WHILE GOLDBLATT WAS SITTING in the doctors’ office on the seventh floor, pondering his awful discovery of the Broderip–Anderssen Principle, Professor Small was sitting in her own office on the first floor. She too was pondering. Not the Broderip–Anderssen Principle – of which she hadn’t yet heard – but its discoverer. As she pondered, she swivelled her chair around and stared at something stuck on the wall.
If anyone had been able to see the Prof when she was alone in her room, they would have often seen her in this posture. At first glance, the thing on the wall looked like a huge ruler made out of cardboard. It was about eight feet high, and numbered in hundreds up to 1800, which was written in bold figures at the top, with closely spaced lines dividing each hundred into units of ten. A thick column of red rose from the bottom to about half its height.
The Prof herself had conceived, designed, and created this scale many years earlier, after an epidemiologist called Dr Murdoch in Glasgow had estimated for her that there were approximately 1800 patients with Fuertler’s Syndrome in Britain. It was the Prof herself who had progressively filled in the lower part of the scale with scarlet paint as the number of Fuertler’s patients on her clinic list grew. Month after month, year after year, she had raised the level of the red column, adding a new band of paint whenever she had accumulated another ten patients. If you looked closely, you could see the lines where each band of paint had been added to the one below it, like the rings on a tree telling the history of its growth. The red column had reached 960. It had been at 960 for over five months, and the Prof still had to acquire another three patients before she could get her tin of scarlet paint out of the drawer in her desk and take it to 970. And above 970 there was still such a long way to go. There was so much white, an empty, yawning wasteland begging to be filled in. And the Prof wanted to fill it in. She yearned to fill it in. She could never rest, she knew, until the very last bit of white had been obliterated, and the column of red rose all the way to the top.
The Fuertler’s Scale was a great motivator for the Prof. But it could also be a great depressor. Like the proverbial glass of water, sometimes it looked half full, and sometimes half empty, reflecting the Prof’s own mood. It was also an incredibly silly object to have on the wall of her office, like some kind of display marking the progress of a church charity appeal, and the Prof felt embarrassed when people came into her room and saw it. She suspected that they talked about it later. Sometimes she wondered if she had outgrown it. But can you ever entirely outgrow the icons and amulets you have clung to in earlier, more desperate times? You can disown them to others, but can you disown them to yourself?
Andrea Small had tried once to take it down, but simply hadn’t been able to. She had never tried again. After all, she had created it. Sometimes she talked to it. ‘Scale,’ she would say when everything was getting too much for her, ‘what am I going to do?’ The Scale never answered, of course. The Prof didn’t expect it to. She wasn’t mad, after all.
In short, the Prof’s relationship with the Scale was probably the most profound emotional involvement in her life. It was certainly the most complex.
When the Scale seemed half full, it was like a comrade in arms, an old, trusted girlfriend who had been with her from the very start and was the only one who could really understand everything she had been through. And when it was half empty, it was like an old, estranged girlfriend who had turned on her and not only knew every secret of what she had been through, but mocked her for it with all the cutting cruelty that only an estranged girlfriend can wield.
When the world looked at her, Andrea imagined to herself, it didn’t see her doubts, only the perfect façade she projected to the outside. It saw only the cool, efficient, learned, and thoughtful scientist, the sensitive doctor, the visionary professor, and the elegant dresser. As Imelda Marcos had been to shoes, so Andrea Small was to silk scarves, preferably from Liberty. She always wore one draped over her shoulders, or, if she was wearing a white coat, bunched around her neck. The silk scarf, she felt, was a central element in the image she portrayed to the world, alluding to her exquisitely feminine taste and sensitivity, while underlining her seriousness and position for all the world to see
But the doubts were there. Bottled up inside her, they boiled and bubbled, frequently threatening to explode, even as she maintained the perfect façade for the sake of her patients, and even as the column of red on the Scale climbed steadily up the wall of her office like some Dorian Gray thermometer of her inner uncertainty. Would the column rise any further? Nothing lasts for ever. As it had risen, so, one day, would it fall?
The perfect façade was just that, a façade that she pushed along in front of her like a heavy shield on castors. And the constant effort of pushing it meant that she could never forget what really lay behind it.
