A Single Dad at Heathermere

by Abigail Gordon

  ‘I most certainly do,’ she said, smiling across at him from the passenger seat, and he thought that she looked more like the old Laura in that moment, happy and relaxed, instead of sombre and withdrawn.

  ‘So now that your mind is at rest, shall we go and see what ails those who couldn’t make it to the surgery?’ he said easily.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, serious once more. ‘I don’t want to be a liability, Jon. I will pull my weight in the practice and am sorry that I’ve been such a wet lettuce on my first day.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re with someone who’s been there already. On Abby’s first day at school there weren’t any tears, but when it was over she announced that she didn’t like it and wouldn’t be going again. It was quite some time before she got used to the idea that she didn’t have a choice.’

  He was pulling up outside the village’s fish and chip shop and she said, ‘It’s rather early for lunch, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re here to see the owner’s mother who lives with him above the shop,’ he explained, ‘so don’t get carried away by the appetising smells. Do you remember Kelvin Cartwright, who was always pulling your plaits at school until I dotted him one?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes. How could I forget him?’

  He raised his eyebrows comically. ‘Well, he owns this “plaice”.’

  Her laughter increased and he thought how great it was to see her unwinding as she said, ‘It sounds a bit fishy to me.’

  ‘His mother has heart problems and he’s brought her to live with him so that he can keep an eye on her. Mrs Cartwright is waiting for a pacemaker to be fitted. She sometimes has periods of complete memory loss and the cardiology department thinks it is when the blood isn’t getting to her brain because of an irregular heartbeat.

  ‘If you remember, she was on school dinners when we were young, but now she’s very frail. I doubt you will recognise her. Kelvin and his wife are doing the best they can for her, which isn’t easy with a business to run.’

  The tormentor of her youth was busy behind the counter, getting ready for opening, but when he saw them he wiped his hands and came round.

  ‘Hello, Laura,’ he said with a sheepish grin. ‘I’d heard you were back. It must seem like old times, the two of you together. The grapevine also said that you’re working at the surgery.’

  ‘Yes, this is my first day,’ she told him. ‘Good to see you again, Kelvin. I understand that your mother isn’t well.’

  He sighed. ‘Yes. Don’t expect her to know you. We take it in turns to be with her. My wife is up there now. Otherwise she gets frightened when her memory blanks out. It comes and goes. We’re hoping that she’ll improve when the pacemaker has been fitted.’

  Jon hadn’t spoken while they’d been chatting, but now he said, ‘We’ll go up then, Kelvin. By the way, I’ve been on to the hospital again to see if I can get your mother’s operation brought forward. They might be in touch with you in the very near future so be prepared.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  BOTH Jon and the shop owner were wrong in assuming that Kelvin’s mother wouldn’t know who Laura was. She was gazing through the window of what appeared to be a bedsitting room, looking down at the main street of the village where people were going about their business, and she turned slowly when Jon said, ‘Hello, Mrs Cartwright. How are you?’

  He saw immediately that they’d caught her on one of her better days as, without replying, she said, ‘Laura? Laura Hewitt!’

  Laura stepped forward and took her frail hand in hers. Alice Cartwright had been a buxom woman when she’d last seen her, but illness and old age had brought about a great change in her.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Cartwright. I’m Laura Cavendish now,’ she told her gently, ‘and I’ve come back to live in the village with my little boy.’

  Kelvin’s mother nodded. ‘That is good. Will you bring him to see me?’

  Laura smiled. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Jon had moved across to speak to Alice’s daughter-in-law, who was hovering anxiously in the background.

  ‘She seems better today, Sandra,’ he said, wondering why she had asked him to visit.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Sandra told him. ‘But earlier this morning Mum was having difficulty breathing.’

  ‘Any chest pains?’

  ‘No. Just trouble breathing, like an asthma attack. She’s got enough to cope with already without that.’

  ‘Indeed she has,’ he agreed. ‘Though she seems all right now. I’ll check her over. We can’t be too careful.’

