by Kate Hardy
And Ashley had died alone. She’d received the call at work, from a neighbour who’d had a key and had promised to keep an eye out. She’d not been able to get home quickly enough. Had got caught in endless traffic jams, delayed by lights and drivers who hadn’t seemed to know which pedal the accelerator was.
She’d just wanted to get back to Grace. Pick her up from the childminder and hold her close against her heart before making that final walk into their bedroom, where Ashley had lain. She’d vowed never to be that far away ever again.
‘It’ll be okay, Nanna.’
Mhairi sank shakily into a seat by the table, adjusting the woven scarf at her neck. ‘You have more faith than I. What that Angus Brodie put me through...’
‘I know.’
‘He ruined my life. I don’t want to see another Brodie man ruin yours.’
‘I might not even get the job.’
But she hoped she would. ‘Brodie man’ or not. They needed this! She’d only been back a few months and their financial situation was getting more dire. They couldn’t live off Ashley’s life insurance for ever.
This was about a job. Employment. That was all. It was a business transaction—not an affair of the heart. It wasn’t going to be anything like what had happened between her nanna and Angus Brodie. Those had been different times back then. It was the past. And Bethan didn’t feel she was ready for another relationship yet. She was over the raw pain of Ashley’s death, yes, and she worried something rotten about raising Grace without a father figure around, but did that mean her heart was on the open market?
No. Not yet.
She kissed her nanna’s soft, downy cheek and sat beside her at the kitchen table, one eye on the clock. ‘We’ll be okay.’
Nanna covered Bethan’s hand with her own, more gnarly, liver-spotted one. ‘I’m just so used to having you here now. I worry he’ll hurt you, like Angus did me. But I’m just being a worry-wart, that’s all.’
‘It’s in the past. Where it should belong. Let’s look positively to the future. I’m a strong woman. I can handle myself and any Brodie male who even tries to cause me trouble.’
‘Even handsome ones? That grandson of his... I’ve seen him about. I’ve seen how the young women of this village look at him. Like they could eat him alive!’ Nanna smiled with reluctance.
‘Even the good-looking ones.’ She held her nanna’s hand and squeezed it reassuringly.
Her grandmother smiled. ‘I suppose I can’t persuade you to become a sheep farmer instead?’
Bethan pretended to consider it. ‘I’m not sure I’m an open-air kind of girl. Besides, wouldn’t that be a waste of all my education?’
Nanna mock-doffed her cap. ‘I don’t know where you get it from. Your father loved to fish before he became a stablehand, and your mother enjoyed to sew...’
Bethan nodded. ‘I do enjoy suturing.’
‘Och, it’s not the same and you know it!’
She got up from the table again and took the red bills from where Bethan had left them and went to switch on the kettle. She let out a heavy sigh, as if resigning herself to the fact that she was going to lose this battle of wills today.
‘Okay...let’s take a look at you.’
Bethan stood up, straightening her navy trouser suit and making sure her cream blouse was crease-free. ‘Will I do?’
‘He’d be a dunderheid to turn you down, lass.’
‘Good.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’ll be late. Will you be all right?’
‘’Course I will. I’ve looked after myself for nearly twenty years—I think I can probably manage the next hour or so. Besides, I’ve had a few orders come in for the shop, so I need to get those bagged up.’
‘Okay. Well...wish me luck?’
‘Good luck, lassie.’
Bethan gave her a quick hug and one last look that she hoped conveyed that everything would be all right, and then she picked up her briefcase and headed out of the door.
Nanna wasn’t the only one who was doubtful about expecting a Brodie to take her on. She’d probably been the most surprised when a letter had arrived, inviting her for an interview with a Dr Cameron Brodie. But the past was the past and she herself had no argument with the Brodies. Clearly Dr Cameron Brodie didn’t have a grudge either, or she wouldn’t have been invited for the interview.
Nanna’s part-time job—dying her own rare wool skeins to sell in an online shop—barely covered the bills, and in the last three months sales hadn’t been good. They’d struggled—and struggled hard. But now, with Grace having started school full-time, Bethan had become free to get herself a proper job again.
She’d really missed work. She’d come home to start their lives afresh, and nothing could beat being a mother, but her whole heart had always wanted to care for others. There was something about being a GP that spoke to her. The way you could build a relationship with patients over years, so they wouldn’t be strangers. It was a privilege to be a friend as well as a doctor, and although sometimes that was a difficult line to walk she did it anyway.
Helping people—healing them, curing them of their ailments—was a magical thing and something that she treasured. But the most she’d done over the last few years with Grace had been to patch scuffed knees, wipe snotty noses and nurse Grace through a particularly scratchy episode of chicken pox. The closest she’d got to medication was calamine lotion.
And what she’d been through prior to that, with Ashley, that had been... Well, I don’t regret a day of that.
But he’d not been a patient, nor a friend. He’d been her husband. Grace’s father. Their relationship had been all-consuming in that last year, and she’d been bereft when he’d died. Quite unable to believe that she would still be able to get up and carry on each day without him.
But I did. For Grace.
