by Heidi Swain
Dolly wasn’t one for melodrama and I began to feel scared.
‘I best go in,’ I said, but I didn’t want to.
My feet stayed rooted to the path. I would much rather not have to cross the cottage threshold. I had a dreadful sense of foreboding that if I did then my life was going to be turned even further upside down.
‘Go on then,’ said Alison, giving me a much-needed nudge. ‘She’s waiting.’
The doctor was packing his bag when Alison and I went in and Dolly was in her usual chair next to the fire, which had been stoked and was bathing the room in a warm glow. I shivered nonetheless.
‘You must be Hattie,’ smiled the young doctor, holding out his hand which I tentatively shook. ‘I’m Doctor Harris.’
I kept my eyes on Dolly.
‘Yes,’ I swallowed, ‘I’m Hattie.’
‘Dolly’s all right now,’ he said, pulling on his coat, ‘and I’ve got to get off to another call, but she knows to ring if she wants me to come back later.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying to smile and failing. ‘Thanks.’
‘Can I give you a lift, Alison?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I better get back.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have missed the start,’ said Dolly.
Her voice sounded completely normal.
‘Doesn’t matter in the slightest,’ said Alison, going over to squeeze her hand. ‘It’s not my favourite bit.’
‘No,’ Dolly smiled. ‘Beginnings and endings are all right, but it’s what happens in between that really counts, isn’t it?’
I knew she was paraphrasing someone but couldn’t remember who.
‘I’ll pop by again tomorrow,’ said Doctor Harris, holding the door open for Alison.
‘No need,’ said Dolly.
He ignored her.
‘See you in the morning,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘perhaps then I might get a cup of tea.’
Dolly tutted. Apparently, her GP was her mischievous equal.
‘I’ll let him get away with that,’ she sniffed. ‘He might only be a babe in arms, but he knows what he’s about.’
‘And what is he about?’ I asked, squatting down in front of her so I could look at her properly. ‘Dolly, what’s going on?’
Dolly instructed me to make a pot of tea and fill a plate with sausage rolls and cheese straws before she would say another word and once it was all arranged, and the drink poured, I pulled my chair closer to hers.
‘Hattie,’ she then said, without any preamble whatsoever, ‘I’ve got cancer.’
My cup wobbled in the saucer and she leant forward to take it from me and put it back on the little table.
‘And I’m not going into details about which one. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to have any treatment.’
I sat stock-still, not knowing what to say.
‘According to Doctor Harris and the consultant at the hospital, fiddling about might give me a few extra months, but there’s no guarantee and they’d be pretty miserable months at best, so I’d rather not.’
I folded my hands in my lap and stared at them.
‘I might make it to spring, if I’m lucky,’ she carried on, ‘Hogmanay if not,’ she chuckled.
My head snapped back up.
‘Sorry,’ she said, the smile fading from her lips.
I shook my head, sharp tears stinging my eyes.
‘You’ll have to forgive my brisk explanation,’ she said kindly. ‘It’s how I’m dealing with it, I suppose and of course, I’ve had considerably longer to get used to the idea than the three seconds I’ve just given you. I didn’t actually want you to know yet, but Dr Harris has said it’s time I spilled the beans’
My heart felt as though someone had wrapped it in elastic bands and were pulling them tighter and tighter. This couldn’t be happening. Dolly had only just retired. She had so much left to do, so many places to visit, so much life left to live. Her entire adult life had been given over to others and now she was telling me that there was nothing left over for herself. That couldn’t be right.
‘And before you ask if the hospital have muddled my notes with someone else’s,’ she said quickly, quashing my last hope, ‘they haven’t. This is definitely me that we’re talking about, whether we wish it otherwise or not.’
‘How long have you known?’ I croaked. ‘Exactly how long have you had to get used to the idea, as you put it, Dolly?’
She reached to the table again and handed me back my tea.
‘I’d add another sugar to that if I were you,’ she suggested.
I shook my head and she picked up her own cup before settling back.
‘I had a feeling something wasn’t right in the summer holidays,’ she explained. ‘Usually I find I’m back on form for the start of the new term, but this year I wasn’t so I took myself along to see lovely Doctor Harris and the rest, as they say, is history, or it soon will be.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.
I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me before. That she’d lived with the knowledge all these months and not said a word. Why had she done that?
‘Why didn’t you say anything sooner?’ I asked, then I realised. ‘Oh Dolly,’ I choked, ‘you knew when you came to see me in September, didn’t you? Is that why you came to find me at the flat the day I was made redundant?’
She nodded.
‘And I was so full of self,’ I said, hating myself for being so caught up in my own dilemma that I hadn’t picked up on hers, ‘that I never noticed.’
‘What was there to notice?’ She shrugged. ‘I’d hardly gone out and had a T-shirt printed announcing the fact, had I? You weren’t to know.’
‘But why didn’t you say anything after?’ I cried. ‘Why didn’t you tell me when you invited me to stay?’
‘Because,’ she said with a heavy sigh, ‘I wanted you to come for the right reasons and not with the knowledge of this hanging over you. I wanted to give you some time away from Jonathan with no strings attached. Some time to be free, if you like.’
