Adaku asked Easter who administered the anaesthetic. Easter said a nurse anaesthetist joined her as needed. “Do you want to see below?” Easter asked her. She didn’t sound enthusiastic about showing Adaku anything else.
“What’s below?”
“A recovery room. The patients remain overnight.”
“Who stays with them?”
“Their mothers or another female relative. I check on them as well.”
Adaku wondered at this. Easter appeared to be a woman-for-all-medical-seasons. Why, then, wasn’t she working at a hospital instead of here, hidden away in a decrepit building in north London? She asked the question.
Easter said, “Because I believe in the work of this clinic.”
But anyone could make that claim, Adaku thought. “Have you lost any patients?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“But that’s what you would say, eh? You’re hardly going to tell me otherwise.”
Easter opened her hands and moved her shoulders in a way that said, Believe what you wish.
“Where do we go from here? I mean, after I see the recovery room.”
“After that, you make your decision.” Easter led the way out of the operating theatre and opened a drawer of the desk. From this she took a card, identical to the one she’d supplied earlier. Printed on it was only a telephone number. No name, no employment, just a phone number. She handed it to Adaku. “If you decide to go ahead, you phone that number for an appointment.”
“Then?”
“You’re given a date for the procedure. Two weeks after, there’s another exam.”
“It sounds very thorough,” Adaku noted.
“It is. What is done here is always swift, hygienic, and without any danger of post-surgery infection.”
“And if that happens? Some kind of infection?”
“Then you’re better off having come here in the first place. I expect you’re not looking for a butcher.”
STREATHAM
SOUTH LONDON
She’d designated the Rookery for their meeting that evening. Part of Streatham Common, it was all that remained of a once-flourishing estate: a large house, and its gardens that had stood on a slope overlooking much of London. Part of the place was walled and formal: neat paths laid out, beds delineated, flowers and shrubbery thriving. Part of it was wild and wooded.
She’d told him she would meet him among a grove of juvenile chestnuts. They were easy enough to find, she said, as they stood on the north side of the Rookery at the end of a wide paved path that bisected the entire area. This path was sided by a long row of wooden benches set against each other cheek by jowl and facing a sloping lawn upon which an enormous cedar of Lebanon stood. There were steps down this slope, she’d told him, but don’t use them. There will be no need. The chestnut grove is above.
Mark Phinney had waited ten hours to see her. When she hadn’t been there as he’d ducked into the grove of chestnuts, the panic he’d felt had nearly—and stupidly—done him in. Foolishly then, he’d phoned her. Foolishly then, he’d texted her. Then, he’d cursed her. Then he’d cursed himself, his life, his desire, and everything that could be cursed save Lilybet. Lilybet, he told himself, did not deserve as a father the kind of man he was fast becoming. No. That last bit wasn’t true, was it? She did not deserve the kind of man he was. He wanted to leap into his own head and scour his brain of every thought that did not have to do with his daughter. That, he decided, was the only solution to what was happening to him.
And then she was there. She came through the trees quietly, and as quickly as an act of magic, everything else was forgotten because she was his anchor and the better part of his soul. He began to kiss her. His abject hunger humiliated him.
But her need seemed to meet his. She removed her blouse and her bra and her breasts were what she offered. He squeezed her nipples till she moaned and then he took one into his mouth as her hands found his waist and his buckle and the zipper and God God God he shoved her against one of the tree trunks and freed his cock and grabbed her again and felt for her skirt and raised it raised it raised it but no she said no Mark no not yet let me and she knelt and took him into her mouth then she rubbed him between her breasts then into her mouth again then her breasts and he wanted to weep and he wanted to hurt her and he wanted to make her want him as much as he wanted her and she couldn’t stop she must not stop she must never stop because for this entire day for every moment when he couldn’t think because of this this she was what was waiting for him.