He almost purred.
Drawing up outside the hotel-like entrance of the clinic, the girl leapt out and shepherded him to the reception area, smiling disarmingly at the doorman’s appraisal of her double-yellow parking. Inside, all was soft lighting, easy chairs and lots and lots of pink carnations. Very like a hotel foyer, in fact. He was early, the appointments clerk’s softly-spoken response reassuring. Frederick felt like a famous vintage lovingly passed from hand to hand. Rowan passed him a current copy of Country Life and settled him on a leather sofa before disappearing to park the car.
Cocooned in the gentle ambience, Frederick relaxed, secure in twenty minutes’ respite before the jaws of hell were due to pluck him into one of the stainless consulting rooms. The rasp of someone demanding his missing copy of The Times struck a discordant note. An argument ensued, clearly audible to the waiting patients and hovering relatives all too eager to be distracted from the matter in hand. A large young man in a tentlike kimono, seated in a wheelchair, his leg encased in plaster, harangued the woman behind the counter of the kiosk in the corner. Being seated and well below her line of vision in no way diminished the man’s control of the dispute, which ranged from icy contempt to flashes of childish temper. It seemed a lot of fuss about a newspaper.
Frederick swivelled round, curious, open to live entertainment of any kind. The voice seemed familiar. The doorman was moving in, sternly intent on shifting the chairborne patient who was ruffling the carefully nurtured calm.
Frederick strode to the kiosk.
‘Aran. Aran Hunter, you noisy bugger!’
The young man expertly spun the wheels of his chair, grey eyes skewering the interfering old party. The frown evaporated.
‘Fred! What are you doing in this Valhalla?’
Frederick smoothly manœuvred the wheelchair back to his sofa and the abandoned Country Life and sank back, smiling broadly, ignoring the question. He tapped the plaster cast. ‘Been kicking up the dust, old son?’
‘Fell off some scaffolding in Venice. Trying to photograph some bloody frescoes for assessment. Flew me home, luckily my insurance covered it.’
‘Bad luck. In here long?’
‘Ten interminable days. It was a complicated fracture. But I’m pretty fair now, just pissed off wasting time I could usefully spend in my studio.
‘When are they discharging you?’
‘As soon as I’ve convinced them I’ve got some place to go which doesn’t involve any more monkey tricks.’ His scowl reappeared, furrowing a tanned forehead untidily overhung with hair the texture and colour of Shredded Wheat.
‘Can’t you work from a wheelchair?’
‘Some,’ he replied guardedly. ‘Problem is they’re trying to shunt me to some convalescent palace of varieties in Torquay which they use here.’
‘If you got an au pair or someone you could probably rest at home just as well.’
Frederick had known Aran Hunter for several years, admired his work enormously, but could hardly imagine this dynamo quietly recuperating in a post-operative lay-by until his plaster was removed.
‘Tried that. Got one of my students to agree to live in but it won’t work. You see, I’ve no lift. Four floors up and I couldn’t possibly cope with the stairs.’
The soft announcement of Frederick’s appointment led them to break off, but, anxious to catch up with Hunter’s news, Frederick pressed him to meet after his check-up. They exchanged details of Aran’s room number and Frederick hurried in the wake of a pair of dark stockings leading him towards the row of steel elevators. In contrast to the cosiness of the reception area the streamlined efficiency of the lifts gave the game away: the Darwin Clinic meant business. Like everything else beyond the ground floor, the lift equipment was probably sterilized daily, he decided.
Rowan was waiting in the reception hall when Frederick reappeared, sickly pale but determinedly cheerful.
‘Hope I haven’t kept you waiting, my dear. I bumped into a young friend of mine who’s a patient here. We had a chat in his room after my tests and I persuaded his doctor to let him out to lunch. He’s on parole,’ he confided as she took his arm, ‘so we must return him reasonably sober.’
Frederick’s protégé appeared on cue, now turned out in a kilt of virulent yellow and black tartan and a tweed jacket of such proportions as to involve the cooperation of several alpaca. Wheeling himself between the leather sofas, Aran Hunter, bright-eyed as a schoolboy on half-term release, was greatly impressed by the old man’s driver. Michelangelo would have swooped on this one, all woman indeed, her male get-up lending a tantalizing fillip to this unexpected exeat.
The doorman gladly assisted the unlikely trio into the street, anxious to maintain the reverential hush which distinguished the Darwin from other less classy establishments.
The Volvo was illicitly to hand.
‘Where to?’ she said.
Confused, Frederick began to stutter about the wheelchair. She patted his arm. ‘Now, have you booked, Frederick?’
‘I thought the Chelsea Arts Club.’
‘Oh no.’ Aran’s response was unyielding.
‘Your leg—?’ Frederick queried.
‘It’s not that. I really can’t face that nosey crowd. To be honest, Frederick, I’d rather the word doesn’t get around that I’m back from Venice,’ he explained, only adding to the confusion.
Rowan took them in hand.
‘Well, how about a little place I know where we can eat in the garden? There’s a back entrance so we can wheel you straight in without struggling through the restaurant proper. Wonderful food. No hassle.’
Frederick nodded; Aran concurred; the matter was settled.
‘We’ll get a taxi,’ Aran said. ‘While you go ahead to clear the way for me and the leg.’
Rowan expertly summoned a cab with an ear-piercing whistle.
The taxi-driver manœuvred Aran, the plaster cast and Frederick into the cab and folded up the wheelchair with a flourish, stowing it inside. Frederick bounced about trying to catch the girl’s eye, worried about the lunch booking.
Aran leaned out of the window.
‘What’s your name? In case we get there first?’
‘Rowan. Just Rowan. They know me. Ask for Toto.’
Aran looked nonplussed. ‘Rowan?’
‘Mountain ash,’ Frederick explained.
‘My mother smoked a lot,’ she said.
‘I thought Rowan was a man’s name.’
‘Well, it’s not. What’s yours?’
‘Aran.’
‘I thought Aran was a jumper.’
He laughed. ‘Touché.’
Lunch was a huge success. They spread themselves beneath a flame-red maple in the walled garden behind the restaurant. The sun lent a gilded touch to the fag end of a hot summer and for weeks tables in the courtyard had been in great demand, giant tubs of geranium, rosemary and basil lending a spicy un-English scent to a backyard only yards from the choked artery of King’s Road.
Aran sat sideways to the table, his leg propped on a chair, his restored bonhomie embracing the entire population of Chelsea. They ribbed Rowan about her previous night’s dip in the Thames,