‘No they don’t. No. But music is such a gift. Maybe one day I’ll be able to hear your granddaughter perform.’
‘I hope so. You and your husband can be her first audience.’
‘Yes we could.’
‘Then one day when you have a child I can come to his recital.’
I drank a little more as we looked through a few more photographs and talked about his four grandchildren. He was so proud of them all. ‘Now, thank you so much for the tea,’ I said after a while. ‘I have to go up to the surgery.’
‘It was nice speaking to you. Mind how you go.’
‘You too.’ I waved as I began to climb the stairs.
A welcome surge of warmth drifted over me as I reached the top of the stairs and entered the surgery. Charles, Nick’s secretary, was staring out the window.
‘Mrs Cawson. I’m sorry, but Dr Cawson isn’t here,’ he said, moving to his well-ordered reception desk. It had a little wooden block with his name, CHARLES O’SHEA, on it, that he had pestered Nick for. Charles was always neatly turned out, his fine hair flipped artfully over on the left side, but his figure was squat and somehow shapeless.
‘Oh.’ It hadn’t crossed my mind that Nick wouldn’t be there to sit me down and help me stave off the pain.
‘You should probably call first next time.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’ I looked at him keenly. I always felt self-conscious in front of Charles. ‘Where has he gone?’
‘He went out for a walk,’ he said, comparing two sheets of paper on his desk. He appeared to have some sort of unpleasant rash on his left hand and when he caught me looking at it he put it in his pocket.
‘But the smog has come down.’ He shrugged, a very slight movement. ‘Well, it’s not too bad today,’ I said, trying to fill the silence.
‘I can give Dr Cawson a message.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
I felt more stupid now. ‘I have a migraine.’
‘I see.’ I wondered if he knew what had happened, how things had changed between Nick and me.
‘When did he leave?’ I asked.
‘About an hour ago.’
‘An hour ago?’
‘As I said.’ He sounded as irritable as ever.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ It just seemed a bit odd. Nick’s Mondays were usually his busiest time – people would store up their problems all weekend and demand to see their GP first thing. Nick’s patients – many of them Party officials – brooked no refusal and he would normally just snatch a sandwich at his desk for lunch in order to meet all their expectations. And yet he had gone out for a walk at noon. ‘The schedule is usually packed, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, I’ll wait for him.’
‘As you wish.’
I sat in one of the plush seats that Nick had rescued from the lines of bombed-out houses – there was something luxurious about sinking into an armchair that had come from a townhouse once lived in by Lord Such-and-Such – and watched Charles glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as he returned to his work, obviously annoyed by my presence. Lorries shuddered noisily along the road as I waited, and somewhere below us two people seemed to be having a blazing row about the cost of office stationery.
After a while the second post arrived, fluttering through the letterbox, but that was all the excitement to be had and I wished Nick would come back. The time ticked slowly and interminably by, marked by a carriage clock in the corner of the room.
Eventually, I grew tired of watching Charles use two fingers to laboriously type up letters, and I could see that the door to Nick’s office was unlocked and ajar. So, ignoring Charles’s protestations, I wandered in. The desk was chaotically strewn with the usual mess of pens, a stethoscope, wooden tongue-depressors in a short vase, drug phials spilling out of cartons, a pharmacology textbook and buff folders of medical notes. And there was something else: torn yellow paper in which a small package had been wrapped. Curious, I took it in my hand.
The paper was embossed with the name of a Bristol shop that had once sold perfume to society ladies and now sold it to the wives of Party men. As I lifted it and held it in the air, a scent drifted up, the remnant of what had been bound in the paper. Its sweet, sultry notes were familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was a strange thing to find. ‘Charles?’ I called out.
‘Yes, Mrs Cawson,’ he replied, in the same tone as before.
‘Why has…’ But then I stopped. I remembered where I had smelled it before. And my eyes gently closed in utter pain.
I had breathed it twice, that perfume. Once at a party and once, terribly, in my own home. I slowly placed the paper back on the desk and began looking among the items on the desktop, searching through the jumble of instruments and papers for something that would speak of her. The scent was based on rich Virginia tobacco, she had said.
I shoved the instruments and pens aside and rifled through the letters and papers, checking for anything with her name. The package could only have contained a gift for her, I was certain. I searched through it all, turning it all over.
But no, there was nothing else. No note, no letter. And I took a step back, smoothing my palms down my skirt, berating myself. Such a fool I had been, and so wrong. I had been jumping to conclusions, nothing more. I stared out the window and the broken Houses of Parliament filled my view. Would I have acted like this a month ago? Before that party when she had shone like the sun? The party that surely led to a death that still has me twisted in a pain that won’t let go? No, no, I was sure that I wouldn’t have. A gunboat on patrol passed slowly along the Thames, its searchlight eerie in the smog, and I watched it disappear from sight.
So I pulled myself together, took another deep breath and turned to leave. I would wait calmly for Nick to return and never breathe a word of this to him. That would be for the best.
But then, just as my fingers touched the brass handle, I caught sight of a side table by the door. It had a short pile of brown folders stacked haphazardly on its polished surface; and there was something strange slipped into the middle of the pile. It looked like the edge of a large photograph, seemingly out of place among the medical notes, as if it had been deliberately hidden. I went over and lifted the upper folders and, as I did so, I found that it wasn’t a photograph I was holding, it was the cover of a magazine – an old society glossy full of pictures of actors and young debutantes in furs outside nightclubs – the type of frivolous publication that had entirely disappeared under the new, classless regime. Its title, On the Town, was blazed across the top in red lettering.
Tensely, I opened it, feeling the smooth paper on my palms, and flicked through a few pages of scattered black-and-white images and unattributed gossip before I noticed that the corner of one page towards the centre of the publication was dog-eared – as if Nick had opened it time after time. My fingers turned quickly to that spread of paper. The pages fell away. And there she was.
In a flashlit scene before one of her film premieres, the faces and smiles around her seemed to drift into the background, their owners blurred and lifeless. It was as if they had stepped back into a whirlwind. And, in the centre of it all, she stood gazing into the camera. Yes, you could see in her eyes that the whole world could go to hell and she would still be there in that light. That blaze of light. I understood why Nick had been unable to leave her in his past.
My hands trembling, I put the magazine back as I had found it and fought to control myself before casually returning to the outer room, where Charles was writing something.
‘When is Nick’s next appointment?’ I asked.