A Family Affair (39 page)

‘I am happy. Really, really happy.'

‘Well, that's all that matters.' Suddenly there was a fizzing sound from behind them; Heather had forgotten all about the milk warming on the stove; now it was boiling over. A smell of burned milk filled the kitchen. She broke away from Jenny, wheeling round and turning the gas tap to the off position.

‘Damn!'

A pool of milk was swamping the white enamel between the burners, the rivulets already beginning to crust over.

And suddenly Vanessa began to scream. Her cries were cries of pure terror, breathless, hysterical. Heather dived through the doorway into the dining room and Jenny followed. Vanessa was cowering against the wall, small knuckles pressed into plump cheeks, body rigid, eyes wide and staring. Minute items of doll's-house furniture lay scattered around her, knocked over or dropped when the panic attack had struck. Heather ran to her, trying to take her in her arms, but Vanessa beat her off in a frenzy of flailing arms and legs.

‘No – no – no!'

‘Darling – hush, it's all right …'

‘No – no – no!'

‘It's all right, darling – Mummy's here! Hush, darling …'

For seemingly endless moments the awful screaming went on, the panic-stricken flailing continued. Then gradually the screams became sobs and the tense body relaxed a little, though it still quivered in spasms of terror.

Jenny watched, shocked and horrified and uncomprehending. What had happened? Had Vanessa hurt herself somehow? But there was no blood, she certainly didn't appear incapacitated in any way, and nothing in the room was different, apart from the small items of furniture scattered across the floor. Nothing to account for this horrendous outburst.

Heather was holding Vanessa now, crooning softly to her; Vanessa's small arms wrapped tightly round her neck. But her eyes, visible over Heather's shoulder, were still wide and staring and her legs, knees locked around Heather's waist, shook with violent trembling.

‘What's the matter with her?' Jenny asked, frightened.

‘It's all right. She'll be all right in a minute. Jenny – could you clean away that burned milk for me, please? The cloth's on the draining board. Wash the cooker down – there should be hot water in the Sadia, and some soapflakes in the cupboard.'

‘But …'

‘Just do it, Jenny, please. Just get rid of that smell.'

Puzzled, worried, Jenny did as she was told. She stacked the metal guards in the sink and mopped up the top of the stove, rinsing it with hot soapy water. Then she scrubbed the metal guards with the pan scourer, flaking off the black bubbles of burned milk. When she had finished she went back into the dining room. Heather was sitting at one of the dining chairs, Vanessa on her lap.

‘What happened to her?' Jenny asked.

‘The milk,' Heather said over Vanessa's head. She spoke quietly, almost as if she didn't want the child to hear.

‘The
milk
?' Jenny said. ‘I don't understand.'

‘The smell,' Heather said, ‘when it boiled over.'

‘But why …'

‘Grampy,' Heather said, almost silently, mouthing the words. ‘The milk. When Grampy …' Her lips squeezed shut, not speaking the word and Jenny added it in her head.

When Grampy died. The milk had boiled over when Grampy died. She understood then. Vanessa had experienced terrible trauma that night and the smell of burning milk had triggered a replay of the terror she had experienced then. Worse, perhaps, magnified by a thousand nightmares.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘The milk.'

‘Don't talk about it,' Heather said fiercely. ‘I want her to forget. She'll be all right once she's forgotten about it.'

‘Right,' Jenny said, but she had an uncomfortable feeling that it wasn't going to be that easy. ‘Heather – I'm going to have to go. Mum will wonder what's happened to me.'

‘That's OK. You go,' Heather said. ‘Vanessa will be all right now, won't you, sweetheart?'

‘I'll just look in and say hello to Gran.'

Glad was sitting up in bed on a bank of pillows. Her nose looked red and sore and there was a resigned sort of expression on her face.

‘Was that Vanessa having another of her turns?'

‘Has she had them before then?'

‘Yes. She has.' Glad was mashing one of Walt's big white handkerchiefs into a ball in her fist. ‘Worries me to death.'