She’d made the decision to move away from Cornwall three years afterwards, and coming back to Gilloch—to Nanna—had seemed the right thing. Mhairi was alone, too. She knew what the pain of losing a husband—and, sadly, a child—felt like. They were comrades in grief to start with.
But that was the past and now the future beckoned—and with it a fresh sense of purpose for Bethan. She felt it in her bones. This job—this interview—was the way forward for all of them.
As she strode through the streets of Gilloch, her head high and the strong breeze blowing her hair from her shoulders, she remembered Ashley’s last words—‘You’ll go on without me and you’ll be absolutely fine.’
She’d doubted it back then. That she would get through life without him. But time, as they said, was a great healer, and now she often found herself yearning for that kind of closeness again.
But she was absolutely sure—no matter how good-looking Dr Cameron Brodie was—that she would keep her work relationships on a different level from her personal ones.
* * *
Dr Cameron Brodie swallowed the tablets with a glass of water and hoped that his headache would pass. He’d woken with it pounding away in his skull and it had been a real struggle to open his eyes to the bright light of the early morning, to get up and get dressed to face the day. If it hadn’t been for Rosie then he would no doubt have pulled the quilt over his head and gone back to sleep.
But it wasn’t just Rosie. He had someone to interview today. Someone he hoped would take his place permanently at the Gilloch surgery. Not that she would realise that at first. He’d advertised it as a year’s post. Twelve months—start to finish. But he knew that before those twelve months were up the people he left behind would have to rearrange their aspirations.
He had a ticking time bomb in his head. An inoperable glioma. And Dr Bethan Monroe had been the only applicant for the post. Beggars can’t be choosers. Wasn’t that what they said?
He made it to the surgery and opened up, having driven there wearing the strongest pair of sunglasses he owned.
Sometimes in the early mornings the sunlight in Scotland could be so bright, so fierce, it would make your eyes water. The sun so low in the sky, its light reflecting off the wet road, was almost blinding.
The headache would ease soon. He knew that. The tablets his consultant had prescribed were excellent at doing their job.
And they allowed him to do his.
For a little while longer anyway.
He hoped that this Bethan character was a strong applicant. Her CV was impressive.
By all accounts in her last post she had started up a support group for people with anxiety and panic attacks. Somewhere for them to get together and share stories and ideas in the hope that they could learn that they were not alone in the fight. She had also put together a volunteer ‘buddy system’, for older people who were lonely to be paired up with a younger person who could be a friend and check in on them whenever it was needed.
Her references were glowing. Her previous colleagues and partners all sang her praises and had been sad to see her go. For ‘personal reasons’, whatever that meant.
He checked the time. If she was as punctual as she said she was in her CV, no doubt she would be arriving in the next ten minutes.
There was a small mirror above the sink in his room, and he quickly checked his reflection to make sure that he didn’t look too rough—that there was some colour in his normally pale cheeks. That was the problem with being a redhead—he had such pale skin that when he was actually sick he looked deathly.
He rubbed his jawline, ruffling the short red bristles, and figured he’d have to do. There were some dark shadows beneath his eyes, but there was nothing he could do about those.
Cameron sat down in his chair and his gaze fell upon the one small picture of his daughter Rosie which he allowed on his desk. In it she sat on a beach, with the sun setting behind her and her long red hair over one shoulder as she smiled at him behind the camera. She’d put a flower behind her ear and begged him to take a picture.
She’d looked so much like her mother at that moment he’d almost been unable to do so. For a moment it had been as if Holly was looking back at him, smiling. She had simply taken his breath away that day. He had almost put the camera down.
‘Daddy! Take my picture!’
He was doing this for her. It was all for Rosie now. They didn’t have long left together and he wanted whatever time they had to be spent together, having fun and making memories, so that she remembered him long after he was gone. His voice, his laughter, how much he’d loved her, how much he’d wanted to spend time with her. He wanted her to know that she had been cherished and adored.
So it didn’t matter if this Dr Bethan Monroe was a three-headed monster from Mars—he needed someone to take his place at the surgery and soon. If she was qualified, and didn’t have a death sentence of her own, then she was going to be perfect for the job.
His phone buzzed. Janet from Reception. ‘Aye?’
‘Dr Bethan Monroe is here to see you.’ Janet had put on her ‘customer service’ voice. It always made him smile when he heard it, because she somehow lost most of her Scottish brogue and sounded more English than anything.
‘Thank you. Could you send her through?’
‘Certainly, Doctor.’
He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes. Everything seemed so much easier when he took a moment to do that. Took a moment to meditate. To calm the body. Concentrate on his breathing.
Perhaps I ought to take up yoga? he thought with amusement.
There was a slight tap at the door.
He opened his eyes and stood up. ‘Come in!’
Janet came in first, smiling, her bonny cheeks rosy-red. ‘Dr Bethan Monroe for you. Can I get you both a pot of tea? Or coffee?’
He lifted his hand to demur, but then he caught sight of the tall, willowy woman who had walked into his room behind his receptionist, her long, chocolatey locks of wavy hair flowing either side of her beautiful face, and he found himself unable to speak any words.
