The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

she would reimburse him for the flight, and he thanked her. “It’s not all that uncommon, you know,” he said.
    “Infections like that?”
    “Yes. But I meant it’s not uncommon for people to let their domestic workers fend for themselves. I see those people every day of the week. Filipina maids, any number of Jamaicans, Haitians – the lot.”
    She said that she had heard about the way he helped. “It’s very good of you …”
    He brushed aside the praise. “I have to do it. It’s my job. I’m a doctor. I’m not a hero or anything like that. That’s not the way it is, you know. You just do what you were trained to do – same as anybody.”
    She watched him. She could tell that he was uncomfortable talking about his work, and she decided to change the subject. Although they had known one another for years, she knew very little about him. She knew that he was British, that Alice was Australian, and that they kept to themselves much of the time. Apart from that, she knew nothing. She asked him the obvious question – the one that expatriates asked each other incessantly. How did you end up here?
    He smiled. “The question of questions. Everybody asks it, don’t they? It’s as if they can hardly believe that anybody would make a conscious, freely made choice to come to this place.”
    “Well, it’s what we all think about, isn’t it?”
    He agreed. “I suppose it is. In so far as we have any curiosityabout our fellow islanders. I’m not sure if I find myself wanting to know about some of them.” He hesitated. “Does that sound snobbish?”
    “It depends on which ones you’re thinking of.”
    “The rich ones,” he said. “I find their shallowness distasteful. And they worship money.”
    “Then it doesn’t sound at all snobbish. And anyway, we all know why they’re here. It’s the others who are interesting – the people who’ve come from somewhere else for other reasons. Not just because they’re avoiding tax.”
    He looked doubtful. “Are there many of those?”
    “Some people come for straightforward jobs. David did.” She felt that she had to defend her husband, who was not as obsessed with money as many of the others were. He was interested in figures , and there was a difference.
    He was quick to agree. “Of course. I wasn’t talking about people like David.”
    She decided to be direct. “So how did you end up here?”
    He shrugged. “Ignorance.”
    “Of what?”
    “Of what I was coming to. You know, when I saw the advertisement in the British Medical Journal , the ad that brought me here, I had to go off and look the Caymans up in the atlas – I had no idea where they were. I thought they were somewhere in the South Pacific, you know. I thought they were somewhere down near Samoa. That shows how much I knew.”
    “So you took a job?”
    “Yes. I had just finished my hospital training in London. I was offered the chance to go on to a surgical job, also in London, but somehow I felt that to do that would be just too obvious. All toopredictable. So I looked in the back pages of the BMJ and saw an advertisement from the Caymans government. It was for a one-year job in the hospital – somebody had gone off to have a baby and there was a one-year position. I thought: why not?”
    “And so you came out here?”
    “Yes. I came to do a job, which I did, and then I met Alice. My job at the hospital came to an end but I applied for a permit to do general practice and I got it. The rest is history, as they say.”
    She smiled at the expression. The rest is history . That meant things that happened – everything that happened. The moss. The acquisitions. Children. Inertia. Love. Despair.
    She looked about her. A group of four people – two couples – had come into the bar and had taken their places at a table on the other side of the room. They were locals – wealthy Caymanians who had what David called that look about them. They did not carry their wealth lightly. She thought