It had been like that ever since the day twenty-nine years earlier when Andrea Small arrived in Liverpool to start her medical training and found herself surrounded by big, loud, brash boys who had never voluntarily admitted ignorance in their lives, many of whom later ended up as alcoholics, adulterers, and professors. But it made no difference how they ended up. She had been thrown on to the back foot from the very beginning, and had never recovered.
No matter how much medicine Andrea knew, it was never enough when faced with someone louder and noisier than herself, even when she knew that person was an inveterate bluffer and liar and never spent any time learning anything properly. She was always waiting for the moment when there would be harmonious discussion and a peaceful interchange of ideas undisturbed by the blistering heat of rivalry. But that utopian time never arrived. When she was a medical student, she thought all the bluff and bluster would end when she graduated and became a member of the profession. And when she was a house officer, she thought it would end when she was a senior house officer and had full registration. And when she was a senior house officer, she persuaded herself that surely it would end when she had passed her specialist exams and was a registrar. And so on. And finally she realized that it would never end and that the cruel, caustic world she inhabited was the one in which she would always live, a world of incomprehensible bravado in which she was the only one, it seemed, who was aware of her own deficiencies, and, like some kind of self-nominated modern-day Christ, had taken on the burden of self-doubt for everyone else.
This was wrong, of course, as all the alcoholism and adultery later proved. But these weren’t ways of coping with self-doubt, they were ways of seeking oblivion from it. Whereas Andrea, who rarely drank and hardly ever committed adultery, wasn’t able to find oblivion from her self-doubt, and therefore experienced it down to the very core of her being.
She picked her way gingerly amongst the loud, brash, future adulterers and alcoholics in Liverpool, bouncing like an easily bruised pinball between their blustering buffers, and on through specialist training in a succession of hospitals. Somehow she survived, although as to the cost, the final account was still in the making. She learned to avoid, evade, ignore, and repress, and these skills, combined with her natural abilities to insinuate and ingratiate, got her through. Thirteen years after that first day in Liverpool, she was appointed as a consultant in London on a unit run by a physician called Dr Edward Wilkinson.
But that wasn’t the end of her torment. It wasn’t the beginning of the end. It wasn’t even the end of the beginning.
Dr Wilkinson was a prickly, old-style general physician who prided himself, erroneously, on his ability to treat everything. His unit wasn’t exactly a powerhouse in the hospital, more of a backwater where little had changed for decades or even centuries. But Edward Wilkinson was a pillar of the local medical community and, like any pillar, no one dared to knock him down. It was likely that he had selected Andrea Small, after the previous young consultant on the unit had fled to New Zealand, because he wanted someone he could dominate, someone who wasn’t going to criticize the antique practices he still employed – exactly the opposite type of person, oddly enough, to Dr Morris, whom Andrea would choose when her own turn came to select a junior consultant seventeen years later. And Dr Wilkinson, who was an excellent judge of character as well as an accomplished bully, had chosen well. He quickly exposed Andrea’s insecurities as a new consultant and picked at them incessantly, ensuring that they would never heal. He regularly humiliated her in front of the registrar and house officer on ward rounds with complicated questions that he looked up deliberately on Tuesday afternoons, and asked her to examine patients with subtle physical signs that she invariably failed to detect. Ducking and weaving to avoid the flak that Dr Wilkinson spat at her, she never really had a chance to develop the manner and cool confidence of a consultant. She lost faith in her ability to diagnose any but the most flagrant and advanced cases of the most common diseases. When Andrea looked back on that time now, it was barely believable that she had survived, let alone that she went on to rise to a professorship.
It was Fuertler’s Syndrome that came to her rescue. Fuertler’s Syndrome – a disease so vanishingly rare that only 1800 people in all of Britain were estimated to have it – that finally allowed her to create a façade that would stand up to the unrelenting corrosiveness of the world that surrounded her.
