She was about to leave the office and walk home when her softscreen chimed.
She was tempted to ignore the summons and sneak off, suspecting that her manager wanted to see her before she left. Guilt got the better of her and she accepted the call. The image of a woman in her mid-fifties expanded into the ’screen and it was a few seconds before Sally recognised her.
“Kath?” she said, surprised and delighted. “My word, where are you?”
“Would you believe here in Wem? In fact, about half a kay from where you’re sitting.” Kathryn Kemp raised a glass and Sally saw that she was beside the canal in the garden of the Three Horseshoes.
“Wonderful. Look, I’ve just finished work. I have a couple of hours before I’m due home. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Kathryn laughed. “I’ll get you as a drink. Leffe?”
“As ever.”
“I’ll get them in,” Kath said and cut the connection.
Sally locked the office, took the open staircase to the sun-filled atrium, and stepped out into the warm summer afternoon. She hurried through the surgery’s garden and took the path along the canal.
Kath Kemp was her oldest friend. They’d met nearly thirty years ago as medical students in London, hit it off immediately and stayed close ever since. Kath was grounded and serious, a private person who let very few people into her life; she had never married, never — as far as Sally was aware — had a boyfriend or girlfriend, and as Kath seemed reluctant to broach the matter of intimate relations, Sally never pressed her on the subject.
Despite their closeness, she had to admit that Kath was something of an enigma. They spoke at length, and at great depth, about their work, the world, politics — and Kath was happy to listen as Sally opened her heart and poured out her troubles, or her joys. But Kath never reciprocated; Sally had been piqued in the early days of their relationship, and then come to accept this as merely a facet of Kath. Sally loved the woman for her warmth, her empathy; she trusted Kath more than anyone else in the world, except perhaps Geoff, and enjoyed basking in her sheer… there was no other term for it… humanity.
It had been to Sally’s great joy that Geoff, when he’d first met Kath nine years ago, had formed an immediate rapport. “She’s a remarkable person, Sal. She exudes empathy.”
Their careers had diverged after graduation. While Sally had specialised in tropical medicine, Kath had practised psychiatry. She’d worked first in London, and then five years ago moved to New York, specialising in the treatment of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics.
They kept in contact with regular emails and online chats, and caught up in the flesh perhaps once every couple of years when Kath returned to London on business.
The Three Horseshoes dated from the sixteenth century, a former coaching inn with bulging walls, a twee bonnet of thatch, and a magnificent beer garden. She and Geoff had spent many a quiet early evening here in the summers, before their daughter Hannah’s arrival on the scene; Sally liked to watch the seven o’clock pulse of energy drop from the troposphere and plummet beyond the inn’s thatch, marvelling at the contrast of ancient and ultra-modern.
She stepped off the canal path and ducked beneath a strand of wisteria, knocking a bloom and inhaling the wonderful scent.
There were few people in the garden; Kath sat beside the well-stocked fishpond, facing Sally with a welcoming smile on her broad, homely face.
She stood and held out her arm. “And look at you!” Kath said. “Motherhood obviously becomes you.”
They embraced, and as always Sally had the odd sensation of hugging her own mother, dead these past thirty years.
They sat down, toasted each other, and Sally took a long drink of sharp, ice cold Leffe.
Kath Kemp was short, a little stout now in her early fifties, with a cheerful face that exuded good will. Sally had no doubt that she was loved and trusted by her patients.
“What a lovely surprise. But you said nothing about coming over! How long are you here for?”
“A last minute decision to attend a conference in Birmingham. I arrived in London this morning, but the conference doesn’t start for a couple of days.”
Sally reached out and gripped her friend’s hand. “You’re staying with us, and no arguments. You’ve not booked in anywhere?”
“I was about to try here.” She indicated the inn at her back.
“Don’t be silly. I want you to see Hannah.”
Kath beamed. “Can’t wait. She’s five now? She must have grown in the past two years…”
“It’s really that long?” Sally shook her head.
“And Geoff?” Kath took a sip of her orange juice.
“He’s very well. You know him — Mr Imperturbable. He never changes. He’s in Tokyo at the moment, covering the opening of a big art gallery, then moving north to shoot the opening ceremony of the latest arboreal city.”
“He certainly gets about.”
Sally smiled. She had told no one about the fact that Geoff liaised for the Serene; she suspected that Kath knew but was too diplomatic to mention the fact.
“I’ll cook you something tonight and I’ll take tomorrow off. Let’s go for a long walk.”
“Just like old times.”
In their student days they’d gone on jaunts along the Thames to Richmond, and spent hiking holidays in Wales and Scotland. Sally squeezed Kath’s hand. “It’s great to see you again.”
“It’s nice to come home,” Kath said, smiling around at the idyllic setting.
“You still think of England as ‘home’?”
“For all the greening of New York and Long Island, it will never be my ‘green and pleasant land’.” She smiled. “Anyway, how’s work?”
“I’m still enjoying it.”
“And still general practice.”
She nodded. “We got away from London over a year ago. I don’t know… perhaps I was getting old, but I couldn’t hack city life. I saw this post advertised, and the thought of rural Shropshire…”
“‘Westward on the high-hilled plains, Where for me the world began…’” Kath quoted, and Sally laughed.
“Housman, right? He always was one of your favourites.” Another odd side of Kath’s nature was her love, her adoration, for old poetry. Sally suspected that much of what she quoted were lines from obscure English poets.
“And you’re settled here?”
Sally nodded emphatically. “Very. Hannah’s taken to it like a fish to water.”
“And Geoff?”
Sally laughed. “I often think he’d be happy anywhere, just as long as he had me and Hannah and a good pub.” She looked at her friend, a suspicion forming. “Why do you ask?”
Kath considered her orange juice. “Well… I’m recruiting good people, doctors in all fields, for a new project. I’m putting out feelers, testing the water with certain people I know and trust.”
“A new project?” Sally echoed.
“Before I talk about the project, Sally, I’ll tell you about what I’ve been doing.”
Working with recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, Sally thought — and in the US at that. It was everything she considered anathema and contrary to the life she’d built for herself and her family here in Shropshire.
“About six months ago I changed jobs,” Kath said. “Nearly a decade ago a Serene-sponsored think-tank was set up to look into humanity’s response to all the changes. Recently they began recruiting for more staff. The offer was too good to refuse.”
“I thought you’d be working with your reclamation projects forever.”
“Do you know something, the incidence of alcoholism and drug dependency has decreased by something like seventy per cent over the course of the past ten years.”