A shadow had appeared in his eyes, and Eve knew the Croatian doctor was remembering happier times when his homeland hadn’t been torn by war, when all of his family had been safe, and alive.
‘Dragan,’ she began hesitantly, and he shook his head and forced a smile.
‘Sometimes it’s good to remember the past, and sometimes it’s not,’ he said. ‘But you must let Tom take you to Switzerland. It truly is a beautiful place.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ Eve said, then added quickly when she saw Tom open his mouth, clearly intending to interrupt, ‘How’s Melinda?’
‘Tired,’ Dragan admitted. ‘Tired of waiting, tired of looking—she says—like a hot-air balloon that’s about to go pop.’
Eve laughed.
‘At least she hasn’t got much longer to go,’ she said. ‘Just two more weeks, and then you’ll be a proud papa.’
‘Do you know whether it’s a boy or a girl?’ Tom asked, and Dragan shook his head.
‘Melinda and I didn’t want to know. We wanted it to be a surprise. And speaking of surprises,’ he added, glancing at his watch, and letting out a muttered oath, ‘if I don’t get my home visits started the only surprise will be me managing to have them finished by midnight.’
‘Brave man,’ Tom observed as Dragan hurried away, ‘coming to the UK, making himself a new life in a foreign land.’
‘It wasn’t easy for him—not at first,’ Eve replied, ‘but then he met Melinda, and…’ She smiled. ‘The rest, as they say, is history.’
‘What I don’t understand is why I keep feeling I know him from somewhere,’ Tom said. ‘I thought the same thing when I met him and his wife at the reception on Saturday, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why.’
And I’m not about to jog your memory, Eve thought as she slipped on her jacket, and led the way out of the surgery. Melinda and Dragan had endured more than enough harassment back in April when their photographs had been plastered all over the newspapers, and they were entitled to some privacy.
‘Where do you want to have lunch?’ she said, deliberately changing the subject.
‘I thought maybe The Grape Seed.’
‘I’m afraid it closed down years ago,’ she replied as they began walking up the road past the surfing and souvenir shops, skirting the puddles left from the thunderstorm that had deluged the village earlier that morning. ‘When Mr Forrest retired, his son didn’t want to take it over, so it became an estate agent’s.’
‘Damn!’ Tom exclaimed. ‘I loved The Grape Seed. Remember when you could choose all those different sorts of salad dishes, like grated carrot mixed with coconut, curried eggs, and pasta salad with tuna, and we thought we were the height of sophistication?’
Eve smiled and nodded, but she wished he’d stop this. She didn’t want to keep dwelling on the past. It was over, gone.
‘We could have lunch at the Anchor?’ she suggested, and he shook his head.
‘Too stuffy. I always feel as though they’re itching to check my pockets for cutlery after I eat there.’
She let out a small snort of laughter.
‘We could just buy some tortilla wraps, and eat them down by the harbour,’ she said, then glanced up at the sky. ‘And, then again, perhaps not. I think it’s going to rain again.’
And it would be yet more heavy rain. The sea might currently be a sheet of near-Mediterranean blue, and the houses and steep roads that made up Penhally Bay might be standing out in sharp relief against the cliffs behind, but she could see another band of black clouds gathering over the cliffs.
‘What’s that café like?’ Tom asked, inclining his head towards it.
‘They do very nice soups, and puddings, and if you want something a bit more substantial—’
‘Lovak!’ Tom exclaimed, coming to a sudden halt in the middle of the pavement. ‘Melinda and Dragan Lovak. She’s that European princess. The one who gave up her throne to marry the Croatian refugee.’
Eve sighed. ‘So it reached the London newspapers, did it?’
‘It reached every newspaper, Eve.’ Tom shook his head in disbelief. ‘I should have recognised them immediately.’
Eve wished he hadn’t recognised the couple at all.
‘Tom, as far as Melinda is concerned, she’s Mrs Lovak, the local vet, and a soon-to-be mum,’ she said. ‘And as far as Dragan is concerned, he’s simply one of the Penhally doctors.’
