A Regular Appointment

A Regular Appointment

October 1965

B RIDIE

B ENNETT WAKES

every morning at seven and says a prayer for the day. She retrieves her locket from the mantel above the bedroom fireplace and fastens it around her neck, using the time it takes to connect the clasp to think about her mother. She says a prayer for her, too. Then she makes breakfast for herself and her husband. She waits for him to finish in the bathroom and does her best to hold her breath while she brushes her teeth and washes her face. Then she takes her hair from their plaits and assesses whether the waves will be enough to subdue her hair. Then she walks with Alistair to the university. Sometimes, he will run a lecture from start to finish in bullet-point form for her to listen and nod along to. Sometimes she is listening, sometimes she is not. Then he will kiss her on the cheek and walk smartly upstairs to his office, the largest of the offices in the arts faculty building, after he kicked up a fuss about being put in the one with the noisy pipe and the head of department offered to swap. It has a wide window view of the green space in the centre of campus where he can watch the students come

and go at the top of the hour, swapping and passing on their way to learn in the lecture theatres or unlearn what they just learned in the pub.

And Bridie? She makes her way along the dark ground-floor corridor of this grand mahogany building to her office, which is jammed with all the filing cabinets the department could fit in. She spends her days as the department administrator, creeping around the egos of the more distinguished professors and managing the needs of the students who come to her for help. From nine o’clock onwards, Bridie makes sure her hair is as unterrible as it can be. She makes sure the room smells of her perfume. She makes sure there are biscuits. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. Ostensibly, she is filing documents and making phone calls and stamping forms and allocating room bookings, but as she does all that, she is waiting for him.

Now that he is teaching undergraduates, Eddie has a more frantic and frazzled disposition and does not appear every day. But he comes most days. And each day, she waits for him. Hoping there will be a knock at the door and his smile, often accompanied by some biscuits. And this person who has only ever been nice to her sits opposite Bridie and talks to her as if she is intelligent. Laughs with her like she is funny. Smiles at her like she is pretty. And how could she not look forward to seeing him? Not wonder which bow tie and knitted-vest-over-shirt combination he is wearing today. Not hope that he will come back. And when he does, not hope he will come again tomorrow?