‘It goes to where the railway is now. There must have been points there.’ He turned. ‘And look behind us it carries on beyond that fence.’ He turned back. ‘You can see it’s got a very shallow gradient. Right from the beginning of the meadow it’s beginning to rise to get enough height for this bridge.’
‘A viaduct.’
‘It must have been a branch line going somewhere. It must have been abolished by what’s his name in the 60s, Beech.’
‘Beeching.’
‘Yeh when all that network was abolished.’
‘And they built Spaghetti Junction instead.’
The two of them stepped from the bridge onto the long gravelly and grassy causeway. Gloom gathered upon the low flat land on either side. Half a mile in front was the edge of the town, with The Willows clustered along it to the left. In the sky ahead of them a layer of mole-grey stratocumulus blocked the sun. Twin solitary little figures, they walked on. Now, in the sky ahead, the sun a hundred and forty-nine million miles away let its shocking orange lip drop beneath the line of cloud eleven miles away. And then amazingly quickly the whole blobby sun was there in front of them, persimmon-red, looming above the tiny houses. It seemed on pause; and yet by the time they had crossed the modern railway and turned left down Helium Avenue it was gone, leaving an umber and ochre slick that could be glimpsed through the chinks between the houses, and a blueish brightness high up in the middle of the sky.
Kitsch, Sue was thinking. No room for kitsch in Ash’s world. Because this is indeed ghastly. She was taking in once more, as so many times before, the line of too-narrow mock-Victorian semis with too-little windows and too-uniform brickwork and too-tidy arrangements of flowerbeds and enormous pots where inappropriate plants like palm and eucalyptus grew. It is fake. It is all wrong. And yet it is also kind of lovable. You can step back from it and look at it and think: so much good will has gone into this disaster. Be charitable. Take the intention, not the deed. No, that’s not right: take the intention plus the way it has gone wrong. Relish the wrong note.
Maybe it is a bit too concrete, Philip was thinking. Maybe it is a little bit of Dubai in middle England. But people have got to have houses. What I don’t think he took enough account of is things like insulation and, OK, it’s probably artificial materials but without it we would all be worse off. And the planet would be. It’s like penicillin. Miraculous discovery. Miraculous drug. Or something simple like just having your appendix out. So straightforward. Who would want to live in a world where you couldn’t do that?
But maybe now we shouldn’t, Sue was thinking. Because of the environmental emergency actually maybe now we shouldn’t find enjoyment in the amazing American ancient gas-guzzling car with shark fins, or those ridiculous completely kitsch SUVs that are 30% too big for human habitation. Maybe we should abandon irony. Look at it all with simple horror. Because now there is no time for forgiveness. The what’s it called, the tolerance, the space in which to be tolerant, has disappeared.
They were at their front door. They opened it, and went in, and set about getting ready for the party at George Emory’s. Yikes was that the time already? So Sue quickly showered and Philip splashed water on his face and Sue gave some attention to her hair and did a bit of make-up while Philip pulled on trousers and a shirt, really the sort of clothes he would wear to work, only with no tie, and perhaps the shirt was a little brighter, as, meanwhile, Sue shimmied her way into a bias-cut black crêpe slip-dress and reached behind her head to clip on a necklace of marble-sized shiny steel balls. He did like it when she dolled herself up, allowed herself to perform her femininity, as she put it, though he could see why the crisp androgynous trousers and tops were better for day to day – when in fact there was also a frisson in knowing that under the no-nonsense outfits was the beautiful tender woman’s body that only he was allowed to hold; but still – as she came towards him in her bare feet, put a hand flat on his chest and bobbed up on tiptoe to peck a kiss on his cheek, and as he let his hand slide down the declivity of her back so that his fingertips rested on the nub of her coccyx, he couldn’t help feeling that it was really lovely when she flaunted herself a little, it titillated him. In his mind an image flashed up of her lying contentedly in Ash’s arms; but then she was levering herself into some unusually formal shoes, and looking at him and reiterating in her mind her established thought that she did actually quite like the way he had no interest in style; that all he was aiming for, and succeeding in getting, was a look of being courteously smart. Now the taxi was hooting and they were downstairs, coats, out of the box of their house and, after a moment of being in the open, into the box of the car. Smoothly and slowly the taxi drove, to use less petrol Philip thought, as Sue looked out at the black-and-white world tinged amber by the streetlights. Through the centre of the old town they were conveyed along the one-way system and around gyratories until, before long, they were out into the more real dark of the countryside. Here there was speed and braking and turns and dips and rises until they were into the village where there were streetlights again.
