By My Side

by Wendy Lou Jones

He sighed. He knew he had been losing it on the ward the other day too. Why couldn’t he just keep control of his temper? He believed Kate really cared about him and what had he done? He couldn’t bear to think of how kissing her had awakened in him something he never thought could breathe life again. He had imagined it, of course, every time he saw her. He knew Kate hadn’t really kissed him out of pity. He knew that. He could see in her eyes that she wanted him; though for the life of him he couldn’t think why. But he couldn’t do anything about it; not yet. It wasn’t right. Until he learned to let go of Ali, there wasn’t room enough in his heart for two.

  Why was life so hard? Why couldn’t he just love again? He wanted to. He needed to. He just couldn’t. It felt like he was being unfaithful to Ali and that was something he could never do. It was the guilt of wanting to move on, that was the struggle he was battling with.

  He stood up. What should he do? A letter? Flowers, perhaps? Or was it better that she hated him? He thought about that. His chest ached and his head was pounding. He rubbed his face with his hands and looked up at the sky as his heart spoke out to the woman he had loved. Then his gaze dropped down to the place where Kate had been and he shut his eyes tightly, turned back and walked in.

  ~

  Kate pulled up outside her house and hurried inside, her heart breaking. How had she messed up quite so badly? He must actually hate her now. All she had wanted to do was go to him and comfort him, tell him everything would be all right and all the time she had been kissing a married man.

  She dumped her coat and keys inside the door and headed upstairs for a shower, where she stayed, until she had collected herself again and then she went back downstairs to cuddle up in front of the TV and lick her wounds. She rang her mum and her dad answered, worrying her a little. “Hello, Dad. What are you doing home?”

  “I had a meeting arranged for this afternoon and they had to cut it short, so I came home to see your mum. Don’t worry. I can hear that nurses’ brain of yours kicking in. So before you ask, she’s fine, so you can stop your fretting now. Is everything all right with you?”

  “Yes, fine thanks, Dad,” she fibbed and spent a few minutes talking with him before he passed her over to her mother. Kate grilled her mum about her symptoms and whether she was doing her exercises and she found a kind of safety and reassurance in hiding behind the mask. Her mum still had an appointment left with Mr Elliott.

  “He’s such a lovely man.”

  “Yes, you may have mentioned that, once or twice, Mum,” Kate said.

  “Well, he is. No ring either. You could do a lot worse for yourself than him. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  “Mum!”

  “I’m only saying.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “Your father and I would love some grandchildren before we die.”

  “You’re fifty-two, mother!”

  “Exactly. And I was twenty-five when I had you. You’ll soon be twenty-seven and you’re not even married yet.”

  That was it; Kate was not in the mood for a lesson on her failings. She needed no reminder of either her loneliness, or the overwhelming distance between her and Adam. Both these things had been painfully etched into her life already that day, so she pulled out her trump card, the tried and tested diversion technique that never seemed to fail. “How’s Marcus doing?” she asked. Marcus was her adventurous older brother, always travelling the world and fighting injustice wherever it might be. He had had several close shaves over the previous few years, a couple with the law and once even with his life. He was always good fodder for a conversation with her parents. And thankfully it worked.

  Kate spotted Adam several times over the following week and she tried hard to relax and pretend to have moved on, even though she had to fight the urge to throw herself at his feet and beg him to forgive her, which wouldn’t have been good for anyone involved. She smiled when she could, and when she couldn’t, she just gazed levelly back at him and defied him to disapprove of her. Had he not also kissed her? And how was she supposed to have known?

  As the cold weather set in, broken bones appeared in A&E with increasing regularity. People in the streets slipped on ice and skidded on the roads. Old women broke wrists, old men broke hips and children broke any bone they fell on.

  Kate found herself escorting patients up to the wards on a regular basis but never a word passed between them.

  One particular day Kate overheard a relative complaining about Mr Elliott, about his gruff bedside manner. The gentleman in question was in quite a temper and the nurse at the desk was taking it in the neck about his father’s treatment, hearing about how unfeeling Mr Elliott was being. The nurse was looking harassed and more than a little uneasy.

  Now Kate had had first-hand experience of Mr Elliott in full sail and understood where the gentleman was coming from, but she also knew now what a wonderful man and gifted surgeon he was, so despite his reluctance to settle a peace with her, Kate hoped she might be able to help and so she stepped in. “Excuse me, sir; I wonder if I could be of some assistance. Trisha, would you like me to take over?”

  The nurse seemed confused by the suggestion, but after the last five minutes of being shouted at she was more than willing to let someone else have a go.

  “It’s all right. I was about to go on my lunch break anyway,” Kate said. “Would you like to go somewhere more private and tell me what the problem seems to be, Mr…?”

  “Johnson,” Trisha offered.

  “Mr Johnson, please; follow me.”

  Kate walked down the ward looking for a private space and found an examination room lying empty. She invited Mr Johnson and his wife to sit down, closed the door and slid the shutter across and then she perched on the examination couch beside them. “You’d better talk me through it,” Kate said. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  Chapter 6

  A few days later, when Mr Elliott walked onto Ascot Ward to do a round before his weekend off, Kate’s dealings with Mr Johnson were already the stuff of legend. The round continued as usual, until they were about to leave, at which point Sister Pritchard asked for a word in private.

