The Shift Key (3 page)

He turned around the green to the bus shelter beside the churchyard gate, where his usual passengers were waiting: boys and girls in blue and grey school uniform. Thursday was never a busy morning. It was pension day, and the older folk must collect their money from the post office before they could go shopping away from the village.

He thought wistfully of times past, when Fidger’s had run a proper service with three buses and hired drivers. Back then, they hadn’t just ferried shoppers and schoolkids, but all sorts of passengers. Every morning they’d taken a dozen people to work at the pharmaceutical factory up the valley in Trimborne, and brought them back in the evening. Then, though, the managers had introduced automatic machinery, and the few staff they kept on became able to afford cars, and the demand dwindled. Now literally no one from Weyharrow worked at the factory any more, and even this rump of a service barely broke even except during the school term, despite weekend holiday excursions …

Still, there were people who without it would never be able to get out of Weyharrow at all. It was a public good, and
worth preserving for as long as possible.

Braking, opening the door, he called good morning to those waiting. He felt fine, despite having been up late. A tourist coach had broken down on the main road, and it had been his turn rather than his brother’s to go and help. He hadn’t got to bed until nearly midnight.

Everybody was aboard. Shutting the door, he engaged gear. And hesitated with his foot on the clutch.

Something really ought to be done about the siting of this stop! Why in the world was it on the wrong side of the road? And there was a car coming!

He waited until it had gone by, then swung over to the right and set off for Powte. Three near-collisions later, his screaming passengers finally made him believe that in Britain one drives on the left.

Shaking and sweating, he obeyed, and delivered them to their destination with no further mishap.

But he had been so sure! He’d
known!
And in his heart of hearts still felt it wrong!

Leaving his boots at the back door, Harry Vikes crossed the stone-flagged floor of the farm kitchen and sat down gloomily at the big scrubbed wooden table.

His wife Joyce bustled over from the solid-fuel range with a mug of tea in her red-knuckled hands. ‘Here you are!’ she said. ‘I’ll get your breakfast directly.’

Harry had been out late last night tending a sick calf, and up again at six as usual for the early milking and to drive the cows to pasture.

His only response was a grunt.

‘What’s amiss now?’ Joyce demanded. ‘Did the calf die?’

‘No.’ Not looking at her, he spooned sugar into his tea.

‘What then?’ And added suddenly: ‘Where’s Chief?’

The door was wide open, but there was no sign of Harry’s constant companion, his black and white collie cross.

‘By the gate, looking like a hundred devils got at him.’

Indeed he was. Joyce spotted him through the window, hunched down to the ground, tail low, eyes wide.

‘What did you do to him?’

‘It’s more what he did to me,’ Harry grunted. ‘And ’tis all the fault of they damned Pecklows!’

The Vikeses and the Pecklows had long been neighbours, but propinquity had never made them friends.

‘Know what they done this time?’ Harry went on.’ Put the piece I rent from Nigel Mender down to turnips – in the night, just like that! ’Course I drove the cows in anyway, but Chief went mad. I had to kick him ’fore he’d leave off snapping at me.’

Joyce sat down very slowly. She said, ‘What piece that you rent from Mr Mender?’

‘The one in Fooksey Lane, o’ course!’

‘Harry,’ Joyce said in a faint voice, ‘that was last year. This year Ken Pecklow has it. He outbid you. And it is down to turnips.’

‘That’s what I said!’ he burst out. ‘And it warn’t yesterday! I remember clear as I see you now!’

‘And you drove our herd into it … No wonder the dog tried to stop you! Seemingly he has more sense than you!’

The phone rang. She forced her heavy body to her feet.

‘That’ll be Ken, I reckon,’ she said in a dull tone. ‘And after we get this lot sorted out, you better go and see the doctor.’

‘What are you rattling on about, woman? It’s the calf that’s sick, not me!’

‘You think you’re not sick?’ she flared. ‘When you’re saying that Ken spent all night setting full-grown turnips in a field you grazed our cows on yesterday?’

‘I told you! I remember clear as I see you now …’

But the words trailed away. He turned his leather-brown face to her, and it grew pale. Beads of sweat started to run
down his forehead, and his hand shook so much that tea slopped from his mug.

