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  ‘But what happened?’ She went over to sit with him.

  ‘I wanted to tell you but Piers acted so fast, there was no time. He and the other Rockfast directors have obviously been planning something like this for ages and then Adam suddenly stepped into the frame. Piers knew I was ready to go, and as for Louis – a casualty of war, I’m afraid.’ He ran his hand through his thinning grey hair. ‘Piers warned me on Monday that they were talking to Adam but I didn’t take him seriously. Then he turned up here today and told me the plan. He’d even spoken to Sam and Louis during the week without mentioning it to me, swearing them to silence. I was just the last nail they needed to hammer in. Big pay-off. I couldn’t say no.’ Bea could see how shocked he was by the way his career had ended so abruptly and, more importantly, out of his control. Deciding to quit when it suited you was one thing. Being sacked according to someone else’s agenda was quite different.

  ‘What do you think is going to happen? Is it going to be the long night of the P45s?’ Bea moved over to the desk where she knew Stephen kept some whisky for emergencies in one of the drawers. Pulling the top one open, she took out the bottle and poured them both a large one. She sat down again.

  ‘Well, I’m going to have to play the game and show Adam the ropes but . . . honestly? Adam is bound to have his own ideas about how to run the place. I don’t think the changes will end here.’

  A penny half dropped. ‘Me?’ Bea felt a rush of anxiety.

  ‘Maybe. But don’t spend the weekend worrying. We’ll just have to see what happens next week.’ He downed his whisky in one gulp. ‘Bea, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to get off. I’ve got a lot of things to talk about at home.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got to get back too.’ Bea left Stephen as he took his old blue cord jacket from the back of his chair and picked up his battered leather book-bag.

  ‘Call me if you want to talk about anything over the weekend.’

  ‘Of course. Thanks.’

  Back in her office, she sat thinking. Don’t spend the weekend worrying. How could she not, for God’s sake? On the other hand, nothing she could do would affect what happened next week, so best just to follow Stephen’s example and go home. She didn’t feel like joining the others at the pub although, by the time she got home, Ben would probably be on his way out for the night. That would give her time to think more carefully about her conversation with Stephen. On the verge of shutting down her computer, she registered the flashing icon that alerted her to new emails. Of course. She opened her mailbox. Before she went, there were two she wanted to check. First Let’s Have Lunch. Their communication was brief.

  Can you make lunch on Tuesday? If yes, Tony Castle will be expecting to meet you at 1 p.m. at Belushi’s in Jordan Street, WC2.

  Sod it. Why not? Life couldn’t be much worse. Fine. I’ll be there, she typed.

  She opened the one from Mark.

  Enjoyed meeting you very much. I thought we might have a drink at the Grape Pip, off Regent Street. Friday week any good? All best, Mark

  What harm could one more meeting do? She’d go for a drink with him and see what happened. Besides, she told herself again, she must try not to judge too quickly. Give the guy a chance. She might at least try to get her full £125 worth.

  Great she typed. I enjoyed lunch too. (A small white lie in the interest of good relations.) Let me know what time’s best for you.

  With that, she shut the screen down, grabbed the manuscript of the novel that she had to finish editing before meeting the author the following week, and walked out.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Come and sit down, Paul. Please.’

  Kate lay back on the leg of the white L-shaped sofa, patting the seat beside her. In front of her, Sky News was playing on the wall-mounted TV but with the volume turned right down. Exhaustion gave way to relaxation as her body zinged with the relief of at last being almost horizontal after a hard day’s work. She watched her husband busy preparing their supper in the state-of-the-art kitchen area at the centre of their open-plan basement.