If one didn’t know the details, one might easily be forgiven for thinking that Andrea Small’s ascent to a professorship had taken place according to some cunning and prescient plan that she had made up as a medical student, and that her decision to specialise in Fuertler’s Syndrome was the most cunning and prescient thing about it. As time had gone by, she had begun began to speak as if she actually had made the plan, saying things like: ‘When I first decided to start treating Fuertler’s patients...’ But the truth was that she had never ‘first decided’ anything. Instead, she had inherited a Fuertler’s patient from Dr Wilkinson, as many other junior consultants had inherited a Fuertler’s patient or two from a senior consultant on their unit who had got sick of seeing them turn up year after year with their mystifying skin lesions that never went away. The difference was that Andrea Small then inherited a second Fuertler’s patient from a senior consultant on another unit, who referred the patient to her on the flimsy pretext that, having recently taken on one Fuertler’s patient, she obviously had an interest in the disease. This too happened to other junior consultants, but having a patient pressed on you from another unit wasn’t the same as having to take one from your own boss. Even junior consultants had the right – and some in the profession might say the responsibility – to send the patient straight back to the unit they had come from. But Andrea was too unassertive to rebel against this flagrant act of exploitation and resentfully acquiesced. Doctors, like most mammals, can smell weakness. Acquiescence in accepting an unwanted patient is like posting an advertisement for more. Two additional Fuertler’s patients followed, then another, by which time Andrea Small had accumulated the entire Fuertler’s caseload of the hospital, and had become, to the amusement of the consultant body, the hospital’s Fuertler’s ‘expert’. Andrea thought this was merely one more joke that life was playing on her.
But at some point she began to realize that this apparent joke might not be a joke at all. In fact, it might turn out to be the best thing that had ever happened to her. People still laughed about her being the hospital’s Fuertler’s expert, but to her own surprise, after a couple of years, she saw that this was precisely what she had become. A couple of newly diagnosed Fuertler’s patients turned up on her doorstep. She began to get referrals from other consultants around London, only too happy to offload their Fuertler’s patients to the new expert down the road. To everyone’s amazement, she took them.
In those days, before she became a great Fuertlerologist, Andrea Small still had enough grasp of reality to recognize that Fuertler’s Syndrome isn’t a very important disease in the great medical scheme of things. But at least it was a disease. More importantly, it was her disease. She began to understand how precious is a disease which one can call one’s own. Andrea’s expertise in Fuertler’s Syndrome gave her an independent position from which to face Dr Wilkinson’s assaults. The frequency with which Dr Wilkinson attacked her over it, mocking and deriding this foolish, unimportant illness, showed how valuable it was. Andrea realized that the very deficiencies of her disease, its rarity and unpopularity, could be its strengths. They concealed a small yet apparently perfectly usable door to security and success.
The more Dr Wilkinson laughed and mocked her for it, the more secure she felt. Dr Wilkinson could laugh all he liked. Fuertler’s Syndrome was hers! Hers! It was beyond his poisoned grasp. One day he would be gone, but Fuertler’s Syndrome would remain.
Eventually Dr Wilkinson did go. He marched crabbily off into retirement, and Andrea Small, with her thirty Fuertler’s patients, inherited the unit. And thus she might have remained, head of a small, unexceptional unit with an unusually large caseload of Fuertler’s mixed in with the usual panoply of diabetics, heart failures, bronchitics, arthritics, and the others who make up the clientele of a general medical unit, if not for the arrival on the scene of Margaret Hayes.
Andrea Small would never forget the day she met the person who was to play such a large part in her life.
A big, solid woman with over-rouged cheeks and dyed brown hair in a beehive hairdo knocked on her door. The big woman came into her office, which wasn’t much bigger than a cupboard in those days, took one look, and said: ‘We’ll have to do something about this.’
‘About what?’
‘About this office, Dr Small,’ said Margaret Hayes. ‘It isn’t big enough to swing a cat in.’
Andrea was half inclined to throw this big, bustling, beehived busybody out of the office to which she seemed to have taken such a dislike.
Fortunately, Margaret Hayes didn’t give her the chance. ‘I have come to you with a proposition,’ she said.
‘What proposition?’ asked Andrea, wondering if it had anything to do with cats.
‘My patients have spoken very highly of you, Dr Small,’ said Margaret Hayes, who readily adopted a proprietorial tone.
‘Which patients?’ asked Andrea, feeling confused.
‘Mine,’ said Margaret Hayes. ‘A number of them attend your clinic. The Foundation feels that it is time to make a commitment to one hospital as a centre of excellence.’
‘Which Foundation?’ asked Andrea.
‘The Fuertler’s Foundation, Dr Small. I am its secretary, and I have come to make a proposition. The Foundation feels that the time has come for a centre of excellence for Fuertler’s patients. Fuertler’s patients are being denied the excellence that other patients have. Is this right? Do you have the ability to head that centre of excellence, Dr Small? Think about it.’
Andrea thought about it. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Thus, in one exquisite moment of mutual bluff, a partnership was born.
