Chapter 13
Gordon
Maia follows the registrar from the room. His pager is going, and he frowns at it before checking his watch and striding off down the corridor. “Mr. Davies, can I have a word?” Maia says, trying to keep pace with him.
“It’ll have to wait. I’m late for a surgery and I have precisely three minutes to eat my lunch before I scrub in.” He looks at her then, as if wondering for the first time who she is and what she’s doing there.
“It’s about your last patient, though. I don’t think it can wait.
” He sighs as she trails him along the corridor toward the canteen.
It’s only the fourth week into her placement on Obs and Gynae and Mr. Davies is already known for making the residents cry.
“When you were asking if anything could have happened to have brought it on, I noticed her partner squeezing her hand.”
“You’re interrupting my few minutes of peace to tell me she has a supportive other half, Miss—”
“Dr. Atkin,” she corrects, “I’m a house officer. But, no, I think he was encouraging her not to say anything. There’s dried blood in her nostrils; she has watery eyes, dilated pupils; and she was irritable when you considered keeping her in.”
Mr. Davies stops and turns to her. “And your point?” he says, checking his bleeper again.
“Placental abruption can be caused by substance abuse.”
“I’m well aware.”
“I think that might be an issue here.”
“Okay. I don’t have time for this. But if you think that’s what’s going on, get the lab to check her urine and delay her discharge.”
“And if it is?”
“Let Sister know, and she’ll make the relevant call.” Maia nods, and as they walk away in opposite directions down the corridor, he calls out, “Good obs, Dr. Atkin.” And she feels as though she’s received praise directly from God.
The roof garden is really just a wooden bench, a plastic chair, and a plant pot of soggy cigarette butts, the surrounding hospital blocks obscuring any view over London, but Maia gravitates there whenever she’s on a break.
A bank of lockers obstructs the external door, so she and some of the other medics have taken to climbing through the staffroom window, although it’s not until she’s out, when turning back would be awkward, that she can see if anyone is already there. Today it’s Kate, another house officer.
“Are you okay with some company?”
“Yeah, although I’ll be gone in a minute.”
“Oh, I can go back in,” Maia says. “I don’t need to interrupt your time.”
“No, no,” Kate smiles, waving Maia forward. “I mean, I really do have to go back in a moment, but until then I’d love the company.”
She holds out a packet of Marlboro Lights, which Maia declines. Kate’s appearance seems at odds with the cigarettes; her face is like a Pre-Raphaelite painting—rosebud lips, cheeks flushed pink, hair falling in heavy auburn waves.
“I just helped deliver baby Portobella,” Kate says, smiling as she exhales a stream of smoke, and Maia sits down beside her. “A naming first for the hospital, possibly the world.”
“Really? I bet she’ll be a fun gal,” Maia says.
“Yeah,” Kate laughs. “She’s actually cute as a button.”
“I see what you did there.”
“Oh, that was accidental, but I’m sure she’s in for a lifetime of it.”
It’s only then Maia realizes that in the few sentences they’ve exchanged, she’s misrepresented herself; she rarely makes jokes. But something about Kate makes her offer up a bouncier version of herself.
“I’m Kate, by the way.”
“Maia. I think we were both at St. Thomas’s on our last rotation, but our paths never really crossed.”
“Really? I’m sure I would have remembered you,” Kate says, arching an eyebrow.
Maia is surprised by the unguarded flirtation. Sometimes it’s hard to read signals from other women, but in this exchange, there’s a rare certainty. Maia smiles. “I think my best line was, ‘You go, I can take the next one.’ ”
“Getting into the lifts?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thanks, belatedly,” Kate says. She stands, winding her hair back into a bun, smiling down at Maia. “Would you fancy a drink tonight? I finish at seven.”
“I’m not out until eight.”
“I can wait.”
“Great,” Maia says, and then cringes at the idea Kate might think she’s rhymed with her reply deliberately.
Kate turns back and grins, and Maia notices the way her nose wrinkles as she does.
Maia sits on the bench in the sunshine and wonders why she’s acted like a fool in the few minutes she’s spent with this woman, and if Kate will still like her when she realizes Maia is not all light-hearted banter and puns.
