Читать книгу A Marriage Meant To Be - Josie Metcalfe - Страница 8

‘WHERE are you, Callie?’ Con muttered aloud, his concern increasing by the second as he put the phone down again. ‘What on earth’s happened to you?’

It wasn’t like her to let people down like this. She should have turned up for her shift nearly two hours ago, and it didn’t matter how many times he’d tried to contact her, there had been no answer, not at home or on her mobile.

‘Con, can you come and have a look at Mrs Fry for me?’ said an all-too-familiar voice at his elbow, and he sighed, dragging his fingers through his hair with frustration.

‘Isn’t there anyone else free, Sonja?’ he asked as he turned to face the willowy blonde nurse who seemed determined to dog his every step these days. ‘I’m trying to make some phone calls.’

‘She’s an elderly lady who’s had a fall,’ Sonja said earnestly, clutching his arm with a determined hand. ‘She’s obviously broken both wrists but it’s the wound on her head I’m worried about. She must have hit it pretty hard to gash it like that. We’ve stemmed the bleeding but she seems very confused. I need to know whether she should go for an MRI.’

He sighed again, knowing he was going to have to look at the poor lady, even though his concern for Callie was growing by the minute.

‘Which cubicle is she in?’ he asked, resigned to the few minutes’ delay before he could contact their neighbour.

Jan should be home any minute if she’d followed her usual routine of doing her shopping when she finished her shift, and he was certain she wouldn’t mind going next door for him. If there was no answer, she had an emergency key to let herself in. If Callie had been taken ill or had some sort of accident that prevented her getting to the phone…

‘Thank you for doing this for me,’ Sonja gushed, and he rolled his eyes behind her back as he followed her along the corridor. Sycophancy was something he’d never been able to stomach, especially when he had too much else on his mind…like his precious, vulnerable Callie.

‘Hello, Mrs Fry. I’m one of the doctors here. What have you been doing to yourself?’ Even as he approached the elderly lady his eyes were beginning their primary survey, noting how pale and shaky she was and wondering how much of that was normal for her.

‘I fell coming in from the hens,’ she quavered, peering up at him from under the bulk of a pressure bandage wound tightly around her head. ‘Hit my head and broke both my eggs.’

‘No, dear, it wasn’t your legs you broke; it was your wrists,’ Sonja corrected in the annoyingly bright tone some people adopted with children and the elderly.

Con threw her a quelling glare and turned back to the little woman who seemed far from confused to him, despite her age and the recent trauma.

‘Eggs,’ the woman repeated stubbornly, fixing her pale blue gaze on Con. ‘I’d been out to the hens and was bringing the eggs back into the house when I missed the step.’

‘Ouch!’ Con said sympathetically, as he took a peep under the bandage and saw the size of the gash on her forehead. He wouldn’t disturb it too much until it was time to stitch it, not while the newly formed clots were slowing the bleeding to a sluggish seep. ‘There was one step you should have missed. Are you in a lot of pain?’

‘I’m eighty-two, doctor. At my age I’m always in pain. Everything’s wearing out.’

‘What about your hands? Can you move your fingers for me?’ he asked, as he pressed on a nail bed of each hand to check that her circulation wasn’t being compromised by the broken bones.

‘I can, but I don’t want to because they hurt,’ she said with a stubborn glint in her eyes.

Con grinned at her. ‘If I give you something to take the pain away, will you move them for me?’

‘I might,’ she conceded. ‘But when can I go home? The ambulance people wouldn’t let me clean the broken eggs off the step. It’ll be a terrible job to do if it dries on. And they shut my dogs Floss and Nell in the kitchen. They’ll be needing to go out to do their business.’

‘You won’t be able to go home for a little while, Mrs Fry,’ he said gently, delaying the moment he’d probably have to tell her that she was going to have to be admitted. With two broken wrists most people would need help to take care of themselves, let alone an eighty-two-year-old with chickens and two dogs to take care of. ‘First, we need to take some pictures. Then we can sort out your hands and fix the cut on your head.’

