Close to Death

Quite apart from all the paperwork and the half-dozen home visits he would have to fit in (although he wondered if Mrs Leigh, with her enlarging aortic aneurism, would have survived the weekend), he had been asked to interview another candidate for the nurse vacancy that the practice had been unable to fill for the past three months. There was a young man due to arrive once the surgery closed – if he remembered to turn up. Just thinking about it all made his head hurt. If he was lucky, he would be home by seven for a quick dinner with Gemma before the meeting that had been called half an hour later at The Stables, the home of Adam Strauss.

That was the only thing that was keeping him going.

There was no point lying here trying to get back to a sleep that would never come. Dr Beresford gently slid out of the covers on his side of the bed, got up and padded out of the bedroom, dragging his dressing gown with him but leaving his slippers behind. Gemma always left the door ajar for the twins, so there was no need to turn the handle, no click from the spring mechanism inside the lock.

He padded down to the kitchen and it was only when he was there that he turned on the light. A half-empty bottle of single malt and a glass with an inch of water from melted ice stood on the counter, accusing him. He had let Gemma go to bed ahead of him, saying he had wanted to catch up with his emails – which was true. But it had also been an excuse to squeeze a few last drops of pleasure out of the weekend. If he were one of his patients, he would interrogate himself as to how much he was drinking. And like most of his patients, he would lie.

He flicked the kettle on and set about making himself a cup of coffee. If he turned on the grinder, he would only wake up the entire house. He would have to make do with instant. It didn’t matter. Was it too early for a cigarette? He hadn’t told Gemma that he was smoking again, but he wasn’t going outside, barefoot, in his pyjamas. He waited for the kettle to boil. Forget the endless paperwork, the patients and his room at the surgery that backed on to the A316 with the traffic rushing past and the smell of exhaust fumes. Don’t worry about Mrs Leigh. What mattered right now was the driveway used by all the residents of Riverview Close. Think about the meeting! It was happening tonight: a chance to come face to face with Giles Kenworthy and settle all the grievances that had been mounting up from the day their new neighbour had arrived. The noise, the parties, the ugly camper van, the smoke from the BBQs – but worse than all of these, the shared driveway. It had become an obsession with him. He knew it was ridiculous, but he was sure the challenge of getting in and out of it was the real reason why Richmond felt so alien to him.

Everything had been fine when he bought Gardener’s Cottage, the second-largest house in the close. Or rather, when Gemma had bought it. It was her money that had made it possible, her success as a jewellery designer running an international business with boutiques in London, Paris, New York and Dubai. The three-storey house stood on the side furthest away from the entrance. To reach it, you drove through the automatic gate, past a line of terraced cottages and then round the top of a circle of grass and flower beds in the centre of the courtyard: effectively a roundabout with its own one-way system. Everyone travelled anticlockwise.

Things became more complicated, though, as Dr Beresford approached his own home. There were three garages in Riverview Close and, perhaps sensibly, the architects had built them out of sight, round the backs of the houses to which they belonged. The problem for Dr Beresford was that he shared a narrow driveway which led off from the roundabout and ran a short distance between the side of Gardener’s Cottage and the garden wall that belonged to Riverview Lodge before coming to a fork at the end: left for the Beresfords, right for the Kenworthys. Both families used this same stretch of gravel to reach their garages, but if Giles Kenworthy parked outside his own garage, it made it almost impossible for Dr Beresford to drive past and enter his.

The Kenworthys, who had come to Riverview Lodge seven months ago, had a two-car garage of their own. Unfortunately, they owned four cars. As well as the Porsche, there was a Mercedes, a Mini Cooper driven by Lynda Kenworthy and a Pontiac LeMans cabriolet, an absurd (and wide) classic car from the seventies. They had also parked a white VW camper van in the space next to their garage. It had never moved from the day it had arrived and for Dr Beresford it had become a skulking monster that he couldn’t help noticing every time he went into his bathroom.