large hand and felt me with the other, felt me as if he were learning me all over again. ‘Don’t move,’ he said as I wriggled in his grasp. ‘Lie quite still now.’ And as he thrust into me I felt he was fucking me with all the suppressed passion, anger even, of the evening. He didn’t speak my name, but he looked at me steadily and I shut my eyes to escape from his. Afterwards I felt battered, wounded. Danny’s breathing became slow and regular and I thought he was asleep. When he spoke it was in the drowsy, slurred tone of a man half asleep, who can scarcely order his thoughts.
‘Have you been looking at Finn?’ he murmured. ‘Really looking at her. Like the great doctor you are.’ I began to answer but he continued speaking as if I wasn’t there and he was just thinking aloud. ‘Or is it all Sam and Elsie and the house and the countryside and a new best friend?’ The bed creaked as he turned, and I felt his breath on my cheek. ‘Have you looked at her, Sam? What’s your sort of word? Objectively. Scientifically.’
‘Are you obsessed with her, Danny?’ A horrible thought came into my mind. ‘Is that it? Were you fantasizing about Finn?’
I was breathless, my heart racing, I could feel its beat in my ears.
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
I felt him turn away from me.
‘Night, Danny.’
‘Night, Sam.’
When I woke the next morning, Danny had gone.
Twenty-One
‘Am I allowed in here?’
‘So long as you don’t try to do anything,’ Finn replied.
‘Don’t worry.’
My kitchen was like a mad scientist’s laboratory, steam and heat and mysterious clatters and hums. Everything was being used. On the hob a pan sizzled and the lid of a saucepan was shivering as vapour puffed over the rim. A bowl of water contained what looked like soggy leaves. The chicken breasts were in the oven. Finn was chopping something very quickly on a board, rat-a-tat-tat, like a snare-drum roll.
‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is the way you’re doing all the different bits at the same time. When I try to cook, I have to do one thing after another and even then I get it wrong.’
A couple of old friends were coming round for supper. Normally I would have got a take-away in or popped various pre-cooked dishes into the microwave, but Finn said to leave it all to her, that she would do something simple. After dropping Elsie at school, we had driven twenty miles through villages, past antique emporia and the paddocks of riding schools, along the coast to a supermarket which was comfortingly identical to the one I used to go to on the way home from work when I lived in London. I bought some frozen stuff and bin-bags and washing-up liquid and Finn headed for the real food: chicken breasts not wrapped in Cellophane, mushrooms and rice in expensive small boxes, rosemary, garlic, olive oil, vegetables, red and white wine. As the trolley filled, I tried to talk her out of it.
‘Sarah and Clyde are just like me. They’ve lived on takeaway vindaloos all their professional lives. Their tastebuds have been burned away. They won’t know the difference.’
‘Enjoy yourself while you’re alive,’ Finn replied. ‘Because you’re a long time dead.’ It was with difficulty that I did not gasp.
‘That’s why I’ve never bothered about what food I eat.’
‘Shame on you, Sam. You’re a doctor.’
Finn was becoming alarmingly imperious and I was becoming strangely passive, like a guest in my own house. It occurred to me, before I hastily pushed the thought away, that in the last few weeks, as she had recovered and bloomed again, so my grip on my own life had weakened. Elsie seemed half in love with Finn, Danny was gone again, my trauma unit had become someone else’s capitalist dream, my book stayed unwritten.
During the early evening my kitchen looked like a casualty department. I did some work and played a bit with Elsie and put her to bed, and when I came back a couple of hours later, without much appearing to have been done it had subsided into something tidier: an intensive-care unit, maybe. There was beeping and bubbling, but only the occasional moment of activity, a stir here and a sniff there.
Sarah and Clyde arrived, just after seven, panting and virtuous in their fluorescent cycling gear. They had taken the train to Stamford and biked out. They headed up for a bath and came back down in jeans, loose shirts. This was the authentically miraculous bit. Even if supper had consisted of nothing more than pizza in cardboard boxes brought to the house by motorbike and six-packs of beer, I still would have been rushing round in a panic. But this evening there was an air of serenity. A couple of bottles of wine stood open on the table next to the olives and some little things of salami and cheese that Finn had put together, and the table was laid and there was a general smell of nice food hanging around the place, but without any sense that anybody was actually doing anything. Finn wasn’t red-faced and dashing off to the kitchen every two seconds to deal with some crisis. She was there, pouring out wine, and not being ostentatious. She had put on a pair of pale slacks and a smockish black top and tied her hair back. Fuck, I was impressed with her.
Maybe I’d become friendly with Sarah and Clyde not just because we’d trained together but because they were tall and rangy like me. Sarah’s flowing hair was grey now and she had wrinkles round her eyes. Clyde still had the chiselled, long-boned Clark Kent looks of the rower he had been at university, but he’d got thinner, so his prominent Adam’s apple seemed even larger. We were all big and looked at each other from the same level. Clyde and Sarah were GPs together at a practice in Tower Hamlets. When they had a free weekend, they would put their bikes on to a train, head out from London and cover a couple of hundred miles by Sunday evening, hopping between the houses of friends. I was the first pit-stop on this weekend’s route.
‘And tomorrow we’re staying with Helen – you know, Farlowe.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Blakeney. North Norfolk.’
‘Jesus, you’ll have earned your dinner tomorrow night.’
‘That’s the whole point.’
We took our drinks outside and wandered in the grounds, as I sarcastically called the neglected garden. Sarah identified birds by their songs and Clyde told me the names of the plants in the garden, some of the nicest examples of which, it emerged, I had weeded in a fit of enthusiasm and tossed on to my compost heap. Finn called us in and we had little bowls of succulent rice with reconstituted mushrooms, followed by chicken cooked in olive oil and garlic and rosemary, with new potatoes and spring greens.
‘Unlike me,’ I explained to Finn across the table, ‘Sarah and Clyde have stayed in London and are doing a real job.’
‘You shouldn’t do yourself down, Sam,’ she said, with feeling.
Sarah laughed.
‘Don’t worry, Fiona,’ she said. ‘Sam is not generally famous for her English modesty and reserve.’
‘Anyway, it’s not modesty,’ I said. ‘The point is to be self-deprecating so that other people then step in and say how wonderful you are. It’s a way of inviting praise.’
Finn shook her head with a wistful smile.
‘I don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that most people are independent enough to look at what someone does and make up their mind about it for themselves. It’s too much trouble. People take you at your own valuation. If you say you’re good, most people will believe you. If you’re modest, they’ll agree with you.’
Finn’s fervent statement was followed by a cavernous silence which was broken by Clyde.
‘And what do
‘I’m writing a thesis,’ Finn said.
