The Importance of Being Ernestine

“Good marks for listening.”

“No need to thank me,” he said with a winsome smile, “someone has to look out for you. And Ben’s not here to do it.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty to keep him occupied at Abigail’s,” I replied with superb nonchalance. “Not that you don’t do a great job, Freddy, but he always likes to catch up after being away on a trip. He didn’t happen to phone while I was at the vicarage?”

“It so chances that he did. Said to tell you he would collect Rose from her play group at 1:00 and go back for the twins at 3:30.”

“Oh, splendid!”

And so it was, because now I wouldn’t have to shift my attention away from Lady Krumley every five minutes to check my watch. Driving down the Cliff Road I heroically banished Ben, between one sniff and the next, from my mind. I was wondering just how badly Lady Krumley had been injured when I drew level with Abigail’s. Ben’s car was neither out front nor visible in the side parking lot. Nothing to that of course, although at 11:30 he would not have set off to collect Rose. There were dozens of places he might have gone. I just couldn’t think of any for the moment. I had the car heater going full blast, and my head was fuzzy. A moment later I was given my answer. While passing the Chitterton Fells Library I saw a man who was unmistakably my husband exiting by the side door with an armload of books balanced precariously under his chin. To honk at him would have been disaster for he would undoubtedly have dropped the lot. So I proceeded on my way, wedged in between a lorry and a woman wobbling along on a bicycle, feeling vaguely comforted. Ben and I were both avid readers. Not much for television, we enjoyed many an evening-especially in wintertime-locked in our own separate worlds yet linked by that special silence that can be better than any amount of talking.

It was no longer raining, but the roads had the black gloss of night and ragged clouds whipped across the sky like clothes blown off a line. What had been a scattering of cottages became rows of tight-faced houses with front doors opening directly onto the street and shops that looked as though they should have signs in the windows warning customers that they entered at their own risk. I drew level with a greengrocer’s. It had boxes of drowned fruit and vege set out front, being sniffed at by a mongrel dog. Catching my eyes he cocked his leg in a desultory fashion and disappeared around a corner. Mucklesby, I decided, was no more attractive by day than at night, a thought shared by Mrs. Malloy when I stopped in the alleyway outside Jugg’s Detective Agency and she climbed into the car.

“What a rat hole of a town!” she said, buckling her safety belt around her middle. She removed her headscarf and patted her blonde hair back into shape. “Course it suits Milk a treat, and us too, Mrs. H., in our line of business. But you couldn’t pay me to live here. Pigeon muck everywhere you step, and the whole place smelling of cat’s pee. Drive on do.” She gave me a nudge that shot the car forward. “Before we catch something and end up in the hospital along with Lady Krumley.”

I started to say that I was not in any line of business other than being a wife, mother and part-time interior designer, but a glance at her set profile let me know I would be wasting my breath. So I stuck to the issue at hand.

“How critical is Lady Krumley’s condition?”

“Oh, you know them nurses, they can spend ten minutes putting the wind up you just saying ‘the patient is doing as well as can be expected.’” Mrs. Malloy took a compact out of her handbag and waved it at me before powder puffing her nose with enough abandon to cause me to gasp and choke.

“Could you put that thing away,” I said testily. “It has to be every bit as hazardous as secondhand smoke.”

“Well, you’re a fine one to talk! But you know what they say about them holier than thou reformed types.”

I ignored this thrust. “Did the nurse who phoned say if her ladyship was in ICU?”

“What?

“The Intensive Care Unit.”

“No, she didn’t, and watch where you’re driving. You almost went up the back of that van and now me lipstick’s all smeared.” Mrs. Malloy eyed herself in the compact mirror before dropping it back with an irritated plop into her handbag. “And me wanting to look my best for all them handsome young doctors that’s bound to be lining the corridors. Some of the happiest days of me life was watching Emergency Ward 10 on the telly and now that I’m going to live it you have to go and spoil things.”

