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He was wrong about that. Something else turned out to be the last thing he needed. When Mickey came out onto the street he found that his car had been ticketed and clamped.

T
wo weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat in her doctor’s surgery, waiting for her name to appear on the electronic screen behind her. It was a Monday, and the surgery was even busier than usual. There were no seats available facing the screen, so every time she heard the beep indicating that another patient was summoned, she had to turn and look and see if her turn had come.

Petunia didn’t much like that she had to do that. When her name came up she would get up and go through to see her doctor and then everyone would know that she was Mrs Petunia Howe, whether she wanted them to know who she was or not, and her name would then stay up there until the next name came up in lights on the board. She was no spring chicken and to turn her neck enough to see she had to swivel the whole top half of her body, and although every other person in the facing-away seats was doing this too, including the ones who were listening to earphones and talking on their mobiles – two of the people doing that were sitting directly beneath a ‘No Mobile Phones’ sign, which was so awful it was almost funny – it still made her feel self-conscious. There was also the fact that the whole reason she had come to see the doctor in the first place was because of these funny dizzy spells, her ‘turns’ as she called them – she had had several more since that time in the newsagent’s, though mercifully all the subsequent episodes had been at home, which was one blessing, and never when she
was on the stairs, which was another. But twisting her neck every minute or two was starting to make her feel funny and the last thing she wanted was to keel over here in the surgery. And all to save the doctor the ten seconds’ effort involved in getting up, walking to the door, and calling out the patient’s name – not going over and actually addressing the patient, of course, since there was no chance the doctor would have any sense of who they were. In the last half an hour – the half an hour since her appointment was scheduled to start – Miss Linda Wong, Mr Denton Matarato, Miss Shoonua Barkshire, Mr T. Khan, and Master Cosmo Dent had gone through to see their doctors, but Petunia was still sitting there. She had long since finished the copy of the
Daily Mail
she’d found on the table beside her and was agonising over whether it would be bad manners to fill in the quick crossword in a communal newspaper; she rather thought it was.

Although Petunia was not a grumbler and a complainer-about-modern-life – Albert had done enough for both of them, for several lifetimes – there was nothing much about her doctor’s that she liked. For one thing, she did not like that it wasn’t really her doctor at all – there wasn’t such a person as ‘her’ GP. In the last twenty years, though she had at one time or another seen more or less every doctor at the practice, she had never seen the same doctor twice in a row. There was something diminishing and impersonal about that and it certainly did not reduce the amount of time that the doctor would spend looking at the computer screen and reading about her, as opposed to looking at her and listening to what she had to say. Petunia disliked feeling such an alien, such an exotic, sitting here in the surgery, where everyone was in Lycra, or crop tops, or T-shirts, or texting, or nodding to just-audible music, or wearing headscarves (two women) or in full concealing hijab (one) or speaking Eastern European languages to each other or over their mobiles. We’re all in this together: Petunia was the right age for that once to have been a very important idea, a defining idea, about what it meant to be British. Was it still true? Were they in it together? Could she look around the surgery and truthfully say that?

Finally, finally, ‘Ms Petuna How’ came up on the board. Close enough. Petunia carefully got to her feet – that was something she was
more and more wary about now – and moved through. She could feel people looking at her, never her favourite sensation. A man moved his legs out of the way to let her through but the fact that he did it without looking up from his newspaper or in any other way acknowledging her presence made it even ruder than ignoring her would have been. Albert would have had something to say to him.

The doctor’s door was open. When Petunia knocked to let him know she was there, he said, ‘Hi! Come in,’ while reading something on his computer screen. She went in and sat down. He turned towards her, smiling, and she knew what he was going to say:

‘Petunia, what can I do for you today?’

Dr Canseca, this was. Petunia had had him a couple of times before. His name was Latin but he wasn’t, not in any way you could notice: he had fair hair combed sideways and always wore a tie and pale V-neck sweaters which looked as though they were made of cashmere, even though the surgery was never underheated and often boiling. If pressed, on the basis of appearances, Petunia would have put his age at about seventeen, though she supposed he must be thirty or so.

