Читать книгу Sleepless Nights - ANNE WEALE - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

ALTHOUGH she had flinched and quivered when Sarah had tried very gently to clean up round the injury, Rose submitted to Neal’s examination without any nervous reactions. She repeated her explanation of what had happened and lay still while he worked on the wound.

‘It’s actually quite superficial,’ he told her. ‘The vomiting sounds like a food poisoning. Where did you eat last night?’

She told him, describing her meal which had finished with apple pie and curd, as yogurt was called locally.

‘Could be the curd,’ he said.

Sarah watched him perform various routine tests, including making Rose follow with her eyes the movements of his finger from side to side and from the tip of her nose to a point several feet away from it.

He then asked her what shots she had had before coming to Nepal and when she had last had a tetanus booster.

‘Right: the nurse will give you a shot to settle your tummy and then you can rest upstairs for half an hour before going back to your hotel. Take it easy for the rest of the day. Tomorrow you should feel OK,’ he told her.

Before leaving the room, he said quietly to Sarah, ‘I’ll have a word with you later...while she’s lying down.’

A few minutes later a nurse came to give Rose an injection. Then, with Sarah following, she helped Rose up two flights of stairs to a small room with a bed in it.

‘You won’t leave me,’ Rose appealed to Sarah, while she was having a blanket spread over her.

‘No, I may pop out for a coffee, but I’ll be here when you come down,’ Sarah promised.

In the light of what Rose had confided on the way to the clinic, she was in no state to be left on her own.

Neal was at the foot of the staircase when Sarah returned to the ground floor. ‘We’ll go round the corner for a coffee,’ he said briskly. ‘How did you come to get involved?’

As they left the clinic, Sarah explained what had happened from her point of view.

‘Now perhaps you’d explain why you fed me all that stuff about being a journalist,’ she finished indignantly.

‘I am a journalist... a medical journalist. I qualified as a doctor, then came to the conclusion it would be more useful to write about how to stay healthy rather than spend my time lobbing out pills to people who, in many cases, had wrecked their health either from lack of information or from deliberate disregard of the basic rules of self preservation,’ he added sardonically.

‘You didn’t say you were on the staff of this clinic.’

‘I’m not. I’m a friend of someone who is and as they were under pressure when I came by to tell him something, he asked me to take a look at Rose Jones. Is she here on her own or with friends?’

‘She’s alone at the moment. She came with her husband. It’s their honeymoon...but it’s gone wrong. He’s somewhere up in the mountains and she’s by herself. I gather they had a big row and she came back to Kathmandu on her own.’

‘It’s not the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last,’ Neal said dryly. ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. She didn’t like the rough and ready conditions in most of the trekking lodges. The very basic amenities were too much for her delicate sensibilities. She’d had no idea how tough it was going to be.’

‘I don’t think either of them had. They’d done some fell-walking together and Rose enjoyed that. But this trip went wrong from the moment they arrived. Apparently it was arranged by some people who run a small shop in their home town and have Nepalese connections. Even the hotel in Kathmandu where they spent their first night, and where she’s staying now, isn’t up to the standard they expected. But I can’t understand her husband letting her come back alone.’

‘Perhaps he can’t understand her being prepared to desert him so soon after marrying him,’ said Neal.

Preoccupied by her concern for Rose, and by Neal’s revelation that he was a qualified doctor, Sarah had been paying no attention to her surroundings. Only now did she realise that they were in familiar territory. The building looming ahead was the Yak and Yeti where they had come the night before last.

In the bar they sat at the same window table where they had had drinks.

‘Coffee...tea...or something stronger?’ Neal asked.

‘Tea for me, please.’ Reminded by where they were of the woman called Julia, she wondered if, yesterday, they had got together.

‘It could be tricky contacting Rose’s husband,’ he said, looking thoughtful. ‘Have you any idea when they were due to get back if their trek had gone to plan?’

‘I didn’t go into that. She was crying...on the verge of hysterics. I just tried to calm her down. I think she was fairly distraught before she threw up and knocked herself out in the loo. It’s a nervous-making situation: being alone in a nasty hotel in an unknown city after a major row with your bridegroom.’

Neal said, ‘Where did you go for your honeymoon?’

For a few seconds the question fazed her. Then she collected herself and said calmly, ‘I’ve never been on a honeymoon.’

He lifted an eyebrow. ‘You surprise me. I would have guessed that you’d walked up the aisle very young and it hadn’t worked out.’

‘You would have guessed wrong. Like you I’m a dedicated single.’

