A Single Dad at Heathermere

by Abigail Gordon

  ‘Yet you never made any effort to get in touch over the years.’

  ‘The same applies to you, and do you think I would have gone barging back into your life because I needed a shoulder to cry on when you were married to Freddie? I thought we’d picked up some of the threads again today at the surgery. But if you think that you’re being patronised, maybe I was wrong, and at the risk of adding to that feeling I’m ringing to tell you that I’ve got a decorator coming to brighten up the apartment for you tomorrow. He’s bringing some colour charts with him so that you can choose whatever appeals to you. How long before you have to be out of your father’s house?’

  ‘I’ve got until the end of next week.’

  ‘Fine. He should be finished by then. You saw that the place is newly furnished, so what do you intend to do with your father’s furniture? Put it in storage?’

  ‘No. I’ll send everything to be auctioned, apart from a few pieces of my mother’s jewellery that he’d always kept.’

  ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘So unless you decide to flee back to Cornwall during the night because I’m too interfering, I’ll see you in the morning, Laura.’

  ‘I don’t think that at all,’ she protested, but the line was dead. Jon had gone back to whatever he did on summer evenings after Abby was asleep, and she was left feeling ashamed at having made him think she didn’t appreciate all that he was doing for her.

  They’d always been straight with each other. Until they’d gone to medical school, that was, and now, as far as Jon was concerned, they were back on the old footing. But he wasn’t having to keep a tight hold on his feelings whenever they were together, like she was.

  In his apartment above the surgery, quiet now that Abby was asleep, Jon was gazing out of the window. Since his daughter had been born no woman had caught his imagination. The practice and his role of single father had kept him fully occupied. But now, amazingly, Laura was back in his life, and all the time he was remembering what they’d said and done together. How they’d laughed at the same things, liked the same things, looked forward to roaming the fields together, playing down by the river, and then moving into adolescence together. It had all been so uncomplicated until they’d gone to university.

  Time had changed them both. His responsibilities controlled his life, and losing Freddie had taken the zest out of Laura. For a crazy moment he wished he could turn back the clock. When he’d discovered that Freddie had died just after Liam’s birth and she’d been alone ever since, he’d been aghast and desperate to make up for his past neglect.

  The yearning to see the old Laura back again was consuming him. The Laura with hair as gold as the corn at harvest time. Who’d saved all her smiles for him, and could climb any tree that he could.

  But after the conversation they’d just had it seemed as if he might be going the wrong way about it. Chipping away at her independence in his eagerness to help.

  The next morning after Liam had gone into school without any sign of reluctance Laura presented herself at the surgery once more.

  Jon and Tim were already seeing their patients as the practice opened at half past eight, so any chance of making peace with Jon from the night before would have to wait until they went on house calls. But they did speak briefly when Jon came to the door of his room to call in the next patient and saw her arriving.

  ‘The decorator has already been and left the brochures if you want to pop up to the apartment in the lunch-hour,’ he told her.

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ she agreed with a smile that she hoped would take away the chill of their last conversation, but it was wasted. Jon had turned his attention to the teenage boy hobbling painfully out of the waiting room towards him.

  Later in the morning as they drove off the forecourt of the old stone building on the main street of the village he said, ‘Ann Stephens rang earlier to say that Martin has had an appendicectomy, so we weren’t wrong about that, were we?’

  ‘No, it would seem not,’ she replied. ‘I felt sorry for him when he was so anxious about leaving the farm. It’s one of the things that I’ve always dreaded. Something happening to me and Liam being left in the care of someone else, maybe strangers.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ he said soberly. ‘I’m fortunate to have my mother close by for that sort of eventuality. But, Laura, I hope you know that now you’re back where you belong, you have only to call and I’ll be there, and so will anyone else who knows you.’

  ‘Yes, I do know that,’ she said, ‘and I’m grateful.’

  He took his gaze off the road for a second to observe her expression and said with a tightness in his tone, ‘You don’t have to be grateful. Happy and secure is how I want you to feel.’

  She didn’t reply to that. Instead, she said, ‘About last night when you phoned. I felt I’d annoyed you in some way. If I did, I’m sorry. You’ve been so good to me and…’

  He was exasperated now. It was there in his voice as he said, ‘We have a lot to catch up on, for goodness’ sake! I want us to be as we were before…good friends. I know whose fault it is that the friendship lapsed, but we’ve been given a second chance and I won’t be making the same mistake twice.’

  She wondered what he would say if she told him that she didn’t want to be just ‘good friends’. That the more she saw of him, the more she wanted from him, and he wouldn’t want to give it because she was just Laura.

  But she couldn’t hurt him by rejecting his wishes for a fresh start. It was turning out to be a time of new beginnings all round, with Liam at school, her medical career moving in a different direction and, most surprising of all, Jon back in her life. If good friends was all that he had in mind, she would be crazy not to take what was on offer.

  ‘Of course I want us to be friends again,’ she said softly. ‘What happened in the past doesn’t matter any more. It’s the present that counts.’

