The Awakening of Dr Amelia Leighton
Dr Vernon Coleman
At the start of my novel `The Awakening of Dr Amelia Leighton’, the young Dr Leighton is an unsatisfied GP working in a soulless city practice. After personal and professional trials and tribulations, she ends up living in a country cottage and working in a country practice. It is a story about enlightenment and liberation - with lots of strange and fun things occurring on the way.
Here is the gentle beginning of my novel `The Awakening of Dr Amelia Leighton’. Dr Leighton has arrived at her new practice. The book then flashes back to her life as a city GP, before bringing her forward again to village life.
The book is available via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Chapter One
There are many different kinds of parties.
There are parties organised as celebrations. There are parties organised to promote something or someone. There are parties where the guests wear funny hats and play games. There are parties where people stand around, drink wine and nibble at finger food. There are parties where people sit down and eat endless courses of food served by smartly attired waiters. There are parties which people attend in the hope of meeting new people, and there are parties which people attend in the hope that they will meet people they know but haven’t seen for a long time. There are parties where at least some of the people who are there fervently wish they were somewhere else, and parties where at least some of the guests spend at least some of their time trying to avoid people they don’t want to see.
There are almost as many different kinds of party as there are different kinds of guests, and the slim girl standing beside the roaring log fire, currently the origin of a cloud of rather sweet smelling smoke, courtesy of a sudden change in the wind, disliked them all. Slightly shorter than average height and attractive in a classic sort of way, rather than extravagantly beautiful or fashionably pretty, she wore her blonde hair cut short, in the sort of style that Clara Bow had first made popular in the 1920s (not that anyone remembered Clara Bow any more) and she wore a simple black dress (which was six-years-old but would never go out of fashion, largely because it had a hem which could quite easily be raised or lowered according to the dictates of the merry band of gay frock designers in Paris who decide these things – it was, for those whose role in life it is to take note of such things, currently just above knee level), simple black shoes (in court style – also unlikely to go out of fashion), a classic pearl necklace (fake, but good enough to fool anyone not equipped with a loupe and a professional eye) and classic pearl earrings (fake and ditto). She also wore the old Rolex that had once been her paternal grandfather’s, had been worn by her father and which was now hers because she no longer had a father and didn’t have any brothers. (She didn’t have any sisters either.) She’d had the watch’s classic two tone band altered to fit her wrist, which was (inevitably and rather happily) several links smaller than her late father’s had been.
The young woman looked around her, thinking that she really should make more of an effort. After all, the party had been arranged in her honour. Still, she thought, the other guests seemed to be managing quite well without her.
The room she was in, clearly a drawing room, was over-furnished in the way the Victorians used to favour, with ornaments on every flat surface and pictures decorating just about every square inch of wall; it was crowded and warm, though not uncomfortably so. And books! There were books everywhere. There were three glass fronted walnut bookcases and two open shelved bookshelves and there were books piled high on the floor. Virtually none of the books had dust wrappers.
Outside it was an agreeable day, the first really warm few hours of spring, and the log fire, crackling and spluttering in the huge fireplace, wasn’t necessary, though it gave the room a focal point. There was a huge basket of logs to one side of the hearth and a huge set of fire irons on the other. People in London ranted angrily about log fires, complaining that they were destroying the quality of the air and contributing to global warming, but she liked the smell and the look and the sound. Was that shallow, she wondered? Probably. Did she care? No, she didn’t. There were two leather armchairs, one each side of the fireplace, their leather cracked and split open in places, and one leather sofa, facing the fireplace, also showing signs of having been sat upon a great deal, an oak writing desk with an old ladder back dining chair, a mahogany table covered in books, of course, six chairs, five of which matched. It was a large room. The young woman looked around and realised that although there were at least twenty people in the room, it wasn’t the people who made the room look crowded but the furniture.
She didn’t hate parties in the same way that she hated long, dull meetings, cauliflower cheese or car parks that won’t let you park unless you have a smart phone equipped with the correct app, but she’d never really grown to like them. The party for her 14th birthday was perhaps the most recently memorable and thoroughly enjoyable one that she could remember, and, although that had been 15 years ago, she vividly remembered that she had eaten too much cake and suffered a probably well-deserved stomach ache that kept her awake for hours. She hadn’t dared complain because her mother had repeatedly warned her about eating too much of the cake. But her grandmother, who had been a baker by trade and a cake-maker by inclination, had made the cake especially for her and it had her name written on the top in pink icing. Under those very special circumstances it had seemed quite reasonable to eat as much of the cake as she’d been able to manage. She could remember everything about that party. All her friends and acquaintances had turned up with presents, and her parents had hired a conjuror who wasn’t very good and who told terrible jokes, the sort of gags you usually found only in crackers. Dr Leighton had been mortified to start with. Only small children had conjurors at their birthday parties. But everyone had laughed (more ‘at’ than ‘with’ the performer) until their stomachs ached.
