Healing Her Emergency Doc

by Caroline Anderson

  He put the rasp down. Well, no, he threw it down, and got to his feet with a growl. ‘What do you want, Laura?’

  She walked up to him and stood on the doorstep. No way was she going to back down, not when he was in this state. ‘I want you to talk to me,’ she said gently. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The optometrist.’

  He looked away, and she could see a muscle jumping in his jaw. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s rubbish.’ She stepped over the heap of sawdust and wood shavings and looked at the door, shook her head in disbelief and closed it behind her. ‘What on earth are you doing to this poor door?’

  ‘Making it fit.’

  ‘No, you’re destroying it,’ she said, and picked up the rasp, threw it back in the bag with the other tools and shook her head again.

  ‘I made supper. I’m guessing you haven’t eaten.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Tom, stop it. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not leaving you like this. Come on, come home with me and let’s have something to eat and talk it over.’

  ‘I don’t need to talk to you.’

  ‘Well, who are you going to talk to?’ She took him by the shoulders and stared into his eyes. ‘I’m the only person here that you know, and you look to me like a man who needs a friendly shoulder right now, so here it is. No strings.’

  She saw him swallow, saw a flicker of emotion in those deep slate eyes before he blanked it. ‘Laura, I’m fine—’

  ‘Don’t lie, Tom. You told me you never lie to me, so don’t start now. What did they say?’

  He held out for several seconds, but she didn’t back down, and eventually his shoulders dropped.

  ‘I’ve got a referral,’ he said.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘She found something. Spots. Dark spots, round the edge of my retinas. And my peripheral vision is patchy.’

  She closed her eyes briefly, drew in a slow breath and let it go. ‘There could be all sorts of reasons for that,’ she said, but there was only one she could think of, and one of the first symptoms was night blindness. And he’d tripped over the kerb in the dark the night they’d gone for dinner, said he hadn’t seen it. And if he had retinitis pigmentosa...

  ‘Such as?’

  She looked up at him, and his face was taut with suppressed emotion. Oh, Tom...

  She dropped her hands and looked away. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen the scans, I’m not a specialist, I don’t know anything about eyes.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You know enough to know that’s the typical presentation of RP, and if I have that it’s going to get worse and worse until eventually I might lose much or all of my sight, and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it.’

  ‘But you don’t know that you’ve got it until you’ve had the referral. You’re jumping the gun. Come on, get in the car and come back with me before the chicken gets stone cold. We can talk about it there.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  She smiled at him and kissed his cheek, swallowing down the tears that were threatening in the wings. ‘That’s fine, you don’t have to. We can talk about something else. You can tell me why you left London.’

  He gave a huff of humourless laughter. ‘Yeah, because that’s so much better.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I know nothing about it, so why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why should I? Just because we were friends once doesn’t mean I want to spill my guts to you. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘So? I didn’t want to talk about my mother last night, but I did. And you know what? It helped. So shut up whinging, get in the car and let’s at least eat before we both die of hunger.’

  ‘I’m fixing the door.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘you’re not. You’re trashing it, Tom. You’re not in the right frame of mind to tackle it properly, and you need to leave it alone while there’s still a door left to fix. Tomorrow’s another day. Come on.’

  She opened the door and stood there, and he shook his head, gave a short huff of what might just have been laughter and picked up his keys.

  ‘You’re a nag, do you know that?’

  ‘Yup. Come on.’

  He shut the door, got into her car and sat, arms folded, staring straight ahead while she drove him back to her house.

  He followed her in, and Millie greeted him at the door like a long-lost friend, and she saw his face contort a little. ‘Hello, sweetie,’ he murmured, and bent down to stroke her. ‘You’re a good girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘She is a good girl. She’s also a flirt. Come on through to the kitchen. It’s all ready.’

  She headed for the kitchen and then realised he wasn’t following her, so she went back and found him standing open-mouthed in the archway that led to the study.

  Grumps had had it fitted floor to ceiling with beautiful bespoke library shelves, all of them full, and everyone was stunned by it so she wasn’t surprised to see that Tom was, too. She was just a little surprised by what he said.

  ‘This is incredible,’ he murmured, his voice sounding slightly awed. ‘I’ve never seen so many books in one house before—well, apart from ours. My mother’s an antiquarian bookseller and my father’s an avid reader, so home’s always naturally been overrun with books, but not like this. This is...’

  He lifted a hand towards the spine of one of the oldest books, his hovering fingers an inch away, almost reverently. ‘Have you had them valued?’

  ‘No. I haven’t done anything with anything. I don’t even know where to start. He used to say there were ten thousand of them, but I have no idea and life’s too short to count them. And anyway, they’re his. It’s where I sit when I want to be near him, which is one reason I liked working in the library at college, and frankly I don’t really want to touch them. I love it like it is.’

  ‘You should get an insurance valuation.’

  ‘Maybe. I suppose some of them might be worth something, not that I’ll sell them. There are some rare first editions, apparently, but I have no idea where. He showed them to me ages ago, when I was at uni, and told me one day they’d be mine. To be honest I wasn’t that interested back then, it was too far in the future to think about, and then it was too late.’

