Joy and happiness bubble up inside me. No one has ever said anything so romantic to me in my life, but where does this leave us? I wonder. Jack ducks towards me and touches his lips to my cheek.
‘I’ll catch you later,’ he says, leaving me standing there, stupid with desire, touching the very spot where he kissed me and wondering what will happen next, and when.
Chapter Thirteen
The Runaway Deer
IT’S EARLY THE following Saturday afternoon, late August, and I am alone at the Sanctuary, having shown the last of the day’s visitors, a family with young children, around the place. They didn’t offer to adopt one of the rescues, but the parents did drop a generous donation into the box at reception, perhaps as a forfeit for their offspring’s behaviour. I asked their boys not to put their fingers in the hamster cage, at which one of them asked why, promptly sticking his finger through the bars. That’s why, his mother said as he let rip an ear-splitting wail. I don’t think he could have made any more fuss if the hamster had taken his finger off and, as it was, I had to dig out the first-aid kit to find some antiseptic and a plaster to staunch the flow of blood. (I’m being sarcastic – the wound was like a paper cut.) Anyway, they left not long ago, heading for the Minor Injuries Unit in Talyton St George to see if the victim of the attack needs antibiotics or a tetanus jab, while I fill in the very first entry in the accident book, leaning against the desk at reception.
My mobile vibrates, making me start. It’s Jack.
‘Hi,’ I say. I’ve been wondering where he is and what he’s doing. I suppose you could say that, after his confession, Jack has become my obsession. I can’t eat or sleep for thinking about him. The feelings I have are far more intense than anything I felt for Nathan, yet neither of us has made any further move towards the other. I suppose it’s better this way, keeping the status quo, but sometimes I wish Jack would take the initiative and ask me out.
‘Tess, I’m going to come and pick you up on the way in to Talyton,’ he says in a tone that brooks no argument. ‘We need as many hands as possible – there’s an injured deer on the loose. As far as the police can tell, although they can’t get that close to it, it’s in a pretty bad way. Can you bring some kit with you? I’ve left the stretcher in the back of the barn. If you wouldn’t mind picking it up …’
‘I’ll find it.’ I don’t mind at all. Deer or no deer, I’d do anything for Jack. I’d walk to the ends of the earth for him, if only he’d ask.
‘Thanks. I’ll be with you in five.’
‘Did you mean five minutes or five seconds?’ I ask him when he turns up, the van screaming to a stop as it enters the car park. I fling the stretcher into the back, jump in alongside him, and he immediately performs a lurching three-point turn. ‘Where’s the deer?’
‘It’s running along the main road. The police have set up a rolling road block to stop the traffic, but they can’t stop the deer. It’s heading straight into town and it’s absolutely petrified.’
I clutch hold of the seat as Jack puts his foot down hard on the accelerator and shoots off, jolting down the track.
‘Luckily for us, it’s a roe deer, not a red,’ Jack goes on, ‘otherwise we’d have no chance of handling it. Either Alex Fox-Gifford or his assistant, Justin, are on their way with a dart gun in case we have to tranquillise it.’
I glance towards him as we drive on into Talyton. He’s totally focused on the task in hand. If anyone can catch this deer, Jack can.
‘This is where you could do with some blue lights,’ I observe when he has to pull onto the pavement at the end of Fore Street because the road is jammed with cars, holiday and weekend traffic heading out to the coast.
‘Unfortunately, we’re not allowed them on our own vehicles,’ he says, getting out of the van, ‘but yeah, they’d be useful in this kind of situation.’ He grabs the stretcher, passes me a couple of blankets and a bag and we run towards Market Square, Jack with his mobile pressed to his ear in full emergency rescue mode, strong, capable and heroic – and very fit, I think, struggling to catch my breath as I try to keep up with him. We push through the crowds in the square where people have got out of their cars to see what is going on, attracted by the sight of not the usual one police car, but two, and several police officers who have gathered outside the ironmonger’s shop.
Jack walks straight up to them.
‘Animal Welfare,’ he says. ‘Where’s the deer?’