Remembering the party brought sadness to her heart, as it always did. Five months later the world had slipped off its axis when her father had suffered a massive heart attack and had died at his desk. He’d gone off to work that morning, cheery and looking forward to a football match on the television that evening, but he had never come home. There hadn’t been any more parties or holidays or day trips to the seaside or the wildlife park. Her mother, overcome with grief, had started drinking to make the evenings bearable. And then the afternoons had needed blotting out, and finally the mornings too.
She had long ago realised that the bit of her that might have enabled her to enjoy dressing up, abandoning her daily anxieties and letting herself go in the way that her contemporaries seemed able to do, was under-developed or missing altogether and she found herself wondering why this was. Maybe it was because she was too conscious of the behaviour of the other guests. Maybe she was too inhibited. Maybe she was just too shy. Too often, she thought, too many of the participants at parties she’d attended had been trying too hard to be witty, wise, bright and beautiful while other guests, wrapped in their insecurities, were busy studying books in a bookcase, looking for ones they’d read or even heard of, or trying to look desperately interested in the curtains or the glass they were holding. (‘It looks like crystal but I don’t like to do that ‘ping’ test.’) Parties, she thought, were like alcohol: they made some people become more like themselves, or more like the ‘themselves’ they thought they were, or more like the people they thought people expected them to be, or wanted them to be.
Tired and bored by her own introspection, she decided to make yet another effort to stop herself thinking, and to try to just start enjoying.
And that was another thing, she thought straight away. She’d never mastered the art of just allowing herself to relax completely. She’d never been able to just ‘go with the flow’, as her ex-husband used to say. Peter had gone with the flow many times and eventually flown off with an advertising executive who insisted on being called Waldo but whose real name was Philip. Waldo, or Philip, had flown away himself a month later but Peter hadn’t returned and for that she was grateful. She wondered if she ever would be capable of relaxing and going with the flow. On the whole, she thought it was rather unlikely.
She suddenly became aware that Dr Hill, the host of the party and now her new employer, was saying something. Dr Hill was very softly spoken and she couldn’t always hear what he said. She didn’t like to keep saying ‘Pardon?’ so she just tried to guess what he was saying. She wondered if she were going deaf. It didn’t seem very likely at twenty nine but you could never tell. Maybe she had an acoustic neuroma. Like most doctors, and all medical students, she was very good at thinking up rare and often deadly disorders with which to label even the most commonplace of signs and symptoms. Or maybe Dr Hill just didn’t speak very loudly.
She’d only met Dr Hill once before, when she’d been interviewed for the job, and he had seemed taller than he now appeared to be. He was remarkably thin, almost skeletal, and wore a linen jacket, that was creased in that expensive way that linen always seems to be creased, and a pair of corduroy trousers that were bald on the knees and around the pockets. She couldn’t help noticing that he needed a haircut too, although there wasn’t all that much hair to cut. He was clearly not a man who spent a good deal of money or time on his appearance. She wondered if he had always been a bachelor or if he had ever had a wife. He certainly didn’t look like a man who’d have ever had a wife or, for that matter, ever been a husband. Even at her age she felt she could tell, somehow. Mind you, things had changed a lot in the last few years. Today, in London just about every other man she met delighted in talking about his husband doing this, his husband doing that, his husband being wonderful, his husband being very caring, very good looking, very everything. She was just old enough, and old-fashioned enough, to still find this rather strange. Not uncomfortable, just strange.
