‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,’ he reassured her, the guilt that was warring with his relief that she was speaking to him again suddenly overwhelming him. ‘It’s my fault that you’re in this position at all. If I hadn’t twisted your arm—’
‘Adam, don’t,’ she said wearily. ‘I really don’t want to spend the next…however long playing the blame game. I shouldn’t have stuck that crowbar there. I should have made certain that I’d cleared the passage better so Pete couldn’t trip, and so on, and so on. I just want…’ There was a wobble in her voice that made a tight fist clench around his heart. He didn’t trust that his own voice would be any steadier so he simply waited for her to continue in her own time.
‘I’m sitting here in the dark,’ she said when she finally broke the endless pause.
Horrified, he broke in, ‘Dammit, Maggie, you didn’t tell me the torch broke when you fell.’ How much worse could her situation get?
‘No, Adam. The torch is OK,’ she reassured him quickly. ‘I decided to switch it off.’
‘Why?’ He couldn’t imagine anything worse than sitting in the dark, deep underground.
‘Partly I did it to save the batteries in the torch, but mostly it’s because that way I can fool my mind a bit…pretend that I’m not surrounded by millions of tons of rock and I… Oh, please, Adam, would you talk to me?’ she asked in a small voice that nearly broke his heart.
‘What do you want me to talk about?’ he offered, willing to promise her anything. Heaven only knew how long it would be before she wouldn’t be able to hear him any more. Every cell in his body rejected the idea of a world without Maggie in it…her courage, her empathy, her sweetness…but logic told him that there was very little chance that they would be able to move such an enormous quantity of rock in the short time available to them. It could take weeks in such an unstable environment, with every bit of excavation needing extensive use of props to stop it collapsing again. Was that why the mine had been abandoned in the first place?
‘Anything,’ she said, sounding so like the young girl he’d first got to know all those years ago that his own eyes burned with the threat of tears. Why had he wasted so much time before he’d come back to see her? If he’d returned before he’d met Caroline, the whole course of both their lives would have been so different.
‘Tell me about your wife,’ she suggested, almost as if she was picking up on his thoughts. ‘Tell me about Caroline.’
His ears burned at the thought that all the rescuers would be listening in to such a personal conversation, but if that was what Maggie wanted, who was he to deny her? She deserved that and more.
‘Where did you meet? Is she a doctor, too?’ Maggie prompted, just as someone tapped Adam on the shoulder.
‘Hang on a second,’ he said, and turned to face the slightly bashful-looking man standing behind him.
‘Doc, I just wanted to tell you that the rest of us have switched our radios off to give you some privacy. The only interruptions will be if someone’s contacting us on this frequency from outside. OK?’
‘Thank you,’ Adam said, hoping he was far enough into the shadows for the heat of his blush to be indistinguishable. ‘I’ll let you know if there are any messages.’
‘Oh, Lord, I’m sorry, Adam,’ Maggie groaned. ‘I honestly hadn’t realised that the whole world was listening in. I’ll just—’
‘They’re not listening any more,’ he broke in quickly, afraid that she might withdraw again. ‘It’s just you and me, the way it was in the library on a Friday afternoon, remember?’
The sudden gurgle of laughter at the other end was exactly how he remembered Maggie…his Maggie…the one who was full of laughter, not the serious, studious one that everybody else had seen.
‘Until the headmaster came in and caught us,’ she reminded him. ‘If you hadn’t lit the candles, he’d never have known we were up there.’
‘We couldn’t celebrate your birthday without lighting the candles on your cake,’ he objected, remembering the sudden stab of fear when he’d seen the expression on the joyless man’s face. He’d been so certain that he was going to be thrown out of school before he could take his final exams.
Then Maggie, his indomitable Maggie had piped up, ‘Would you like a piece of my birthday cake, sir? It’s chocolate with real chocolate icing.’
The voice coming out of the radio was repeating the words verbatim, and he burst out laughing. ‘Only you would have dared to offer the old dragon a piece of cake when he was ready to breathe fire.’
‘Ah, but, then, I was one of the few people who knew that Mr Pendragon had a seriously sweet tooth and couldn’t resist chocolate,’ she said smugly, her Saturday job, when she served the older man with his news pa per and a large bar of chocolate each week having given her the idea.
‘Well, he certainly proved it that afternoon,’ Adam grumbled, still sore that the treat he’d organised for Maggie had been so thoroughly hijacked by their headmaster. ‘He ate nearly half of it and it was supposed to be for you.’
‘It was the thought that counted more than the cake,’ she said softly, her voice almost lost in the crackles. ‘I knew Mum was upset about working late on my birthday, but I never dreamed that when I told you, you’d go out to the bakery in your lunch-break and bring a cake up to the library.’
He hadn’t been able to believe it either. Buying a birthday cake for a sixteen-year-old certainly hadn’t been the sort of thing most other seniors would have done, and if his classmates had known about it…or about the fact that, instead of taking advantage of an afternoon without lessons to start the weekend early, he’d been meeting Maggie up in the library for several hours of study…
About the only part of it that his hormone-ridden classmates would have applauded was the fact that on her sixteenth birthday, in the shadows behind the furthest library stacks, he’d finally found out what it was like to kiss Maggie Pascoe.
