The Watchful Eye by Priscilla Masters

as he.
    The moment they were in the examination room he started firing questions at her. ‘How long has she been like this?’
    ‘Since yesterday morning, Doctor. When I woke up and went in her room she was like this, takin’ no notice of anything.’
    He was already feeling the child’s pulse. Thready. Her eyes were sunken, her skin wrinkled like an old woman’s.
    ‘Has she been sick, vomiting?’
    ‘Not that I’ve seen.’
    ‘Has she been drinking all right?’
    ‘She had her bottle when she went to bed.’
    ‘Diarrhoea?’
    ‘Not as I’ve seen.’ There was a quick defensiveness in Vanda’s manner.
    ‘I’m just going to prick her finger to see what her blood sugar is.’
    5.6. Normal. As usual none of it made any sense.
    ‘She’ll have to go into hospital, Vanda,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the girls to ring for an ambulance.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ she said quickly. ‘My mum’s outside. She can drop us off on her way to work. We’ll be there quicker than hanging around for an ambulance.’
    ‘I didn’t see your mum in the waiting room.’
    ‘She waited outside – in the car park. We was blockin’ a car in so she didn’t dare come in. I’ll go and get her if you like.’ All was eagerness.
    ‘No, no. That’s all right. Get Anna-Louise dressed while I write a letter and ring the duty paediatrician.’ He hesitated. ‘Perhaps you’d better go and warn your mother that Anna-Louise needs to go into hospital.’
     
    He was surprised that Bobby hadn’t realised just how sick the child was, that she had allowed her granddaughter to deteriorate and done nothing for twenty-four hours. The next moment it was himself he was chiding. Bobby Millin was a health care assistant, not a trained nurse. It wasn’t
her
job togauge the severity of an illness. She was untrained in such things. Besides, she worked with geriatrics, not paediatrics. She wouldn’t realise how quickly a two-year-old can dehydrate when something is wrong.
    But what?
    Again he asked himself the question.
    What had he missed? The eternal question of a doctor. Nature has fooled me.
    How?
    None of his formulaic questions had given him any answer as to why Anna-Louise was so sick. The flow chart had failed him.
    He picked up the phone and was quickly connected with the paediatrician.
     
    Claudine always went shopping on a Monday afternoon; for things she had run out of over the weekend, he presumed. He watched her leave the house, carrying the big wicker basket. How very French, he thought. Not like an Englishwoman who would have driven to one of the supermarkets, either the Co-op here, or into Stafford or Newport to one of the bigger chains, Asda or Sainsbury’s or Waitrose, and bundled her purchases into a plastic carrier bag. Oh no, tidily dressed in navy trousers and a white blouse, Claudine walked, the basket over her arm, a list in her hand, as though she was in a French village, visiting the local shops: the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s and the baker’s. It wouldn’t have surprised him if she had returned with one of those long French loaves sticking out of the basket. But apparently she had been converted to English bread. Brian’s taste? Guy had seen a large, brown loaf at the top of her basket one day when she had passed him inthe street. Occasionally when he had been working at the Co-op she had wandered in and he had served her, hoping she noticed how deft he was at clocking the purchases over the bar-coder.
    She had walked straight past him, exchanged pleasantries over the counter. But he had caught the flash of friendliness in her beautiful brown eyes. This unknown, secret intimacy thrilled him.
     
    ‘I’m sending a little girl in. Anna-Louise Struel. She’s two years old.’
    Concisely Daniel related the story of the breath-holding attacks, the frequent attendances at surgery, working his way round to the current problem – clinical dehydration with no history of any obvious cause.
    The on-duty paediatric