‘I see.’
‘And it did the trick, didn’t it?’ she said, smiling again and sounding rather pleased with herself. ‘You didn’t know about my illness, so you weren’t fretting about me and my failing organs.’
I couldn’t help but flinch when she sounded so blasé.
‘Coming to Wynbridge and making friends with Beamish opened your eyes and helped you make the decision to break things off with Jonathan, didn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘yes I suppose it did, in part.’
Then wasn’t the time to tell her that keeping Jonathan a secret had ultimately cost me my precious friendship with Beamish.
‘I have to admit,’ she said, her eyes narrowing as her tone sharpened, ‘Jonathan had me under his spell too for a while, what with that fancy hamper and his honeyed words.’
‘Well, under the circumstances—’ I began to say.
‘Never mind the circumstances,’ she cut in, ‘we got there in the end.’
She sounded relieved and I guessed there were more loose ends that she wanted to tie up before too much sand slipped into the wrong end of her hourglass.
‘And the Wish List,’ I said, nodding to where it was pinned up next to the fire.
It was far lengthier than when we had first written it and ran to a full couple of pages, but most things were ticked off. Now, knowing about her illness, I could appreciate just what an effort it must have been for Dolly to glide around the ice rink and make the walk to see the geese. She’d never shown any sign, other than a little general tiredness, that anything was wrong, had she? Later I would trawl back over my time here, looking for clues I might have missed.
‘That wasn’t all about me, was it?’
‘No,’ said Dolly, with a wry smile, ‘there were actually a few things on there that I wanted to do for myself but convincing you that you should do them too ensured you got to enjoy them. It was a little underhand, but . .
.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ I smiled, thinking of the fun we’d had, especially putting up the decorations.
My amusement was tempered when I realised she had insisted they all went up because it the last time she was going to see them. Come to think of it, at one point, she’d even mentioned ‘last Christmas’ and then modified her words to make me believe she was talking about my last Christmas in the UK.
‘It was clever,’ I acknowledged.
Dolly smiled in agreement.
‘Had I known that you were ill, I’d have gone about everything with a completely different mindset, wouldn’t I?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you would and so would I. I was looking for unadulterated joy with no sympathetic undertones and I got it.’
‘I wish I could say the same,’ I told her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘My time on the ice rink,’ I reminded her, giving a little shudder as I remembered my fears and another as I recalled the feeling of Beamish’s strong hands grasping my waist. ‘You might have had the joy on that occasion Dolly, but I was looking for sympathy. That ice was cold and very hard!’
Dolly laughed at the memory.
‘But, Hattie,’ she said, the laughter fading as she reached for my hand, ‘please don’t convince yourself that I am simply ill, as you just said. I am dying. There is absolutely no doubt about that.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ I said, looking her in the eye and trying to sound stronger than I felt.
‘That we are,’ she sighed, ‘but some of us are going far sooner than others.’
We talked long into the night, about all sorts of things. Some related to what was going to happen to Dolly and others completely unconnected. One thing we did decide, was that I was going to stay at the cottage until . . . well, you know . . . and I would do my utmost to make sure Dolly stayed there too. She was adamant that she didn’t want to go to the local hospice. She’d lived the best part of her life in the cottage and she wanted to leave there ‘feet first’ as she put it.
I couldn’t help but admire her candid grasp on the situation, but like she said, she’d had far longer to get used to the idea than I had. She had told everyone she had shut herself away because she’d had a cold, bordering on flu, but that was all a ruse. What she had actually done was sensibly taken some time out to come to terms with her diagnosis. She explained that she had gladly gone through the whole anger, denial and self-pity process in complete privacy.
‘So where did you slip off to earlier?’ she asked as I eventually began to clear things away to go to bed.
I was surprised that between us we had worked our way through the seasonal snacks Dolly had suggested. All that was left were a few crumbs.
‘I wondered if you might have gone to tell Beamish about Jonathan?’
What a wily old fox she was.
‘I had,’ I admitted.
‘And how did he take it?’ she asked, watching me closely.
‘Well,’ I said, puffing out my cheeks, ‘it turned out there was far less for me to explain than I thought there might be.’
‘Oh?’
‘Let’s get you settled in bed,’ I told her, ‘and I’ll tell you what happened.’
‘It can be my bedtime story,’ she joked, then catching my expression added, ‘it won’t give me nightmares, will it?’
With Dolly tucked, disconcertingly without any insistence that she could manage on her own, under her eiderdown and with a mug of cocoa on the nightstand, I told her what had unfolded when I went to find Beamish and Jonathan had gatecrashed. Her eyes widened when I reached the part about the two men already knowing about each other, and Jonathan pulling an engagement ring out of his pocket, but she didn’t interrupt.
‘And how did you leave things?’ she asked once I had finally reached the end.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m pretty certain that Jonathan has finally got the message.’
‘And Beamish?’
I shook my head.
‘Let’s just say, I don’t think we’re friends anymore.’
Dolly looked appalled.
‘This is my fault,’ she said, plucking at a loose thread on the eiderdown.
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No. It’s mine. I should have been talking about Jonathan from the off.’