‘Heather says she'll be all right.'

‘
Heather
says … Oh, I expect she's right. But I don't like it. It's not natural.'

‘Heather says it's because …' She broke off. She didn't want to upset Gran by talking about Grampy dying like that. ‘I've got to go, Gran. I hope you'll be feeling better soon.'

‘I expect so. I won't ask you to kiss me – not with this cold. You don't want to catch it.'

Jenny got her coat. But as she climbed the hill home, for the first time for weeks she had other things than Bryn on her mind.

Helen's day had been long and tiring. The sudden onset of cold winter weather had laid a lot of people low and the surgery had been overflowing with those seeking relief from coughs, colds, earaches and sore throats. In addition, the list of home visits requested had been so long as to be almost insurmountable, but somehow she had managed to get to every one of the addresses, where she had dealt with the influenza victims and even a case of pneumonia.

However late morning surgery finished, there was no way of cutting back on the home visits. In the main they were the most vulnerable of her patients, the very old, the chronically sick and the very young, those most likely to lose their battle with bugs and viruses and swell the ever-growing number of fatalities. The undertakers were being rushed off their feet too she knew and she had no intention of allowing any of her patients to require their services if there was anything she could do to prevent it. As it was, she was very concerned about the pneumonia victim – a middle-aged woman with a history of chest and heart problems, who had steadfastly refused to go into hospital in spite of the fact that she could scarcely draw breath. Even now, an hour or more after she had visited her, Helen couldn't forget the terrible rasping that had echoed through the house.

‘I think I should go back and see her later,' she said to Paul.

They were sharing an evening meal, something which had become an almost daily habit, though today, because of the pressures of work, it was more scratch than usual – bacon, baked beans and some ‘flat'chips made from potato slices browned almost to crisps in the frying pan.

‘You look dead on your feet,' Paul said. ‘There's nothing more you can do if she's refusing to go into hospital.'

‘I know. I just want to check on her – make sure she's getting the right nursing care. I don't think she's going to make it, Paul. If the crisis doesn't come to a head soon her heart won't take the strain much longer and I don't want to give anyone the chance to accuse me of neglect. She should be in hospital!'

‘If she's that bad there's no guarantee she'd make it even if she was,' Paul said reasonably.

‘But at least she wouldn't be my responsibility. Honestly …' she ran her fingers through her hair, which was overdue for a trim, ‘it's really weird. You get some like that, so stubborn they just won't admit they're at death's door, and others who bang on about every little thing.'

Paul speared a last chip and used it to mop up the remaining tomato sauce.

‘The heart sinks, you mean.'

‘The heart sinks. The ones determined to waste my time. I had Ida Lockyear in again today.'

‘Ah!'

‘Don't say it like that! It's not funny.'

‘No, of course it's not.'

They had discussed Ida before. She turned up at the surgery with monotonous regularity, always complaining of the same things – headaches, tiredness, dizzy spells, flu-like symptoms which never actually came to anything. Helen had run a whole series of tests to try to determine what was wrong with her but when they had all come back with negative results she had come to the conclusion that Ida's biggest problem was loneliness. Living alone in an isolated farm cottage she had too much time to exaggerate all the normal aches and pains that went with growing old. And when she wanted someone to talk to there was one person she could rely on to sit and listen to her – her GP.

Helen felt sorry for Ida – her husband had died suddenly a couple of years ago and her only son lived in London and didn't visit often, but when she was rushed off her feet with patients who were genuinely ill she found the constant demand on her time for what amounted to no more than a desire for company irritating, to say the least.

Helen had tried, without success, to persuade Ida to join in with some activity in the local community – the WI, the Mother's Union, a knitting circle, a choir. But Ida maintained she wasn't up to it, couldn't get there with her bad legs, was so tired that she was ready for bed by nine, and Helen had given up. There was no way to help someone who wouldn't help herself.

