Prescription—One Husband
Page 13
‘To me, of course,’ she answered.
Of course.
There was no ‘of course’ about it, Fern thought miserably. Of course it was the obvious assumption when they were sharing a house but Quinn had carefully made it clear that they were separate right from the start.
They didn’t share a bedroom. They’d split the house into his and hers and just shared a kitchen…
And a life.
There were marriages and marriages, Fern thought bleakly, but regardless of how separately they lived Jessie and Quinn were still man and wife.
Because they didn’t share a bedroom—because Quinn was an arrant flirt—it didn’t make them any less married.
Fern felt sick to the stomach. Her world was no longer tilting. It had shrivelled into something puckered and ugly and somehow…somehow tainted…
Numbly Fern gathered her bloodstained clothes from the night before and bade Jessie farewell.
This was where she bowed out.
She should go back to Sydney, she thought bleakly as she made her way out of the hospital, but her aunt was still desperately ill. There were fine strings of duty holding Fern to the island.
Not duty, Fern acknowledged at last, feeling the pain she had been trying to avoid since her family were killed.
She loved her aunt. She couldn’t leave. The bonds of duty had become bonds of love.
She loved Quinn!
‘I do not,’ she said savagely to the silence as she started the long walk back to her uncle’s farmhouse. Fern’s car was still down at the harbour from last night and to have asked one of the hospital staff—or Jessie—for a ride would have choked her.
It was a half-hour walk. Fern kept off the road, knowing that Quinn would return this way from the airstrip.
She didn’t want to see Quinn Gallagher ever again.
Quinn might be able to take his marriage vows lightly but if he did that…If he did that then how much truth was there in what he told her?
Somehow she had given her heart to a base cheat who was playing with the emotions of two women.
Two?
Who knew? There might even be more. Who knew what was causing those shadows under Jessie’s eyes?
The girl looked haunted.
Fern thought back to the night before and mentally cringed. Quinn hadn’t even let Fern go when Jessie walked in on them and he had put Fern to bed with all tenderness while Jessie was forced to watch.
‘She doesn’t have much time for people,’ Quinn had said of his wife and Fern was starting to see why.
‘He’s a toad!’ she said savagely to a lone cow peering over a fence. ‘Toad, toad and double toad.’
The cow, heavy with calf and sleepy with the midday sun, closed her eyes and swayed as though she was in complete agreement.
How to get through the next few days?
How to persuade her aunt to leave the island?
There were no easy answers. Fern cleaned the house yet again for her uncle and then tackled his dry garden. The drought meant that there was no water for luxuries like watering the lawn so the front garden was a brown and dismal sight, but digging in the caked dirt was work suited to Fern’s bruised soul—no matter how useless.
Finally, towards evening, when her uncle had disappeared again to visit his wife Fern donned her bathing suit and headed to the beach.
Beneath the house was a tiny cove. ‘We had it put there just for you,’ Fern’s uncle had told her when Fern had first come to the island, and it was such a magic place—and so private—that Fern had almost believed him.
A tiny strip of soft white sand ran down to the water’s edge. Out to sea a shelf of rocks deflected the worst of the surf so what had formed was a huge, natural swimming pool. Fern never swam alone. There were masses of glittering subtropical fish swimming beside her every stroke she took.
There was usually other company and tonight was no exception. Out to sea a pair of dolphins rolled lazily in the swell and then nosed their way in to find out who was intruding in their territory. The presence of the dolphins meant that sharks kept well away and the fluorescence of the leaping dolphins in the moonlight was enough to make Fern almost weep with their beauty.
Even the dolphins couldn’t work their magic tonight, though.
Fern had come down here and swum and swum in the months after her parents’ death, searching for some comfort in the steady rhythm of surf and sea and the companionship of the same two dolphins who seemed to use this cove as their permanent base. They had soothed her finally—but it had taken years.
Would it take years now?
Fern swam for what seemed an hour, until the sun was just a flickering memory of fire on the horizon.
