. I explained it was wet eczema brought on by something which had irritated the skin in that region. The dog had started nibbling the spot, making it more sore, so that it, in turn, made him lick more, making it even more sore so that he …