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‘Thanks,’ he said softly.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and the impact of it was enough to make Kelly feel as though she had been winded and bruised by an unexpected blow.
‘I’d better go and talk to the mother,’ she said quickly, but he didn’t seem to hear her. He was too busy pushing a fine syringe into the damaged area of the child’s face with delicate precision even to notice Kelly’s departure.
Heart hammering, Kelly picked up the casualty card, rang through to the reception desk, and asked for the mother of Gemma Jenkins to be sent along to the doctor’s office.
She sat down, noticing dispassionately that her hands were actually trembling. She had never thought that she would see Randall ever again, she really hadn’t—or perhaps that had been wishful thinking. But even given the notoriously closely knit world of British medicine, she certainly hadn’t considered that just the merest glimpse of him, just the sound of that seductive mellifluous voice would be enough to shatter her composure and make her feel like the insecure seventeen-year-old she had been when she’d first met him.
She sighed. Nine long years ago. Where had they gone? Nine years of study, study, study and work, work, work.
And she had imagined that she had acquired a little sophistication on the way, had thought that she had become a little more worldly-wise. Was she going to let just the sight of Randall rip away all the complex layers of emotional maturity she had carefully constructed over the years?
Like hell she was!
There was a soft rap on the door, and Kelly instinctively sat upright in her chair, pulling her narrow shoulders back and arranging her features into a neutral expression.
‘Come in!’ she called.
Gemma’s mother had, predictably, brought the boyfriend in, clinging possessively on to his arm, as though he were the first prize in a raffle. He had lurid tattoos over every available inch of flesh and he stank of booze. Kelly swallowed down the feeling of revulsion, determined to remain impartial. She had been taught, over and over again, that emotionally involved doctors who made value judgements were simply not doing their jobs properly.
The mother could have been little more than twenty-two—a woman who looked little more than a girl herself. She’s younger than me, thought Kelly, with a jolt of surprise. And yet there was a grimy greyness to her complexion which told of a life lived inside, in high-rise blocks far away from the fresh air and the sunshine. She wore cheap, ill-fitting clothes. Her legs were pale and bare and she had squeezed her feet into tight, patent shoes, obviously new, though they were spattered with mud. On her heels she wore plasters where the shoes had obviously cut into her flesh. Her blonde hair was full of gel with little bits spiking upwards like a porcupine’s, and already the dark roots were an inch long. Stooping, sad and pathetic, she stared back at Kelly with blank, disillusioned eyes and Kelly cursed a society which could allow the cycle of deprivation which had made this woman into one of life’s losers. And would now probably do the same for her daughter.
She schooled her face into its listening expression. ‘Mrs Jenkins?’ she asked politely.
‘It’s Miss!’ interrupted the man. ‘That bastard didn’t bother marrying her when she had his kid.’
‘And your name is ...?’ prompted Kelly.
‘Alan,’ he swaggered. ‘Alan Landers.’
‘How’s ... how is Gemma?’ the woman asked, her voice a plaintive whine.
At last. ‘The doctor is suturing her face now,’ said Kelly briskly. ‘Given his skill, and the fact that your daughter is young enough to heal, well—we’re hoping for the best, but I have to warn you that she will have a scar, though the surgeon is doing his best to ensure that it will be as small and as neat as possible.’
She took a deep breath. The police would investigate, but the A & E department themselves would need details of what had happened. ‘Just for the record, would you mind telling me how it happened?’
Mr Landers screwed his face up into an ugly and menacing scowl. ‘Stupid kid was winding the dog up. That dog wouldn’t hurt no one.’
Refraining from pointing out the obvious flaw in his logic, Kelly thought that if she had been a man and not a doctor nothing would have given her greater pleasure than to punch this ignorant lout on the nose, but even if she had done, that wouldn’t have been the answer. He had probably grown up fighting violence with violence, and as soon as he was old enough had gone out and bought an aggressive dog as a kind of ferocious status symbol, supposed to demonstrate just how much of a man he was.
Kelly looked directly at the man. ‘Did you witness the attack?’
‘Nah.’
‘But it was your dog?’ persisted Kelly, her fountain-pen flying as she wrote on the casualty card.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you weren’t there when it attacked?’
‘That’s right,’ he said again.
Kelly had to bite back the incredulous question of how someone could leave a big, violent dog alone with a small child. ‘So where were you when the attack took place on Gemma?’
This provoked a raucous belly laugh. ‘In the bedroom,’ he leered, and his eyebrows lifted suggestively as his gaze dropped to Kelly’s breasts. ‘Want me to tell you what we was up to?’
‘That won’t be necessary, Mr Landers,’ said Kelly crisply. She turned to the woman and her totally vacant expression.
