Angel Kate (15 page)

Kate swivelled her body in the deckchair so she could look at him. 'If she could see you today, all you have achieved, wouldn't she be thrilled. Wouldn't she be proud.'

Tom looked taken aback. For once he was lost for words. 'Go on,' prompted his listener.

 'Well. It has to be said George and I didn't make life easy for her. We were very physical boys. Falling out of trees, cutting our legs on rusty barbed wire … up to all sorts of mischief. But we always knew whatever scrape we got into, Granny would sort it out.'

'Unconditional love,' murmured Kate, more to herself than to Tom.

He heard her. 'Exactly. Eventually we went off to  university. The pool didn't get much use after that.  Granny told Stan not to bother with it. The bottom cracked and broke up so George and I dug it out and turned the thing into a sort of wildlife pond with water buttercup and willow moss, and pickerel weed. The waterlilies were Stan's idea. That's him, that little speck in the distance, spraying the apple trees in the orchard. My right-hand man is dear old Stan.'

Kate's head was full of pictures of the schoolboy Tom. Just the sort of son she hoped she'd be lucky enough to have one day, all sturdy scabby knees and good-natured charm. Tom was watching swallows darting across the blue sky, his very grownup legs sprawling close to her slender white ones.

A hundred questions hovered on her lips, but she stayed silently listening.

'I used to imagine renovating the pool for my own children, but Diana tells me no one in their right mind would attempt to raise a family here.'

Diana's actual words had been more forthright. 'Listen, Tom, I'm not Wonder Woman. I can't make jam and bring up half a dozen kids and appear on TV. And Foxe Manor's no place for bringing up children. It's too big—too spooky. Too far from playgroups and kindergartens and shops. You'll have to sell up, Tom. Think about it. Some rock star or Russian oligarch will pay a small fortune to get their hands on Foxe Manor.'

Out of the blue came an idea. It was so obvious! Tom and his brother should share the house. 'Two families, Tom! Two incomes. Imagine all your children growing up here, just as  you two boys did.'

Tom smiled at her enthusiasm but shook his head. 'George is a professor at Harvard - we only see each other when I'm at conferences in Washington. If the Manor was sold I doubt he'd object, but he'd never put me under any pressure. He's not married, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.'

Kate stared into the dark weedy waters of the pool. It wasn't George she was wondering about but Tom and Diana. Their recent time away together …

'I expect it did your fiancée some good to  have a break from television. You said she's a workaholic. You're a well-matched pair.'

His face darkened but he said nothing.

His silence was reproof, a warning that she'd been impertinent. Kate  chewed her bottom lip; she really must guard her tongue. He'd been so friendly and welcoming and now she'd gone and spoilt it.

He stayed silent. She dared not look at him, her fingers playing nervously with the buckle clasping back her hair. Tom's relationship with Diana was none of her business. That thoughtless comment was way out of order.

Suddenly Tom pulled himself up from his deckchair and moved to the edge of the pool. To Kate's alarm he seemed to sway towards the dark green murk shifting gently below him. Fearing for his balance, she sprang up and moved swiftly to his side, linking her arm through his good one, trying to show him she was more sorry than words could convey.

Tom stared across the pool to where the lawn ended in a low wall fronted by a hedge of spring-green beeches. On the meadow land beyond a herd of golden-brown Jersey cows could be seen peacefully grazing on the long sweet grass. His field, but rented out for extra income.

 'I'm thirty-eight. Soon be thirty-nine.' He seemed to be speaking to himself. Kate clung on to him wordlessly. 'There should be children playing here. This house is crying out to be a family home again.'

It suddenly dawned on Kate … but it was inconceivable, surely. Impossible. What woman in her right mind would reject Tom Galvan? But had the impossible happened? Had he put pressure on Diana to give it all up and marry him, come and live here at Foxe Manor for good. And had she said no?

Could it be that the television doctor … had turned her neuro-surgeon lover down?

*  *  *

In a mood that was a complicated mix of frustration and self-doubt, and had nothing to do with Dr Diamond or any other woman, Tom strode into his oak-panelled study and slammed the door on the rest of the world. Though he was unable to operate, he could still usefully immerse himself in his own investigations into the human pineal. Why should it be that this gland, occupying roughly just one per cent of the human brain, appeared to be vital to man's sense of direction? A third eye in the brain—that was how Descartes, French philosopher and mathematician, had once so aptly described the pineal. If the gland was not functioning, men lost their way.