‘But how soon can I go home?’ she demanded, clearly determined to get an answer. ‘I haven’t even given the dogs their breakfast, yet.’

‘Have you had anything to eat this morning?’ he sidestepped, not wanting to upset her with the bad news until he knew exactly what they were dealing with.

He quickly scrawled his signature on the paperwork for an MRI of her head to rule out any injury to her brain and X-rays of both wrists to find out exactly how many breaks there were in there. Depending on what each revealed, the poor woman might even have to go to Theatre for Orthopaedics to patch her up.

‘Haven’t eaten anything yet. That’s why I was out getting the eggs. I was going to boil one and have it with some toast—I still make all my own bread,’ she added with a spark of pride, ‘and my own marmalade, too.’

Con’s stomach gave a sudden noisy growl and he chuckled. ‘You can’t imagine just how delicious that all sounds at this time of the morning,’ he said, even as his thoughts automatically flew to Callie and the way she always insisted on setting a place at the table for him before she came out to work. There would be no breakfast for him any time soon—not until she turned up to start her shift. They were far too short-staffed during this early-morning rush of patients for him to feel comfortable taking off just because it was past the end of his own shift. As long as the department manager didn’t spot him…

‘Dr Lowell! Your shift ended two hours ago,’ said a stern voice behind him as he was making for the nearest phone, and he turned with a rueful grin to meet the unsmiling eyes of Selina Drew.

She wasn’t a big woman by anybody’s standards but there was absolutely no question about who ruled St Mark’s A and E department.

‘I know, Selina, but—’

‘But nothing! There’s no point thinking you can soft-soap me,’ she continued firmly. ‘You had a tough shift last night and you know as well as I do that you won’t be able to do your job properly when you come on shift again if you don’t get a proper rest.’

She was right, but under the circumstances…

‘I wasn’t just staying on for the fun of it,’ he said, uncomfortably aware that there was definitely a defensive sound to his voice. And he was tired…oh, so tired. Sometimes it felt as if the weariness had penetrated right to the marrow of his bones. ‘Callie hasn’t arrived yet, and I was just…’ He shrugged.

‘You were just keeping busy while you waited for her to turn up?’ she suggested kindly, obviously understanding far more of his situation that he’d realised. ‘Well, Con, as of this moment, you’re officially off the clock. I’ve just been informed by the office that your wife’s reported off sick today. Now, get yourself home and take care of each other.’

She started to turn away from him then changed her mind.

‘How is Callie really doing, Con?’ she asked, and with this lion-hearted woman he knew that the question came out of genuine concern rather than any other reason. ‘It’s just that…well, she seemed to be coping reasonably well since she came back to work, right until the last few days.’

Con blinked, puzzled. ‘What do you mean? What’s been happening the last few days? I didn’t know she’d been having problems. She hasn’t said anything to me.’

‘Not problems, exactly.’ She pulled a face, looking as if she now regretted saying anything. ‘It’s almost as though…as though she’s had something weighing on her mind. You know how it is when you’re trying to make a decision about something?’

‘Did she give you any idea what it was about?’ he asked.

It didn’t feel quite right to be pumping Selina for information, but if there was something that Callie was worrying about—something that was actually affecting the way she did her job—then it was something he needed to know about. They’d spent the last three years going through hell and high water together as they’d tried to start a family the hard way, and he couldn’t believe that there was anything they couldn’t talk about any more.

‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ she admitted, then paused a second as though worried about encroaching on private territory. ‘Con, I didn’t know if perhaps the two of you were trying to make a decision about calling a halt…if you’d decided that she’d been through enough?’

He closed his eyes and sighed, pressing his head back against the wall, knowing that if he didn’t consciously keep his knees locked he would probably slide right down into a heap on the floor.