Margaret Hayes had been in charge of the Fuertler’s Foundation for all of two months, having taken control from some drooping lily who had been running it so effectively that Andrea Small, the only doctor in London who would confess to having an interest in Fuertler’s Syndrome, had never even heard of it. Its membership numbered all of eleven. This was something Margaret Hayes didn’t tell Andrea on that fateful day. Andrea, on the other hand, knew as much about running a centre of excellence as she knew about performing cardiac surgery, which is something she didn’t tell Margaret Hayes. Margaret Hayes had perceived very clearly that she required a medical alliance to cement the place of the Foundation in the hearts of the nation’s Fuertler’s sufferers, preferably with someone pliant, needy, and undemanding, and within a minute of meeting Andrea Small she guessed that she had found the right person. Andrea, who knew nothing about alliances and had never even thought about what kind she might want to have, merely sensed that something exceptional was on offer – even if the offer was being made by a big, brash blusterer who had turned up in her office like a beehived version of the boys she had known in Liverpool – and she could either take the chance or spend the rest of her life regretting it. They were both right.
In short, it was Margaret Hayes who was responsible for the fact that Andrea Small’s cunning and prescient plan to become a professor – the one she had never actually made – moved ahead as if on schedule.
Margaret Hayes set about developing the Foundation with skull-crunching energy. How could she rest while her people – people with Fuertler’s Syndrome – were in need? Not one of them, not a single one, was getting care that was good enough. How could they? There was no care that was good enough. The Foundation was their only hope for improvement, their one chance, and the responsibility of it weighed so heavily on Margaret Hayes’s shoulders that she sometimes almost groaned with pleasure.
The Fuertler’s Foundation grew, and, as its satellite, so did Andrea Small’s unit. As Margaret broadcast the news to her growing membership, Andrea’s fame as a Fuertlerologist spread over England’s green and pleasant land. And over Scotland and Wales too. Patients began to mention her name to their consultants, wondering whether they could be referred to her. Their own consultants couldn’t have been happier to oblige. The red column on the Scale in her office began its dizzying rise, slowly at first, then accelerating. Patients streamed towards Andrea’s clinic from all over the country. And every patient who streamed through the door brought an extra payment to the hospital from their local funding authority. For the first time, Andrea Small noticed, the hospital administrators listened to what she was saying. For the first time, they began to agree with the things she wanted to do.
She set about the total Fuertlerization of her unit. Throwing her growing financial weight around to the full, she progressively divested her unit of its general medical functions. First, she turned her own clinic list into a Fuertler’s-only zone, leaving other patients to be seen by the SR and registrar. Then she squeezed funding out of the managers for a couple of specialist assistants to help in her Fuertler’s clinic as the number of referrals continued to rise. She stealthily transferred old non-Fuertler’s patients, many dating back to the days of Dr Wilkinson, to other units, employing any pretext she could concoct. Then she achieved her greatest coup. Over howls of protest from her fellow consultants, she succeeded in withdrawing her unit from responsibility for emergency medical patients. The labour of her junior doctors was still allocated into the rosters for the overnight on-call slogs, but the patients her doctors admitted went to other units, and Andrea herself had no responsibility for their ongoing care. With this step, the process was complete. Other than the clinics of the registrar and SR, and the occasional admissions that came from them, the unit had been Fuertlerized. Andrea herself was insulated virtually completely from contact with any other disease, which had been her dream ever since Dr Wilkinson had pulverized her faith in her ability as a general consultant. The sixteen beds of her unit on the seventh floor were as a shrine to Jacob Fuertler, occupied almost exclusively by the patients he had loosed on the world.
But what were they doing there?
