‘What do you mean?’
‘My work,’ he specifies when he sees my confused face.
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘I don’t need the money, and it hasn’t given me any pleasure in a long time.’
‘Is there something else you want to do? Maybe go travelling?’
‘I do want to travel. I want to go back to Ireland.’ He reaches for a glass of water. ‘I just have this yearning to go home, you know?’ I nod and give him the space to keep talking. ‘I miss Mary,’ he says softly. ‘I miss the girl I met when I was fourteen. I’m forty-seven now. How tragic is that?’
‘It’s not tragic. You were married – it’s not like she’s a girl you talked to for half an hour at a party once. And even if she were, if you miss her, you miss her.’
‘I thought I’d convince her to come to London when I got my first job in the city, but she didn’t want a life in a big heaving metropolis. She wanted to be near nature, have green fields on her doorstep and watch cows graze.’
His words are hitting a little close to home. ‘You wanted different things,’ I tell him softly. ‘Sometimes, there’s no way to bridge that gap.’
‘She never asked me to stay,’ he says sadly.
‘Would you not have left if she had?’
He pauses to reflect. ‘Truthfully? No, because I was a self-centred, hot-headed twenty-year-old, suddenly offered a yearly salary that was more money than my parents had earned in their lifetimes.’
‘Financial security is important to everyone. It’s not selfish to want that.’
‘When she didn’t ask me to stay, I took it as a sign she didn’t really love me. So I packed my bags, without looking back, and threw myself into my new life.’
‘You took it as a sign she didn’t love you, but might there have been another reason?’
‘She didn’t want to clip my wings. I know that now, but I also know if I’d stayed, I would have ended up resenting her. It was always a no-win situation.’
I nod, swallowing heavily.
Keep it together.
I can’t lose it in front of a patient. Clive’s situation is nothing like mine.
But hours after he’s gone, I can’t help thinking that it is.
The night before the wedding, Tig decides it’s a good idea to go for cocktails and dinner in Soho. It’s partly my fault because after she found out that Theo was doing some bachelor-party-adjacent drinking with friends in Leeds, she felt left out that she hadn’t had a hen night with her friends. So, I treated her and Pen to a spa day in one of the nicer West End hotels, which they both loved and now, understandably, she thinks coming back to Ealing for an early night will be an anti-climax.
Yan and I have been at work, but come to meet them for food and to keep an eye on Tig to make sure she’s home at a decent hour.
The dinner reservation is for 7 p.m., and I’m in the bar by 6.45 with a glass of chilled rosé, when Yan finds me. I haven’t seen him for almost a week because, like me, after a week away he needed to concentrate on work, and in Yan’s case, get on top of the renovations for his restaurant.
‘So, there were definite signs of heterosexual shagging in my flat when I got back on Monday night.’
I freeze. What the hell did we leave lying around? Did Mark not fix the bed?
‘I’m going to bloody kill him.’
Yan’s eyes widen. ‘That was a complete shot in the dark.’
Shit. I’ve fallen for the oldest trick in the book.
‘Sneaky bastard,’ I mutter under my breath.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
