She had left home on her sixteenth birthday and found a bed-sit in the next suburb. Every week until he died her father sent her a five-pound note. She never acknowledged it but took the money because she needed it to supplement the cash she earned in the evenings and at weekends working as a waitress, telling herself that it was probably less than her food would have cost at home. When, five years later, with a first in history and established in her first job, her mother phoned to say that her father had died, she felt an absence of emotion that paradoxically seemed stronger and more irksome than regret. He had been found drowned, slumped in an Essex stream whose name she could never remember, with an alcohol level in his blood which proved that he had been intoxicated. The coroner’s verdict of accidental death was expected and, she thought, probably correct. It was the one she had hoped for. She told herself, not without a small flicker of shame which quickly died, that suicide would have been too rational and momentous a final judgement on such an ineffectual life.

3

The cab ride was quicker than she had expected. She arrived too early at Harley Street and asked the driver to stop at the Marylebone Road end of the street, then walked to her appointment. As on the rare occasions when she had passed this way, she was struck by the street’s emptiness, the almost uncanny calm which hung over these formal eighteenth-century terraces. Almost every door bore a brass plate with a list of names confirming what surely every Londoner would know, that this was the hub of medical expertise. Somewhere behind these gleaming front doors and discreetly curtained windows, patients must be waiting in various stages of anxiety, apprehension, hope or despair, yet she seldom saw any of them arriving or departing. The occasional tradesman or messenger would come and go, but otherwise the street could have been an empty film set, awaiting the arrival of director, cameraman and players.

Arriving at the door, she studied the panel of names. There were two surgeons and three physicians, and the name she expected to see was there at the top. Mr. G. H. Chandler-Powell, FRCS, FRCS (Plast), MS—the last two letters which proclaimed that a surgeon had reached the summit of expertise and reputation. Master of Surgery. It had, she thought, a fine ring to it. The barber-surgeons awarded their licences by Henry VIII would be surprised to know how far they had come.

The door was opened by a serious-faced young woman in a white coat cut to compliment her figure. She was attractive but not disconcertingly so, and her brief welcoming smile was more minatory than warm. Rhoda thought, Head girl. Girl Guide patrol leader. There was one in every sixth form.

The waiting room into which she was shown so matched her expectations that momentarily she had the impression that she had been there before. It managed to achieve a certain opulence while containing nothing of real quality. The large central mahogany table, with its copies of Country Life, Horse and Hound and the more upmarket women’s magazines so carefully aligned as to discourage reading, was impressive but not elegant. The assorted chairs, some upright, others more comfortable, looked as if they had been acquired in a country-house sale but had seldom been used. The hunting prints were large and undistinguished enough to inhibit theft and she doubted whether the two high-baluster vases on the mantelpiece were genuine.