In the consulting room she sat with her legs dangling over the edge of the examination couch. Good legs for forty-two, she thought, as a handsome young doctor considered them with an air of scrupulous concern. His white coat accentuated the darkness of his skin. Middle Eastern, she supposed. Persian, he told her when she asked. She was struck by that, since she thought people said Iranian these days. ‘Persian’ suited his cultured air. He was both deferential and aristocratic, a charming combination. He asked questions delicately, waiting humbly for her answers, though the fact that he was kneeling in front of her no doubt enhanced that impression.
The varicose veins, he said, were not pronounced. Treatment was a possibility but not urgent. How much pain? he asked. Lots, she emphasized, determining not to be too ready to oblige the waiting list by downplaying her symptoms. “It’s pretty bad now,” she said. “Won’t it be worse if they’re not dealt with?” He looked at her doubtfully. “Given my medical history,” she pleaded, “to have this on top of everything else!” He had read her notes, surely.
“It is borderline. I must ask Mr. Fielding. I could not recommend you for treatment without checking with him.” He lifted one hand, turning it palm upward as though proffering it for fate to drop something beneficial into it. How graceful he was! He made to stand but suddenly he cried out in agony and clutched the couch, stuck in a crouched position, his head almost in her lap, unable to move further. “Doctor!” she cried, in alarm.
He gasped. “Nothing! Nothing.”
She slid off the couch and pushed a chair towards him. He collapsed into it. His beautiful eyes were blank with pain. He closed them. His forehead was damp, his knuckles white. He let go of the couch. Recovering a little, he straightened very slowly. She handed him a plastic beaker of water from the little sink. He looked, she thought, dreadfully tired all of a sudden. She sighed. She knew how pain can hollow you out and now, she could tell, he was disheartened and embarrassed, or even ashamed.
Their eyes met. “Is it your back?” she asked.
He nodded. “It happens. I don’t know why.”
“But you will. Someone’s looking, aren’t they?” What was she doing? He could have cancer or AIDS or heart failure. She shouldn’t stumble about offering platitudes, and he was the doctor not she, but when he raised his eyes sadly she wanted to help. “It’s tough,” she said. “You’re doing well.” He smiled, just slightly, whether in contradiction or rueful agreement she couldn’t tell.
Suddenly there was less space in the room as the door, opening sharply inwards, missed her by inches and a blue suit entered. In it was a short man of about forty, speaking to someone in the outer office even as he came in. “Two! Not ten past! Tell him I said that!” He started when he saw them, unexpectedly close: the doctor in the chair, the patient, bare-legged, where she should not be. He saw the beaker of water and their self-conscious expressions. She saw contempt on his face as he watched the Persian struggle to stand; slim, tall and hurting.
“Let’s have the patient where we can see her, shall we, Dr. Houshmand?” The consultant, tucking a cardboard file of notes under his arm like a swagger-stick, cocked his head to one side, insolently, she thought. He showed no sympathy for his colleague. He asked for an assessment which Dr. Houshmand supplied respectfully. It was met with something very like a snort. Turning to her he sneered, “And you want surgery?”
“I want what’s appropriate,” she replied. She added, as pleasantly as she could manage, “You are Mr. Fielding, I suppose? Only you didn’t happen to say when you came in.”
He didn’t deign to answer this. He put the file down and leafed through it, asking a few questions about medication, ending with, “No medication of any kind at all?” in a tone that conveyed that he thought she was a crank.
“No,” she insisted. Really, he was not a pleasant man and seeing him next to handsome and courteous Dr. Houshmand did him no favours. His physique, his features, were mediocre. They seemed inadequate to contain his sizeable self-regard.
Had he read that thought? His lips tightened. He waved Dr. Houshmand brusquely out of his way and stood in front of her. He seemed to be waiting for something – the chair that Dr Houshmand placed for him. Carefully hitching up the knees of his trousers, Mr. Fielding seated himself regally in front of her legs.
It was indeed a beautiful suit, she acknowledged silently as he lifted one of her heels, then the other, and poked his forefinger along her shins. An unusually blue blue for a British man. It would stand out in a crowd. It said status, success. A considered choice.
He pursed his lips, continuing to press and probe. “A little vain?” he said lightly.
“Where?” she asked, then his smirk revealed her gullibility.
“Old age comes to us all, you know,” he said. “Sometimes we find that ladies want our help for cosmetic reasons. Turn around, please.”
“I brought my legs along to be looked at. That’s all I can do,” she said coldly. “This leg hurts. You’ll have an opinion.”
“Oh, I do. A little vein, just here.” She stayed silent. He pressed her calves between finger and thumb along their length. “Well.” He threw his voice in Houshmand’s direction. “Shall we allow vanity to prevail?”
“No, Mr. Fielding!” Dr. Houshmand was shocked. “A little vein is no basis for….”
“A play on words!” Fielding snapped irritably, as though lumbered with a stooge who couldn’t play along. Houshmand looked confused. “I think we can consider Mrs. Matthews’s legs as candidates for treatment,” said Fielding. “Not stripping, though. Injection. Stripping would be….” He scrutinised her legs, head on one side.
“In vain,” she said, very seriously.
He looked up sharply but she met his gaze deadpan.
“Contra-indicated,” he snapped pompously.
“A play on words,” she smiled.
“Not one I haven’t heard before,” he sneered.
“Such an elegant double negative.”
He avenged himself. “It will hurt,” he warned, with relish, “but that’s life. We must grin and bear it – some of us better than others.” He looked, as he sprang briskly to his feet, at Dr. Houshmand. He settled his cuffs so that their glittering cuff-links displayed themselves. He glanced at his shoes and she saw they were immaculate. He was a well-armoured man. His supremacy was incontrovertible. He could now afford to condescend. “I’ll take you round to Dr. Preece myself – he does the injecting – as he may well wonder why he’s being asked to fit such a borderline case into his busy schedule.”
He swept from the room; swept as though trailing voluminous draperies or enveloped in the billows of an academic gown, its sleeves swelling in the breeze of his momentum. Staff in the outer office paused as he entered (deferentially she assumed) and she and Dr. Houshmand followed in his wake and then she saw it!
Across the back of the blue suit was a huge, white splatter of bird shit. Involuntarily she glanced at Dr. Houshmand, startled. He looked at her in alarm. Other faces in the office, who must have seen Mr. Fielding on his way in, were, she realised, concealing amusement. She saw that Mr. Fielding was reading the charged atmosphere as a fitting tribute to his prowess, because he smiled complacently and lifted his head. “We are the vanquished he is leading in chains,” she thought. “This is his triumphal march.”. She swung a glance at her fellow captive. For a moment he nobly resisted looking at her but then he smiled, a marvellous smile which he quickly folded away and they continued with downcast eyes to process out of the office suite into a public corridor where Mr. Fielding’s persona, like a prow, cleared a passage through the flood of hospital-users that swept towards them. Abruptly he turned left, pushed open a door and disappeared inside. Without looking at Dr. Houshmand she said quietly to him, “I hope your back gets better.”
Mr. Fielding re-appeared on the threshold. “You should find it all satisfactory,” he said. Carefully keeping any compassion out of her expression (because he would interpret that in retrospect as pity) she thanked him. He headed for his department. She paused just long enough to look at Dr. Houshmand. He nodded, a little sadly. Yes, he would be magnanimous. He followed his superior back through the crowd.