‘You do know, Miss Jenkins, that I’m going to have to call in Social Services?’
‘Do what?’ The grey-faced woman was on her feet at once. ‘And get some nosy-parker social worker sticking their oar in?’
Kelly looked at them both sadly. Didn’t they realise that if the child was deemed to be at serious risk she could be taken away from them? God forgive her, but in a way she wished that Gemma would be free of them, if she hadn’t also known that often children in care suffered from a different kind of neglect. ‘I am also going to have to report the injury to the police—’
‘What for?’ the man demanded belligerently.
Kelly put her pen down. ‘Because this category dog is supposed to be muzzled, Mr Landers—as I’m sure you know. It certainly shouldn’t have been left alone in a room with a toddler ...’ Kelly paused, recognising that, despite all her pep-talking to herself, she had done the unforgivable—she had sounded judgemental. But doctors were human too, and she wondered seriously whether anyone in their right mind could have stopped themselves from adopting a critical tone with a case of this sort.
But it was when the man stabbed an angry finger in front of her face that she realised that if she wasn’t careful, he really could turn nasty. She had better let him have his say. Even in her three short weeks in A & E, she had learnt that ‘verbalising your feelings’, as one of the social workers put it, also tended to defuse pent-up emotions.
Mr Landers’s face was contorted into an ugly mask. ‘You listen here to me, you little bitch—’
‘What’s going on in here?’ came a deep, aristocratic drawl.
The three of them looked at the door, where the tall, dark and rangy form of Randall Seton stood surveying them through narrowed eyes.
The man replied in time-honoured fashion. ‘Push off, you stuck-up git!’
There was a silence of about two seconds, and then Randall moved forward, his whole stance one of alert, healthy and muscular readiness. He radiated strength and he spoke with quietly chilling authority; but then, thought Kelly somewhat bitterly, that was the legacy of privilege too.
‘Listen to me,’ he said softly. ‘And listen to me carefully. Dr Hartley has just been caring for your daughter in Casualty. So have I. I’ve just stitched together the most appalling wound inflicted by an animal that I’ve ever seen, praying as I did so that it will leave as little scar tissue as possible. An anaesthetist is currently pumping air down into her lungs, because where the dog’s teeth ripped at her throat it caused such swelling that if an ambulance hadn’t been on the scene so promptly, her airway could have been obstructed and your daughter could have died from lack of oxygen.’
The mother gave an audible gasp of horror, as though the reality of what had happened had just hit her.
‘She is shortly going to be admitted to the children’s ward,’ he continued, ‘where she will be looked after by another series of staff. Now we’ve all been doing our job, because that’s what we’re paid to do and that’s what we chose to do. What we do not expect is to be criticised or insulted for doing just that. Have I made myself perfectly clear, Mr— Mr—?’ The dark, elegent eyebrows were raised in query, but there was no disguising the dangerous spark of anger which made the grey eyes appear so flinty. At that moment, he looked positively savage, thought Kelly, but he somehow managed to do it in a very controlled kind of way. But there again, Randall was the master of self-control, wasn’t he?
‘Landers,’ gulped the man. ‘Yes, Doctor. I understand.’
‘Good.’ Then the dark-lashed grey eyes swept over Kelly. ‘Can I see you for a minute?’
Nine years, she thought, slightly hysterically, and he asks can he see me for a minute. Breaking up with Randall—not that such a brief acquaintanceship really warranted such a grand-sounding title—had been the best thing which had ever happened to her. But she had often wondered, as women always did wonder about the first man who had made them dizzy with desire, just what would happen if they saw each other again. What would they think? What would they say?
She had never imagined such an inglorious reunion taking place in a tiny and scruffy little office in one of London’s busiest A & E departments, nor him saying something as trite as that.
He looked ...
Admit it, Kelly, she thought reluctantly. He looks like a dream. Every woman’s fantasy walking around in a white coat.
He was lightly tanned. Naturally, he was tanned; he was always tanned. In the winter he skied down the blackest runs in Switzerland, and in the summer he holidayed with friends around the Mediterranean on a yacht which he had owned since the age of eighteen. Nine years hadn’t added a single ounce of fat to that incredibly muscular body, honed to perfection by years of rigorous sport. The hair was as dark as ever, almost too black—a gypsy ancestor had been responsible for the midnight gleam of those rampant waves, he had once told her—sure!—and it curled and waved thickly around a neck which Michaelangelo would have died to sculpt.
She stared into eyes the colour of an angry sea, trying to equal his dispassionate scrutiny, trying to convince herself that it was just the shock of seeing him again which made her heart thunder along like a steam train. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that I’m busy just now taking a history.’
