Steady Now Doctor by Robert Clifford Page A

back to Blackpool, then he took Andy up to the cemetery.
    His mother’s grave was covered with a mound of wreaths and flowers. His father was strangely silent.
    They drove home and there was Mrs Robinson bustling around again, flitting, would have been a more appropriate word, but everything was neat and tidy, everything was washed up. There were some sandwiches on the table.
    Andy’s father said, “I’m just nipping upstairs for a bit,” and, to his surprise, Andy could hear him sobbing.
    He thought of the constant warfare that had gone on between his parents over the years.
    Why was he crying now she was gone?
    For no reason, Andy’s mind suddenly flashed back to the time when he was at the Grammar School and in a boxing match where he and his opponent were so shagged out that they leant against each other. They had got applause for good sportsmanship, whereas, they were so tired that that was the only way they could stay on their feet.
    He realized that the continual battle that went on between his parents, really held them in balance against each other, and with one gone it left his father to fall on his face. In spite of all the words that had been flung about for so many years, perhaps he had been a good enough husband and perhaps she had been a good enough wife and mother. She had certainly looked after them.
    Andy walked into town to a stationers, and bought a couple of books of leaf type photograph albums where you slide in photographs and they stick up like a pack of cards, each containing about sixty photos. He then went through all the drawers and desks in the house looking for photographs of his mother, slotting them into his new purchases.
    Having finished, he took them up to his room and carefully studied the hundred or so photographs he had collected. On nearly every one she was smiling. Could she really have had a happy life?
    Tears ran down Andy’s cheeks, then, like his father, he turned on his bed and wept.
    He stayed another week at home with his father, and they seemed at ease with each other, and Mrs Robinson seemed to be almost a permanent fixture.
    Andy was pleased she was unobtrusive, spotless and a good cook, although she couldn’t make Yorkshire pudding like his mother, and her Sunday lunches weren’t nearly as good, but they weren’t bad. Perhaps she’d take care of his father, unless he had other ideas about his future.
    It was possible that he already had a partner lined up, but this didn’t seem obvious in the way he behaved during the week of the funeral.
    At the end of the second week since the day of his mother’s death, Andy said he would have to be getting back to medical school.
    His father nodded in agreement and said, “Well I expect I must get back to work as well.”
    On the Sunday he drove Andy to the station, he had been away from the medical school for two weeks but it seemed like two years.
    When he got back everything had been going on apace, and everybody seemed settled and had got on with their studies, their games, their clubs and their associations.
    He felt like a stranger coming into the hostel. The others all seemed like old hands with Andy being the only new boy.
    When he got back to the physiology department and the anatomy department he was a full two weeks behind everybody and he never caught up.
    It took Andy a month to settle back into the hospital and medical school life. He still felt slightly apart from the others, principally because he knew less than anybody else. Being away for two weeks meant that he had lost his place in the Extra ‘A’ XV and was now a hooker of the ‘B’ XV where the rugby was more social than enthusiastic. In the ‘B’ XV he could almost guarantee that he would hook the ball from 95% of the scrums, whoever put the ball in.
    So the autumn term drifted on. He went home every Sunday for lunch to keep his father company. Mrs Robinson was a permanent fixture