Nobody is quite sure how, or why, she came to work with us, but I have a feeling she’ll just disappear one day, as quickly and mysteriously as she arrived. There’ll be someone else at her desk one morning and I’ll have to spend the rest of my life imagining what she’s doing. My money’s on her heading up a multi-billion-dollar drug cartel somewhere. Driving around in an armoured Humvee, getting presidents and monarchs in her pocket.
‘By the way, I saw Emma,’ she says now, as we all return to our computers. ‘Yesterday.’
‘Oh yes?’ Sheila has a habit of jumping from topic to unrelated topic without a moment’s notice. She leaves us all behind in team meetings.
‘She looked upset. It’s none of my business, of course, but I do hope she’s all right.’
Emma hasn’t mentioned this.
‘She was nervous about her scan results,’ I improvise, because I don’t want one of my colleagues to know more about my wife than I do. ‘We’re seeing her haematologist this afternoon.’
I start a message to Emma, to check she’s OK, when Sheila pipes up again: ‘She was at Waterloo Station.’
‘Yeah. She works down in Plymouth two days a week,’ I say, without looking up. Sheila knows this. We were talking about Emma’s huge commute just a few days ago.
‘That’s why I was surprised to see her at Waterloo – don’t trains to Plymouth run from Paddington Station?’
I stop messaging and think about it. ‘Actually, you’re right,’ I admit. ‘She was doing fieldwork in Dorset yesterday. Hence, Waterloo.’
Oddly, Emma didn’t mention her trip last night, so I’d forgotten to ask how it went.
‘Oh, lovely,’ Sheila says. Her voice is friendly now, as if it’s just me and her in the pub. ‘Where in Dorset? I love that coastline.’
This is not only irritating, but most unlike Sheila.
‘Wherever it is that her friend’s collecting phytoplankton samples,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember where.’
‘Probably out from Poole Harbour,’ Sheila says, nodding.
What? How does she know about bloody phytoplankton, on top of everything else?
‘It was quite late in the morning,’ she adds, going back to her screen. She gives me a curious sort of a smile – something not far from sympathy – and then returns to her screen.
Jonty looks up from his desk. He’s noticed too.
What is she up to? Sheila and I often discuss Emma in the pub, in wider conversations about family lives, but this is different. I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of the interrogator she once was. （There’s no way she was doing a desk job at MI5.） She’s polite and friendly; but there’s an implied meaning that I neither like nor understand.
‘She said something about how phytoplankton do a daily migration to deep waters,’ I say, eventually. ‘I guess she was waiting for that to happen.’
I don’t offer that Emma’s been struggling with timekeeping lately – sometimes a warning sign of her depressions – but it’s no matter. The conversation seems to have reached its conclusion.
At 3 p.m. I get up to leave for the hospital, and nobody knows quite what to say to me. ‘All the best,’ Sheila calls, as I go. ‘I’ll be thinking about you both.’
Chapter Five
LEO
I don’t like hearing people complain about the NHS, but as we wait forty, fifty, sixty-five minutes to be called into Dr Moru’s office, I sink into fury. I try to read a former MP’s obit one of our Westminster contributors has sent in, but I’m too anxious and angry to concentrate. A silent television suspended over the waiting room shows us footage of absolutely nothing happening at Jeremy and Janice Rothschild’s house, a handsome Georgian terrace in Highbury.