‘I can see why,’ Tom observed. ‘I wouldn’t want my past splashed all over the papers. You’d be OK with your blameless history, but me…’ He laughed. ‘I doubt if my bosses would be overjoyed to learn I burned down bicycle sheds when I was at school.’
And he’d somehow put his foot in it again, Tom thought as he saw Eve’s face set. He’d only been making a joke at his own expense, and yet the shutters had quite clearly come down and he could almost feel her physically withdrawing from him.
‘Is Dragan taking paternity leave after his wife’s given birth?’ he continued quickly. ‘I know I would be if I were in his shoes.’
‘Yes, he’s taking paternity leave.’
And that hadn’t helped at all, he realised, seeing her face set into even more rigid lines. OK, change the subject, he told himself. Talk about something else—somebody else.
‘I met your minister on the way down here—Reverend Kenner,’ he declared. ‘He had his daughter, Rachel, with him. Nice kid. When’s her baby due?’
‘December.’
Which didn’t seem to please Eve any more than his comments about Dragan and Melinda had, he thought with a sigh.
‘Look, I know you’re not happy about the situation,’ he said. ‘Her being only being seventeen, and Gary Lovelace being the father, but I’ve always been a very firm advocate of a woman’s right to choose. She didn’t have to go ahead and have the baby, Eve. She could have opted for a termination, but she didn’t. Her decision, her choice, and I admire her for it.’
Eve clearly didn’t if her complete silence as she led the way into the café was anything to go by, and Tom groaned as he followed her.
Hell, was he always going to be fated to somehow inadvertently say the wrong thing? Maybe he should just have gone back to London this morning, but he hadn’t wanted to leave, hadn’t wanted the last words they’d exchanged to have been remote and distant ones.
And was that the only reason you didn’t want to leave? his mind whispered, and he sighed.
He wished it was. It would have made things so much easier, but he’d spent the last twenty years of his life trying to convince himself he’d done the right thing only to have that illusion blown straight out of the water the minute he’d seen her again. All it had taken was one smile from her and the great weight that had been lying on his heart for so long had suddenly lifted and the world no longer seemed such a dark and empty place.
But how to tell her this? he wondered as they sat down at a table, and both picked up a menu. How to confess he’d made a mistake all those years ago?
‘Eve—’
‘I’ll have the carrot and coriander soup, then lemon meringue pie, please,’ she told the smiling waitress who had appeared at their table.
‘The same for me,’ Tom said, not bothering to look at the menu. He glanced around at the café as the waitress bustled away. ‘Nice place,’ he continued awkwardly. ‘I’m surprised we’re the only customers.’
‘They’ll be closing at the end of the week,’ Eve replied. ‘They haven’t gone bankrupt, or anything,’ she added. ‘A lot of the restaurants, and most of the craft and gift shops, in Penhally close down at the end of the summer. It’s not really viable for them to stay open over the winter.’
‘Right,’ he said, then cleared his throat. ‘I want to apologise to you for what I said about Tassie yesterday. I don’t know the family—don’t even know the girl—so I spoke out of turn.’
‘Yes, you did.’
Which pretty well finished that as a topic of conversation, he thought.
‘It’s
raining again,’ he ventured, as he stared out of the café window looking for inspiration. ‘And the Lanson’s running pretty high.’
‘We had a lot of rain this morning,’ Eve replied. ‘We often do in October.’
And I’m dying a death here, Tom thought ruefully, if we’re reduced to talking about the weather. Hell’s teeth, it shouldn’t be this hard to start a conversation, and keep it going. All he had to do was not mention Tassie Lovelace, Melinda and Dragan Lovak, Rachel Kenner or Eve’s parents, and surely he’d be on safe ground.
‘Dirty Dancing,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ve just remembered the film I took you to see at the old La Scala was Dirty Dancing, and you made me see it three times because you had a thing about Patrick Swayze.’
‘It wasn’t so much Patrick Swayze,’ Eve said as the waitress appeared with their soup. ‘It was more…I think I liked the film because it was about trying to fulfil your dreams.’
‘Don’t tell me you actually sit down and watch it when it comes on TV?’ He laughed, and saw her jaw set as she picked up her spoon.
