The One Day You Were My Husband (8)

“Essentially.”

“What a job! Tell me more.”

“Well, I made him come here tonight and fill the table with his wealthy friends. And I made him buy that painting. It’s not all black-tie dinners, of course, but I enjoy my work.”

A few minutes later, one of my fellow organizers turned up to take over on the card machine.

“Lovely to meet you, Carrie,” the man said. “And for what it’s worth, having listened to you talk to the punters about surgery for the past fifteen minutes, I’d choose you over this robot any day. You sound like the real deal.”

It was only when he’d gone that I realized I’d never even asked his name.

And that I very much wished I had.



* * *



—

He sent me a letter the next week, asking if he could take me out to dinner. His name was Robin Carghill.

I loved the old-fashioned straightforwardness of putting pen to paper. Dell, who had watched our entire exchange, imagined Robin to be the sort of person who would book an iconic London restaurant and then roll us into a dive bar later on. She was spot on. Our first date was at Quo Vadis, followed by a disgusting Soho bar, the name and location of which neither of us can remember.

He had ordered—and demolished—a giant steak, laughed sympathetically at my “weedy” cod cheek salad and asked me endless questions about my work.

“Are you joking?” he asked, genuinely appalled, when I paused to check he wasn’t bored. “Everyone wants to know what it’s like to be a surgeon! You cut people open and chop things out and then go off and have lunch as if you’ve spent the morning bumming about on the internet like the rest of us. It’s witchcraft.”

I smiled.

“Did you not watch ER when you were a teenager?” he went on. “Peter Benton and Elizabeth Corday were my heroes. Their storylines trumped all the others.”

“I did watch it. I’m afraid I often took notes.”

“Of course. How did you rate their surgical practice, out of interest?”

“Well, questionable, at times.”

Robin started laughing. “You had feedback! Oh, but this is wonderful. What age were you?”

“Fifteen.” I was laughing, too.

“I hope you wrote them a strongly worded letter.”

I stayed silent.

“Oh my God! You actually did!”

I put my head in my hands.

“Oh, Carrie, this is priceless. Did they reply?”

“To the third letter, yes.”

Robin roared with laughter.

“I have a very high-achieving mother. And my grandmother was even worse. None of us were fitted with an off switch. But trust me, not everyone has found this trait as appealing as you.”

At his request I told him a little of my mother and of her mother, who’d come over to England from Malaysia because her family would not pay for her to receive a university education. Against all odds, my grandmother had become a professor of epidemiology and even had a stint advising the government. By the time she was fifty, three different men had left her. She was too busy for husbands, Mum always said. She’d had to hustle ten times as hard as her British colleagues to achieve the same academic credentials, and even then she was always the least likely to get the jobs. If she hadn’t died of cancer in her sixties she would probably have worked until she was a hundred.

“My mum’s different,” I said. “Extremely charming, funny, engaging—people fall in love with her on the spot, although she’s come up against plenty of prejudice too. But she’s no less of a workaholic. She cannot, will not, sit still until she’s saved the world. I’m a good surgeon, but I’ll never have the kind of impact she’s had.”

“Oh, hang on now,” Robin said. He was no longer laughing. “You have plenty of impact, Carrie. I wish I’d…” He broke off. “I had no choice but to write to you, Carrie. No choice at all. I couldn’t think about anything else. It was infuriating and very enjoyable.”

The kissing started when we left the restaurant. I hadn’t kissed anyone since Johan and I enjoyed it even more than I expected to.



* * *



—

Luckily, Robin was relaxed about my cautious pace. He arranged excellent dates without any fuss or back and forth; he’d just message me things like, I’m taking you to see the ENO. 7:30 p.m. next Thursday, Coliseum. He took the time to memorize my on-call rotas so that he could plan things I could actually do. And from the very beginning, he was transparent about everything.

Earlier in the year, he told me, he had split up with a woman who’d had several other lovers. He only found out when one of the other men let himself into her house while Robin was there, scrambling eggs in her kitchen.

“It’s been very difficult to accept that I was fooled so easily,” he admitted. “You’re not shady, are you? You’re not living a double life?”

We were walking in Richmond Park in the early evening with binoculars, Robin teaching me basic constellations.

“No. But don’t forget that I married a man who really did have a double life. And that was only four years ago. So if you’re naive, I’m…Actually, I don’t think there’s a word for it.”