A Very Single Woman

by Caroline Anderson

  She didn’t see Nick again. He must have put on his clothes and left, because when she came out of the house, his car was gone and she was alone. Trembling violently with reaction, she scribbled him a note and put it by the kettle where she knew he’d find it, then she let herself out and went back to her cottage, struggling with the fence panel rather than walk round on the road in full view of everyone.

  She let herself in, made a cup of tea and took it up to bed before the tears came, and then she rolled into the pillows and sobbed as though her heart were breaking.

  Not surprising, really, since it was.

  She felt devastated by loss, grief-stricken, bereaved.

  It was crazy. He wasn’t dead, he was alive and well and had gone off to lick his wounds, she told herself, but she knew that what they’d had, that amazing, incredible, beautiful loving they’d shared, was gone for ever, broken into a million pieces by a few carefully chosen words.

  It just proved to her what she already knew, that she couldn’t afford to allow herself to become so emotionally dependent upon somebody, because when it went wrong, as it inevitably would, her world would be devastated.

  And once she had a child, she couldn’t allow that to happen. She would have to be the rock on which the child depended, and she couldn’t do that if she was falling apart inside.

  She slept fitfully until midday, then got up and attacked all her boxes. She found a hammer and nails, unpacked all her pictures and put them up.

  She found the rest of her curtains, but none of them really fitted, so she drove down to Ipswich, went into the nearest department store and bought herself some ready-made curtains in a plain cream damask for the sitting room, and two pairs of pretty, cottage curtains for the bedrooms. She didn’t worry about the dining-room, she couldn’t be bothered with that, and by the time she’d chosen the others she was overwhelmed again with the need to cry.

  She went back to the car, drove out into the countryside and howled again. Then she pulled herself together, blew her nose, wiped her eyes and drove back to the cottage.

  As she went past Nick’s drive, she noticed that his car was back and her heart wrenched.

  He didn’t want to see her. It was pointless going round because she’d said all she needed to say, all there really was to say. Instead, she went home, unpacked and ironed her new curtains, and hung them up. She needed new tracks, really, but putting them up was beyond her, so she would have to wait until she could get a handyman.

  One thing was for sure, it wouldn’t be Nick.

  She went to the village shop and bought herself a few basic provisions, went home and made scrambled eggs on toast, and realised it was the first thing she’d had to eat since the middle of the night, when Nick had fed her slivers of avocado and tasty morsels of chicken and fresh, juicy strawberries.

  Remembering it made her cry again, tears welling up and spilling down her cheeks in endless rivers that dripped into her supper until she dashed them away angrily with the backs of her hands.

  She made herself eat the eggs, even though she wasn’t hungry, and then she went to bed again.

  She didn’t sleep. Although she was exhausted with emotion and lack of sleep from the night before, still it eluded her. The bed was too big, too empty without him, and she realised that it probably always would be.

  She got up early on Sunday morning, dressed in jeans and boots and went out for a walk. She drove the car to a nearby heath, parked it and walked for hours, wandering aimlessly round in circles until she eventually found the car again.

  She was too exhausted to cry now, too wrung out to feel anything. She went home, had a bath, surrounded by Nick’s tiling, and went to bed. This time she did sleep, but her dreams were nightmares and she was only too ready to go to work on Monday morning.

  Of course, the surgery was the last place she really wanted to be, because inevitably she would see Nick, but it had to happen, and she might as well get it over with. He wasn’t there when she arrived, so she put on a brave face, smiled at Julia, made herself a cup of tea and took it into her consulting room, hiding there until the start of the surgery.

  There was no way he’d come and find her there, she was sure he would avoid her, and so she felt relatively safe. However, she was tense, and every knock made her heart pound.

  She had a phone call from Mr Hardy at eleven o’clock, just as she finished her surgery, to tell her that his wife had had her ovary removed and that the lump had been a benign cyst.

  He sounded hugely relieved and almost pathetically grateful for Helen’s help, and she thought, He loves her, he really loves her. What would he have done if she’d died?