When he was busy, he could almost forget, but as soon as the memories surfaced, the devastation was enough to cut him off at the knees. He could only guess how much worse it was for Callie. The first two pregnancies hadn’t even progressed far enough to show, and she’d broken her heart over each of them. The third one—third time lucky, they’d told each other as the weeks had gone past—had been more than halfway to term when the routine ultrasound had failed to pick up a heartbeat and they’d learned that the baby had died before they’d even held him.

‘I tried to talk about it the other day,’ he murmured, feeling the warmth of her concern as she stood silently beside him. ‘Because we just can’t go on in…in limbo like this, but she said she just wasn’t ready yet. You know this one was just such a shock…’

He couldn’t go on. His eyes were already burning with the threat of tears when he remembered the tiny boy she’d finally given birth to after six hours of induced agony, and how perfect he’d looked in every way. It still tore his heart out by the roots to think that his son would never open his eyes or smile or walk, that his precious life had been over before it had begun.

‘Go home, Con,’ Selina said with a gentle pat on his arm. ‘If she hasn’t turned up at work this morning it’s because she’s still at home and she needs you with her. Just one thing, though. If the two of you need an extra day or two to get your heads on straight, let me know so I don’t end up without any staff at all! I’ll need some time to call in favours.’

‘Will do, boss!’ he said with a flip of a salute, suddenly eager to get home. He had no idea why Callie wasn’t answering her mobile phone—unless she’d forgotten to charge the battery again—but Selina was probably right. He’d get home and she would be sitting in the kitchen-diner they’d remodelled together with a pot of coffee and a pile of freshly made toast…no, make that a scattering of crumbs on the plate, because she wouldn’t have sat there looking at hot buttered toast for long without tucking in.

And while she was waiting, she’d be going over in her head exactly what she wanted to say, and as soon as he walked in she would stand there and deliver her little prepared speech the way she always did once she’d weighed everything up and come to a decision….

And all the while he was driving, a little corner of his brain was doing calculations and lining up facts and figures, deliberately cross-checking the tests he’d ordered on the patients he’d seen…anything to stop him trying to second-guess what she was going to say. After all, it was her body so ultimately it was her decision whether to put it through yet another round of IVF…or whether to finally abandon the attempt at having the child she desperately wanted.

The short distance to the spacious home they’d bought when they’d first got married—chosen both for its proximity to the hospital and because they’d thought they would have no problem filling it with children—was long enough for him to recall that it was nearly five months since their son had been stillborn.

In that time they’d both spent far too many nights staring into the darkness, alone with their thoughts even though they still shared the same room and the same bed they always had. Yet, in spite of that surface closeness, in all those weeks he’d been very careful not to let Callie know how much he’d missed the ultimate intimacy of making love with her, their joining not just the sexual one of bodies but of hearts, minds and spirits, too. He’d been determined to wait until she was ready, but she’d only ever shown that she would welcome his attentions once, and with his emotions on a hair trigger with the months of abstinence, that had hardly been an outstanding success.

He’d hoped that his consideration would help to show her how much he cared for her but now he wondered if it might have been a mistake to put a lid on what he was thinking, how he was feeling and what he wanted. If she’d spent all that time waiting for him to make the first move…

He chuckled wryly when he realised that was all too possible. He had been Callie’s first and only lover, and while she was a generous and passionate woman she still remained a little shy about letting him know what she liked and how she liked it when they came together.

‘Let’s hope that today marks the start of a new beginning,’ he said with an expectant lift to his spirits. Selina had seemed to think that Callie had been coming to a decision about something over the last few days, but what that decision was, he had absolutely no idea.

The thought of abandoning that last batch of fertilised eggs to their liquid nitrogen prison put a lump in his throat that threatened to choke him. She’d been so adamant that she wanted the children she carried to be their babies that she’d put herself through misery over and over again before she’d managed to produce enough viable ova.

But, ultimately, it was her choice. Her body would have to go through the punishing hormone regimen to prepare it for implantation, and they knew to their cost that getting pregnant wasn’t anywhere near the end of the road.

