cracked as soon as she heard him. ‘Oh God, it was awful. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.’
‘What was?’ Panic rose like bile in his chest as he depicted terrible fates befalling his children, each racing heartbeat showing him a different image of terror.
‘The nutritionist.’
He relaxed. ‘Oh, of course, what did he say?’
‘I can’t talk now. You know, little ears and all that.’ Her voice shook and he could almost see her trying to hold herself together for the sake of the kids. She’d done a lot of that when Hal was a newborn baby. ‘I wish I hadn’t gone, though. The whole day’s been a disaster. I don’t know if I can do this any more.’
‘Do what?’
‘Be a mother.’
‘Come on, Ruth, calm down. Why don’t we go out to dinner tonight and talk about this properly, see if Aggie can babysit?’
‘I’m so tired, I don’t know if I’ve got the energy.’
‘Come on, just somewhere local. It’d be good for you.’
Ruth sniffed heavily down the phone. ‘All right.’
The death of the Brat had been a bad omen. Betty’s hysterics had only gathered momentum the further they got away from the scene of the crime. Nothing Ruth could say would calm her down so that by halfway there Ruth thought she might have a panic attack. The walls of the tube were too tight a fit and she was acutely aware of the bumps and grinds of the tracks. She wondered what she was doing, taking her children on this hurtling mass of metal deep underneath London. Everything seemed terrifying.
Betty had reduced herself to dull whimpering by the time they arrived in Oxford Circus but she was petulant and stroppy and hung off the buggy like a damp rag. The street was thronged with young girls waltzing carefree into Topshop, their skinny hips unscarred by child-bearing. Any of them could have been Viva models and yet the magazine was aimed at women like her. Well, not like her. Viva women juggled everything successfully, whilst also looking flawless.
The nutritionist’s offi ce was in a thin, tall building between Oxford and Regent Street and looked as imposing as a giant headmaster. Ruth had expected to press a buzzer and be shown up to a floor, but she was able to walk straight in and up to the reception desk because the nutritionist seemed to command the whole building. The receptionist gleamed, like a woman in a cosmetic surgery advert in the back of a magazine. Ruth felt grimy and under-nourished as she said Hal’s name.
Dr Hackett’s offi ce was bigger than her sitting room and furnished in a parody of the image of a successful private doctor, with gilt-framed paintings, a large well-polished wooden desk and two deep leather armchairs positioned on either side. He sat in front of two floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a private garden which seemed an impossibility in the middle of the city. Ruth couldn’t hear any traffic noise.
Ruth had fixed Dr Hackett in her mind as a friendly, slightly hippyish but very posh man with longish grey hair and gangly legs which he would cross and uncross incessantly. Never had he been a paunchy older man with spectacles on the end of his nose and a ludicrously expensive-looking three-piece tweed suit. He also shouldn’t have been sitting on the other side of a heavy desk and he shouldn’t have looked so bored by the whole encounter.
As she sat down, Ruth could see herself and her children through his eyes so exactly the recognition hurt. Betty’s face was smeared and dirty and blotchy from the excess of tears; Hal looked nonplussed, stuck to her hip with a bottle in his mouth; and she looked too thin, with straggly hair and an air of neurosis resting on her like most women wore perfume. I’m not really this person, she wanted to say, you’ve just caught me on a bad day.
‘So, Mrs Donaldson,’ he said, ‘what seems to be the problem with your son?’
Ruth immediately felt defensive. ‘I don’t know if it’s a problem.’
The doctor sighed. ‘If it’s not a problem, then can I ask what you’re doing here?’ He made her feel stupid just as she supposed he’d meant to. She wondered how on earth he had ended up being a nutritionist.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I just meant we don’t know what to think.’
‘Please, put that down.’ Ruth jumped, only then noticing that Betty was pushing an enormous glass paperweight perilously close to the edge of the desk.
‘God, Betty, what are you doing?’ she shouted. Betty’s lip started to tremble. ‘Sorry,’ she said to the doctor. ‘Hal has never eaten anything solid. Ever. He lives on bottles of milk.’
‘How many does he have a day?’
The truth seemed suddenly untenable in this pristine office and so Ruth pointlessly lied. ‘About ten.’
‘At least they’re sustaining.’
‘Yes, but he’s nearly three.’
The silence was broken by the sound of Hal’s sucking. It could have been funny.
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