Tea and Dog Biscuits Read Free Page B

by two men, came through a pair of swing doors that broke up the mural.
    The woman rustled across to the old man and spoke quietly to him. One of the men released the brake on the old man’s trolley and with his colleague pulled it to the swing doors. The woman paused to say to us, ‘We’ll be with you in a couple of minutes, Mrs Hawkins.’
    She knows Dorothy’s name, I thought. I was always grateful when they used my wife’s name. If they used her name it seemed as if she mattered more. It was an enormous hospital, like a small town, and there was the anxiety that you were just one of a mass of patients. But the staff worked against that. There had been worrying stories in the newspapers about the state of the National Health Service but they bore no relation to what we had seen. The images we had grown up with and held all our lives of knowledgeable doctors and kind, smiling nurses had come to life.
    Any isolated lapses had been more than made up for by the reassurance of all the professionals we had met: the quiet, calm voices; the seemingly unhurried manner, especially the doctors; the young lady doctor who had so patiently talked us through all the alternatives to what was going to happen; the surgeon who had crept into the ward late at night, unexpected after his twelve-hour shift in the operating theatre, to sit on my wife’s bed, chatting to her quietly for half an hour the night before her operation, before going home at last for his evening meal.
    I was recalling all this in the silence that had returned after the swing doors had banged together, eating up the old man.
    I was squeezing Dorothy’s hand and I stared into her eyes. In comparison with most people her green eyes seem unusually big, or it may be that she is often wide-eyed like a little girl. My own eyes were wet.
    I felt privileged that she had chosen me to be her husband. In the months past I had often wished that I could just lift the pain off her, even if only for a while. That we could have passed it backwards and forwards between us when it became too much, that we could have shared it like we had shared everything else.
    With only a couple of minutes to go, the time had come to reassure Dorothy, although I knew that, typically, she would be more worried about me than about herself. I couldn’t start with what I wanted to say, so I said instead, ‘It’s true, you know – you should have been a nurse. You have an angelic face, my Dorothy. If it was me that was in hospital and I opened my eyes and saw you, I would think I had died and gone to heaven.’ Without meaning it the dreaded word had come into the conversation. Now I was prompted to say what I had to.
    â€˜If… if this doesn’t work out… I won’t do anything silly. I’ll keep myself busy. I won’t waste my life.’
    â€˜You’ll find somebody else. You must get remarried.’
    â€˜That’s not going to happen,’ I said.
    We were both crying.
    This was more than two minutes. Is it going to be delayed again? We had never got this far before. I closed my eyes and memories from the last few weeks appeared before me. The endless discussions about whether she was strong enough for this ‘procedure’. The waiting: When would we have the result of the test that would tell us? Would the test be decisive? What did the test say? Should she have another test? What if we waited another twenty-four hours? Then the relief when a decision was made: Yes, they think her heart is strong enough.
    One of the swing doors was pushed back for the woman in full theatre gear to put her head round.
    â€˜Nearly there,’ she said. She screwed up her face in a kindly gesture of sympathetic pain. ‘Sorry.’
    The door closed with a bump. We were left to fill more time.
    I looked down at the floor. What would I do if I was left on my own?
    Dorothy had read my thoughts.
    â€˜Rescue work.’
    I looked