  Adam obliged willingly, assuming there must be some very good reason for her obvious unease and he arranged for his team to go ahead of him, to meet him on Kempton Ward as soon as he was through.

  Sister Pritchard closed the door to the office and took a second to consider her words. “I thought it best that you became aware there has been some tension with one of your patients,” she told him. “Well, their relatives anyway.”

  “Which one?” Adam asked.

  “Mr Johnson. His son.”

  “Mr Johnson’s son?” Adam’s eyebrows flickered. “I’m surprised; he was all politeness and gratitude when I passed him in the corridor the other day.”

  “Well, perhaps that was after Staff Nurse Heath had worked her magic on him,” she said.

  “Nurse Heath?” Adam’s very blood reacted.

  “She’s from A&E. Don’t ask me how she came to be involved in this, but apparently she swooped in out of nowhere and diffused the whole situation.”

  Mr Elliott settled back on a short filing cabinet. “I think you had better tell me exactly what happened, don’t you?” he said.

  Sister pulled up a chair and sat down. “It was Tuesday, late morning I think. Trisha was at the nurses’ station catching up on some paperwork when Mr Johnson’s son started kicking off. It was something to do with what you had or hadn’t done with his father’s treatment and what he seemed to think you should be doing.”

  “Yes, he had been a bit prickly that day, come to think of it,” Adam said. “I seem to remember him wanting a second opinion, or something.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “I told him he was perfectly entitled to do just that if he wanted to, but that it wouldn’t do any good.”

  The nurse seemed to weigh this up. “Well, whatever it was, he didn’t appear to take it ver
y well and he started stamping around the ward, shouting abuse and threatening to sue you. He wanted Trish to give him the name of the person to contact to set up a complaint and then he began ranting about the standard of care and anything else he could think of, from what the staff told me. And then, like an angel, Kate drifted through the ward, calming the whole situation. She took him and his wife into a side room and when they came out… he was a kitten. Don’t ask me what she said. I don’t really care, but he’s been as quiet as a mouse ever since. She did us all a favour.”

  ~~~

  “What did she do?” Lena asked, but the woman just smiled and gently shook her head.

  “Patience.”

  ~~~

  Adam took a deep breath and let it out. He nodded. “Thank you, Sue. Leave it with me. I’ll take it from here.”

  Sister Pritchard nodded and let herself out and Adam stayed where he was for a few minutes and then strode off to re-join his team.

  The day was busy and afternoon clinic ended late. At six o’clock he was finally ready to leave. He walked outside and sat in his car. His fingers hovering for a minute over the mobile phone in his jacket pocket. He picked it out and rang the hospital switchboard and asked to be put through to A&E. “Hello,” he croaked. “I was wondering if Nurse Heath was on duty today.”

  The person on the other end of the line rustled through some papers. “I’m afraid not, sir. She won’t be back on until tomorrow afternoon. Can I take a message?”

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.” Kate wasn’t there.

  Adam’s apartment was in a new, modern building. He had paid a top notch price for a designer lifestyle that somehow left him hollow. He let himself in and slumped down in his leather settee. He looked up at the picture Alison had loved and frowned. “You’d like her,” he said, his voice laden with melancholy and he turned on the TV to slip away, but it was no good, he couldn’t concentrate. What had Kate said in there? What confidences had she broken? And how, without undermining him completely, could she have placated the situation so thoroughly? He rested his head back and closed his eyes. The image of Kate talking softly to the little girl sprung vividly to his mind. She may be passionate about her patients, making her jump in too eagerly sometimes, he thought, but she wasn’t cruel or unkind. Kate was Sasha’s angel and his too now it seemed. She had taken care of Sasha, whispering words of tenderness in her ear when she needed comfort and now she was doing the same for him, despite his turning her away.

  He had tried hard not to want her. He had done his best to avoid her whenever he could, but fate wasn’t making it easy for him. Could he go to her? Just talk to her? Would she still want to listen to him after all he had put her through? Adam wasn’t sure. But he knew then that he had to try.

  But was he ready to talk? He was still afraid to look in a mirror in case he saw the reproach in his own eyes. His demons were always with him, reminding him of what he’d lost. He couldn’t bear any more pity. He had been glad to leave his last job behind, to get away from all the sad looks and tilted gazes. He wasn’t about to risk seeing that in Kate’s eyes. Kate had to see him for himself, a solitary figure who still wanted her, even though he battled every day with himself to avoid it.

  He loved Ali, he really did, but Ali was gone and Kate was here. She was flesh and blood and he wanted her. He wanted the companionship, the intimacy of loving. He couldn’t bear to keep hurting her and if he couldn’t manage to live without her, he was going to have to try.

  ~

  Kate started work on Saturday afternoon with her head pounding. She had slept a little too heavily the night before and her neck ached. She eased her head from side to side and felt the pull.

