Capital

Asian family of five sat waiting, a grandmother and her daughter and son-in-law and her two grandchildren. They had brought books, video game thingies for the children, magazines, and a plastic bag of snacks; their equipment for the wait and their obvious experience at waiting made Petunia feel very amateurish.
    After about an hour, Petunia summoned up the nerve to go and ask if she had been forgotten. No one ever admitted that they had actually forgotten you, but the fact was that reminding people of your existence did sometimes have an effect. The woman at the counter looked up from her computer very briefly and looked down again before answering.
    ‘There’s a queuing system,’ she said.
    ‘Only my appointment was for one thirty and it’s now a quarter to three.’
    ‘All Dr Watson’s clinic appointments are for one thirty,’ said the woman.
    ‘Oh well, that’s all right then,’ said Petunia. The woman looked up at her briefly again, and Petunia went and sat back down with her heart beating harder and more quickly.
    Forty-five minutes later the woman called out, ‘Miss Hoo, er, Miss Howe.’ Petunia went in to see the consultant. A young woman doctor in a white coat – Petunia could see she was a doctor because of her stethoscope – smiled and said hello while in the corner of the room a man in his fifties sat at a computer screen typing. There was a lot of complicated-looking equipment in the room, machines with wires and screens, a couch with a drawn-back screen and a shiny metal device on a stand hanging over it, which instantly made Petunia think of something on a television nature programme, but gone wrong, like a huge steel insect.
    The woman doctor indicated a chair and said, ‘He won’t be a minute.’ The older doctor sat and typed for five minutes and then said,
    ‘Yes, hello. You are?’
    ‘Mrs Howe.’
    The doctor looked at the notes.
    ‘Symptoms worse?’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    Raising his voice, as if the fact that she had not immediately understood the doctor’s question meant that she was deaf, he said:
    ‘Have the symptoms you reported got any worse? The things that you felt were wrong with you, are they worse? Are they different? Are there any new things?’
    Petunia described her symptoms. When she came to the one about the vision in her left eye, she had the feeling that the doctor was listening to her with more attention. He had brown hair of the shade which in youth was probably red, and his face was reddish too; he looked like a drinker and he also looked like a man who was often angry, and who used anger to get his way. An effective man. He had the air of an over-quick listener, someone who makes up his mind about what is being said to him very quickly, and then doesn’t entirely listen to the rest of what is being said. Petunia, perhaps because she had spent so much of her own life in what felt like passive states, attendant on other people who were better at expressing their wishes and needs, had always been very conscious of people’s ways of waiting while other people were talking or doing things. This doctor was truly terrible at that. He was vibrating with impatience.
    ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And the tiredness and balance? Feel tired, dizzy?’
    Petunia described the ways in which that was true. As she spoke she felt herself becoming more anxious. Something about describing her own symptoms made her wonder, for the first time, if she might truly be ill; if she might be going to die. The thought had flitted through her mind before but now it seemed to be settling in. It was embarrassing, to have got to the age of eighty-two without having these thoughts before, but Petunia was now beginning for the first time to imagine what it would be like to die. It was talking to this doctor which was making her do so. Perhaps because he was so bored and so impersonal, he brought to mind the final impersonality of death – the way in which it was the same for everybody. An intimate event which was identical for all and could not be escaped.
    ‘There are a few things we need to eliminate,’ the doctor said. ‘A brain tumour is the first of them.’
    ‘I have a brain tumour?’ asked Petunia. She saw a tiny flicker in the man which showed that he did in fact think it possible that was what she had; it might even have been the thing he thought likeliest. But he didn’t admit that, what he said, in a patient, irritated way, was:
    ‘No. When we talk about “eliminating”