Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Prescriptions I Send Ahead
Round the equinox I post the round's repeats before clinic day, and some of them come back signed off early, kindly, in hands I have known for years.
- dated: "round the equinox"
- narrator: "Alfred Bright, dispensing doctor"
Saturday 20th. Fog thinned by nine, so the round's posts went out early. Six repeats, written and enveloped last night at the surgery desk: Mrs Ellen Porritt at the lighthouse end, Mr Stanley Fereday past the gasworks, and the four along the terrace between. My habit these nine years: clinic day is Wednesday, posts go Saturday, counterfoil stays with me, the patient signs and posts hers back with the medicine card. It spares them the queue in the yellow rain, and it spares me the knocking twice. None of it is modern practice. All of it works, or did.
Wednesday 24th. First counterfoil back, Mrs Porritt's — dated the Monday, two days before I could have knocked, brought up the mill lane by the early post. Pencil along the foot: signed early to spare you the hill, Alfred. E.P. The E curls left, as it has since the fifties. I called in anyway; a shilling's bus and a chat, and she was ready when I came, kettle on, card on the mantel under the photo of the boat. Before you knock, she said, I am already sure of you. I have written that down because it is the whole of her and I am fond of her, and because kindness on paper is still evidence, and I do not know what it is evidence of.
Sunday 28th. Now the one I cannot set down. Mr Fereday's counterfoil, signed the Thursday, back with me the Saturday; and the Thursday, I knew, he had been two nights in the cottage hospital — taken in the Wednesday, chest, kept till the Monday for watching. I went to the Sunday hour and found him easy and glad I had come. He said the counterfoil had been in his coat pocket all along, and he had asked the night porter for his pen. Which pocket should have been hanging on his nail at home, with the rest of the coat. The ward sister confirms he slept the Thursday through and put his name to nothing that day but the medicines card. The signature on my counterfoil is his old hand, the boat-ledger hand, firmer than it has been since the spring. I have filed it under his initials and told nobody, there being nobody it would help.
Tuesday 1st. Posted the next six this morning before the mist dried on the surgery windows. Before sealing I sat with the pile and did my private sums, the ones I keep off the National Health's paper: three years of this habit, thirty-two counterfoils returned, every one signed kindly, every one early, none late, none wrong except the ones I cannot fit to a ward or a weather. I tell myself I am saving them the queue, and they are saving me, before I ever reach their doors, the finding out. Which way the kindness runs between us I cannot settle, and Wednesday is coming, as Wednesdays do, whether I post them or not — and next Thursday, or the Thursday after, whose name will the post bring me before it brings the person?