The Doctor's Wife by Brian Moore

Author:Brian Moore [Moore, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781408827024
Amazon: 1408827026
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1976-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Part 2

Chapter 10

When the telephone rang that night, Dr. Deane and his family had already gone to bed. It was after the eleven o’clock news, and as he undressed he could hear his daughters playing the record player in their bedroom. Agnes, his wife, went along the corridor to the bathroom and stopped to knock on the girls’ door in warning. “Anne and Imelda, turn that down, you’ll wake the whole avenue up!”

The phone rang, just at the moment the record player was turned down. He lifted the receiver, expecting a patient. “Dr. Deane,” he said.

“Owen, this is Kevin Redden.”

“Oh, hello, Kevin, how are you?”

“Listen, Owen, I’m sorry to disturb you at this time of night, but I’m in a spot of trouble. Could I come over and see you? It’s about Sheila.”

“Sheila? Is she sick?”

“No, no, it’s not that. It’s something else.”

Dr. Deane heard his wife inside the bathroom, turning on the water taps. He lowered his voice. “Kevin, let me come and see you. That might be better.”

“Well, I hate to bring you out at this time of night.”

“No bother,” Dr. Deane said in a quiet voice. He tried to make a joke of it. “I’m used to night calls.”

He had dressed himself again when he heard Agnes leave the bathroom. She stopped by the girls’ door, as she did most nights, to call: “Imelda and Anne, have you brushed your teeth?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“All right, then. Good night, dears.”

“ ‘Night, Mummy.”

He went out onto the landing, buttoning up his tweed jacket. “Don’t switch the hall lights off,” he said.

“You’re not going out?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Where is it, this time?”

“Oh, it’s just a case over on the Antrim Road,” he lied. “I’ll not be too long, I hope. Don’t wait up for me.”

“Take your scarf,” she said.

It was raining out. In his car, he set the windshield wipers flicking and reminded himself that he had lied to her. He hated to do that. But she had the habit of telling everything to her sister and the sister told the mother, and so it was broadcast to all and sundry. And this did sound like a serious matter. It was not like Kevin Redden to ring up and ask for help. He and Redden were not at all close, a brother-in-law he saw perhaps twice a year at some family occasion, a large, handsome chap with an irritating nervous laugh that was very disconcerting and awkward when you first heard it. He wasn’t at all the sort you’d expect Sheila to have married. She was fond of reading and the theater. Redden seemed just the opposite—never opened a book, liked his golf and fishing and so on. Still, he was clever enough, he had his F.R.C.S. and was on the staff of the Royal, the Protestant teaching hospital, which, when you considered that he was Catholic, meant he knew his stuff. Besides, Sheila had married very young, at a time when she was unsure of herself and her prospects. She was lazy about jobs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.