'Be serious.'
'I am serious.'
'You're not on,' laughed Sue.
'Come back to bed.'
'There isn't time. You can't be late for your interview,' she said sitting down on the edge of the bed and ruffling her husband's dark hair.
'Of course there's time,' said Scott Jamieson. He circled his arm round Sue and pulled her down on top of him but she remained adamant. 'There isn't!' she said putting both hands against his chest to fend him off.
Jamieson relaxed his grip and smiled. 'I love you,' he said softly.
'I know you do and I love you,' said Sue. 'But right now… shower!'
'You win,' conceded Jamieson swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Sue looked at the scars on his body as he sat up and kissed his shoulder on impulse. 'Change your mind?' he asked.
'Get on with you,' she said. 'I'll get breakfast.'
Jamieson turned on the shower with his right hand and felt a sudden, sharp twinge of pain in his fingers that made him draw back with a soft curse. He stretched his fingers out and examined them as he had done a thousand times before in the recent past but there was nothing untoward to see, no disfigurement, no indication of misalignment, no obvious reason why he should not hold a scalpel again if it were not for a residual stiffness that prevented him keeping perfect control of it. Give it time Jamieson, he reminded himself and immediately felt pleased at his new-found philosophical attitude.
It was a view he could not have expressed in the early months of his recovery when a mixture of frustration, self pity and blind anger had ruled his head and made him almost insufferable to live with. But Sue had never wavered. From the time of the accident she had been a tower of strength, nursing him through the physical pain and then the mental anguish that followed. It had even been her who had made him face up to the obvious — that he should at least think about changing specialties, an idea he had found abhorrent at first but had eventually come round to considering and finally to giving it a try.
A change to pathology had been the first idea to be mooted but a career among cadavers and the sweet, sickly smell of formaldehyde had held little attraction. Too many of the pathologists he knew were well on the way to alcoholism and he could understand why. For him, medicine was about saving lives not finding out why they had failed. He knew that this was a ridiculously simplistic view of things but white tiles and the stench of death were not for him.
That had left radiology and the lab specialties, haematology, biochemistry and microbiology. In all, Jamieson had spent eighteen months trying to find a new niche in medicine but in the end he had admitted defeat. His academic performance in refresher and re-training courses had been beyond reproach but once the challenge of learning something new had receded he had been left with an undeniable feeling of restlessness that he suspected the laboratory specialties could never satisfy. He was temperamentally unsuited to them, having known the excitement and challenge of surgery too well.
Jamieson had reached the point of considering leaving medicine altogether and joining his father's business when one of the consultants on his last re-training course had persuaded him to let him put his name forward for a job he thought Jamieson well-suited for. He was unwilling to say exactly what the job would be, only that it would not be ordinary and that it would not be a desk job. Agreeing finally that he had nothing to lose by applying, Jamieson was invited to attend for interview at the Home Office.
Scott Jamieson was thirty-three, eight years older than Sue. He had been brought up in the Scottish border town of Galashiels, a mill town that nestled on the banks of the River Tweed in soft, rolling countryside. The eldest son of a successful mill owner, Jamieson had been educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh like his father before him. Blessed with an easy charm and both physical and scholastic ability, he had sailed through his school years and in the process, acquired the confidence of someone who had never known anything other than success.
A down to earth father and the level headedness of the border folk who were his friends and neighbours had prevented this confidence from ever fermenting into arrogance. It was one thing to be captain of rugby at school quite another to take the field with the rugby- mad border teams on a Saturday afternoon. Self-opinionation had a habit of coming to grief in border mud.
From school Jamieson had gone on to Glasgow University to study medicine after taking a year out to work in his father's mill. Although he had enjoyed the experience of working in the mill, he knew that the life was not for him and had been relieved when his father had not seemed too disappointed when he told him as much. The fact that he had two younger brothers probably helped.
At university, he made the first mistake of his young life when he underestimated the demands of first year medicine and spent too much time socialising when he should have been studying. He had come close to failing the exams but scraped through and was careful not to make the same mistake again. He eventually graduated in the top one third of his class. An elective at a Boston teaching hospital in the United States had been followed by residencies at two London hospitals and a decision to become a surgeon.
He had met Sue, who was then a student nurse, during his appointment as surgical registrar at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge and, like so many men who had known a string of girl friends, Jamieson had fallen head over heels in love when the real thing happened. He had known at once that Sue was the girl he must marry and eight months later he did.
Sue's father, a Surrey stockbroker, had given them a splendid wedding in the village where Sue had been brought up. They were married in the Norman village Church on a beautiful sunny day with Scott and his brothers adding colour to the gentle green of English grass by wearing full highland dress. Tartan had mingled easily with taffeta and champagne had sparkled in glasses shaded by floppy hats as both families and a host of relations celebrated the wedding of a golden couple whose horizons seemed unbounded.
Ironically it was Jamieson's unfamiliarity with any kind of failure that had made him so unable to cope with it after the car accident. He was unconscious for nearly two weeks and very weak when he finally did come round but as soon as his strength started to return he felt sure that it would only be a matter of a few weeks more before his life would return to normal. He would start operating again and resume his career path to the top. When it finally dawned on him that recovery was going to be a long, slow process and there was still a question mark over how complete it would be, he had started to behave with a petulance and ill temper that he had never displayed before.
His general rudeness to the hospital staff and in particular to the people who cared about him most had been compounded with long periods of relentless self-pity, with suicide at its main theme. Throughout it all Sue had shown a maturity beyond her years and she had brought him through the darkest period of his life to accept what lay before him — before them as she had never tired of pointing out. She eventually succeeded in restoring Jamieson to a point where he became thoroughly ashamed of himself and of his insufferable behaviour. From this point on Jamieson had improved day by day until now when, although there was still a large question-mark over his professional future as a surgeon, he was definitely restored to her as her husband, the old Scott Jamieson.
'Good luck,' said Sue as Jamieson turned at the door and kissed her on the cheek.
'If they want me to catalogue bedpans I'm not taking the job is that understood?' said Jamieson.
'Understood,' said Sue with a smile. 'But I'll get something special in for dinner just in case.' She stood in the road waving until the car had disappeared round the corner at the end of the lane.
Scott Jamieson always had to steel himself to leave the peaceful Kent village where he and Sue lived go up into central London in July or August. It invariably made him short tempered with its crowds and oppressive heat when the sun shone. But today the sun did not shine and a dull greyness gave the buildings in the city a blanket anonymity as he drove to an underground car park behind Trafalgar Square and collected his ticket at the barrier. It was a slow, five minute spiral before he found a place being vacated by an elderly man. The man was having difficulty reversing due to an inability to turn his head properly. Each attempt was accompanied by a corresponding increase in engine revs until, when he had finally succeeded, the entire parking level was filled with drifting blue smoke.
Jamieson locked up his car and sprinted up the stairs to begin his walk to Whitehall, weaving in and out groups of tourists who were moving along aimlessly and seldom looking in the direction in which they were travelling. He had to halt and make three attempts to pass a Japanese man, Nikon held to his face, moving synchronously with him each time he decided to change direction. The Japanese man's wife laid a hand on her
