The Best of Times Read Online Free Page A

persuade her many times, none of those things were exactly professional drawbacks.
    “There are dozens of successful black actors these days—”
    “Oh, really? Like who?”
    And, of course, there weren’t. There was Adrian Lester and there was Sophie Okonedo and Chiwete Ejiofor … and after that the list tailed to a halt. Dancers, yes, singers, yes, but not actors. She had tried to persuade Georgia to go for some chorus parts in musicals, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
    “I’m a lousy dancer, Linda, and you know it.”
    “Georgia, you’re not! Maybe not Covent Garden standards, but extremely good, and you’ve got an excellent singing voice, and it’d be great experience; you’d almost certainly have got a part in Chicago , or that revival of Hair , or—”
    “Which folded after about three days. Anyway, I don’t want to be a dancer. I want to act. OK?”
    She still lived at home, in Cardiff, with her adoptive parents. Her father was a lecturer at Cardiff University, her mother a social worker:charming, slightly hippie middle-class folk, unsure how to manage the ambitions of the beautiful and brilliant cuckoos in their nest. Their other child, Michael, also black, blacker than Georgia, who was actually mixed-race—a fact that added to her neuroses—was five years older than she was, a barrister, doing well in a London chambers; he had gone to Cambridge and was acknowledged as extraordinarily clever.
    Well, maybe this production would be Georgia’s big chance, Linda thought; and much more likely it would not. She decided not to tell Georgia about it yet; she couldn’t face the unbearable disappointment if the production company never even wanted to see her.
    • • •
    People—nonmedical people, that was—always reacted the same way when they heard what Emma did: “You don’t look like a doctor,” they said, in slightly accusatory tones, and she would ask them politely what they thought a doctor did look like; but of course she knew perfectly well what they meant. Most doctors didn’t look like her, blue eyed and blond and absurdly pretty, with long and extremely good legs. And she had learnt quite early on in her career that she might have been taken more seriously had her appearance been more on the … well, on the earnest side. Now that she was a houseman, she wore longer skirts—well, on the knee anyway—and tied her hair back in a ponytail, and obviously didn’t wear much makeup; but she still looked more like a nurse in a Carry On film than the consultant obstetrician she was planning to become.
    She was a senior houseman now, working at St. Marks Swindon, the new state-of-the-art hospital opened by the health secretary earlier that year. She knew she was very lucky to be there; it was not only superbly designed and multiple-disciplined, with extremely high-calibre and highly qualified staff; it was just near enough to London, where she had first trained, for her to see her friends.
    She was really enjoying accidents and emergency—A&E; apart from obstetrics, it was her favourite department so far. It was so differentevery day; there was always something happening, and yes, you did have to cope with some awful things from time to time—major car accidents and heart attacks and terrible domestic accidents, burns and scalds—but a lot of the time it was quite mundane. And the whole A&E experience was very bonding; you shared so much, day after day; you worked together, sometimes under huge pressure, but it had a culture and a language all its own, and you made very good friends there, lasting relationships. And you felt you really were doing something, making people better, mending them there and then, which sounded a bit sentimental if you tried to put it into words, but it was the reason she had gone into medicine, for God’s sake, and it was far more satisfying than orthopaedics, for example, seeing people with terribly painful hips and backs and knowing it would be months before anyone