  Although he was going grey at last, Paul still had the look of the handsome man she had met thirty years ago: tall, athletic and perennially tanned; his strong jaw sagging a bit; deep laugh lines bracketing his wide mouth; wiry eyebrows now out of control; the round wire-framed spectacles that he had always favoured. He had remained slim despite his well-known love of food and drink, so he still looked good in his clothes. This evening he was casual in cream chinos and a loose white linen shirt. When he walked into a room, heads still turned, though perhaps not for quite as long as they once did, and people still flocked to him, wanting to be in his shadow. But, out of everyone, he had chosen Kate. With her petite, dark, retiring appearance and in the definitive way she approached the world, she was almost his polar opposite. It still surprised her that they had ended up together.

  ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ He looked up from what he was doing, giving her the oddly attractive asymmetric grin that had never failed to captivate her. ‘I’ve just to get the timing right with this cheese soufflé or I’ll ruin the thing.’

  ‘I thought we were having omelettes.’ Kate tried to hide her disappointment. All she wanted was something plain and simple, something that didn’t demand such attention. She wished she had insisted on her original plan of dragging him out to their local Italian after work. If they were there, at a table for two, they’d be forced to talk to one another over the trademark gluey pasta, to communicate about something other than Paul’s culinary efforts. Not that she should complain. The fact that he was a keen cook meant that she rarely had to lift a finger in the kitchen except for the odd bit of dutiful washing-up. Her friends always commented on how lucky she was to have him. Even when he’d had a long day in the City, and often with more work in his briefcase for later, he could still muster the energy to knock up a decent meal. However, his culinary enthusiasm (was there such a thing as culinary obsessive compulsive disorder? she wondered) was something she didn’t share. Falling through the door, exhausted after an evening session at the surgery, she was incapable of doing any more than flinging a ready-cooked meal from the freezer into the oven.

  She picked up the latest BMJ from the top of the small pile of medical journals that served as a constant reminder of how much and how often she should attempt to catch up with the ever-advancing world of medicine. She put it down again. ‘You wouldn’t believe how late I ran today. I could have spent all morning with the first three patients alone.’ A GP who prided herself on her ability and commitment, she was often frustrated by the necessary time restrictions put on her work. ‘I kicked off with a guy who claimed he’d collected enough anti-depressants to kill himself, so that was a suicide risk assessment. Then, as he was leaving, he happened to mention that he had a jock itch so I had to look at that, which took ages.’

  Paul’s full attention was on the window of the oven as he watched and waited for his soufflé to rise, so Kate just carried on, assuming he was listening. ‘After him, I had a dear eighty-three-year-old who had nothing wrong with her but who wanted to tell me about everything that was going on in her life. And then I had to refer a woman for a termination, which took ages because she couldn’t decide which hospital she wanted me to refer her to. How was I supposed to deal with any of them in ten minutes flat? Paul! Am I boring you?’

  He turned in her direction for a second, making a sterling effort to appear interested. ‘No, no, darling. Not at all.’ His attempt to disguise a yawn was futile. ‘Keep going.’

  She wasn’t fooled. ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll spare you. Just one of those days. How was yours?’

  ‘Same old, same old. Aaah.’ Said with the satisfaction of a job successfully executed. ‘I think we’re ready.’

  Triumphant, he made his way to the table by the wide glass door to the garden carrying the perfectly risen soufflé, its smell filling the room. ‘Come and sit down.’

  Kate dragged herself across the room while Paul ex
amined the interior of the main course as if it was a biological specimen before serving it, then passed her the salad. He was uncharacteristically silent as they ate so she filled the vacuum with more gossip from the surgery while he nodded or shook his head, making the occasional sympathetic sound at the right moments. She could tell by the way his eyes occasionally drifted towards the kitchen that his mind wasn’t entirely on what she was saying but she forgave him. Her professional problems must sometimes seem so petty and tedious to him, but she wanted him to understand her irritation when one of the other partners had to go out for a chunk of the morning leaving her and the on-call doctor to share his patients, as well as her impatience with the practice manager who seemed to be having an awful lot of days sick in the run-up to her daughter’s wedding. Never mind the frustrations of an appointment system that rationed only ten minutes to everyone, when many needed more time – much more time.