She began to describe her symptoms, the dizziness and fainting and general sense of being under the weather, and after she had spoken for about fifteen seconds, during which time he was nodding and making encouraging noises, Dr Canseca turned to his keyboard and, still nodding, began to type. Petunia had worked as a secretary in her youth and it was interesting how things had changed so that the person doing the typing was now the more important one.

Petunia came to the end of saying what was wrong and stopped talking. The doctor typed on in silence for a minute.

‘Any weakness on one side or the other? Funny tingling feelings?’

Petunia shook her head. Dr Canseca asked some more questions. Then he asked if he could take Petunia’s blood pressure and listen to her chest. She had dreaded this but had also prepared for it by wearing, under her coat and jacket and cardigan, a blouse which was easy to unbutton. She took off the various layers and was suddenly glad of the overheated room. Funny to think her breasts had once been her prize asset. Her skin felt as if it wanted to goose-bump and mottle, but did
not. Should have asked for a woman doctor, she thought – but asking for things at the doctor’s did not come naturally to Petunia, she was the wrong type and wrong age. Dr Canseca did not ask her to take her top off but instead slid the stethoscope up inside her blouse. The metal was freezing of course but at least she still had her top on. She breathed in and out, her breaths sounding a little rackety and thready even to her. Then the doctor took her blood pressure. Then he took it again. Then he sat looking at his computer screen for a little while.

‘You’re not on any medication, are you?’ It wasn’t really a question so Petunia didn’t answer. He began typing. While he did that Petunia read the poster behind his head, about safe sex. There were also posters about the different health risks you could be exposed to travelling to far-off parts of the world. Then he turned to Petunia.

‘Well, you seem all right, but I’m just going to send you off for a couple of tests. When somebody faints, sometimes it’s a sign that everything’s not right with their ticker. Their hearts, your heart. Your blood pressure is on the low side. That’s a good thing! You lot live for ages! So, I’m writing off to Tommies, and they’ll send you a letter, and you call and make an appointment, and we’ll get it all fixed. All right?’

And that was it. Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually having something to worry about. When she came out feeling no less anxious, as this time, something had gone wrong. The basic contract had been broken. Petunia came out through the surgery, again feeling slightly self-conscious – too self-conscious to go into the loo, on the other side of the room beside the door, even though she could have done with a pee before the walk home in the cold. She braced herself and went out through the two sets of sliding doors into the December afternoon, with the air cold and damp and the traffic roaring past. It would take about fifteen minutes to walk home. Petunia pulled her hat down, tightened her scarf around her neck, checked that her coat was properly buttoned, adjusted the way her handbag lay over her shoulder, put her hands into her pockets, and set out.

Albert had not been a big fan of her worrying. It was one of the things he would lecture her about, which was no help at all, since all that did was make her less free to express her worries, so she kept them to herself, which had the effect of magnifying them. Which made her more fretful, which in turn irritated Albert more. And it had been hypocritical of Albert too, since he had so many bees in his own bonnet, especially about money, and tax, and savings, and the untrustworthiness of banks and insurance companies and credit-card companies and the government and everybody else, and the way that you couldn’t be too careful. He wouldn’t even have a cashpoint card, because he didn’t trust machines or PIN numbers; after his death their daughter Mary had had to teach her how to use one. That was one of the many, many things she had had to learn to do for herself after Albert dropped dead.

