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.
‘Nothing yet. Don’t worry about him. Let’s just assume his silence is a sign that he’s too busy having a good time or has a problem getting to the Internet.’ He tried to pour her more wine but she put her hand over her glass.
‘I’ve