He gave her a cool smile, the flash in the grey eyes mocking her. ‘When you’ve finished, then?’
It would never occur to him to take no for an answer. ‘I’m afraid that I may be tied up for some time.’
He shrugged the broad shoulders. ‘In that case, I’ll chase you up when I’m out of Theatre.’ His eyes glittered. ‘I can’t wait.’ It sounded awfully like a threat.
She wanted to say, Why bother? What was the point? Instead she shrugged her shoulders indifferently—a gesture which deserved to win her an Oscar. ‘If you like,’ she answered coolly. And picked up her pen again.
‘And now, Miss Jenkins. If you’d like to give me a few more details ...’
She didn’t have time to think of him again during that shift; she was absolutely run off her feet. A middle-aged man came in on a stretcher with his leg badly broken in three places, and then a teenage girl was admitted with an overdose.
‘How many has she taken?’ Kelly asked her white-faced and trembling mother as she handed her the empty bottle.
‘Only ten. That’s all that was left in the box. She left a note. It said—’ and here the woman started sobbing helplessly ‘—said it was to pay me back. I wouldn’t let her go out last night, you see. Told her she had to revise for her exams, or she’d end up like me, Doctor, struggling just to survive.’
‘Ssssh,’ said Kelly softly, as she handed the sobbing woman a paper handkerchief. ‘Try not to distress yourself.’
‘She will be all right, won’t she, Doctor?’ asked the mother plaintively.
Kelly nodded, and answered with cautious optimism. ‘I’m confident that she’ll pull through. She’s in good hands now.’ Though it was lucky that the pills the girl had taken did not have any major side-effects.
She watched while the nurses, garbed in plastic gowns, gloves and wellington boots, put a wide tube into the girl’s mouth and worked it down into her stomach. Then they tipped a saline solution into it, and waited for her to start retching. The physical ignominy of this uncomfortable procedure would hopefully make the girl think very carefully about attempting such an overdose again, Kelly hoped. Because what had started out as an angry gesture could have ended up with such tragic consequences.
She had been working in Accident and Emergency for just three weeks, but already she had discovered that her job was as much social worker as doctor—if she allowed it to be. And, frankly, she didn’t have the time to allow it to be. The lives that people lived and the conditions in which they lived them sometimes made her despair, but there was little she could do to change anything, and accepting that had been a hard lesson.
It was seven o’clock by the time she finished, although she’d been due off at six. She had been held up with a cardiac arrest, and by the time she took her white coat off and washed her hands she was bushed, and could think of nothing she would like more than a hot bath, a good book, and an early night, particularly as she was not seeing Warren until tomorrow.
She set off for her room, through the winding corridors of St Christopher’s—one of London’s oldest and most revered hospitals. The main corridor was particularly impressive at night, and the ornately carved marble pillars dating back from a more prosperous time in the hospital’s history cast long and intricate shadows on the well-worn stones of the floor.
Kelly heard a sound behind her. A sound she knew so well.
Sounds echoed on this particular floor and foot-steps were normal in a hospital. Day and night, people moved in endless motion.
But Kelly stiffened, then remonstrated silently with herself. Of course she wouldn’t be able to recognise his footsteps. Not after nine years.
She turned round to face whoever was close behind her, as any sensible female doctor would.
And it was him.
‘Hello, Kelly,’ he said, his voice a deep, mocking caress, and Kelly felt herself thrill just to the sound of him speaking her name. He managed to make it sould like poetry, but he had always had the ability to do that.
And as she stared into eyes as silvery and as crystalline as mercury, nine years seemed just to slip away, like grains of sand running through her fingers.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_f83bf059-cc23-5328-a60c-d7d66e428a6d)
NINE summers ago Kelly had been in the first year of her school’s sixth form, studying science, and studying hard. When other students moaned about the rigorous demands of the syllabus they were expected to cover, Kelly did not. Her study had been hard fought for.
Not many students had to fight their parents to stay on at school—it was often the other way round—but Kelly’s parents simply had not been able to understand why she didn’t want to leave school at the earliest opportunity to start ‘bringing a bit of money in’, as they put it. Which, loosely translated, meant—certainly in the culture which Kelly had grown up in—to help boost her mother’s already meagre income, made even more meagre by her father’s liking for a drink and a bet on the horses. What they had expected for Kelly was a local shop or factory job. But Kelly refused to be condemned to a life of drudgery before getting married to a man like her father and having to scrimp and save and hide her money from him.
Kelly had tried to hide her bitterness at the lack of ambition in the Hartley household, knowing that any hint of rebellion would seal her fate. And she was lucky in two respects. The first was that she had been born with an outstanding intellect, and the second was that she had an absolute champion in her chemistry teacher—a Mr Rolls. Not only did his passion for his subject inspire her to work as hard as she possibly could, but through him she learned really to love the discipline of science.
