The London Doctor

by Joanna Neil

  She went outside to where Adam was waiting for her in the car.

  ‘Was it any help?’ Adam asked as he opened the car door for her and watched her slide into the passenger seat.

  ‘Not really,’ Hannah said. ‘There was just this letter of resignation. The address is my grandmother’s house, and I’ve already looked at that and come to a stop.’ She pressed her lips together to stop them from trembling. ‘At least I have something that was hers.’ She showed the letter to Adam, and then when he handed it back to her, she folded it carefully and pushed it into the pocket of her jacket. Her hands were shaking, and she clasped her fingers together to hold them still.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know that you were hoping for a lot more.’ He drew her to him, wrapping his arms around her, and that simple act was her undoing. Salt tears trickled down her cheeks, and she buried her face into his shoulder, quietly weeping for what might have been.

  His hand gently stroked the silk of her hair, and she let him soothe her, absorbing the comfort of his nearness, his undemanding gentleness.

  Slowly she cried herself out, and then gradually began to pull herself together. She brushed the dampness from her cheeks with trembling fingers and tried to make herself presentable again.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said, straightening. ‘I’m sorry. I should have tried to hold it all together.’

  ‘Crying is probably the best thing you can do. It will do you good to let it all out and to let go. It’s one of the ways that we start to heal.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Is there anything that I can do?’ He ran a finger lightly along her cheek, as though satisfying himself that she really was over the worst. Then he moved back from her and simply looked at her, waiting for her response.

  ‘I think I’ve come to the end of the line,’ she said huskily. ‘I don’t see any other avenue to explore.’

  She was quiet for a moment, and then said, ‘Perhaps I’ll never know the truth of what happened, but I do believe that my mother didn’t do anything wrong, no matter what my father might have implied. How could he be the judge of her? Perhaps he let his guilty conscience do the talking. Throughout my childhood, he hardly ever made much of an attempt to take care of me, but I never heard my mother say a bad word about him.’

  ‘What will you do now? Do you have any idea?’

  ‘I think I’ll go home to the Chilterns and try to get on with my life when my stint in A and E here finishes. I’ve always been relatively secure there, and I know my mum will be pleased to have me nearby. She worries about how I’m doing.’

  ‘So you’re giving up? You’re planning to run away?’

  She stiffened. ‘If you want to put it like that, yes.’

  He turned on the car’s ignition and began the drive home. He didn’t say very much, and Hannah was lost in her own thoughts.

  Had he wondered whether she might want to stay on in London? He hadn’t asked her to do that, and she honestly didn’t know whether she was up to it.

  Being close to him had taught her one thing above all…she wanted him to stay close by. She wanted to see him and be with him, and most of all she wanted him to feel the same way about her. She loved him, that had become clearer to her day by day, week by week, but it had come as no surprise. She had always known that he was special.

  The trouble was that in following through on that love, wouldn’t she be copying the pattern set by her mother, in loving a man who was more interested in his career prospects than he was in wanting to be with her?

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘’BYE, sweetheart. I’ll see you later,’ Hannah said, waving to Ellie as the childminder led her into the house.

  Ellie blew her a kiss. ‘Bye, Hannah.’ She clutched her teddy bear tightly to her chest, but she was smiling, and Hannah began to relax a little.

  ‘She seems a lot happier this morning,’ Ryan commented as they headed towards the hospital. ‘I think seeing her mother last night must have helped.’

  Hannah nodded. ‘I’m sure it did. She was much chattier when she came home, and I managed to have a talk with her about what has been upsetting her, lately—apart from her mother being in hospital, of course.’

  ‘Did you find out what the problem was?’

  ‘I think so. It’s all to do with her teddy bear, apparently. She likes to keep him with her all the time, but the teachers have been asking her to leave him in a bag in the cloakroom during the day, in case one of the other children takes a fancy to him. They’re afraid of personal items going astray.’

  Ryan lifted a brow. ‘Poor little thing. I can see how she wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘I’ve had a word with the childminder about it, so that she’ll be able to talk to the teachers and explain the situation, and I’ve written Ellie’s name on a ribbon and sewn it around the bear’s neck, so hopefully they’ll have no objections to her keeping him with her.’

  They arrived at the hospital, and Hannah started towards A and E. ‘Will you be going back to college later on?’ she asked, glancing back at Ryan.

  ‘That’s what I planned to do. I’m going up to the ward to see Abby for a while first, but I’ll come down to A and E and say goodbye before I go.’

  ‘OK. I’ll talk to you later, then.’

  Hannah pushed open the door of the emergency department and went to prepare for her first patient of the day. She saw that Mr Tremayne was on duty today, and her spirits drooped as she realised that Adam was probably not going to be around.

  ‘He’s gone to a meeting with management about the new consultant post,’ Sarah told her, as they began to treat a woman whose heart rate was too rapid and causing her to collapse.

  Hannah grimaced inwardly. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise to her that he was still in talks about the job. Adam was ambitious, and he’d made no secret of the fact that he wanted this opportunity…but even so, she had clung to the hope that he might reconsider.