  She sucked in a breath and slid open the pocket door that led to the dining room. ‘Come on, the chicken will be freezing. Let’s eat.’

  * * *

  Tom pushed away his plate and smiled at her ruefully. ‘That was lovely. Thank you. I’m sorry I was such a grump.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You had a good excuse. Would you like a coffee?’

  ‘That would be great, thanks. It’s been quite a day.’

  ‘So it seems. What made you make the appointment?’

  He shrugged. ‘What you said after we’d had dinner back in February, when I tripped over the kerb. It wasn’t the first time I’d stumbled in the dark, and it wasn’t the last. It just made me think I should get it checked out. I’d been telling myself for ages it was nothing, just eye strain or whatever, but I was in denial.’

  ‘You still don’t know for sure,’ she reminded him gently, and he nodded.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. I don’t. My grandmother used to say something about not borrowing trouble. Maybe she had a point.’

  She spooned ground coffee into the cafetière and poured boiling water on it, and he sat at the table with Millie’s head on his lap, stroking her and tugging her ears gently and murmuring sweet nothings while she gazed up at him adoringly and Laura poured the coffee and tried not to cry.

  ‘Millie, you’re a hussy. Let’s go and sit in the garden. She loves fossicking around in the undergrowth. I think it should be warm enough. Do you want me to put the outside lights on?’

  ‘No, you’re fine,’
he said, but then he missed the step in the fading light and she felt a jolt of fear for him. Oh, Tom...

  ‘Are you OK? I’m sorry, I should have warned you about the step. Let me put the lights on.’

  ‘No, leave it. I’ll be better in a few minutes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. Don’t fuss. It’s not that bad.’

  She wasn’t sure if he was telling her the truth, but there was something lovely about sitting there with the twilight wrapped around them like a cloak, oddly intimate and comforting. She turned to look at him in the semi-darkness.

  He was motionless, staring out across the garden, his face set in stone, and she felt a pang of guilt. She should have put the lights on, but maybe he’d be more likely to talk to her if they couldn’t see so well.

  ‘Tom?’

  He turned his head, his mouth tilting a little into a smile that broke her heart. ‘You’re right. It’s nice out here. Peaceful.’

  ‘It is. It was my grandfather’s favourite place. We sat here a lot, especially after his stroke when he couldn’t get out any more.’

  ‘Couldn’t he use a mobility scooter?’

  ‘No, he couldn’t. Not with Millie. She wouldn’t have been able to guide him.’

  ‘Guide him?’

  ‘Yes—he was blind. I thought you knew that? He went blind years ago.’

  He stared at her blankly. ‘I didn’t know he was blind. All those books. What a waste. And Millie?’ He looked down at her head on his lap, his hand resting gently on it, stroking her lovingly. ‘Millie’s a guide dog?’

  ‘Yes. Well, she was. She’s ten now, and they retire at about nine or ten, so he was allowed to keep her after he had his stroke because I was with him, and then when he died I said I’d keep her with me and they were OK with it because I’d known her for years and she’s happy with me.’

  She could see the shock on his face still as he took all that in. ‘How did he cope? When he went blind? Was it sudden?’

  She shrugged. ‘No, it wasn’t. He had macular degeneration and it was so gradual at first that he had time to adapt.’

  ‘Like RP,’ he said slowly, and she felt her heart pick up.

  ‘A bit, but it progressed quite rapidly and because he’d had the odd mini stroke he wasn’t able to have the injections they wanted to give him, so by the end he couldn’t see anything well enough to identify it really.’

  ‘And Millie? When did he get her?’

  ‘While I was at uni, just before my final year.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  She smiled. ‘We weren’t really talking much then. Anyway, he went on the waiting list for a guide dog once he couldn’t manage any more, and he got Millie six months later, when she was two, and they bonded instantly. She took him everywhere safely for nearly seven years, bless her. Unlike RP where it’s a long time before the central vision goes, if it ever does, he’d lost his central vision completely by the time he got her, but he still retained some peripheral vision which helped him with navigation but just meant he couldn’t read or see what he was doing. At least with RP you can still see to read facial expressions almost to the end, but he’d lost that long ago.’

  He grunted. ‘For someone who knows nothing about eyes, you seem to know a lot about it.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You do. I reckon you knew exactly what it was when I told you what the optometrist said.’

  She felt a twinge of guilt. ‘No. I knew what it could be, but I didn’t want to compound it with an uneducated off-the-cuff diagnosis. I wanted to support you, to stop you worrying overly before you needed to, because it could be something else, Tom. You still don’t know for sure.’

  She heard him huff dismissively. ‘I do know, and so do you, and anything less than facing that reality is clutching at straws. And I don’t need your support. I’m fine.’

  She let out a tiny, shaky sigh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘You’re right, and anyway, it’s none of my business.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t need to, Tom. I’m just presuming on our old friendship, and I probably shouldn’t do that. Like last night. I was a bit judgemental about the way you were at uni. That wasn’t any of my business, either.’