‘Whatever she’s decided will be OK with me,’ he said firmly as he pulled into the driveway, puzzled to see that she’d put her car away in the garage rather than leaving it in the drive ready to go to work. ‘Callie is what matters more than anything. She’s my wife and I love her. No one has an absolute right to have children. We have a good, strong relationship and a happy marriage, so a family would have just been a wonderful bonus.’

There was still the possibility of adoption, with so many children needing loving homes, but even though Callie might still be desperate for a child, it might take a while longer before she was ready to contemplate that step. For now, it was time to sit down together and talk…really talk…and to repair and strengthen the bonds that had made the two of them invincible.

‘Callie?’ he called as soon as he let himself into the house, feeling more upbeat than he had in a very long time. ‘Sweetheart? Where are you?’

The silence almost echoed around him with a strangely ominous feeling.

‘Callie?’ He could hear the sharper edge to his voice this time as his feet took him swiftly down the polished hallway along the original floorboards that they’d laboriously refinished. A quick glance in either direction as he passed the open doors told him that she wasn’t in the lounge or the spacious study they shared, or in the formal dining room they only used when they were entertaining.

‘Sweetheart?’ He pushed the kitchen door wide and shuddered when he took in the almost clinical neatness of the whole room. Every surface gleamed and there wasn’t even a teaspoon on the work surface where she always made her last cup of instant coffee before she left the house each day. There certainly wasn’t any evidence of hot buttered toast.

Panic roared through him and in an instant he was racing back down the hall and taking the stairs two and even three at a time in his desperate need to get to their bedroom and the en suite bathroom.

‘She wouldn’t,’ he told himself fiercely, fighting with a sudden nightmare vision of his wife’s lifeless body sprawled across their bed or on the bathroom floor.

It was a heart-stopping body blow to realise that he might have drifted that far away from her. He honestly didn’t know if she’d become so depressed that she might attempt suicide, but he prayed that her deep reverence for life would have prevented her taking that awful step.

‘Oh, thank you, God,’ he whispered as he clung to the door-frame, tears of relief already starting to flow when he realised that she wasn’t there…wasn’t anywhere in the house, in fact.

It took him several minutes to compose himself and a cold facecloth to remove the evidence of his loss of control before he dragged his heavy feet across to slump on the side of the bed.

‘So, where are you, sweetheart? Where have you gone?’ he asked the silent room, with a sudden memory of the laughter that had filled it when they’d been decorating it together, getting more paint on each other than the walls and then having to spend ages under the shower washing each other off…just to be certain there were no spots of paint remaining, of course.

His eyes drifted across to the photograph in the silver frame that graced the dressing-table, searching out the bright, laughing face he loved so much…and found it covered by the envelope propped against it with his own name written across it in her familiar script.

Dread wrapped around his heart as he reached for it, his hand visibly trembling as he pulled the single sheet of paper out and fumbled to unfold it.

There was no heading to the letter. No ‘Dear Con’, ‘Darling’ or ‘My Love’, the way she always began the most mundane of notes. Before he could even focus on what she’d written his heart was breaking to see the marks on the paper where her tears had fallen.

‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to admit that I’ll never be able to give you what you want,’ she said in the frighteningly brief missive. ‘It’s best if I go away so you can start the divorce proceedings. Let Martin know what you want to do. I won’t fight it. Be happy.’

‘No!’ he roared in disbelief. ‘Callie, no!’ And he felt his heart shatter in agony.

Callie turned her face to the window as the woman beside her got out of her seat and set off to leave the coach, the bulging photo album detailing every moment of her grandchildren’s lives back safely in her handbag.

She rested her head against the glass, hoping that her next companion on this never-ending journey would take the hint and leave her alone with her thoughts.

She didn’t want to know about anyone else’s problems. She only wanted to know how she was going to cope with her own…how she was going to find the will to draw her next breath when she’d just walked away from everything she’d ever loved.

