The White Family by Maggie Gee Read Free Book Online Page A

moment, but he winked as he said it, and May knew he was happy.
    ‘Now we’re all right,’ said Shirley. ‘Do you want to have a look at your chocolates, Dad?’
    ‘I’d better get a vase for those lilies,’ said May, stirring.
    ‘The nurses’ll do that,’ said Alfred, sharply. ‘Don’t you move. That’s what they’re paid for.’
    This was plainly untrue, but May realized that Alfred didn’t want to be left alone with his daughter.
    ‘I’ll go,’ said Shirley, getting up again.
    ‘Just everyone sit still for a moment,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve only just come in, and you can’t wait to leave.’
    They sat in silence, suddenly uneasy, the bundle of lilies in their gilt-stamped paper becoming bigger, less comfortable, louder, rustling every time Shirley breathed, and May thought suddenly of arum lilies, flowers for a wreath, flowers for a funeral.
    She only just got here, and she can’t wait to leave. Life’s like that, all rush, and then over
.
    ‘Isn’t anyone going to ask how I am?’ he demanded, grimacing his lips over his teeth where they sometimes slipped and made him look foolish.
    ‘You were asleep. She did ask me,’ said May, humbly,
don’t be cross with me
.
    ‘How are you, Dad?’ asked Shirley, brightly.
    ‘Can’t complain. I don’t really think there’s much wrong with me.’
    ‘Was it a heart attack?’ Shirley pressed, and May wanted to shush her, for it wasn’t right to talk of such things in loud voices.
    ‘They keep calling it an
event
,’ he said, with a certain amount of satisfaction.
    ‘I think that’s a stroke,’ said Shirley.
    ‘It was an
event
,’ he said, displeased. ‘They think I might have another one.’
    ‘It’s your circulation,’ said May. ‘That’s nothing new. That was always bad.’ She didn’t want some alarming new game.
    ‘Well it is new,’ he said, staring hard at her, one huge white eyebrow twitching upwards like the feathers of the ostrich in the zoo where they’d gone with the two older ones, thirty years ago. ‘Being found out cold on my back is new.’
    ‘So are they going to give you drugs, or what?’
    May frowned at her daughter, who didn’t notice. (Why did she keep on bothering her father? If he wanted to tell them, he would tell them. If he knew, that is, if the doctors had told him, and she hoped they wouldn’t tell him things to frighten him. It was she who should know. May would ask the doctors.)
    ‘I’m rattling with pills already,’ said Alfred.
    ‘Stop questioning your father,’ said May.
    ‘I don’t mind people taking an interest. They’re doing a test on my brain,’ he said, once more unable to suppress a note of pride. Medicine had ignored him for seventy-odd years; now important doctors were testing his brain.
    ‘Must have been a stroke then,’ said Shirley, satisfied. ‘I mean, I’m afraid it must have been a stroke,’ catching her mother’s indignant glare. ‘But lots of people get better from strokes.’
    ‘How do you know so much about medicine all of a sudden?’ May asked her.
    ‘I don’t,’ she said. And then, foolishly ‘Well Elroy does work in a hospital, so I suppose I have picked up a bit from him –’
    ‘You’ve picked it up from bloody Elroy, have you?’ her father demanded, stung into life, cranking up his head several inches from the pillow. ‘This is medicine according to Elroy, is it? Well thank you very much, I want English medicine, English medicine from English doctors.’
    ‘Elroy is English,’ said Shirley. ‘Well – British. Elroy is as British as me or you.’
    ‘Oh yes?’ said Alfred, now alarmingly red, blue eyes alight, clawing at the bedclothes. ‘He’s about as British as bananas, is Elroy.’
    Shirley was trying very hard to keep calm. ‘He is British, but I’m not going to argue. Thing is, you should know what’s the matter with you. You have a right. All patients do.’
    ‘He’s not bloody British!’ Veins bulged in his neck and his head