They took rooms at the Goat and Periwinkle in Croyde, not far north of Barnstaple.
Much to Troy’s surprise, and most certainly to the surprise of all the locals, Anna changed for dinner. A black dress that was sleeveless, backless, and almost arseless.
“Don’t you have any of those gloves that go past your elbow?”
“Now you’re just being silly. It’s steak and kidney pud with mash, in a country pub.”
“Quite. I wondered if you’d noticed.”
With the arrival of dessert—stewed pears with condensed milk—small talk turned big.
“I could do with your advice,” she said.
Troy doubted this but said, “Of course. What about?”
“My job. The National Health Service. I joined it because I believe in it. I believe in it as firmly as Rod.”
“But?”
“But I’ve done two months and I find I’m exhausted. I’m twenty-eight and I feel fifty.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Or perhaps I won’t. Perhaps it isn’t me? Perhaps it’s the system?”
“Are you writing it off already?”
“No. We have to have a national health system. I just find myself wondering if we have to have this one, wondering if we got the mix right.”
“Rod doesn’t think we have. He told me he thinks there were too many compromises to get the consultants and the old fuddy-duddies among the general practitioners on board. He thinks it was an all-or-nothing call. The coexistence of private practice within the NHS is bonkers, according to Rod.”
“He’s right. We simply don’t have enough troops at whatever the medical equivalent of the coal face is.”
“How about ‘skin level’?”
“Sounds about right. At skin level the demand is overwhelming. Perhaps I had a sheltered upbringing. My experience of rickets comes out of a text book . . . but I can scarcely believe the state of the health of the nation . . . that so many people can be quite so ill with so many ailments that ought to be readily preventable. I find myself trying to remember what it was like before the war but I can’t remember because I didn’t know. We gels knew fuck all—’scuse my French. So much of it comes down to simple matters of nutrition, and if there’s one thing rationing did, it was to give everyone a much better, balanced diet. You might hate the national loaf but it’s full of what those idiots in advertising call ‘goodness.’”
“Then perhaps you’d better write to Mr. Strachey at the Ministry of Food and tell him we should hang on to rationing.”
“We should . . . it sounds bonkers, but we should. The question is whether I can hang on to the NHS.”
“Are you thinking you might not?”
“I’m thinking I’m a coward. I’m thinking right now that I’m glad it’s you across the table, not your brother. I’d hate to have to tell Rod they didn’t get it right. I couldn’t tell Rod they didn’t get it right. I’m a coward.”
“I just told you: he already knows.”
“If I leave . . .”
“Yes?”
“Don’t judge me. Don’t . . . try not to think the worse of me. I believed in it, I really did.”
“But?”
“But Paddy Fitz has offered me a job in Harley Street.”
“Well, that should be fun. I gather he leads a life not unlike Errol Flynn’s.”
“It gets exaggerated.”
“He asks for it.”
“Okay. He asks for it. All the same, it’s a tempting offer. It would leave me time to study nutrition. As long as the government leaves an ‘outside’ to the NHS, I may be able to achieve more on the outside.”
“If you do, I shall not utter a word of criticism.”
“Thank you.”
“But there’s a quid pro quo.”
“Oh, you . . . bastard!”
“Take me on as a patient.”
“Why, haven’t you got a GP?”
“I have one of the old fuddy-duddies, when what I really need is a doctor as discreet as Kolankiewicz for the times when I don’t have Kolankiewicz.”
She was nervous, she’d been that all evening, but now she seemed to Troy to be close to anger.
“Now why would that be? Planning on getting shot again, are you?”
In the corridor, her room to the right, his to the left, she dawdled, the nervousness of the evening wrapped like a veil around her. Dawdling led nowhere. He no more understood the next move than she did.
He asked about the book she was clutching.
A matter-of-fact question eliciting a matter-of-fact reply.
“Eustace and Hilda,” she said.
He looked at the spine. L. P. Hartley. He’d heard of the author but not the book.
He jingled his keys and said, “good night.”
Anna pecked him on the cheek, still beneath her invisible veil, and said, “Try not to get shot Troy.”