“That’s not a van?”

“What isn’t?” Mrs. Malloy was dabbing at her purple lips with both pinkies.

“The one you just said I almost hit.” I rounded a corner and drove under a short brick tunnel and emerged into a parking lot. “It’s an ambulance. And this is the Cottage Hospital.”

“Well, I could have told you that! There’s the door to outpatients. Don’t see as we can go too far wrong if we go in that way.”

It sounded sensible. But after fifteen minutes of wandering green hallways that hadn’t been updated since the 1940s and not having spotted one handsome young man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling around his neck, the fact that we were hopelessly lost became my fault.

“Thanks a lot, Mrs. H.! Me feet are killing me. In the time we’ve been here I could have had me insides taken out and put back in again. That’s five times, as I’ve counted, we’ve been around this way. Even them pictures on the wall are beginning to look at us funny.”

She had a point. The expressions on the faces of the illustrious personages who had served this hospital over the past hundred years appeared to have grown increasingly stern. The directions given to us at the information desk had seemed straightforward at the time. We had taken the lift to the second floor as instructed and turned left at the maternity unit. After that it was pretty much all a blur. But it wasn’t my fault that Mrs. M. was wearing her customary four-inch heels. Neither was I to blame because her miniskirted powder pink raincoat now reeked of disinfectant, or so she claimed. I was about to explain that I wasn’t happy at the prospect of wandering these labyrinths for all eternity, when a man in hospital attire came up behind us wheeling a gurney. Mrs. Malloy immediately brightened. The man wasn’t bad looking and the gurney was unoccupied. Stepping away from the wall she stretched her butterfly lips into her most engaging smile and hooked up a thumb. Hadn’t her mother ever told her she was liable to end up in the morgue if she hitchhiked lifts from strange men in hospital corridors?

Luckily his mother must have warned him about the sort of women he was liable to encounter in the course of a day’s work. Or maybe he had a bad back and couldn’t risk hoisting Mrs. Malloy onto the gurney and making off with her into the sluice room. (From what she had told me sluice rooms had figured prominently in Emergency Ward 10.) At any rate he chuckled in appreciation of what he obviously took to be her little joke and escorted us a short distance to where personnel were occupied behind a desk area talking into telephones, bustling about with notepads or issuing instructions in a kind of verbal shorthand. Feeling like a lion singling out one deer from the herd to pounce upon I caught the eye of a woman in a floral cotton jacket that seemed to indicate she might be a nurse or possibly a member of the housekeeping staff. She came toward me, while Mrs. M. was still muttering in my ear.

“It’s not like I was ready to go off with a perfect stranger. His name was Joe; it was right there on his jacket pocket. And whatever you’re thinking I know he was dying for a moment alone with me so he could tell me all about his bunions. It was there in his eyes-the deep quiet knowledge of a man who has just met the woman of his dreams. But it was all ruined because you had to insist on tagging along. The very least you could have done was stay behind and pretend you was looking out the windows.”

Clearly in addition to her enthusiasm for Emergency Ward 10, Mrs. Malloy had been reading too many of those nurse doctor books. I little doubted that in next to no time Joe would be transformed into a well-built, well-heeled senior consultant-probably a titled one at that-and instead of wanting to talk about his bunions he would be casually mentioning his three ancestral homes and his silver gray Rolls Royce. I was wondering what sort of car Lady Krumley had been driving, while explaining to the woman in the floral jacket that we had received a phone message requesting we visit her ladyship.

“Let me see what I can find out for you, Mrs. Haskell.” She gave me a brisk smile before going into a huddle with the other assorted jackets and coats. After what seemed ages she came around the counter to escort me and Mrs. Malloy the length of the corridor. “You’re to be allowed ten minutes. The doctors are due back to examine her ladyship shortly. I’m sure I don’t need to caution you that our object is to keep her calm, so please restrict the conversation to general chitchat-nothing to get her the least bit worked up.” A beep sounded and with an