A lot of those things had been to do with money. What it came down to was that Albert, like lots of people, had had a streak of madness running through his character, like a seam running through a rock. He was not, in general, mad; but when the subject was money, he could not be relied on to be sane. For him, money was out of perspective, both all-important (because it at times seemed to be all he thought about) but also completely out of step with reality, so that he wouldn’t do normal things like use a bank or have a pension; he would never pay a bill before, not the reminder, and not the final reminder, but the threat of legal action. It was exhausting; it was mad. But even someone like Albert, obsessively miserly though he became, had to pay gas and electricity bills. He had once mentioned the possibility of getting one or other of these utilities put on a coin-operated meter, and that was one of the few times Petunia had put her foot down with him, telling him no very firmly and then putting up with two weeks’ silence while he sulked. And then after a fortnight’s huff he had got up in the morning perfectly calm and behaving as if none of it had ever happened. One of the effects of this was that she now missed him in particular when she had to do the practical things that he had taken all on himself, the water bills and the rates and checking that her pension had been paid and worrying about the plumbing. All of these were a
bore and a burden in themselves and they also made Petunia miss the man who was missing.

It was funny that most of the specific stories she could tell about Albert made him sound awful – the money stuff, the arguments he’d get into with people, his sheer impossibility. He could make a point of principle about absolutely anything. The things that had been good about him, his warmth and kindness and unpredictable sensitivity, the way he’d do good deeds for people and not tell her about them (loans of cash, a lift home, writing letters when people were bereaved), the sense that he was basically a loving man – those translated much less well into stories that you could tell. His good side had been fully on show only to her.

Petunia was now passing the posh butcher’s in the high street. There was a queue, as there often was – the new people who lived in the area, unthinkingly rich. In the window a turkey had been decorated with a gold ribbon and a crown. At its feet was a sign saying ‘Order Me’.

Walking past the bright lights and tat of the imminent holiday, Petunia thought about the way that Albert had loved Christmas. You would have expected him to be Scrooge, but he loved every bit of the ritual, from the advent calendar to the hymns to the hats to the Queen’s Speech (which he enjoyed being rude about: ‘the amazing thing about that family is the way every single member of them gets slightly stupider every year’). He loved seeing Mary and her children at Christmas, even though the holiday made their daughter revert to being a stroppy fifteen-year-old again, silent and grumpy and always judging everything. She couldn’t blame Mary for moving away to Essex. She needed to get away. She didn’t have to be quite so far away now that her father was dead and her mother lived alone in a big house, but that was her choice and Petunia understood it without liking it.

Albert had been a difficult man, there was no denying that. She had spent more time and energy coping with her husband than a person ought to do. When he died, part of that energy ought to have gone into something else. Her life should have opened up a bit, if only in a private feeling of being a little freer. It hadn’t and that, Petunia had
to admit, was her own fault. She had blamed Albert for a certain narrowness in the way they lived, but she did not live any more broadly in his absence. Perhaps the problem was that she hadn’t had a clear idea of what that broader life might have been: travel, or going out more often, or, or … what, exactly? Petunia had always liked colour but she didn’t feel she had had much of it in her own life. Or rather she felt she had had all too much of one single colour, grey. Since Albert’s death, Petunia would sometimes have the feeling that she could look back over her life and see nothing but grey. From a moral point of view, it is not possible to be too good; but from the point of view of daily living, making your way in the world and demanding your share of its good things, there is a way of being good which does not help you. Petunia had some of that too-quiet, too-undemanding goodness. Given a choice between someone else’s needs and her own, she would always opt to put the other person’s needs first. And this was one of the things which now made her sometimes feel that everything about her life had been spent in a narrow range of monotones.

Now she was at the end of her own street, Pepys Road, where she had been born and where if she had any say in it she would die. She must have taken this trip ten thousand times in her life. She had done it in a thousand different moods; in fact one of the happiest days of her life had been when she made this very same walk, back from the doctors’, on the day she found out she was pregnant. She had gone in the door sad, she had gone in exhausted, she had gone in feeling flat, fat, sexy, giggly, furious, absent-minded, tipsy from holiday sherry, in a flat rush to get to the loo, in every physical or mental state possible. She had gone through a phase of being frightened that robbers would rush up behind her as her attention was on opening the door, and grab her bag or force their way into the house; but that fear, and others like it, had long since passed. It was still the same house and still the same door and still the same her walking through it.