All Creatures Great and Small (29 page)

As I mumbled apologies he tugged fretfully at the counterpane and looked me up and down with deepening distaste. “And another thing, that’s a terrible pair o’ breeches you’re wearing. If you must wear breeches to your work, for heaven’s sake go and get a pair made at a proper tailor. There’s nae cut about those things at all—they’re not fit to be worn by a veterinary surgeon.”

The knife really went in then. I was attached to those breeches. I had paid thirty shillings for them at the Army and Navy Stores and cherished a private conviction that they gave me a certain air. And Grier’s attack on them was all the more wounding when I considered that the man was almost certainly getting my services free; Siegfried, I felt sure, would wave aside any offers of payment.

I had been here a week and it seemed like a lifetime. Somewhere, far back, I knew, there had been a brighter, happier existence but the memory was growing dim. Siegfried had been sincerely apologetic that morning back in Darrowby.

“James, I have a letter here from Grier of Brawton. It seems he was castrating a colt and the thing threw itself on top of him; he has a couple of cracked ribs. Apparently his assistant walked out on him recently, so there’s nobody to run his practice. He wants me to send you along there for a week or two.”

“Oh no! There’s a mistake somewhere. He doesn’t like me.”

“He doesn’t like anybody. But there’s no mistake, it’s down here—and honestly, what can I do?”

“But the only time I met him he worked me into a horrible rubber suit and made me look a right chump.”

Siegfried smiled sadly. “I remember, James, I remember. He’s a mean old devil and I hate to do this to you, but I can’t turn him down, can I?”

At the time I couldn’t believe it. The whole idea was unreal. But it was real enough now as I stood at the foot of Grier’s bed listening to him ranting away. He was at me again.

“Another thing—my wife tells me you didna eat your porridge. Did you not like it?”

I shuffled my feet. “Oh yes, it was very nice. I just didn’t feel hungry this morning.” I had pushed the tasteless mass about with my spoon and done my best with it but it had defeated me in the end.

“There’s something wrong with a man that canna eat his good food.” Grier peered at me suspiciously then held out a slip of paper. “Here’s a list of your visits for this morning. There’s a good few so you’ll no’ have to waste your time getting round. This one here of Adamson’s of Grenton—a prolapse of the cervix in a cow. What would you do about that, think ye?”

I put my hand in my pocket, got hold of my pipe then dropped it back again. Grier didn’t like smoking.

“Well, I’d give her an epidural anaesthetic, replace the prolapse and fasten it in with retention sutures through the vulva.”

“Havers, man, havers!” snorted Grier. “What a lot of twaddle. There’s no need for a’ that. It’ll just be constipation that’s doing it. Push the thing back, build the cow up with some boards under her hind feet and put her on to linseed oil for a few days.”

“Surely it’ll come out again if I don’t stitch it in?” I said.

“Na, na, na, not at all,” Grier cried angrily. “Just you do as I tell you now. I ken more about this than you.”

He probably did. He should, anyway—he had been qualified for thirty years and I was starting my second. I looked at him glowering from his pillow and pondered for a moment on the strange fact of our uncomfortable relationship. A Yorkshire man listening to the two outlandish accents—Grier’s rasping Aberdeen, my glottal Clydeside—might have expected that some sort of rapport would exist between us, if only on national grounds. But there was none.

“Right, just as you say.” I left the room and went downstairs to gather up my equipment.

As I set off on the round I had the same feeling as every morning—relief at getting out of the house. I had had to go flat out all week to get through the work but I had enjoyed it. Farmers are nearly always prepared to make allowances for a young man’s inexperience and Grier’s clients had treated me kindly, but I still had to come back to that joyless establishment for meals and it was becoming more and more wearing.

Mrs. Grier bothered me just as much as her husband. She was a tight-lipped woman of amazing thinness and she kept a spartan board in which soggy porridge figured prominently. It was porridge for breakfast, porridge for supper and, in between, a miserable procession of watery stews, anaemic mince and nameless soups. Nothing she cooked ever tasted of anything. Angus Grier had come to Yorkshire thirty years ago, a penniless Scot just like myself, and acquired a lucrative practice by the classical expedient of marrying the boss’s daughter; so he got a good living handed to him on a plate, but he also got Mrs. Grier.

