Free The White Family by Maggie Gee Page A

wedding.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Simultaneously, they both remembered that they had got drunk and flirted with each other. They had possibly kissed. They had certainly danced. Shirley’s spirits began to rise.
    ‘He’s on his third marriage by now, you know. None of us got invited to the last one. They ran off to Bali. Very glamorous … You didn’t come to my wedding, did you? I can’t remember if I asked you.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘But didn’t I hear –?’
    ‘My husband died three years ago. Cancer.’
    ‘I’m so sorry.’ He really looked sorry.
    ‘My little brother’s just gone up to the ward.’
    ‘I’d better give them some time together.’
    On impulse Shirley said, ‘Good idea. Come and have a cup of tea in the café.’
    Two bored black women were standing by the till, which was full of ravenous young doctors in white coats, furiously feeding haunted faces. It was a banqueting hall for ghosts. The tables and chairs were of royal blue plastic, which made chill reflections on their skin.
    ‘Hot meal arl finish,’ one of the black women told them. There remained some cupcakes, two squashed jam-tarts, some ginger biscuits and some cling-wrapped salads, half-decomposed, like overcooked spinach.
    ‘Just tea, I think,’ said Thomas. ‘Can’t say I fancy anything else.’
    They sat down at the only table free of white-coated inmates stripping their plates. ‘They’re like a plague of locusts,’ she said.
    ‘Stress,’ he said. ‘Exhaustion. They’ve probably been working twenty hours already.’
    ‘I suppose you just expect them to have good manners. Seeing as they’re professionals.’ She saw on his face a kind of disappointment.
    ‘Professionals are the rudest of all. In fact, they have qualifications in rudeness.’
    ‘I haven’t got any qualifications.’ (Why did I have to tell him that?)
    ‘I’ve got lots but I don’t really use them.’
    ‘I’d have thought you’d need them, to look after books. And to write a book, like you did.’
    ‘Oh, any fool can be a writer.’
    ‘Lots of people would love to be in your shoes,’ she said. ‘People admire writers.’
    ‘Do they, still?’
    ‘Well our house is crammed wall to wall with books’ – (Kojo’s books, if she was honest. Why was she trying to impress him? But Shirley herself had once been a reader, when she was young, doing teacher training.) Thomas was looking inside her coat, his eyes slipping down the cream silk of her blouse. His kind of woman would be thin and sharp.
    ‘Is Darren coming home?’ he asked.
    ‘Well he doesn’t exactly keep in touch with me. Of course he doesn’t, with his high-powered lifestyle.’ She made herself smile, to cover her chagrin.
    ‘I never hear from him, either.’
    On the other side of the canteen, there was something going on. The voice of one of the attendants was becoming steadily shriller. ‘Because it gone six o’clock already and dis kitchen not doin’ any more cookin’ –’
    A man with his back to them was making a scene. ‘You’re supposed to serve cooked meals between five and seven. Which means there should be an hour to go –’ A slim blond woman dressed in pink was plucking ineffectually at his shoulder.
    The black woman jabbed the air with her finger. ‘I can’t help what nonsense de notice say. The doctors come eat the lot. And that’s that.’
    It struck Shirley and Thomas at the same moment, and their eyes met, briefly, apprehensive, as the man snatched up his bleak tray in disgust and turned, with a little flounce of anger and tiredness
– It was Darren, of course
. Darren’s tanned face, which gaped and grew pinker the moment he saw them. He had come after all, the prodigal son. ‘Darren White, Voice of the Left, Man of the People’, as the papers called him. A jet-lagged man with an American twang, making a mean little scene in a café.
    He swept up to them in a gale of tension, handsome from a distance, gaunt close up. His hair had subtly changed