Chapter 7. Brother-in-Law

Mrs Lake was pensive, petite and demure. Her husband was tall and burly, a fair haired, pink cheeked coach driver who presided over his family with quiet good humour. Over twenty years, Mrs Lake had given birth to three sons and two daughters. I joined the practice in my twenties, and was the same age as her eldest son: she addressed me as “dear”. The family lived in a secluded curved tree-lined street of council houses, near the park: they were built between the wars with generous gardens front and back, and the tenants made good use of them for vegetables, flowers and children's play.

Of Mr and Mrs Lake's children, it was the first and last who worried them most. When the eldest son, Henry, married Sheila, the divorced eldest daughter of the Sumner family, round the corner, the Lakes were not happy. The Sumner's had a reputation for wildness: according to Mrs Lake, it was notorious that Mrs Sumner's children included one fathered while her husband was away at the war — certainly her Fred didn't look like his brothers — and one that was her grandchild.

Mrs Lake's youngest, Brian, always retained his status as the baby of the family: even after his marriage he never looked anything but immature, incomplete, and distracted. His left eye squinted inward, the other looked guardedly out through his spectacles. A crisis overtook Brian, when after the death of the parents, Henry's shadow fell over his marriage.

I had worked in the practice for over ten years, when Mrs Lake came to the surgery with a cancer in her breast, and had a radical mastectomy. Outwardly calm and smiling, she was never reconciled to this hateful insult, which put an end, permanently, to her peace of mind, and to the pleasure she could take in the beauty of her body. Thereafter she was wracked with conflicting anxieties. An undetected return of the adversary could be fatal, and she needed careful supervision. But she felt profound revulsion against being examined and avoided it, until the need for reass