  She saw his mouth tilt into a wry smile. ‘I don’t know. I pretty much made it your business. And yes, you were, but I can see why now, with your mother being like that. For the record, I did have a couple of short relationships while we were there.’

  ‘You did? When?’

  ‘Early on. But they wanted more than I did, and a few dates in they were leaving a toothbrush next to mine and spare underwear in the drawer. It was the thin end of the wedge, angling for moving in, and there was no way I wanted that, not at that point in my life.’

  ‘Other people did. Lots of them coupled up.’

  ‘I know, and most of them uncoupled again over the course of the next five years with all sorts of emotional fallout, and of the ones that didn’t most of them have split up by now. Life’s tough as a junior doctor, and I just didn’t want the hassle. I was too young to settle down, I knew I had years ahead of me of moving from job to job in different cities, which is incredibly disruptive. I wasn’t ready.’

  She blew on her coffee and eyed him over the top of it. ‘That was years ago, though, so what’s your excuse now?’

  She searched his eyes, but she couldn’t read them any longer in the dim light, and then he looked away and shrugged. ‘I’ve come close. Only the once, but that was enough, and it was definitely a mistake.’ He hesitated, shrugged again, and looked back at her. ‘Still, it’s done now and I’ve moved on.’

  Done now? ‘Is that why you left London? Not that you have to tell me...’

  He smiled again and nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. It was one of the reasons. Karen was working in the same hospital as me and she’d moved in with me, we’d talked about buying a house together, so I put my flat on the market and my boss wanted to buy it because it was so handy, so it was ideal. And by then I wanted to get out of London, move somewhere rural, somewhere cleaner and less crowded, somewhere like this, but I was working crazy hours, so was she, so we didn’t do anything about finding new jobs. To be honest we hardly saw each other for weeks, so we just didn’t have time. And then at the end of January, after my seventh fourteen-hour night shift in a row, I went home and found Karen in bed with him. Our bed.’

  ‘With your boss?’

  ‘Yeah. The one buying my flat because it was so handy. A bit like your mother and your boyfriend. People you trust—only you can’t. I guess we both learned that the hard way.’

  ‘Oh, Tom.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘Yeah. And even then she didn’t tell me the truth. She tried to explain it away by saying he’d missed the last train so she’d let him stay over.’

  ‘In your bed?’

  ‘Well, exactly. We had a sofa bed in the lounge, he could have slept on that, but it was all lies. It had probably been going on behind my back for months. I think they’d planned the whole thing, including him buying the flat.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  He gave a bitter little laugh that made her ache for him. ‘I told him if he upped his offer he could have the flat immediately with all its contents, including Karen, and I handed in my notice and told him I’d be taking payment for all my holiday and time in lieu and leaving at the end of March with a damn good reference, and if he didn’t want the Board to know what he’d been doing he’d better make sure it happened. Then I looked for jobs, found this one, phoned and spoke to James because I’d just missed the deadline, zapped him over my CV and he tacked me on the interview list. The rest, as they say, is history.’

  She tried to smile, but she was still shocked at how his girlfriend had treated hi
m. ‘How could she? How could she do that to you—to anyone?’

  He shrugged again. ‘We were never there at the same time, our sex life was practically non-existent, and she told me she was lonely. But apparently I was better in bed, if it was any consolation.’

  Laura felt her eyes widen. ‘She actually said that to you?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. She actually said that. I told her it was her loss. We haven’t spoken since.’

  ‘Oh, Tom. I’m so sorry. How could she do that to you? Didn’t she care about you at all?’

  ‘Apparently not. Turns out I was no more than a meal ticket, and Adrian was paid more. So how about you? How come you’re still alone?’ he asked, and she swallowed.

  ‘I wasn’t. Not until I moved back here. I had a boyfriend—Pete. I was living with him, and Grumps had had a couple of very minor strokes, but then he had another at the beginning of March and couldn’t really look after himself, and I couldn’t bear the thought of him going into a home. He would have found it so disorientating without his sight, and he’d taken such good care of me when I needed him, and it would have meant him losing Millie which would have broken his heart, so I chucked in my job in Nottingham and came here to look after him, and that was the end of it for me and Pete. I started doing a few locum shifts which was a bit of a lifeline, and I got to spend lots of time with Grumps, and I wouldn’t change a second of it. Well, except the end, of course. That was...’

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, warm and gentle, a little squeeze for comfort, and she laid her fingers over his and he curled them into his palm and held them.

  ‘Gosh, we’re cheery tonight,’ she said after a long moment, and gave herself a little mental shake. ‘Tell me about your mother. She sounds interesting.’

  He chuckled softly, the sound wrapping round her in the darkness. ‘Where do I start? She’s a great mum in a lot of ways, but she’s a bit of a workaholic and she spends a huge amount of time in her bookshop researching stuff and repairing old books. She’s very talented and very interesting. I think she and your grandfather would have got on well.’