Zoe took discreet notes, appreciating the way Connor was sliding in advice about sticking to weight-bearing activities, suggesting a course of action that would see Linda walking rather than running or jogging in her last trimester and also sounding her out about how she felt towards the baby and parenthood. Interposing her own instructions to eat proper meals, Zoe wondered about that last line of questions. Maybe she was imagining it, but Connor seemed to be placing a lot of emphasis on establishing that Linda and her partner wanted the baby and that she didn’t resent the new life inside her. For all his serious, pleasant air, he was making quite a point about making sure the runner wasn’t going to compromise the health of the foetus. It was a good thing Linda was her last patient of the day—anyone still outside would be having a long wait.
Linda left much happier than when she’d arrived and promising to attend appointments more regularly in the future.
‘A driven woman,’ commented Connor, his hand on the door ready to go. His eyes were bleak.
‘As long as she listens to advice, that’s not a bad thing. Thank you for helping. How do you know so much about having children and—’
‘I wasn’t busy and it’s my job,’ he said, interrupting her. ‘That reminds me—you’re going over to the maternity unit at Sheffield hospital to get signed on and registered and so on?’
‘Yes, Jo’s taking me tomorrow.’
‘She was. Now she’s got a finance meeting and asked, as I was going over anyway to check on half a dozen of our patients, would I mind taking you instead.’
Something in his tone of voice made Zoe’s hackles rise. ‘And do you?’ she asked tartly.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Do you mind? After all, I drove to Buckley from London. I found two outlying farms this morning. I’m quite sure I could drive another twenty miles to Sheffield without getting lost.’
‘Of course I don’t mind. It’s just that Jo…’ He broke off, passing a hand across his eyes. ‘Forget it. I’m a bit tired, that’s all. Can you be ready by nine tomorrow?’
And now he would think she got prickly over the least little thing. What on earth was the matter with her? ‘I’ll wait in reception,’ she said. She thought ruefully that she knew what he’d been about to say. It’s just that Jo often has her own agenda. Which she did. And throwing them together for the morning wasn’t what you might call subtle. Zoe thought she might just have to have a word with her friend and ask her which part of I am staying single for the rest of my life she didn’t understand. It wasn’t until she was hurrying to fetch Jamie that she realised Connor had diverted her interest in his ‘ speciality’ very neatly. She also wondered why he was so tired.
Connor leaned his forehead against the cool panes of his window. This was ridiculous. He was letting Zoe Hilton get under his skin. There was no reason whatsoever why any of the doctors at this practice shouldn’t give a new midwife a lift to the hospital to oversee their registration, so why had he felt instantly manipulated when Jo made the request?
His was an upstairs office. He looked down at the familiar school playground without seeing it. He’d slept badly last night, plagued with snippets of dreams in which his nephews and nieces played around him calling him their favourite Uncle Connor, but that was no reason to have got irritated during a professional conversation. He did feel manipulated, though. When Jo had originally suggested that Connor might rent Zoe the coach house, she had described her friend as newly widowed, desperate to get away from the scene of her husband’s car crash, in no fit state to make decisions on renting or buying houses. The impression she had given was of someone small and slight, battered, at the mercy of her memories. Was it any wonder he thought he’d been had? Zoe was not small and slight. She came up easily to his shoulder and she filled that uniform of hers extremely well. And she laughed. She had…vibrancy.
And she cared.
Connor didn’t need any care in his life. He kept his family at a safe distance and his old friends on the end of sporadic emails. He liked his colleagues but none of them was close. He was making a new quiet, self-contained life for himself. He enjoyed the work, liked the countryside, found nothing to disturb him. He knew he was not yet cured. He had seen too many patients who thought they were over an illness and plunged into their previous life without any thought of a period of recuperation. It always ended in disaster. And you didn’t get over a severe case of Lyme disease that easily. He remembered the long weeks of lying in bed or sitting in a chair, unable to walk more than a few steps, unable to concentrate on anything. He wasn’t going back to that. But he’d regained his former strength, was starting to pick up his old pastimes. He was building up his walking, doing some climbing—though his joints occasionally complained—even canoeing.
