The One Day You Were My Husband (33)

This was the sort of story he loved, but he didn’t reply.

I knew he was quite literally under the sea. I knew he was busy and wouldn’t necessarily have access to a satellite phone in the evenings on the rig; I didn’t dwell on it. But on day two, when I messaged him about a colleague who’d missed the pacemaker from a patient’s crem form and had essentially caused a crematorium to blow up in Kent, and I heard nothing back, the rational structures of my mind began to crumble.

Are you OK? I texted.

Nothing.

I called him. Before bed, I emailed him, but there was nothing in my inbox the next morning.

Despite my better judgment, I began to panic. Surely the rig had satellite phones—internet, even—it was 2010! With great shame, I called the marine archaeology company to ask if they’d heard from him. They had, they said. Did I want them to pass on a message?

Eventually, I called Dad. After Dad had met Nicola and returned to his old self, he’d become a remarkable anchor to teenage Maya and Carrie. No matter what problems we brought to the kitchen table, Dad had always managed to apply some immutable law, some algorithm with which even Maya struggled to argue. Best of all, he’d always served his solutions with a hot sweet tea and one biscuit.

“Dad. Can you make phone calls from oil rigs?” I asked. It was a Thursday evening, which meant he was on the train back to Devon from London. “I know you’ve visited a few.”

Dad was quiet for a moment, but I knew that this was his much-vaunted “essential pause” rather than a lapse in the phone signal.

“Is Johan on an oil rig?” he asked.

“Well, yes. But I’m asking in a general sense.”

“Oh, Carrie, love. Of course people can make calls from oil rigs. But if Johan is on an oil rig and he hasn’t called you, it means he can’t.”

He listened patiently as I told him that Johan had been in touch with his office but hadn’t even read my messages.

“And you think this is a sign?”

I flushed. “Maybe.”

“I’ll only say this, my darling: love makes us think and do many strange things. What is presented by our minds as incontrovertible truth is often wildly off the mark. Try to remember that.”

“But how are we supposed to know which voice to trust?”

“We always know the truth, Carrie. Deep down. These things needn’t be complicated.”

“I miss you, Dad,” I sighed.

But his train was now deep in the Wiltshire Downs and he lost signal.

Three days later, still with no word from Johan, I made the first major mistake of my career. I was assessing a patient in Acute Medical when Yanika pulled me out into the ward reception.

“You prescribed Augmentin to a diverticulitis case,” she said in a low voice. “She’s penicillin allergic. If the ward sister hadn’t remembered, we’d have a potential medical negligence case on our hands.”

“Oh God,” I said. “Really? No…Surely I…Oh, shit.”

“I also heard you failed to send my hernia patient to scan yesterday. And that you didn’t turn up for the rota meeting I asked you to attend on my behalf.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I said, after a pause. I couldn’t deny any of it.

“Your mistakes were regrettable, but they were detected in time,” Yanika said. “What I actually want to talk about is why you’re behaving like this. What’s happening?”

The policeman I’d shouted at when I met Johan had not made a complaint about me. But this poor woman could have been a different story if the ward sister hadn’t intervened.

To my horror, my eyes filled with tears.

“Carrie,” Yanika hissed. She funneled me into a corner where the ward linen was kept. “Can you please pull yourself together?”

But that was the problem. I didn’t know how to. I hadn’t been able to for six days. I should never have allowed myself to get into a relationship.

“Carrie, talk to me.”

After a few moments, I said, pathetically, “I’m having relationship trouble.” Tears dripped down my cheeks and onto my scrubs.

She looked surprised. “I’m sorry to hear that. But—Carrie, that’s not good enough. I don’t want lovestruck teenagers on my team. I need adults who carry out their responsibilities and don’t just burst into tears when they mess up. I’m embarrassed for you.”

I was embarrassed for me, too.

Yanika’s phone rang and she left. I went to the toilet and washed my face, patting it dry with an abrasive blue paper towel. I looked even worse.

Just as I re-emerged into the ward, Johan finally called.

I tried to end our relationship. There, on the phone, before he’d even had a chance to ask how I was. It just burst out of me, as if it were the only sane and sensible thing to say.

I told him that I’d been thinking about us and that it was probably just too much for me at this stage of my career. I liked him, I said, but I just wasn’t sure I could give us the attention and focus we needed. Just today I had made a big mistake and the patient could have ended up with an ADR, maybe even died. I needed to focus just on one thing, and that thing needed to be my job.

I talked until I had nothing else to say and then ground to a halt, even more ashamed.