‘No. I don’t.’
OK, he thought. Let’s try something else.
‘Do you remember—?’
‘Stop it, Tom.’
Her large brown eyes were unexpectedly hard, and he gazed at her in confusion. ‘Stop what?’
‘All these reminiscences, this trip down memory lane. We’re not in our twenties any more. We’ve both moved on, we’re different people now.’
‘I don’t think you’ve changed very much from the person I once knew,’ he said with a smile, and she shook her head.
‘You didn’t even know me twenty years ago, Tom, not really.’
‘Of course I did,’ he protested, then glanced over his shoulder to see where their waitress was. ‘Hell, Eve, we were lovers. If anybody knows you, it’s me.’
‘You might have known my body,’ she said quietly. ‘But you didn’t know me.’
‘You’re talking in riddles,’ he replied. ‘Of course I knew you. Just as I also feel…’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘The old attraction between us…It’s still there, isn’t it?’
A peal of thunder had rung out, followed by a jagged fork of lightning, but Eve ignored them both and put down her spoon, cynicism and anger plain in her eyes.
‘What you’re feeling is a desire for the past, Tom,’ she replied, ‘for when your life was simpler. It’s isn’t me you want back. It’s your youth.’
Was she right? he wondered as he stared back at her and unconsciously he shook his head. It was more than that, so much more than that.
‘If you’re saying I want to be young again, then the answer’s no,’ he replied. ‘If I could go back, knowing what I know now, that would be different, but to go back to the thoughtless man I was then…’ He reached out and clasped her hand. ‘All I do know is I never forgot you.’
‘Your never forgetting me didn’t extend to you keeping in touch, did it?’ she exclaimed, pulling her hand free, and he winced at the hardness in her voice. ‘Two postcards, Tom. Two lousy, miserable postcards. One saying you were lonely, the other saying you had applied for a job with Deltaron, and then nothing.’
‘I meant to write,’ he began hesitantly, ‘but the longer I was away, the more—’
‘You forgot about me?’ she finished for him, and he dragged his fingers through his hair.
‘No,’ he protested. ‘I just thought—as the years passed—you’d be bound to be married—have a family.’
‘And now you’ve discovered I’m not, you think it might be nice to try to pick up where you left off,’ she said, her voice brittle. ‘Well, you can forget it, Tom.’
‘Eve—’
‘Something wrong with the soup?’ the waitress interrupted, appearing without warning at their table, and glancing from Eve’s scarcely touched bowl to Tom’s.
‘It’s lovely—perfect,’ Tom said with an effort.
‘Better than the weather.’ The waitress laughed as another peal of thunder rang out and rain began bouncing onto the street outside, filling the drains and gullies so quickly they started to overflow.
‘Eve, I didn’t come back to resurrect the past,’ Tom said the second the waitress had gone. ‘I came back for two reasons. One I can tell you about, the other…’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you that, not just yet.’
‘Then tell me the one reason you can,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest with a look on her face that said all too plainly, you’d better make this good.
‘I came back because…’ He took an uneven breath. ‘I wanted to see if I could still feel anything. Even if all I felt in Penhally was the old resentment, the old hatred, at least it would mean I could still feel something.’
Eve gazed at him, open-mouthed. Whatever she had been expecting him to say, it hadn’t been that.
‘I…I don’t understand,’ she faltered, and Tom pushed his soup away.
‘Eve, during the years I’ve worked for Deltaron, I’ve witnessed the most wonderful—amazing—acts of courage and self-sacrifice. I’ve seen men and women tear at rubble with their bare hands in a desperate attempt to rescue people they’ve never met, but I’ve also seen men and women trample on children—babies—crushing them into the mud, in order to save themselves or to grab a crust of bread.’
‘I suppose disasters always bring out both the best, and the worst, in people,’ she said awkwardly, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile.
‘It also breeds indifference, Eve. I was in New Orleans, and Colombia, and Phuket. Horrendous, all of them, but they got help because they made the headlines, whereas in so many places—too many places—I’ve had to watch people die because the food, and the shelter, and the medicine never came.’
