‘Right,’ Malcolm said, getting briskly to his feet. ‘I’d better be off. It’s my weekly visit to the old folks’ home, and I don’t want to miss their morning coffee. Sister Mackay makes the best scones in the north.’
‘I’d better hit the road, too,’ Alex said, getting to her feet, but Hugh held up his hand to stop her.
‘Didn’t Chrissie tell you I’d like a word?’ he said.
Yes, but I was hoping you might have forgotten, she thought, as Malcolm hurried away and she gazed enviously after him. I was praying you might have forgotten, but he obviously hadn’t, and reluctantly she sat down again.
‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’ she said when she and Hugh were alone.
‘Malcolm and I want to offer you a permanent post with us in our practice.’
Whatever else she had been expecting him to say, it hadn’t been that, and as he smiled at her, clearly expecting her to accept, her heart slid slowly down to the foot of her stomach. It had been so easy to refuse the offer of a permanent post from the other GPs she had worked with, but this was going to be harder, so much harder.
Then tell him you’ll stay, her mind whispered, but she couldn’t do that, she knew she couldn’t, not when she was so attracted to him, not when he said he trusted her, and she hadn’t told him the truth about herself.
‘Hugh, I…’ She came to a halt, cleared her throat and began again. ‘I’m very flattered that you and Malcolm would like me to join you here, but I’m afraid I can’t accept your offer. I’ve agreed to help out at a practice in Cumbria next month, then I’m going to Lisbon for a couple of weeks in January, and in February I’ll be working in Glasgow.’
The smile that had been on his face when she’d begun speaking had vanished completely by the time she was finished, and in its place was confusion and bewilderment.
‘But can’t you simply tell the agency you’re no longer available for locum work?’ he protested. ‘That you’ve accepted a full-time post here? I appreciate you won’t want to give up your holiday in Lisbon, but Malcolm and I would be more than happy to cope for those two weeks.’
Oh, please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is, she thought, seeing not only confusion but also hurt in his grey eyes. Please, can’t you just accept that I can’t stay here, that I have to go?
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. And I am, I am. ‘But I can’t accept your offer.’
‘But why?’ he demanded. ‘You fit in here so well, and you like it here, I know you do. If it’s your New Year challenges that are bothering you, I’m sure we can figure something out, perhaps give you a longer annual leave to enable you to undertake them.’
Oh, don’t, please don’t, she thought, feeling a hard lump in her throat. You’ve no idea of how much I want to say yes, but it wouldn’t be fair to you or to Malcolm.
‘You have a wonderful practice, Hugh,’ she said as evenly as she could, ‘but staying here…It’s not for me. I’m sorry, but it’s not for me.’
‘But, Alex—’
She didn’t give him time to reply. She just headed out of his room as fast as she could, and when she shut the door behind her Hugh slumped back in his seat, torn between bafflement and anger.
She hadn’t so much as hesitated before she’d refused his offer. She’d just given him a flat, unequivocal no, and it didn’t make any sense. She liked the patients, and the patients liked her. She liked Malcolm, and he knew, too, though he wasn’t a vain man, that she liked him, so why would she want to leave?
Well, he was damned if he was going to let her go, he decided, at least not without a fight. She had somehow crept into his life—bulldozed into it, more like, he thought ruefully—and he couldn’t imagine his life without her, refused point blank to.
‘Well?’ Malcolm said hopefully as he stuck his head round Hugh’s consulting-room door, and Hugh frowned at him.
‘I thought you were going to the old folks’ home for coffee and scones?’ he said, and Malcolm grinned.
‘I am, but when you said earlier that you were going to offer Alex a partnership this morning I knew I couldn’t leave without finding out what she said.’
‘She refused.’
‘She refused?’ Malcolm repeated, amazement plain on his face, then he sighed. ‘Well, that’s it, then. You’ll want me to phone the agency, to arrange for them to send us another locum.’
‘No,’ Hugh said grimly, ‘because this isn’t over yet. There’s something she’s not telling me, something she’s holding back, and I’m not going to rest until I find out what it is.’
A slow smile crept across Malcolm’s plump face.
