by Carol Smith
“I saw you at the theater,” announced Eleanor. “I recognized you then but Catherine didn’t. I thought it best to say nothing. Does she know it’s you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s really pretty ill and her mind seems to be wandering.”
How could he admit to her mother that he hadn’t even recognized her, hadn’t given her a second thought for twenty years?
“You never did have much backbone,” said Eleanor, with satisfaction.
Which was surely the understatement of the century.
• • •
Catherine’s pale eyes flickered with renewed hope and she leaned across to the dressing table mirror to try to see how she looked. Not too bad, all things considered. The flush his visit had brought to her cheeks was not unbecoming and Sally had brushed her hair and helped her with a flick of lipstick and a dusting of powder before he arrived. Sally would have made an excellent nurse. She had the right instincts regarding a patient’s comfort as well as a genuine caring, something Catherine had always been aware she herself lacked.
“You’re a dear,” she said, touching Sally’s hand. “But what makes you think a man like that would take notice of a wreck like me?”
“I was watching him.” Sally’s vigorous nod brought a ghostly smile to Catherine’s lips. “If that wasn’t lust in his eyes then I’m still a virgin. Hurry up and get well so that he can have his wicked way with you.”
After Sally had gone with a lascivious wink, back to the pub to do her evening stint, Catherine lay in the semi-darkness and thought about Tom. He hadn’t said so in so many words but she knew it was him come back to save her. She’d allow him his little surprise. He had given her some pills which were making her feel luxuriously drowsy and, for the first time in weeks, the ache in her abdomen had abated. Tom Harvey. Back at last, just as she had always known he would be, more successful than ever but every bit as charming, with the genius in his healing hands to make her well again. It was funny really. Throughout her recent illness, she had felt his presence hovering near. Now she knew for certain it wasn’t an illusion; she had been right all the time.
She was wearing her faded Viyella nightgown, which Sally had hastily snatched from a drawer, the one with the high lace-edged collar and three-quarter sleeves and a motif of tiny green and white apple blossoms on a white background. He had asked Sally to stay while he lifted the nightgown and probed her stomach with the strong, cool fingers she remembered so well and had dreamed of all these years. Then he had slipped on thin rubber gloves and examined her internally; just feeling his fingers inside her again had made her want to cry out in happiness, despite the pain.
He had come back, her beloved, and all the lost years of hopeless longing and despair faded into insignificance. It had all been worth it now that she had seen him again. Her love burned as fiercely as ever and this time she knew he would not abandon her. It just went to show what God could do if you kept the faith. With hope in her heart and a soft smile on her lips, Catherine closed her eyes and slept.
• • •
Outside in Prince Consort Road, Addison Harvey sat at the wheel of his silver Corniche with his head in his hands, a wrecked man. The nightmare he had dreaded had finally caught up with him, just when he thought he was finally home and dry, with royal patronage beckoning. Yet the instant he found himself face-to-face with that singer, the years had simply melted away. Catherine Palmer—how was it possible he had been able to forget her so completely? The name had rung a distant bell when he saw it on her medical notes, but it had all happened so many years ago, he had failed to make the connection. So much had happened since that fateful night, he might be forgiven for having eclipsed her. So many patients, so much hard work; everything he had striven for and achieved, all thrown into jeopardy by one foolish act more than twenty years ago.
“I’m going to have a baby!” she had said, running to him with tears in her eyes, blind with infatuation, confident he would take her in his arms and give her the comfort she desired. Poor fool. Instead, he recoiled in horror and pushed her roughly away. Who did she think she was kidding? He had just been royally humiliated by her bitch of a mother. Did she really believe her sniveling was going to work with him now?
“You stupid little fool!” he said. “Don’t you know enough not to let these accidents happen? You work in a hospital, for Christ’s sake. Have you learned nothing about the facts of life?”
He left then, in a towering rage, and went home to sink a bottle of Johnny Walker and try to forget his humiliation. When Nancy, the roommate, called to tell him about Catherine’s attempted suicide, he had been in no state to understand, let alone do anything about it.
Oh God. Addison wiped his face with a silk handkerchief and lit a cigar. The next part was even worse. He ought to be thinking about going home but hadn’t the strength; besides, he couldn’t bear the thought of Phoebe seeing him in this state.
Just thinking about it brought him out in a sweat. The afternoon of the men’s finals at Wimbledon, while the whole world was otherwise engrossed, he remembered the deserted theater with its makeshift lights and the gowned and masked figure of that nurse—the roommate—standing mutely by, scared witless as he was, assisting him. While he, the boy surgeon, not yet fully qualified and lacking proper experience, wielded his knife and broke every ethical code by cutting away his own fetus—the daughter he had never managed to replicate—and dropping it, still pulsating bloodily, into the kidney bowl.
Nancy’s reward was to have been to share his future. How foolish women could be; how trusting, even the canniest among them. She had been a good friend to Catherine, had stood by her, but the law of the jungle prevailed when it came to catching a man and she had been the first to agree that Catherine was bound to get over it; would find someone worthier to love one day, someone more of her own kind. Nancy and Tom were two of a kind, with their rough upbringing and working-class roots. He was already safe in Boston, making plans to dump her too, when he heard news of her fatal road crash. Once again, the luck of the Harveys held, leaving our hero free—to proceed with his upward scramble without so much as a backward glance at the wreckage strewn behind him.