‘That was my first kiss,’ she said, proving that her thoughts had been following the same inevitable path.
She’d been so very young when he’d met her, captivated at first by her quick silvermind and shy sense of fun. He’d thought it would be little more than a quick peck…a token to celebrate the fact that she had officially become a woman. What he hadn’t expected had been that her lips would be so sweet, or that they’d cling softly to his as her arms had come up to twine about his neck, pressing her slender elfin body against his and setting off an unexpected fire storm inside him. It had taken all his self-control not to let things get out of hand and it had almost been a relief when the bell for the end of the school day had sounded stridently right above their heads.
He’d needed a long cold shower when he returned home that night, but he’d made a promise to himself that, however their relationship went, he wasn’t going to rush Maggie. He was the older of the two of them and it was his responsibility not to rush her through the wonderment of growing up.
He was determined that, even if he had to suffer frost bite under the shower on a daily basis, he would keep his libido under control, limiting their sexual experimentation to the kisses and cuddles appropriate for someone who had never run with the fast crowd. Just because he was older and ready to take things to a more intimate level, it didn’t mean that he had the right to rush her before she was ready to take that step.
Neither of them could have known what that year was to bring. At the time that the two of them were laughing, teasing, talking and kissing their way through a glorious Cornish summer they had no idea that the next time they saw each other would be at his father’s funeral and the memorial service for all those who had lost their lives that day.
‘I missed you when we moved away,’ he said, only now realising just how deep that emotion had gone. It had been as if an essential part of him had been torn away inside and hadn’t been put back until he’d walked into the staffroom at Penhally Bay Surgery and seen Maggie standing there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I MISSED you when we moved away,’ he said in the darkness, and Maggie’s heart swelled inside her, sending warmth to every part of her.
She’d never known that before, thinking that when they’d moved away he’d instantly forgotten the skinny bookworm he’d given her first kiss to on her sixteenth birthday.
For months after he and his mother had moved away she’d waited and hoped that he would write to her, but when nothing had come all she had been left with had been the determination to work hard enough to be accepted at the same medical school he attended. In her teenage mind she’d pictured the day when she would be able to meet him on even ground at least, both of them medical students working towards the same goal. Perhaps then he’d finally realise that she was ready for more than kisses.
Except while she was making her plans, the one thing she hadn’t counted on was that her mother would become ill.
‘Mum had cancer,’ she said, and the stark words still had the power to wound. ‘Ah, Maggie, keresik, I’m sorry. Once Mum moved back to be near her family we lost touch with what was going on in Penhally. How long…?’
‘She was diagnosed just before I took my last school exams—breast cancer—so even though I got the grades I needed, I couldn’t take up my place at medical school.’ Even this much later she could remember the bitter turmoil inside her as she’d railed against fate.
Her mother had been the only relative she’d had in the world and because she’d loved her, there had been no way she could have left her to go through the misery of cancer treatment by herself. But that didn’t mean that she hadn’t mourned the destruction of all the plans she’d made for her future, not least the fact that she would once again be able to see Adam on a daily basis.
‘What treatment did she have?’ he prompted, and after years of reticence it was almost a relief to be able to talk about it with him. He’d actually met her mother and he was also someone who would understand what she was talking about without having to go into long and involved explanations.
‘She had a radical mastectomy and they excised the lymph nodes, too.’ She could still remember her shock when she’d seen her mother for the first time after the surgery. ‘She looked as if she’d aged twenty years overnight,’ she murmured, reliving her terror that her mother wouldn’t survive the night, that she’d be left completely on her own to make her way in the world. ‘The primary tumour was the size of a pigeon’s egg and highly vascularised and every lymph node they took out seemed to be affected. She was an absolute mess by the time they’d finished.’
‘Chemo?’ he asked.
‘By the time she called it quits she’d had everything they could throw at her,’ Maggie said through a throat that ached with tears. ‘The surgeon seemed so sure that they’d got it all, but somehow they’d missed a tiny tumour in the other breast, and it was one that didn’t respond to the chemo she was on for the other one. By the time they found it and realised what it was…’ She swallowed, recalling the day when her mother had sat her down in their tiny kitchen and told her what the oncologist had found, and what the prognosis was.
‘It was very fast growing, very aggressive, and he couldn’t be certain that there weren’t others elsewhere in her body so he…’ She dragged in a quick breath so that she could get the telling over with. ‘He told her that they could hit it with everything they’d got, but the treatment would probably be worse than the disease and there was very little chance that it would be successful. So she’d decided that she would like to spend the time she had left with me rather than in a hospital ward with a load of strangers.’
It had been a strange time, full of memories recalled and memories made. A time when she’d delighted in driving her mother to all the places that had been special in her life and listening as she’d told the tales of people and incidents that had made her who she was. It had been a time when she had been very aware that her mother had been saying good bye to her life and all the things that had made it so rich, and it had obviously given her so much joy and such an air of peace that Maggie had decided that it was what she would want to do when her time came.