If Mr Rolls had never achieved his full potential, he was determined that Kelly should not follow the same pattern. In his late thirties, he had never married, instead devoting all his energies to his students. It was Mr Rolls who spoke to Kelly’s dazed parents, told them that it would be a crime if she were not allowed to pursue higher education. It was he who allayed their financial fears by telling them that all sorts of grants were available for gifted students these days, and that they would not be asked to provide money they simply did not have. The only thing he did not discuss with them, at Kelly’s behest, was her ambition to become a doctor.
‘Time enough for that,’ Kelly told him firmly.
‘But why?’ He was genuinely non-comprehending.
She stared back at him, her large green eyes already wise beyond their years, in so many ways. ‘Because it will honestly be too much for them to take in all at once,’ she told him gently. ‘To tell them that I want to become a doctor would be like telling them that I want to fly to Venus!’
But she had felt as though if she spread her arms she really could fly to Venus that August evening, as she walked up the gravelled drive of the enormous country house for the summer school in science which Mr Rolls had insisted she attend. He had even arranged for the school governors to sponsor the trip.
‘And Seton House is in the heart of the country,’ he told her smilingly. ‘Do you good to get out of London for a bit—put a bit of colour in your cheeks.’
Kelly had never seen such a beautiful place in all her life as Seton House. It was not quite as impressive as Hampton Court Palace, which she had visted on a trip with the Brownies years ago, but it came a pretty close second, with its sweeping manicured lawns in the most dazzling shade of emerald, and its carefully clipped yew trees, and its parklands.
She stared up at the house, slightly fearful of knocking, when at that moment the vast door opened and a man in his early twenties came running lightly down the steps, saw her, stopped, and smiled. He had thick, black hair and the longest pair of legs she had ever seen.
‘Well, hello!’ His eyes were sparkling—fine grey eyes with exceptionally long black lashes—as they looked Kelly up and down with open appreciation.
That summer she had grown used to the stares from men; it had been a liberating summer in more ways than one. She had grown her hair, so that it rippled in dark red waves all the way down her back, and the faded jeans and T-shirt which every student wore emphasised the slim curve of her hips, the gentle swell of her burgeoning breasts. If men ogled her, she soon put them in their place. But somehow she didn’t mind this man looking one bit. It gave her the chance to look at him, and he was, without exception, the most delectable man she had ever set eyes on. ‘Hello,’ she answered. ‘Who are you?’
He grinned. ‘Well, actually I’m wearing two hats this week.’
Kelly blinked. ‘Excuse me? Your head is bare.’
His eyes narrowed, and he laughed—the richest, deepest, most mesmerising sound she could imagine. ‘Sorry. What I mean is that I’m one of the medical students running the course, and I ...’ And then his gaze fell to the cheap and battered old suitcase she was clutching, and his eyes softened. ‘Come inside. You must be tired after your journey. Here, let me carry your bags for you,’ and he took them from her without waiting for her assent. ‘Come with me. I’ll show you to your room. You’re the first to arrive. We weren’t expecting anyone until this evening.’
‘I—caught the early train,’ faltered Kelly, as she followed him up the steps leading to the house. The cheaper train, the bargain ticket, planning to kill time looking around the village of Little Merton. Except that when she had arrived in Little Merton there had been absolutely nothing to see, so she had come straight on up to the house. ‘I can always go away and come back later,’ she ventured.
‘What to do? There’s not a lot to see in Little Merton!’
‘So I noticed,’ remarked Kelly drily, and he turned his head to stare down at her again, giving her another of those slow smiles. She wondered if he knew just how attractive those smiles were—he must do!
Kelly followed him into the vast entrance hall, with him still holding her bags. No one had ever carried her bags for her before; in her world, women struggled with the heavy items, like pack-horses for the most part. She rather liked this show of masculine strength, and of courtesy. It made her feel fragile and protected, and rather cherished.
She stared around the hall. She had never imagined that a place could be so large and so beautiful, without being in the least bit ostentatious. There was none of the over-the-top gold scrolling which had abounded in Hampton Court. Instead, just an air of quiet loveliness, and the sensation of continuity down through the ages, of treasures being treasured and passed on for the next generation to enjoy.
‘It’s quite perfect,’ said Kelly simply.
He looked down at her. ‘Isn’t it?’ he said quietly. ‘I’m glad you like it.’
It didn’t occur to her to ask why. She just assumed that, like her, he had an eye for beautiful things.
He showed her upstairs to her room, decorated in a striking shade of yellow with soft sage-green fittings. It was just like being at the centre of a daffodil, thought Kelly fancifully.
