I was at that point in the centre of the little town whose brightly lit shops were closing their doors for the day, and I stopped and asked an elderly woman with a shopping basket where I could find a doctor. She directed me to a large house in a quiet side street, and I parked outside and rang the door bell.
A pretty girl appeared and said, ‘Surgery at six,’ and began to close the door again.
‘If the doctor is in, please let me speak to him,’ I said quickly, ‘it’s not a case for the surgery.’
‘Well, all right,’ she said and went away. Children’s voices sounded noisily somewhere in the house. Presently, a youngish, chubby, capable-looking man appeared, munching at a piece of cream-filled chocolate cake and wearing the resigned, enquiring expression of a doctor called to duty during his free time.
‘Are you by any chance Grant Oldfield’s doctor?’ I asked. If he weren’t, I thought, he could tell me where else to go.
But he said at once, ‘Yes, I am. Has he had another fall?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘but could you please come and take a look at him?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘He... er... he was knocked out at the races.’
‘Half a mo,’ he said and went back into the house, reappearing with his medical bag and another piece of cake. ‘Can you run me down there? Save me getting my car out again for those few yards.’
We went out to the Mini-Cooper and as soon as he sat in it he made a remark about the broken back window, not unreasonably, since gusts of December wind blowing through it were freezing our necks. I told him that Grant had smashed it and explained how I had come to bring him home.
He listened in silence, licking the cream as it oozed out of the side of the cake. Then he said, ‘Why did he attack you?’
‘He seems to believe I took his job.’
‘And did you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He lost it months before it was offered to me’.
‘Are you a jockey too, then?’ he asked, looking at me curiously, and I nodded and told him my name. He said his was Parnell. I started the car and drove the few hundred yards back to Grant’s house. It was still in complete darkness.
‘I left him here not ten minutes ago,’ I said as we went up the path to the front door. The small front garden was ragged and uncared for, with rotting dead leaves and mournful grass-grown flower beds dimly visible in the light from the street lamp. We rang the bell. It sounded shrilly in the house, but produced no other results. We rang again. The doctor finished his cake and licked his fingers.
There was a faint rustle in the darkness of the patch of garden. The doctor unclipped from his breast pocket the pen-shaped torch he normally used for peering into eyes and down throats, and directed its tiny beam round the bordering privet hedge. It revealed first some pathetic rose bushes choked with last summer’s unmown grass; but in the corner where the hedge dividing the garden from the next door one met the hedge bordering the road, the pin point of light steadied on the hunched shape of a man.
We went over to him. He was sitting on the ground, huddling back into the hedge, with his knees drawn up to his chin and his head resting on his folded arms.
‘Come along old chap,’ said the doctor encouragingly, and half-helped, half-pulled him to his feet. He felt in Grant’s pockets, found a bunch of keys, and handed them to me. I went over and unlocked the front door and turned on the lights in the hall. The doctor guided Grant through the hall and into the first room we came to, which happened to be a dining-room. Everything in it was covered with a thick layer of dust.
Grant collapsed in a heap on a dining chair and laid his head down on the dirty table. The doctor examined him, feeling his pulse, lifting up his eyelid and running both hands round the thick neck and the base of the skull. Grant moved irritably when Parnell’s fingers touched the place where I had hit him and he said crossly, ‘Go away, go away.’
Parnell stepped back a pace and sucked his teeth. ‘There’s nothing physically wrong with him as far as I can see, except for what is going to be a stiff neck. We’d better get him into bed and I’ll give him something to keep him quiet, and in the morning I’ll arrange for him to see someone who can sort out his troubles for him. You’d better give me a ring during the evening if there’s any change in his condition.’
‘I?’ I said, ‘I’m not staying here all evening...’
‘Oh yes, I think so, don’t you?’ he said cheerfully, his eyes shining sardonically in his round face. ‘Who else? All night too, if you don’t mind. After all, you hit him.’
‘Yes, but,’ I protested, ‘that’s not what’s the matter with him.’
‘Never mind. You cared enough to bring him home and to fetch me. Be a good chap and finish the job. I do really think someone ought to stay here all night... someone strong enough to deal with him in a crisis. It’s not a job for elderly female relatives, even if we could rake one up so late in the day.’
Put like that, it was difficult to refuse. We took Grant upstairs, balancing his thick-set body between us as he stumbled up the treads. His bedroom was filthy. Dirty tangled sheets and blankets were piled in heaps on the unmade bed, dust lay thick on every surface, and soiled clothes were scattered over the floor and hung sordidly over chairs. The whole room smelled of sour sweat.
‘We’d better put him somewhere else,’ I said, switching on lights and opening all the other doors on the small landing. One door led into a bathroom whose squalor defied description. Another opened on to a linen cupboard which still contained a few sheets in a neat pile, and the last revealed an empty bedroom with bright pink rosebuds on the walls. Grant stood blinking on the landing while I fetched some sheets and made up the bed for him. There were no clean pyjamas. Doctor Parnell undressed Grant as far as his underpants and socks and made him get into the fresh bed. Then he went downstairs and returned with a glass of water, wearing so disgusted an expression that I knew without being told what state the kitchen must be in.
Opening his case, he shook two capsules on to his hand and told Grant to swallow them, which he docilely did. Grant at this time seemed as if he were sleep-walking; he was only a shell, his personality a blank. It was disturbing, but on the other hand it made the business of putting him to bed much easier than it might have been.
Parnell looked at his watch. ‘I’m late for surgery,’ he said as Grant lay back on his pillow and shut his eyes. ‘Those pills ought to keep him quiet for a bit. Give him two more when he wakes up.’ He handed me a small bottle. ‘You know where to find me if you want me,’ he added with a callous grin. ‘Have a good night.’
I spent a miserable evening and dined off a pint of milk I found on the back doorstep. Nothing else in the stinking kitchen was any longer edible. There were no books and no radio to be found, and to pass the hours I made an effort to clean up some of the mess, but what that dreadful house really needed was a breezy spring day, lashings of disinfectant, and an army of strong-minded charwomen.
Several times I went softly in to see how Grant was doing, but he slept peacefully, flat on his back, until midnight. I found him then with his eyes open, but when I went close to him there was no recognition in them. He was still in a withdrawn blank state and he obediently, without a word, swallowed the capsules when I offered them to him. I waited until his eyes had closed again, then I locked his door and went downstairs and eventually fell uneasily asleep myself, wrapped in a travelling rug on a too short sofa. There was no sound from Grant all night, and when I went up to him at six in the morning he was still sleeping quietly.