‘Like that, is it?’ he said, and Hugh’s own lips curved ruefully.
‘Not yet, but I’d like it to be,’ he said. ‘I care about her, Malcolm. I care a lot, and there’s something wrong here, something she’s scared about, and I want to know what it is.’
‘Be careful, Hugh.’ Malcolm warned. ‘You know what Alex is like. If you antagonise her, she’ll clam up like a shell.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Hugh replied.
But not that careful, he thought as he buried himself in the practice paperwork for the rest of the day. He wanted answers, and not just answers. He also wanted to tell her that no matter what Jonathan had done, she had to let go of the past because if she didn’t it was just going to fester, as his own grief and guilt had festered.
This evening, he told himself. There was no surgery this evening, so he’d corner her when she got back from her home visits, and he wouldn’t let her leave the surgery until she’d listened to him.
But it looked as though he was going to have a long wait, he realised, when he carried all the folders he’d been working on through to Chrissie’s small office and saw it was almost six o’clock.
‘Alex, not back yet?’ he said as Chrissie shook her head.
‘Mr Nolan phoned from Heatherlea farm at three o’clock to say his wife had fallen and he thought she might have broken her leg so I paged the call through to Alex.’
Hugh nodded, but Heatherlea was only a forty-five-minute ride away, and Alex would have been coming back from her home visits by three o’clock so where the hell was she?
‘Hugh?’
Chrissie looked uncertain, and a little worried, and he managed a smile.
‘You get off home,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Alex another half an hour, then I’ll phone the Nolans to see what the problem is.’
He lasted only five minutes in the empty surgery after Chrissie had gone. Five minutes of pacing up and down, picturing Alex lying out on the road somewhere, her bike having hit a deer, her slender body bruised and broken, was enough to have him dialling the Nolans’ number, and he didn’t know whether to cheer or swear when it wasn’t the Nolans who answered, but Alex.
‘What the hell’s wrong?’ he demanded, his worry making him sound angrier and more impatient than he’d intended. ‘Why are you still there?’
‘There’s a problem,’ Alex said. ‘I’m almost one hundred per cent certain Mrs Nolan hasn’t broken her leg, just very badly jarred and bruised it, but I want her to go to hospital to have it X-rayed, and she’s refusing to go.’
Hugh frowned at the phone. Alex sounded unsure, upset, and completely unlike herself.
‘I’m on way,’ he said.
‘There’s no need,’ Alex began. ‘I can—’
‘I’m on my way,’ he said, and put down the phone before she could protest any further.
‘If you’ve come here as backup for your partner,’ Frank Nolan said the minute he opened his front door and saw Hugh standing there, ‘you’ve wasted your time. You can’t make my wife go into hospital if she doesn’t want to.’
‘No, I can’t,’ Hugh said mildly, stepping forward so Frank Nolan had no other option but to let him in, ‘but the fact that you actually phoned my practice, asking for a doctor, suggests you’re worried about your wife.’
‘Of course I’m worried,’ Fr
ank Nolan exclaimed. ‘She’s my wife, and I love her, but she doesn’t want to go to hospital.’
‘And, as I keep telling Mr Nolan,’ Alex declared appearing behind him, ‘although I don’t think his wife’s leg is broken, I really would be happier if the X-ray department verified it.’
A faint feminine voice called from somewhere in the house, and, as Frank Nolan headed off instantly towards it, Hugh looked at Alex, his eyebrows raised.
‘OK, what’s going on here?’
‘Irene Nolan has multiple sclerosis,’ Alex replied wearily. ‘That’s why she has so many bruises—she keeps falling over—but she and her husband have decided they want to go down the holistic path with her treatment.’
‘But you can’t holistically treat a broken leg,’ Hugh protested.
‘And you think I don’t know that?’ Alex exclaimed. ‘I’ve gone over and over the same ground with them for the past two hours, and they just won’t listen. It’s…it’s…’ She sniffed. ‘It’s like talking to a brick wall.’
It was the sniff that did it. Alex wasn’t a sniffing sort of a woman. Alex was a life-is-there-to-be-grabbed-by-the-throat sort of a girl, and without thinking Hugh put his arm round her.
