I have loads of friends in the UK when—if—I feel the need to socialise.’
‘No one who could come with you? We Greeks find it difficult to imagine being on our own. As you’ve probably noticed, we like to surround ourselves with family.’
‘Plenty of people offered to come,’ she said quickly. ‘But this trip was something I needed to do alone.’
He said nothing, just looked at her with his warm, brown eyes.
‘I wish I could have come with Mum before she died, though. She always hoped to return to Greece, with Dad and me, to show me her country, but sadly it never happened,’ she found herself explaining, to fill the silence.
‘Because of her MS?’
‘Yes. Mostly.’
But even before her mother’s diagnosis the trip had been talked about but never actually planned. Her parents’ restaurant had taken all their energy, money and time. At first it had seemed to be going from strength to strength, but then the unimaginable had happened. Dad had died and without him Mum had become a shadow of herself and had talked less and less about returning to Greece.
It had only been later that she’d realised that her father’s death and struggling with a failing business hadn’t been the only reasons Mum had been listless. She’d hidden her symptoms from her daughter until the evening she’d collapsed. And that had been the beginning of a new nightmare.
‘What do you do when you’re not working?’ he asked, when she didn’t expand.
‘I kind of work all the time,’ she admitted ‘It’s honestly my favourite thing to do.’
He frowned as if he didn’t believe her. But it was true. She loved her work and found it totally absorbing. Given the choice of a night out or settling down to some research with a glass of wine in one hand, the research won hands down.
Their food arrived and was set before them. Katherine reached for the bowl of lemon quarters at the same as Alexander. As their fingers touched she felt a frisson of electricity course through her body. She drew back too quickly and flushed.
He lifted up the dish, his expression enigmatic. ‘You first.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So why public health?’ he asked, seeming genuinely interested.
‘I thought I wanted to do general medicine but I spent six months in Infectious Diseases as part of my rotation and loved it—particularly when it came to diagnosing the more obscure infections. It was like solving a cryptic crossword puzzle. You had to work out what it could be by deciphering the clues, and that meant finding out as much as you could about your patient—where they, or their families, had been recently, for example. Sometimes it was obvious if they’d just come from Africa—then you’d start by think of malaria—or typhoid or if they’d been on a walking holiday in a place where there were lots of sheep, making Lyme disease a possibility. It was the patients who made the job so fascinating. When you’d found out as much as you could, you had to decide what tests and investigations to do, ruling diseases out one by one until the only one left was almost certainly the right answer.’
She rested her fork on the side of her plate. ‘Of course, it wasn’t always a good outcome. Sometimes by the time you found out what the patient had it was too late. And what was the point in diagnosing someone with malaria if you couldn’t stop them getting it in the first place? I became really interested in prevention and that’s when I moved into public health.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on. But when I get talking about work...’
‘Hey, I’m a doctor, I like talking shop.’
‘Why did you decide to come back to Greece?’ she asked.
Something she couldn’t read flickered behind his eyes. ‘I wanted to spend more time with my daughter,’ he said shortly. ‘But we were talking about you. How did your parents meet?’ It seemed he was equally determined to turn the conversation back to her.
‘Mum met Dad when he was in the armed forces. He was stationed in Cyprus and she was visiting friends there. They fell in love and he left the army and they moved back to Scotland. He tried one job after another, trying to find something he enjoyed or at least was good at. Eventually he gave up trying to find the ideal job and started working for a building company. We weren’t well off—not poor but not well off. We lived in a small house bordering an estate where there was a lot of crime. When I was eight my father became unwell. He didn’t know what was it was—except that it was affecting his lungs. He was pretty bad before Mum persuaded him to see his GP.’ She paused. ‘That’s when I began to think of becoming a doctor.’
He leaned forward. ‘Go on.’
‘We used to go, as a family, to his doctor’s appointments. We did everything as a family.’ Sadness washed over her. ‘First there were the visits to the GP, but when he couldn’t work out what was going on, he referred Dad to the hospital. I was fascinated. Everything about the hospital intrigued me: the way the doctors used to rush about seeming so important; the way the nurses always seemed to know what they were doing; the smells; the sounds—all the stuff that normally puts people off I found exciting.
‘Of course, I was too young to understand that the reason we were there was because there was something seriously wrong with my father. His physician was a kind woman. I remember her well. She had these horn-rimmed glasses and she used to look at me over the top of them. When she saw how interested I was, she let me listen to my father’s chest with her stethoscope. I remember hearing the dub-dub of his heartbeat and marvelling that this thing, this muscle, no larger than his fist, was what was keeping him—what was keeping me and everyone else—alive.
‘I was always smart at school. It came easy to me to get top marks and when I saw how proud it made my parents, I worked even harder. My school teachers told my parents that they had high hopes for me. When I told Mum and Dad—I was twelve—that I wanted to be a doctor they were thrilled. But they knew that it would be difficult if I went to the high school in our area. It had a reputation for being rough and disruptive. They saved every penny they could so they could send me to private school.
‘My father had received a payment from the building company when he left—by this time he’d been diagnosed with emphysema from years of breathing in building dust—but I knew he’d been planning to use the money for a down payment on a mortgage to buy a little restaurant—Dad would be the manager, Mum the head cook—and I didn’t want them to use their life savings on me, not if they didn’t have to.
‘I persuaded them to let me apply to one of the top private schools. My teacher had told them that the school awarded scholarships to children with potential but not the funds to go to the school. She also warned them that it was very competitive. But I knew I could do it—and I did.’
‘I am beginning to suspect that you’re not in the habit of letting obstacles get in your way.’
Suddenly she was horrified. She wasn’t usually so garrulous and certainly not when it came to talking about herself. Over the years she’d become adept at steering the conversation away from herself and onto the other person. Now she was acutely conscious of having monopolised the conversation, and when she thought about it she realised she’d made herself out to be a paragon of virtue when nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps it was the wine. Or the way he listened to her as if she were the most fascinating person he’d ever met. Her heart thumped. Perhaps this was the way he was with everyone. She suspected it was. In which case he’d be an excellent family doctor.
‘So how long have you been back in Greece?’ she asked when their waiter left them, after replenishing their water glasses. She really wanted to know more about him.
‘Just over two years.’ His gaze dropped to his glass. He twirled his water, the ice cubes tinkling against the side. ‘Not long after I lost my wife. I worked at St George’s in London—As I mentioned earlier, I trained as surgeon before going into general practice—but my wife, Sophia,