‘Any idea where it is?’ asked the driver.
‘It’s the rectory so I suppose near the church.’
There was the church on higher ground. It had a square castellated tower. Oh and look, there were balloons at the gate in the old stone wall here, how sweet. ‘This must be it.’ So they were out in the air again, chillier now, and crunching along a gravel driveway behind dark evergreen bushes. It was a tall fat house with George’s long grey car parked in front of the steep-roofed porch. Victorian presumably. They must have built a new rectory then.
Philip reached for Sue, draped his arm across her back so that her shoulder came in under his armpit as he hugged her to him: he kissed her on the side of her head and she with her fingers squeezed his hip-bone on the other side of him. Then he had pulled the bell and they were standing somewhat formally apart from one another. The door swung open and there was, not George Emory, but a girl. Pale pink twinset, black mini-skirt, thick black tights. ‘Hello,’ she said. Blonde bob.
‘I’m Philip Newell, George’s colleague. This is Sue.’ She must be early twenties.
‘George is fussing in the kitchen.’ Slightly raised eyebrows. Pencilled. A warm look in her round face. ‘Do come in.’
Their feet rang on the flagstones. There was space above them and around them.
‘Let me take your coats.’
Through an open door to the right was the room where the party seemed mainly to be. The low light of twinkling candles, the swell and fade of conversation, the sporadic chink of a bottle on a glass or a glass on a plate. The young woman took their coats in one of her arms and, with the other, pushed open a door on the left. Among the shadows inside was a desk where other coats lay harvested.
‘I’m Tasha by the way.’
Beyond it were bookshelves that went right up to the ceiling.
‘Thanks.’
They turned and moved into the room where the people were. Tasha went off through the room and out of a door in a different corner to get them drinks. It was a long room going from the front to the back of the house.
‘Who was she?’ Sue asked.
Big enough for a grand piano to squat at the far end in front of French windows.
‘I guess we’ve a choice of lover or daughter.’
There was a dangly cut-glass chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. There was a complicated cornice.
Tasha brought their drinks. Sue had noticed what seemed to be a really quite good turn-of-the-century painting over the mantelpiece. A landscape with the blank, white, dominant wall of a farmhouse off centre. Couldn’t be James Orr? No, surely an imitator. Philip had noticed Sushma and Jackie and David clumped in a corner. Sushma and Jackie had their shoulders to the rest of the room. Their heads turned out to look and then turned back to comment. They shifted, smiled as he and Sue moved towards them.
‘No Amanda?’ – he asked.
‘She’s always late,’ sa
id Jackie.
‘Usually arrives . . .’ said Sushma.
‘Usually arrives just as everyone else is leaving,’ said Jackie.
‘Like at the Christmas party, do you remember?’ – said Sushma: ‘Only got there half way through.’
‘When the rest of us were already totally wasted,’ said Jackie.
‘Especially Dr Kaiser,’ said Sushma, mildly.
‘How does she get to work on time in the morning?’ – Philip managed to contribute.
‘She has six alarm clocks,’ David put in authoritatively in his soft voice with wide, ironic eyes. ‘And a wake-up call. And a cockerel in her back garden.’
‘She lives in a flat.’
‘Her balcony then.’
‘This is Sue,’ said Philip; ‘and this,’ he said to Sue as she glanced from one to the other warmly, ‘is three quarters of the back office.’
‘And front office,’ said Sushma.
‘Front and back office,’ put in David, bluntly.
‘Or SWAT team as we like to call them,’ said Philip.
‘We do our best to keep the rabble in order,’ said Sushma.