  He was smiling now, regretting his impatience. Being with Laura again gave him a good feeling. He was the one who should be grateful. He’d been living too long without female company of his own age.

  Laura went up to the apartment on her own in the lunch-hour as Jon had been waylaid by a salesman from one of the big pharmaceutical firms and she was anxious to view the place again and pick up the colour charts.

  When the door swung open the place was in darkness as the curtains were still drawn, and her hand went out to grope for a light switch. There was nothing immediately obvious so she stepped into the darkness of the hallway and went flying over a large can of paint that the decorator must have left.

  Jon had finished talking to the salesman and was halfway up the stairs when he heard her fall. He took the last few steps two at a time, flicked on the light switch, which had been just a couple of inches beyond her reach, and found Laura struggling to her feet, with blood oozing down the side of her face.

  ‘I hit my head on something,’ she said shakily as his arms went round her, and then fainted.

  ‘Oh, Laura, sweetheart,’ he murmured gently, aware of the limpness of her soft curves as he pushed open the door of the main bedroom with his foot and laid her gently on the bed. He’d had no idea that the decorator had left a big tin of undercoat in the hallway, he thought raggedly.

  It had only been a couple of hours ago that she’d voiced her fears of anything happening that would stop her from looking after Liam and here she was, bleeding and fainting all in the space of minutes.

  Jon took her hand in his and felt her pulse. It seemed regular enough and at that moment she moaned and opened her eyes. ‘What happened?’ she asked groggily. ‘Did I faint?’

  ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘Stay where you are for a moment. Don’t try to move. I’m going to go downstairs to get something to stop the bleeding. You hurt your face when you fell, most likely banged it against the hall table, and the shock of the fall made you faint.’

  When he’d bathed her face and put an antiseptic dressing on the cut, he ran his fingers gently across her cheek and as
ked, ‘No broken bones or other injuries that you haven’t mentioned?’

  She was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt and a big bruise was appearing on her arm just above the elbow, but she shook her head at the question and said, ‘No. I seem to be able to move everything, though, no doubt, I’ll have more bruises tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ he offered. ‘You need to rest.’

  She shook her head and raised herself upright on the bedcover. ‘No, Jon, I’m all right. Just a bit shaken up, that’s all. I must be there to pick Liam up after school, whatever happens, as it’s only his second day. As for the colour charts, I might as well take them with me, having almost knocked myself out in the process of getting them.’

  ‘I didn’t know the decorator had left the tin of paint there,’ he told her regretfully, ‘and the light switch in the hall is quite a way in from the front door. I’ll have to take better care of you in future.’

  He wasn’t going to mention that he would rather the first time he’d held her in his arms had been on a less fraught occasion. In that moment he’d been amazed at the anxious tenderness that had overwhelmed him on seeing her in such a state.

  When they went downstairs Laura insisted that she was all right to assist with the antenatal clinic that Jon and one of the practice nurses took on a Tuesday afternoon, but he wouldn’t have any of it.

  “You can sit and watch, and that is it,’ he told her. ‘And I’m going to ask one of the receptionists to make you a cup of hot, sweet tea.’

  It was happening again Laura thought wryly. She was at a disadvantage and Jon was taking charge. And how odd that on the only occasion she’d ever been in his arms, she’d known very little about it.

  As she waited for Liam once more outside the school gates it suddenly hit her how near she’d been to the thing she dreaded. If she’d been seriously hurt in the fall she wouldn’t have been there to meet him, and what would she have done then?

  But even as the dismaying thought came to mind there was comfort to be had in knowing that she wasn’t alone any more. Jon was close by, and if he never ever touched her again, she would get by somehow.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JON came to check on Laura later that evening and when she opened the door to him in the summer dusk he answered the question in her eyes by saying, ‘Abby is staying at my mother’s for the night. She does that sometimes.

  ‘I’ve come to see how you’re feeling and if you’d like me to stay the night in case you have any after-effects. That was some fall and I feel I should keep my eye on you, as I am your GP.’

  ‘I would love to tell you that’s an offer I can’t refuse,’ she told him. ‘But I’d be trading on your good nature. I admit that I’m stiff and sore and have a headache, but that’s all, and I’m sure that you can find better things to do with a free evening.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? What do you usually do?’

  ‘It happens so rarely I can’t remember,’ he told her with a smile. ‘So if you don’t require my services, how about inviting me in for a coffee?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, throwing the door open wide and thinking at the same time that she must be crazy to pass up the chance of being under the same roof as Jon for the night. Even though she would be asleep upstairs and he would be bedded down on the sofa.

  She thought she knew why he’d made the offer. It was because he felt responsible for her having an accident on the surgery premises, even though he hadn’t been the one who’d left the paint can there.

  Jon went into the sitting room, glancing at her as she went into the kitchen. The last thing likely to occur to her was that his concern was tinged with a sudden awareness of her that he’d never experienced before, and that, having felt it, he’d been eager to see her again to discover if it was still there…and it was.