The phone was still ringing. Wearily Joyce moved to answer it.

Dr Steven Gloze did his best to look cheerful as he came downstairs for morning surgery, but Mrs Weaper the receptionist was doing the opposite, as though the name she had married into had permanently conditioned her expression. She informed him tartly that there were patients waiting, as though that were somehow his fault. But the first appointment was at nine, and only now was that hour clanging from the church clock.

Steven sighed as he collected the patient records. He had undertaken not a few engagements as a locum since his graduation, but they had mostly been in or around London. The idea of spending a month in a West Country village, especially in a practice where rumour hinted that Dr Tripkin, the incumbent – currently on holiday in Spain – was seriously considering retirement, had greatly appealed to him.

However, he was being made to feel distinctly unwelcome. Last night, when the parson had called him to attend Mrs Lapsey, the old bag had snapped at him as though he were some kind of unreliable quack.

Still, he had only been here since Monday. More than three weeks remained.

Riffling through the documents he had been handed, he discovered that the first patient was one William Cashcart, whom he had not previously met. An intercom linked the consulting-room with the waiting-room; he pressed the button and called him in.

Mr Cashcart, who was forty, said he was employed by Wenstowe’s the builders and that his right wrist was hurting even though he’d bought a navvy’s bracer to put round it. A
brief examination revealed he was most likely suffering from chronic but as yet low-grade arthritis. Well, that meant a good plain start to the day. It didn’t seem worth sending him for an X-ray. Steven wrote out a prescription, told him to take it across the green to the chemist’s, and called for the next patient.

She was just leaving when the phone rang. He picked it up. It was Mrs Weaper.

‘Mr Ratch wants you!’ she said sharply.

Steven’s heart sank. Mr Ratch was the pharmacist, and he seemed as suspicious as anybody of this intrusive young stranger to whom the health of Weyharrow had been entrusted.

‘Put him on,’ he sighed.

‘Dr Gloze? Lawrence Ratch here. Since when have newly-slaughtered chickens been available on the Health Service?’

‘What? But it’s standard treatment – has been since Lord knows when!’

‘I have no idea’ – frostily – ‘what in the world you’re talking about.’

‘But surely …’ Steven sought words through a haze of incomprehension. ‘All he has to do is plunge his hand into the chicken while it’s still warm, and keep it there until it’s cold. The vital forces –’

Then, slowly, a vision of Mr Ratch’s shop, which he had visited on Monday morning, took form in his mind. Indeed, it was not the sort of place where one would find live chickens. But why not, when their use was a commonplace? In town perhaps one might not obtain them so easily, but in the country …?

He forced himself to say politely, ‘Don’t you have an arrangement with a local butcher? Or a farmer?’

‘Dr Gloze! If this is a joke, it’s in very poor taste! Mr Cashcart obviously has arthritis. I’m taking it upon myself to let him have something suitable, and I trust you’ll sign a
revised prescription straight away! Be so good as not to play such pranks again!’

The phone slammed down, leaving Steven in a state of indescribable bewilderment. There was a rack of medical texts above his borrowed desk; he snatched at each in turn, searching for the treatment he was so sure he had been taught to use.

It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there …

And then the phone rang again and Mrs Weaper announced that he was needed urgently to tend two farmers who’d been fighting.

At least, her scornful tone implied, he must be up to applying bandages and sticking-plaster.

But by then Steven himself was far from sure.

Jenny Severance backed her dark-blue Mini into its usual space in the yard outside the offices of the
Chapminster Chronicle.
She was trembling. Partly that was due to the near miss she had had when leaving Weyharrow (what could have possessed Tom Fidger to drive his bus around the green on the wrong side of the road?), but far more importantly it was because she had a really tremendous story to file, and it would only just be in time. Publication day was tomorrow, and the presses were due to roll at noon.

Maybe she should have filed it with one of the nationals last night. …

But somehow it hadn’t occurred to her. She had no idea why not, even though the meeting at Hatterbridge that she’d been sent to cover had dragged on far later than intended, and then fog had delayed her, so it had been midnight when she got to bed.

