Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon - M. C. Beaton [77]
A nurse approached her and took the X-rays away from her. “Mr. McSporran will see you now. Follow me,” she said.
“Are you sure that’s his name? Sounds like a Scottish music hall joke.”
“McSporran is a good old Scottish name. Please don’t make any jokes about it. He does get tired of them.”
Mr. McSporran was a small, neat man. He put Agatha’s X-rays up on a screen.
“Uh-uh!” he murmured.
“What?” demanded Agatha nervously.
“You will see quite clearly that you have arthritis in your right hip. It is not terribly advanced, but I would advise you to make an appointment for a hip operation. The longer you leave it, the less successful the operation will be.”
“I’m too busy at the moment to take time off,” said Agatha.
“As I said, it is important you do not leave it too long. We can make arrangements to give you an injection in the hip as a temporary measure. If you are lucky, the injection will last six months.”
Agatha felt she had just received a stay of execution. “I’ll have it now.”
“It doesn’t work like that. You will need to make an appointment. You are put under a general anaesthetic. It only takes one day. I would suggest also that you have a bone scan.” He opened his diary. “We can do the hip injection for you on the twenty-fifth. That’s in two weeks’ time. You will need to be here at seven-thirty in the morning and do not eat or drink anything after ten o’clock the evening before.
“All right,” said Agatha bleakly.
“Now lie down and let me examine you. Remove your trousers.”
Agatha suffered her leg being pulled this way and that.
“Right,” he said when he had finished. “Call at the X-ray desk on your road out and make an appointment for a bone scan.”
Agatha was just leaving the hospital when her mobile phone rang. It was Charles. “Have you eaten?”
“No, I’m in Cheltenham.”
“I’ll take you for dinner. I’ll meet you in the square in Mircester. How long will you be?”
“The traffic should have thinned out. About three quarters of an hour.”
“See you then.”
“Why were you in Cheltenham?” asked Charles when they were seated in an Italian restaurant.
“Working on a case,” said Agatha, who had no intention of telling Charles about her arthritis. So ageing.
“You’ve been having a lot of excitement.”
“You could have been in on it, Charles, if you hadn’t gone scuttling off. How’s it going?”
“Turns out she was engaged and was just using me for a bit of a fling.”
“Poor you.”
“Yes, poor me. Do you ever worry about getting old on your own, Agatha?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Sometimes I think it would be awful to sink into decrepitude on my own.”
“You’re hardly on your own, Charles. You’ve got your aunt and Gustav.”
“My aunt can’t last forever and Gustav is hardly the sort of sympathetic type to soothe the fevered brow. Still, there’s always hope. Lots of pretty girls out there.”
Agatha obscurely felt she was being dismissed because of her age. Charles was in his forties, but she was only in her fifties. And yet men in their forties could still hope to wed some young miss.
When the meal was over, she hoped Charles would volunteer to stay with her because she did not want to go back to an empty house, but he showed no signs of wanting to. Agatha felt too demoralized to ask him.
She went home alone and checked her phone for messages. There was one from Roy thanking her for the weekend, but the next one made her heart soar. It was Freddy.
“How’s my heroine?” he said. “I’ll call you at your office tomorrow.”
Agatha’s black mood lifted. Somebody loved her!
* * *
The next day in the office, she jumped whenever the phone rang, waiting for Freddy to call. By late afternoon, she had almost given up hope and was tired of making excuses not to leave the office when he did call. “What about dinner tonight?” he said.
“At what time?”
“I’ll pick you up at your cottage at eight.”
Without making any more excuses, Agatha left the office and went straight to the nearest hairdresser’s. Then, with her hair newly done, she hurried off home to begin elaborate preparations for the