Nothing about the long road was nice now. There was no footpath so they walked on the gravelled verge, conversation becoming impossible because of a convoy of passing trucks. Angie’s pace quickened even more in spite of the gravel and her high heels, and Seymour wondered why she was walking so fast, so urgently, but he didn’t like to seem nosey by asking questions. She glanced at her watch as they completed a long uphill stretch and turned into an asphalted driveway with a sign saying ‘Ambulances Only’.

‘It’s kind of a weird place to have a hospital, isn’t it, stuck out here away from everything?’ Seymour said. ‘Are you visiting someone who’s sick in there, Angie?’

‘No, nothing like that. I’ve just got to pick up something, some medicine I’ve got to take every day. Waste of time, really, can’t say it’s doing anything to…Well, anyway, I’ll only be a minute. Hospitals aren’t all that fascinating, so you don’t have to come in with me. Just wait out here on the lawn, okay? There’s goldfish in that little pond you can look at, only don’t be a dag and fall in. I’ll be back in a couple of shakes, promise.’

He sat down on the concrete rim of the pool while Angie went up a ramp into a low red-brick building. It didn’t look like an ordinary hospital, he thought idly. Once he’d stayed with his father in a motel opposite a hospital and they’d had to keep the windows shut to block out the constant noise of traffic and people. But this place was very quiet, hushed almost, and the only people about were a few men sitting in cane chairs at one end of an open veranda. They didn’t take any notice of him. They just sat huddled into their own thoughts, not even chatting to one another. At first he thought they were elderly people. It was the way they sat, as though laden with the cares and loneliness of old age, but when he glanced at them properly, blinking against the raw sunlight, he saw that some of them were quite young men. He looked away and down into the pool at the goldfish instead, but almost immediately, Angela came back. She was walking normally, not in any particular hurry now, and appeared to be rather pleased with herself.

‘Well, I won that round!’ she said. ‘They weren’t going to let me have it just because I was ten minutes late.’

‘Why can’t you get your medicine from a chemist, like on a doctor’s prescription? Thelma’s got to take stuff for arthritis, but she just…’