  *

  Her day had begun to go wrong at 8.15 a.m. when she had turned up at the practice and asked Mrs Yilmaz to come inside before the doors officially opened.

  The old woman was leaning against the wall, her stick not enough to support her for the wait until the surgery opened, a warm smell of urine and old age drifting off her. A patterned headscarf covered most of her head and face while an old patched coat hid most of what she was wearing, except for the bottom of a long, shapeless dark skirt, thick stockings and sensible black shoes. Her entire body shook with a guttural graveyard cough as she took Kate’s arm, then shuffled beside her to the glass door, coughing again as she waited for her to open it. Kate dug out her keys, aware that she was about to incur the wrath of Sonia, their draconian receptionist, who liked the practice to run the way she thought best. And that meant not having the doctors bringing in the patients to the waiting room, however needy they might be, until the clock struck half past eight on the dot. Not only was Kate about to annoy Sonia but, sensing the pent-up irritation behind her, she’d already alienated most of the remaining queue of patients. Some of them were probably on their way to work, already displeased at being late, while others always felt they had first call on the doctor’s attention. Just another Friday morning.

  Having settled Mrs Yilmaz into one of the comfier chairs in the waiting room, she greeted Sonia with the cheeriest ‘Good morning’ she could muster, only to be met with a scowl and a grunt. Their chief receptionist had made herself indispensable to the practice but, all the same, a little compassion wouldn’t go amiss, thought Kate, as she walked down the corridor to her room. She was the first of the partners to be in, as usual. She liked it that way, having a bit of time to make the transfer from her life at home to her role at work, to gather herself for the day ahead. She let herself in. The pale blue of the walls at least had a soothing quality as did the view over the small haphazard garden at the back of the building.

  She hung her bag on the back of her chair and sat behind her desk, where her computer was already on and a cup of coffee steaming beside it. Thank God for Evangelina, the junior receptionist, who suffered under Sonia’s large thumb but remembered the little things that made the partners’ lives bearable – a regular supply of hot drinks and occasional biscuits being two of them. Kate flicked to her appointments’ screen, her heart sinking as she registered in whose company she would be spending her morning.

  With one or two exceptions, it was a question of the same old patients with the same old insoluble problems: people suffering from all manner of aches and pains that were usually merely symptomatic of their circumstances. Unloved, unhappy, lonely, unemployed: the conditions that bred so many minor complaints. All those patients wanted was a reassuring chat or a token prescription and to be sent away feeling someone was taking notice and cared about them. No one else did. She sighed. At least she had the post-natal clinic to look forward to in the afternoon. That was one of the bright spots in her week, where her examinations gave her the perfect excuse to cuddle and play with one cute, unquestioning, doted-upon baby after another.

  She glanced at her watch. She had five minutes. Just enough time to check her emails and not enough to do anything else. Having negotiated the rigmarole that got her through to her NHS inbox, she ran her eye down the entries, hoping to see one from her middle son, Sam, who had recently arrived in Ghana on a school-building project. She was disappointed to find nothing.

  Dear Sam, the most adventurous of their children, the one who dared to go higher, further and faster than either of his siblings, up for any kind of physical challenge. Always the dreamiest of the three, he had left school and, to her and Paul’s dismay, chosen not to follow his friends to university. With no idea what he wanted from life, he had travelled alone to New Zealand where he had found a job in the timber industry. Just when she’d thought he had settled, he was off again, this time to work towards preserving the Canadian wilderness. And now he was building a school in Ghana. She knew rationally that each of their children had to leave home and follow their own path in life. But if only his didn’t have to take him quite so far away. They couldn’t even pick up the phone for a chat when they felt like it. She missed him terribly.