‘In there,’ one of the policemen says. ‘The vet’s gone in to try and catch it.’
Jack pushes the door open and I follow. As we enter, a bell rings and a parrot screeches from a perch beside the counter. There’s a scuffle from the room beyond and the sound of voices.
‘Oh dear,’ Jack says to me. A smile flickers across his face. ‘Get it?’
‘Ha ha,’ I say. ‘Very funny.’
‘You don’t seem convinced,’ he says lightly, before moving on through the shop, stepping over boxes of nails and screws that are strewn across the floor. Mr Victor, the proprietor, a man of small stature and wide girth, balding on top and wearing an old-fashioned brown shopkeeper’s coat and glasses with thick, circular lenses, appears in the entrance to the room beyond.
‘You’d better wait there,’ he says curtly. ‘The vet’s trying to dart the damned thing. Look at the mess it’s made. Why did it have to come in here?’
Mr Victor isn’t renowned for his good temper, and at the moment he is definitely not a happy man. I glance behind me, noticing the overturned display of brooms, mops and buckets in the shop window. The parrot moves sideways along its perch, bobbing its head up and down in a threatening manner, before it opens its beak and speaks. It takes a couple of repeats before I understand that it’s telling us to go away in no uncertain terms.
‘Captain, that’s enough,’ Mr Victor says, his cheeks turning pinker than a hot dog’s tongue. ‘Not in front of the lady, thank you.’ He turns to me. ‘You’re Steve’s daughter, aren’t you?
‘That’s right.’
‘Your dad was in here this morning for batteries, long-life double As,’ he goes on.
‘It’s okay to go through, Tess,’ Jack interrupts. ‘Justin’s managed to dart the deer.’
‘You’d better go and get it out of here, before I have it for venison,’ Mr Victor says.
Jack and I head through the back to the garden, a tiny walled area of paving slabs and potted geraniums, where we find the vet squatting down and pulling a dart from the rump of a reddish-brown deer that’s about the same size as a border collie. It lies on its brisket with a glazed expression on its face. It has a black nose, small antlers and big brown eyes that are ringed with long lashes, the kind Katie’s clients at the salon would kill for.
‘What do you think, Justin?’ Jack asks.
Although I know Justin is a vet, he doesn’t look like the sort you might find in the stories of James Herriot. He has to be in his mid-twenties yet looks younger, and wears a stud in one ear and his hair gelled up at the front. When he turns to face Jack, I can see the multicoloured logo on his black T-shirt: Feed the Fire.
‘He’s completely stressed out. He’s got a nasty injury to the left hind-limb, probably a result of jumping through a wire fence, and I’m not convinced he hasn’t fractured the right one. I can’t understand how he ran this far.’ Justin hesitates. ‘I’m reluctant to go straight for euthanasia – he has a lot of fight left in him – but it’s going to be a long haul if he does pull through. Have you got the time and space to nurse him up at the Sanctuary?’
‘Of course,’ I cut in, desperate for this beautiful creature to have a chance of life. ‘We wouldn’t turn any animal away.’
‘In that case, we’ll get him up to the Manor so I can knock him out properly, X-ray the leg and see what I can do with this wound,’ Justin decides.
Jack unrolls the stretcher, placing it alongside the patient. ‘He can travel in the back of the van. He’ll be safest in there.’
‘Mind the legs,
’ Justin warns me as I move to assist. ‘They kick pretty hard.’
‘Tess knows a bit about deer,’ Jack says. ‘She’s a vet nurse.’
‘That’s cool,’ says Justin with a brief smile. ‘You’ll be able to help me out at the other end with the surgery. Alex doesn’t believe in paying for a nurse as well as an assistant.’
‘As long as you don’t expect me to wash up at the end for nothing,’ I say lightly, looking forward to getting back into an operating theatre even for a little while.
