The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(30)

Over two nights, they’d managed to clear out the junk, wash down the walls and Niall gave the place a quick lick of paint one afternoon when the rain outside meant that he had no excuse not to. Alice was thrilled with her new consulting room where she would provide triage and basic medical care and shorten the queue for Lucy after her house calls were complete.

‘I love it,’ Alice said when Elizabeth led her into the little examination room once it was ready. ‘It’s just perfect.’

‘Oh, dear, I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mishmash,’ Elizabeth said because apart from the few bits of furniture that had been buried beneath the trash, they’d hauled down carver chairs from the dining room and hung old prints from a spare bedroom on the walls. Lucy had picked fresh wild flowers – gorse and enormous happy dog daisies on her morning walk – and a view of the overgrown garden completed the easy, if not exactly sterile feel to the place.

‘No, she’s right, it’s perfect; exactly what we’re going for,’ Lucy said expertly. ‘It’s an old practice. We can’t compete with the shiny new medical centres in the bigger towns, but the reason you’re going to get patients coming back here is because we’re offering a top-class medical opinion, in a small village atmosphere.’ She smiled then. ‘We want the place to feel welcoming and relaxed, the kind of place that downplays the bad news and makes people feel like they’re a little lighter leaving.’

‘I think between you, you’re already managing that,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Between us,’ Lucy corrected her softly.

The thing that really surprised Elizabeth, apart from how busy the practice was, was actually how much money flowed through the place. On her first morning, the small drawer filled up with fifty-euro notes so quickly that soon she was tucking them beneath the drawer to keep the thing looking tidy. At the end of the day, they’d taken in far more than she assumed was made in a week. Again, Lucy had changed things around when she arrived. Rather than patients handing over their payment to the doctor, they set up a proper area so a receipt could be issued and a record made of all payments at the reception desk. This, she told Elizabeth, would make it a lot easier for her to see exactly what the practice could be worth before she went about making any decisions to sell it on in the future.

By the end of that first week, between the actual work of the place, knowing what the income was like and enjoying being part of it all, Elizabeth had begun to feel very differently about the future of the practice.

‘It’s not a golden hen, but it’s a very good income,’ Lucy agreed at the end of a long day, where the practice had been brisk and steady. ‘You’ll still have to pay for insurance and supplies and…’ She lowered her voice then, aware that Alice was next door. ‘You should probably look at Alice’s salary. Eric was paying her a pittance. She should at least be paid a community nurse’s wage, since that’s the work she will be doing.’

‘I was going to ask you about that,’ Elizabeth said, closing the door softly behind her. She had been shocked when she realised what Alice received for a full week’s work; it was verging on slave labour when you divided it out at an hourly rate. ‘Will you let me know what the rates are? She’s worth every penny that’s due to her for her qualifications,’ Elizabeth said softly. ‘There needs to be mileage too, for that little car of hers. She covered a lot of ground this week.’

‘She won’t be expecting a raise.’ Lucy smiled.

‘Probably not, but even so…’ Elizabeth felt embarrassed at how miserably her husband had treated her. It turned out, when you looked at the weekly takings and the money that he managed to fritter away between the pub and bookies, he’d treated Alice every bit as shoddily as he’d treated Elizabeth. ‘We’ll set things straight and then I can start thinking of the future,’ Elizabeth said softly.

‘It’s too soon to go making any big decisions yet,’ Lucy told her. ‘Just sit tight for a few months. Certainly, you’d be mad to go handing the place over to the likes of that awful woman who covered for your husband.’

‘Thea Gilchrist? Not likely, not now.’ Elizabeth smiled, thinking of what a near miss she’d had if she’d been foolish enough to let the other woman take the reins of the place from her.

It seemed to Elizabeth that once she began helping out in the surgery the weeks just fell into each other, like a lazy train of dominoes, each day following easily and happily from the last. She quickly managed to build up something like a routine. Arriving bright and early to open up the surgery, she brewed fresh coffee before Lucy and Alice arrived. The days were filled with meeting people and maybe counting her blessings too. Then, for that last delicious hour, she went about all the little jobs that tidied away her work for the day.

It surprised her just how much had to be done, from lodging the takings, replacing the files and finally tidying up generally, so they were ready for the next day.

Arriving back in her own kitchen, the silence after such a frenetic day was suddenly a welcome bliss. Dinner alone – looking out onto the garden – was not the empty, lonely affair she had expected it to be since Eric had passed away. Rather, she was very often entertained by the busy wildlife at play outside her window. If anything, she wondered if it had been lonelier when he’d been alive, when she’d had the expectation of so much more knocked out of her.