All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell

Author:Alastair Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407008561
Publisher: Random House

19

An accident on the A1 South reduced the motorway to one lane each way, and it took Sturrock almost two hours before he was back in the Chiswick area. Even with the delay, though, he couldn’t face going back home straight away, so stopped at a little coffee shop near Gunnersbury station. He was killing time.

There were eleven tables in the café. Three were empty. Seven were taken by families or groups of friends. He was the only one there who was alone. He ordered a coffee and a tuna sandwich, and went to sit down. At the table next to him, a couple with a young child in a pram were talking about whether to go to the swings, or whether to go home. The man wanted to go to the swings. The woman thought it was too cold. At the table behind him were two married couples dressed for a long walk. The men were looking at a map, and plotting their route. Their wives were talking about who was doing what and who was going where at Christmas. One of them had a dispute with her sister as to which of them would have their mother. So far as he could tell, both the sisters actively wanted the mother to be with them, which was nice, he supposed. He wondered where the mother wanted to be. Dead, possibly. That was when he knew he was on the verge of a plunge, possibly even well into it. Such a tiny trigger for his thoughts to turn to death.

As the Eastern European waitress brought over his coffee, he felt close to being overwhelmed by the sense of solitude that had been growing all day. He had been with his mother, but had wanted to get away from her. He was heading home to his wife, but didn’t want to get there. He was dreading the visit from his son tomorrow, because he was sure it would go wrong, no matter how hard he tried. All around him was the noise of families and friends enjoying their weekend, but not his family, not his friends. By the time his sandwich arrived, he was lost in thoughts about Stella, and whether there was any hope for their marriage.

When he met her, almost forty years ago, Stella had been a bright, exuberant young medical student, hoping one day to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a general practitioner. They first encountered each other one Tuesday morning coming out of a lecture. He wasn’t looking where he was going, bumped into her, and amid all the mumbling and stumbling that followed, they agreed to go for a cup of tea. Both were finding it more difficult to be away from home than they had admitted to anyone else. They became friends quickly, lovers more slowly, and married in their final year of studies. But marriage was followed swiftly by one child, then another, both girls. Stella was thinking about getting back into medicine when she became pregnant again, and their only son was born.

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