Jack takes the deer by the antlers, while Justin and I support the front and back ends respectively. As we lift it onto the stretcher, it starts to panic, in spite of the effects of the tranquilliser, kicking out like mad until Jack wraps its head with a towel so that it can’t see me passing the straps around its body and tightening them up. Once the deer is secured, Justin and Jack carry it out through the shop into the square, where the crowd begin to clap and cheer, setting the deer off again.
‘Quiet, please,’ Jack orders sharply, and the noise subsides. ‘The sooner we get this poor thing out of here, the better. Open the van, will you, Tess?’
‘The key, Jack,’ I say. ‘You must have the key.’
Holding the back of the stretcher with both hands, Jack glances down towards his trousers and grimaces. ‘Um, it’s in one of my pockets.’
Great, I think. Until now, I’ve been maintaining a strictly ‘no contact’ policy, doing my best to keep my hands off him so as not to fuel the passion that is gently simmering between us when we are together, and now he’s asking me to look through his pockets.
‘Hurry up, Tess,’ he says, looking at me with an expression of amusement at my discomfort. ‘I’m not asking for a strip search.’ He glances towards Justin who grins back, as though he’s worked out the reason for my hesitation, and I feel a rush of heat flooding up my neck. Am I that transparent?
‘Which pocket?’ I ask. Jack’s trousers do have rather a lot of pockets.
‘I’m not sure. Try the back right.’
I move up behind him, pull the top of his pocket out with one finger and peer in. ‘Nope.’
‘Try another one.’
If this wasn’t a critical situation for the deer, it would be funny, I think, embarrassed at having to grope Jack to find the key to the van, and it’s a relief to find that when I do discover an object in his front pocket, it is indeed his key ring, a plastic representation of a moon bear.
My face continues to burn when I unlock the van for Justin and Jack to slide the stretcher into the back.
‘I’ll travel with the patient,’ I say, keen to be able to sit in the dark to let my blushes subside.
‘Okay,’ Jack says. ‘I’ll shut you in. We’ll see you up at the Manor.’
‘Don’t drive too fast,’ I say quickly.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle with you,’ Jack calls back, and a tiny yet delicious shiver runs down my spine, a yearning for Jack to be as gentle with me as he likes. Not for the first time, I wonder what it would be like to kiss and be kissed by him once more, not a peck on the cheek, but full-on, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
It’s hard to remain detached and professional when you’re waiting for someone to make the first move, I muse as I check the deer’s heartbeat, touching its chest to see if it’s still alive. It’s been a while since we rescued the swan, and one thing is clear: something has to happen and soon because the tension is almost too much to bear.
Half an hour later, having put thoughts of Jack aside, Justin and I are working on the deer at the Talyton Manor practice. The operating theatre is not what I’m used to, being an ordinary room off the office above the stable block at the manor. There’s a sink for scrubbing up, a bench with an autoclave on top for sterilising instruments, a cupboard with various kits wrapped in green drapes and labelled with tape, and an operating table that has a piece of timber jammed underneath it because the height adjustment mechanism has failed.
‘Alex and I don’t do much surgery,’ Justin explains. ‘We refer most things, although the boss is looking at moving the practice to one of the outbuildings on the other side of the manor house. He’s been waiting for months for planning permission to redevelop it. It’ll be great once it’s done though, if I’m still here.’
‘Are you moving on, then?’ Jack asks, looking on.
‘This is my first job. Eventually, I’ll want to look for a partnership or set up on my own.’
I tweak flow rate on the intravenous drip, while Justin checks the X-rays of the deer’s back leg on the laptop he’s set up on the shelf alongside the operating table.
‘There’s no fracture, just bruising, which means we’re okay to go ahead and look at this wound.’ Justin fills a kidney dish with cotton wool and dilute antiseptic, using it to rinse the deer’s other back leg, the lower part of which has no skin left on it, the shiny white tendons and network of dark blood vessels completely exposed. ‘There’s nothing left to suture, so we’ll have to go for repeat dressings to let it heal by secondary intention, i.e. on its own. It’ll be a long, slow job, although it will heal eventually, as long as the deer doesn’t succumb from something else. Sometimes post-capture myopathy can set in, where the muscles break down because of the effects of stress or infection.’
