‘All right, darling. I’m sorry. So, these poor sick children you look after – what are they suffering from?’
‘Oh, so many things,’ said Ned, feeling himself calmer as he talked. ‘In the hospital we get the acute cases – convulsions, appendicitis, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and of course this dreadful thing, leukaemia, which is cancer of the blood. I have been doing some work on that, and I’ve discovered that in some cases, simply a fresh blood transfusion will bring them into a remission.’
But she was looking round the restaurant, smiling at people at other tables; and he gave up, resigned, wondering why he had thought for even a moment that she would really be interested in anything he had to say.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Was there a wild mutiny with the doctors when this new arrangement, the National Health Service, began?’
‘There wasn’t,’ he said, adding, ‘I’m surprised you even know about it.’
‘Well, of course I do. I was once a doctor’s wife, after all – it interested me. All the stories in the papers, this man Bevan, wildly attractive I thought, telling the doctors what to do, they can’t have liked it.’
‘Well, in the end they – we – didn’t mind. Now, shall I walk you back to your hotel?’
‘No need,’ she said, but he did and then wandered home slowly, reflecting on her visit, on all her visits, so rare, so irritating and yet for all that, so special.
The launch of the National Health Service really had been something of an anticlimax: after all the headlines and the speeches and the BMA voting against it, it had been launched that summer and in the hospitals, at any rate, on that day, 5 July, you would have been hard-pressed to know anything important had happened at all. Doctors and nurses arrived, looked after their patients as they had always done, performed operations, ran clinics, delivered babies, and at the end of their day left again.
Ned couldn’t remember anyone saying, ‘Oh, my God, the Health Service has started’; nobody said we won’t be doing it like that any more; nobody even said thank God for the Health Service. It just happened.
It affected the honoraries, like his father and him, hardly at all. In fact, privately, away from the headlines, where many of them thundered about not allowing the government to tell them what to do, they were arguably happier and certainly better off.
They had always given their services free to the hospitals, sometimes paid an honorarium, hence their title of honoraries – sometimes not, making their money from their private practices. Now they were paid by the NHS as well, per session – eleven in each week maximum – and beyond that could do as many or as few as they wished. It suited them very nicely. Even Ned’s father could find little to complain about. The much-vaunted spectre of government busybodies standing in operating theatres and by patients’ beds, telling the doctors what to do, had disappeared like so much hot air.
Now, Ned thought, he had everything he had ever wanted: work he loved and was absorbed by, a pleasant lifestyle, a good income. But he made a decision that night, as he walked home through the long summer evening, shaken by the conversation with his mother. It was, as his father and his friends, his colleagues and his superiors, all kept telling him, time he got married.
If Ludo Manners could raise a large and happy family, then maybe so could he; but it was a terrifying prospect. Could he do that – live a lie, pretend to everyone, even to himself – make such a marriage work? But the alternative, carrying on as he was . . . suspicions would arise, the occasional lapse was fraught with huge danger, and as a life, it was a terribly lonely one.
He sank into his big easy chair when he got home, poured himself what must have been a triple brandy, and tried to concentrate on his dilemma. As always his mind absolutely refused to focus on it.
‘Well, wasn’t that lovely?’ Diana collapsed onto the sofa in her parents’ drawing room, kicked off her high heels and took the glass of champagne her father had passed her. ‘Thank you, Daddy. Funny how it can revive you, when you’ve already had too much.’
‘It was a perfect day,’ said Caroline. ‘Darling Betsey! Daughters-in-law can be such hell, and here are we, sent this angel. Her parents are so nice too. Lovely house. I do like Berkshire – if I ever had to choose another county, that would be it.’
‘God forbid,’ said Sir Gerald, irritable with a growing hangover, picking an argument as he was inclined to do on such occasions, ‘that we should even think about living somewhere else.’
‘Oh, darling, I know. And I’m not. I just said I liked it.’
‘Betsey’s dress was wonderful, wasn’t it?’ said Diana, oddly exasperated by the comparison of two counties she would have killed to live in, banished as she was to the wretched wilds of Yorkshire.
‘And darling, may I say again, yours is quite lovely,’ said Caroline. ‘You looked beautiful. Didn’t she, Johnathan?’ she added, as he came into the room. He looked distracted.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said Diana looked – looks – beautiful in that dress?’
‘Oh, yes. Well, she always does. Now – darling – I don’t know if you heard the phone just then?’
‘No,’ said Diana, a sense of alarm creeping over her. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Well, it was Mother. She, well, I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to have to leave first thing tomorrow.’
‘Oh, Johnathan, no!’ Diana looked at him, unable to disguise her horror. ‘I thought we were going to stay a few days.’
‘We were. And of course you may, if you like. But Father’s taken a turn for the worse. Mother fears a stroke – only a small one, but she’s terribly worried.’
I bet she is, thought Diana, terribly worried that her darling son is away from her, possibly even having a nice time, with his wife and son, a few days’ break he had certainly earned,
‘Oh, Johnathan,’ said Caroline, flashing a warning look at Diana. ‘I’m so, so sorry. Of course you must get back. We can put you on an early train, and you and Jamie too, of course, Diana . . .’
‘I – but I have a few arrangements for next week,’ said Diana helplessly, seeing it all disappearing, her trips to London, lunching with friends, going to a matinee with Wendelien, leaving Jamie behind with his grandmother and his nanny, treats in prospect that had sustained her sanity for the past month or more. ‘I . . .’
‘Well, Diana, they hardly matter, surely?’ said Caroline. ‘Not if Vanessa needs you all back at Guildford Park.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t need all of us,’ said Johnathan hastily. ‘She did specifically say she didn’t want to spoil Diana’s plans.’
‘Well, that’s exceedingly generous of her,’ said Caroline. ‘Isn’t it, Diana?’
‘Exceedingly,’ said Diana.
Next morning, Johnathan safely on the train to London and thence to Yorkshire, Diana most willingly accompanied her parents to church. As they drove away, they passed a tall, gaunt figure walking down the hill towards the churchyard.