The Best of Times (4 page)

• • •

Emma looked at her watch: three o’clock. It was Friday and it seemed to be going on forever. She was on the eight-a.m.-to-six-p.m. shift, and it had been one of the slow days. Tomorrow she was going to London and out with her boyfriend. She’d been going out with him for
only three months, and he was the first she had had who wasn’t a medic. She’d met him in a bar in London; she’d been with a crowd of friends from uni, and one of them, a lawyer, had worked with him briefly.

His name was Luke Spencer, and he worked for a management consultancy called Pullman. He earned what seemed to her an enormous amount of money and worked tremendously long days—almost as long as hers, but then, while she went home exhausted and slumped in front of the television, Luke and his colleagues went out for dinners at hugely expensive restaurants like Gordon Ramsay and Petrus and extremely trendy clubs like Bungalow
8
and Boujis and Mahiki. Occasionally Emma and other WAGs, as Luke insisted on calling them, rather to Emma’s irritation, were invited along on these evenings. The first time Luke had taken her to Boujis, Emma had practically burst with excitement, half expecting to see Prince Harry every time she turned round. How Luke and his friends got on the guest list there she couldn’t imagine.

She liked being with Luke; he was cool and fun and funny, and he threw his money around, which was rather nice; he hardly ever expected her to pay for herself, and he wore really great clothes, dark suits and pink shirts and silk ties done in a really big loose knot. He took all that very seriously. He wouldn’t be in his suit today, she reflected, because it was Friday, which was dress-down day, and they all wore chinos or even jeans. Not any old jeans, obviously, not Gap or Levi’s, but Ralph Lauren or Dolce & Gabbana, and shirts open at the neck, and brown brogues. Dressing down or indeed up on any day was not something that figured large in Emma’s life.

She wasn’t at all sure if she was actually in love with Luke—although she had decided she would really like to be—and she was even less sure if he was in love with her; but it was very early days, and they had a lot of fun together, and she always looked forward enormously to seeing him. He was very generous, always tried to take her somewhere really nice. The other thing that was really sweet and that had surprised her was how much he respected her work.

“It must be absolutely terrifying,” he said, “life and death in your hands. And surgery: cutting people open, how scary is that?”

She said it wasn’t that scary—“What not even the first time?”—and she explained that you arrived at the first time so slowly and so well supervised, you were hardly aware at all it actually was the first time.

She was certainly looking forward to seeing him; they were going to have quite a bit of time together, not just Saturday night, but the whole of Sunday and Sunday night as well; she didn’t have to be back at the hospital till ten on Monday morning.

So she’d be able to stay in his flat for two nights, which was a really cool studio apartment; and obviously that meant they’d be having sex, quite a lot of sex. Luke was good at sex, inventive and very, very energetic, but also surprisingly considerate and eager to please, Emma thought, smiling to herself as she looked at the text he’d sent her that morning:
Hi, babe. Really looking 4ward 2 tonite. I mean really. Got some news. Take care Luke xxx
.

She wondered what the news was: probably something to do with work. It usually was. Anyway, only seven more hours … There’d been a few kids with broken bones, a couple of concussions, and a boy of seventeen with severe stomach pains. It turned out he’d drunk two bottles of vodka, three of wine, and a great many beers over the past twenty-four hours, celebrating his A levels, and seemed surprised there could have been a connection. And then there were a few of the regulars. All A&E departments had them, Alex Pritchard had explained to Emma on her first day, the Worried Well, as they were known, who came in literally hundreds of times, over and over again, with the same pains in their legs or their arms, the same breathlessness, the same agonising headaches. Most of those were seen by the resident GP in A&E, who knew them and dispatched them fairly kindly; Emma felt initially that she would dispatch them rather more unkindly, seeing as they were wasting NHS time and resources, but she was told that medicine wasn’t like that.

“Especially not these days,” Pritchard said. “They’d be suing us,
given half the chance. Bloody nonsense,” he added. It had been one of his scowling days.

Anyway she might not look like a doctor, Emma thought, but she was certainly beginning to feel like one. And even sound like one, or so Luke had told her last time he’d had a bad hangover and she’d been very brisk indeed about the folly of his own personal cure: that of the hair of the dog.

“You’ve poisoned yourself, Luke, and swallowing more of it isn’t going to do any good at all. It’s such nonsense, and it’s so obvious. The only cure is time, and lots of water for the dehydration.”

He hadn’t liked that at all; knowing things, being right about them, was his department.

“If I want a medical opinion, I’ll get it for myself when I’m ready,” he said in a rare demonstration of ill humour. “I don’t want it doled out in my own home, thank you very much, Emma.”

And he poured himself a large Bloody Mary and proceeded to drink it with his breakfast eggs and bacon.

Alex Pritchard, who adored Emma, and had never met Luke, but had heard more than he would have wished about him, and referred to him privately as the oik, would have interpreted this as proof, were it needed, of his extremely inferior intelligence.

CHAPTER 3

The thing most occupying Laura’s time and attention as the long summer holidays drew near to their close was Jonathan’s surprise birthday party; he was forty in early October and had said several times that he didn’t want any big festivities.

“In the first place, I’ll feel more like mourning than celebrating, and in the second I find those big-birthday parties awfully selfconscious.
So no, darling, let’s just have a lovely family evening, Much easier for you too, no stress, all right?”

