I had worked out by then that she was the only person in that building who had looked at a forty-five-year-old consultant surgeon standing in her doorway asking for an application form, and had simply given him one.
I wanted to know what she had said to him.
And she made me a cup of tea in a cupboard of an office and said that she had not said anything at all.
She said: "He asked for a form. I gave him a form. He filled it in and I put him on a Tuesday."
And I said that she must have known.
And she said: "Course I knew. Half the building knew. What was I supposed to do, interview him about it?"
And then she said the thing that I have repeated to about nine people since.
She said: "I've had four of them in twenty years. Doctors. They always come for the trolley. They've spent thirty years going into the room to say the worst thing and then leaving, and the trolley's the only job in the place where you go in afterwards and stay."
