None of the patients except herself gave any clue to the particular expertise they required. As always, she was able to observe them knowing that no curious eyes would be fixed for long on her. They glanced up as she entered but there were no brief nods of acknowledgement. To become a patient was to relinquish a part of oneself, to be received into a system which, however benign, subtly robbed one of initiative, almost of will. They sat, patiently acquiescent, in their private worlds. A middle-aged woman, a child in the chair beside her, gazed expressionlessly into space. The child, bored, restless-eyed, began gently knocking her feet against the chair legs until, without looking at her, the woman put out a restraining hand. Opposite them, a young man who looked in his formal suit the epitome of a City financier took the Financial Times from his briefcase and, unfolding it with practised expertise, concentrated his attention on the page. A fashionably dressed woman moved silently to the table and studied the magazines, then, rejecting the choice, returned to her seat next to the window and continued her stare at the empty street.

Rhoda was not kept waiting for long. The same young woman who had let her in came over to her, speaking softly and saying that Mr. Chandler-Powell could see her now. With his speciality, discretion obviously started in the waiting room. She was shown into a large, light room across the hall. The two tall double windows facing the street were curtained in heavy linen with white, almost transparent net softening the winter sunlight. The room had none of the furniture or equipment she had half expected, a drawing room rather than an office. An attractive lacquer screen decorated with a rural scene of meadows, river and distant mountains stood in the angle to the left of the door. It was obviously old, possibly eighteenth-century. Perhaps, she thought, it concealed a washbasin or even a couch, although this seemed unlikely. It was difficult to imagine anyone taking his or her clothes off in this domestic if opulent setting. There were two armchairs, one each side of the marble fireplace, and a mahogany pedestal desk facing the door, two upright chairs before it. The only oil picture was over the mantelpiece, a large painting of a Tudor house with an eighteenth-century family carefully grouped in front of it, the father and two sons mounted, the wife and three young daughters in a phaeton. On the opposite wall was a row of coloured prints of eighteenth-century London. They and the oil added to her sense of being subtly out of time.

Mr. Chandler-Powell had been sitting at the desk and, as she entered, he rose and came to shake her hand, indicating one of the two chairs. His grasp was firm but momentary, his hand cool. She had expected him to be wearing a dark suit. Instead he was in very pale grey fine tweed, beautifully cut, which paradoxically gave a greater impression of formality. Facing him, she saw a strong bony face with a long mobile mouth and bright hazel eyes under well-marked brows. His brown hair, straight and a little unruly, was brushed over a high forehead, a few strands falling almost into his right eye. The immediate impression he gave was of confidence and she recognised it at once: a patina which had something, but not everything, to do with success. It was different from the confidence with which as a journalist she was familiar: celebrities, their eyes always avid for the next photographer, at the ready to assume the right stance; nonentities who seemed to know that their notoriety was a concoction of the media, a transitory fame which only their desperate self-belief could maintain. The man before her had the inner assurance of someone at the top of his profession, secure, inviolable. She detected, too, a hint of arrogance not altogether successfully concealed, but told herself that this could be prejudice. Master of Surgery. Well, he looked the part.