15
Magazines are on a square central table. The fitted carpeting is flecked, grey and brown. There are pale clean walls. Two different nurses keep passing through; and once a specialist, white jacket and trousers, short sleeves. Behind a glass window that slides open a staid receptionist is occupied at a desk. Classical music plays. Two girls wait also, one with a youth, the other alone. The one on her own leafs through Woman and Hello!, a tough-looking creature in Mr Hilditch’s opinion, with aluminium hair. The couple whisper. Mr Hilditch is certain that conclusions have already been reached in the waiting-room. Twice he has approached the staid receptionist, apologizing for doing so, seeking assurances that there are no complications. On both occasions she suggested he should go for a walk, or simply go home and return later, which is the more usual thing. ‘If you don’t mind, Nurse,’ he replied, the same words each time, ‘I’d prefer to be near my girlfriend.’ He could feel the youth thinking about both of them before they called her in: a man of fifty-four or -five, the youth was speculating, the kid no more than seventeen. When he called her darling, telling her not to worry, the youth heard every word. ‘Now then,’ a nurse with a mole says. ‘Miss Dikes?’ ‘It’s Mrs, actually,’ the youth sharply corrects her. The girl with him doesn’t move. ‘Go on, Nella,’ he urges in the same sharp voice. ‘You’ll be all right.’ ‘Just the prelim, Mrs Dikes,’ the nurse says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ ‘I’ll come back in a while.’ The youth is on his feet also, halfway to the door. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d remain until the prelim’s complete, Mr Dikes,’ the nurse requests. The girl with the coloured hair reaches for another magazine,
Out and Away. The youth raps on the glass of the receptionist’s window and when she slides it back he asks if there’s a coffee to be had. She closes her eyes briefly, snappishly. Coffee isn’t available. ‘Bloody marvellous.’ The youth addresses Mr Hilditch. ‘You pay through the bloody nose, you think they’d supply a coffee.’ ‘I imagine the young ladies get something. I imagine they’re well looked after, it being private.’ ‘We had the dosh put aside for Torremolinos, but there you go. Nella wouldn’t touch the other. Gets around, she says, if you go on the public, and she don’t want that. The wife’s far on, is she? Don’t look it to me.’ ‘No, she’s not far on.’ Mr Hilditch pauses. ‘Actually, she’s not my wife.’ The girl with the coloured hair looks up from her magazine, interested now. ‘Girlfriend,’ Mr Hilditch says, and when a second specialist, smaller and bald, enters the waiting-room and raps on the receptionist’s glass, Mr Hilditch hopes the youth will ask another question so that the specialist and the receptionist can be drawn in. But the youth says nothing further and the bald specialist requests that when the eleven-fifteen appointment arrives he is to be informed immediately. ‘Cut it a bit fine, the eleven-fifteen has,’ he comments, hurrying away again, and Mr Hilditch smiles and catches his eye. It is then that the excitement begins, creeping through him, like something in his blood. He is the father of an unborn child, no doubt in any of their minds. The girl they have all seen, who was here not ten minutes ago, whey-faced and anxious, is at this very moment being separated from their indiscretion. A relationship has occurred, no way can you gainsay it. That he is an older man is just fact. Girls can take to an older man, they can take to a stout man: it’s a natural thing; it isn’t peculiar, it isn’t wrong. ‘You’re never that big boy’s mother!’ people used to say, the other way round then; strangers would say it when they were out somewhere, down town or at the Spa they went to. Funny if she were here now, Mr Hilditch reflects; funny if she came back from the dead. Mr Hilditch closes his eyes and the indiscretion that occurred is there, an episode in his car. It’s dark; they can’t see one another; nothing could be nicer, the Irish girl is whispering to him; she wants to be with him for ever. In the waiting-room a tremor afflicts him, a slight thing, nothing serious: he has experienced this before. It’s in his legs and then his arms; he steadies the quivering it causes in his hands by pressing the tips of his fingers into his knees. He would like to rest for a moment, to close his eyes again, but he does not do so. He smiles in order to control the quivering when it affects his lips, hoping it will not be taken as untoward that he should smile at this time.