The thought of losing her mother, source of so much resentment and self-sacrifice, caused her heart to gallop in frantic denial. How would she tell Dorrie? How would she live out the rest of her years—an orphan—in the empty house?

It was only a short journey to Bromley & District Hospital and the ambulance man, at the head end of the stretcher, kept up a flow of reassuring chatter, even though the patient was unable to respond with more than a blink and a flutter of her fingers.

“She will be all right, won’t she?” Jean whispered, from the foot end, when at last she could bring herself to meet his eye.

“Oh yes,” he said with massive, beaming confidence. “She’s tough, aren’t you, Mother?”

Standard-issue reassurance that did for everyone not yet deceased, no doubt, but Jean was grateful for it.

On arrival at the emergency department her mother was borne away and Jean felt herself dismissed. The smell—nauseating gusts of sickness, rubber, disinfectant and cooking—still made her queasy. Her recent happier visits to Charing Cross Hospital with Gretchen and Margaret couldn’t quite efface those earlier grim memories of being a patient herself.

In the waiting room, half a dozen people, relatives of other recent casualties, similarly abandoned, sat gazing into space. Occasionally, a door would open and they would sit up hopefully as a nurse appeared and then slump back again as she passed through without breaking her stride.

In one corner an elderly clergyman was trying to cough discreetly into a handkerchief, his lungs bubbling and crackling. Opposite Jean was a young man, with quiffed hair and a cigarette behind his ear, dressed up as though for a night out. He seemed hugely self-conscious and ill at ease, his neck red with embarrassment, one foot tapping uncontrollably. Jean remembered the awkwardness of youth and pitied him.

One woman was attempting to distract a grizzling infant with nothing but a door key on a leather fob. Within seconds its potential to fascinate was exhausted and the child’s whining redoubled. The woman stood up, hauling him onto her hip, and began to pace.

“He’s not mine; he’s my daughter’s,” she announced with a preemptive glare.

The young man looked up and Jean recognized him now as the Romeo from the print room. She nodded at him and he nodded back, but not before she saw a flicker of alarm cross his face—a fear of being acknowledged in public by a middle-aged woman. Jean sighed. The cigarette behind his ear reminded her that she had smoked her last one with Howard at lunchtime, a lifetime ago. The realization that she had none left and tomorrow was Sunday brought on an unassailable craving.

Leaving the hospital, she crossed the road to the pub. It was dark outside and cold, too, after the heated stuffiness of the waiting room, and she shivered in her thin raincoat. The pub was bright and crowded with drinkers enjoying their Saturday night. Jean bought twenty Players. Even though she often ran out and had no intention of giving up the habit, she couldn’t quite bring herself to buy in bulk. It seemed to demonstrate too hubristic a faith in the future.