‘The doctors, that is,’ said Jackie.
‘Well,’ Sue ventured: ‘You’ve made Philip feel really at home.’
‘Oh that’s no problem,’ said Sushma.
‘He’s a sweetie,’ said Jackie.
‘Unlike some others we could mention,’ said David.
‘Philip!’ – a voice came booming. Philip turned. Of course it was George.
‘Welcome,’ announced George. ‘And you must be . . .’ – turning to Sue.
‘Sue,’ she said.
‘That’s right, Sue,’ George answered as though confirming it. ‘Great man,’ he said, looking at Philip; ‘and great woman.’ Philip saw David wince and felt a smile inside.
‘May I?’ George was topping up their glasses.
‘What a lovely house,’ said Sue.
‘Thank you.’
‘I love that painting. Is it anything to do with the Glasgow School?’ – she asked. ‘It’s not James Orr, is it?’
‘Do you know I don’t know what it is,’ he said, turning, looking it up and down. ‘It belonged to my late wife. She was the one with taste. With an eye for . . .’ Suddenly he was at a loss. ‘Well, with an eye, I suppose. I just . . .’ His eyes were aiming past them all, over David’s shoulder. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Must circulate. Topping people up. Do make yourselves at home.’
He lumbered away to another group of people where they heard his rich voice rise, ‘surely not?’, and saw his arm lift to hold the bottle high up, mock-threateningly on display.
The office threesome seemed to have recombined. Philip and Sue were standing a step away from them. How many people were in the room? Four, seven, twelve, seventeen, plus them nineteen, oh and then twenty-two.
‘The men,’ Sue said, ‘are all fat and the women are all thin.’
‘Except me.’
She twinkled at him, not replying.
‘I think it’s partly the cut of their jackets.’ Apart from them, and of course Sushma and Jackie, and David, oh and the girl who had opened the door, everyone was of George’s generation. Or rather the men were and the women were generally younger. The men wore tweedy jackets and grey flannel trousers – except for the one over there who is in bright yellow cords. The women are in pastel dresses which pull in or are belted round their waists. The men’s hair is grey; the women’s hair is not. Oh, but there are a younger couple, dressed in black. And there is . . . ‘Come and meet Sara,’ Philip said.
Sara was in a group, listening and nodding. Philip touched her on the upper arm. She turned and her face warmed, taking them both in. And then they were all three chatting happily, about living where they were, and commuting, and the pressures of the job, and Sue’s work. Sara was asking about public funding and visitor numbers and then onwards to ethnicity; at which Sue explained, as she often did, that the difficulty was with the institution, with the place that was cut out in society for art to occupy, and therefore how people looked at it and indeed what kind of people came into the gallery in the first place. That while there was obviously lots of art that was very alert to ethnicity and provocative about it, Ofili for instance or Al Ahmed, it was true that it tended to get anaesthetised as soon as it was put on display in the big, institutional space, frankly very often the dead space, of the gallery. And it was the same with people working there. So that even though Omar, obviously, counted as ethnic minority he had actually turned into a pretty conservative figure, culturally speaking – and probably he’d been forced to go that way because of the pressures put on him by the institution.
It does make a difference not drinking alcohol, Philip thought, noticing the green juice in Sara’s glass, to the sort of thing you want to talk about. Listen to.
‘There is still a lot of prejudice, I think, in this country,’ Sara was saying. ‘People know they should not say things, know they shouldn’t behave like that. I admit there is the BNP but on the whole people do know. Still, there is hidden prejudice. But it comes out when they visit the doctor.’
‘Because we are like confessors,’ Philip said.
‘Yes, there is that,’ Sara said, welcoming the thought as though she had not heard it before.
‘Though partly it is a generational thing,’ Philip said. ‘Our older patients really grew up in a different world.’
‘I just don’t think that’s really an excuse,’ said Sue.