Not that it had been an easy decision, far from it. In fact, she was ashamed to realise how selfish she’d been for so long, wasting years and an almost obscene amount of money trying to force her body to do something it would never be able to manage—give them the child they’d both wanted.

She tried to stop the image forming inside her head but it was already there, indelibly, for the rest of her life.

The tears began again as she remembered how grey and still her baby had been when he’d finally been born.

He’d been perfect. Absolutely perfect in every way, with ten tiny fingers and toes each with the most minute nail already there and growing. She would never know whether he’d inherited Con’s deep blue eyes or her own grey ones or whether he would have the mischievous dimples that punctuated her husband’s cheeks whenever he smiled.

Not that he’d been smiling much in the last four months and twenty-three days. It seemed as if they’d both forgotten how to do that when they’d seen that precious little image on the screen and realised that the heart had no longer been beating.

The memory was still so painful that she could barely draw breath, her own heart feeling as though some alien force was crushing it inside her chest. What right did it have to beat when her baby’s didn’t? Why was it that even the youngest teenage girl could manage to get pregnant, seemingly with even the most meaningless of sexual encounters, while she…she couldn’t carry a child for the man she’d loved from the first moment their eyes had met, the only man she’d ever loved.

No more crying, she told herself, suddenly remembering that she mustn’t do anything to draw too much attention to herself. Concentrate on something else—except there wasn’t much else to look at in the barren wasteland of a bus and coach depot other than the people in the queue waiting to get on.

She hastily dragged her eyes away from the young woman struggling to fold up her baby’s pushchair single-handed with the child cradled in the other arm. She wouldn’t allow herself so much as a glimpse of the perfect little face so she would have no idea if it was a girl or a boy, if it was about the same age that her…

No! Concentrate on the two girls chattering brightly together. Were they friends setting off for a day’s shopping in the next big town or was this just the most convenient way for them to get to and from work each day?

The two older women in front of them were talking equally animatedly. Were they friends taking the trip together or were each of them like her previous garrulous companion, lucky to have found someone equally inclined to chat?

And the cadaverous young man with the tattoo sprawling up one side of his grubby neck? It was all too easy after spending time as an A and E doctor to spot the fact that he was a drug addict, but whether he was using illegal Class A drugs or had gone onto a methadone programme was more difficult to tell at first glance. The ravages of what he’d been doing to his body weren’t.

Then, in front of him, there was the white-faced young woman obviously trying hard not to cry as the stern-faced man spoke to her through a mouth thinned by a mixture of anger and exasperation. It must be hard for him to keep his voice down so the rest of the queue couldn’t hear what he was saying. He looked like the sort of man used to having his orders obeyed without question.

Apparently unaware that the passengers already on the bus had a bird’s-eye view of those waiting to join them, the man took out his wallet and grabbed several high-denomination bills, folding them twice, neatly, before he tried to press them into the girl’s hand.

Initially, she refused to take them, shaking her head fiercely, and the revulsion on her face was a far clearer indication of what was happening than any words she was saying. But, of course, the older man had made up his mind and with a few terse words denied her objections and thrust the money into her hand before he abruptly turned on his heel and strode away.

And then it was time for them to board and Callie watched out of the corner of her eye to see where each of them ended up.

Thankfully, the young woman with the baby decided to sit somewhere near the front. Callie didn’t know if she could have borne it if she’d chosen to sit beside her for the next hour or two. She wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation of looking and longing and…

The two young women chattered their way towards the back of the coach, leaving a trail of perfume in their wake, unlike the cadaverous young man. She was uncomfortably aware of holding her breath as he stood for several seconds beside the empty seat next to her, but he, too, passed on down the coach.

It was the white-faced young woman who finally slid herself into place beside her and it was only then that Callie saw what hadn’t been visible while the youngster had been part of the queue. She was pregnant.