Laura agreed with her fingers only slightly crossed behind her back, for what she had planned was very close to a family evening, just a dozen or so couples, their very best friends, and the children, of course. She was sure Jonathan would enjoy that and would actually have regretted not having a party of any kind; and so far the preparations were going rather well. Before their return from France, she had already organised caterers; Serena Edwards had been enrolled as her helpmeet with the flowers and decorations (it was most happily a Saturday, when Jonathan was on call), and Mark, Serena’s husband, was compiling a playlist and organising and storing the wine. Everyone invited could come; and Mark and Serena had also been enrolled as decoys, and had invited them both for a drink before dispatching them home again for dinner with the family. All the children were in on the secret and thought it was tremendously exciting.

• • •

Would she recognise him? Well, of course she would. From the pictures. Only people did look different from their photographs, and Russell had clearly selected his with great care over the years.

The day was nearly here; only two and a half weeks to go. And after they had met at Heathrow—and for some reason she had insisted on that; it was neutral territory—they would travel together to London, where he had booked rooms at the Dorchester—“two rooms, dearest Mary, have no fear; I know what a nice girl you are!”—for two days, while they got to know each other again: “And after that, if you really don’t like me you can go home to Bristol and I shall go home to New York and no harm done.”

She still thought much harm might be done, but she was too excited to care.

She had told no one. She didn’t want to be teased about it, or regarded as a foolish old lady; she had simply told her daughter, Christine,
and a couple of friends that she was going to London to meet an old friend she’d known in the war. Which was absolutely true.

But she had bought a couple of very nice outfits from Jaeger—Jaeger, her!—where the girl had been so helpful, had picked out a navy knitted suit with white trim and a very simple long-sleeved black dress; and then, greatly daring, she had asked Karen, the only young stylist at her hairdressing salon, if anything could be done to make her hair look a bit more interesting.

“Well, we can’t do much about the colour, my love,” Karen had said, studying Mary intently in the mirror, her own magenta-and-white-striped fringe falling into her eye, “although we could put a rinse on to make it a bit blonder-looking. Or some lowlights,” she added, rising to the undoubted challenge, “and I do think you could wear it a bit smoother—like this,” she said, putting a photograph of Honor Blackman in the current
HELLO!
in front of Mary.

Mary heard herself agreeing to this; after all, Honor Blackman was almost as old as she was. “You going to meet someone special, then, when you go away?” Karen said, as she started leafing through the magazine for more inspiration.

“Oh, no, of course not,” said Mary, “just an old friend, but she’s rather … rather smart, you know?”

“Mary, you’ll look smart as anything when I’ve finished with you,” said Karen. “Now let me gown you up and we’ll start with the colour. Very gently, then if you like it, we can push it a bit. When’s the trip?”

“Oh—not for another two weeks,” Mary said.

“Well, that’s perfect. We can sort something out, see how you like it, and then keep improving it.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You can go back to your own style, no problem.”

“Bless her,” Karen said, smiling after Mary as she walked out after the first session. “That took real courage, but you know, she looks five years younger already.”

• • •

They had met on a bus, Mary and Russell; he was on a forty-eight-hour pass and wanted to take a look at Westminster Abbey: “Where England’s kings and greatest men are buried,” it said in his booklet.

“Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain,
1942
” it was called, and all servicemen had been given a copy on departing for Europe. It had produced a lot of cynical comments on the troopship, with its warning that Hitler’s propaganda chiefs saw as their major duty “to separate Britain and America and spread distrust between them. If he can do that,” the booklet went sternly on, “his chance of winning might return.”

To this end, there were many and disparate warnings: not to use American slang, lest offence might be given—
“bloody
is one of their worst swear words;” not to show off or brag—“American wages and American soldiers’ pay are the highest in the world, and the British ‘tommy’ is apt to be specially touchy about the difference between his wages and ours.” And that the British had “age not size—they don’t have the ‘biggest of’ many things as we do.”

It had warned too of warm beer, and of making fun of British accents, but most relevantly, to Russell, of the British reserve. Soldiers should not invade the Brits’ privacy, which they valued very highly; and they should certainly not expect any English person on a bus or train to strike up a conversation with them …

• • •

The bus he was on made its way down Regent Street, stopping halfway. Several people got on, and Russell realised a girl was standing up next to him; he scrambled to his feet, doffed his cap, and said, “Do sit down, ma’am.” She had smiled at him—she was very pretty, small and neat, with brown curly hair and big blue eyes—and she thanked him, and promptly immersed herself in a letter she pulled out of her pocket.

The bus had stopped again at Piccadilly Circus. “See that?” said
one old man to another, pointing out of the window. “They took Eros away. Case Jerry ’it ’im.”

“Good riddance to ’im, I’d say,” said a woman sitting behind, and they all cackled with laughter.

The bus continued round Trafalgar Square, and Russell craned his neck to see Nelson’s Column: he wondered if Jerry might not hit that as well. They turned up Whitehall; about halfway along, a great wall of sandbags stood at what one of the old men obligingly informed the entire bus was the entrance to Downing Street. “Keeping Mr. Churchill safe, please God.” There was a general murmur of agreement.