Finally, reluctantly, she turned to shore.
Quinn was waiting.
How long he had been there she couldn’t tell. He was sitting on the sand beside her towel, watching her with eyes that knew trouble when they saw it. His open-necked shirt was rippling in the soft night breeze, his jeans were rolled to the knees and his feet were bare.
His eyes never left Fern as she walked up the beach toward him.
Amazingly, there was compassion behind those dark eyes.
‘I thought you’d turn to a prune,’ he said gently, as she faltered and stopped. He stood and held out her towel. ‘You and Lizzy…You’re like fish…’
‘Why are you here?’
It was a flat accusation and it cut across the night like a whip.
‘I wanted to see you.’
‘Well, you’ve seen me,’ Fern snapped, snatching her towel from his hands and wrapping it round her wet bathing costume in a childish gesture of defence. ‘Now leave.’
‘What’s wrong, my Fern?’
‘I am not your Fern!’ Fern turned away from him and stalked two yards up the path toward the house but suddenly she stopped, fury surging. She wheeled back to face him, green eyes flashing fore. ‘How dare you make love to me, Quinn Gallagher? With Jessie present, even…How dare…?’
‘I know why I dared,’ Quinn said softly. He was watching her as a man might watch a dearly loved time bomb. He loved what he was seeing but he just knew that she was going to self-destruct.
So let her self-destruct…
‘You’re married to Jessie.’ As explosive as any bomb, Fern’s words shattered the peace of the cove. They echoed round and round them, awful in their truth.
There was a deathly silence.
‘That’s right,’ Quinn said finally, as though confessing to something he had no part of. ‘But that doesn’t mean…’
‘Doesn’t mean what?’ Fern asked in fury. ‘Doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit on the side—and I’m the bit? And is Jessie supposed to sit back and watch? No wonder she looks like she has ghosts haunting her, Quinn Gallagher. With you as a husband, who needs ghosts?”
‘Fern, you don’t understand.’ Quinn took a step towards her but Fern took a hasty step back. And another. ‘It’s just a marriage of convenience. Jess and L…We need to be married for all sorts of reasons—reasons I can’t explain—but we’re free to lead our own lives.’
‘Well, from where I stand,’ Fern said grimly, ‘that looks like a really, really good deal for Quinn Gallagher. And a lousy one for Jess. But it doesn’t matter, anyway, Dr Gallagher. I’m not the least bit interested in another woman’s husband—even if I was interested in you in the first place. You’ve made me feel dirty. Jessie’s lovely. She doesn’t deserve my betrayal—as well as her husband’s. You touch me once more and I’ll scream sexual harassment so loud you’ll hear it from the mainland. Now get off the beach before I start screaming.’
‘Fern, you don’t understand.’
‘No?’ Fern mocked, her anger building to the point where it was due to explode. ‘You’ve got your lines wrong, Dr Gallagher. It’s supposed to be “my wife doesn’t understand me”. Not “my latest floozie doesn’t understand me”.’
‘“Floozie”…’ Quinn’s voice was blank.
‘I can’t apologise deeply enough to Jess for what I let happen between us. But I’m telling you now, Quinn Gallagher, whatever I feel—whatever I felt—nothing is going to happen between us again. Ever.’
‘“Ever”, Fern?’ Quinn’s voice was suddenly almost as desolate as hers.
There was real pain in his voice.
It took an iron will not to step towards the pain in Quinn’s tone but somehow she found it.
‘“Ever”,’ Fern whispered bleakly and turned to walk up the beach.
The hundred yards until she was out of sight were the longest hundred yards she had ever walked.
Quinn didn’t follow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE news from Sydney the next morning was good.
Sam seemed on the way to recovery. He had tedious surgery in store to graft skin over the wound but his body was recovering from shock and his natural constitution of something akin to a very healthy ox was taking over.
Thanks to Quinn Gallagher’s meticulous cleansing of the wound, there seemed no sign of infection.