  How could anybody live their life drenched in so much emotion? It terrified her, all that love and need and dependence. She couldn’t cope with it. She only needed to depend on herself, because nothing else could be relied on as permanent.

  Helen cradled the phone after wishing Mrs Hardy well, picked up the notes and her mug, dragged in a deep breath and went out to the office. Nick was there, his back to her, and as she went in, he left, bag in hand.

  Lawrence gave her an old-fashioned look, stood up and propelled her gently into the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind them.

  ‘Cup of coffee?’ he offered, and she nodded warily.

  She needed to be wary. Lawrence put the coffee down on the table, sat down opposite her and met her eyes searchingly.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what’s going on, would you? I can’t get any sense out of Nick this morning, but you both look like hell and one of you must know what’s going on.’

  ‘If Nick wants you to know, then I expect he’ll tell you,’ she said, hanging on by a thread.

  Lawrence snorted. ‘That’ll be the day. Nick never talks about anything. I’ve spent the last five years with my fingers crossed, hoping he’d survive, and finally I thought he was getting somewhere. Then this morning he walks in looking as if he’s been hit by a truck, and we’re back to square one.’

  He stirred his coffee idly, giving her time, but she remained silent.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me, would you? You see, the thing is, I happen to be rather fond of the poor bastard, and I don’t like to see anything happen to him.’

  ‘He asked me to marry him,’ she said unevenly.

  ‘And I take it you said no?’

  She nodded miserably. ‘He wasn’t meant to fall in love with me. I thought he just wanted an affair, I never realised how seriously he was taking it.’

  ‘No, well, you wouldn’t, because he never shares his feelings.’

  ‘He did on Friday night,’ she said quietly. ‘I was just too blind to see it coming until it was too late.’

  ‘And is this going to affect your position here?’ Lawrence asked pragmatically, and she gave a helpless shrug.

  ‘I don’t know. Probably. He won’t look at me, I can’t talk to him, I don’t know what to do—’ She broke off, biting her lip against the tears, but they came anyway, and Lawrence just sat back quietly and let her cry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘I thought I’d finished doing that.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Lawrence scolded her gently. ‘When you love somebody that much, you can cry for ever.’

  Helen looked up at him with wide, tear-washed eyes, and shook her head. ‘I don’t…’

  Lawrence just looked at her, his eyes filled with understanding, and she looked away, because the truth was reflected there in his eyes, and she couldn’t bear to see it.

  She stood up, scraping her chair back across the floor with a hideous noise, and backed towards the door. ‘I have to go,’ she said desperately, and turned and fled.

  There was nothing more she could do at home until the carpets came, and she couldn’t bear to go out in the garden, so close to Nick’s, even though she knew he was at work. She got in the car and drove for hours, and then ran out of petrol and had to walk two miles, buy a can and walk back with it ban
ging against her legs with every step.

  Her feet hurt, because she was wearing her work shoes still, and she wanted to cry with pain and frustration and unhappiness, but she wouldn’t let herself. She was finished crying, whatever Lawrence thought. She was tougher than that.

  Almost.

  Nick thought he knew all about pain, but over the next few days, he discovered he was wrong. He got through the days, somehow, but the evenings were the hardest, pretending to Sam that everything was all right when his world was falling apart.

  And then at night, he had to go into his bedroom and lie in the bed where he’d shared his soul with Helen, and pretend to sleep.

  He couldn’t do it, any more than he could lie on the sofa in the sitting room and sleep, and he ended up moving into the spare bedroom and pretending to Sam that there was something wrong with the walls in his bedroom and he’d have to fix them before he could sleep in there again. It was a feeble lie, and he couldn’t believe that Sam swallowed it, but of course he did, because Nick never lied to him.

  Well, not until now, anyway.

  He couldn’t bear to go down the garden, but he did go down there once, with a hammer and some nails, and fixed the fence panel back permanently. He didn’t look at Helen’s cottage. He couldn’t bring himself to, and he found himself wondering if all this would have happened if she hadn’t bought it, and he hadn’t spent so much time with her, helping her fix it up. If it had been anywhere else, he wouldn’t have been able to help so much, because of Sam, but because he’d been able to keep an eye on him through the fence, it hadn’t been a problem.