‘This is Dr Amelia Leighton, who will be working with me in our practice,’ said Dr Hill, introducing her to a middle aged man with no hair at all on his head but, as though in generous compensation, a generous growth of the stuff sprouting from both ears, both nostrils and his upper lip. Dr Leighton didn’t quite catch the man’s name and didn’t like to ask Dr Hill to repeat it. The man, who appeared to have no neck at all, was quite round and looked, she thought, a little like one of those dolls that can’t be pushed over because they always bounce back and become upright again. Dr Leighton wondered which of the man’s cervical vertebrae were missing and whether he found having no neck an inconvenience. The hair decorating his upper lip had been groomed in the shape of an old-fashioned toothbrush moustache, the sort which the Grandfather she had never met had worn in the sepia pictures which had been her only memory of him, though this moustache looked as though it hadn’t been trimmed for a while and her Grandfather’s moustache had been manicured perfectly, though perhaps just for the photograph. The spherical man’s moustache was lopsided too, one side being notably longer than the other. She wondered, idly, if it were possible to tell if a man were right handed or left handed simply by looking at the irregularity in his moustache. It was the sort of query that a postgraduate student in search of a PhD would leap on as a suitable subject of enquiry. Several crumbs of what looked like some sort of pastry were clinging to the growth, and Dr Leighton wondered if the man ever combed them out or just brushed them onto his tongue if he suddenly felt peckish. He wore a three piece suit in a very loud tweed check which made him look like a bookmaker. He was holding a food-laden plate in one hand and a wine glass in the other, and he somehow managed to transfer the wine glass to the hand holding the plate so that they could shake hands. She tried not to wince. Someone had obviously told him that if a man has a firm handshake it means that he is solid, reliable and trustworthy. She wondered if anyone had ever done any research into whether a firm handshake meant anything at all. She couldn’t help noticing that the plate he was holding was laden with pastry covered brown food; there looked to be plenty of fats and carbohydrates but very little in the way of protein or vitamins. She wondered what his coronary arteries looked like; she imagined she could see them silting up.
‘What do you do? In what way will you be assisting?’ asked the man with the moustache, putting a good deal of emphasis on the last word as though he’d just said something remarkably clever and funny. He had a remarkably patronising way about him. It’s not easy to be patronising in two short sentences but he managed it with plenty of words to spare.
Dr Leighton stared at him, bemused, not quite sure how to answer. He looked, she thought to herself, like the sort of man who has expensive luggage and wraps it in protective covers and then, when he arrives at his expensive hotel, removes the covers so that the porters and reception staff can admire his expensive luggage.
‘Dr Hill is here to work with me,’ explained Dr Leighton. ‘In the practice.’
‘Oh, you’re a doctor!’ said the man with the moustache, the iron grip and the almost certainly narrowing arteries. ‘I thought you were here to help out with the housework and the laundry – a bit of cooking and dusting and stuff like that.’ He laughed merrily at what he clearly thought was a jovial remark. ‘Are you really a proper doctor? You’ve very short for a doctor. Are you going to look after the women with their special problems?’
‘I didn’t know there was a size requirement for doctors,’ Dr Leighton replied, thinking that three insults in a single breath were pretty good going. ‘I think that used to be the case with policemen, but I think I heard that they’d abandoned that rule now.’ She decided that if the man wore a hat he would probably protect it with a plastic cover if there were any threat of rain. She disliked him quite intensely. Unconsciously, she tried to stand a little straighter, caught herself doing it and slumped back to her more normal posture. But she did wish she’d worn shoes with a bigger heel. She was five foot three inches tall. That, she thought, wasn’t small at all. Even in quite flat heels she was five foot four inches tall and that’s nearly five foot five inches. That was quite a decent height for a woman. Why, she wondered, did people feel it so easy to criticise others for their appearance. You were too small or too tall, too thin or too fat. Her red shoes, the ones from Jimmy Choo, had three and a half inch heels and they would have made her over five feet seven inches tall. She felt herself reddening with anger. She wanted to say something cutting but her brain let her down. She never thought of witty things to say until she was in bed, or in the bath, and wherever it was, the bon mot always arrived a few hours too late. She thought most people were probably much the same but she did envy those who were quick witted. Her former husband, Peter, would have skewered the pompous, little man with a sentence or two and left him deflated like an old balloon. She wondered why she kept remembering Peter and hoped it wouldn’t be long before she didn’t. She hadn’t worn the Jimmy Choo shoes, she tried to convince herself, because they just didn’t go with the dress she’d chosen. But she knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t worn the Jimmy Choo shoes because Peter had bought them for her as a birthday present and she didn’t like to wear anything he’d bought her. Actually, he hadn’t paid for them. He’d been broke and she’d had to pay. But she always thought of them as shoes he had bought her. She would have given them to a charity shop but they cost a fortune and she’d have to work her way up to giving them away. She’d never have paid that much for a pair of shoes herself. And she’d always thought ‘Jimmy Choo’ a rather silly, childish name for a pair of shoes anyway. She wondered if there had ever actually been anyone called Choo. It seemed unlikely. And she was furious about the crack about patients with women’s problems. Did Dr Hill only deal with prostate difficulties?
‘Have another vol au vent,’ said Dr Hill to the pompous man with the moustache. Dr Hill had picked up a plate laden with the things, and he now offered him the plate, or, rather, his choice from the plate’s contents.
‘Oh yes. Rather like those,’ said the man with the moustache, bending over the plate with a greedy gleam in his eyes, even though the plate he was holding was already piled high with brown food.
