Second Opinion (3 page)

And, she had continued, warming to her theme, it wasn’t as though it was only in Pathology there were problems with staffing; wasn’t the entire fabric of Old East under threat with all the changes the new Trust Board was making? ‘Counting the bloody paper-clips,’ she said bitterly. ‘That’s what we’re doing. Everything’s being cut to ribbons.
It’s death by a thousand cuts, that’s what it is.’ She said it as though the cliché were a phrase she had newly minted. ‘There are all those bloody Union meetings all the time and you fall over protesters and their placards every time you go in and out of the place — and then to cap it all you come back and have a go at me when I’ve done all I could, I swear to you, all anyone possibly could do, to keep things going properly —’

George had taken a deep breath and stopped listening, while biting her lip to keep back any comments regarding the amount of time Sheila might have spent gossiping on the phone — her most infuriating habit — and said merely that she would talk to Professor Hunnisett about it. The person who really had control over staffing, of course, was the Chief Executive Officer, Matthew Herne, but she knew she’d get short shrift from him if she asked for more help. The only thing that man cared about was the rows of figures he spent all his time with; if she didn’t get a clinical ally to help her lean on him, she’d never get anywhere. Professor Hunnisett, as head of the Clinical Directorates — these new labels they all had now they were an NHS Trust were another source of irritation to George — was the only person she could ask to help her; not that he could be expected to do all that much. He never did, after all.

She got rid of Sheila by dint of asking for coffee — a request which sent her off in a huff to complain to Jerry and Jane and Peter and anyone else in the main lab who would listen that she wasn’t a domestic, for God’s sake, the woman could make her own bloody coffee, before going into the little kitchen to make it — and settled at her desk.

The paperwork would have to wait; first there was the report on this post-mortem to do, and she took the cassette Danny Roscoe, her mortuary porter, had given her after she’d finished her dictation, and pushed it into her Walkman. It would have to be typed out so that she could read
the notes at her leisure, but now she wanted to recall what she’d seen and done.

She sat with her eyes closed, slowly rubbing her dull left hand with her right as she listened, and frowned.

It had seemed to be a cot death. Certainly there were no signs of any kind to explain the death in any other terms; she had looked particularly carefully for needle marks and there had been none, and had taken samples for Jerry, her most sensible technician, to check for insulin. She, like every one else in the pathology world, had become particularly watchful for that ever since the fuss last year over the nurse suffering from Munchausen’s by Proxy, who’d murdered in-patient children up in Lincolnshire. But she doubted there’d be any; there had been no signs to lead her to suppose anything untoward had been done at all. Inevitably she was left with that most deeply unsatisfactory of diagnoses — Sudden Infant Death Syndrome — to put on the report for the coroner, and she opened her eyes and rewound her tape, glowering as she thought about it. It was as bad as those ghastly historical days, when they had entered things like ‘Dead of the Flux’ or ‘Succumbed to Melancholy’ in cause of death columns in church registers. Positively antediluvian.

She leaned back and rubbed her face, trying to make her left hand feel less heavy, and knew the problem was as much her own mood as anything else. If she kept thinking about her hand, of course it would feel odd. Somatizing, that was what she was doing. She was anxious and pushing her anxieties into her work and thereby into her body. If she hadn’t been thinking about her mother that day when she’d done the post-mortem on the vagrant’s sadly decomposing body (they’d found him in a pile of dustbins where he had clearly been for almost a week, unnoticed because the street-cleansing work of the local council had been privatized and somehow the collections were ‘all over the place’, as the policeman who brought in the body had told
her gloomily), if she hadn’t, she repeated inside her head, she wouldn’t have let her hand with the scalpel slip. If it hadn’t slipped she wouldn’t have stuck the back of her other hand and let in the infection that sent it swelling to terrifying proportions and pushed her temperature sky high. And if
that
hadn’t happened she wouldn’t have had to spend almost a month in the Communicable Disease Ward while they sorted out the causal organism and got rid of the infection. Time she had spent thinking about her mother …

With a sharp gesture she reached for the pile of paperwork and tried to start on it, but it was no use. She still had to decide what to do, for it had been over a month since Aunt Bridget had written, and the sooner she did it, the sooner she’d get her head together.

After a few minutes she pushed the work away and pulled out from her drawer a piece of blank paper. She’d do it in columns the way she usually did when she had a problem to solve. Neatly she ruled a line down the centre of the page, then wrote across the top: ‘EPB. WHAT TO DO.’

‘ONE’, she wrote. She stopped and chewed her pen. After a while she bent her head and wrote firmly: ‘Ignore A.B.’s letter as nonsense.’ And then stopped again.

Aunt Bridget, as she had called her since infancy, even though the woman was just her mother’s friend and not a relative at all, had never been one to fuss. That was why her mother had loved her and why George herself had quite liked her. So if things were worrying her about Vanny — George’s mother — as she had said in her letter, then she was indeed deeply concerned. This wouldn’t be a small matter.

‘She’s not quite as good at caring for herself as she thinks she is,’ Bridget had written in that strong backwards-leaning script that was so familiar.

And apart from some inconsequential chatter about the doings of some of George’s scatter of cousins, most of whom still lived in New England well away from Upstate New York where Bridget and Vanny had been contented neighbours and friends this past forty years, that was all. Not another word about what it was that worried her. And even when George, anxious about what little she had said, had phoned her, Bridget had not been forthcoming.

‘Come and see for yourself,’ was all she would say. ‘I’m not the doctor, George. You are. Not that’s she’s sick, exactly. I don’t mean that. It’s just that — well, come and see.’ And that had been that, and George, remembering the stubbornness of the woman, had given up trying.