‘She was at the head of the queue again this morning,' she said now. ‘There she sat with everybody sneezing and coughing germs all over her – she'll be going down with it next and wonder where she got it – complaining about the children and the hard seats in the waiting room and just about everything else. In the end I had to prise her out of my surgery like a sardine out of a can. It's sad really, but what can I do? I'm a doctor, not a social worker.'

‘Sometimes,' Paul said, ‘you have to be both.'

‘You don't need to tell me that.' She was thinking now of little Vanessa. She had seen the child quite a few times recently, always with comparatively minor ailments, but considering what a healthy baby she had been, Helen couldn't help feeling they were stress related and a result of the trauma she had suffered the night Walt Simmons had died. She had suggested as much to Heather, citing the fact that Heather had mentioned that Vanessa sometimes woke in the small hours, screaming from what could only be nightmares, but Heather wouldn't have it.

‘She's forgotten all that now. She never mentions it.'

‘Just because she doesn't mention it doesn't mean she's forgotten,' Helen had persisted. ‘It could well be that she's put it out of her conscious mind but I think it's probably still bubbling away in her subconscious, causing all sorts of problems.'

‘She was too young to know what happened,' Heather said.

‘Old enough to be terrified. There's evidence to suggest that even a bad birth experience can traumatise a child, and Vanessa was far beyond that stage. I'd like to arrange for her to see a child psychiatrist, see if we can't get to the bottom of it.'

‘A child psychiatrist!' Heather was horrified. The words conjured up visions of mental illness and the poor people down at Wells who had gone funny.

‘There's nothing to be alarmed about,' Helen reassured her. ‘If there is a problem, a psychiatrist would be able to bring it to the surface and help her deal with it.'

‘Remind her all over again, you mean,' Heather said. ‘Drag it all up when she ought to be forgetting it. I'm sorry, Doctor, but I wouldn't be agreeable to that. And whatever would people say?'

‘There's no stigma attached to emotional illness any more. We're moving into a much more enlightened age, thank goodness. I'm quite certain that in the next twenty years or so we shall see counselling become commonplace for adults and children alike, and the stiff-upper-lip attitude that has caused so many problems will become a thing of the past. The time is coming when people won't be ashamed to seek help. It has to.'

‘Well, there you and I must agree to differ, doctor,' Heather said stubbornly. ‘If we all went running to psychiatrists every time some little thing went wrong we'd never get anywhere. No, I'm sorry, but in my opinion if you've got a loving family to support you, you're better off just pulling yourself together and putting whatever it is behind you.'

Her tone was vehement, her pretty face almost hard. Once again, Helen found herself wondering about Heather, and she wondered about her now, remembering what Paul had said about Vanessa not being her first-born.

Had she lost a child? Suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth? Had an illegal abortion or an illegitimate baby she had given up for adoption? Helen was quite sure that the vehemence was born of some deep, festering pain. It was as if Heather was trying to say: ‘I've been through hell and I coped. I didn't have any truck with all this psychiatric nonsense, and I'm fine!' Except that she wasn't. Not really. Somewhere, deep inside, was a seething cauldron of suppressed emotion. Perhaps it would stay that way. Or perhaps one day, like a volcanic eruption, it would burst through the layers of restraint in a brilliantly devastating explosion that would change the surrounding landscape for ever.

Whichever, it wasn't an attitude that was going to help Vanessa, and Helen, concerned about the child's welfare, was helpless. She couldn't insist Vanessa go for treatment, the situation simply didn't warrant it. She could see no alternative to simply continuing to try to persuade Heather, but even that was fraught with danger. She didn't want to alienate Heather by harping on about it. Which left the only other option. Give up and hope that Vanessa would eventually overcome her trauma in her own way. It wasn't an option Helen cared for but at the moment it seemed the most politic.

‘You remember me telling you about my bird phobia?' she said now.

‘Uh-huh.'

‘And how I was concerned something similar might happen to little Vanessa Okonski?'

‘Yes.'

‘I think it has …' She broke off mid-sentence. The telephone was ringing.

‘You want me to answer it?' Paul offered.