She’d been duped – he’d played her. He’d lied to her and left her to sit around waiting for him like some stupid sap while he was off somewhere with her, Hermione Alleyn, life-saving surgeon, Cambridge graduate, key researcher, speaker at international conferences. Success. What was she, Hannah? A cheated-on wife, a deluded fool, an unemployed, powerless idiot. The handle of the jug lay on the floor, still attached to a circle of china. She lifted her foot and stamped on it, reducing it to powder.
Then she’d grabbed her bag and coat, slammed the door behind her and run up the street. She couldn’t stay in the house – his house – with its oppressive, oxygen-sucking silence. She needed to get out, be somewhere she could breathe.
She’d crossed New King’s Road, passed the deli and the off-licence, the hairdresser’s with its tableau of swaddled, tin-foiled ladies sipping coffee and reading magazines, and taken the pavement that ran parallel to the edge of Parsons Green. A Dalmatian tore across the muddy autumn grass after a stick, and his pure, uncomplicated enjoyment as he snatched it from the air and carried it back to his mistress, tail a blur, brought sudden tears to Hannah’s eyes. Biting the inside of her cheek, she’d hurried on past the pub to the Tube station.
Long as the journey had been, south-west London all the way across to the east, it had passed in what felt like minutes, the consuming rage bending time so that she looked up seemingly seconds after the doors had closed at Gloucester Road to find they were at Embankment; Mansion House; Cannon Street. The anger ebbed and flowed, and when it retreated, she felt the stab of disbelief again, the ache in her stomach that said, Really? Mark?
Now, as she emerged from the Underground at Whitechapel, the hospital was right in front of her. The suddenness of it took her aback. On the way across London the idea of coming here had been reinforced by her anger and the momentum of the train itself, ticking off the stations one by one, but looking at the hospital now she asked herself what the hell she was doing. What had she hoped to achieve? She’d needed to get out of the house, she told herself, before she smashed the entire place up, but that was only part of it. She could have gone anywhere. The truth was, she’d wanted to see this place, to have a picture of where this woman worked, what her life might be like.
It had been hot underground, all the train’s heaters on, but here a biting wind drove the litter along the pavement and caused the awning outside the discount store two doors down to billow and flap like a loose sail. She pulled her coat tightly round her and shoved her hands in her pockets. When the traffic stopped at the pedestrian crossing, she dashed across the road.
There had been major building work going on at the hospital, that was evident: from behind the dour yellow-brick façade of the old buildings soared a new complex that seemed to belong to a different world, let alone a different age. The impression was of a three-dimensional Tetris game in which the blocks were made of highly reflective glass in varying shades of petrol blue, punctuated here and there by a tessellation in pale grey concrete. It was as if the entire thing had been snatched from the City, where it would have kept good company with the Gherkin and the Cheese Grater, and dropped down here just to highlight how tired and snaggle-toothed the rest of Whitechapel Road was, with its jumble of rooflines and dusty shop-fronts, the bookies and Poundbuster, importers and immigration lawyers’ offices, the pub on the corner painted in orange tiger-skin pattern. This was a very different London from Mark’s and even from Kilburn, where Hannah had lived before she moved to New York.
The work looked almost finished now but the front of the old building was still surrounded with wooden siding. A sign on it advised that the hospital had moved and directed visitors around the corner. Hannah followed the arrows and found herself standing outside the new main entrance, sliding glass doors set into a Tetris block made of red brick, a sheer cliff of blue glass rearing overhead. The doors opened to admit a man in his sixties carrying a bouquet of ox-eye daisies wrapped in cellophane, and she stepped in after him.
She stood and looked around for a moment, getting a sense of the place, but then she was spotted by a smiling woman with a security card round her neck identifying her as a hospital volunteer. ‘You look lost,’ she said.
‘I’m looking for the renal ward,’ Hannah heard herself say.
‘Ninth floor.’ The woman gestured towards the lifts. ‘There’ll be a board when you get there to point you in the right direction.’
If the lobby was anything to go by, the new building was working at or near full capacity already. The place was thronged with people: staff, the walking wounded with their drips and plaster casts, and dozens of visitors. The lift she waited for stopped at every floor on its way down to the lobby and then every floor on its way back up to the ninth. Heart thumping, she stood pressed in at the back between a tall Indian man in surgical greens and a couple who, from the sound of their whispered conversation, were on their way to visit their daughter and new grandson in the maternity ward. A pair of women in their early twenties – student doctors, Hannah guessed – were talking about a ward round and she felt a pang of jealousy and painful inadequacy, as if she were excluded from a gang that everyone else belonged to. Hermione must have been like them fifteen years ago, at the beginning of her career.