Free On Loving Josiah by Olivia Fane

demanded more and more detail ‘to make a case against him’.
    There were various inquiries set up to establish whether this was a bona fide case of professional misconduct (after all, the misdemeanour occurred when Eve was no longer his patient). Roger Bolt made numerous pleas for a paternity test (unanswered, thanks to the intervention of the British Medical Council), but the net result was that Dr Michael Fothering resigned his post as a consultant psychiatrist in Hull even before the case had been made against him, and retrained as a General Practitioner. Two years on, he attached himself to a surgery in a suburb of Leeds, where it was his destiny never to find another Eve, either as a patient or a wife.
    But while Roger Bolt occupied his sleepless nights plotting against Dr Fothering, the indefatigable Eve spent hers scheming against the carbuncle himself. And so it came to be that Bolt’s downfall swiftly followed that of Fothering’s: she accused him of trespass, to begin with; of looking at her lustfully, of being a peeping Tom. At first he was simply taken off her case; but when the letters continued, whenshe threatened to take her complaint to the police as the Social Services were so slow to respond to it, and when, finally, Bolt confessed to climbing over their garden fence to gain access to their property (and June Briggs told him he was a ‘moron’), everyone realised his time had come to move on. So his wife and children welcomed him back in Darlington, and his prospects drew to a close: a residential worker in a home for the mentally handicapped was his ignominious fate, for which he was paid little more than four pounds an hour.  
    Meanwhile, there were other social workers to fill Roger Bolt’s shoes: a series of women, coming one after another in merciless succession. Just as Eve thought she might be left in peace, there would be another introductory letter, in which another hopeful would say how much she was ‘looking forward to meeting her.’  
    Of course, it would have been easy for Eve to be out, to have simply avoided contact with ‘the termites’ as she called them. (Gibson enjoyed it when she railed against ‘the termites’ – it made him laugh nervously.) But the truth was, there was a way in which she enjoyed venting her resentment at their intrusion. She would smile, inviting each of them into her home, give them cups of tea. Then she would sit them down and ask them what seemed to be the problem.  
    ‘Now, tell me everything that’s on your mind,’ she would say, pleasantly. ‘Don’t leave a stone unturned.’ And when the poor woman hesitated, she pressed,  
    ‘I’m all ears. Now, don’t be embarrassed.’  
    And when the social worker tried to put the record straight, with some inane comment such as, ‘We’re here to help you,’ Eve would lean forward, smiling pleasantly, and ask, ‘Could you explain? Who is “we” in this instance? Are you married? Do you mean your husband and you?’  
    ‘No, I mean, “our team’’’.
    ‘I’m sorry to sound so dense,’ said Eve, disingenuously, ‘but does that mean you play a sport? In which case, which sport?’
    ‘You know what I mean by “team”,’ huffed the social worker.
    ‘Well, no, no I don’t actually. Tell me about your team and I might get the idea.’
    ‘Now, Eve. I have come to talk about you, not me. We’re concerned about you.’
    ‘Oh yes?’ Eve would reply vaguely.
    ‘And your baby. Now, where is your baby?’
    How vainly these women tried to take the reins! How vainly, indeed, did they write ‘unco-operative’ in their files, always forgetting to add the ways in which she did not co-operate: if they had done, they might have discovered some pattern in the way Eve manipulated them. So one by one, these women would ask Eve where her baby was, and Eve would try, try ever so hard, to remember.
    ‘Now, where did I see him last?’ she liked to muse.
    ‘Might he be in his cot?’ the social