But there was being physically fit—and being emotionally fit. And no way was he the second. The illness—and the personal misery that followed it—had done more than injure his body. It had left him emotionally scarred. The fact that he was aware of this didn’t make it any less true. Which was why he was determined to stay well away from anything—or anyone—that might set him back. Zoe attracted him, therefore she had the potential to hurt him. He needed to be very careful.
Happy shouts of children being released from school broke his reverie. Despite the bitter knowledge that he would never have any of his own, the sound always brought a tiny smile to his lips. He looked down into the playground. And there was Zoe again, chatting to one of the other mums. She’d unpinned her hair. It was a rich dark brown colour, its shine reminding him of the conkers he used to gather as a boy. Earlier it had been twisted up in some convenient way, but now it cascaded down below her shoulders just like it had yesterday. It made her seem free and untrammelled, not the efficient midwife who’d consulted him about a patient. If he was being fanciful, it seemed to suggest that at times she just liked to let things go.
Her little boy came out of the doorway, looked around uncertainly and then spotted her with what Connor thought was relief. She gave him a swift hug, took the piece of paper he showed her. Jamie pointed things out on it. Connor saw Zoe blot her eyes with her sleeve when he wasn’t looking. Odd. What could he have drawn that made her cry?
Zoe had just put the potatoes on to boil when she became aware that Jamie’s bike was still, the saddle empty. Heart in mouth, she dashed outside, only to stop as she saw her son sitting crosslegged on the path, watching Connor mend the gate.
She hid a smile. For a man who was so precise with his patients, he was making a decidedly amateur job of nailing a piece of wood across a couple of uprights. But he was talking to Jamie with nothing of the reserve he kept for her, telling him what the saw was for, explaining how trees were turned into planks, both of them speculating as to how nails might be made. Zoe went quietly back to the kitchen.
Ten minutes later there was an, ‘Ow,’ and a bitten-off curse from outside and suddenly Jamie was tugging Connor up the path.
‘It’s all right,’ he was saying anxiously. ‘Mummy’s got plasters. They stop germs getting in. And you can draw smiley faces on them.’
Connor was dark red with embarrassment. ‘It’s only a splinter,’ he muttered. ‘I picked up the broken strut without looking.’
‘Sit down and I’ll get it out, then,’ said Zoe, reaching for tweezers. ‘Splinters are like paper cuts—the pain is out of all proportion to the size of the wound.’
Jamie hovered, distressed. Zoe gave Connor full marks for noticing this and distracting him. ‘I like your pictures,’ he said, nodding towards the fridge.
Zoe smiled as Jamie explained them to Connor. Today’s drawing was identical to the first, except for the addition of a broken gate and a new path leading off on the other side.
‘He likes mapping out his surroundings,’ she said. ‘But he does tend to put in only the things that are of interest to him.’
‘…and that’s Daddy in Heaven,’ finished Jamie.
Zoe was holding Connor’s hand steady. She pu
lled out the splinter and continued to hold on, just for a moment. To her utter astonishment, he closed his fingers over hers in brief sympathy.
‘That’s done,’ she said, and let go. She didn’t want sympathy. It would be taking something for the wrong reason. ‘A good wash and a dab of antiseptic and you’ll be right as rain.’
‘Thank you.’ He looked at the pan bubbling on the stove and sniffed appreciatively. ‘Something smells good.’
She chuckled. ‘Fish fingers, new potatoes and peas. I’d offer to share, but fish fingers only come in packs of ten these days, and Jamie and I are really hungry.’
He laughed out loud. Zoe was truly amazed, contrasting the gravely interested doctor at the surgery with this amused man, carefree for one blinding second. It was astonishing how his whole bearing could lighten up like that. This was how he was supposed to be. Her amazement must have shown on her face because his laughter died as he met her eyes. ‘I’ll…um…see you tomorrow morning, then,’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘I told you Mummy would make it better.’ Jamie put his hand in Connor’s.
