Chapter 10 #2
Jolyon, who’d wobbled to his feet and came over to his mum, sensing her getting upset, took the sheet from her hands. The women watched him crumpling it into a ball and bowling it along the rug. She sensed Mhairi feeling embarrassed but also wanting to smile. So Alice made sure to smile first.
‘Nice bowling, Jolyon!’ she told the boy. She placed another sheet on the desk, but Mhairi didn’t take this one.
‘Dan, my husband,’ said Mhairi, clearing her throat, ‘…said I might be suffering from an imbalance of some kind, but I’m fine. I’m just tired.’
If Alice could have glanced into their marriage she’d have seen Dan saying this on his way out to work while Mhairi struggled to rip open the lid of the supermarket savers mega tub of Greek yoghurt after Jolyon had turned down yet another attempt at mashed banana on toast.
‘Do you have any friends in a similar situation?’ Alice tried.
Mhairi explained her best friend was away in Switzerland for a while, and she didn’t have any kids, though she had two other mum friends who were also lovely and always offering to help, but they were super busy like everyone else was and she didn’t like to burden them.
‘It might help you to meet other parent carers,’ Alice suggested. ‘Does Jolyon have many friends to play with, because play is so important, isn’t it?’
Alice registered the way the woman’s face froze.
Had she made another mistake? Did Mhairi not think of herself as a parent carer?
Or are they more isolated than she was letting on?
Maybe Jolyon didn’t have many little buddies to play with?
She wished she hadn’t said anything about it now.
She wished there was longer to talk. Mhairi was looking down at her hands in her lap. Alice had to think fast.
‘I wonder whether we should begin a referral to the educational psychologist. It’ll be a very long wait, probably, but they can help with things like school and education plans.
He’ll be starting school soon, won’t he?
’ She was aware of not trying to promise too much. Resources were so thin on the ground.
‘I’ve deferred his place for a year,’ the mum said. ‘The idea of school terrifies me. How can he be ready for it?’
Alice didn’t know what to say about this, and she found herself wondering why Dr Millen hadn’t made these same referrals. What had he been waiting for?
‘What else does Jolyon need, do you think?’ Alice faced Mhairi now, her hands in prayer between her knees.
‘I… I thought you could tell me that.’
Alice blinked, at a loss.
Time was up. She should be showing Mrs Sears and her son out, their worries gone, or at least on their way to being gone.
She let her eyes fall to Jolyon who was now happily sitting in a splayed-ankle kneel, picking fluffy bits from the rug. He beamed up at her, then at his mummy.
Mhairi smiled tenderly back at her son, and a little conspiratorially too, like they were the only two who understood each other in the whole world, and like she was very, very glad when her son was affectionate with her in public.
Maybe because it stopped people thinking the worst about her and her parenting?
‘You look happy to me,’ Alice tried, addressing Jolyon. ‘And you’re growing, and playing.’ She indicated the little cairn of rug fluff that the boy had piled on the toe of Mhairi’s trainer. ‘And you communicate very well, given the way you scrunched up that questionnaire for your mummy.’
Jolyon, seeing his mother smiling, smiled too.
‘I… I don’t have children myself.’ Alice let this tail away to a shrug, turning back to Mhairi. ‘But if he’s loved, and clothed and growing and happy, and making his feelings felt, that seems great to me.’
Mhairi’s face fell as though she didn’t know whether to thank her for the vote of confidence or throw herself on the floor and have a fit of rage at this brushing-off.
‘Great?’ Mhairi echoed.
‘Really, really great!’ Alice’s double thumbs-up detracted from the reassurance she was desperately trying to offer.
‘Right, well, thank you.’ The woman was shrinking before her eyes.
Oh no! Alice could see it all now. Dr Millen had been the practice GP for decades now, and he could be fusty and set in his ways, if Alice’s first encounters with him this morning were indicative of how he was all the time.
He’d shaken Alice’s hand in greeting with the relieved look of a man who ought to have retired years ago and who was now in the presence of his ticket out of here and onto his final-salary pension.
He was literally the only doctor for miles, experienced and wise, yes, but overburdened and, Alice sensed, rapidly losing interest in new medical developments, if the conversation they had about a training initiative he was required to attend soon was anything to go by.
He’d grumbled about how the surgery had been chosen to trial ‘some new ambient voice technology thing, supposed to transcribe consultations for us and keep medical notes without us having to do a thing. I don’t know, what is the point of doctoring if I can’t write my own medical notes and draft my own patient letters?
’ Then he’d shut himself in his office and left her to her patients.
Plus, Alice hadn’t failed to notice, he’d expected Gracie to make his tea and take in his lunch to him, treating her more like his secretary than the surgery’s receptionist.
Yet, now here she was, the ‘young woman doctor’, a fresh new presence in the staid old surgery. She had to be up on childhood developmental stuff, right? And if Mhairi Sears had been looking to her as a lifeline at last, other patients would too.
Queasiness spread from her stomach to her throat. She looked at the little boy again.
Just because Jolyon seemed happy enough right this second didn’t mean he didn’t still deserve the very best support and understanding possible, and just because his mum had coped until now didn’t mean she wasn’t worried sick about the future.
‘What was it you wanted to get from today?’ Alice asked softly, because she’d been trained to ask this, feeling herself being pulled out on the tide, way beyond her depth.
She’d experienced this feeling on many occasions at the hospital, but still, it was dreadful, because it wasn’t her who was at risk of going under. It was Mhairi and her little boy.
Silence bloomed between the three of them. Mhairi’s face set into a dignified, placid mask. She hauled her bag onto her shoulder and reached for Jolyon’s hand.
‘Thank you for seeing us, Doctor,’ she said, unable to answer the question. ‘Come on, Jolly. Let’s go home.’
Alice watched him get into his stroller without complaint and Mhairi pushed her beautiful son right out of the room.
Alice had jumped up, obligingly holding the door. ‘If it’s any help, I don’t think it’s you or Jolyon who needs to adapt? It’s the rest of the world that needs to be more understanding and accommodating.’
Mhairi’s tears welled and she put a hand to Alice’s wrist. ‘That’s what I think too, but the world is the way it is…
’ She heaved a sigh. ‘There’s just never enough time at these things.
’ Mhairi gestured back towards the empty chairs where they’d just sat.
‘People often say a lot, promise a lot, but nothing much seems to materialise, unless I’m willing to fight to the point of exhaustion, you know? ’
Alice didn’t know exactly, but her heart cracked all the same. ‘Let’s see how we get on with those referrals, eh? Come back in three months for a review and we’ll talk again. Or sooner, if you want.’
Mhairi crossed the now empty waiting room, keeping her head down and only replying with a hasty ‘Cheerio’ to a concerned Gracie behind the reception desk asking if she was all right.
Alice shut her consulting room door and pressed her forehead to the cool frame, trying not to cry.
‘Dr Hargreave?’ a voice called from the other side after a few moments.
She dabbed her eyes dry before pulling the handle, showing her face, hoping she wasn’t as pale as she felt.
‘Ah, there you are. Time for the social prescription project meeting,’ said Dr Millen, his bushy brows slanting, lending him a slightly puzzled-looking expression which, Alice was beginning to suspect, he wore much of the time.
Behind him stood a ramshackle group of strangers, all staring expectantly at her, getting their first eyeful of the new doctor in town.
‘Right away,’ she said, putting on a practised smile.