Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [32]
Lucy didn’t mean to sound as angry as she did: ‘I can take a certain amount of this, Patrick, although it’s all bollocks, but don’t you dare to say that you were second-best for me. Don’t you dare!’
He stared at her, for long enough to make her squirm a little in her seat. When he said, ‘Okay,’ he sounded strange.
She wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t want to go home to Cynthia early and she didn’t have anywhere else to go. So they ordered starters and main courses, coffee afterwards, and sent back plates that raised concern in the kitchen: a waiter was despatched to ask if everything had been okay for them. And they had an oh so polite conversation about Patrick’s plans – where he would send his CV, which head-hunters he thought it best to approach, and so on. It was the bones of the conversation that Lucy had known for some weeks that they had to have, but it had no blood, no muscle and no skin.
And all she kept thinking, as she chewed the food that tasted like sawdust, drank the wine, listened and nodded, was that he was right. He was second best. Not to Will, certainly. Maybe not to Alec. But to what she knew she wanted. He was second best.
Anna
The average GP’s waiting room must be the best place in the world to go if you wanted to get sick. People were coughing up their guts here today. What on earth was she doing here? She’d promised Nicholas she’d come. He’d wanted to be with her, but she’d said no. She hadn’t been able to stop him driving her, though. He was sitting outside now, in the car, reading the newspaper. She’d asked him not to come in, and even though he had made that sad face at her, she was glad. Anna flicked through a copy of Hello!, three years out of date. Almost every couple on its pages, photographed exchanging vows at absurdly over-the-top weddings, or frolicking, scantily clad, on sugary beaches or cradling designer babies in their arms, was now divorced. Living a different life.
An elderly man pushed his wife into the room in a wheel-chair, and parked her in the only available space, next to the Lego table. Maybe he’d rather be outside too, in his car, reading The Times. Except he couldn’t be, could he? His wife needed him.
When Jim Callaghan, the former Labour prime minister had died, his obituary had made much of his marriage. He’d outlived his wife by eleven days, having spent the last ten years caring for her as she grew more frail and ill. But he’d never complained, apparently. He once told someone that she’d spent sixty years taking care of him and now it was his turn to take care of her. And Anna didn’t know whether that was the loveliest or the saddest thing she had ever heard. Both, maybe. She couldn’t help wondering whether Audrey Callaghan would have wanted it to end like that. Carers find it hard to be taken care of, don’t they? And he’d died so soon after her – one of those couples who become two halves of a whole, like conjoined twins, and can’t live without each other.
Anna wondered what kind of carer Nicholas would have made, if she had needed it. It was about a year ago that they’d been here, waiting to be called in. He’d gone in with her, that time, had sat on the other side of the sprigged curtain as she had taken off her blouse and bra, laying them carefully over the chair. It had felt cold, and she had felt vulnerable, standing behind the curtain, topless, waiting for the GP to come behind it and tell her she was going to die.
It must be the baby clinic this morning. Four or five mothers were sitting on one side of the waiting room with their red books, waiting to painstakingly record each new ounce of their child on the graph. The babies were in their car seats, and their mums had loosened their fleecy suits, taken off woolly hats.
The GP came in for her next patient, saw Anna and smiled reassuringly. ‘You’re next, Anna, okay?’
Maybe she thought the lump was back. In a way, Anna wished it were. You could do something about that. You could