Fern found some relief in the news of Sam—but not so much as would lift the black cloud of depression hanging over her.
The next two days seemed to take for ever.
Fern drifted from home to hospital in aimless misery, learning Quinn’s clinic times and planning visits to her aunt purposefully to avoid him.
She was supposed to be on three weeks’ honeymoon. Therefore she had three weeks of idleness before her, even if she went back to Sydney.
With someone else looking after her job in Sydney, there was no justification for Fern to leave her aunt and uncle—especially when they seemed to need her so much.
As Fern expected, Maud was appalled that Fern’s engagement to Sam was off.
‘Mind, it never really felt right,’ she told her niece, gripping Fern’s hand in trembling fingers. ‘But I so hoped…’
‘You so hoped to see me married,’ Fern agreed. ‘But maybe marrying isn’t what I’m meant to do with my life.’ She told her aunt Sam’s logic—that Fern was clearly unsuitable because of her disinterest in drowning or poisoning—but it hardly cracked a smile.
‘There’ll be someone else in time.’ Her aunt sighed.
‘I just hope I’m alive to see it.’
‘You will be if you have this operation.’
‘I don’t know.’ Fern’s aunt sank back onto the pillows and a tear of hopelessness slid down the pillows. ‘I thought I might hold your wedding out as a bribe. I don’t know whether I can make you understand, Fern, but it felt like a sort of a bribe to me. If I agreed to the operation then nice things would happen as well as scary ones.’
‘They will,’ Fern said with asperity. ‘For a start, you’ll live.’
‘But that’s in the future.’ Her aunt sniffed at her crazy logic and shook her head. ‘I suppose you’ll talk me into it eventually,’ she whispered, ‘but for now…leave me be, Fern. I just want to sleep.’
She was growing weaker.
She should be in Sydney now, Fern thought bleakly, wishing that there was some way she could forcibly pick her aunt up and move her. Impossible. To take her without her full co-operation—without her calm acceptance of what was happening—would be to put more strain on her damaged heart. The results could be disastrous.
She left her aunt soon after.
‘Dr Gallagher wants to see you,’ Geraldine told Fern as she left her aunt’s room. ‘He asked you to wait.’
‘If Dr Gallagher wishes to discuss my aunt then he’d better do it with my uncle,’ Fern said bleakly, ‘because I don’t want to discuss anything at all with Dr Gallagher.’
She walked out with her head high and, ignoring Geraldine’s astonished look, climbed into her car and burst into tears.
Her nights were awful.
Fern took hours to drift into troubled sleep and the nightmares she had made it hardly worth the effort. When her uncle woke her that night it took a while to realise that his calls weren’t an extension of her dreadful dreams.
‘Fern!’
Her uncle’s voice finally penetrated the mist. Fern sat up in bed, fumbling for the light switch and for reality.
‘Fern!’ There was trouble in her uncle’s voice—and urgency.
Her aunt. Something was wrong with her aunt Even as Fern stumbled out of bed the nightmares cemented into certainty and she knew what the matter was. Her aunt had died and someone had telephoned from the hospital. She’d been so exhausted that she hadn’t heard…
By the time she reached the head of the stairs the horror inside her was a sick dread. Fern stared down the stairs at her uncle’s face in the hall light, waiting for confirmation.
It wasn’t there. Her uncle’s face didn’t reflect her horror.
It wasn’t Maud, then…
It was something urgent, but not with Al’s beloved wife.
‘What’s wrong?’ Fern managed, relief making her dizzy.
‘Fern, how do you feel about getting dressed and coming on a mercy mission?’
Fern shook the last strands of nightmare away with a visible effort.
‘A…mercy mission?’
‘Look, it may be nothing,’ her uncle confessed, ‘but I can’t help feeling a bit concerned…’
‘About my aunt?’
‘No.’ The elderly farmer shook his head. ‘Maybe I’m being a fool—but I was worrying about Maud and couldn’t sleep so I went down to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. You can see Bill Fennelly’s place from the kitchen. His light’s still on.’