No, she couldn’t ignore Aunt Bridget’s letter. So she looked at her piece of paper again and wrote another line. ‘Go home to Buffalo.’

She leaned back in her chair and contemplated that. And then shook her head. It just was not feasible. The job here was not one she could easily leave for a month or more, not after such extended sick leave, and there would be little point in going for a shorter time, surely? Even if she could afford it, and truth to tell she’d be hard pressed to do so.

It had cost a fortune to get her tiny flat in Bermondsey; she’d tried to find somewhere in an area still untouched by the creeping tendrils of gentrification which had invaded the whole Docklands area, but had had to give that up. No one had any flat to offer in what she called the ordinary streets. They were all council tenants or people who had lived in the same houses for so long no one would get them out till they died, and then the council had a waiting list so long that — No, she’d had to give up that idea, and find herself a flat to buy amongst the smartened-up streets, with their brass carriage lamps and gleaming white paint at which the locals sneered and which made the shopkeepers watch out for the residents so that they could overcharge them. And that had cost money. She’d scraped the bottom of her savings account to get the place, had borrowed to the hilt to furnish it and heaven knew when she’d be out of debt.

So, she was broke and that was the core of her predicament. She couldn’t visit Ma, because she daren’t take time off for which she wouldn’t be paid and she couldn’t afford the price of an air ticket anyway.

Again she reached for the piece of paper and this time wrote more slowly: ‘Get Ma to visit me’, and put down her pen and rested her chin in her hand.

She loved her mother dearly — at a distance. When they had shared a home, long ago when her father Oscar Barnabas was still alive, the only thing that had kept them from arguing all the time had been his gentle buffering; he’d told George firmly that he loved his wife and wouldn’t let the impetuous young George drive her crazy; he’d told his wife he loved his daughter and wouldn’t allow her strong-minded mother to run her life. And they’d listened and managed to live together amiably enough on that basis. But since her father had died — oh, no. There could never be any peace if they lived together.

Face it, woman, George told herself now. You don’t want
to go to Buffalo because you just don’t want to have to live with her. You could get a job there, probably, but you’d rather stay here. And if you can’t live with her in Buffalo, having her here will be just as bad.

‘I’ll ask Bridget too,’ she said aloud, and then grinned in relief. Of course. She wrote that down on her sheet of paper and then screwed it up and threw it into the waste basket. It had worked again, writing it down, and for the first time that morning she felt better, in control of herself and what was going on around her.

Now she could put her mind to her job. She pulled the paperwork back and started to sort it with swift fingers into piles of urgent, not-so-urgent, and get-someone-else-to-do-it. It only took her half an hour to finish by managing to get a good deal of it on to the someone-else pile (Sheila? Probably. Do her good, she thought with a shaft of malice), leaving herself with some stuff she could get through before the end of the day if she put her mind to it. Which meant she could now go back to the matter of the Popodopoulos baby.

She looked again at the note that had been written on a scrap of paper and attached to the forms that had come with the body. ‘This is the third infant death we’ve had in Maternity since the summer. ?? Linked.’ The note was typed and unsigned but she assumed it had been written by the registrar who’d verified death, and she riffled through the forms to find out his name. Ah, yes, she thought. Didier St Cloud. A stocky young man with a great deal of untidy fair hair and no hint of a French accent in his speech, even though he had been born and reared in Lyons; she remembered seeing him in the canteen laughing and sitting rather close to one of the prettier young nurses and being told all about him by Hattie Clements, her closest friend among the nursing staff, who was as eager and amused by hospital gossip as was George herself.

‘Very bright, according to Audrey Burke. She rather
fancies him, I think. She’s quite jealous because he’s obviously got a thing for Alison Gurney — that’s the girl he’s talking to — and she knows that Celia Lichfield dislikes him and that makes him even more attractive in her eyes. She can’t stand Lichfield though they always seem to get on well together. But then, as Audrey says, you have to try when you’re stuck with each other.’

None of which, George told herself now sternly, is at all relevant. The thing is, if this is his note and he’s right and there’ve been three sudden infant deaths in Maternity then there is indeed something to worry about. I’ll have to ask him if he did attach it to the request form, and why he didn’t sign it — because if there’s something odd going on, his coyness in being direct about it gets to be significant.

Her spirits lifted suddenly and she found herself whistling softly through her teeth as she left her small office and went to check on the state of things in the labs; it wasn’t so bad being here, after all, rotten though the weather was. She’d get Ma over on one of those special tickets that meant she had to go home after a fixed time, so even if they did argue while she and Bridget were staying with her (and it was going to be dreadfully crowded; she only had the one bedroom and they’d have to share, which no doubt they’d fuss about), well, it would only be for a few weeks. And she had an interesting mystery to get herself buried in. Lately, there’d been nothing much to interest anyone.

She stopped outside the door to the main lab and smiled a little wryly. You mean there’s been nothing much to interest Gus, she told herself, so you haven’t seen much of him and you miss him. Go on, be honest. You miss him.

‘I miss the laughs,’ she said aloud, and then shook her head. It was that of course, but a bit more besides. He really was being very odd in the way he behaved and that itself was a mystery she’d like to solve. There’d been a time, not all that long ago, when he’d been amazingly attentive. Phoning her all the time, dropping into the lab on the
flimsiest of excuses, and generally behaving like a really ardent swain. And she’d liked it. Naturally, she wouldn’t have let him know that for the world. He was quite conceited enough already, and anyway she still hadn’t forgiven him for the way he had behaved back when she had been going around with Toby Bellamy after the business of Richard Oxford’s death; he’d actually lied about there being a case they had to go on together just to stop her seeing Toby. And all the time Toby had been at Old East, even long after she and he had rather cooled off each other, Gus had gone on being attentive.