Now
The Doors With No Knobs

Two years later

London, Monday, 8 April 2019

I’m back from Cheltenham by 11 a.m. but I don’t go into my flat. I leave the car on my street and walk quickly to the station. Forty-five minutes later, I am sitting on the train to London, trying to make myself relax in the hope that if I do then the identity of the man Jane met will come to me. I close my eyes, but open them with a jerk when my telephone vibrates.

It is the hospital’s number, so it will almost certainly be Trudy on the other end of the line. She pretty much runs Paediatric Outpatients. I nearly ignore the call, given that the train is ten minutes outside of Paddington and I have slept nearly the entire journey away, but something makes me answer.

Trudy launches straight in. ‘Sorry to bother you – I know you’ve taken today as sick-leave – Are you feeling better? – I hope you’re resting. Is that – Is someone on a loudspeaker? – Are you on a train, Helen?’

‘I’m on my way to a clinic in Wimpole Street. Trying some stuff to boost my immune system. I get too many colds.’ The lies come easily.

‘Really,’ Trudy says, meaning, do you really think I’m an idiot. ‘Will you be in work tomorrow?’ She is asking this despite knowing very well that I don’t work on Tuesdays.

‘I don’t work on Tuesdays,’ I say, with extra sweetness.

‘Wednesday, then?’

‘If I’m better. Sorry, Trudy – my train’s about to pull in.’

Trudy gets to the point. ‘You know that little girl with Waardenburg syndrome, Alice Wilmot . . .’

My heart is thumping. ‘Yes.’

‘Her mum’s trying to reach you. She sounded pretty upset.’

‘Oh.’ I inhale. ‘Did she say what was wrong?’

‘Only that she’s having some sort of family emergency. Not the child, the mother. I explained I couldn’t give her your number, but I promised to pass the message on.’

The metal cylinder of the tube train is shaking me and shaking me and shaking me some more as it hurtles along beneath London. There is a pleasure in giving myself over to its rhythms, my neck loose, my head jerking from side to side, as if I am hypnotised, for once abandoning control and not fighting, not stiffening myself against these external forces.

The hot, burnt-smelling wind of the tunnels slaps me in the face and chases me up the escalators, though it seems to be under a spell that traps it within the station’s boundaries. It cannot pursue me when I emerge into still air and bright sunshine, blinking, my eyes watering.