  Well, it was a problem now.

  It wasn’t his only problem, though, by a long way. Whereas the cottage at the end of the garden just stayed there and minded its own business, the same couldn’t be said of Lawrence. He meddled, he interfered and he nearly drove Nick crazy.

  Nick knew what Lawrence was doing, of course. He was trying to break him down, make him talk about it, get it out in the open and deal with it. Sue would have done the same, of course, but Nick couldn’t. It was too private, too deeply personal to share. His only comfort was that Helen, too, looked as bad as he felt.

  He didn’t know why that was a comfort. He didn’t want her to be hurting. Fool that he was, he loved her too much to wish any pain on her.

  Fortunately they were busy at work, and he threw himself into the practice with enthusiasm. He even took over some of the admin from Lawrence, but then Lawrence took it back because he was making such a mess of it. He was all right with the patients, but the admin couldn’t really hold his attention, for all that he tried to make it.

  He stole one of Lawrence’s clinics, though, and did all the house calls.

  On Thursday, he went to see Mr Palmer, who was home from hospital after his heart attack and still complaining of chest pain. Nick drove up to the farm, ran the gauntlet of the dogs and the malevolent son and stomped his way up to the bedroom.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? Thought I’d get that young floozy again.’

  Nick glared at him. ‘Dr Moore’s busy,’ he told him bluntly. ‘I gather you’ve still got chest pain?’

  ‘Just a bit. Told the boy not to bother to get you, but he’s stubborn, just like his mother.’

  Nick grunted and got out his stethoscope, listened to his patient’s chest, sounded it and listened to his heart. The beat was irregular, and he seemed to be suffering from atrial fibrillation. That was potentially dangerous, because clots could form in the heart and then get sent out to cause havoc in the rest of the body. ‘Are you taking your warfarin regularly?’ he asked.

  ‘Rat poison? You got to be joking! No way I’m taking that. You’re trying to kill me, all of you!’

  ‘We’re trying to keep you alive,’ Nick explained patiently. ‘It’s to thin your blood, so you don’t get clots in your heart muscle or your brain or your chest, so you don’t have a heart attack or a stroke or a pulmonary embolus.’

  The last was too much for him. He’d had a heart attack, he knew about strokes, but a pulmonary embolus was unheard of and a step too far for Mr Palmer.

  ‘You’re just trying to put the fear of God into me, aren’t you?’ he said angrily. ‘Go on, get out of here. I don’t need your help, you quack.’

  Nick shut his bag with a defiant snap and picked it up. ‘Call me what you like,’ he said, ‘but if you don’t take your warfarin, you’re very likely to die. It’s up to you. I can only tell you the facts.’

  He went downstairs and left the foetid cottage, dragged in a lungful of pure, clean air and went and found the son.

  ‘He’s not too bad,’ Nick told him, ‘but he must take his pills regularly. Try and make sure he does, please, or I can’t be responsible for what happens to him.’

  The son grunted, and not for the first time Nick wondered if he was quite all right or if there was something slightly askew in his head.

  With a mental shrug, he got back into the car and drove off, nearly running over one of the scruffy collies that attacked his wheels as he left. Oh, well, he thought, if the old man took his pills, maybe he wouldn’t have to go out there again and visit him.

  No such luck. The following morning at eight o’clock, just as he arrived at the surgery, there was a phone call to say that Mr Palmer had collapsed.

  ‘Oh, damn, I’ll go out and see him. I know what it is. He’s been refusing to take his warfarin—said he wasn’t having rat poison, silly old fool.’ He turned to Lawrence. ‘Can you sort out my patients, split them with you and Helen or something? I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  He drove out to the farm as fast as he could, and as he arrived the son came out of the house, brandishing his gun.