  If he wasn’t so determined to stay on in London, there might have been a faint chance that she would meet up with him again, some time in the future, closer to home. She couldn’t bear the thought of not being near him, and at the same time she desperately wanted to be near her own home and family.

  ‘I suppose they must be getting ready to announce the appointment,’ she said. She worked carefully as she spoke, inserting an intravenous cannula and giving the woman an initial dose of adenosine.

  ‘I imagine it’s a foregone conclusion,’ Sarah murmured. ‘Adam really wants a consultant post, and he’s always said that this hospital is second to none.’

  Hannah tried not to think about that. ‘You might feel a slight sensation of flushing and a little chest discomfort to begin with,’ she told her patient, ‘but it’s nothing to worry about. This should help to bring your heart rate down.’

  Sarah recorded a rhythm strip and Hannah studied it briefly. ‘That seems to be doing the trick,’ she told the woman with a brief smile a short time later. ‘We’ll see how you go for a while, and then I’ll refer you to Cardiology. They’ll take over your care from here.’

  She went over to the desk to put a call through to Cardiology. Sarah followed, filing the ECG strip along with the patient’s notes.

  ‘Have you made up your mind what you’ll do when your appointment here comes to an end?’ she asked. ‘Have you sorted out another job yet?’

  ‘I’m going to apply for a posting nearer home,’ Hannah said. ‘I keep longing for the valleys and the streams and the woods. It’s peaceful near where my mum lives in the Chilterns, and I think I’ll try to get work with a general practitioner over there. I heard that there should be a place for me at a surgery close to home.’

  ‘We’ll miss you,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Me, too. I’ll be sorry to leave everyone behind.’ Especially Adam, but it was best not to think about that. It hurt too much.

  She moved away from the desk and went to find her next patient. For the rest of the morning, she tried t
o immerse herself in her work. That way, she had less time to think of her own problems and it helped to numb her own inner pain in some small way.

  Adam came into the department just as she was about to go for a coffee break, and she tried to read his expression in an attempt to discover whether he was pleased with the outcome of his meeting. She didn’t want to ask him how things had gone. She wasn’t ready to hear outright that he had been given the job. Where would that leave her, other than nursing her loss back home?

  He was giving nothing away, though. Instead, he murmured, ‘Did I see Ryan come in with you this morning?’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right. He’s going back to college later, and then he said he planned to go home and spend some time with our mum and dad.’

  ‘Oh? Has he said anything to you about his search for a job, now that he’s close to finishing his course? Is he likely to be looking for something back home?’

  ‘He hasn’t said too much about it, but I know he’s looking around. It seems that we’re in the same boat, with my job coming to an end and his college course finishing.’

  He gave her a quick, assessing glance. ‘Are you still thinking of going home, too?’

  ‘That’s what I had in mind, yes.’

  ‘Have you given up on finding your natural mother here in London? You were upset yesterday, but I wondered if you might feel differently about things in the light of day.’

  ‘I don’t know what else to try. I’ve pursued every avenue I can think of and all of the agencies have drawn a blank.’

  ‘Yes, I know it hasn’t been easy. The trail just seemed to vanish, didn’t it? It occurred to me, though, that your mother was working in the area some twelve years ago, and there could be a good reason why she dropped out of sight after that.’

  ‘Apart from deliberately concealing her whereabouts, you mean?’

  He nodded. ‘She was ill when you were very young, and then she had a nervous breakdown and suffered from bouts of illness, which I’m assuming was why you were eventually adopted. It could be that the illness continued, and perhaps she was in hospital for some of the time. Has anyone checked hospital records?’

  ‘I believe so, but nothing surfaced. Anyway, she was well enough to work for a while, and to take time out to sell my grandmother’s house and consider freelancing.’

  ‘That’s the point, though, isn’t it? Perhaps she wasn’t able to go on doing freelance work. Isn’t it possible that she was taken ill again?’

  ‘I suppose so…Or she might have been an addict or an alcoholic…that’s what my father seemed to suggest.’

  ‘He probably said that because he didn’t understand what was wrong with her, and he didn’t take the trouble to find out.’ He looked at her searchingly.

  ‘There is one way that we might be able to find out more…through hospital admissions records. These things are highly confidential, of course, and it all depends on whether I’ll be able to obtain the relevant permissions to pass on certain information. I could try to do that, if you like. Would you let me do that for you?’

  She was startled by his offer. ‘I thought you said it would be best left alone? You said I might not like what I found.’

  ‘Perhaps I was wrong.’ He grimaced. ‘If we could clear up the mystery of what happened to her, it might help you to be able to move on. What do you say?’

  ‘All right.’ She gave him a faltering smile. ‘You’re really my last hope.’

  He gave her hand a light squeeze. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll do my best to find her for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Hannah wasn’t sure what to think. He was helping her, and he was being kind and considerate, and more than anything she wanted to reach up to him and put her arms around him and thank him for trying. Something held her back, though, and perhaps it was the thought that he might just do this one thing for her and then he would prepare to move on once again.