  On her desk, she had a calendar that Sam had given her as a farewell present. Each day displayed a photograph from a different part of the world and each day she tore one off and tossed it into the bin. Today she was saying goodbye to a yellow-and-black-shrouded Japanese monk, his legs in white stockings, his face hidden under the upside-down bowl of a straw hat, begging outside a temple in Kyoto. Taking his place, a small plane flew high through the spray that erupted into the air from a rushing Victoria Falls. In the background, the sky was a cloudless periwinkle blue. Sitting in her purpose-built medical centre off a busy arterial road that took traffic roaring through London, she couldn’t have felt more remote from either of them. She stopped herself turning up the corner of Victoria Falls to see what was underneath. Every day she performed this ritual, remembering their son, and hoping that one day when she wasn’t so caught up in the politics of her practice and the welfare of her patients, perhaps she and Paul would be able to coincide their busy lives to travel to one or two of these far-flung destinations. One day.

  A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She glanced at her watch again. Only a couple of minutes until the floodgates opened.

  ‘Come in.’

  Pete, the senior partner, entered the room. His wispy beard and sandals gave him the air of a throwback to the sixties. He was thin, slightly round-shouldered and wore a succession of short-sleeved checked shirts that she suspected he bought in bulk from a mail-order catalogue. Kate often wondered why his teacher wife didn’t help him in the sartorial stakes. Too preoccupied with her own work, probably. Besides, not everyone was interested in what they wore. They must have higher things on their minds. She straightened her thick woven leather belt, which had swivelled to one side, retucked her coffee-coloured T-shirt into her patterned Hobbs skirt and pulled the front of her long buttonless coral-coloured cardigan together.

  ‘There’s bad news. And there’s bad news.’ Pete pulled up the chair to sit beside her desk. ‘Which do you want first?’

  ‘Oh, God. What’s happened? Break it gently.’

  ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this but Sally’s phoned in sick and won’t be in today.’

  ‘Again?’ She ignored his look of disapproval. Pete never questioned his colleagues’ reasons unless they threatened the practice. If the practice manager went sick with no warning there were always difficulties, and today was no exception. ‘But the IT people are coming in from the PCT. I suppose I’ll have to deal with them. Damn. And?’

  ‘And old Mr Cantor’s had a stroke by the sound of it. I’m going to have to go out there. I know, I know,’ he said, as Kate put her head into her hands. ‘But I’ll be as quick as I possibly can. Sonia will divide my patients between you and Jim. Anyone not urgent, you could ask to book to see me tomorrow.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Kate could see the blue light
on her computer screen alerting her to her first patient. Sometimes she felt like King Canute trying to hold back the waves and, once again, the waves were beginning to break over her, the swell threatening to increase by the minute. ‘All right.’ She groaned. ‘We’ll manage. Let the day begin.’

  ‘Thanks, Kate. I knew you’d understand. I owe you one.’ He slipped out of the door.

  ‘Bloody right you do,’ Kate shouted after him, before making a final check that her room was in order. She walked down the corridor, past a series of brightly coloured geometric-based prints given to the practice by a grateful patient, and pushed open the door to the waiting room.

  ‘Stewart Bowles? This way.’

  *

  She looked across the table at Paul. He was staring into the middle distance, as far away as she had just been. The difference was that she had snapped back to the present and he showed no sign of doing the same. More and more often recently, he had seemed to drift off into a world of his own and she couldn’t draw him out of it. Not that he was unpleasant, just increasingly remote. When she tried to talk to him about his day, he would clam up. Unlike her, he’d never really shared his working life, preferring to keep it to the office as much as possible. He had always maintained a strict divide between the two halves of his life, even to the extent that they rarely entertained his colleagues at home. That was what he preferred and she saw no reason for them to change things. Besides, as he said, hedge-fund management wasn’t a subject likely to bring much joy to her heart whereas he had always been genuinely interested in the nuts and bolts of her profession. He enjoyed hearing about the lives that came in and out of his wife’s practice. But not so much recently. And not tonight, obviously.

  ‘Have you heard from Sam? I wish he’d get in touch.’ She knew she was on safe ground here. They never had any trouble talking about any or all of their children. They shared the same sadness that their child-rearing days were over, as well as the excitement and pride in what the children were making of their own lives.