‘Tom—’
‘Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, said Hell was other people. He was wrong, Eve. Hell is people ceasing to care.’
‘But you care,’ she protested, seeing the desolation in his face. ‘You wouldn’t be doing the job you’re doing if you didn’t.’
‘But the trouble is…’ He picked up his spoon and put it down again. ‘I’m ceasing to care. Ceasing to feel anything. So a hundred people were killed a month ago, a thousand the month before that. Maybe they’re better off dead rather than being rescued by my men simply to survive for another month, or a year, only to be hit by yet another catastrophe, yet another disaster, and lose more loved ones.’
It was so dark outside the café now it could almost have been night, and vaguely Eve was aware of people scurrying past the café window, hurrying to get out of the rain, but what she was most aware of was the bleak, raw despair in Tom’s face. Never had she seen such utter desolation on someone’s face before and, as she stared at him, she suddenly realised she was feeling an emotion she would never have believed she would ever feel for him, and it wasn’t attraction, or anger, or hatred. It was pity.
‘Tom, you can’t—you mustn’t—think like that,’ she said quickly, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
‘So many children orphaned, Eve,’ he murmured. ‘So many babies, sitting in cots all over the world, who are given enough food and water to live on, but no love, no affection, because there’s simply too many of them, and every year their numbers increase.’
‘Tom—’
‘Maybe Nick was right,’ he continued with a shuddering sigh. ‘Maybe my whole working life has been nothing but a series of photo opportunities.’
She caught hold of his hand and held it tightly.
‘Nick was wrong,’ she protested. ‘Your work is vitally important.’
‘Yeah, right,’ he said, with a smile that tore at her heart. ‘Dr Tom Cornish, head of operations for Deltaron, the big cheese, the head honcho, but, when it comes right down to it, you’re the one who’s made something of your life.’
‘But you’ve made a wonderful success of your life,’ she said, even more confused. ‘I’m just a nurse, Tom, whereas you…There are people alive tod
ay who wouldn’t be if you hadn’t rescued them.’
‘But at the end of the day, it’s you people remember, isn’t it?’ he said, turning her hand over in his, and staring down at it. ‘You’re that nice, kind, sympathetic nurse at the surgery. The one who holds people’s hands when they’re scared, the one who gives them a cuddle when they need it.’
The misery in his face was palpable and she had to swallow hard before she could answer him.
‘Tom, people remember you,’ she declared, her voice uneven. ‘You’re the man who arrives whenever there’s an emergency, the man who helps. What you do, it’s what you always wanted to do—so how has it all gone wrong? I can see how constantly facing so much death and destruction must wear you down, but what’s happened to make you feel your work—your whole life—has been pointless?’
He didn’t get a chance to reply. Another peal of thunder rumbled overhead, the lights in the café flickered and went out, and the waitress bustled towards them.
‘Thought as much,’ she said with resignation. ‘Sorry, folks, but I’m not going to be able to give you your puddings.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tom said, getting abruptly to his feet and extracting his wallet. ‘We’ve discovered we’re not very hungry.’
‘I’d get home as quickly as you can if I were you,’ the waitress declared as she took Tom’s money. ‘The Lanson’s running higher than I’ve ever seen it.’ She glanced at Eve’s light jacket, and Tom’s sweater and jeans. ‘You’d better borrow these umbrellas or you’ll both be soaked in seconds.’
The waitress was right, Eve realised when she and Tom left the café. Not only was the rain—if anything—even heavier, the Lanson was now lapping ominously close to the top of its banks.
‘I don’t like this,’ Tom murmured as he stared at it. ‘Look at the colour of the river, Eve. It’s almost black, and can you smell it? That’s earth—lots and lots of earth. We have to get back to the surgery, and phone the emergency services, because I think this means trouble. Big trouble.’
‘The Lanson’s breached its banks before,’ Eve protested. ‘See, people are already putting sandbags round their doors, and boarding up their shop windows. OK, so we’ll probably get an inch or two of water on the pavements, but once this thunderstorm’s over—’
Caroline Anderson, Josie Metcalfe, Maggie Kingsley, Margaret McDonagh Page 37
