Page 2 of Lost in Love
When she reached the front of the queue, a snooty receptionist informed her that the doctor was running about ten minutes behind. She looked at her watch.There goes the contingency.The receptionist looked around her to the next patient in what looked like an attempt to shoo her away.
Anna huffed loudly and scanned the waiting room for her dad.
“Ten-minute wait, Dad,” she said, collapsing into the seat beside him. She placed a careful hand over his twitching ones.
“I didn’t have to wait last time, but she’s such a lovely doctor, you’d wait forever and a day.” He grinned. “She’s what we would have called glamorous in our day, but you young’uns would call her ‘hot’.”
“Dad!” Anna turned to look at him.
“What? I’m a red-blooded male as much as the next man,” he chuckled.
The man sitting beside him grinned, as if in agreement with what he had overheard.
Anna looked around the waiting room.This is what it looks like sitting in God’s waiting room.Everyone was over the age of seventy, she was sure. They would have been in their fifties when she left Nunswick twenty-odd years ago. Probably out playing golf every day at the local course, having a tipple after the eighteenth hole. Now all sat, waiting for the call from above. She shuddered at the thought of what her own future looked like.
She couldn’t imagine willingly picking up a copy ofGood HousekeepingorWoman’s Ownlike half the patients there. They were no doubt fighting to get that week’s copy, having read the previous week’s when they’d been in for their endless string of appointments.
Having the time to read them was another thing altogether; reading was a luxury not afforded to Anna since she’d moved home. As a researcher, she had spent all day with her head in one book or another, often just skimming for particular words, but she got the gist from what she did read and picked up a lot of knowledge along the way. She couldn’t help but smile at those simpler times.
The only reading she had managed recently wasThe Tour Guider’s Handbook, given to her by the abbey when she first started. A handbook it was not. It was only named as such because someone had scribbled it at the top of the front page in marker pen. It comprised a few photocopied sheets from a book published in the 1930s about the history of the abbey.
During her interview at the abbey, the trustees had explained that the ruins of the abbey and its land were once owned by Abbey House. The developers who purchased it renovated Abbey House and divided the land from the abbey, selling them as two separate properties. The trustees had been after the abbey itself for years, but the price was always too high, as it had always included Abbey House.
After having read the few pages from which she had been expected to create a tour, she promised herself she would present the abbey with a new version as soon as time would allow her. She realised it was unlikely to happen now.
A warmth washed through her and her lungs tightened. She closed her eyes and took short, controlled breaths, telling herself good things would happen again in good time and that she had to focus on what was important now — her dad.
“This is ridiculous,” Anna breathed out.
“Don’t make a fuss. I’m sure your work will understand if you’re a bit late back.”
She was grateful for his attempt to reassure her, but he couldn’t understand her situation.
“I need to make a good impression; we need this job or you’ll be on baked bean rations.”
“What will you be on?”
“Thin air, Dad.”
He scrunched his face and went back to thumbing through what looked like a classic car magazine but could have been a car magazine that had sat in the surgery since the seventies.
Anna fidgeted in her seat. Noticing there was no queue at the reception desk, she leapt to her feet.
“You said a ten-minute wait. We’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes now,” Anna said, loudly enough for all eyes in the waiting room to turn and stare at her.
“I’m sorry, madam, but our doctors spend the time they feel they need to with their patients. I’m sure if your father required more than the allotted time you would want him to have…” She trailed off and returned her attention to her computer screen. A grin spread across her face.
Anna frowned at her and was about to chastise her for her insolence when she felt a presence. She turned. A doctor had appeared beside her. Although the same height as Anna, it felt as if the doctor loomed over her, assisted by a pair of enormous breasts that were suffocated behind a white silk blouse. Anna felt the need to take a step back to take her all in but instead found herself frozen on the spot.
“You must be… Miss Walker? I’m Dr Katherine Atkinson, but please call me Katherine. I’m sorry to have kept you and your father waiting,” she said, finishing with a smile so wide it created an attractive crease line on either side of her mouth, just below her prominent cheekbones.
Her whole manner exuded confidence and glamour. Anna opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“If you have somewhere more important to be, I can give your father his diagnosis alone?” She gave a little twist to her head and a raise of her eyebrows as if straining to hear an answer she knew wouldn’t come.
Again, Anna opened her mouth to speak, but the doctor interrupted whatever may have eventually come out.
“I thought not,” she added, looking around the waiting room. “Ah, Mr Walker, if you will?” She gestured towards her office.