  After he’d had Alice breathing in and out several times Jon put away his stethoscope and said to Sandra, ‘Her breathing is shallow. If you could bring Alice to the surgery I’ll get one of the practice nurses to do a spirometry test.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Alice will be asked to breathe out into the mouthpiece of a spirometer and it will produce a graph that helps to show if any kind of lung disease such as asthma is present. It’s a simple enough procedure, nothing that will alarm her, and if the signs are there I will probably prescribe an inhaler.’

  He glanced across to where Alice was still chatting to Laura. ‘The fact that Alice does have days like this is encouraging. If we can sort out the irregular heartbeat that momentarily stops blood getting to the brain, the memory loss might lessen, but don’t get your hopes up too much, Sandra.’

  “I won’t,’ she promised, ‘and thank you for coming, Dr Emmerson.’

  Driving towards their next call, Jon sighed. ‘You’ve just seen Alice on a good day,’ he told Laura. ‘Sometimes she doesn’t know me, but today she certainly knew who you were.’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, she did. It’s good to be meeting people who once were so familiar to me. They’ve changed, of course, but so have I…and so have you, Jon.’

  ‘Responsibilities do that,’ he said wryly. ‘I hadn’t a care in the world until I knew I was going to be a father. I was so intent on enjoying myself that I shut you out, didn’t I?’

  ‘You didn’t owe me anything.’

  ‘Yes. I did, Laura. We’d been friends for years and I behaved as if we were strangers.’

  ‘Like we are now?’

  ‘Is that how it feels?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not surprising, is it? We’ve been travelling different paths for a long time. I married Freddie, and your future had already been mapped out with your resolve to bring up Abby yourself. Though I would have expected you to have found someone else by now. Surely there are lots of women who’d love to marry a man with a ready-made family.’

  ‘And what about lots of men wanting to marry a woman in that situation,’ he asked whimsically. ‘Does that apply?’

  She smiled and again he was reminded of how she’d once been. The glance from eyes as blue as the Cornish sea that had taken her husband wasn’t as strained and wary as it had been.

  “I’ve never had the time or inclination to find out,’ she said, and wondered what he would say if she told him that she’d never forgotten him. That though they’d been out of touch for a long time he had a special place in her heart and always would have. Nothing was going to change that, and nothing was going to change the feeling that he would run a mile if he knew.

  ‘Same here,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had the inclination either.’

  Maybe, she thought, but not for the same reason. He hadn’t known the pangs of a teenage crush that had never come to anything.

  Jon’s life was safe and secure. He had it all mapped out. Yet he’d found her employment and somewhere to live, and she was grateful. Even though she knew it had only been for old time’s sake. Or maybe because he’d remembered how he’d dropped her the moment they’d gone to medical school and had felt guilty.

  ‘We’ve been asked to call at one of the sheep farms,’ he said, turning onto a steep road that led to the moors and the magnificent peaks beyond. ‘Martin Pritchard, who owns the place, has an ongoing relationship with my mother.
’

  ‘Really?’

  He was smiling. ‘Purely platonic. Martin is a grumpy old thing, but has a soft heart underneath. When a ewe has a sickly lamb in the spring he sends it down to her to be nursed. She has a small grazing area at the bottom of the garden and at the moment there are three sheep on it that she has reared.

  ‘They are the first thing Abby goes to look at when she comes home from school. She’s seen them grow from lambs and has named them Baa, Lambkin and Curly.’

  ‘That’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Can I bring Liam to see them some time?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied easily. ‘Whenever you want. It will seem strange but nice, watching our children grow up together like we did, won’t it?’

  Laura nodded but made no comment, and Jon thought that she was probably remembering how she’d become surplus to requirements once they’d gone to university.

  It was going through her mind that maybe they were moving too fast. She could be asking for more heartache and end up fretting on the sidelines of Jon’s life once more. But it would be delightful for their children to get to know each other. It was going to seem very strange to Liam on his first day at school if he’d never met any of the other children.