‘With women who look the way you do that usually means a career conflict. You said you worked with computers. Was that a throwaway reference to something extremely high-powered? Are you a computer scientist at the cutting edge of research?’

Sarah laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m the computer equivalent of the man who comes to fix the washing machine or the dishwasher...except that I’m female and I fix personal computers. But I have no idea how to fix Rose’s problem. There has to be some way to contact her husband, surely?’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll look into it. Do you have the time to take her back to her hotel? What time are you leaving town?’

It pleased her that he thought her capable of being a computer scientist and that he hadn’t forgotten today was the day the group left.

‘Not till after lunch. We’re leaving for the airport at two and spending the night at Lukla to start the trek tomorrow.’

Neal leaned towards her, his forearms resting on his knees, his long fingers interlaced. ‘I wish you weren’t leaving so soon. I feel this is one of those times that “taken at the flood leads on to fortune”...at least in the sense of some memorable days, and possibly nights, together.’

She didn’t know how to respond but just then the waiter returned and saved her from saying anything.

She watched him unloading his tray, thinking it far more likely that a brief affair with Neal, rather than leading on to fortune, would fulfil the continuation of that famous quotation and, like so much of her life, be ‘bound in shallows and in miseries’.

‘When you were here before, did you go to Bhaktapur?’ he asked, as the waiter went away.

Sarah knew the moment of truth could not be put off any longer. ‘I haven’t been here before. This is my first visit. I’m sorry my T-shirt misled you. It was lent me by a friend. But I should have put you right.’

Her confession was followed by a long moment of silence. She could not read his expression. Had the lie by omission made him distrust her?

‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked.

‘It’s hard to explain. I’m not usually careless with the truth. I suppose I wanted you to see me as someone more interesting than I am. We were strangers on a plane and I thought you might be bored if I admitted to being a “newbie”.’

As a journalist, used to computer-speak, he would know that was the somewhat derogatory name given to the inexperienced by those who knew their way around.

‘Who makes you feel you’re not interesting?’ he asked.

‘No one...not in my own world. But your world is different. I’ve read enough to know that real travellers haven’ t much time for tourists. I’m not even much of a tourist. The truth is I’ve never been anywhere. This is my first time abroad, can you believe?’

‘Considering how comfortable you seem, I do find that hard to believe. When I saw you in the airport at Doha, I took you for someone who’d chalked up a lot of air miles.’

‘I wish I had. I always wanted to travel, but my life went another way.’ She glanced at her watch. Already it was fifteen minutes since they’d left the clinic. ‘We mustn’t be too long.’ She began to pour out the tea. ‘I’m glad I’ve got it off my chest. I didn’t like not being honest with you.’

‘As long as you promise not to do it again, I’ll forgive you. Only straight answers from now on...agreed?’

For a second or two she hesitated. If she agreed, would he want to open doors she would prefer to keep closed?

Another quotation from Shakespeare came into her head. This above all: to thine own self be true...thou canst not then be false to any man.

‘Agreed,’ she said firmly, handing him a cup of tea. ‘Tell me about this place you mentioned...Bhaktapur? What’s special about it? I don’t think Naomi has been there. She’s the friend who lent me the T-shirt and made me wear-in my boots.’

‘What’s special about Bhaktapur is that it’s still the way Khatmandu used to be when the only people who came here were mountaineers and hippies. I don’t think Bhaktapur will stay the way it is now. Tourism changes places... always for the worse unfortunately. But right now it’s still a magic place. You mustn’t go home without seeing it...especially the golden gate. It’s not as famous as San Francisco’s Golden Gate, but if someone could only see one of them, I’d recommend Bhaktapur’s.’

‘Having seen both presumably?’

‘Yes. I spent a year travelling before I switched careers.’

Sarah was silent, sipping the hot tea and thinking thoughts it would be tactless to disclose to him.

Disconcertingly, he read her mind. ‘You’re thinking that journalism is a trashy occupation compared with medicine. I’ve had lots of people put that to me. They forget that if it were not for investigative journalists, a lot of bad things would continue unchecked. Some forms of journalism are tacky, but a free press is still our main safeguard against bad governments and unscrupulous vested interests such as some of the drug manufacturers. Just recently I wrote an exposé of racketeering in cosmetic surgery. It carried more weight coming from a doctor and it certainly warned a lot more women to be careful who they trust their faces and bodies to than I could have done any other way.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ she conceded. ‘I hadn’t thought it through. My attitude to journalists is coloured by all the bad things we know they do...targeting public figures in the hope of catching them doing something they shouldn’t...hounding people at times when they need to be private...concentrating on the horrors and ignoring the good side of life.’