Eventually the father of the family I lodged with packed me off to the doctor, more from his own frustration than from kindness, I imagine. And so it was that I found myself in a walk-in clinic in Jericho—wheezing my way through the appointment with enough vigor to warrant a prescription for antibiotics and a firm warning to take good care before it developed into something worse.
I was ushered out of the consulting room and into the reception area, which had packed out in the past ten minutes. I could hardly see where I’d entered for all the sick: mothers jiggling their fussy babies, a couple with matching plaster casts on their wrists, teenagers with glazed eyes and restless feet slumped against the wall when there wasn’t room for them on the waiting-room seats. As I was squeezing my way past, muttering my apologies, the attention shifted to the front of the room. From the community-nursing office, a voice emerged, a voice I would remember anywhere.
“All right, all!” you say. “We’ll be seeing you all individually, so please do make yourselves comfortable until then. I’m a newbie too, so be kind. You have been warned!”
In an instant, I am back at the Rose & Crown: the same studied irreverence and the same ability to disarm and win over any audience with that self-deprecating charm that had sent my head into a tailspin.
I know it is now or never. I’ll never know how I summoned up the courage, but the word is out of my mouth before I can overthink it.
“Maggie . . . Maggie!”
You stop in your tracks, rising onto your tiptoes to survey the room and find the source of the voice. By this time, I have reached you. “Nurse Marbury, rather,” I manage, quickly assessing the name badge on the breast pocket of your pinafore and ensuring my eyes don’t linger too long.
For one cruel second, I suspect you can’t place me. Then you exhale, beaming. “Frank! My man of principle. What brings you here?”
With impeccable timing, the rattle in my chest rises up and I find myself coughing a chunk of phlegm straight into my hankie, crumpled from overuse and a few days spent stuffed at the bottom of my pocket. I don’t think I have ever been so grateful for a cough before or since. I tell myself it is fate, that this is meant to be.
“Ah, well, I might be able to guess that one.” You smile, placing your hand on the top of my arm. The spot where your hand rests tingles, and in that one gesture I realize just how hungry I am for touch, your touch.
I imagine we are being watched, and you are careful not to cause a scene. “Take good care of that cough, Frank, lots of hot chest compresses, tea every hour . . .”
“Look, Maggie, I wanted to ask you something. And not about the cough.” I haven’t much of a voice left after weeks of coughing, but what little there is comes out with uncharacteristic decisiveness. “Maggie, would you go out with me sometime? Just the two of us?”
Our interaction seems to have attracted an audience. I can sense the row of patients behind me leaning just an inch forward. In the far corner, the receptionist peers suspiciously in my direction, one minute away from tapping her watch at me, if she gives it even that long.
“Yes. Yes, I’d like that.”
I haven’t given much thought to being taken up on my offer. I feel very much out of my depth but manage to relax my face into a smile that I hope says how delighted I am, without putting you off. It works. You offer up your availability as if you have spent a lifetime arranging dates.
“I’m off a week tomorrow, which should give you enough time to clear that cough. You can pick me up outside the surgery at two thirty. I’ll leave the rest up to you.”
And with that, you call your next patient.
I stumble out into the fresh air, relieved to be away from the smell of stale human bodies and its unconvincing antiseptic mask. On the cycle ride home, I am elated; I have found you again and convinced you to go on a date. What were the chances? Surely that was fate in action? And it was on my side for once too! It isn’t until I get into bed, the duvet pulled right up to my neck, that I realize we haven’t even hit the hard part yet.
Our first date rolls round quickly enough. I arrive horrendously early and do laps of the nearby streets, hoping there aren’t any residents hovering at their net curtains, primed to call me out on my suspicious lingering. You are true to your word, perfectly on time. From a hundred yards away, I catch a flash of your bright red skirt. Hardly your usual uniform and more likely to cause a cardiac arrest than cure it, I find myself thinking, feeling my own pulse surge with each step you take toward me.
“Hi, Frank,” you say, your face flushed. From cold or nerves? I wonder. “Where are we off to, then?”
“I thought we could go to the Ashmolean? There’s meant to be a good exhibition there at the moment, Japanese screen paintings . . .” I trail off, suddenly not so sure of my romantic sensibilities or my ability to plan anything remotely “fun.” I sound thirty years older than I really am and cringe, scouring my brain for last-minute alternatives.
“How cosmopolitan, Frank. That sounds wonderful!”
For a cruel second, I think you are mocking me. Then, from nowhere, you link your arm through mine, and suddenly I don’t care. I know I have got something right, and the warmth of your enthusiasm floods through me.
At the museum, you are keen to pick my brain on the exhibition, which is, mercifully, empty. I’d had visions of schoolchildren watching me floundering from their crocodile formation; worse yet, the students I supervised making use of their university discount on a weekday afternoon. There is something about the way your face lights up when I impart a titbit of information, your head cocked to one side, looking up at me from under the curtain of your fringe, that makes me want to impress you.
I overreach myself. Before I realize it, I am an expert on the Edo period. I provide all manner of observations on the shogun’s favorite ceramic vase, the screens saved from the battle of Osaka. I pray you don’t know enough to see straight through my invented tales, which grow ever more extravagant in my bid to light you up, to sustain the glow and glee on your face. For the first time in my life, I feel confident. Calm, at ease, not aching with the overwhelming desire to be someone, anyone, else. You are here, freely, with me. For some unfathomable reason, you seem to be very happy about that too.
At the final case, there is an array of fans, painted silk with bamboo handles, each one decorated exquisitely. On the table beneath, there are some less antique equivalents for school visitors to practice their own fanning, or to hit each other with, whatever might buy their teachers more time. Picking one up, I extend its cheap gauze across the lower half of my mouth and look down at you with a gaze that I hope looks coquettish.
“And how did the empress like the exhibit?” I ask.
You laugh, your head thrown back, your neck bare and beautiful. It has been a risk worth taking. When you gather yourself, you take a step closer to me.
“Oh, you are an odd one, Frank,” you say. “Oddly brilliant too.” You fleetingly cast your eyes left and right before pushing the fan aside and placing a kiss on my lips.
I knew then that I loved you, Mags. I have loved you since that moment on and in every minute since. I should have told you then. I worried that it was too early. We had all the time in the world to grapple with our emotions, for me to admit just how deep you ran in my veins. Only now, when we have used up that time, can I see my mistake. I see them all. These past six months, I haven’t been your clown, and I certainly haven’t been your samurai. Forgive me, Mags, please?