  The night seemed to have started early, with drunken teenagers and hordes of cuts and breaks queuing up to be tended to, so they were dealing with a hefty backlog by the time the night shift came on. Fortunately, Sheila, a very experienced night nurse, had just had a basin full of her eighteen-year-old son and was in just the right mood to take on the drunks. Kate stayed ten minutes longer to finish up with her gentleman with heart failure who was waiting to go to coronary care, and then finally, with great relief, she was out of there.

  Outside, she took a deep breath of fresh air. The cold crept in and she wrapped her coat around her. Looking up at the clear night sky, Kate let out a deep sigh and walked over to her car. A man stepped out of another car close by and looked at her. Kate stopped and looked a little harder in the dim light, anxious to recognise him as a friend. He started to walk toward her and Kate hurried to open the car door, but as the light from the street lamp fell across his features, Kate suddenly recognised the dimly lit face of Adam. She hesitated and then continued to unlock her car.

  “Kate.”

  Kate turned back round, shivering. She hugged her coat tighter about her. Adam approached and his face was difficult to read. Was he going to be pleasant, or not?

  “It seems I am indebted to you for your efforts with Mr Johnson the other day,” he said.

  Kate struggled for a second to think of what he could be referring to, but then she remembered. “It was no bother.”

  “I think it was,” he said. “Sister Pritchard told me everything that happened.”

  Kate shook her head trying to play down her part. “I just listened to him really,” she said. “All he needed was someone to vent at. He was just worried.”

  “I very much doubt that was all there was to it, but thank you anyway.” There was a more comfortable silence between them now, as his sincerity showed. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “I was just wondering because I would really like to take you out to dinner to apologise.”

  Kate was speechless. What did this actually mean? She was just beginning to sort herself out. She still yearned for the man but she was back in control of her life again and his attentions, however desirable they might be, were only going to cause her more pain. “Er, that’s really not necessary,” she said. “I was just glad to be able to help.” She looked into his gorgeous eyes and smiled warmly. "But it’s very kind of you to offer, thank you." She turned to go.

  “There’s nothing kind about it, Kate. I want to,” he said, stopping her with a touch on her arm.

  Those words she had longed to hear. Why was he saying them now? “You’re married, Mr Elliott.”

  “I’m not.”

  What was he saying? “But you said-”

  “I know. I’m not, Kate. I was, but I’m not anymore.”

  Kate was confused.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I panicked.” He shrugged. “Forgive me?”

  Could this be real? Could she trust him? This was too much. But she hadn’t wanted him to come to her out of duty or some kind of misguided gratitude. She hadn’t done it for that. She would have been happier if he had never found out about the whole thing. Her only thoughts had been to protect him, if she could. She had wanted to make his life easier. She wanted his patients to understand what a wonderful surgeon they were dealing with and having achieved that much, she had been happy enough, until now.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Kate looked at him. “So you’re really not married?”

  He took a step closer and smiled the sort of smile that warms your heart and melts your soul. “I promise,” he said softly. “I can explain… if you’ll let me.”

  Kate took a deep breath. “Okay, then,” and she shivered in the bitter evening air.

  “Come on. We’ll take my car.”

  “What, now?”

  “Do you have somewhere else you need to be?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well then.”

  “But what about my car?” Kate said.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll drive you back here later to pick it up. Or drop you home. Whichever you like. You’re not on in the morning, are you?”

  “No. Monday,” Kate said.

  “Good. Come on then. Let’s get out of here.�
�

  Kate locked her car again and with trembling limbs, she walked with Adam across the car park to his black Audi R8, parked further up the row.

  He blipped the car and told her to hop in and Kate climbed into the passenger seat. The interior was spotless. A flash of dirty uniform screamed out from across her knee. “I’m in my uniform,” Kate said as he climbed in next to her. “I can’t go anywhere dressed like this.”

  Adam paused. “Would you like to go home and change first?” he asked.

  Kate looked at her watch. “It’s too late for that,” she said. “By the time I could get ready no-one would be left serving.”

  “So we’ll get a take away and take it back to my place,” he said.

  Kate thought for a moment. Her heart was racing as everything she had hoped for seemed to be finally falling into place all at once. “All right.”

  “That’s settled then. What would you like? Chinese? Indian? Pizza?”

  “Mediterranean,” Kate said.

  “Mediterranean?”

  “Yes. There’s a great place on-”

  “Church Street.”

  “You know it?”

  Adam nodded. “It’s practically my second home.” He started up the engine and pulled out of the car park.

  “You know Niko then?” Kate asked. Niko was the owner of the restaurant, a lovely man and Kate had a real soft spot for him.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a sweetie, isn’t he? He always puts something extra in my order.”

  Adam raised an eyebrow. “I’m not convinced his motives are entirely altruistic there.”

  “Don’t be silly, he’s about fifty,” she said.

  Adam shrugged. “Your point being?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t think of me like that.”

  Adam shook his head and smiled. “You’ve got a lot to learn about men, Kate.”

  Kate looked at him for a second and then moved her gaze back to the window.

  They turned into Church Street and Adam parked the car. Kate hopped out and huddled up in her long winter coat. But it wasn’t long before the icy wind had her shivering again. Her teeth started to chatter and Adam looked round.