Other than the tiny percentage of patients with severe pulmonary fibrosis, Fuertler’s patients had hardly ever needed admission before Andrea Small’s unit had turned into a centre of excellence. Not that her patients with pulmonary fibrosis weren’t important to the Prof. They were. The fact that Fuertler’s patients could get such a grave condition, and could even die of it – even if it was only a fraction of a percentage point who did – somehow made Fuertler’s Syndrome a more important disease than it would have been if all there was to it were blotches on the skin and an occasional blip in the heartbeat. But Andrea rarely had severely ill patients like that on her ward. To be honest, she wasn’t altogether comfortable with the thought that they were lying around in her beds and might actually die in one of them. To be even more honest – which was something she was prepared to be only in the locked privacy of her office, for obvious reasons – they scared her witless, and reminded her of those horrible days with Dr Wilkinson when she had people dying of heart attacks and lung cancers and emphysema and all kinds of awful things all over the place and had no idea what to do about them. She therefore had her patients with pulmonary fibrosis transferred immediately to a respiratory specialist called Dr de Witte at the East Surrey Hospital, despite the fact that the East Surrey Hospital was eight miles away and there was a perfectly fine clutch of respiratory physicians right there in the hospital with a unit only two floors below her own ward. A unit on which Dr de Witte himself had once worked, and which he had left a few years earlier after failing to get the appointment as unit head. The reason that Andrea continued to send her patients to him, even after he had left, was a mystery to all but those who knew the most intimate details of the Prof’s private life – or would have been, had they not spread such scurrilous rumours about her and Tom de Witte, a number of which were definitely untrue.
But what about the other patients, the ones not blessed with pulmonary fibrosis? Were they never to be admitted? Margaret Hayes insisted that they should be. Andrea agreed. She devised a six-monthly work-up of fifty-four tests looking for every conceivable problem that was known to develop in Fuertler’s Syndrome and for quite a few that weren’t. There were ECGs and echocardiograms and thyroid scans and pulmonary function tests and X-rays and so many blood tests that any patient who came in was guaranteed to take home at least a borderline case of anaemia as a souvenir of their stay.
There was no particular reason that Andrea had chosen six months as the interval for the work-up. There were no scientific papers that demonstrated that work-ups at six-month intervals, or twelve-month intervals, or any other intervals, increased the rate at which Fuertler’s problems were detected or, more importantly, improved the way in which these problems could be treated, and Andrea herself didn’t initiate any studies to verify this. Six months just sounded about right.
The hospital management didn’t object to the work-ups, whatever the scientific evidence or lack of it. Why would they? Every patient admitted to the ward brought a payment that was far larger than the payment when the patient merely came to clinic.
Naturally, the work-ups were an opportunity for important scientific investigation. The progress and test results of every one of Andrea Small’s patients were carefully recorded on data sheets contained in special folders. As often as possible, Andrea got one of her SRs to write up the findings into scientific papers that were usually rejected by the more reputable journals because of poor statistical method.
With financial support from the Fuertler’s Foundation, Andrea also set up a little one-room lab and got funding for a Russian post-doctoral fellow called Bolkovsky to produce papers that were published with her name on them. And yet not even this was enough for Margaret Hayes. As time went by, it became intolerable to her that as the head of the Fuertler’s Foundation’s centre of excellence, Andrea Small was still not a professor. It was just one more example of the discrimination that the entire medical profession practised against her disease.
Andrea didn’t disagree. Even after all she had done, she felt that her colleagues still didn’t take Fuertler’s Syndrome seriously enough. But Andrea wasn’t sure that trying to secure a professorship was the right answer. She knew that Professor Dennis, the Dean of the Medical School, and Professor Gold, the Director of the Department of Medicine, didn’t consider her research or her contribution to the medical school to be of sufficiently high standard to justify a professorship, and she didn’t think it would improve the seriousness with which her colleagues took Fuertler’s Syndrome if it became known that she had been rejected for one. Not to mention the seriousness with which they took her, which wasn’t all that it could be, either.
Margaret Hayes knew better. Without even consulting her, Margaret spoke to the hospital’s Director of Finance. The Director of Finance recognized an irresistible argument when he heard one, especially one that was coupled with a threat to take away the very thing that made it irresistible. The Small unit had become one of the hospital’s most lucrative earners. Shepherded by Margaret Hayes, the Fuertler’s faithful flocked to it from the four corners of the country. But as Margaret didn’t fail to point out to the Director of Finance, there were other Fuertler’s practitioners in the country – one or two, anyway – including a certain Dr Jenkins in Leicester who was champing at the bit – literally champing – to receive the Fuertler Foundation’s recommendation.
The Director of Finance spoke to the Chief Executive. The Chief Executive, who had recently had to sit through an Andrea Small tirade on the allocation of physiotherapy sessions, didn’t think much of her. He thought more of the Dean of his Medical School, whose opinion he trusted on academic matters, and he thought more of his Director of the Department of Medicine, whose opinion he trusted on clinical matters. But he also thought a lot of his Director of Finance, whose opinion he trusted on financial matters. The campaign for Andrea Small’s professorship, which might easily have been misconstrued as a professional question, actually turned out to be a financial question. Or a question of financial blackmail, to put it another way. Or financial common sense, to use a less pejorative term.