‘Hey, come on,’ he said softly. ‘It’s not like you to get so down.’
‘I know.’ She sniffed again. ‘But Irene and Frank Nolan…They obviously love one another so much, and yet this hospital thing…’
There was something else here, Hugh thought as he stared down at her. It wasn’t just Irene’s refusal to go to hospital. Something else had got under Alex’s skin, and pushed all of her buttons, big time.
‘Alex—’
‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered, pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket and blowing her nose vigorously. ‘I can assure you I’m not usually this feeble.’
‘I don’t think you’re feeble at all,’ Hugh protested, holding her tighter. ‘I think you’re just at the end of your tether, and understandably so.’
‘You could say that,’ she said, then she stepped out from under his arm, leaving him feeling cold without her. ‘She’s through here, and I hope you have more luck than I’ve had.’
Hugh hoped he would have, too, as he followed Alex down a narrow corridor, and into a small sitting room, and saw Mrs Nolan lying on a sofa, her face chalk-white with pain, her husband hovering anxiously beside her.
‘Irene—may I call you Irene?’ Hugh asked as he crouched down beside her, and Mrs Nolan nodded. ‘I’m Dr Scott, and my partner tells me you have multiple sclerosis. When were you diagnosed?’
‘Five years ago,’ Mrs Nolan replied. ‘I went to the doctors because my foot kept feeling numb. It was a nuisance, nothing more, but Frank…’ She smiled weakly up at her husband. ‘He insisted I went.’
‘Sensible man,’ Hugh observed.
‘When the doctors told us what was wrong, that there was no cure…’ Frank Nolan bit his lip. ‘I wasn’t about to give up, accept the diagnosis without a fight. We’ve seen just about every specialist in the country, including quite a few crackpot ones.’
‘Frank can be very determined when he wants to be,’ Irene Nolan said with a shaky laugh.
‘Of course I’m determined,’ her husband exclaimed. ‘You’re my wife, God dammit, and I love you. Do you know she actually told me to divorce her, Doctor?’ he continued with a look of exasperation. ‘As though her being ill was going to make me love her any less.’
‘You clearly don’t understand the full power of love, Irene,’ Hugh said with a smile, and looked up to catch Alex’s eye, to share his incredulity with her, but she wasn’t looking at him.
She was looking at Frank Nolan, and her eyes were full of such heartache, such indescribable pain that he almost went to her, but he couldn’t, not when his first priority was their patient.
‘What medication are you on, Irene?’ he asked, forcing his attention back to her.
‘I stopped taking everything the hospital prescribed about two years ago,’ she replied. ‘None of it seemed to help, and so Frank and I decided to try changing my diet to see if that would make a difference, and it did for a while, but just recently I’ve started to have trouble seeing.’
‘She began bumping into things, falling over,’ Frank Nolan declared. ‘That was when I wondered whether a move to the country might help, as the air is so much cleaner here than it is in the city.’
‘You do know that the chances of you going into remission—of the symptoms lessening, or disappearing completely—for a while are good?’ Hugh said gently, and the Nolans nodded.
‘It’s what we’re hoping for, Doctor,’ Frank Nolan said. ‘I don’t know how long Irene and I will have together, but I want that time to be the best it can be.’
Faintly, Hugh thought he heard Alex give a small sob, but he kept his gaze fixed on the Nolans. Whatever was upsetting Alex so much would have to wait.
‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Mr Nolan,’ he said, ‘which is why I can’t understand why you’re both so reluctant to have her leg X-rayed. She’d only be at the hospital for a couple of hours, whether the leg is broken or not.’
‘That’s what the doctor said when I fell and broke my wrist two years ago,’ Irene Nolan replied, ‘and yet they kept me in for a month, doing all these tests. Tests that only prove what I know already.’
‘We know Irene has MS,’ Frank Nolan declared, ‘and she was so miserable in hospital, Doctor, so very unhappy, and I don’t want her to go through that again.’