‘So?’
Bill Fennelly was a neighbour, a man in his twenties, and he’d lived alone since his sister married. He was asthmatic, Fern remembered. His asthma was sometimes severe but the last time Fern had seen him he’d been well enough. Had she seen him the day of the wedding? She couldn’t remember. Maybe she hadn’t seen him since the last time she’d been home—twelve months ago.
‘I guess he’s just reading a good book,’ she suggested mildly but her uncle shook his head.
‘He’s been crook, Fern. He had pneumonia just before you came home. It took ages to clear. I know Doc Gallagher’s still worried about him, though. He checked him at home a couple of days ago and wanted to stick him in hospital but Bill wouldn’t have a bar of it. He’s fed up to the back teeth with being ill. And I saw him earlier tonight down at the store. He’s looking bloody awful—worse than Maud—and coughing fit to bust. Said he was going straight home to bed—but now the light’s still on.’
‘So he went to sleep with the light on.’
‘You don’t know Bill Fennelly,’ her uncle said darkly. ‘Comes from a very parsimonious line, does our Bill. No Fennelly known to man has ever gone to sleep with the light on.’
‘We could telephone,’ Fern said doubtfully. ‘It couldn’t hurt.’
‘I already have.’ Al Rycroft lifted his coat from the hook by the door. ‘There’s no answer. So I’m going over. I’d appreciate your company—but I’ll go alone if you won’t come.’
‘Oh, of course I’ll come.’ Fern took a deep breath. ‘Of course.’
Bill was an islander. The islanders looked after their own—and Fern was an islander as well.
Whether she liked it or not.
Bill’s house was locked and silent when they approached. Bill Fennelly was the only son of dour, strict parents and little had been wasted on luxuries. The farmhouse had always been bleak, though Fern noticed that a bright row of roses had been newly planted by the front door. Breaking out, our Bill, since his parents’ death.
They knocked and knocked again and then Al stood back and lobbed stones up at the bedroom window. No one appeared.
‘The man must be dead,’ Al said morosely. ‘The din we’ve made is enough
to wake an army.’
‘Maybe we should contact Quinn,’ Fern said uneasily.
‘Why?’ Al had disappeared into the dark back shed with his torch. Now he reappeared carrying a crowbar. ‘We have the means to get in and there’s a qualified doctor on hand. What more could we ask?’
‘That we know he’s home. Uncle, what are you intending to do with that thing?’
‘Smash the door in.’
‘And if he’s gone to his sister’s for the night because he’s not feeling well?’
Al paused. ‘You know, I never thought of that, Fern, girl,’ he said solemnly. ‘I hope you’re right. Guess I’ll help Bill fix the door in the morning if he’s done that.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to check first?’
‘Not now we’re here.’
He’d had enough talking. Al had decided to see for himself long before waking Fern and nothing was stopping him now.
He placed the crowbar against the lock and shoved. Then shoved again.
The old wood creaked a protest and then splintered into fragments as the door folded inwards.
Bill hadn’t gone to his sister’s.
He was lying on the kitchen floor, his face grey, and the floor tiles under his head were specked scarlet. He’d been coughing blood but he was almost past coughing now. Every breath was a frantic, rasping effort.
He was facing the door as they entered and Fern saw relief flooding through the fear.
Thank heaven for Al’s decisiveness.
‘What the hell’s wrong?’
Al bent over Bill and took his shoulder. ‘What is it, mate?’
Bill didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Al looked frantically up at Fern but Fern was raking the kitchen with her eyes. Most severe asthmatics had salbutomol, pump and nebuliser close at hand—in case. If ever there was an ‘in case’ this was it.
‘Where’s your stuff, Bill?’ she snapped across his dreadful breathing. ‘Here or in the bedroom?’
Bill rolled his eyes upward and then went on to fighting for all that mattered. His life.