“Miss Bryant, do you think you might give us the benefit of your undivided attention? This is a medical school, not a dating agency, as I am sure that you are well aware.”

Professor Hodges glared down his nose, over his spectacles and up to the row on which Alex and I were seated; how he achieved this feat of visual dexterity we never did find out. I glanced at Alex; we exchanged slight smiles, before turning our attention back to the professor’s revelations of the intricacies of the human digestion system. The few titters which greeted his outburst were quickly silenced by his scowl.

Alex and I first met many years ago when my family moved house. My father’s promotion enabled my parents to buy the neat little 1930s semi in the suburbs of the town in which we lived.

Both having older siblings who left us alone and did their own thing, Alex and I became firm friends at our first meeting. We rarely argued, played happily together and shared everything. For eight year-olds, that was certainly a welcome change from the growing pains of others at our school.

Neither of us was interested in doing what the other kids found fun, and so we tended to spend more and more time together. Our parents were concerned enough to try to get us to be “more sociable.” When that didn’t work, they engineered invitations to parties, often with cousins with whom we had nothing in common. Parental conferences were a regular event; much tea and coffee was consumed on these occasions and they would go on for hours.

Alex and I just ignored them and did our own thing. We could often be found in one of the bedrooms, listening to music or discussing any number of the topics that regularly occupied our young minds. We were officially of the same gender then so it was not a problem.

We sailed through secondary school, where we both achieved consistently high marks. We adopted the time-honoured principles of making as few waves as possible and blending in as best we could; thus neither teachers nor parents had any just cause to worry about us. Studying was usually done together but, as homework was submitted on time, without prompting and was always neat and accurate, there was no room for complaint.

We entered university, having both decided on the same courses. For us, there was no question and failure wasn’t even an uninvited blemish on our mutual horizon. It was a kind of competition if you like; not that we were in the least competitive, but there was no way that either of us was not getting a first class degree.

We decided to specialise in different branches of medicine — Alex wanted to go into urology — not literally thank goodness- and I took haematology. Both plumbing, if you like; just different fluids flowing through the tubes.

Eventually a decision had to be made; inevitably it was made together.

“Chris, I’ve been accepted for the Royal London.”

“So have I.”

“Still together, then, after all these years.”

I smiled and thus the die was cast. We started on the long road, and equally long weeks, that led to experience and, eventually, consultancy.

How we ended up at the same hospitals for all those years I’ll never know, but we did. Call it good planning if you wish; I prefer to believe that Fate, in whatever form you like to think of it, was looking after us. We shared nice houses — small but nice — in the three towns in which we lived, finally buying something much grander when we both got our appointments, predictably within weeks of one another.

I think by then that all four parents had resigned themselves to the fact that Alex and I were now in a relationship. We didn’t wake one morning and think “I love you;” it was more like we took it for granted. If we'd been asked we'd have probably said, "Yes, of course, we're soul mates." We’d neither of us had another love interest; I guess that, when you’re studying and working as hard as we were, and had the challenges we faced, you’re sort of blinkered. Anyway, that’s the way it seemed to us — soul mates.

It was when we confirmed that we were more than friends that the parents accepted, reluctantly, that we would never provide them with grandchildren. They were wrong.

THE END