But that had been the pattern of Tom’s life. It was luck rather than brilliance that had set him on his way, first in London, courtesy of a scholarship, later in the States. It was charm rather than brains that had won him the right wife, with social connections to enhance his surgical skills and oil his way up the ladder to the glittering prizes of the medical world. His youthful ideals were long since forgotten; these days money and social position came first. After fifteen years at the top of his profession in New England, he had returned to set up a lucrative private practice in Harley Street plus, with an eye to a future gong, a spot of National Health work thrown in on the side, a salve to his famously liberal conscience. On the right occasions, he swanked about his humble origins though the hint of Durham Catherine had once found so beguiling was no longer detectable in those smooth, mid-Atlantic tones. Each year he went back to Consett to visit his folks, though he almost never invited them back to his affluent riverside home in Sunningdale.
“They just wouldn’t feel comfortable,” he explained to Phoebe. “Dad likes his walk down the hill of an evening to the Union for a couple of jars, while Mum would miss her regular brew and her chats over the garden fence to those nosy neighbors.”
The truth was he was ashamed, and no longer felt at ease in the company of his father, who had devoted his life to the defense of his workingman’s ideals and had sacrificed so much in order to educate his son. Nothing gave the old man greater pleasure, on those rare occasions when Tom actually did come home, than to take him into the Miners’ Union for a pint, in order to show him off to the men who had known him all his life.
“Here’s our Tom,” he’d say with pride. “Got his gold medal and his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. There’s nowt can stop him now, I reckon. He’s always been set on saving
lives, right from when he was a nipper.”
“Happen he ought to stay here,” growled one old man, lighting his pipe with difficulty due to one arm being amputated at the elbow. “Here, where his roots are, and put his skills to mending bones and saving workingmen’s lives.”
Tom had got them all another round and endeavored to change the subject. He knew about the Harvard fellowship but had not yet broken the news. His mum and dad had struggled so hard to set him on his way, they would never be able to understand why he was abandoning them for America. Nor could he tell his gruff old dad, who had spent all these years risking his life on the pitface, about his chosen area of specialization, gynecology. It was more lucrative and would bring him into contact with a better class of patient.
So he had slipped away and sold them down the river, married the Boston heiress, built himself a new, cushy life, and only returned to his native England when his boys were growing and he wanted to enroll them at Harrow. Old traditions die hard and Tom had always been a secret snob. Fortune had continued to smile on him and life to treat him well. He was unfaithful to his wife, but not excessively, and he was proud of his place in the community. There was a lot wrong with the British medical system, which he felt lagged light-years behind the States, but it was a comfortable life and he had few complaints.
Twenty years ago he had acted as he did out of panic linked to ambition. Faced with a threatening dilemma, he had chosen to save the career he had worked so hard to achieve and abandoned the Ambassador’s daughter and her child. Yet now, right under his nose, lay clear evidence of his ancient crime, come back after all these years to haunt him. Catherine might have changed but the X-rays would reveal all and the plates now locked in his office safe were potentially lethal.
For Catherine was dying of an ovarian tumor caused, almost certainly, by that bungled abortion twenty years ago. Her life was ebbing away and she seemed not to want to fight. He had an uneasy feeling she was fully aware of who he was but was not letting on. That would certainly be in keeping with the shy, pretty nurse he had known so long ago and callously trifled with, thinking that she might help to further his social career. But the bitch of a mother had put an end to all that.
Yes, she knew. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became. She had recognized him and had forgiven him. That was the hardest part of all to bear. At the prospect of what he now stood to lose, Addison Harvey put his head back in his hands and wept.
Chapter Thirty
Sally had really liked working at the pub, but now Joe was getting rather heavy and she found that a real drag. After losing his temper when she had abandoned him for Paris, she had sweetened him up with some all-night sex. He was cute enough and good in the sack and he made her laugh. That should have been enough, but lately he was growing possessive and that was always the beginning of the end as far as Sally was concerned. She simply wasn’t ready to settle down, not in this country, and although she thought she would quite like a kid one day, she didn’t particularly want it to have mixed blood, and besides, there was plenty of time. She was not long past thirty; these days that was nothing.
“Don’t even think about it,” cautioned Beth. “Not yet, not until you have some prospects and some money put away for a rainy day.”
“You sound like Dreardre,” said Sally with a grin.
“I know I do, but on this one subject I know whereof I speak. You have to want it a lot to make it worth doing and I honestly don’t think you’re ready yet.”
“Not until the right man comes along, huh?” said Sally.
“Well, I never know with you. That never seems to be a problem.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“I mean it. One of these days I hope you’ll fall in love and then you’ll suddenly know what life is really about.”
“How do you know I haven’t been in love already?”
“I know.”
“Well, it’s all a lot of rubbish if you ask me. Look at you and Gus. That didn’t work. Look at you and Oliver.”
“I know. I’m not saying do as I do, only as I say. And I love you enough to want the best for you. You’re my little mate.”
