Free Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe Page B

who’d been brought over all the way from Moscow zoo in a crate especially for that purpose.
    And my sister had said, ‘Hey, just like Mum and Mr Lomax.’ And we’d laughed.
    Mainly I remember that my sister loved being at the zoo and was utterly captivated by certain young animals and seemed to want to gaze at them for ever.
    And when it was time to leave the zoo and go to Devonshire Place, she complained that we’d not seen half of it and begged for another ten minutes which turned into twenty and then, when we did finally leave, lots of other people wanted to leave too and there was a very long line at the taxi rank. I suggested that I pretend to be very ill and ask to jump the queue to get to a hospital. But my sister is less deceitful than me. We did ask to go to the front, our reason being that we needed to get toDevonshire Place to get our mother’s pills. No one felt it a good enough reason to let us jump in and everyone ignored us, looking away and pretending to chat, but looking at us again when we turned away. We stood at the end feeling foolish. It was just like being back in the village.
    We decided it would be quicker (and less embarrassing) to walk, so we did and we ended up lost and then very late. When we finally arrived at Devonshire Place the enormous shiny door was shut and didn’t have a real knocker, only an ornamental knob bang in the middle. My sister rang the bell and rang and rang. I looked around.
    The street – or should I say the ‘place’, since it was a place, not a street – was a row of very tall terraced houses each with its own identical set of black-painted railings, the same set of windows (smaller and less impressive the higher you went up, so that the top windows were just rectangles of grubby glass), the same large black front door and door furniture. The houses were identical except for one, halfway along the terrace, whose paint was beginning to peel and whose window box contained browning geraniums, petals from which were dropping into the cracked paint and bleeding their browny-red juice into the cream, making it all unkempt and messy.
    Dr Gilbey’s, like the rest, was pristine. Its window boxes festooned with tiny lime green spheres and frondy leaves in different shades trailing – but tidily – onto the hard deep ledge. I felt sorry for the odd one with its geraniums, its neglect highlit by the uniform smartness of the rest. But thanked God it wasn’t Dr Gilbey’s. That would have been awful.
    My sister pressed the bell again and then held her finger there until a woman put her golden head out of an upstairs window.
    ‘We’ve come to see Dr Gilbey. We’re late, we got lost, but we’re here now,’ my sister shouted.
    ‘The consulting rooms are closed, I’m afraid,’ the woman called.
    ‘But we’ve come from Leicester on the train, all the way, just to get our mother’s pills,’ my sister shouted up.
    ‘Dr Gilbey can’t see anyone now, you’ll have to make another appointment,’ the woman shouted back.
    ‘Please, can you ask him to just chuck the pills down to us. We can’t go home without them, she’s had a terrible time, she’s split up with our father and everyone in the village hates us and the doctor in the village won’t give her any more pills, please, please.’
    I decided (judging by the look on the woman’s face) we were getting somewhere with the pleading, so I joined in.
    ‘Please,
pleeease
, this is the only doctor in England who will give her any pills,’ I called up, and for some reason I burst into tears and stayed looking up. Even my sister was shocked and looked round at me as if I’d made a terrible mistake.
    But the door buzzed and as we walked through the inner door the woman was trotting down the pretty stairs, her golden hair immobile. She ushered us into a white waiting room and established our identity.
    ‘Wait here, girls,’ she said, and paused in the doorway to ask, ‘Can I get you a glass of orange