  Was she being fair to him? she wondered. If she’d gone back to Cornwall, as had been her intention before she’d met Jon again, everything would have been much simpler. But just the sight of him had made her come to life again and she hadn’t felt like that in a long time.

  ‘And so what is wrong with Martin Pritchard?’ she asked, bringing her mind back to the reason they were driving towards the moors.

  ‘When Martin phoned the surgery this morning he said that he’d been having minor pain around the navel and that now it had moved to the lower right-hand side of his stomach and it was intense.’

  ‘Sounds as if it could be appendicitis.’

  ‘Mmm. It does,’ he agreed. ‘And it’s sometimes a tricky condition to diagnose. I once nearly lost a patient because he didn’t know that in such a situation an inflamed appendix is at its most dangerous when the pain goes away. He thought it had just been a gastric upset.’ He pulled up outside a rambling farmhouse. ‘Martin is a tough old guy. He runs the farm with the help of a couple of local people, and I don’t remember him ever having anything wrong with him before, but there’s always a first time.’

  Ann Stephens, a bustling fifty-year-old from the village who drove up each day to keep the place tidy, opened the door to them and said, ‘I’ve just arrived and found Martin really poorly, Dr Emmerson. He’s in a lot of pain.’

  Jon nodded. ‘Lead us to him then, Ann,’ he told her.

  As the two doctors followed her into a cluttered sitting room she said, ‘It’s nice to have you among us again, Laura.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she replied. ‘It’s good to be back.’

  If Jon had heard her, he gave no indication. He was striding across to where the farmer was slumped in an easy chair, ashen-faced and groaning.

  As Ann made a discreet exit Jon said, ‘I need to feel your stomach, Martin. Can you loosen your trousers?’

  The farmer did so with difficulty and cried out when Jon felt the area where the pain was located.

  ‘I’m going to ask our new doctor to examine you now,’ he said. ‘Two heads are better than one, though I’ve a good idea what’s wrong. You remember Laura, don’t you?’

  ‘Aye,’ Martin grunted. ‘Harry Hewitt’s daughter, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘and I’ll be as gentle as I can.’

  When she’d finished feeling the lower abdomen of the sick man she nodded without speaking and Jon said, ‘I’m going to do a further examination, Martin. We think the pain is coming from your appendix.’

  When he’d finished his expression was grave. ‘Can you phone for an ambulance, Laura?’ he asked. ‘Impress upon them that it’s urgent.’

  ‘I can’t leave the farm,’ Martin protested weakly. ‘There’s the chickens to feed and a couple of horses to exercise. The sheep are out on the moorland so they’re no trouble at this time of the year, but—’

  ‘Your farmhand can see to those sorts of things,’ Jon told him firmly.

  ‘The most important thing is to get you to hospital before your appendix bursts.’

  Laura had made the call he’d asked for and said, ‘The emergency services are on their way, Mr Pritchard. I’ll go and ask Ann if she’ll pack you a bag with a few essentials so that there will be no delay when they get here.’

  When the ambulance had taken the suffering farmer to A and E, the two doctors left Ann to keep an eye on things and proceeded to their next call, which was to the home of a small boy with an inflamed throat that had all the signs of tonsilitis.

  He was enjoying having Laura with him, Jon was thinking. She was quietly efficient, ready to keep in the background but there when called upon. He wondered how she was seeing her first foray into village health care.

  When they got back to the practice Tim had just returned from his home visits and while the three doctors stopped for a break and a quick bite Laura went to have a peep at the schoolyard again during the afternoon break.

  A reassuring glimpse of Liam, with Abby hovering protectively beside him, sent her back to the surgery with a lighter heart, and as she ate a sandwich and drank a quick coffee her spirits lifted.

  Life was going to be good, she thought. Better than she’d ever thought it could be. Both Liam and herself had had hurdles to face that morning—Liam his first day at school, and for herself joining the practice. There had been a feeling of unreality about it all, but it had gone well and she was happy.

