‘Do you want me to get dressed up?’ she said.
‘Of course. I may even get out my old dinner suit, if I can find it.’
She smiled. ‘I can hardly wait.’
‘I’ll come and get you at nine. How does that sound?’
The dinner suit had a stale and musty smell, and the collar on my dress shirt was much too tight, but I put them on anyway. At nine o’clock the lasagne was bubbling away quite satisfactorily, the table was laid, the wine was nicely chilled. I let myself into Fiona’s flat. She wasn’t in the sitting room and there was no answer when I called out her name. A sudden premonition drew me into the bedroom.
Fiona was kneeling on the floor in front of the open wardrobe. She was wearing a long blue cotton dress which was not yet zipped up at the back. She was rocking slowly backwards and forwards and struggling for breath. I knelt down beside her and asked what was wrong. She said that she’d felt more and more exhausted as she was trying to get dressed, and then she’d been looking for a pair of tights in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe when she found that she couldn’t get her breath. I put my hand to her forehead, which was very hot, and beaded with sweat. Could she breathe now, I asked. She said yes, but she didn’t think she could get up just yet. I said that I was going to phone for the doctor. She nodded. I asked her where the number was. Between short, high breaths, she managed to say: ‘Phone.’
There was an address book by the telephone in the hallway. It took me a minute or two to remember the doctor’s name.
‘Dr Campion?’ I said, when the call was answered, and then realized that I was talking to a machine. There was a recorded message which told me to try another number. This time I got put through to an answering service. The man at the other end of the line asked me which doctor I was trying to contact, and whether it was an emergency. When I’d given him the details he told me that the deputizing doctor would call back as soon as possible.
The phone rang after about three or four minutes. I started to tell the doctor what was wrong. I wanted to be as quick and as clear as possible, so I could get back to Fiona, but it wasn’t that easy. Because he’d never heard of her before, never examined her, never seen any notes, never been told about the case, I had to explain everything from the beginning. Then he asked me if I thought it was serious. I told him I thought it was very serious, but I could tell that he didn’t really believe me. He thought I was talking about someone with a bad cold. I wasn’t going to be put off. I told him he had to come out and see her. He said that he had two other patients to see first — urgent cases, was how he described them — but that he’d come out as soon as he could.
I helped Fiona back into bed. Her breathing was marginally better by now. I went back to my flat and turned off the oven and blew out the candles. Then I changed out of my dinner suit and came back to sit with her.
She looked so beautiful, so—
The doctor arrived at about ten-fifteen. I tried to be angry with him for taking such a long time but he made this difficult by being so kind and efficient. He didn’t do much, just listened to her chest and took her pulse and asked me a few questions. He could see that she was ill.
He said: ‘I think she’d better go into casualty.’
This was the last thing I’d been expecting.
‘Casualty? But I thought that was for accidents.’
‘It’s for emergency cases,’ he said. He tore a page out of his notebook, scribbled four words on it, and then sealed it in an envelope from his briefcase. His own breathing while he did this seemed wheezy and over-emphatic. ‘Take this letter with you. It’s for the casualty doctor. Do you have a car?’
I shook my head.
‘You’d probably have a long wait for a taxi tonight. I’d better drive you both in. It’s on my way home.’
We prepared Fiona for the journey by helping her to put on two thick jumpers over her dress, and some thick woollen socks and a pair of boots. By the time we’d finished with her, she looked slightly ridiculous. I half-carried, half-walked her down the stairs and within a few minutes we were in the doctor’s shiny blue Renault. I was trying to stay calm but found that without realizing it I had screwed his envelope up into a tight ball in the palm of my hand. I did my best to smooth it out as we arrived.
The casualty unit, while not quite as run-down as the outpatients’ clinic, none the less managed to feel both crowded and desolate. Business was brisk. There was frost on the pavements and several people had showed up with minor injuries from slips and falls; and because it was New Year’s Eve, there were already one or two victims of pub fights nursing swollen eyes and head wounds. They were expecting more of those later. At the same time there was an atmosphere of rather desperate levity and celebration in the air. Threadbare decorations adorned the walls and I got the impression that there was some sort of low-key staff party going on in a distant room. Some of the nurses running backwards and forwards were wearing silly brightly coloured hats, and the woman at reception had a radio on her desk, tuned to Radio 2 I gave her the doctor’s note and pointed to Fiona sitting over on a bench, but she didn’t seem to think it was any big deal. That was when I realized that the doctor hadn’t actually been as efficient as I’d thought, because he’d forgotten to phone up and let them know that we were coming in. She told us to wait and that a nurse would be along soon to take down all the details. We waited twenty minutes and there was no nurse. Fiona was shivering in my arms. Neither of us said anything. Then I went over to the desk again and asked what was going on. She apologized and told us we wouldn’t have to wait much longer.
Ten minutes later a nurse turned up and started asking questions. I answered most of them: Fiona wasn’t up to it. The nurse marked the answers off on a clipboard. Quite soon she seemed to reach a decision and said, ‘Follow me, please.’ As she led us off down a corridor I ventured a meek complaint: ‘There don’t seem to be many doctors about.’
It was already after eleven o’clock.
‘There’s only one casualty officer tonight. He’s seeing the majors and the minors, so he’s got a lot on his plate. There was one very sick patient in earlier. Rotten luck, isn’t it, on New Year’s Eve?’
I didn’t know whether she meant it was rotten luck for the patient or for the medical staff, so I didn’t answer.
She took us into a tiny windowless cubicle, equipped with a trolley and not much else, and fetched Fiona a gown.
‘There you are, dear. Can you put that on?’
‘Perhaps I’d better step outside,’ I said.
‘It’s all right, he can stay,’ said Fiona, to the nurse.
I turned to the wall and didn’t look while she took off her clothes and put the gown on. I’d never seen her naked.
The nurse took her temperature and her pulse and blood pressure. Then she disappeared. About a quarter of an hour later we were seen by the casualty officer, a harassed-looking man who went through only the most cursory introductions before putting his stethoscope to Fiona’s chest.