Case Histories

Every time Laura left the house he worried about her, every time she leaped on her bike, put on her wet suit, stepped on a train. He worried when she went out in a high wind that a piece of falling masonry might drop on her head, he worried that she would take a student flat with an unserviced water heater and die of carbon-monoxide poisoning. He worried that her tetanus shots weren't up to date, that she would walk through a public building that was pumping Legionnaires' disease through the air-conditioning, that she would go to the hospital for a routine operation and never come out again, that she would be stung by a bee and die from anaphylactic shock (because she'd never been stung by a bee, so how did he know she wasn't allergic). Of course he never said any of these things to Laura – they would have seemed ridiculous to her. Even if he expressed the mildest trepidation about something ("Careful making that left turn, you've got a blind spot" or "Turn the light off at the switch before you change the bulb"), Laura would laugh at him, would have said he was an old woman and couldn't even change a lightbulb without foreseeing a disastrous chain of events unfolding. But Theo knew that the journey that began with a tiny screw not being threaded properly ended with the cargo door blowing off in midair.

"Why worry, Dad?" was Laura's constant amused reaction to his qualms. "Why not?" was Theo's unvoiced response. And after one too many early morning vigils waiting for her to come home from work in the pub (although he always pretended to be asleep), Theo had suggested casually that they needed a temp in his office and why didn't she come and help them out and to his astonishment she'd thought about it for a minute and then said, "Okay," and smiled her lovely smile (hours of patient, expensive orthodontic work when she was younger), and Theo thought, "Thank you, God," because although Theo didn't believe in God he often talked to him.

And for her very first day at work at Holroyd, Wyre, and Stan-ton (Theo was the "Wyre"), Theo wasn't going to be there, which upset him a lot more than it did Laura, of course. He was in court in Peterborough, a tedious dispute over a land boundary that should have gone to a local solicitor but the client was an old one of Theo's who had moved recently. Laura was dressed in a black skirt and a white blouse and had tied her brown hair back and he thought how neat she looked, how pretty.

"Walk to the station, promise, Dad?" Laura said sternly as Theo got up from the table, and Theo said, "If I must," but knew he wouldn't make the train if he did and thought he could pretend to walk and then take a taxi. He finished his low-calorie, high-fiber cattle-feed cereal and drained his cup of black coffee, thinking about cream and sugar and a Danish pastry, one of the ones with apricot and custard that looked like a poached egg, and thought perhaps they might sell them at the station buffet. "Don't forget your inhaler, Dad," Laura said to him, and Theo patted his jacket pocket to prove he had it. The very thought of not having his Ventolin inhaler made Theo feel panic, although he didn't know why. If he had an asthma attack on any English street probably half the people on it would be able to whip out an inhaler and offer it to him.

He said to Laura, "Cheryl will show you the ropes" – Cheryl was his secretary – "I'll be back in the office before lunch, maybe we can go out?" and she said, "That would be nice, Dad." And then she saw him off at the front door, kissing him on the cheek, saying, "I love you, Dad," and he said, "Love you too, sweetheart," and at the street corner he'd looked back and she was still waving.

Laura, who had brown eyes and pale skin and who liked Diet Pepsi and salt and vinegar crisps, who was as smart as a whip, who made scrambled eggs for him on Sunday mornings, Laura, who was still a virgin (he knew because she told him, to his embarrassment), which made him feel immensely relieved even though he knew she couldn't stay one forever, Laura, who kept a tank of saltwater tropical fish in her bedroom, whose favorite color was blue, whose favorite flower was the snowdrop, and who liked Radio-head and Nirvana and hated Mr. Blobby and had seen Dirty Dancing ten times. Laura, whom Theo loved with a strength that was like a cataclysm, a disaster.