‘I smile sometimes because, with me,’ said Sara, ‘patients who don’t know me, first of all they think they are going to see a man, because I am a doctor, and then they think I am going to be European because of my name. Actually all the fascists choose me! When they come in I see the shock in their eyes. Sometimes they gulp and try to carry on. Say if there is a sexual problem. We get to the moment when I say: so are you going to get your dong out then? Actually that’s not what I say, I say: if you’d like to lie on the couch I’ll need to take a look. They simply say no.’ There was amusement in her voice but also an edge of contempt. ‘Or their faces seize up. Like they are in short circuit, you know as if they are trying to say something but can’t? So I say: in that case I cannot help you. And they absolutely don’t mind. The infection will spread but they don’t mind. Compared to how terrible it would be if an Asian woman touched their willie! Because obviously it would shrivel up. Dry up and collapse into powder. They would crawl off and die in the corner rather than that.’
She was declaiming now and Sue and Philip were her audience.
‘Actually those ones I tell to go out and make an appointment with another doctor, for instance nice Dr Newell. But there are other ones who walk in and suddenly forget what is the matter with them. You can see it happening between when they open the door and when they sit down. Their poor little minds are racing. Maybe they say: I have got a pain in my shoulder. So I sit them down and check the flexion and rotation. There is no problem. They say: it’s gone now, it’s completely disappeared. Good, I say. I smile sweetly. I tell them that if they have any more excruciating shoulder pain they should come back. They never come back.’
‘Isn’t that pretty depressing?’ said Sue.
‘In a way,’ said Sara. ‘Yes in a way it is. But also,’ she carried on, ‘it braces me. Because it shows I matter, you know, that it matters that it’s me who is there doing that job. Just by being me I make, only a little bit, but a little bit of a difference.’
‘Dr Kaiser.’ It was a small man in a tight red v-neck jumper. ‘And you must be Dr Newell.’ The small man held out his hand. ‘Graham Epsom, kiss.’
‘Kiss?’ Philip said, shaking it.
‘Clinical and Integration Solutions.’
Oh, CIS.
‘Exciting times,’ said Graham Epsom.
‘Egypt?’ – said Sue.
‘Well yes that too of course.’ Graham Epsom smiled at her but did not say hello. ‘I was thinking more of the adve
nt of GP commissioning.’
‘Graham,’ said Sara Kaiser, ‘is one of the people who are going to make millions on the back of it.’
‘We are only here to facilitate,’ said Graham. ‘You have skills in the consulting room. We have skills in systems management. If we are really going to run with this fantastic opportunity, really going to deliver radically improved outcomes for patients, then the two skill-sets need to work together. Because at the moment they don’t. It must be very frustrating for you’ – he turned to Philip again – ‘to at the moment make your referrals and sometimes they get lost, there are long delays, sometimes they even get rejected.’
‘I find it works pretty well in fact,’ said Philip. ‘In fact the only difficulties I’ve had are caused by factors which, so far as I understand it, are going to get worse under the new system.’
‘Well in fact . . .’ Graham Epsom was starting to say.
‘Like for instance, I make a perfectly straightforward referral and it gets rejected. I make a referral based on the clinical evidence. Using my skill as a doctor. And it gets rejected by a manager. Who probably isn’t a qualified doctor. And who absolutely certainly has not seen my patient.’
‘That’s exactly what the new system is designed to resolve.’
‘No because . . .’
‘Would you mind telling me’ – Graham Epsom was setting himself up as the expert – ‘what condition it was?’
‘Cataract,’ said Philip, hostility rigidifying inside him. ‘In an elderly patient. It didn’t meet the mathematical criteria for sight-loss but it was causing intense distress. Stopping her watching television, for instance: she said the blurriness was making her feel dizzy and sick. Absolutely crystal-clear case for surgery. It was rejected! And the nod and the wink said try again when it’s got worse. So . . .’
He was aware that Sue and Sara had moved away. He could hear Sara’s voice behind him saying ‘. . . the demonisation of the Muslim Brotherhood . . .’
‘. . . so it doesn’t save anyone any money in the long run. It makes an elderly lady suffer more, for longer. And it’s only done because of an accountant who wants to balance this month’s books.’
The World Was All Before Them Page 11