  He became briskly efficient, assessing the list of patients waiting to be seen and prioritising them. ‘I’ll be in treatment room two, if I’m needed,’ he said. He glanced at Sarah, who had come to look through the charts. ‘Will you come and assist? I need to reduce a fracture.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Hannah went back to work, trying to concentrate her attention on her patients, but she saw Ryan walk into A and E just a short time later, looking pleased with himself.

  ‘Has something happened?’ Hannah asked. She put the collection of lab reports that she had been scanning to one side. ‘You’re looking very bright and breezy. Have you had some good news?’

  He nodded, coming over to her. ‘I’ve just heard that they’re sending Abby home today. She’s looking so much better than she was just a few days ago.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Hannah said with a smile. ‘Ellie will be so pleased.’

  He nodded, but hesitated as Adam came to join them at the desk. Adam glanced at Ryan and inclined his head in a greeting, but said nothing.

  ‘Yes, I think she will be,’ Ryan went on. ‘Of course, she’s going to have to adjust to the fact that she has grandparents…I’ve just been introduced to Abby’s mother and father, up on the ward.’

  ‘Really?’ Hannah was startled. ‘I didn’t think they would get together so soon. Did everything work out all right for them? Did the meeting go all right? It’s been so long since they last saw Abby.’

  ‘Yes, to all of that.’ Ryan laughed. ‘It sounds as though there was a mix-up over communication. They moved house and Abby’s letters to them weren’t forwarded on to the new place, and then Abby moved to a bigger flat and changed her phone number and everything became confused. They seem to have sorted out everything now, though.’

  ‘I’m so relieved.’ Hannah was happy for her friend. ‘I’ll have to see if I can be home in time to welcome her back. Are her parents going to take her home?’

  ‘Yes, they’ve just been making the arrangements.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news.’ She turned to Adam. ‘It is, isn’t it? We’ve all been so worried about her.’

  Adam nodded. He glanced at Ryan and said, ‘You’ve been a good friend to Abby, and to Ellie, these last few weeks. I suppose you must have taken on board that she was in a difficult position, as a single mother, with no contact with her parents. It must have been fairly easy for you and Hannah to identify with her, given your own family backgrounds.’

  ‘That’s true enough. I suppose you could say that, in a way, there’s a kind of unspoken bond between us.’ He sent Adam a curious glance. ‘I wouldn’t really have expected you to notice what I was doing, or to take all that on board. I’ve always been the black sheep where you and your family were concerned.’

  ‘I don’t think I would agree with that. It has been obvious that you’ve had a lot to contend with yourself lately, what with exams and the problems with your accommodation and so on. Things must have been difficult for you, but you still took the time to help out with Ellie.’ He paused, looking thoughtful for a moment or two. ‘I think Hannah has been glad of that, and she tells me that in spite of everything you might have done all right with your studies.’

  Hannah sent him a quick, puzzled look. She hadn’t known him to talk like this to Ryan in a long time. Perhaps things were different now because Ryan was showing that he was more receptive to what he had to say.

  ‘I don’t have the results yet,’ Ryan murmured, ‘but, yes, I think it might work out all right. My tutor glanced through the papers and says I shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘That sounds encouraging. What about the problem with your accommodation? I couldn’t help hearing that you were having difficulties over various debts. I know it can be difficult for students to keep on top of things.’

  Ryan didn’t immediately jump to his own defence as he might have done at one time. Perhaps it showed the measure of his good humour now that Abby was finally coming home.

  ‘Eventually, I did, with Hannah’s help. The thing is, I used to share the accommodation with some other s
tudents, and they dropped out one by one, and went off without paying what they owed. The debts were all theirs, but I was left to carry the can. I’ve managed to persuade a couple of them to cough up, though.’ He sent Hannah a quick look. ‘I’ve put the money to one side, so that I can pay you back what I owe.’

  ‘I told you, you don’t need to worry about that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you have lots of other things on your mind right now. Not least the worry of finding a job now that your course has come to an end.’

  Ryan grimaced. ‘That’s true enough.’

  Adam studied him. ‘Have you thought about where you might apply for work?’

  Ryan nodded. ‘I’ve put out some feelers, and I’ve a few interviews lined up, but my final decision will depend on what Abby wants to do, really. I need to talk to her about it some more, but I’ll settle for something that will suit both of us. If she wants to move back near to where her parents are living, then I’ll look for something close to there.’

  Adam looked as though that surprised him. ‘Are you saying that you and Abby are a couple?’ He watched him, his head tilted slightly to one side, as though he wasn’t sure what to make of him.

  Ryan nodded, smiling. ‘I’ve liked Abby from the time I first met her. She and I just seemed to click somehow. Anyway, we’re not going to rush into anything, because I have to find work first of all, but as soon as I have my career sorted out, we’ll make it official.’

  Hannah hugged him. ‘Ryan, you didn’t say a word. How long were you planning on keeping it to yourself? I’m so pleased for you.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Of course, I did sort of guess, when you kept finding a reason to go off and visit her.’

  Adam was staring at both of them, looking perplexed. ‘I had no idea what was going on,’ he said. He looked preoccupied all at once. ‘You know,’ he added, turning his attention to Ryan, ‘if you have any trouble finding work, and you decide to move back to near where your foster-mother lives, I’m sure my father would be able to find you some work on the estate.’