‘What if I came with you to the hospital?’ Hugh said. ‘Insisted that Irene was only there for her leg to be X-rayed and plastered if necessary, and then you’d be leaving.’
‘You’d do that for us?’ Irene Nolan said, amazement plain on her face, and Hugh smiled.
‘Consider it done. Alex, would you ring for an ambulance?’
She did, and the ambulance was there within minutes.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Frank Nolan said, gripping Hugh’s hand tightly, after the paramedics had carefully carried his wife out to the ambulance. ‘I know that sounds completely inadequate, but I won’t ever forget this.’
Hugh shook his head and grinned.
‘Just get in the ambulance with your wife,’ he said, and when Mr Nolan had, and the ambulance drove away, Hugh turned to see Alex standing beside her motorbike. ‘You, OK?’ he continued.
‘Why did you come out here?’ she said. ‘I’m very glad you did, but why did you come?’
‘You sounded upset—in trouble—and you’re my friend so of course I came,’ he replied.
‘Just like that?’
He frowned, and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean. Why should it surprise you that I came out to help you?’
Because Jonathan wouldn’t have, Alex thought. Miss Fix It. That’s what he’d used to call her. Little Miss Fix It, and she’d used to laugh at the nickname, until she’d really needed him, and he hadn’t been there.
‘Alex?’
Hugh was staring at her with a puzzled frown, and she managed a smile.
‘You’d better go. The Nolans need you.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Go, Hugh,’ she insisted, and for a second he hesitated, then he strode to his car, and Alex didn’t even wait for him to drive away.
She just hit her ignition and rode off into the dark, with what Hugh had said to Irene Nolan reverberating around in her brain.
‘You don’t understand the full power of love,’ he’d said.
She couldn’t have either, she thought, not if what both Frank Nolan and Hugh Scott had felt for their wives was what love—true love—was really like.
And you never will, her mind whispered, and she bit down hard on her lip to quell the tears she could feel welling in her eyes.
Tears never solved anything. Tears didn’t change anything. Get something to eat, Alex, she told herself when she got back to her flat. You’ll feel better if you have something to eat, but she wa
s so tired, so bone-wearily tired, that she just curled up on the sofa and when she heard a knock on her door an hour later she knew who it was, and wished he would just go away.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ Hugh said when she reluctantly opened her door, ‘but I wondered if I might have a word?’
‘Can’t it wait, Hugh?’she protested. ‘I’m really tired tonight.’
‘I’m afraid it can’t,’ he declared, his face implacable, and she sighed.
He wasn’t going to go away. No matter what she said, she knew he wasn’t going to go away, and she led the way into her sitting room with resignation.
‘OK,’she said as she turned to face him, ‘what’s so all-fired important that it can’t wait until tomorrow?’
‘I thought you might like to know that Irene Nolan hasn’t broken her leg,’ he said. ‘You were right. It’s just badly jarred and bruised.’
‘I’m pleased to hear that,’ she said. ‘Irene and Frank must be, too.’
He nodded. ‘They’ve signed on with the practice now, as well, so that means we can keep an eye on them both.’
‘Good,’ she replied, and began to walk pointedly towards her front door. ‘Well, if there’s nothing else…’
‘There is,’ he said, staying exactly where he was in the centre of her sitting room. ‘I want to know why you refused my offer of a permanent post.’
‘Hugh, we’ve been through this already,’ he protested. ‘I’ve agreed to help out in a practice in Cumbria, and then—’
‘Alex, what if I asked you to stay,’ he interrupted, ‘not for the practice, but for me?’
No, her brain protested as she heard the huskiness in his voice, and felt her own heart contract. I don’t want you to be attracted to me. I thought I did, but I was wrong, selfish, because it won’t work, it can’t.
‘Hugh, don’t make this even more difficult than it already is,’ she began, but it was the wrong thing to say because his eyebrows snapped down immediately.
‘If this is a difficult decision for you to make,’ he said, ‘that would suggest you don’t want to make it.’
‘Hugh—’
‘I want to know what’s wrong, Alex,’ he interrupted. ‘I know you’re keeping something from me, and I want to know what it is.’
A Wife Worth Waiting For Page 10