Except now she wasn’t going to have that option, not since half a hillside had come cascading down and buried her before she was even dead.
Maggie shook her head and firmly pushed that thought into the darkest corner of her mind. She didn’t know whether she had just a few hours left or several days…but, then, was that really any different to anyone else? To Walter Dinnis, for example? One minute he’d been living his life, happily retired and spending the afternoon with his wife, and then the next Betty had been frantically phoning for an ambulance to take him to hospital and Maggie had needed to use the defibrillator to shock his heart back into its proper rhythm.
So she wasn’t going to sit down here getting more and more maudlin by the minute. She may not have the option of doing it in person, but she was going to do her best to revisit all the events and places that had meant the most to her in her mind. And along the way perhaps she could get the answers to all those questions that had been plaguing her for so long.
‘So that explains why you didn’t go to medical school,’ Adam said with the air of someone who had discovered the secrets of the universe. ‘When we met up in London, I couldn’t believe that you’d qualified as a paramedic instead. You’d been so determined to do well in your exams that I was sure you’d be tapping me on the shoulder one day to show me that you’d made it.’
Maggie burst out laughing. ‘That’s exactly what I’d intended doing,’ she admitted. ‘I had it all planned in my head.’
‘And after your mum was gone?’
‘I couldn’t afford to do it,’ she said simply. ‘Medical training was just going to take to long and be too expensive without any finances behind me. I even thought about selling the cottage, but…’
‘But it was all you had left of your family,’ he finished for her, knowing how she felt without her having to say it. ‘I think that was one of the things that stopped me coming back to visit Penhally—the fact that I would have to see our old home and know it wasn’t ours any more, that someone else was living there in the place that held all my childhood memories.’
‘And now you’ll be going past it on almost a daily basis when you’re out doing house calls. Is it still a problem for you?’
‘Not going past it, no. It looks so completely different because someone’s painted the old stone walls white and stuck fake shutters either side of the windows.’
‘Don’t forget the fact that the windows are now plastic and the new front door is studded with fake iron nails,’ Maggie said, and was rewarded with a chuckle.
‘What on earth makes people think that sort of thing is an “improvement”? There was nothing wrong with it the way it was—an honest-to-goodness fisherman’s cottage built of local stone, roofed in Delabole slate and with the original sash windows.’
‘Well,’ she said, deliberately broadening her accent, ‘you know what us locals say about they incomers…all thur taste is in thur mouth,’ she teased, and he laughed aloud.
‘You’re not wrong there. It seems to be happening wherever there’s a pretty sleepy place with tiny cottages. Before you can turn around, there’s a crop of multi-million pound mansions squeezed between them—second, third and even fourth homes, meaning the locals haven’t a hope of buying a home within twenty miles of their families or their jobs.’
‘Well, at least the outsiders are only there for the summer,’ she consoled him. ‘Most of those new houses are probably only used for a fortnight every year, and long before the autumn gales come, the population’s back to just locals, and life returns to normal.’
‘I take it you’ve seen it at its worst, as a paramedic?’
‘And then some,’ she groaned. ‘There’s been an annual influx of Society types when the big public schools break up for summer. For a couple of weeks there can be several thousand teenagers congregating on the sand at one venue or another, fighting w
ith their enemies from a rival school, or with pupils from some of the local schools. And when you factor in underage binge-drinking and the fact that some bring drugs down with them, it can be an explosive mix.
‘I presume the authorities have been taking steps to minimise the damage, in human terms, at least?’
‘You mean, apart from drafting in almost every available policeman in the area to police the alcohol and drugs and imposing a curfew on the beaches?’ Maggie laughed wryly. ‘They risk life and limb trying to separate the warring tribes while we paramedics are playing piggy-in-the-middle taking care of the injuries and over-does. Thank goodness for places like Padstow. There’s more for people to do there; more entertainment and come very good cafés and restaurants, as well as a lot of more affordable accomodation.’
‘So, when we get you out of here, would you like to go to Padstow for our celebratory meal?’ he asked, and her heart gave a sudden leap.
‘At least in February you’d be certain of finding something open in Padstow,’ she said wryly, while she tried to find the words to clarify the situation. In the end, all she could do was ask point blank. ‘Adam, did you just ask me out for a meal?’
‘I must be more out of practice than I thought if you couldn’t tell that was an invitation,’ he complained. ‘Perhaps I need to give it another go. So, have you got a favourite place, Maggie? Will you come out with me?’
It was such a tempting thought and would be the fulfilment of a dream she’d had since she’d been fifteen, but there was one enormous obstacle.
‘Won’t your wife mind you asking me out, or will she be joining us?’ she asked pointedly, knowing she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she went against her personal convictions, and that included an absolute ban on having a relationship with a married man.
‘Dammit, Maggie, I should have told you about Caroline—’ he began, only to break off when there was the sound of a shout from somewhere behind him. ‘Just a minute,’ he said distractedly, his voice fading, and she could picture him turning away from the radio to speak to the man who’d hailed him.
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