‘Yes! It was a light bulb moment, Cat, it really was. She was so interesting, she really made her case –’

‘Of course she did – she was recruiting.’

‘Oh. Yes, I guess.’

‘And why not? Listen, it’s easy to be swept away by a pitch from someone passionate about their specialty, but have you thought about it and gone over every aspect of it since her talk? What exactly is it about psychiatry that suddenly appeals to you more than all the other options? It’s a long way from neonatal.’

Rosie’s expression changed again but Cat could not read it.

‘I always said I thought you’d be good at that – you have a calmness and a gentleness but you’re quite decisive . . . well, usually.’

‘And I have very small hands! I know.’

‘That and Sam doing midwifery. What a team!’

There was a long silence. They sipped their coffees. The bras-serie hummed. Rosie looked up. ‘What do you think?’

‘What I think isn’t relevant, it’s your career. Psych isn’t something I could have done, though it has a lot of relevance to general practice of course – a GP often has to be a therapist, or should be, though there’s precious little time for it in the NHS now. Was your recruiting sergeant talking generally, across the whole psych spectrum? It’s pretty wide of course.’

‘She went quite deeply into adolescent psychiatry and eating disorders because that’s her field, and then to the other end of the spectrum but that’s definitely not for me.’

‘Geriatrics? Dementia?’

‘Yes. I mean, what can you do about ageing? It just happens.’

Cat thought about Lionel Brown. But how young Rosie was and so how differently she saw things. Had she been the same when she was newly qualified? She suddenly remembered saying to a nurse, after a difficult time with an elderly patient in A&E, ‘When I hit sixty, take me outside and shoot me.‘

’I tell you what, Rosie, – forensic psychiatry is absolutely fascinating – the sharp end, pretty tough – but you’re very clever and if you’re interested in the place where the law meets medicine meets a human being, I think you’d find it worth looking into.’

‘Hm. Actually the eating disorders stuff got my attention. I had a room-mate in my third year who was anorexic and it took me a while to spot it, but in the end I got quite involved. Bit too involved really.’

‘How?’

‘Honestly – I think I was impatient with her. I just couldn’t understand why she was doing it, I kept asking her why she didn’t just . . .’

‘Eat?’

Rosie nodded. ‘I still think that, so I’d be no good, would I?’