Penny Vincenzi - The Best Of Times

Well, maybe this production would be Georgia ’s big chance, Linda thought; and much more likely it would not. She decided not to tell Georgia about it yet; she couldn’t face the unbearable disappointment if the production company never even wanted to see her.

People-nonmedical people, that was-always reacted the same way when they heard what Emma did: “You don’t look like a doctor,” they said, in slightly accusatory tones, and she would ask them politely what they thought a doctor did look like; but of course she knew perfectly well what they meant. Most doctors didn’t look like her, blue eyed and blond and absurdly pretty, with long and extremely good legs. And she had learnt quite early on in her career that she might have been taken more seriously had her appearance been more on the… well, on the earnest side. Now that she was a houseman, she wore longer skirts-well, on the knee anyway-and tied her hair back in a ponytail, and obviously didn’t wear much makeup; but she still looked more like a nurse in a Carry On film than the consultant obstetrician she was planning to become.

She was a senior houseman now, working at St. Marks Swindon, the new state-of-the-art hospital opened by the health secretary earlier that year. She knew she was very lucky to be there; it was not only superbly designed and multiple-disciplined, with extremely high-calibre and highly qualified staff; it was just near enough to London, where she had first trained, for her to see her friends.

She was really enjoying accidents and emergency-A &E; apart from obstetrics, it was her favourite department so far. It was so different every day; there was always something happening, and yes, you did have to cope with some awful things from time to time-major car accidents and heart attacks and terrible domestic accidents, burns and scalds-but a lot of the time it was quite mundane. And the whole A &E experience was very bonding; you shared so much, day after day; you worked together, sometimes under huge pressure, but it had a culture and a language all its own, and you made very good friends there, lasting relationships. And you felt you really were doing something, making people better, mending them there and then, which sounded a bit sentimental if you tried to put it into words, but it was the reason she had gone into medicine, for God’s sake, and it was far more satisfying than orthopaedics, for example, seeing people with terribly painful hips and backs and knowing it would be months before anyone could do anything for them at all, and then it wouldn’t be you.

She had been three of the statutory four months now in A &E, as senior house officer, and she was really dreading moving on. Especially as her next department would be dermatology, which didn’t appeal to her at all. She had even considered, very briefly, becoming an A &E consultant, like Alex Pritchard, her present boss, but he had told her it was a mug’s game and that she’d never make any money.

“Not many private patients come into A &E, and as we all know that’s where the money is.”

“Money isn’t everything, though, is it?” Emma had said.

“Perhaps you could try telling my wife that,” he’d said, and scowled; she never knew whether he was going to scowl or smile at her. He was a great untidy bear of a man, with a shock of black hair, and beetling eyebrows to match, and very deep-set brown eyes that peered lugubriously out at the world. Emma adored him, though there were more scowls than smiles at the moment-he was reputedly going through a very unpleasant divorce. But he was immensely supportive of her, praised her good work while not hesitating to criticise the bad, and when she removed a healthy appendix unnecessarily, having put down the symptoms of IBS to acute appendicitis, he told her he had done exactly the same thing when he had been a junior surgeon.

“You just have to remember everyone makes mistakes; the only thing is, doctors bury theirs,” he said cheerfully as he found her sobbing in the sluice, “and that woman is far from being buried. Although with her weight and her diet she probably soon will be. Now dry your eyes and we’ll go and see her and her appalling husband together…”

But obstetrics had remained her first love, and the following summer, she would start applying for a registrarship.

Emma was twenty-eight and, as well as her exceptional looks, was possessed of an extremely happy, outgoing personality. She had grown up in Colchester, where her father had worked for a finance company and her mother was a secretary at the junior school that Emma and her brother and sister had all attended before going on to the local comprehensive. It had been a very happy childhood, Emma often said, lots of fun, treats, and friends, “but Dad was very ambitious for us, quite old-fashioned; we were all encouraged to work hard and aim high.”

Which Emma, by far the cleverest of the three, was certainly doing; a Cambridge place followed by a Cambridge First. In medicine, a subject acknowledged as very tough, she was about as high as anyone could have hoped for. She had never thought for more than five minutes that she might have preferred to do something else. She loved medicine; it was as simple as that. She enjoyed-almost-every day, found the life hugely satisfying and absorbing, and remained extremely ambitious.

Emma looked at her watch: three o’clock. It was Friday and it seemed to be going on forever. She was on the eight-a.m.-to-six-p.m. shift, and it had been one of the slow days. Tomorrow she was going to London and out with her boyfriend. She’d been going out with him for only three months, and he was the first she had had who wasn’t a medic. She’d met him in a bar in London; she’d been with a crowd of friends from uni, and one of them, a lawyer, had worked with him briefly.

His name was Luke Spencer, and he worked for a management consultancy called Pullman. He earned what seemed to her an enormous amount of money and worked tremendously long days-almost as long as hers, but then, while she went home exhausted and slumped in front of the television, Luke and his colleagues went out for dinners at hugely expensive restaurants like Gordon Ramsay and Petrus and extremely trendy clubs like Bungalow 8 and Boujis and Mahiki. Occasionally Emma and other WAGs, as Luke insisted on calling them, rather to Emma’s irritation, were invited along on these evenings. The first time Luke had taken her to Boujis, Emma had practically burst with excitement, half expecting to see Prince Harry every time she turned round. How Luke and his friends got on the guest list there she couldn’t imagine.

She liked being with Luke; he was cool and fun and funny, and he threw his money around, which was rather nice; he hardly ever expected her to pay for herself, and he wore really great clothes, dark suits and pink shirts and silk ties done in a really big loose knot. He took all that very seriously. He wouldn’t be in his suit today, she reflected, because it was Friday, which was dress-down day, and they all wore chinos or even jeans. Not any old jeans, obviously, not Gap or Levi’s, but Ralph Lauren or Dolce & Gabbana, and shirts open at the neck, and brown brogues. Dressing down or indeed up on any day was not something that figured large in Emma’s life.

She wasn’t at all sure if she was actually in love with Luke-although she had decided she would really like to be-and she was even less sure if he was in love with her; but it was very early days, and they had a lot of fun together, and she always looked forward enormously to seeing him. He was very generous, always tried to take her somewhere really nice. The other thing that was really sweet and that had surprised her was how much he respected her work.