A Few Green Leaves Read Free Page A

thirty he was as fully qualified as Dr G. and much more up to date in the treatments and drugs he prescribed.
    ‘And how are you today?’ he asked tentatively, for, after all, she must be over eighty and there was something about her that did not fit in with the neat rows of meek old people in the hospital where he had developed his interest in geriatrics. Still, everyone knew that people in villages were different. Those bright beady eyes had plenty of life in them and it was perfectly sensible to ask how she did.
    ‘It’s these fleas,’ she said, ‘and that stops me sleeping. I’d like some of those sleeping pills.’
    ‘Well now, we must do something about that,’ he said briskly. No point in telling her that he didn’t just dish out sleeping tablets to anyone who asked for them. No good explaining that if you would take hedgehogs into your house you’d get fleas. It wasn’t really the kind of problem he expected to have to face on a Monday morning when the patients were more apt to imagine themselves to be suffering from ailments they’d read about in the Sunday papers, but Martin was equal to the challenge. ‘Let’s get rid of those fleas first, shall we?’ he said. Health visitor, district nurse, social worker, ordinary village do-gooder, even his own wife
    Avice – all these could be called in to help, and a note authorising the purchase of a suitable insect powder might do the trick. ‘Next, please,’ he said to himself, pleased at having disposed of Miss Lickerish.
    The next three patients were perfectly ordinary and, as it were, satisfactory – a youth with acne, a young married woman with a contraceptive problem, an older man needing to have his blood pressure checked. The fourth person to enter the room, smiling apologetically as if she knew in advance that she was going to waste his time, was the rector’s sister Daphne.
    ‘Good morning, Miss Dagnall,’ he adopted his most cheerful manner, ‘and how’s the world treating you?’ A silly thing to say, as he immediately realised, trotting out that old cliche. ‘Sit down and let’s have a chat,’ he went on. The doctor needed to relax as much as the patient, even with the consciousness of a full load still slumped in the waiting-room.
    Daphne was not exactly sure what, if anything, was the matter with her. She was depressed (or ‘in a depressed situation’), she longed to get away from the village, from the damp spring of West Oxfordshire, to live in a whitewashed cottage on the shores of the Aegean.
    ‘Do they have cottages there, as we know them?’ Martin asked, playing for time. Why on earth didn’t she go to Dr G.? he wondered. She must have been his patient long before he (Martin) came into the practice. He could not know that Daphne had deliberately chosen him because she knew only too well what Dr G. would say to her. (‘We’re all getting on a bit – it’s been a long winter – very natural to feel a bit under the weather – go and buy yourself a new hat, my dear’ – his panacea for most feminine ills, when women hadn’t worn hats for years. Such old-fashioned advice and he wouldn’t even prescribe suitable tablets.) She hoped for better things from Martin Shrubsole.
    ‘Of course I can’t leave my brother,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s the trouble, in a way.’
    ‘You don’t like living at the rectory?’ If this were so it was ironical, for the beautiful old grey stone rectory was the one house in the village that he and his wife coveted. ‘ That's the house I want,’ Avice had said.
    ‘It’s so big and rambling,’ Daphne went on hopelessly. ‘You’ve no idea how difficult it is to heat.’
    Avice had pointed out that they hadn’t even got night-storage heaters, Martin remembered, just a few paraffin stoves and rather inefficient ones at that. Would they be eligible for some additional heating allowance? he wondered. Probably not, as they were neither of them pensioners yet. Did Miss Dagnall wear