Falling For Dr. Dimitriou

by Anne Fraser

  At first she’d thought she dreamed him up.

  He was every bit as beautiful as she remembered. His hair was slightly longer and he’d lost weight so that his cheeks were more prominent but laughter still lurked in his eyes.

  He was wearing a thick trench coat over a thin jersey and jeans and heavy boots.

  They looked at each other for a long moment. ‘Katherine,’ he murmured, and stepped towards her.

  She’d been waiting for him to come to her since she’d left Greece. She’d told herself that he would but she hadn’t been sure. Then, as the days had turned into weeks, she’d given up hoping.

  What had brought him here now? Her heart hammered against her chest.

  ‘How did you find me?’ she whispered.

  ‘You do know that Poppy and Crystal still write to each other? Crystal has been giving me regular updates every time your name is mentioned, which is pretty often, or so I gather.’

  But it had taken him all this time to come and find her.

  ‘Is Crystal with you?’

  ‘Of course. I left her at the hotel with Poppy. It was Poppy who told me you’d be here and where to find you.’

  ‘Poppy is in London?’

  ‘She met us at the airport earlier.’

  ‘It sounds as if she’s decided to meddle. I think she’s frightened I’ll stay an old maid and she’ll spend her adult years looking after me when I’m an old lady. That’s why she asked you to come.’

  It was a conversation they’d had as a joke—so why was she repeating it? Why was she babbling?

  ‘Poppy didn’t ask me to come, Katherine. I wrote to her and told her I was coming to see you and she asked me to keep it as a surprise.’ He stepped towards her, his familiar soapy smell turning her bones to water. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.’

  She stepped back and he halted where he was. ‘How is Grandmother?’ she asked.

  ‘Looking forward to seeing you again. I think she’s decided that you are already part of her family.’

  Already part of the family?

  He took hold of her collar and pulled her close. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said into her hair. ‘More than I thought possible.’

  ‘You don’t sound too pleased about it,’ she mumbled.

  ‘I am. I’m not. It depends.’

  She placed her hands against his chest and although she wanted nothing more than to go on touching him for ever, to be held by him for ever, she pushed him away. ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘On whether you feel the same way.’

  ‘I think you know how I feel.’ She took a moment to steady her breathing. ‘But I won’t be with you and have you disapprove of me—or of what I did. I can’t go through life thinking and feeling I have to pay over and over for what I did.’ She tried to smile but it came out all wobbly. ‘I’ve spent the last seventeen years of my life feeling as if I don’t deserve to be happy. Being in Greece, being with Poppy changed all that for ever. I did what I felt I had to do at the time. That was the person I was back then and I can’t change her. I’m not even sure I want to.’

  ‘God, Katherine. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? I love you. I love everything about you and that includes the person you were as well as the woman you are now. When I met you I didn’t want to fall in love with you. I tried not to but I couldn’t help it. So I told myself that Sophia would want me to be happy, would want me to remarry, especially someone who obviously cared for Crystal.’ He looked at her with anguished eyes. ‘I didn’t tell you everything about Sophia. I have to tell you the rest so you can try to understand why I did what I did.’

  He took her hand and led her across to a bench. ‘I was six months away from being able to apply for the job in America. In the meantime I had been offered a consultant post at St George’s, even though they knew I was going to America. In fact, they said it was one of the reasons they’d chosen me. While I was away they would employ a locum and my job would be kept open for me. It was a flattering reminder of the esteem in which I was held, but at the time I saw it as nothing less than what I was due—what I had worked for over the years.

  ‘But I didn’t want to take my foot off the pedal, although I could have. I had the job I wanted—one that was mine for life. I had the post in America. I had done everything I’d set out to do. Now, if there ever was, it had to be Sophia’s time. And I was prepared to shoulder more of the child care—or at least that’s what I promised Sophia.

  ‘She had an interview for one of the smaller orchestras. It wasn’t the career as a concert pianist she’d hoped for but it would have been a start. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if she’d be expected to travel. And it would only have been for eighteen months. But she was so happy to be given the chance. Nervous too. She started playing the piano, practising as if her life depended on it.

  ‘Every hour that she wasn’t looking after Crystal she was practising. Often I’d wake up in the night to hear the sounds of Mozart or Beethoven; I can barely listen to their music now. She was in a frenzy—so sure that this was her last chance. It was only then that I realised how much she’d sacrificed for me. And then she fell pregnant again. It wasn’t planned, just one of those things, and that was that. Her chance was over.’

  He paused for a long moment.

  Katherine held her breath as she waited for him to continue.

  ‘It was December and the winter had already been harsh. I left the house early—sometimes before six—but she always got up to see me off. That morning she’d been complaining of a headache. When I think back she’d been complaining of a headache the night before too. But I didn’t take too much notice. I was already thinking of a complicated surgery I had that morning. She said she would take some painkillers and go back to bed for an hour or so. Crystal was staying with my mother for a few days. Sophia was thirty-two weeks by this time so I told her that I thought it was a good idea, kissed her and left.’ He passed a hand across his face.