It seemed to me that she felt she was still in charge—probably because she had always lived in this house with its memories of her father who had built up the practice. Other people would seem like interlopers and I could understand how she felt; after all, she was childless, she didn’t have much of a life and she had Angus Grier for a husband. I could feel sorry for her.

But that didn’t help because I just couldn’t get her out of my hair; she hung over my every move like a disapproving spectre. When I came back from a round she was always there with a barrage of questions. “Where have you been all this time?” or “I wondered wherever you’d got to, were you lost?” or “There’s an urgent case waiting. Why are you always so slow?” Maybe she thought I’d nipped into a cinema for an hour or two.

There was a pretty full small animal surgery every night and she had a nasty habit of lurking just outside the door so that she could listen to what I was saying to the clients. She really came into her own in the dispensary where she watched me narrowly, criticising my prescriptions and constantly pulling me up for being extravagant with the drugs. “You’re putting in far too much chlorodyne—don’t you know it’s very expensive?”

I developed a deep sympathy for the assistant who had fled without warning; jobs were hard to come by and young graduates would stand nearly anything just to be at work, but I realised that there had been no other choice for that shadowy figure.

Adamson’s place was a small-holding on the edge of the town and maybe it was because I had just been looking at Grier but by contrast the farmer’s lined, patient face and friendly eyes seemed extraordinarily warming and attractive. A ragged khaki smock hung loosely on his gaunt frame as he shook hands with me.

“Now then, we’ve got a new man today, have we?” He looked me over for a second or two. “And by the look of you you’re pretty fresh to t’job.”

“That’s right,” I replied. “But I’m learning fast.”

Mr. Adamson smiled. “Don’t worry about that, lad. I believe in new blood and new ideas—it’s what we want in farming. We’ve stood still too long at this game. Come into t’byre and I’ll show you the cow.”

There were about a dozen cows, not the usual Shorthorns but Ayrshires, and they were obviously well kept and healthy. My patient was easy to pick out by the football-sized rose-pink protrusion of the vaginal wall and the corrugated uterine cervix. But the farmer had wasted no time in calling for assistance; the mass was clean and undamaged.

He watched me attentively as I swabbed the prolapse with antiseptic and pushed it back out of sight, then he helped me build a platform with soil and planks for the cow’s hind feet. When we had finished she was standing on a slope with her tail higher than her head.

“And you say that if I give her linseed oil for a few days that thing won’t come out again?”

“That’s the idea,” I said. “Be sure to keep her built up like this.”

“I will, young man, and thank you very much. I’m sure you’ve done a good job for me and I’ll look forward to seeing you again.”

Back in the car, I groaned to myself. Good job! How the hell could that thing stay in without stitches? But I had to do as I was told and Grier, even if he was unpleasant, wasn’t a complete fool. Maybe he was right. I put it out of my mind and got on with the other visits.

It was less than a week later at the breakfast table and I was prodding at the inevitable porridge when Grier, who had ventured downstairs, barked suddenly at me.

“I’ve got a card here frae Adamson. He says he’s not satisfied with your work. We’d better get out there this morning and see what’s wrong. I dinna like these complaints.” His normal expression of being perpetually offended deepened and the big pale eyes swam and brimmed till I was sure he was going to weep into his porridge.

At the farm, Mr. Adamson led us into the byre. “Well, what do you think of that, young man?”

I looked at the prolapse and my stomach lurched. The innocuous-looking pink projection had been transformed into a great bloated purple mass. It was caked with filth and an ugly wound ran down one side of it.

“It didn’t stay in very long, did it?” the farmer said quietly.

I was too ashamed to speak. This was a dreadful thing to do to a good cow. I felt my face reddening, but luckily I had my employer with me; he would be able to explain everything. I turned towards Grier who snuffled, mumbled, blinked his eyes rapidly but didn’t say anything.

The farmer went on. “And you see she’s damaged it. Must have caught it on something. I’ll tell you I don’t like the look of it.”

It was against this decent man’s nature to be unpleasant, but he was upset all right. “Maybe it would be better if you would take the job on this time, Mr. Grier,” he said.

