Life

My doctor now works out of a room in a terrace house in Carlton. The house is one of a row of houses each with four or five brass plates beside the door. I do not know if those houses all work in the same way, but I will describe how my doctor's house works. There is a keypad on the front door door and the patient pushes a code on the buttons to unlock it. Every thing in this house with a moving part has a laminated notice on it asking you to be quiet, yet the door has a sort of roller draught-strip attached to the bottom and when you open the door it groans and whistles and there is nothing you can do about it. There is a waiting room at street level at the back. If you know Carlton terrace houses you will know which room it is. The pictures in the waiting room have faded to blue and pink inside their thin brass frames. The fireplace has been boarded up for at least thirty years. There is a tray on the table which holds a jug of water and eight glasses. The jug has a lid on it and I think there used to be nine glasses. I have never seen anyone else in the waiting room. My doctor comes downstairs at my appointment time and then I get up and go up the stairs and she follows.

The stairs are not reassuring. They creak, and under their serviceable grey carpet the treads are very worn down in the middle. They are steep, and narrow, and much too shallow for my entire foot to find accommodation on them, or else my feet are much too long. In complete fairness and honesty, it is probably a bit of both.

There are three rooms off the landing at the top of the stairs. My doctor's room is the middle one. If you know Carlton terrace houses you will know which room it is, and where the door is placed relative to the landing, where the fireplace is relative to the window, and what you would see if you looked out the window, which I have not done. Some mornings the window is open and the air rings with the sound of metal on metal, engines, and men's voices coming from the huge building site. My doctor sits in an armchair by the window and I sit on a couch, facing her at a 110 degree angle. There are two other chairs in the room, cushions, a desk, a filing cabinet, a bookshelf, five potted plants, some ornaments, two side tables, and three paintings, a drawing, and a Persian carpet. The pictures, the carpet and the books have followed her to this room from the last one; everything else in the room is new, tasteful, but bland. One of the two chairs upon which my doctor does not sit when I am there is placed in front of the desk and evidently is used sometimes when there is writing or computing to be done, but the other, a Thonet B9, is probably never going to be sat on. It is a chair without a reason. It might stay there, between the couch and the door, for years, and never be sat on once. I suppose another patient might put a bag or coat on it. I won't. I put those things onto the floor.