by John Collee
'Lovely.'
'How long are you staying?'
'We're going back on Wednesday.'
'Why Wednesday?'
'For the Friday list.'
'Chuck it. Jennings can do it. He'd like that. You can call him on Friday to check everything's OK and stay here with Sheila until after the weekend.'
'Maybe you're right.'
' 'Course I am. Trouble with you, Alistair, is you never learnt the difference between dedication and obsession.'
'I've seen them both.'
'So stay the weekend. Your patients will survive without you.'
Kingsley had heard the phrase used flippantly many times in the past, but now it had a comforting ring of truth. His patients would survive without him, just as they might die, despite his best efforts. He suspected now that he had never been the altruist he was cast as, that he was motivated purely by enjoyment of his work, irrespective of its success or failure.
In a way he was reassured by his revelation, how tenuous the association between motive and action, action and effect.
His professional selfishness usually inspired love and gratitude, which was more than could be said for Roland Spears's brand of altruism, or, indeed, for Dhangi's. Cranley had been highly moral and widely disliked for it. Richard Short, now relieving himself into a snowdrift, was entirely immoral and owed much of his popularity to the fact. In such an absurdly paradoxical universe there could be no retribution for somehow having shirked one's fate.
Kingsley smiled, gazing out over the snow-clad moor. In the distance, the small grey capsule of their cottage nestled in the snowfields.
Inside, Sheila Kingsley was returning from the window when she winced and was forced to stop. For the first time in weeks she had experienced a tiny twinge of pain in her hip.