Chapter 9: Nutthill Nutria

      Two weeks later I found myself sitting in a dingy hospital corridor on a bursting plastic chair, thinking about Life, the Universe, and other more mundane things such as why James hasn’t noticed the state of panic I’ve been in for a fortnight.

      He ought to have guessed something was wrong. But even last night, when I was so nervous and in need of a hug that I wound my arms round his neck and kissed him, he just sort of suffered it, then leaned over and pressed the video play button.

      If he ever touched me these days he might have noticed the lumpiness himself … which is another thing: since the move our love life seems to have pretty well tailed off. (Not that I ever found the sex riveting, but I do miss the cuddles.) Our only physical contact lately seems to be James’s absent-minded goodbye kiss in the mornings – when he isn’t staying at Horrible Howard’s.

      Now I’ve stopped the pill I’m back to the light, erratic periods I had before I started taking it. But I don’t really mind – it’s only the unpredictability that’s irritating, and I’m sure my body is enjoying a holiday from all those chemicals.

      James did notice I wasn’t eating much lately, but thinks I am on a diet. He said if he wanted a wife who looked like a coat hanger with a dress on it, then he would have married one in the first place! I am certainly not that thin – I do go in and out in the appropriate places – but perhaps I have become too thin to attract James any more?

      Mind you, if I am getting thinner, he is putting it on – especially round the waist! And his face seems to be losing some of its craggy good looks under a blur of padding and saggy eye pouches. He always looks worse when he’s spent the night at Howard’s, so he’d be much better off coming home and getting a good night’s sleep when he works late.

      He was a bit miffed when I asked him if he’d weighed himself lately, and muttered that at least he wasn’t a hollow-eyed drug addict like my former boyfriend, which I ignored as beneath contempt. (I mean, have you seen Fergal Rocco? You don’t acquire a body like that through a syringe!)

      With all this to occupy my mind it was some time before I began to resurface and take stock of my fellow sufferers in the waiting room – and a highly unsavoury lot they appeared to be, too, though it could have been the lighting that made everyone look terminally consumptive.

      Some were talking quietly, but no one tried to exchange even a nervous smile with me, and eventually I realised that there was something that made me conspicuous from the other women – the brightness of my clothes.

      I was the only one wearing anything brighter than beige, and in fact most of them looked as if they’d gone into mourning for themselves already.

      James would like me to wear smart Country Casuals-type stuff and little suits, and he often says I should go and have my hair styled.

      What does he mean, styled? It is deep gold, naturally curling, and hasn’t been cut since I was old enough to resist Mother, although the curls ravel it up like knitting. Isn’t that a style?

      By the time I was summoned an hour later I looked more Edith Cavell than the nurse, since I’d been too afraid of missing my turn to go to the ladies.

      She marched me past two men in white coats with their heads together in earnest discussion and threw open the door of a little cell.

      ‘In here,’ she ordered bossily. ‘Undress. Top half only.’

      With the closing of the door the distant rattle of the hospital was abruptly silenced, and I turned to face the narrow room with its couch, washbasin and sliver of frosted window.

      I unfastened the straps of my dungarees, took off my shirt with fingers made clumsy from cold and fear, and laid it on the end of the couch.

      There was a white cellular hospital blanket folded there, clean, but marked with old stains, and I felt so cold that I draped it round my shoulders and huddled on the couch. My legs dangled, and one shoe fell off on to the chewing-gum-coloured lino. I let the other one drop too, realised my hand was pressed firmly to my Lump, and snatched it away.

      After ten interminable minutes a spotty youth in a white coat breezed in. ‘Good morning! I’m a student doctor and, if you don’t mind, I’m going to examine you first,’ he said cheerfully, without looking up from the grubby clipboard he carried, and the nurse materialised from behind him and deftly removed the blanket without waiting for my reply.

      He probed long and deep at both breasts like a child searching for the free plastic toy in a box of cereal. Then he straightened and let his breath go in a long sigh.

      I looked fearfully at him.

      ‘Yes, there does seem to be the hint of a lump there, doesn’t there? I’ll just fetch Mr Thomas, the consultant, now – won’t be a tick.’

      Five minutes later, while I was still visualising my deathbed scene, a small, rotund, elderly doctor with a polka-dot bow tie and an entourage of obsequious nurses swept in.

      He wasted no time on polite preliminaries.

      ‘Lift your arm. Left arm. Higher. So?’ He probed once, fingers flat and unpleasantly warm. ‘Nothing there. You can go.’

      And out he marched again.

      Blankly I stared at the student doctor hovering in his wake: ‘Does that mean – does it mean I’m all right?’

      ‘Yes, if Mr Thomas says so. You can go.’

      I exhaled deeply, and colour, warmth and movement flooded back into the world. ‘My God! I thought he was about to say I had six months to live, or something.’

      ‘Not this time!’ He hurried off after the Master.

      The relief!

      From not wanting to tell anyone about it I swung round to wanting to tell everyone. James just said I was an idiot, and he could have told me there was nothing wrong with me, but since he hasn’t got a medical degree it would hardly have been likely to reassure me.

      Secretly, I’m still hardly convinced of my reprieve, and the lumpy tenderness is still there. But I expect I’ll live with it, since it’s got to be better than the alternative.

      It’s put me right off checking my breasts, though. How can you spot one rogue marble in a bagful?

      James’s reaction was such a damp squib that I cast about for someone else to tell, then I thought: why not phone Peggy? She’d understand.

      Peggy Mulvaney, my friend from the Society for Women Writing Romance, writes raunchy books under a variety of unlikely pen names, Desdemona Calthrop being the best known of them.

      She says she spends a lot of time on research.

      I haven’t seen much of her since we moved here because it’s so difficult to get to SFWWR meetings as a non-driver, and I do miss her and my other friends in the Society. Being accepted as a member when my first book was published did wonders for my self-confidence. And, of course, since my books keep on selling, I do feel I’m a success at something.

      Anyway, I phoned her up and we had a lovely long chat. She understood perfectly what I’d been going through, because she had a similar scare in the past and they’d told her it was some sort of benign thing and to ignore it, which she did.

      She said now she’d put on so much weight it would take her a week to do a check, but Gerry, her current lover, was always willing to try.

      I felt much happier after this, and thought Mother might like to know what I’d been through, too. But there was such a very long wait before the phone was picked up that I’d begun to imagine her lying in a pool of cooking sherry in the kitchen before there was a click and a