And here am I, mused Tom, three centuries later, and one among many medic-detectives
still
trying to solve the pineal mystery.

From his music collection he chose something to match his mood—Amfortas's Lament from
Parsifal,
loaded the disc and settled himself at his desk. Then he pressed the remote control button and the rich bass-baritone of Bryn Terfel filled the room and startled a pair of doves dozing peacefully on the windowsill.  Amfortas, wounded by the Holy Spear, lamenting his suffering and begging release …

Tom glowered at the papers spread over his desk. Could it be that his brain had, after all, been damaged? A weakening of that steely nerve so vital in his field of surgery. Supposing the arm healed one hundred per cent, as Jonathan so confidently predicted, was the mind going to prevent him ever taking up his scalpel again?

The telephone bleeped. Tom pressed the remote, cutting Amfortas short. 'Yes?' he growled unhelpfully. 'Oh, it's you, Frank… How am I?'

'I
know
you warned me this was likely to happen. That I'm going through body-image disturbance!… Yes yes, I know all that: the plaster cast is temporarily alienating me from myself, lack of confidence in my damaged arm and hand etcetera etcetera. Once the cast's removed and I get back in the saddle …'

'Yes, Kate's arrived. No, not in uniform but looking her usual no-nonsense self. Overfond of dark clothes, in my humble opinion, anyone would think she was clinically depressed…'

'Seriously? You think she
has
been in the past?'

'Of course I'm still here… Well, thank you, Frank. And please thank Mary too, that sounds exceedingly pleasant. Actually it's my thirty-ninth birthday.'

Frank's chuckle rolled down the line. 'That little whizz of a secretary of yours reminded me. Black tie, Tom.  Bring the lovely Kate. We'll be glad to see her.'

A few minutes later came a knock at the door.

Tom pushed away the diary and shouted 'Yes!' as his third finger hit the volume button.

A blast of plaintive baritone hit Kate as she carried in her patient's lunch on a tray. She recognised the music immediately: Wagner.

Dad would choose that Lament when one of his theatrical projects was a bit of a headache. The fact that Tom was playing it now said a lot about his suffering over Diana.

 And to think she, Kate, had been the one to rub salt in an all too fresh wound.

In a rattle of cutlery the tray landed on Tom's desk and Kate, her hands shaking, bolted for the door.

'You eating with Bess?'

She nodded but did not turn around.

'Can you come back in half an hour?'

'Of course.'

'Good, we'll go through the diary.'

For lunch Bess produced bowls of Irish stew with crusty bread still hot from the oven. She and Kate sat down at the table together and tucked in.

'Perhaps it's just as well Tom doesn't have neighbours,' smiled Kate. 'I can still hear Amfortas down here.'

''Nobody to disturb round here, Only me and Stan up the lane in our cottage. His Granny used to tell Tom he'd go deaf,' reminisced Bess. 'Course it was pop music in those days. Him and George. Place was well alive in them days.'

Though Eleanor Galvan had brought the kitchen into the late twentieth-century, Kate could see that it would take serious money to refurbish Foxe Manor.

It was sad but true: Diana had a point. How could anyone raise a family in such an isolated spot?

'Where do you and Stan come from then, Bess.

'Village yonder. Went to the village school and so did our two girls.'

'A
school?
But I didn't even see a house when I drove down here.'

'Bless you, Kate dear, you came what we call the back way.'  Bess threw up her hands in amusement. 'My goodness, Tom would never get to the hospital if yon was the only way out.'

'And the village?'

'Take the lane behind the barns and it's half a mile down the road. We've a shop and a post office and a lovely little church. Nice little walk for you this afternoon, maybe.'

'Have you got grandchildren, Bess?'

'Aye that we have, five between our two girls, Joan and Sal. They're both Dorset way and always on at us to retire down near them. We're not getting any younger, see. Little place in Lyme do us nicely, it would. We'll be sad to go – aye, that we will. End of an era for us. '

Poor Tom
. Yet another problem for his broad shoulders. 

'You won't say anything, Nurse, will you. We're biding our time, see,' she explained, lowering her voice—though Tom would have required a bionic ear to hear one word through the intensity of sound vibrating the study walls.