Sometimes she wondered whether she did really have the makings of a reporter. Ian Tenterwell, her editor, had often voiced the suspicion in his thin sarcastic tones.

But she was determined to prove herself.

Inevitably, as she jumped out and locked the car, half a dozen male passersby whistled and catcalled at the sight of this plump but pretty blonde of twenty-five. She pretended they weren’t there.

In spite of that, too, she was determined to prove herself.

Rushing into the building, fending off still more would-be admirers, she hastened to her desk and rolled paper into the elderly manual typewriter which was the best – so Ian claimed – that funds would stretch to.

Maybe so, since the
Chronicle
’s was still a ‘hot metal’ operation.

And, speaking of Ian …

Here he came, when she had written scarcely more than a dozen lines.

‘Well, well!’ he said, swinging his leather briefcase. He affected dark suits and striped ties, the businessman look. ‘Good to see you hard at work before I got here – for once! How was the meeting?’

Gritting her teeth, Jenny forced a smile.

‘It’ll be this week’s lead.’

‘What?’

‘Just wait till you see what I’ve got. It’ll make international headlines!’

Uncertainly he said, ‘Jenny, are you feeling all right?’

‘Stop trying to put me down!’ was her cross reply. ‘I’ll bring it in as soon as it’s ready. Then you’ll see!’

And went back to pounding the keys. Ian shrugged and passed on.

The story was complete in a matter of minutes. Waving three pages in triumph, Jenny leapt up from her chair and marched straight into the office whose glass door was branded with the gilt word ‘
EDITOR
’, eedless of the fact that Ian was involved in deep discussion of galleys with chief sub Dennis Dewley. The latter looked at her reprovingly over his bifocals.

‘Here you are!’ she exclaimed. ‘And it’s all ours! None of the nationals sent so much as a stringer!’

And then, in the nick of time, she realized what Ian was about to read.

‘Hal Awnham,
MP
for Hatterbridge, has finally revealed in public what so long has been suspected. The us government plans to launch an all-out nuclear attack on Russia next year, and British forces will be involved from the very first strike …’

She snatched the pages back in terror. She could imagine precisely what Ian was bound to reply, his voice acid with scorn.

‘He can’t have said anything of the sort, or there’d have been a bloody riot! He went to address a meeting of Hatterbridge Peace and Disarmament Group, right? For a Tory, that’s playing Daniel in the lions’ den! He can’t possibly have uttered such a load of claptrap! If he had, the disarmers would have made sure every paper in the country – and the BBC, and
TV-AM
! – headlined it this morning. Have you seen the papers? Did they have to call the police because the audience was trying to lynch him? Isn’t that what you’d expect if he had said this?’

Suddenly, terrifyingly, there was a gap in her memory. She remembered the hall, the restive audience, the look of boredom on the chairman’s face – he was a local vicar …

But no riot.

And, logically, there should have been.

I am not going to be weak and womanly. I am not going to break down and cry
…

It was no use. Clutching the pages to her, she spun on her heel and ran out of the room, out of the building, leaving Ian and Dennis to exchange patronizing shrugs and carry on.

Vic Draycock knew it was a bad habit in a teacher to take out his own snappishness on his pupils. Today he couldn’t help it. Instead of what he had planned to do with his morning history class, he set them an essay. They were to describe General Wolfe’s attack on the Heights of Abraham. He gave them twenty minutes, and himself a chance to brood over his own stupidity in deleting his article.

When he called their papers in, the top one – last to be collected, of course – was from Harold Ellerford, who had
kept scribbling until the latest possible moment. He and his brother Paul made an unlikable pair, forever hinting that they were somehow ‘better’ than their companions, and ought never to have wound up in a lowly state school like this.

Victor had intended to tell the class to study the next chapter of their history book while he glanced through what they had written, then spend a few minutes at the end of the period passing comments.

But the moment his eye fell on Harold’s essay he felt beside himself.

‘Harold!’ he barked. ‘Stand up!’

‘Yes, sir?’ – in the meek but defiant tone he and his brother seemed to have been coached in by their mother. (She was a leading light in the Weyharrow Society, as might have been expected.)