Sally went and put her arms around Beth, touched. Beth pushed her away. She was, as always, cooking and had reached a tricky part. Sally was just like Imogen at times, as guileless and as immature. And every bit as lovable.
“No, I am going to be the Bad Fairy in your life and wish that you fall in love. You can’t stop me, the spell is already cast. And you’re far too special not to hold out for the best. Wait and see.”
“What do you think of Joe? Or Sam? Or Jeremy? Not good enough for you, huh?”
“They’re just boys, you need a man. You’ll know him when you meet him, believe me.”
“Besides,” said Beth later, wiping down the kitchen table with a damp cloth, which she then hung on the rail of the stove to dry, “it did work with Gus. And with Oliver. Relationships are all different and have their own course to run, and now that we all live so much longer, you can’t expect to be faithful and loving till death do you part. It’s simply not realistic.”
“How is Oliver? Do you still see him?”
“Yes, I think so. Not for a week or so, though.”
Not since Vivienne’s lunch party, if she were honest, and that frightful unexpected confrontation in the hall. Oliver had called her later to demand what she was doing in his house and why he didn’t know about it.
“Ask Vivienne, it was all her idea. Besides, you weren’t around,” she explained. “You were in Strasbourg when she rang and I couldn’t really get out of it. Not without it looking very strange and making her suspicious.”
What were you doing, come to that? she should have asked. Home in the afternoon without ever telling me? Having a bit of nookie with the wife on the sly, I shouldn’t be at all surprised.
She had felt enough of a bitch as it was, blatantly sitting there in Oliver’s house, smiling at his wife and acting like a friend. It was all wrong, it wasn’t Beth’s style. Something would have to be done but she wasn’t quite sure what. Next time Oliver called for a date, she surprised them both by taking a rain check, with the bald excuse that she had too much work to do and was tired. And when she phoned Vivienne to thank her for lunch, she said they must do it again, quite soon, next time on her own turf. She didn’t really want Vivienne in her life but something deep inside her, some elementary sense of fair play, made her feel she should put out some sort of a hostage to fortune. Even if Oliver was willing to go on playing the adulterer, the role didn’t sit easily with Beth.
“Now Oliver,” said Sally shrewdly, reading her thoughts. “He’s a man.” She had only seen him that one time but he had left his mark.
“Perhaps,” said Beth reflectively.
• • •
Beth’s words came back and hit Sally with a resounding thwang next time she strolled into Albert Hall Mansions and found Eleanor taking tea with Duncan, the vet. He was leaning back in a tiny, uncomfortable chair, completely at his ease, and he rose to his feet when Sally arrived and shook her hand with a lazy smile.
Wow, thought Sally, rebounding from the force of the impact. He really is a hunk. How come nobody warned me?
Eleanor clearly thought so too and was much less welcoming than usual. She was all decked out in her fancy best so she must have been expecting him. She fixed Sally with a baleful stare, willing her to leave. She was a wily old bird and very competitive. Sally grinned companionably and thwarted her by helping herself to a cup from the kitchen and settling down to spoil their tête-à-tête.
“Don’t you want to look in on Catherine?” asked Eleanor in her diva’s voice.
“She was asleep when I left her,” said Duncan helpfully.
“Then I won’t,” said Sally. She liked this man.
He wore jeans and a denim jacket and his hair was brown and longish for a man of his age, covering his ears and merging with his beard, which was already streaked with gray.
His eyes were a clear, searching blue. Sally felt them scanning into her soul and turned away, discomfited.
“Who’s minding the shop while you’re away?”
She rose and paced the room, looking at Eleanor’s knickknacks which she had examined so often before. She was ill at ease and didn’t know why. It was a feeling entirely alien to Sally, who normally kept on top of things.
“Vanessa. I told her I’d be back soon.”
His voice was warm and soothing and reminded her of sunshine and the great Australian outback. His hand, lying idly on the arm of his chair, was brown and capable; his wrists were strong. Sally had an overpowering desire to climb up on to his knee and rest her head against that powerful chest. With difficulty, she resisted. He was looking at her strangely, almost as if he could tell.
As was Eleanor, with open hostility now in her aging eyes.
Well, at least I’m making an impact, thought Sally. When Duncan said it was time he was going, Sally said she would stroll along with him.
“Give Catherine my love,” she said, forgiving Eleanor enough to peck her on the cheek. “Tell her I’ll be back soon when she’s awake.”
• • •
“And where do you fit in?” asked Duncan as they walked past the Royal College of Music and down toward the Gloucester Road and Duncan’s surgery.
“Hospital,” said Sally.
“But you don’t come from these parts. You’re an Aussie like me.”
Sally stared at him. He had a good ear.
“Actually, I’m a Kiwi,” she said but she felt uncomfortable.
“But the accent?”
Sally just grinned. “I’ve knocked around the world a bit. Guess I’ve just mixed too much with Aussies. Bit of a mongrel these days, I suppose. That’s what comes of living in Kangaroo Valley.”
“What do your folks do?”
“I don’t have any folks,” said Sally. “They’re dead. But my dad was a doctor, internationally known.”