Second Chance For Love. SUSANNE MCCARTHY
Forget it, she advised herself despondently. Maybe once, a few years ago, she could have stood a chance of competing, but not now—he wouldn’t even look twice.
Wearily she closed her eyes, hardly interested in what was happening to her as the doctor examined her. His touch was light, but not quite as gentle as Tom’s had been, and Josey found herself wishing that it were he who was examining her instead.
‘Well, I don’t think you’ve done yourself any serious injury, apart from your wrist,’ the doctor was saying. ‘I’ll send you down for an X-ray on that, and then we’d better see about putting it in plaster for you.’
She nodded apathetically. Tom had gone, and she just wished they would let her go to sleep. But first the nurse had a form to fill in, with all her personal details, and then a porter came—the irritatingly cheerful sort—and wheeled her through deserted corridors to the X-ray department. Then at last it was back to Casualty, where someone put a warm plastic splint on her wrist, and tied it up in a sling.
She was back in her cubicle, half-dozing in the wheelchair, when she heard Tom’s voice outside again. ‘I thought I’d just drop by on my way home and see how she is.’
‘She seems fine,’ the doctor responded, a note of constraint in his voice. ‘There’s no sign of concussion. The wrist is fractured, but it’s been set. Apart from a bit of shock, there are no other problems.’
‘So what’s wrong?’
She heard the doctor sigh. ‘I really can’t justify keeping her in, Tom—not on medical grounds. You know the situation we’re in for beds—I’ve got a threatened miscarriage in cubicle three, and I’ve already had to send a coronary over to the Norwich.’
‘You’re going to discharge her?’ He sounded surprised.
‘I don’t really have much choice. At the most, I suppose I could stretch a point and keep her here until the morning. But all she needs is a couple of days’ rest, with someone to keep an eye on her, and she’ll be perfectly all right. Did she mention to you where she was planning to stay? Does she have friends or relatives up here?’
Josey heard Tom laugh drily. ‘She was old Miss Calder’s niece—remember that old stone cottage out by Breck’s Coppice?’
‘She wasn’t planning to stay there?’ The doctor sounded incredulous. ‘But it’s been empty for years—it must be practically falling down!’
‘Oh, the structure’s basically quite sound, but it’ll need a lot doing to it to make it habitable. Though she looks as if she’s got the money,’ he added, a sardonic inflexion in his voice. ‘Anyone who can afford to write off a Porsche can’t be short of a bob or two.’
There was a distinct note of contempt in his voice, and Josey felt herself wishing she could crawl into a corner. Of course those who eavesdropped never heard good of themselves, she reflected bitterly, but what else could she do but listen?
‘But in the meantime, that doesn’t solve my problem of what to do with her, does it?’ the doctor pointed out grimly. ‘Of course, I could ring her husband and get him to come and fetch her.’
‘No!’ The sharp protest broke involuntarily from Josey’s lips, and she tried to stand up.
The curtain was drawn back, and the doctor hurried in, frowning as he saw her struggling to her feet. ‘Now, now! You shouldn’t be trying to get up on your own,’ he chided, pushing her back with a gentle pressure that Josey didn’t have the strength to resist.
‘There’s…no need to ring my husband,’ she insisted weakly. ‘I’ll find myself a hotel or something.’
Tom had come in behind the doctor, and he laughed mockingly at her words. ‘Where do you think you are, South Kensington?’ he enquired drily. ‘We don’t have too many hotels around here, and those there are will be full for the tourist season.’
‘Besides, I wouldn’t be very happy just to let you go to a hotel,’ the doctor put in seriously. ‘Don’t you have anyone up here you could go to for a few days? A relative, or a friend?’
‘No,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘It’s years since I’ve been up here. It…it was just an impulse that I came, really.’
The doctor sighed. ‘Well, where are you going to go…?’ He hesitated, glancing round at Tom. ‘I don’t suppose…?’
Tom looked faintly alarmed. ‘What…?’
‘It would only be for a day or two,’ the doctor assured him persuasively. ‘She won’t need any special care—just lots of rest. By Monday she should be as right as rain.’
Josey gasped in shock as she realised what the doctor was suggesting. ‘Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly…!’
‘It would really be an enormous help, Tom,’ the doctor persisted. ‘Besides, if I knew it was you keeping an eye on her, I’d know she was all right.’
Tom hesitated, then smiled wryly. ‘OK,’ he conceded with no great deal of enthusiasm. ‘It looks as if that’s the only option.’
The doctor looked relieved. ‘I’ll give you a prescription for some diazepam for her—the pharmacy will be able to make it up for you tomorrow. Where have you parked your car? Nurse, get the porter to bring a chair, will you?’
He bustled away without waiting for an answer, leaving Josey looking up at Tom in some embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured awkwardly. ‘I’ve put you to so much inconvenience already.’
‘It’s no trouble.’ But his unsmiling expression did nothing to reassure her.
‘I’ll find a hotel as…as soon as I can.’
‘I said it’s no trouble,’ he reiterated a little impatiently. ‘Just don’t expect the Ritz.’
JOSEY lay in the big bed with her eyes open, trying to make herself believe that all this was actually real. Bright sunlight streamed through yellow chintz curtains, falling on the faded home-made patchwork that covered her bed and warming the mellow oak of the old-fashioned furniture.
Yesterday morning, and most other mornings for years past, she had woken in a stylish Italian bed, in a room with smart white walls and a pale beech floor, where she could just glimpse the south column of Tower Bridge if she leaned slightly to her left. Colin would be in the shower, and she would pad out of bed and into their glossy space-age kitchen, to pour him a glass of orange juice from a carton in the refrigerator.
But yesterday had gone—irrevocably. Her marriage—or rather the empty shell of it that she had been clinging to as if it were some kind of security blanket for so long—was over, and she had to face the world on her own. And this world was very different from any she would have expected to find herself in.
She didn’t remember much about getting here from the hospital. The doctor had injected her with some kind of pain-killer, and she had wanted to do nothing but sleep. She vaguely recalled a low, rambling building of weathered brick and flint, and the perfume of roses on the night air. And a cosy, old-fashioned kitchen, with a slightly uneven quarry-tiled floor, and a wicker dog-basket with a well-chewed red blanket beside a large inglenook fireplace.
These images came back to her like snap-shots in her mind. She could remember too, with a feeling that made her mouth a little dry, how she had stumbled woozily, and Tom had picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all, and carried her up a flight of steep, narrow stairs, and brought her into this room, with its low, oak-beamed ceiling and big comfortable bed.
And she had been so clumsy with her wrist splinted and tied up in a sling that she had had considerable trouble getting out of her clothes and into her nightdress, and he had had to come and help her. But the unceremonious