For a moment, Zoe saw the total shock on Connor’s face. Please, she thought, please don’t rebuff him.
Connor looked down at the small hand tucked so confidently in his, then smiled ruefully and let Jamie trot down the path alongside him.
Zoe watched the pair of them, watched Connor jump on the strut of the gate to test it, and then keep a careful eye on Jamie as he did the same. She watched as he picked up his tools, said goodbye to her son and disappeared towards his own house. A nice man. So who had damaged him? Because somebody most certainly had.
Chapter Three
CONNOR came down the stairs to reception at precisely nine a.m. to find Zoe ready and waiting. In fact he’d already known she was there because he heard her voice when he was halfway down. Zoe’s voice—try as he might not to admit it—was marvellous, low-pitched, musical and calming. He knew how important voices could be in medicine and could see that if a mum-to-be was having trouble giving birth then Zoe’s voice would soothe her. That was if her smile hadn’t done the job first. Connor paused on the bottom step, analysing it. The smile said that Zoe was happy and she wanted you to be happy too. The infuriating thing was that it worked. Meeting her in the corridor yesterday, he’d been awkward and she’d cheered him up. Yesterday evening he’d been downright embarrassed, and she’d made it no big deal. But he’d also seen moments of stillness in her—she was obviously still grieving for her husband. How could she simply put her own unhappiness aside?
Anyway, today they were doctor and midwife, professional colleagues getting a tedious bit of business over with. He walked through the swing doors in full control. ‘Ready, Zoe?’
‘Absolutely.’ And she turned from laughing with the receptionists and her wide smile hit him squarely in the solar plexus.
The trouble with car journeys was the air of forced intimacy. If you weren’t careful, the enclosed space, the sense of being separate from the rest of the world, could turn into a confessional. Connor intended to be very careful indeed.
‘How are you settling in at the coach house?’ he asked, before she could get comfortable and start a topic of her own.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘Jamie loves the garden. We lived in a flat in London, so we had to spend a lot of time in the park. This is like having a mini-park of his own. The only thing that would make it more perfect as far as he’s concerned would be a set of swings and bouncy seesaws—but I told him you can’t have everything, and we’re going over to Jo’s at the weekend, where he can play on their outdoor equipment.’
Swings and seesaws? Connor had a momentary stab of guilt, but she was still talking.
‘The coach house itself is just lovely. I can see once Jamie gets to be a lanky teenager leaving huge anoraks and size twelve trainers everywhere it might not be big enough, but just now it’s exactly the right size for one and a bit. It kind of wraps itself around you.’
‘It does!’ agreed Connor, startled to have his own feelings put into words. ‘I thought the same thing as soon as I first walked through the door. I was ready to give the estate agent the money for it on the spot.’
Zoe chuckled. ‘But then you saw the big house and couldn’t resist the two-for-one deal?’
‘Oh, I’d already seen that. Jo put me onto it and the family nagged me into buying it. I’m still convinced it was less for me and more so they’d have a useful holiday home in the Peak District.’
‘Why buy the coach house as well, then?’
‘So I’d have somewhere to escape to,’ he said feelingly. ‘And also because I didn’t want neighbours.’
There was a split-second pause. ‘Oh,’ said Zoe.
Connor could have banged his head on the steering wheel. This was what he’d meant by a confessional. He’d have to remember Zoe was appallingly easy to talk to. ‘Neighbours not of my own choosing, I mean.’
‘But—you didn’t choose us.’
‘Jo did. Her judgement is generally sound.’ Had he said enough to cover his rudeness? ‘What made you go into mid- wifery?’ he asked, changing the subject.
She smiled again but, glancing sideways at her, he thought there was a touch of sadness. ‘Do you want the short answer or the long one?’