  ‘You killed him, you bastard!’ he screamed. ‘It’s all your fault, round here yesterday, meddling in his pills. I made him take them last night, and now look what’s happened! He’s dead!’

  With a sobbing cry, he raised the gun, pointed it at Nick and pulled the trigger.

  ‘Nick not back yet?’ Lawrence asked Julia after surgery had finished.

  ‘No, there’s been no word from him. Actually, I’m a little bit worried. I tried to ring the house, and his mobile, but I couldn’t get any reply.’

  Helen looked at them both. ‘Where is he? I know he went out on a call, but that’s all I know.’

  ‘He’s gone to see Mr Palmer,’ Lawrence told her. He frowned, glanced at his watch and met Julia’s eyes. ‘I think I’ll just run out there and check everything’s OK.’

  Helen felt panic rise in her chest. ‘Try the phone again,’ she suggested to Julia after Lawrence had gone.

  She did, but again there was no reply.

  ‘Lawrence will be there in five minutes, and he’ll ring us. Don’t worry. I expect what’s happened is that he’s left the farm and his car’s broken down, and his phone is out of range. He’ll be all right.’

  Helen knew Julia was right, but all she could see was the man with the gun and her heart was filled with fear for Nick.

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang. Julia answered it, and her face went white and she laid her hand across her chest. ‘Yes, of course, I’ll get her now.’ She held the phone out to Helen with a trembling hand. ‘It’s Lawrence.’

  Helen snatched the phone from Julia’s hand. ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’ve found him, Helen,’ Lawrence said urgently. ‘He was at the farm. I’ve called an ambulance, and they’re taking him to Ipswich hospital. I’m afraid he’s been shot.’

  ‘Shot?’ she said, sitting down abruptly. ‘Oh, my God, is he dead?’

  ‘No, he’s not dead, but I think you should go to the hospital.’

  Panic swamped her. She grabbed her keys and ran to her car, breaking every speed limit on her way to the hospital.

  She was there when the ambulance pulled up and they unloaded Nick, strapped to a stretcher and covered in blood-soaked bandages, with an oxygen mask on and saline drip running in. She got in the way, of course, and they tried to rem
ove her from the scene, but she refused to be taken.

  She shrugged them aside angrily, grabbing his hand and hanging onto it as if it was the only thing between him and death.

  ‘Don’t die, Nick, please, God, don’t die—’

  ‘I don’t think he’s going to die, unless it’s because we can’t get to him,’ a doctor told her gently but firmly. ‘He’s quite stable, but he’s lost a lot of blood and we need to have a proper look at him. Now, please, could you wait outside?’

  Helen stood her ground. ‘I’m a doctor,’ she told them firmly, ‘and I’m not going anywhere. I’ll just stand here out of the way if you like, but there’s no way I’m leaving, so don’t even bother to suggest it.’

  And so she propped up the wall, her arms wrapped firmly round her waist, and watched as they peeled away Nick’s clothes and revealed his injuries. His left shoulder and arm were covered in tiny holes where the shot had penetrated, and there were one or two on the side of his face and head. He was peppered with them, but what she didn’t know, and what they didn’t know, was if any of them had penetrated vital organs.

  The portable X-ray machine was wheeled in and they took plates of his head, and chest and arm. They were developed within moments, and put up on the light box in the corner of Resus.

  ‘Well, at least they look superficial,’ the doctor said with a sigh of relief. ‘He’ll have to go up to Theatre to have them removed, because there are so many of them, but I’m more worried about his head injury.’

  ‘He’s coming round,’ one of the nurses said.

  Helen spun round, hurrying to Nick’s side as his eyes flickered open and struggled to focus.

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘Helen?’ He looked around him, closed his eyes and groaned. ‘That bastard shot me, didn’t he?’ he muttered.

  ‘Looks like it. We’re going to have to take you up to Theatre and get the shot out of you, but there doesn’t seem to have been any serious damage. I think the police are waiting to talk to you, though,’ the doctor told him.

  He looked round for Helen, his eyes locking on her face when he found it, and his hand reached blindly out to her.