  Before she’d just been Laura. Part of his growing-up and teenage years. If anyone had asked him to describe her, he wouldn’t have known where to begin, so used had he been to her presence.

  But it was different now. She was her own person. Liam’s mother, and a doctor like himself, with a delicate attractiveness that he was becoming more aware of all the time.

  What she thought of him after all this time he didn’t know. Laura had only sought him out once of her own free will since she’d come back to Heathermere. It had been the night when she’d found him at his mother’s house, and told him she had a buyer for the cottage in Cornwall, and would like to accept his offer of employment at the practice.

  In the kitchen, making coffee, Laura had no idea of the direction of his thoughts. She was still trying to come to terms with Jon wanting to stay the night because he was worried about her. It was pleasant to be the subject of his concern, but she wasn’t going to read anything into the gesture that wasn’t there.

  When she went into the sitting room with the coffee-cups he said, ‘Do you remember how we used to go to the midsummer fair that came to Heathermere every year when we were young?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Well, it still comes. The sequence has never been broken. It will be here for two days on Friday and Saturday. How about we take the children?’

  ‘That’s a nice idea,’ she said slowly, a little taken aback by the suggestion. ‘Liam would love that. Especially if Abby is going to be there. He talks about her all the time.’

  ‘She’s the same about him,’ he told her, and there was regret in his voice.

  ‘Abby pretends he’s her little brother, which just goes to show how she wishes she wasn’t an only child. But I’m afraid there is nothing I can do about that.’

  ‘That’s not quite true, is it?’ she pointed out.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your mother would like you to find yourself a wife.’

  ‘Yes. I know. Yet I can’t fall in love to order, and after my experience with Kezia I wouldn’t settle for anything less than the real thing. An all-consuming love that would embrace Abby, too. But I don’t have much time for socialising. I’ve managed without a woman in my life so far, and my daughter seems happy enough, even though she hasn’t got any brothers and sisters.’

  Laura nodded, wishing she hadn’t said anything.

  ‘So, back to the fair,’ he continued. ‘How about we call for you both after lunch on Saturday? Then when our young ones have had their fill of it, take them to eat at one of the fast-food places that children seem to like so much.’

  ‘Yes. Why not? It sounds like fun,’ she told him, eyes sparkling at the thought of prime time with Jon and the children.

  He didn’t stay long. When he’d drunk his coffee he said, ‘If you won’t let me be the night nurse, I’ll be off, Laura. At least I can let you have an early night. I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror since you came home, but that is a beauty of a black eye you’ve got. Promise you’ll ring me if you don’t feel well. I can be over in minutes.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him, still thinking she was insane not to take advantage of his concern. Yet she couldn’t do that. Jon was going through the motions of the caring employer and she couldn’t fault him on it. But she’d turned up for work at the practice in Cornwall and looked after Liam many a time when she’d felt a lot worse than she did now.

  ‘You are a very independent woman, Laura Hewitt.’ he said.

  ‘Cavendish,’ she reminded him, with the sparkle still there.

  ‘All right then, Cavendish. But I suppose it isn’t surprising. You’ve had to be, haven’t you?’

  ‘Mmm, I guess so,’ she replied. ‘But I was a much stronger person than the one you knew when I lost Freddie. I’d begun to make a life of my own before I married him and he loved the new me because I was no longer prepared to put up with the way my father treated me.

  ‘If I’d been like my old self when he drowned, I don’t know how I would have survived, but as well as being more positive I had the greatest reason of all to face up to what
had happened. Liam was just six months old when Freddie was taken from us.’

  He nodded and said with a sombre smile, ‘So do I need to remember that I am dealing with the new you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But there is a lot of the old me still there as well.’

  In the way my heartbeat quickens every time you are near she wanted to tell him, and how I seem to just exist from one moment to the next because I am realising that I still care for you. That my feelings for you that I thought had completely gone during my happy years with Freddie are now taking over my life again.

  When he’d gone she locked up and went slowly up the stairs, bemused by many thoughts, and uppermost among them was Jon’s suggestion that they take the children to the fair. It was something to really look forward to. For one thing it would give her the opportunity to get to know Abby, who in her own sweet young way was helping Liam to settle into his new life more than anyone.

  One thing she didn’t want to dwell on was Jon’s description of what he would want out of a marriage. She would want the same. But it hurt too much to think that if he ever did consider it, he wouldn’t be looking in her direction. Even if she filled her wardrobe with fashionable clothes, had her hair restyled and a beauty treatment, she would still be Laura Hewitt to him.

  Before Saturday there was the rest of the week to be got through with the children at school and the doctors fulfilling their function at the practice. In the midst of it Laura had chosen colour schemes for the apartment and every time she went up there she was conscious of the two front doors facing each other on the landing.

  She wanted to be near Jon and was getting her wish, she thought, but would it prove to be too near? They were together down at the surgery and would be only feet away up above it. It could prove to be a painful pleasure.