Chapter Three
Three.
“You look stuck,” was the first thing Robin ever said to me. “Can I help?”
He had no idea, poor man, what a precedent this would set.
I took a good look at the winning bidder while the ballroom around him erupted like a football stadium.
He was the host of the table, a wealthy and influential man invited to fill the seats around him with wealthy and influential friends.
His name was Andrew Heynes, and I knew nothing of him other than that he was a prolific giver to medical causes.
As the celebratory music pounded I watched him get up to personally top up his guests’ champagne glasses, even though we had waiters paid just to do that.
Heynes’s shirt was hanging loose and undetected over the back of his belt.
To my amusement, I watched another man at his table get up and simply tuck it back into Heynes’s trousers without comment before sitting back down.
On the stage the auctioneer was shouting, “Three hundred and fifty thousand, ladies and gentlemen! Three hundred and fifty thousand raised tonight for the Royal Marsden Hospital!”
The waiting staff started clearing away dessert plates, which was my cue to open up the donations table.
I knocked back the rest of my champagne before making my way cautiously across the ballroom on my new heels.
I hadn’t got out much over the past four years and was quite unsteady.
Surgical clogs would have been preferable.
“Oi!” Dell called as I approached her table. “Carrie Cole!”
She was too loud now the music had been turned down; several faces from Andrew Heynes’s table looked up.
We’d left only two tables for the general public to buy seats at and Dell, my steadfast Dell, had organized a group of our old friends from the Royal London to fill one. They’d each parted with ￡500 for the chance to be here tonight.
“You look ravishing!” she shouted delightedly.
“You really do!” said Kiran, who had been a scrub nurse when Dell and I were core trainees at the Royal London back in 2010.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” I picked up an untouched glass of champagne from their table and took a long swig. “I’m feeling very proud.”
“So you should!” Dell and Kiran raised their own glasses. Then Dell stood up, hugging me. “You’re incredible, Carrie. And I haven’t seen you look this happy since, well…for a long time.”
Since you were with Johan, she’d managed not to say.
I made way for a couple of men from the Heynes table to walk past.
“I am happy,” I said, smiling. “Thank you.”
“I know what it took to put yourself back together.” Dell was uncharacteristically emotional. “You should be proud.”
I shrugged. One of the many things I’d learned in my career was that no matter the scale of rupture our bodies suffer, they are united by a penetrating and intrinsic desire to repair.
Three days earlier, I’d helped my consultant resect a seven-hundred-gram tumor from a man in his sixties.
When I’d come in yesterday the man was propped up in bed, joking with ward staff and FaceTiming his daughter in New Zealand.
That untaught ability to heal, that drive to survive, is life. I had had my rupture; I had healed. It was the natural order of things.
I made my excuses and headed off toward my donations table, in the same direction as the two men from Heynes’s table. One went to the toilet, the other to the bar. The bar-bound man was the one who’d tucked Andrew Heynes’s shirt back into his trousers as if he were Heynes’s long-suffering wife.
For a brief moment I tried to imagine the sort of world these men must inhabit: the houses abroad, the yachts, the comforting knowledge that they would never need to take the tube.
The staging laparoscopy I’d performed that afternoon had been on a woman so hard up, she’d had to take four buses to get to the hospital. It was a different world.
I was still following the shirt-tucking-in man. He wasn’t heading for the bar, I realized: he was heading for my donations table, just up ahead, where Kenny, my consultant, was throwing on his dinner jacket and talking rapidly into his phone.
“I have to go,” Kenny said as I arrived. “One of my patients needs me.”
“But you’re not on call!”
“I took her stomach out yesterday and now she’s been transferred to ICU,” he called, already off. “Over to you, Carrie.”
I was left with the man from Andrew Heynes’s table. Behind him, an elderly couple had joined to form a small queue.
“Right…” I said to the man. “Plan B it is. I just need to get this card machine up and running. Then I can tell you all about the incredible work we’re going to do with this robot.”
He waved a hand, smiling, as if to say, no rush. While I wrestled with the machine, he started chatting with the couple behind him. But after a few minutes with no progress at my end, he turned back toward the table.
“You look stuck,” he said. “Can I help?”
“Do you know how to operate a card machine?”