‘No,’ she said, refusing to let me shoulder the blame. ‘Like I said earlier, I underestimated the power of love and that was foolish of me.’
As a result of everything that had happened since, I’d forgotten she’d said that earlier.
‘You do know,’ she carried on, ‘that Beamish has fallen in love with you, don’t you, Hattie?’
‘Of course, he hasn’t,’ I said, my temperature rising.
He might have liked me, even fancied me a bit, but he wasn’t in love with me. How could he be when we’d known each other for less than a month?
‘I should have realised it sooner,’ Dolly tutted, ‘but with everything else that’s been going on I didn’t spot the signs.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I tried to tell her.
‘And,’ she carried on, talking over me, ‘I think you’ve fallen in love with him.’
I shook my head. I knew now that the ‘L’ word wasn’t one to casually bandy about. I would readily admit that there had been a spark of attraction, one that had led to our near-kisses, but it had been well and truly snuffed out now. The look of hurt on his face earlier was enough to confirm that we were done for. There was no room for even a hint of a friendship, let alone a loving feeling.
‘If you had seen the look Beamish gave me when he left, Dolly,’ I told her, ‘then you’d be as sure as I am that the last thing he feels for me is love. He hates me for my deception and harbours no other feeling than that.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Dolly vehemently.
‘It isn’t,’ I batted back, ‘it’s true and even if it wasn’t, we could hardly do anything about it, could we?’
‘Why not?’
‘Well for a start I’ve just ended one relationship so I could hardly fall straight into another, especially with a man I barely know. It wouldn’t be appropriate.’
Dolly was looking mutinous.
‘Since when,’ she demanded, ‘has true love ever taken into account what’s appropriate and what’s not?’
Chapter 26
As I gradually drifted up through the layers of sleep, I realised I wasn’t alone in the bedroom. I cautiously opened one eye and found Dolly standing next to the bed.
‘What’s wrong?’ I panicked, sitting straight up and feeling instantly awake. ‘What is it? Have you got a pain? Why didn’t you wake me before?’
Dolly let me blow myself out before she said anything.
‘Do you know what today is?’ was her first question.
I took a quick mental jog around the calendar. I didn’t think I’d slept right through to Christmas day, but I couldn’t be sure. I’d felt emotionally wrung out by the time I crawled into bed so it wasn’t beyond the bounds that I’d slept for days rather than hours.
‘No,’ I said, thinking it would actually be quicker for her to tell me than for me to try and work it out.
‘It’s the winter solstice,’ she said. ‘You need to get yourself up, organised and ready to go to Wynthorpe Hall. They’ll be having the ceremony to celebrate it later.’
I wasn’t sure why she thought that would have any significance for me. I hadn’t much interest in the lengthening of days given our conversation the night before. If anything, I would rather have spent my time working out how to stop time. At least that way I might have my darling Dolly for a bit longer.
‘If it’s all right with you,’ I said, ‘I think I’ll give it a miss. I’m not in the mood for getting in tune with my pagan side today.’
‘No, it’s not all right with me,’ she tutted, tugging at the corner of the eiderdown. ‘Beamish is going to be there. It will be the perfect opportunity for you to clear the air.’
I coul
dn’t agree. I was pretty certain my former friend would far rather be left in peace. I would be the last person he’d want to have turn up and spoil his fun. Assuming a solstice celebration was fun.
‘I think you’re wrong, Dolly.’
‘And I think you’re wrong,’ she interrupted. ‘So, get yourself up. I’ve been told there’s only so many times I can play my cancer card before it loses its power, but I’m playing it now.’
I looked at her aghast.
‘You wouldn’t want me to waste it, would you?’ she asked craftily ‘Surely you wouldn’t dismiss a dying woman’s wishes.’
‘Really, Dolly . . .’
‘Just don’t tell him about my troubles,’ she added as she walked out. ‘I’ll do that later when you come back here together for dinner.’
She had far more faith in my magical powers than I did. There was no way I would be able to get Beamish back to the cottage.
*
Catherine Connelly happened to be in the Wynthorpe Hall courtyard when the taxi I’d taken from Wynbridge dropped me off that bright but cold afternoon. I made a quick scan of all the vehicles I could see. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one attending the gathering. My heart rate sped up to a gallop as my eyes came to rest on Beamish’s truck. I had been hoping that he might have been elsewhere, but alas, no.
‘Hattie!’ Catherine called. ‘How lovely to see you again. Are you here for the ceremony?’
‘Um, yes,’ I said. ‘Dolly suggested I should come. Is that all right? I don’t want to impose.’
‘Of course, it’s all right,’ she said, opening the courtyard gate and letting the dogs rush over to greet me. ‘The more the merrier. We’re expecting quite a crowd, but we won’t be starting for a while. Would you like to come in for a coffee?’
I wasn’t sure what to do. For all I knew Beamish could be ensconced inside and it would be impossible to talk to him in a room full of people.
‘Or you could take a turn around the Wonderland?’ She suggested, reaching into the pocket of her skirt for something. ‘Some of it has been packed away and I’m afraid Santa has vacated the grotto, but the reindeer are in their paddock and the trail is still set up.’