  ‘If I’d stopped to look at her, really look at her, I would have seen the warning signs. I was a doctor, for God’s sake. A couple of minutes—that’s all it would have taken.’

  A chill ran up Katherine’s spine as she sensed what was coming.

  ‘The roads were bad. The gritting lorries rarely came down the lane leading to our house so I’d taken the four-by-four. She sometimes drove me to the train station so she would have the use of the car, but because she had a headache she suggested I take it. I would leave it at the train station and catch the train from there. It would mean Sophia being without a car, but she said she wasn’t intending to go anywhere anyway. She didn’t need anything from the village and if she did, she would call me and I could pick it up on the way home.

  ‘I was just relieved to get the use of the car. I needed to catch the six-thirty train if I was to make it to the hospital in time to see my patient before surgery was scheduled to start.’

  Katherine’s heart was beating a tattoo against her ribs. She sensed what was coming. ‘You don’t have to tell me any more,’ she said softly.

  ‘I do. I have gone over the day so many times in my head, trying to make it come out a different way, but of course that’s impossible. We make these decisions in our lives, sometimes ones made in a split second, like the car driver who reverses without looking or overtakes when he shouldn’t.’

  ‘And sometimes we agonise over decisions for months but it doesn’t mean that they turn out to be right,’ she whispered. ‘I, of all people, know that.’

  ‘But you’ve come to terms with your demons. It’s taken me this long to come to terms with mine. You need to know what happened so you can try and understand why I reacted to finding out about Poppy the way I did.’

  ‘Tell me, then,’ she said softly.

  ‘Surgery that day went like a dream. I had t
wo on my list—both major cases so I wasn’t finished in Theatre until late. My secretary had left a note that Sophia had phoned and I tried to call her back, but there was no answer. I assumed she was in the bath—if I assumed anything. I went to see my post-operative patients and planned to try to get her again after that.

  ‘Typically I got caught up and it wasn’t until seven that I remembered I hadn’t phoned her. I tried again and it went to voice mail. I still wasn’t worried. She could be in the bath or in the garden and not heard the phone. She didn’t keep her mobile on her unless she was away from home.

  ‘But I was keen to get home—just to reassure myself. I had this uneasy sense of something not being quite right.

  ‘The train seemed to take for ever. I kept trying to get her on the phone and when she still didn’t answer I became more and more worried. I wondered if she’d fallen. There was no one nearby—no neighbours for me to call. Sophia would have known their names but I wouldn’t even have recognised any of them.

  ‘It did cross my mind to call the police, but I couldn’t think of a good reason. My wife not answering her phone for an hour or two was hardly an emergency.

  ‘I collected the car from the station, cursing the snow and praying that the road wouldn’t be completely blocked, but nothing was going my way that night. I could only get as close as the lane leading down to the house before drifting snow made it impossible for me to go any further. There was nothing for it but to walk the rest of the way. All this time I was getting increasingly frantic. What if Sophia had gone outside and something had happened? What if she was caught in a snow drift?

  ‘But I told myself that she was too sensible for that. Why would she need to go outside? By that time I was at the house. It was dark—it would normally be lit up like a Christmas tree. It could be a power cut—they weren’t infrequent where we lived—but I couldn’t fool myself any longer about something being seriously wrong.

  ‘I let myself inside and called out for her. No answer. The lights were working so it wasn’t a power cut.

  ‘I found her in our bedroom. She had her mobile in her hand. She was unconscious. But she was alive. I could see that she’d been fitting and now I noticed that her ankles, hands and face were puffy.

  ‘Eclampsia. And I’d been too damn into myself and my career to even notice. But there was no time to berate myself then. If Sophia was to have a chance of surviving I had to get her to hospital and quickly.

  ‘I called 999. They said they would send an ambulance straight away. I told them they wouldn’t get any further than my car and that I would meet them there. They said it would take around twenty minutes to get to me, supposing the roads stayed clear. The baby had to be delivered. If I’d had a scalpel with me, so help me God, that’s what I would have done.

  ‘She came round briefly, enough to recognise that I was there, but she started fitting again. I waited until she stopped and then I wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the car. Thankfully the ambulance arrived at almost the same time.

  ‘They delivered our son. But it was too late. For either of them.’

  Katherine wrapped her arms around him and held him. What could she say? All she could do for him was let him talk. No wonder he’d been so shocked when he’d found out about Poppy. Sophia had died bringing a child into the world, whereas, it must have seemed to him, she had casually given hers away.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Crystal I don’t know how I would have got through the next months. In the end it was Helen stepping in that saved us both. As soon as she heard the news she jumped on the first plane. She was with us before night fell. I was like a madman. That I’d lost the woman who was my very heartbeat was bad enough, but the guilt that she might not have died had I been a different man was worse.

  ‘I stopped going to work. I turned down the consultant job at St George’s and the one in America—to be fair to them they told me to think it over, to take my time, but I knew I wouldn’t take them up. You see, I no longer felt as if I deserved it. I guess, to be honest, I was sunk in self-pity. So far sunk in it I was wallowing.’

  ‘How old was Crystal?’