So Andrea Small became a professor, exactly on schedule with the cunning and prescient career plan that she had never made. But did it change anything? Did it drain the acid pool of self-doubt that boiled and bubbled behind the façade? Or did it make it boil and bubble even faster? By now Andrea had become a leading light in the tiny international world of Fuertlerologists. She spoke at conferences, she wrote review articles. Yet despite all of this, despite everything she had done, despite the fact that her unit was indisputably the only centre of excellence for Fuertler’s Syndrome in the entire country and also happened to be one of the highest earning units in the hospital, despite her newly acquired professorial status, Andrea Small had a strong suspicion that her consultant colleagues still didn’t take her seriously. They didn’t sufficiently respect her, nor the disease to which she had dedicated her life.
Much of her energy over the past couple of years had been spent in a drive to make sure that they did. She had manoeuvred to achieve the appointment of a second consultant, Dr Morris, and only now had successfully completed a campaign for a senior house officer post to be funded on her unit. And yet still her suspicion was not allayed. Like a meerkat constantly scanning the horizon, Andrea was alert to every nuance and sign of disrespect, and often detected them. Even the new locum registrar she had just employed, Dr Goldblatt, after just one or two brief conversations, gave her that same horrible feeling of not being respected that she had felt so often before.
It was at times like this, when she felt insecure, that she would turn around and gaze at the Scale, hoping it was going to be one of those days when it appeared half full rather than half empty, hoping that it was going to be one of those days when it was like a trusted comrade rather than a treacherous friend.
She gazed at the Scale now, thinking about Malcolm Goldblatt. He was only a locum registrar, and the circumstances being what they were – the SR having walked out with hardly so much as a week’s notice – she had needed someone in a hurry. He had faxed his CV in response to the urgent advertisement that the hospital had placed, and it was all done over the phone. Not a proper interview, nothing even approaching the exhaustive selection process before a full panel that would have been required for a substantive job. Considering the CVs of the other candidates who had applied, she thought she had been lucky to get him.
So what was it about him? A certain insolence. She had found him drinking coffee in the doctors’ office. Nothing wrong with drinking coffee in the doctors’ office, of course. Everyone did it. But the way he had been drinking it...
And the conversation on the phone about the poor patient who needed to come in from clinic. What was that about? She could hardly imagine a more unreasonable response. What was wrong with the boy? Perhaps he had misunderstood her. Yes, a misunderstanding.
No, it wasn’t a misunderstanding. He had actually told her to send the patient to Emergency. To Emergency! On the surface, certainly, perfectly sensible, and probably exactly what he was supposed to do according to the hospital handbook, if such a thing existed – but completely absurd! She had had to call Emma, who had told her he had some problem with manipulating beds, of all things. For heaven’s sake, what was he there to do if not manipulate beds?
Why couldn’t they all be like Emma? Compliant, if not shamelessly sycophantic, and terrified of rebuke. Why couldn’t they all be like her? But they weren’t. Very few, anyway.
Dr Goldblatt clearly wasn’t.
The Prof got up. She went to a filing cabinet and pulled out his CV.
Yes, it was impressive. Undergraduate degree at Cambridge. First class honours. HO and SHO jobs at good London hospitals. First part exam for the Royal College of Physicians, then the second part... Then he’d gone off to study law. Law! Honestly, whatever was he thinking? First class honours again, then a stint at some kind of non-governmental organization. Then back to medicine. The Prof shook her head. Medicine, law, medicine... What was wrong with the boy? He must be intelligent. Intelligent, certainly. But peculiar.
The Prof swivelled around and gazed at the Scale, thinking about the conversation she had had with Goldblatt on the phone. Perhaps she should have a talk to him. Perhaps she ought to say something to him about it.
She looked back at Goldblatt’s CV. She thought about the way he had been drinking his coffee, the sound of his voice on the phone when she had called him in clinic.
The finely honed skills of avoidance and evasion that had served Andrea Small so well since the early years of her career were always primed to kick in. So deeply ingrained were they that she was no longer even aware when she was practising them.
No, she thought. No need for a talk. It was definitely a misunderstanding.