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What was wrong with him this morning?
As she watched him, the newsreader was announcing a suicide, a man found dead in his car. Deborah heard the item without paying it too much attention. It was a depressingly common event these days, and besides, she was much more concerned about Mark’s comment to her than she was about the death of an unknown man.
* * *
‘Bad night?’ Elizabeth Humphries asked her husband sympathetically as he let himself into the kitchen. He had been called out on an emergency at two o’clock, a bad accident on the bypass, a young boy on a motorbike with serious injuries.
‘With luck he’ll make it … just, although for a time it was touch and go … His left arm was severed and some ribs were broken, causing internal injuries. Luckily someone had had the forethought to pack the arm in ice. Twenty years ago, ten years ago even, it would have been impossible for us to reattach it. Surgery’s come a hell of a long way since I first started practising. Not that there’s any way I could have done an intricate operation like that.’
‘Micro-surgery is not your speciality,’ she reminded him. ‘But without all the hard work you put in fund-raising, the hospital wouldn’t have a micro-surgery unit.’
‘I know, I know, but sometimes it makes me feel old, watching these youngsters.’
‘You’re not old,’ she protested. He was three months away from his fifty-fifth birthday. She was five years younger.
They had been married for twenty-eight years and she still loved him as much now as she had done then, albeit in a different way.
‘You should be in bed,’ he told her. ‘Isn’t today one of your days at the Citizens Advice Bureau … ?’
‘Yes.’
No matter how busy he was, how overworked, he always seemed to find time to remember what she was doing. He had been the one who’d encouraged her to do voluntary work when their daughter had first left home.
She had been afraid then, convinced that her services wouldn’t be wanted. Now, with the problems caused by the recession, they were busier than they had ever been, so busy, in fact …
She frowned as she heard him saying tiredly, ‘We had another emergency tonight … not one we were able to do anything about, unfortunately. A suicide.’
‘Oh, poor man!’ she exclaimed, putting down the teapot.
‘You spoil me, you know,’ he told her as she poured him a second cup of tea.
She laughed at him. ‘I enjoy doing it. Sara rang. She thinks Katie has chickenpox.’
‘Oh, lord. Well, a few spots won’t hurt her.’
‘No, but Ian is already panicking. You know what doctors are like about their own families.’
‘I should do … after all, I am one.’
They both laughed.
‘Do you remember the time Sara fell off the swing and broke her arm? You were in a worse state than she was. “It’s broken, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll have to set it."’
‘Yes, I remember … I was shaking so much I didn’t dare touch her and you had to splint it in the end. Some surgeon. Some father.’
‘The best,’ she told him lovingly, rubbing her face against his head.
‘I hope that young lad survives,’ he told her more seriously. ‘It’s always such a damn waste when we lose a young life like that. Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this job, too emotional. A surgeon shouldn’t have emotions.’
‘If you didn’t care so much you wouldn’t be such a good surgeon,’ she told him fiercely. ‘People trust you, Richard. And with good reason.’
‘I wonder what made him do it?’
‘What? Oh—speeding … the usual thing …’
‘No, not him, the man who killed himself. Such a dreadful thing to do, to end one’s life …’
‘Mmm, it’s ended for him, but for those closest to him … for his family it’s just beginning, poor devils.’