  ‘She was three. Old enough to miss her mother but not old enough to understand that she would never see her again and definitely not old enough to understand that this man—who she barely knew, remember—hadn’t a clue how to look after her. Even if I had, I was so deep in my trough of self-pity I think I was in danger of enjoying it.

  ‘And when Helen came to stay that gave me more opportunity to wallow. Now she was there to take care of Crystal, there was nothing to hold me back. I drank myself almost unconscious most nights. I rarely got out of bed until mid-morning and when I did I couldn’t be bothered getting dressed or shaved. Sometimes I didn’t even shower until mid-afternoon.

  ‘God knows how long that would have gone on if Helen hadn’t called in reinforcements. It was as if the whole of my extended Greek family had taken up residence. Helen, her mother, my mother and my grandmother too—if my grandfather and father had been alive they would have been there also. I’m pretty sure their disapproving ghosts were in the background, cheering them on and wagging their heads at me.

  ‘Those formidable women kissed and hugged me and then marched me off to the shower. My mother threw every last drop of alcohol down the sink and then Helen and Yia-Yia cooked up a storm. They looked after Crystal, but most importantly they made me see it was my job to care for my child. They fed her and dressed her, but after that it was up to me to look after her.

  ‘Do you know, she clung to them the first time I tried to take my daughter to the park on my own? She gripped the sides of the door when I tried to lift her, so in the end my first trip outside with my daughter since the funeral was with my whole family in tow. It got better after that. I still mourned Sophia but my family made me see that she would have been furious if she’d seen the way I’d gone to pieces. And I knew they were right. I had stolen her dreams from her, and what kind of major creep would I be if I couldn’t make a life—a good, loving, caring life—for our daughter?

  ‘The rest, as they say, is history. I sold everything we owned in England and ploughed it into a small practice here in Greece. Then...’ he smiled wanly ‘...I met you. I fought my attraction to you, but I couldn’t help it. You were the only woman who had come close to measuring up to Sophia, the only woman I could imagine spending the rest of my life with. But I felt guilty. It seemed a betrayal of Sophia’s memory.

  ‘Then I found out about Poppy and it was as if I didn’t know you at all. As if the perfect woman I had built up in my mind had disappeared in a breath of wind. I’d put you on a pedestal’ you see. I guess we’re not so dissimilar, huh? Both of us seemed to feel the need to atone.’

  Katherine grimaced. ‘I no longer feel I have to atone. As I said, I did what I did and I just have to look at the wonderful young and happy woman Poppy is today to know I made the right decision. I’m sorry I couldn’t be perfect for you. But, you know, Alexander, I don’t think I want to be perfect.’

  ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘Of course you don’t. You’re human. Like us all.’

  ‘So what changed your mind?’

  ‘Nothing changed my mind. When you told me why you gave Poppy up I realised why you’d felt you’d had no choice. And when I saw you with Poppy I could see how you felt about her. I was coming to beg your forgiveness when Grandmother became unwell. As soon as I was sure she was all right I was coming to ask you to stay—to marry me. That’s when you phoned me about Poppy. I knew it wasn’t the time to tell you how I felt. Every ounce of your attention was—quite rightly—focussed on your daughter. I knew there would be time later—when she was better.’

  He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘What I wasn’t so sure about was whether you could forgive me. Then when you were about to leave and you looked right through me, I thought I had ruined any chance I had wi
th you.’ His Greek accent became more pronounced, as it always did when he was emotional.

  She looked him in the eye. ‘You said you forgave me! I wasn’t looking for forgiveness. Not from you! How could I be with a man who thought I needed his forgiveness?’

  ‘It was a stupid, thoughtless thing to say.’

  ‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘I needed the man I loved to love me warts and all.’

  His eyes burned. ‘So you do love me?’

  ‘I think I fell in love with you almost from the moment I set eyes on you. But I was frightened too. I wanted to tell you about Poppy but I just couldn’t. At least, not then. I was planning to tell you, but then Poppy turned up. I never wanted you to find out that way.

  ‘Then she became ill and I couldn’t think of anything else. I thought I was going to lose her again. I made a pact with myself, with the gods, to anyone I thought might be listening. If they’d let Poppy live I would give you up. I know it’s crazy but I was crazy back then.’

  ‘But when she was better, why didn’t you write to me?’

  ‘It took a long time for her to recover completely. I couldn’t leave her.’ She smiled wryly. ‘And I was keeping my pact. Then when she was completely better I wanted you to come to me. I needed to know that you wanted me. The woman I am, not the one in your imagination.’

  ‘I would have come sooner, but I was arranging a job here. I’ve taken a year’s sabbatical. I love you. I adore you. I don’t want a life without you. I lost Sophia because I put my ambition before her needs. I won’t do that to you. God, woman, put me out of my misery. I have to know if you love me—if you will marry me and live with me. If you say yes, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make you happy.’ A gust of wind blew the leaves around his feet. But she needed to be sure. She had to know she wouldn’t be second best.

  ‘What about Sophia?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to spend my life competing with the memory of a woman who was so perfect. Because we both know I’m not. None of us are.’