Free Fifty-Minute Hour by Wendy Perriam

she’d been a disappointment – a shy and clinging child who had kept crying to come home (though she wasn’t sure where ‘home’ was, since her parents moved a lot, not just from house to house, but from continent to continent); then an awkward bashful teenager who’d been prone to eczema and flunked all her exams, and finally a tame suburban housewife. No degrees in anthropology, or doctorates in political science, no high ideals, no desire to save the world or serve her God. What had happened to her parents’ genes, she often wondered, guiltily? Her mother had been a saint, a pioneer; her father a philanthropist, reformer.
    Lionel Ernest Delahaye was still very much alive, though she saw him only rarely. He was still too busy – yes, even in his eighties. Her parents had conceived her very late; had more important things to do in their brisk and tireless twenties, their zealous thrusting thirties, than simply making babies; had waited till their forties to produce their only child – though even then there hadn’t been much time. She’d been born two months prematurely, as if her mother had lost patience with the passive tedious pregnancy, couldn’t wait the whole nine months when there were vital projects piling up, life and death decisions hanging on her word. She – the wretched infant – had almost died, in fact, and been rushed to neonatal, a nuisance from day one. Her mother told her, some time later, that just one machine in intensive care, which helped to save a few small and puny babies, cost more than what was desperately required to feed a whole village in Nepal.
    She’d mentioned it to John-Paul once – not Nepal, just neonatal.
    â€˜Do you recall anything at all of the experience?’ he’d asked. He did have strange ideas. Remember things at only one day old! ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘My memory’s a total blank till nursery school at four. But my mother said the doctors were quite wonderful.’
    She stared down at the carpet. It wasn’t very clean. Did John-Paul have domestic help, someone to look after him? It couldn’t be that easy lugging Hoovers up those stairs. He was definitely too thin, probably wasn’t eating, just making do on snacks or sweets, with no proper nourishment. Though she liked men with that sort of build – not bluff and broad, as James was, but slender and refined-looking, a charming man of average height who didn’t dwarf or swamp her, and with those lovely slim artistic hands, not James’s carpet-beaters. His skin was rather sallow, though, which could mean liver trouble, or perhaps just a lack of God’s fresh air. But how could he get out for daily exercise when it was patients, patients, patients, dawn to dusk? She knew he was too busy because when she’d phoned to inquire about appointments, he’d said at first he couldn’t fit her in, simply didn’t have a space, but then he’d rung her back to say another patient who’d been due to start that week had suddenly been posted overseas, so he could offer her Fridays at five-ten. He also said he’d keep her on his waiting-list, since once a week was clearly not enough. It seemed an awful lot to her, and she was really quite astonished to hear many of his patients attended three or four times weekly. However did they do their jobs, or get dinner cooked in time, and the cost must be prohibitive?
    She closed her eyes a moment, still aware of John-Paul watching her, his gaze piercing her closed lids. His own eyes were quite remarkable – dark and very lustrous, like the eyes men had in early silent movies when only eyes could speak – eloquent observant eyes, reacting to her every word, narrowing in sympathy, or clouding with her pain. He sometimes wore dark glasses, which she could completely understand. Too much pain must hurt, like too much light. Though he was sitting naked-eyed now