And at about half ten a woman came in — not a doctor, not a midwife; she introduced herself as the safeguarding lead and she was about fifty and she had clearly been got out of bed.
She asked me, very pleasantly, to go and get a coffee.
And I said I would rather stay, and Maia said nothing, and this woman looked at my wife and then at me and said: “Mr Beckett. I’d like twenty minutes with your wife on her own, please. That’s how we do it.”
I went and sat in a corridor for twenty-five minutes and it was the longest twenty-five minutes of my life, and I understood — sitting on a plastic chair at eleven o’clock at night — that a stranger had just done for my wife, in one sentence, the thing I had not managed in two years.
She got everybody out of the room and asked her what was actually happening.
I have thought about that woman more than I have thought about my own mother.
What I have had to take.
And that is where mine starts.
Everybody tells me I could not have known. My mother-in-law says it. Maia says it. The family liaison officer said it twice.