She was beautiful. Elegant. Elfin bone structure.
For a moment she looked startled, then she gathered her composure after seeing his no doubt deathly pale face and walked towards him and held out her hand. ‘Very pleased to meet you.’
Now, she did have an English accent. A real one.
He suddenly became aware of his throat. His tongue. Had the temperature of the room increased? He felt hot, his mouth dry, but so he didn’t give Janet too much fodder for the village grapevine he managed to force a smile himself and shake her hand. ‘Hello, there.’
‘Did you want tea, Doctors?’ Janet persisted, looking from one to the other with wry amusement.
He hadn’t wanted any before, but with his mouth this dry it might be a good idea. ‘Er...aye...thank you, that would be great.’
Bethan Monroe nodded agreement. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll be back in a moment, then.’ And Janet hurried from the room, closing the door behind her.
He couldn’t get over Bethan’s eyes. As chocolate-brown as her hair, if not more so. She also had beautiful, creamy skin, with a hint of the English rose on her cheekbones and a wide, full-lipped mouth. She looked nothing like her grandmother, whom he knew well—even though she’d refused to be his patient for years and saw Dr McKellen instead, over in the next village.
You couldn’t help but see the same faces out and about in Gilloch, and her grandmother, Mhairi, was well-known to him because of the upset between her and his grandfather years back, that probably no one except them ever talked about any more. He often saw her. She took long walks down to the wool mill, or along the front of the bay to sit outside the coffee shop, wrapped up in swathes of knitted garments and watching the fishermen come in with their catch.
‘I’m Cameron. Very pleased to meet you.’
‘Bethan. Likewise.’
‘Please take a seat.’
She was long-limbed but graceful as she sank into the seat opposite and laid her briefcase neatly against her chair. ‘Thank you.’
‘You found us all right?’
Clearly, or she wouldn’t be here, idiot!
‘I did. It’s not far from my nanna’s house. Well, my house, too, now, I guess.’
‘You’ve been back in the area for a short while?’
‘A few months, yes. I moved here from Cornwall.’
He nodded. Good. That was all good.
You’re staring.
Cameron cleared his throat and stared down at her paperwork. The only application on his desk.
‘So, we’re here to discuss the vacancy of general practitioner here in Gilloch.’
He needed time to think. Time to reorganise his thoughts. He picked up her CV and read it through as if it were the first time.
‘You’re looking for a full-time post?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve spent the last few years as a full-time mother? That’s correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re aware that this post is very demanding? Long hours—frequently past school pick-up time—sometimes evening work, call-outs, home visits, that kind of thing?’
Are you trying to scare her away?
She seemed to bristle slightly. Had he implied that she wouldn’t be able to cope because she had a child? He hadn’t meant to.
‘What I mean is, it’ll be an abrupt change from what you’re used to.’
‘I don’t think so at all. Being a mother is about having demands made on you all the time—all day long and sometimes through the night. There are no days off. You can’t go sick or take a holiday. You’re always on call.’ She smiled.
He nodded, seemingly unable to tear his gaze away from her. There was something so vibrant about her. So intriguing.
‘You’re absolutely right. I have a child myself. Same age as...’ h
e quickly scanned her personal statement again ‘...Grace, is it?’
Bethan smiled. ‘Yes. She’s just started at Gilloch Infants’ School.’
‘So has Rosie. My daughter.’
She looked surprised. ‘Which teacher does she have?’
‘Mrs Carlisle.’
‘Oh! They’re in the same class, then.’
‘I’m sure they’ll become good friends.’
She smiled at him—a beautiful smile. ‘Let’s hope so.’
He considered her, enjoying her optimistic outlook. It had been a long time since he’d felt optimistic about anything, and it was just fascinating to see someone who shone so brightly with it. Surely there had to be shadows somewhere?
‘It says here that you left your last post for personal reasons?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Not because of the job itself?’
‘No. I loved working as a GP, but my husband got sick and needed someone to look after him.’
‘Oh. I’m very sorry to hear that. I hope he’s better now?’
She looked down at the ground for a brief moment, her smile faltering, before she met his gaze again. ‘He died. Of pancreatic cancer.’
He was shocked. And a little embarrassed at having pushed her to explain. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
‘I lost my wife when Rosie was born. It’s difficult being a single parent, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry, too. It can be, if you’re truly on your own. That’s why it’s good to have family around.’
‘Is that why you moved to Gilloch?’
‘Yes, I was born here. Lived here in Gilloch until about the age of three or four, when my parents moved to Cornwall. My father was looking for better job prospects—my mother for better weather!’
She laughed at the personal memory and he loved the way her eyes lit up as she spoke of her parents.
‘It was in Cornwall that I met my husband. He was a doctor, too. When he died I felt incredibly alone. My parents were gone by then, and I just felt a yearning to be with family. It’s important, that connection. More than any other. We’d always kept in touch with my grandmother, speaking online and on the phone, and I wanted Grace to know her properly instead of just being a voice...an image. So I decided to move back here so we could look after each other.’