Norma hadn’t attended the Marcie Young inquest. She had offered, dreading that Don might take her up on it, but he’d said, ‘I’d only be worrying about you. I’ll be fine.’
He wasn’t fine though, she had seen the signs of strain on him as the start date drew closer. Last night when he came home, he was ashen-faced, distracted. She teased it out of him, ‘How was it, did you have to speak?’
He said a little, then added to it, then elaborated until he was giving full vent to his sense of outrage at the whole charade. He was drinking more, a tumbler of whiskey as soon as he crossed the threshold, wine with his meal. But who was she to comment? He’d been under so much pressure, what with the inquest and problems at the surgery.
Don generally got along with people but one of the GPs, Fraser McKee he was called, got right up Don’s nose. A younger man, he was trying to tell Don how things should be done. He wanted to coach patients and staff to use the Internet, to research current medical thinking, he had ideas for setting up clinics for this, that and the other, as though Don’s thirty years in the job counted for nothing.
At first Don had appreciated Fraser’s clumsy attempts to innovate, then he began to complain mildly about him, putting it down to the man’s inexperience but as the months went on Don became increasingly hostile.
‘He’s after a partnership,’ Don had said, ‘he talks as though it’s a sure thing.’
‘And it’s not?’ Norma said.
‘Over my dead body,’ Don had said, ‘he’s no idea how to work as a member of the team. If you don’t agree with his projects and his buzzwords he writes you off.’
‘What do the others think?’ Norma said.
‘He’s not made himself popular,’ Don said. ‘I don’t think anyone will disagree.’
Norma wondered now, as she ironed his shirts, what sort of doctor she herself would have made, if things had turned out differently. Would she have gained the loyalty and affection of her patients and colleagues like Don had or been an irritant like Fraser? Would she even have been a GP? Perhaps she’d have chosen a specialty and gone for a hospital career instead.
At eighteen all she knew was she wanted to study medicine, to save lives. She had worked so hard to get her A levels, to get into medical school, swotting late into the night, taking diet pills to keep awake. Diet pills and black coffee. There were extra classes at school, too, and she went to every one of them. There were about a dozen girls selected for the fast stream, about half of them doing science.
The exams made her terribly anxious, a tightening across her back, churning in her stomach and a clammy sensation across her forehead. She gripped the pen so hard that the indentations remained on her fingers for hours. Once, half way through the first chemistry question, she tore a hole in the paper.
They were in France when the results came out and she had rung Uncle Marty who had opened the letter and read out, ‘Four As: biology, chemistry, physics and maths.’ Four As! She had her place in Manchester.
The relief was like someone releasing her from an iron lung or something and she’d spent the rest of the holiday having fun with the friends she’d made from the village where the gîte was, in a haze of Gauloises and cheap wine, holiday romance and Pernod.
There were three weeks after they got back from France to get ready for student life. She was going into halls for the first year. She’d never been north and imagined it to be pretty grim but when the training was done she would be able to work pretty much anywhere, even abroad. Doctors were always in demand.
Mummy and Daddy drove her up one fine Saturday afternoon. She felt sick with excitement as they carried clothes and records, her books, sheets and blankets and her castor oil plant up to the room.
Once lectures had started, it didn’t take long for that excitement to be replaced with the crushing realization that if swotting for exams had been hard going at school then studying medicine was ten times worse. Until she met Don.