A road sign flashed by. Sheffield: sixteen miles. ‘The long one,’ he said.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Okay; you asked for it. I said the other day that my father died when I was quite young. It was a terrible blow to my mother—she’d been completely bound up in him. He was in the army, so we’d moved from base to base every few years. Looking back on it now, she hadn’t had the chance to make close friends any more than I did, but it didn’t matter to her because Dad was her whole world.’
Connor glanced sideways again, catching the nuance in her voice even if she didn’t realise it was there. She’d been lonely.
‘I wasn’t unhappy that Mum was leaning on me. I just knew there was more to life. Girls at school would talk about bowling, or discos or kissing boys in the back row of the cinema—and I didn’t have anything similar to relate to. But then, when I was fifteen, the school I was at arranged for me to spend time in a hospital on a Work Experience scheme.’
She looked at him, her face lighting up, and he felt a strange thud in his chest. ‘Oh, Connor, I came alive! I loved it—the intimacy, the teamwork, the feeling that I was helping, the knowledge that I was needed by people other than my mother. We moved around the departments and one day I was observing in the Delivery Suite when there was a birth. The moment I saw that tiny, new little person emerging, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. The rush of feelings shown by the mum when the baby was first placed in her arms, the tears of the watching father, the broad grins on the faces of the midwife and nursing staff—they were like rain in the desert, completely missing in my own life. I wanted to bring that joy. I wanted to live, not just exist. I wanted to be part of it. So I decided to train as a midwife.’
‘I needn’t ask if it’s been everything you expected.’
‘More,’ she said simply. ‘Sometimes it’s kept me sane.’
Sane? Connor looked at her sharply, but was distracted by a wave of red brake lights ahead. He frowned. There was only half a mile to go—they should have missed the rush hour—what was going on?
He slowed. There must have been an accident at the roundabout. As the car came to a complete stop, his previous fears were realised as Zoe said, ‘Anyway, that’s my story; what about you? Have you always wanted to be a GP?’
As she asked the question, Zoe saw Connor’s face tighten. She saw him look at the stationary traffic in front of them, saw his eyes flick to the mirrors to the queue backing up behind.
He sighed. ‘Nearly. I entered medicine intending to be a GP. Did my first six years and then started the GP training programme. You know it, I’m sure—four six-month periods in hospital in various GP-friendly specialities. Several of my pals in
the climbing club were doing surgery, so I chose that as one of the options to give me a different perspective. And I found I liked it—and I was good at it. The hospital persuaded me I shouldn’t waste my talent, so I began training to be a surgeon.’
Listening to him, Zoe suspected he’d forgotten she was there. He wasn’t just telling her his story now, he was re-living it. Perhaps re-examining his choices.
Reflectively, he said, ‘Climbing skills help you be a good surgeon. You learn never to panic, never to move too quickly, to concentrate on the job you’re doing. You feel the same way when you’re balanced on two tiny ridges over a six hundred foot drop as you do when you’re about to cut into living tissue. Aware of the dangers but not nervous, not afraid. Focused.’
Zoe was fascinated. Not just with the story, but what it told her about Connor. This was what she’d seen as he’d walked through the theatre on her first morning. That complete command. ‘What happened? Why aren’t you still doing it?’
‘I contracted Lyme disease.’ The words were quiet, but she could feel the carefully controlled emotion behind them. ‘My consultant—who was a friend of mine—told me cheerfully that it was one of the worst cases ever seen in England.’
She frowned. ‘It rings a bell. Remind me.’
‘It’s a bacterial disease. Common in some US states, but few lay people over here have ever heard of it. It wasn’t even named until 1975. For the vast majority of sufferers it’s just like a bad dose of flu with a nasty skin rash. For the unlucky ones—the ones who don’t show any symptoms to begin with so they aren’t treated with the right antibiotics straight away—basically the bacteria melts down the nervous system.’
Village Midwife, Blushing Bride Page 4