‘Well, take two. They look home-made but we got them from the village shop. They have an excellent bakery display just next to their Post Office counter.’
‘I’ve never been in the village shop,’ said the man with the moustache. He said this as though he were complimenting himself.
‘Oh you should,’ said Dr Hill. ‘It’s run by Mick and Doreen; a lovely couple who come from Middlesbrough.’ He stopped and thought for a moment. ‘It might have been Marlborough. Or even Scarborough. It’s almost certainly somewhere ending in borough. He was an accountant and she did something or other with income tax and they’d both always wanted to run a village shop. Isn’t that strange? I wonder if it was a dream they shared or a dream one of them had and then the other acquired later?’
The man with the moustache, whose name Dr Leighton hadn’t quite caught, took two, bit the first one in half and sprayed flaky pastry everywhere. ‘So you can buy buns and stamps at the same shop?’
‘Oh yes, village shops have to do a bit of everything to survive. I can’t see how they make a living to be honest but they always seem happy and welcoming. They do deliveries in a very old Citroen van. The one they used to advertise as having such a good suspension that you could drive over a ploughed field without breaking the eggs you had piled on the back seat.’
Dr Hill, sensing that Dr Leighton, was about to explode and wanting to introduce her to the other guests, gave her a glass of wine and led her away.
The wine, as Dr Leighton already knew, was white, cold and quite delicious. At the last reception held by her previous practice the wine had always been warm and sharply acidic, the sort that would have given a car battery a severe bout of indigestion. The glasses, she noticed looking around the room, were all different – some were proper wine glasses, some were tumblers and some were whisky glasses. Hers was an old-fashioned champagne glass, one of the ones with a big bowl that allowed the bubbles to escape too quickly. You really could tell Dr Hill was a bachelor, she thought. He was in his mid to late 60s she thought, and she remembered, with a smile she didn’t show, that he had told her earlier that he had organised the catering himself. It was clear that organising the catering meant calling in at the bakery, pointing to things and taking out his wallet. She wondered where on earth he’d found the wine and strongly suspected that it wasn’t on a shelf in the village shop.
‘His name is Scrymgeour Wallace and he invited himself,’ whispered Dr Hill, as he moved her away. ‘He hasn’t lived in the village long, but he bought himself a house here a few months ago. It was one of those houses that gives the owner the right to describe himself as Lord of the Manor and he likes people to address him as ‘Your Lordship’. I always forget I’m afraid. He had a coat of arms drawn up by those people in London who do those things and had it put on his notepaper.’
‘Do you have parties very often?’ asked Dr Leighton, who was pretty sure she knew the answer to her question before she asked it.
‘To be honest with you, no, not very often,’ replied Dr Hill. ‘I’m afraid I am not what you city folk would call a party person. I had one to celebrate the moon landings, I was very young then, of course, just an assistant to my predecessor, and I think the last party I organised was held to celebrate young Charles’s wedding. The one when he got married to that young girl who died so tragically. We didn’t have a party for the other wedding, though I’ve nothing against the new woman despite the fact that she seems a little determinedly horsey. And we certainly didn’t bother when the sons got married. We thought about a celebration party when Queen Elizabeth died but it didn’t seem appropriate to have a party, even though it would have been a celebration for her life, not her death, of course. I just thought it would be nice to have a little get together to welcome you to the practice and to the area.’
Dr Hill put a hand on Dr Leighton’s shoulder, very gently, and for just a brief moment, smiled and nodded. ‘I’m not sure it was entirely the most sensible thing to do,’ he added softly. ‘But it was arranged with the best of intentions.’
Dr Leighton thought he had a very comforting, reassuring manner and was probably an excellent, if perhaps slightly eccentric general practitioner.
Dr Leighton smiled at him, as though what he’d said made sense and muttered something appropriately grateful. She was trying to remember what year the moon landings had taken place. Dr Hill must be older than she thought. And she wondered where the other partner was. She hadn’t yet met him, which seemed strange to say the least.
‘Is your partner not here?’ she asked, looking around.
‘Mallory, that’s Dr Croft, doesn’t socialise much,’ explained Dr Hill. ‘He sent his abject apologies. He’s really not being rude but he finds the world a bit of a trial and doesn’t much like having to talk to people.’
‘Doesn’t that rather make his life as a GP rather difficult?’ asked Dr Leighton. ‘How does he manage?’
‘Well, he doesn’t actually see patients,’ replied Dr Hill. ‘I do the surgeries and any visiting that’s necessary. That’s why I needed another pair of hands.’
Taken from the beginning of `The Awakening of Dr Amelia Leighton’ by Vernon Coleman which is available via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Copyright Vernon Coleman April 2024
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