‘So, who is this lady, Gramps?’ Donna asked.

Wilf smiled. ‘She’s a lady astronomer I know, from Greenwich. Helps out at the observatory there, has done for years. But about three years ago she was… well, she fell ill and had to stop working. We chatted on the phone a couple of times, met up, had dinner. You’d think I’d started dating a teenage married pregnant cousin the way Sylvia goes on about her.’

The Doctor was looking at Sylvia Noble, however.

 

Spotting what made her flush angrily when Wilf spoke. It had been the word ‘ill’.

He looked back at the old paratrooper. ‘Why’d she give up at the Observatory then?’

‘Ask her yourself,’ Sylvia said. ‘She’ll be here any minute. Even on Geoff’s day, my daughter brings you round, and he brings her round.’

And Sylvia was up and out of the kitchen.

Donna sighed and went after her mum. Wilf made to follow, but the Doctor caught his arm.

‘I’m no expert, Wilfred, but I reckon best leave the ladies to it.’

Wilf nodded.

‘And your friend?’

‘Netty. Henrietta Goodhart.’

He smiled. ‘Most appropriate name I think she could have. But she was diagnosed with… She has Alzheimer’s, Doctor. And it’s not getting any better.’

‘It wouldn’t,’ the Doctor said quietly, just as the doorbell rang. ‘That her?’

Wilf nodded and went to let her in.

A moment later and the Doctor was grinning at a vision of eccentricity, charm and humour that only certain English women of a particular age and bearing could carry off.

She was dressed from head to foot in brown – knee-length corduroy skirt, tan blouse, chocolate-coloured jacket – and carried a tan handbag. On her head was an amazing hat with at least half a dozen brown feathers of different shapes and sizes. Wilf was removing her long

dark overcoat, and Netty offered her hand to the Doctor before Wilf had got the coat off her, meaning one sleeve, the handshaking sleeve, was still on.

‘Doctor, how marvellous to meet you. Hooray and huzzah, it’s a real pleasure.’

‘Mrs Goodhart.’

‘Miss, please. Better still, just Netty. Never been married and, despite what Wilfred’s daughter believes, have no intention to ever be married.’

Wilf finally got the coat off her, and Netty slid neatly into a chair, grabbing a glass of water in an obviously well-rehearsed manoeuvre.

‘I never married,’ she went on. ‘Seemed such an alarming waste of time. I live in Greenwich you know, bit of a trek out here, but my local cab firm, they know me and my little ways, so it’s never a problem if I forget to have money. Or where I’m going.’

The Doctor had taken to this gregarious lady instantly.

‘You can’t beat a reliable taxi firm, Netty,’ he said, managing to get a sentence in before she blithely carried on.

‘Are they rowing yet? It’s all they ever do. And it’s about me. I was so ashamed to start with, now I just treat it as a ritual, and in ten minutes Sylvia’s back to her normal charming self, full of tea and crackers.’

The Doctor smiled. ‘Sylvia Noble? Charming? Words not often in the same sentence.’

The look he got from Netty showed him how he’d misjudged the situation between the two women.

‘Oh, don’t disappoint me, Doctor. Not after all I’ve

been told about you. That woman out there is a saint.

She’s just lost her husband, she’s got a daughter you drag halfway to God knows where on a whim, and has to tolerate that marvellous Wilfred, who can be just as stubborn and cantankerous as her. More so in fact. I like her a lot. Besides which, and I know she complains, but that’s just her way of letting off steam, she’s bloody terrific with my… you know…’ Netty tapped the side of her head. ‘My condition. Bless her, last weekend she drove Wilf all the way to Charlton. Apparently I was found in someone’s back garden, trying to convince them I used to live there when I was six!’

‘And did you?’

‘Good gracious, no. I was brought up in Hampshire.’

She dived into her handbag and brought out an A5-sized red notebook and showed it to him. ‘My life,’ she said simply. ‘So I can remember things.’

The Doctor looked her straight in the eye and saw, briefly, a very scared but very proud old lady. And he liked her even more than before.

‘Without that book, without the likes of Sylvia Noble, I’m nothing. I’d left my bag in a shop on Greenwich High Street, so I’m in this garden, unable to know who I am, where I’m from. Sylvia found a receipt in my pocket, found the shop, got my bag back where I’d left it, sorted it all out with the police. She wants to put me in a home, you know. The brochures are in that drawer next to the cooker.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Wilf won’t hear of it. Says he’ll have me move in

here first. Daft old fool, as if I’m going to go from one house I can barely cope with to another. But a lovely nursing home, where I’ll be looked after? How marvellous is that?’

The kitchen door opened. Donna and Sylvia trooped in, and Donna immediately introduced herself.

As Sylvia put the kettle on, the Doctor crossed and stood behind her. ‘Does Wilf know all you do for his friend?’

‘Does Donna know you’re poking your nose into her family’s business?’ Sylvia responded.

‘I’m not your enemy, Mrs Noble,’ the Doctor said.

Sylvia turned and smiled at him. The most insincere smile possible. ‘For my daughter’s sake, Doctor, I tolerate you in this house. But that’s all. For my dad’s sake, I’ll do the best I can for Netty Goodhart. I don’t think I’m a selfish woman, Doctor. I’ve worked hard, I built a life, I never had much money, and I tried to give Donna a decent life. But then one day, I lost my husband. My rock. And since then I’ve tried to do what both of us did, but with a daughter who one minute won’t get a job, the next can afford to be in a different hemisphere, but can’t afford a stamp, and an old dad who seems to have decided it’s time to replace my mum once and for all.’

‘Are you sure you’re not worried he’s replacing you? I imagine he let your mum go a long time ago.’

The silence that followed the slap around the face he received seemed to go on for a few hours, but was probably only a few seconds.

‘I didn’t mean it like that…’ the Doctor started. ‘I

genuinely wondered—’

Sylvia ignored him. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you take the Doctor up to the allotment, eh? Donna and I can catch up with Netty while you two have an hour or… a few hours up there, yes?’

Wilf took the hint and was all but dragging the Doctor out of the kitchen as the women watched.

The last thing the Doctor heard was ‘Tea, everyone’

from Sylvia, before Wilf had thrust them both out into the night air.

‘Allotment. This way,’ the old man said.

Babis Takis hoiked the largest bale of hay onto the back of the station wagon and stopped to rest. He wasn’t getting any younger, and this was really Nikos’s job.

But Nikos wasn’t here, he was probably around the back of the farm, messing with that Spiros girl. Typical.

There was work to be done – they had to get this consignment over to Faliraki, where so much building work was still going on. Hotels, apartments, shopping malls, everything the whole Dodecanese would benefit from because of the continued tourism it would bring.

Babis yelled out Nikos’s name a couple of times as he hauled up more bales of hay. He glanced at his watch. It would take an hour or so to drive across the island to the Petaloudes, where they would collect Kris, before going on to Lindos and along the coast to Faliraki. They’d drop off the hay at the depot, then it was off to Erik’s Taverna for the night.