'We wouldn't want to worry him with what he's been through.' Bess dried her hands on a clean towel, then, on an impulse to confide, pulled her chair closer to this young nurse who was so very different from the alarming Dr Diamond. 'We reckon Diana'll get her way in the end. She'll have our him sell up and go to one of them London hospitals.' She patted Kate's arm reassuringly. 'Don't you be worrying, Nurse. Stan and me, we'll hold on till our Tom's fit and well and back at his hospital.'

Till he marries and goes to London. Kate sat brooding over this shattering news. Sell Foxe Manor. Quit St Crispin's. Marry Diana and live in London because all of this suited the TV doctor!

The prospect of St Crispin's without its hero was too awful to contemplate.

Yet by the sound of it, the plans were made and had only to be finalised. Two such busy people—just a question of agreeing on a convenient date, when Tom got his clean bill of  health.

How foolish of me to imagine there could be anything wrong between such a charismatic pair, Kate chided herself.

'I'll take his coffee up for you, Bess.'

In his study she found Tom still at his desk, a red sweater slung across his shoulders, deep in thought as he gazed down into the green valley.

'Are you ready for us to go through  your diary?' she asked quietly.

He snapped to attention. 'Come and sit by me, Kate.' He pulled a chair close to his, opened his big black diary and flipped through the pages to the current date.

He was still wearing shorts and those sturdily muscled brown thighs were just inches from Kate's bare knees. Her eyes fixed on his hand as if imprinting the shape of it on her memory … short very clean nails … strong fingers that did impossibly delicate work inside human brains …

Kate felt oddly dizzy. It was an effort to concentrate.

'Two-fifteen tomorrow. Meeting of my senior team, here in my study. I was wondering …'

She pulled herself together. 'Yes?'

'It would be a big help if you'd sit in and take the notes.'

Kate cleared her throat. 'Of course,' she said huskily. 'I want to be useful in any way I can.'

Tom raised an eyebrow. 'Is that a promise?' His voice was meltingly slow and deep and his eyes locked with hers.

Kate stared him out for three whole seconds, then gave in. 'Within reason,' she said, glancing up at him through her eyelashes, her lips curving in a slow provocative smile.
Katie Wisdom, you're flirting with a patient. Behave yourself!
scolded her horrified inner voice.

'Better wear those specs of  yours and do your hair in that frigid super-nurse style. You're mine and I don't want Kingsley coming on to you.'

Kate said nothing but her eyes widened. More of his teasing: he meant 'you're my nurse'… didn't he?

'Needs a wife to go with that consultant's post he's up for. They like married candidates.

'I'd offer him Diana but  she tends to scare the pants off men.'

Kate shivered. She could feel goosebumps break out on her bare arms.
What had Tom just said? He surely couldn't mean that. Not if he wanted Diana for himself.

'But you aren't married!' Kate exclaimed, then lowered her eyes as if embarrassed by what she had just said.

Taking his time about it, Tom looked her over quizzically, examining the girl from under heavy speculative lids. Was it cold in his study? He could see the goosebumps on her bare arms. One handedly he took his scarlet sweater and wrapped its warmth over her shoulders, pulling the sleeves down, his fingers brushing against the buttons of her white shirt and making her go tense.

His voice broke the spell between them, making a joke of it. 'Of course the powers-that-be prefer married men! Look at the havoc I've wreaked at Crisp's. Bleeding hearts in the nurses' home, swoons in the corridors as I pass by, fumbling fingers in theatre.'

Now Kate could only laugh at his good-humoured exaggeration.

'Promise me you won't run off with Kingsley Armstrong tomorrow.'

Kate wished she could counteract his teasing with the dignified declaration that she was engaged to Dr James Mallory. But she couldn't say it because it wasn't true. 'And the next item in your diary?' she asked, cool composure now regained.

'Wednesday. A meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons. Can you drive me to the station and meet the six-thirty train? Good. I'll pay your petrol, of course. Then Saturday night we're having dinner with Professor Davy.'

Kate frowned. She didn't mind in the least ferrying Tom from A to B and she certainly wouldn't take money for the petrol. But if it meant the chauffeuse must be tolerated at Professor Davy's dinner table … 'I would really rather not.'