Grier, who still had not uttered an intelligible word, now sprang into action. He clipped the hair over the base of the spine, inserted an epidural anaesthetic, washed and disinfected the mass and, with an effort, pushed it back to its place. Then he fastened it in with several strong retention sutures with little one-inch lengths of rubber tubing to stop them cutting into the flesh. The finished job looked neat and workmanlike.

The farmer took me gently by the shoulder. “Now that’s something like. You can see it’s not going to come out again now, can’t you? Why didn’t you do something like that when you came before?”

I turned again to Grier, but this time he was seized by a violent fit of coughing. I continued to stare at him but when he still said nothing I turned and walked out of the byre.

“No hard feelings, though, young man,” Mr. Adamson called after me. “I reckon we’ve all got to learn and there’s no substitute for experience. That’s so, Mr. Grier, isn’t it?”

“Aye, och aye, that’s right enough. Aye, aye, rightly so, rightly so, there’s no doubt aboot that,” Grier mumbled. We got into the car.

I settled down and waited for some explanation from him. I was interested to know just what he would say. But the blue-veined nose pointed straight ahead and the bulging eyes fixed themselves blankly on the road ahead of us.

We drove back to the surgery in silence.

I
T WASN’T LONG BEFORE
Grier had to return to bed; he began to groan a lot and hold his injured ribs and soon he was reinstalled upstairs with the pillows at his back and the little pink jacket buttoned to the neck. Whisky was the only thing that gave him relief from his pain and the level of his bedside bottle went down with remarkable speed.

Life resumed its dreary pattern. Mrs. Grier was usually around when I had to report to her husband; beyond the bedroom door there would be a lot of whispering which stopped as soon as I entered. I would receive my instructions while Mrs. Grier fussed round the bed tucking things in, patting her husband’s brow with a folded handkerchief and all the time darting little glances of dislike at me. Immediately I got outside the door the whispering started again.

It was quite late one evening—about ten o’clock—when the call from Mrs. Mallard came in. Her dog had a bone in its throat and would Mr. Grier come at once. I was starting to say that he was ill and I was doing his work but it was too late; there was a click as the receiver went down at the other end.

Grier reacted to the news by going into a sort of trance; his chin sank on his chest and he sat immobile for nearly a minute while he gave the matter careful thought. Then he straightened up suddenly and stabbed a finger at me.

“It’ll not be a bone in its throat. It’ll only be a touch of pharyngitis making it cough.”

I was surprised at his confidence. “Don’t you think I’d better take some long forceps just in case?”

“Na, na, I’ve told ye now. There’ll be no bone, so go down and put up some of the syrup of squills and ipecacuanha mixture. That’s all it’ll want. And another thing—if ye can’t find anything wrong don’t say so. Tell the lady it’s pharyngitis and how to treat it—you have to justify your visit, ye ken.”

I felt a little bewildered as I filled a four ounce bottle in the dispensary, but I took a few pairs of forceps with me too; I had lost a bit of faith in Grier’s long-range diagnosis.

I was surprised when Mrs. Mallard opened the door of the smart semi-detached house. For some reason I had been expecting an old lady, and here was a striking-looking blonde woman of about forty with her hair piled high in glamorous layers as was the fashion at that time. And I hadn’t expected the long ballroom dress in shimmering green, the enormous swaying earrings, the heavily made up face.

Mrs. Mallard seemed surprised too. She stared blankly at me till I explained the position. “I’ve come to see your dog—I’m Mr. Grier’s locum. He’s ill at the moment, I’m afraid.”

It took a fair time for the information to get through because she still stood on the doorstep as if she didn’t know what I was talking about; then she came to life and opened the door wide. “Oh yes, of course, I’m sorry, do come in.” I walked past her through an almost palpable wall of perfume and into a room on the left of the hall. The perfume was even stronger in here but it was in keeping with the single, pink-tinted lamp which shed a dim but rosy light on the wide divan drawn close to the flickering fire. Somewhere in the shadows a radiogram was softly pouring out “Body and Soul.”

There was no sign of my patient and Mrs. Mallard looked at me irresolutely, fingering one of her earrings.

“Do you want me to see him in here?” I asked.