She wonders, too, if Kate will instantly guess the reason if Maia suggests somewhere other than the pub around the corner, and perhaps decide she doesn’t want to be involved with someone who isn’t out yet.
Sometimes she thinks it would have been easier not to have followed her father into medicine.
If she’d chosen to exist in an entirely different world.
Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 is in the CD player and when it comes to an end, Gordon takes a hand from the steering wheel and points to the glove box. “Before I forget, there’s something in there for you.”
Cora rests her fingers on the catch and pauses until he nods that she should go ahead and open it.
Inside, there’s a CD, its cover obscured by a Post-it.
For Cora, with love x, written in Gordon’s neat script.
She lifts back the note. It’s Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites.
She holds the case to her chest and sighs.
Gordon smiles. “Put it on. It’s the fourth track,” he says.
“In the Hall of the Mountain King.” It’s a selfless gift; he loathes the mincing theater of this piece.
Early in their relationship, he referred to it as the Disneyfication of classical music.
Orchestral junk food. Jesus Christ, Cora!
Even its own composer hated it. It was meant to be satire!
To Cora, though, it’s the “Sugar Plum Fairy” with backbone and a little more edge.
She sinks into her seat to listen, shuts her eyes, and sees the velvet burrow of the auditorium, feels the burning white of a stage spotlight.
Her limbs tingle with imagined movement.
Gordon takes a hand from the wheel again and rests it on hers.
When the piece finishes, he clicks off the stereo and they drive the last few miles through the Cotswolds countryside in silence, Gordon only taking his hand from hers occasionally to change gear.
She blinks behind closed lids—a clamshell on tears that have appeared from nowhere; on the sadness that comes after the last note and not knowing when she will hear this again.
And the longing for this scene to be as it seems. Just a man and a woman, in a normal marriage, doing normal things, so simple they might almost be taken for granted.
At the hotel, they leave their luggage and Gordon takes Cora’s hand as they go to join the other couples already having drinks just off the lobby.
The wives welcome Cora in and affectionately protest not seeing her more often as they embrace.
She knows they socialize without the husbands in the months between these annual gatherings.
And that over the years, it has become accepted that, for whatever reason—her comparative youth, introversion, ballet (which everyone still seems to assume makes up some part of her life)—Cora will not be there.
They don’t seem to hold this against her.
Instead, they treat her like a rare butterfly, accepting these moments when she is amongst them and appears, however briefly, to dazzle.
Gordon once told her a butterfly’s average lifespan is twenty-nine days.
She wonders, when she adds up these moments where she exists out in the world, if her lifespan will be any longer.
And which would be better? To have those days boiled down into one intense burst of color, or to have the pin removed from the thorax every now and then, dusty wings fluttering back to life, a little more time eked out before being locked away again?
Someone has ordered afternoon tea, and as Cora bites into a scone layered with thick clotted cream and strawberry jam, its sweetness causes her to close her eyes for just a second.
When she opens them, Gordon catches her eye from where he’s sitting further down the table with the other husbands, and raises his glass to her.
She feels wrong-footed, as though the last step on the stairs has arrived before she expected, but she smiles, and for a moment, before they return to their conversations, it is just the two of them.
The women are discussing a book they’ve read, and Dorie tells Cora she finished her copy on the journey, that she’ll drop it in with her later.
The conversation moves on, but Cora’s thoughts snag on whether the rules will change here, if she and Gordon might sit up in bed, side by side, reading companionably before sleep.
Perhaps she could finish the book before they go home.
She looks back at Gordon, who is now engaged in conversation with the men.
He is laughing; he looks happy, relaxed.
In the afternoon, they set out on foot, first down quiet country lanes and then across fields toward Broadway Tower.
Gordon drops back and walks with the women, and Cora can tell they’re enjoying him seeking out their company and asking questions about their lives.
He is only adding to their already-high opinion of him.
A few years earlier, in barely hushed voices, gathered around an end-of-the-evening table, the other women had declared him to be the ideal husband: attentive, accomplished, impeccably dressed, athletic, a good father.
Someone who has a way of making whoever he speaks to feel special.
The sort of face you instinctively trust. Kind eyes, an open smile, good-looking, but not dangerously so.
Cora had listened, blinking. Because, yes, all that is true.