.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ She wanted to help James just as she did with any friend or relative of a critically ill patient—and to do that, it would help to know.

      ‘Who is she, James?’

      It took till they were in the lift and heading upwards toward ICU for James to answer.

      ‘She’s my ex-wife.’

      CHAPTER THREE

      MAY HADN’T SEEN that one coming. Oh, she knew they all had pasts but she’d been working with James since he’d come to the department on his emergency rotation as a senior house officer, had known him since he’d been fresh faced out of his internship, yet never once had he mentioned that he was or had been married.

      For James, that walk to ICU was the longest of his life. Stuck in his office these past few hours, he’d almost prepared himself for her death. He had tried not to think of what would be going on in the resuscitation room. He had just thought about her and felt strangely grateful that Lorna was here in London, that he could be with her now if that door opened and May told him they were stopping the resuscitation attempt.

      Yet she’d made it through that, and now he must make it through this.

      It felt strange to buzz the intercom and ask for permission to enter, only not as a doctor this time, to have to wash his hands and sit in a little side room as May spoke with the nursing staff.

      ‘They’re just settling her in.’ May clucked like an old hen when she returned, pouring him a cup of water from the little sink in the relatives’ room. ‘You’ll need to turn off your mobile here, before you go in.’

      He pulled it out, saw that there were eight missed calls and he hadn’t even heard the phone ring.

      Ellie. He glanced at the clock on the wall. He was supposed to have been there hours ago. He turned off his phone and used the one on the table beside him, listening to it ring and her irritated voice when she realised who it was.

      ‘Hi, Ellie.’ He tried to keep his voice vaguely normal. ‘Look, obviously I’m not going to be able to make it tonight.’ He heard her strained sigh and glanced up at May, who was pretending not to listen. ‘No, it’s not work…’ He raked a hand through his hair, took a breath and continued, ‘You know I told you about Lorna…’ His words were met with silence. ‘Well, she’s had an accident. She’s here at the hospital in Intensive Care. There’s no one else here for her yet.’

      He glanced over to May, who must have read the ‘Please Wash Your Hands’ sign about twenty times now.

      ‘No.’ James said, and then ‘No,’ again. ‘Look I’d really rather just deal with this on my own. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

      ‘Ellie.’ James said, when May sat down.

      ‘Your girlfriend?’ May asked, because even though she never usually would, she was here tonight as a friend and colleague and she was also treating him as a relative of a patient, trying to piece it all together so that she could help him best. ‘So she knows about Lorna.’

      ‘I told Ellie about Lorna a couple of months ago. We were starting to get a bit more serious. I thought it was right…’ His voice trailed off.

      ‘You were married to Lorna?’ May checked. ‘For how long?’

      ‘Not even a year.’ He could have stopped there. A year wasn’t long after all and it had been a decade ago. It should all be neatly relegated to the past, only he’d never quite managed to do that, had never been able to add a neat full stop to that chapter in his life and move on. He’d tried, though, over and over he’d tried, but that year with Lorna had been a roller-coaster ride from start to finish and he felt as if he were back on it again. He’d wondered sometimes at the ease with which patients gave the most personal details, had decided there was this need to make sense of the life the doctors and nurses were fighting for, to make that person real and warm and perhaps, a need to put things into frantic perspective. He had been right, because here he was doing the same now, trying to match up that limp lifeless patient with the person he knew or, rather, had known.

      ‘She was a couple of years younger than me,’ James explained. ‘She seemed a strange little thing, very prim and shockable, or she was when we were at medical school. She never came to many of the social things, but she always stood out.’

      ‘With her hair?’ May smiled, but James shook his head.

      ‘There are plenty of redheads in Scotland. I don’t know May, she just always stood out for me, sort of stood apart. I was a bit fascinated by her, I guess. And then one night there was a party and she was there…’ He even smiled at the memory, his face ashen but still he smiled in recall. ‘She just blew me away, we couldn’t stop talking. We’d known each other vaguely for a while yet that night it was as if we’d met each other for the first time. We went to bed that night. She’d never slept with anyone before…’ He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. ‘But there was no question in my mind that she’d ever sleep with anyone but me again. I was crazy about her. We spent the next two weeks in bed, not just that, talking, studying, May it was the best two weeks of my life. It was crazy, it was wild, but it made perfect sense at the time.’

      ‘And then what?’

      James didn’t answer straight away. He stared up at the clock that must surely have stopped, because if felt as if they’d been sitting in there for hours. Felt as if he was living it again after all these years.

      ‘Let’s just find out!’ Normally calm and practical, he needed to be even more so here, James had realised, because Lorna was a mess. Handing her the little paper bag with the pregnancy test kit he had bought, he remembered guiding her to the bathroom, but at the door she baulked.

       ‘You don’t understand…’

      ‘Lorna!’ He was getting exasperated now. For two days she’d been panicking that her period was late, two days of anguish, which, over and over he had pointed out, might be unnecessary—they had been careful. ‘Let’s just find out first if there really is anything to worry about.’

      He’d sounded so calm and practical, but sitting outside the bathroom in his junior doctors residence flat, he had been nervous. He’d just started his internship, had just moved out of student accommodation, and was finally starting to earn some money—and now this! As careful as they had been…well, they’d barely been out of bed, and… He closed his eyes and blew out a breath, trying not to think about how they could have been a bit more careful. Well, they would be in the future, James had decided. She hadn’t wanted to go on the Pill in case her parents found out, which James had found bizarre! Well, they’d have to sort something out, they couldn’t go through this each month.

       They wouldn’t have to.

      Her sobs from the bathroom told James before he even went in that there would be no second chances. Holding her sobbing body, he tried to comfort her, to tell her it would be okay, that they would sort something out, that they would get through this, only she was beyond comfort.

      And as he held her late into the night, only then did the realisation hit that she wasn’t worried about her career, or her future, or how a baby СКАЧАТЬ