  ‘I don’t need to ask where you’ve been.’ Jon said when she’d got back from her surveillance of the schoolyard. ‘Was Liam all right?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, he was fine. It seemed as if Abby had taken him under her wing, which was sweet of her. I suppose you think I’m fussing a lot.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. I was just as bad on Abby’s first day. I should have guessed she might seek him out. When she knew he had no father she amazed me by saying, “And I have no mummy. So we’re not like other children, are we?”’

  ‘What did you say to that?’ she asked, as a small lump formed in her throat.

  He smiled. ‘I told her that because of it they were loved twice as much, and it’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ she agreed, and for a fleeting moment thought it was a pity they couldn’t do something about the gaps in their children’s lives, but the sea would freeze over before Jon ever thought along those lines. She wasn’t gorgeous Kezia with the come-to-bed eyes, but neither was she a woman who could desert her child.

  She adored Liam, and if she never did anything else that was praiseworthy, she was making sure that he had a happy and secure childhood. That he knew he was cherished above all else. Like herself, he had lost a parent, but unlike what had happened to her, he was loved all the more because of it.

  Laura was waiting at the school gates, along with the other mothers. School was over and the children were about to come streaming out when Marjorie appeared beside her.

  ‘So how has the day gone, Laura?’ she asked with a smile. ‘It’s been a new beginning for both Liam and yourself, hasn’t it.’

  Laura smiled back at the woman who’d been the nearest thing to a mother she’d known during her childhood days and said, ‘I’ve enjoyed every moment at the surgery with Jon and Tim, but Liam wasn’t happy when I left him this morning and he’s been on my mind all day. Abby was with him in the afternoon break when I went to have a quick peek at him, and I did feel better after that.’

  ‘She’s a loving child,’ Marjorie said. ‘She wasn’t sure about him being around at first, but when she knew that they both only had one parent, our little girl felt protective of him. Jon adores her and so do I. Sometimes I wish she had a loving stepmother, but Jon doesn’t seem prepared to take any risks on that score.

  ‘He says
she is too precious to be in the care of any other woman than myself, and that she’s happy enough as she is, but I worry for him. It’s a lonely life for any man, bringing up a child without a mother, and I’m sure that it is no joke either when the boot is on the other foot and there’s no father.’

  ‘It isn’t always a bundle of laughs, for sure,’ Laura said, ‘but Jon and I are blessed with our children, aren’t we? Does he ever hear from Kezia?’ she asked, not sure what she wanted to hear.

  Marjorie shook her head. ‘Never a word. What’s more, he doesn’t want to. It is as if she’s disappeared off the face of the earth. She was young and couldn’t face up to the responsibility of parenthood. Yet so was he, and having to take full responsibility for a baby hadn’t been how he’d had his life planned. It soon brought him down to earth, but he’s done it.’

  At that moment the school doors were flung open, the children came pouring out and Liam was coming towards her, eyes blue as her own big in his face as he gazed up at Abby walking beside him.

  When he saw her waiting at the gate he ran forward and threw himself into her arms, and as Laura looked at Marjorie and her granddaughter, smiling across at them above his fair head, she felt for the first time as if she had really come home.

  Jon had found her a job and a place to live, but she knew he was just going through the motions, helping her sort her life out, and the last thing she wanted was pity. She’d been a single parent for five long years and knew how to cope. It was just unfortunate that they’d met again under such circumstances. That it had taken her father’s funeral to bring her back to the village and the man who’d once held her heart in his hands without even knowing it.

  He rang that evening and there was a lift to his voice as he said, ‘So we have a good report of Liam’s first day I believe. I’ve heard all about it from Abby. They seem to be getting on very well.’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ she told him, her pleasure at the thought equalling his.

  ‘But I still can’t help feeling that Liam and I are butting into your lives.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment and then he said coolly, ‘Do you have to be so independent, Laura? Can’t you see that I realise what a pain I was all that time ago, and because I got my priorities wrong by being selfish and uncaring, I want to make up for it.’