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touching, from your childhood, come back to you often now.
        ‘Gynaecology and obstetrics,’ you’d answered your mother proudly, when Michael first started courting you. ‘And GP work at the Albert Road surgery.’
        Your mother lowered her teacup. ‘Well then, you’ll need to get him off his pedestal right away.’ She snorted. ‘No playing doctors and nurses in a marriage.’
        You laughed together in her steamy kitchen, wiping tears from your eyes. A suet pudding simmered in a pan on the stove, lid rattling. She’d paused in the doorway, slipped her arms around your waist, rested her head on your shoulder. ‘You make sure he’s right for you.’
        How do you ever know?
        Michael had swept you off your feet. You were still new to the hospital, nervous to prove yourself capable of a promotion to theatre sister which you hadn’t thought you’d get. Your first Monday, and Michael sailed down a hospital corridor towards you, white coat billowing. He swivelled round as you passed each other.
        ‘Nurse!’ He whisked a black-and-gold fountain pen out of his breast pocket and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Write it down for me,’ he handed you the pen, ‘your name. Have you a telephone number?’ He put out a hand; his handshake was firm and warm. ‘Michael.’
        He tore a corner from a notice on the board for you to write on. His nib scratched; you were anxious about spoiling it.
        ‘I’ll take you for a drive,’ he nodded in agreement with himself. ‘In fact, I’ll give you a driving lesson. What do you say to that?’ His voice was just like James Mason’s. And there was the wave in his hair, combed to one side. He pocketed the scrap of paper and leaned with an elbow on the window ledge as you walked away down the corridor. You hoped the seams of your stockings were straight. He watched, you knew he did, even though by the time you reached the corner and glanced back, he was gone. You splashed out on a visit to the hairdresser’s for a Veronica Lake cut and set, shiny waves lifting to one side from your forehead and nestling at your neck, and spent an age worrying about which shoes you should wear for driving.
        He called you a ‘handsome’ woman. You were flattered until you wondered why he hadn’t said pretty, or beautiful. Jean said it was because you are tall and well endowed. ‘It’s always breasts with men,’ Jean said, eyes narrowed as she lowered her head to light her cigarette, ‘the bigger the better. He wouldn’t tell you that.’
        Michael strode the hospital wards and corridors, back straight, head up. He bent close to patients, looking them full in the eyes. Women smiled up in surprise when he cupped a heel in his palm, ran his fingers lightly either side of the length of a foot as he chatted about dates and antenatal care. They weren’t to know the intimacy of his touch was an illusion; he was simply assessing pelvic width. Even the elderly female patients responded to him, fingering the ribbons at the neck of their bed jackets, fluffing up their bed-flattened hair if they glimpsed him sweeping down the ward.
        He took you to the pictures to see Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train , boating on the river at Henley. He bought sheet music: Mario Lanza’s ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’; ‘Unforgettable’ by Nat ‘King’ Cole. That won your mother over straight away, those gatherings around her piano while you played and Michael and your parents sang. He drove you to the little church at Cookham where, walking in the graveyard, he pointed out the gravestones with his family name, lichen-covered and leaning, one or two of them going back as far as the 1700s. He bought expensive flowers and chocolates every week for the first two months. The other nurses exclaimed over the roses in crisp Cellophane brought to the staff kitchen by the porter almost every Monday. Often you took them to the wards.
        The sex had