Page 11 of New Dreams for the Village Nurse
Ottilie put a hand to the spot, but she couldn’t feel anything. ‘What kind of weird?’
‘I don’t know…I can’t really describe it.’
‘No fever or sickness?’
‘No…I mean, I’m not sure. I’m exhausted and feeling a bit strange. What do you think it is?’
‘I don’t know. Are you otherwise well?’
‘It only started this morning. Like I said, I felt a bit weird but haven’t been sick or had a fever or anything. Should I go to see Dr Cheadle? I suppose I could ask her about the car at the same time.’
Ottilie gave a wry smile. ‘See how you get on this morning and if anything develops, you probably ought to make an appointment. Not sure about the car sales, though – she might not appreciate that during your consultation. If you’re reallyworried, or you think you’re deteriorating quicker than she can see you, then you can phone me and I’ll get you an emergency slot.’
‘You’re so good to us,’ Ann said. ‘Thank you, I will.’
‘Right…I’d better go.’ Ottilie held up the sandwich. ‘Thanks for this – I haven’t had breakfast yet, so this is going to go down nicely.’
‘You don’t eat properly’ Ann said. ‘It’s a wonder you don’t fade away.’
‘With these hips?’ Ottilie laughed. ‘I’ve got enough padding here to see me through an apocalypse!’
‘Don’t be daft – you have a lovely figure. I wish I still looked like that.’
‘You do – you’re too hard on yourself. Anyway, I must dash. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’
‘And we’ll have the bike ready for you,’ Ann said.
Ottilie bid a distracted Darryl goodbye and closed the door of the farmhouse behind her.
She was about to unwrap her sandwich and eat it on the walk back to her car when her phone bleeped a notification. It was a text from Lavender, and it was then she noticed she had half a dozen missed calls from the surgery receptionist that she hadn’t heard come through because she’d been talking to Ann. Perhaps there’d been a problem putting off her early patients. With a vague frown she dialled the number, but there was no answer.
Weird. Lavender always answered during surgery open hours, and if she had to leave her desk she usually took the phone with her.
Ottilie opened the text and froze as she read it. And then she started to run down the hill, sandwich and mud forgotten as she raced to her car.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fliss had already left by the time Ottilie arrived at the surgery. Lavender was back at her post on reception, making frantic phone calls and clearly struggling to hold back tears.
‘Ottilie!’ She looked up from a call she’d just ended. ‘Thank God you’re here!’
‘What do you need me to do?’ Ottilie asked briskly, shrugging off her coat and dropping it and her bag on the nearest empty chair.
‘I’m trying to cancel as many non-urgents as I can. I won’t be able to get them all, and some will still turn up, but we’ll just have to deal with that when they do.’
‘If they’re within my remit, I might be able to see some of those. What about the urgent appointments?’
‘We’ve got a locum doctor on his way from the agency, but it’s going to be at least an hour before he gets here. But he won’t be up to speed with any of our patients, so we still need to cut this afternoon’s clinic to make it as small as we can because he’ll obviously take a bit longer with everyone than Fliss does.’
‘Right.’ Ottilie went to look over Lavender’s shoulder at the clinic lists. ‘I’ll start cutting some of mine so it will make room for some of Fliss’s to go on my list.’
‘Why don’t I phone yours and you go through Fliss’s to see who’s on there and who you’re qualified to look at?’
‘OK, that makes more sense.’
Lavender pressed print on a list while Ottilie went over to the printer to wait for it. Her head was in a whirl, but there was no time to reflect on the madness of the morning’s sudden handbrake turn, or to get any real detail from Lavender about what had happened. All she knew was that Fliss had had to run to Charles’s house and that whatever had made her go must be very bad for Fliss to abandon her clinic. Lavender must have known more, but until they’d sorted this situation, it would have to wait.
They spent the next hour phoning as many people as they could get hold of to ask them not to come to the clinic or to change their appointment or to see Ottilie instead of Fliss, and by the time they’d finished, Ottilie was starving, having abandoned her sandwich in the rush back down from Hilltop Farm. She hadn’t had a drink that day either, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it. And there was still no time to find out exactly what had happened that morning, because patients had started to arrive and Ottilie had to either see them or help Lavender explain why they couldn’t be seen.