Callie drew in a sharp breath as the shock hit her, and closed her eyes while she battled against the jealous tears with the realisation that she seemed to be showing about the same as she had, just before…

‘It’s not catching, you know,’ the young woman snapped with an attempt at bravado that was completely destroyed by the wobble in her voice.

‘Unfortunately,’ Callie muttered, even as she felt guilt that her reaction had made the young woman feel uncomfortable.

‘You…what?’ Her garishly painted mouth fell open and eyes heavily outlined with kohl grew wide. ‘Did you say…unfortunately?’

‘Yes,’ Callie admitted uncomfortably, wishing she’d either kept her mouth shut or stuck to a simple apology for her apparent disapproval. Now she was going to have to make some sort of explanation even though she knew it was going to hurt more than ripping a scab off a wound that had barely started healing. ‘I lost my baby nearly five months ago. I was just over halfway through the pregnancy.’

‘Oh…! I’m sorry if it makes you…Look, would you rather I asked someone else to swap seats with me?’ she asked earnestly, revealing a far more considerate side than the initial belligerent attitude would have suggested.

There was a sudden rumble of sound as the driver started the engine and an explosive hiss of air as he released the brakes to start the next stage of the journey.

‘It’s too late now,’ Callie said, resigned to a companion who was managing, in her early teens, to do what she, a mature professional, couldn’t do with all the expertise of her health service colleagues behind her. ‘You can’t go changing seats while the coach is moving. If the driver had to brake suddenly you might injure the baby if you hit something.’

The youngster stared at her in surprise then she pressed trembling lips together and Callie was startled to see that her eyes were swimming with tears.

‘I’m sorry. Did I say something to upset you?’ Callie was suddenly concerned that she must have inadvertently hit a sensitive nerve.

‘No. It’s just…You said that as if you actually care what happens to it…to the baby,’ she said in a choked voice.

‘Of course I do. Anybody would,’ Callie said, knowing that this wasn’t the time to talk about her own desperate longing for a child.

‘Not everybody,’ she snapped bitterly, then suddenly seemed to remember that they were surrounded on all sides and lowered her voice so that her words would be masked by the sound of the other voices around them and the rumble of the coach itself. ‘My stepfather gave me money for an abortion even though he knows it’s too far along. He said if you pay enough money any doctor would do it.’

‘Most doctors wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole even if you offered them the moon on a silver platter,’ Callie said quietly. In her days on Obs and Gyn she’d seen botched abortions go horribly wrong. ‘And why would you want to abort the baby when there are so many people desperate to adopt?’

‘I don’t want to give it away,’ she said fiercely, a protective hand curving over her noticeably swollen belly even as she lost her battle with the tears. ‘But I’ve got no way of keeping it, have I? Not at my age. I’m still at school and a Saturday job won’t pay enough to find somewhere to live.’

‘What about your mum? Won’t she help you?’

‘Not her!’ she said, bitterness and devastation combining corrosively in those two words. ‘She kicked me out when she found out. She would have killed me if she knew it was his…my stepfather’s.’

Callie thought it would have been more to the point if the mother had killed the stepfather who’d been having sex with her underage daughter, but now wasn’t the time to voice those sentiments. She fished a packet of paper hankies out of her pocket and offered them to her companion.

‘Listen, we’re going to be sitting together for at least an hour. Shall we introduce ourselves? I’m Callie,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘Steph…Stephanie,’ she said, and blew her nose furiously. ‘I didn’t want to cry, not over them.’

‘Hey, don’t knock crying. Sometimes it’s good to let some of the emotions out.’

‘It doesn’t solve anything, though—like, what am I going to do when the coach arrives at the depot? I’ve got nowhere to go and no one to ask.’

‘That makes two of us,’ Callie said, surprising herself.

‘You…what?’ Steph blinked. ‘You’re kidding! You’re a grown-up and grown-ups always know where they’re going and what they’re going to do.’

‘Newsflash, Steph. Grown-ups are just as mixed up as anybody else. They’ve just had a bit more practice at hiding it.’