"Oh my goodness," she thought. "Gordon," she called. "Gordon!"
Gordon thought he heard his wife calling him, so he walked towards their bedroom, leaving the door to Tom's room wide open, so that if Tom were to need him, he could hear. "Jill? Jill, is everything okay?" he asked her, concerned that his wife should be sounding this urgent at 10:00 in the evening, just before they went to bed.
"Oh, Gordon, I'm sorry!" cried Jill. "Alicia Winger has Scarlet fever and I visited their farm 3 times today. Mary Hackett, George and James Kinsley all have it too."
"And they are all in the same form as Tom at school," they both said together, an expression of realisation appearing on both of their faces.
"I will go and call Dr Joseph now!" said Gordon, urgency now in his voice.
"Katie has tummy ache too. She could have it too!" whispered Jill. The realisation was too much to cope with that evening.
When Gordon reappeared in the doorway of their bedroom, he looked pale.
"Is everything alright with Dr Joseph? Is he coming round?" Jill asked. A hundred questions suddenly tumbling through her brain. What if she had realised earlier? What if he hadn't vomited; would he still be feeling ill, with nobody knowing? Could they have predicted that something like this would happen sometime soon? There hadn't been an epidemic of Scarlet fever in North Yorkshire since 1943. She remembered it clearly. It was summer in the middle of the war. She had had it herself. The doctor had said that she had nearly died on her thirteenth birthday. She hated the disease. Mostly since it had killed her best friend. She still visited her grave. But what had hurt most about it was that no one had told her until she recovered, and by that time it was too late to say goodbye to the one person she truly trusted.
"He told me that he had been called out by three other people, all of them children in Tom's class. He was just on his way out when I rang. He agreed to come and see Tom first thing tomorrow morning. He said that he was sorry, but it was the best he could do."
Jill could just see the outline of his drained expression through the darkness of the bedroom. She lay in bed, waiting for her husband to return from checking on Tom and Katie and to join her. She just hoped that Tom would last the night if he had Scarlet fever.
Gordon could tell that his wife was asleep when he returned to their bedroom. Katie and Tom had both been asleep when he had checked on them. He looked at his watch as he climbed into bed. It was 11:05pm. Had it really been over an hour since Jill had warned him about the Scarlet fever? It certainly didn't feel that way.