“I have Google?”
“Oh, no, it’s OK. I’ll just…” I trailed off. “Actually, yes please,” I said. “And thank you. I am completely stuck.”
“I see that. OK, so, Carrie? Is it Carrie?”
“Yes…?”
He smiled. “Your friend yelled your name earlier when you walked past. It was hard to miss.”
“Ah, yes. That’s Dell.”
“OK. Carrie. You radio for backup. I’ll sort this machine out. And you can talk to the lovely couple behind me about robotic surgery, because that is something I definitely cannot do.”
With that, he came around the table and sat down. Five minutes later, the machine had taken ￡1,000.
“How do you know Andrew Heynes?” I asked him as we waited for our next donation. He was nice-looking in a slightly posh, British sort of way. Lots of healthy brown hair, tanned skin as if he’d just got back from the Caribbean or wherever it was the wealthy went on holiday at this time of year.
“I work for him.”
“Oh! I assumed you were…”
“One of his very rich friends? Sadly not. That’s why I came to donate some money at this table rather than paying twenty-five grand at auction to go and see the Stones play in Tennessee.”
“So what do you do?” I asked. “Are you his butler? Smuggled in to keep him on brand?”
“I am not.”
“I saw you tucking in his shirt.”
He laughed. “Andrew can’t be wandering around with his shirt hanging out. He wasn’t listening to a word I was saying.”
I told him this was something I often experienced with my patients.
He looked right at me for a few moments as though trying to make a decision, and the energy changed between us.
“Can I—ah, can I get you a drink?” he asked, suddenly shy. “I’d love to hear more about your work.”
“Thank you, but no.” I smiled. “I’ve had to do a hard stop. I drank far too much during the auction.”
The man nodded. “I relate.” He asked a waiter for a glass of champagne for him and some water for me. “Anyway—I’m a philanthropic adviser. In answer to your question.”
I sat back in my chair. “You tell Heynes how to spend his excess billions?”
“Essentially.”
“What a job! Tell me more.”
“Well, I made him come here tonight and fill the table with his wealthy friends. And I made him buy that painting. It’s not all black-tie dinners, of course, but I enjoy my work.”
A few minutes later, one of my fellow organizers turned up to take over on the card machine.
“Lovely to meet you, Carrie,” the man said. “And for what it’s worth, having listened to you talk to the punters about surgery for the past fifteen minutes, I’d choose you over this robot any day. You sound like the real deal.”
It was only when he’d gone that I realized I’d never even asked his name.
And that I very much wished I had.
—
He sent me a letter the next week, asking if he could take me out to dinner. His name was Robin Carghill.
I loved the old-fashioned straightforwardness of putting pen to paper.
Dell, who had watched our entire exchange, imagined Robin to be the sort of person who would book an iconic London restaurant and then roll us into a dive bar later on.
She was spot on. Our first date was at Quo Vadis, followed by a disgusting Soho bar, the name and location of which neither of us can remember.
He had ordered—and demolished—a giant steak, laughed sympathetically at my “weedy” cod cheek salad and asked me endless questions about my work.
“Are you joking?” he asked, genuinely appalled, when I paused to check he wasn’t bored.
“Everyone wants to know what it’s like to be a surgeon!
You cut people open and chop things out and then go off and have lunch as if you’ve spent the morning bumming about on the internet like the rest of us. It’s witchcraft.”
I smiled.
“Did you not watch ER when you were a teenager?” he went on. “Peter Benton and Elizabeth Corday were my heroes. Their storylines trumped all the others.”
“I did watch it. I’m afraid I often took notes.”
“Of course. How did you rate their surgical practice, out of interest?”
“Well, questionable, at times.”
Robin started laughing. “You had feedback! Oh, but this is wonderful. What age were you?”
“Fifteen.” I was laughing, too.
“I hope you wrote them a strongly worded letter.”
I stayed silent.
“Oh my God! You actually did!”
I put my head in my hands.
“Oh, Carrie, this is priceless. Did they reply?”
“To the third letter, yes.”
Robin roared with laughter.
“I have a very high-achieving mother. And my grandmother was even worse. None of us were fitted with an off switch. But trust me, not everyone has found this trait as appealing as you.”