‘Do you think it’s really the right thing to do?’ Jack asks.
I know what he means. The deer is stressed out already and redressing the limb every few days isn’t going to help, but – I check the patient’s reflexes as I lighten the anaesthetic slightly, turning the dial on the vaporiser – he has beautiful eyes – deep, dark and captivating, much like Jack’s – and I really don’t want to lose him.
‘It’s up to you, Tessa,’ Justin says, turning to me. ‘You’re the one who will be looking after him.’
‘What do you think of his chances?’
‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ Justin pulls open one of the drawers in the cupboard and several rolls of bandages, the soft fleecy kind used for padding legs, spring out across the floor. He collects up a selection of dressing materials and places them on the operating table. ‘Sixty-forty, as long as he gets through the next couple of weeks when the risk of myopathy or muscle damage is highest. I’ll give him selenium and vitamin E to try to prevent it, along with a shot of antibiotic. He’ll have to be tagged to show he’s received medication, and it will be up to you to decide if he can be released back into the wild or not at the end of his treatment.’
‘That won’t be such a problem,’ says Jack. ‘I’ve got a contact with a herd of rehabbed deer on a country estate about twenty miles from here, if it comes to that.’
‘Let’s go for it then,’ I say. I’ll take the flack if there’s a problem with paying the bills. I don’t mind. It will be worth it, if the deer survives. I assist Justin with cleaning and dressing the wound before turning off the anaesthetic gas completely to allow the patient to recover consciousness, crossing my fingers and praying that he will wake up. In the meantime, Jack answers his mobile.
‘That was Libby,’ he says, smiling. ‘She’s wondering where we’ve got to.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s with your aunt. They heard we were tied up with the deer, and decided to head up to the Sanctuary when Libby’s shift finished at the Co-op. They’re doing the supper round and they’re going to let Buster and Tia out for five minutes before they go home.’
‘That’s very kind of them,’ I say. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love the baby birds, but it’s great to have a break.’
‘I wouldn’t describe this as a break,’ Justin says, frowning.
‘Oh, it is when you’ve been at the Sanctuary all day,’ I assure him. I change the subject. ‘How are we going to transport the deer?’ He’s beginning to stir, his ears and limbs twitching, and his eyes beginning to focus. I check his pulse. It’s almost impossible to count and I don’t like it: a rapid pulse is a sure sign of stress. I place a fresh towel over the deer’s head to cover his eyes.
‘Has Alex got my crate somewhere?’ Jack asks. ‘I left it here a while ago.’ He looks at me. ‘The last deer didn’t make it.’
‘I think it’s in the storeroom,’ Justin says. ‘I’ll get it.’
Five minutes later, Justin returns, struggling through the door with a wooden crate. He places it on the floor, and Jack and I lower the patient inside and secure the lid. There’s a brief scrabbling sound, followed by silence.
‘Let’s get him to the Sanctuary,’ Jack says. ‘Thanks, Justin.’
‘Where are we going to put him?’ I ask as Jack drives us back to the place I’m beginning to call home. I sit beside him this time, the deer in the crate in the rear of the van.
‘You’re the boss.’ Jack glances towards me, smiling. ‘You decide.’
I give him a playful nudge. ‘Keep your eyes on the road, please.’
‘And I could ask you to keep your hands to yourself,’ he teases back.
‘So, are you?’ I say boldly. I don’t know what has got into me today.
‘Am I what?’
I assume that he’s changing gear to make the turn up the track to the Sanctuary, but his hand deliberately brushes against my fingers. The contact is electric and very distracting.
‘You know very well.’
‘You have to be explicit,’ he says in a low and suggestive tone, and I’m certain now that we’re on the same wavelength.
‘Are you asking me to keep my hands to myself?’
‘That would seem a little hypocritical of me.’
Because? I want to ask, but we’re back at the Sanctuary and Jack’s attempting to reverse the van around the side of the barn. ‘You’re going to hit the—’
‘Tess!’
I bite my tongue.
The Village Vet Page 21