Page 23 of Lessons in Love at the Cornish Country Hospital

‘Which hospital did you say you were at before?’ She set down the cardboard cups she’d brought back from a quick coffee run to the Friends of St Piran’s shop. Eve had offered to go when Danni had asked if anyone wanted a drink, but there was only so much taking it easy she could do.

‘Jimmy’s. I stayed on after my training.’ Eve’s face had taken on a slightly wistful look. Jimmy’s was an affectionate nickname for Leeds General Infirmary, an internationally renowned teaching hospital, which was a world away from somewhere like St Piran’s. It made Danni’s next question an obvious one.

‘What made you want to come down here?’

‘The quiet life.’ The way Eve said it, with an upward inflection at the end, made it sound more like a question than an answer. As if she was testing whether anyone would believe her. But Danni had harboured her own secret reasons for leaving behind a job in a busy London hospital and taking refuge on the Cornish Atlantic coast, none of which had anything to do with wanting a quiet life. At this stage of her career, if Eve was ambitious, there probably couldn’t have been a better place for her to work than Jimmy’s, so there had to be more to it than wanting a life by the sea. Danni wasn’t going to push her for an explanation, though; it was none of her business if Eve didn’t want to share the real reason. And the truth was, she was just grateful to have her new colleague on board. Jimmy’s loss was almost certainly St Piran’s gain.

‘I don’t think our jobs are ever going to give us the quiet life.’ Danni smiled. ‘But it’s certainly a beautiful place to live. I love being able to take the dogs out on a walk along the cliffs after work, or going in for a swim whenever the mood takes me. I was at King’s College Hospital before I came here, and I thought I’d miss the city life, but I wouldn’t trade this for the world.’

‘So you’d never want to go back?’ Eve’s eyebrows shot up, half-disappearing behind her fringe. Clearly she wasn’t so certain that she wanted to stay.

‘I thought I might want to at first and I even contemplated it in my first year here. I think it’s because of the reasons I came in the first place. I was in a bit of a toxic relationship with a colleague, that wasn’t really even a relationship in the propersense, but it was still messing with my head and stopping me from getting on with my life.’ Danni shrugged; it was funny how easy it was to talk about all those wasted years trailing around after Lucas and hoping that her best friend would fall out of love with him, so that they could be together in the way she’d been convinced they were meant to be for so long. But it had all been an illusion. She’d never really loved Lucas, and he’d certainly never loved her, he’d just been an incredibly skilled manipulator. She thanked God every day that it was her love for Esther, which had always been far stronger than the illusion of loving Lucas, that had stopped her crossing a line she would have regretted forever. She wasn’t embarrassed to talk about what had happened, even with a new colleague. Everyone in St Piran’s seemed to know the story anyway, so it was best that Eve heard it from her. It might also make her more wary if her path crossed with Lucas’s, because a beautiful young woman who was homesick for her old life, and who might be a bit vulnerable as a result, would be just the sort of person he’d hone in on. ‘Then he decided to follow me to Cornwall and I thought about heading back to London, but I love living here, and the friends I’ve made since I started at the hospital are great. There’s a sense of community here too that I never found in London. This is my home and it’s where I met Charlie, so it feels like our place too. And it’s definitely where we want to raise our son.’

‘I can see the appeal of all of that, but I’d never have left Leeds if it hadn’t been for…’ Eve hesitated for a moment, her breath seeming to catch in her throat before she continued. ‘My fiancé was brought up around here, and he needed to move back to be closer to his parents. So of course I came with him.’

‘But your heart is still in Leeds?’ As Danni asked the question, she didn’t need to wait for a response, it was written all over Eve’s face even before she nodded. ‘You can always go back. No decision about your career is forever unless you want it to be.’

‘I hope so.’ Eve seemed to shake herself, then she smiled. ‘But the decision about how long I stick around might well hang on just how good or bad this coffee turns out to be.’

‘It’s lucky Danni got them from the hospital shop and not the vending machine then, or you’d probably be handing in your notice by the time you’d finished it.’ Aidan marched towards them, clearly having caught the tail end of their conversation. ‘The good news is, if you know where to go, you can get just as good a vanilla latte in Port Kara as you can anywhere else. And I really need a decent coffee right now.’

‘Tough night?’ Danni looked at Aidan, who had dark circles under his eyes and a lot more stubble on display than he usually did, which suggested either a change of image, or that he’d started his day in a bit of a hurry.

‘We had a call from Ellen last night. She’d had a bit of spotting.’ Aidan shook his head. ‘Jase went into full panic mode and to be honest I wasn’t much better. So the pair of us got in the car and drove an hour and a half to meet her at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth. She didn’t want to go into the Early Pregnancy Unit without us, because she couldn’t face it alone if she’d lost the baby. By the time they called us in, I’d convinced myself it was over. I think it was the only way I could cope, facing the worst head on before I even got the news.’

‘Oh Aidan, you shouldn’t even be here.’ Tears were pricking Danni’s eyes, and she couldn’t believe he’d come in to work, but he was shaking his head again.

‘It’s okay, they saw a heartbeat. Can you believe it? A tiny flickering little sign that our baby wants to stay around to meet us. Neither of us could sleep when we got in, we were so excited.’ Aidan smiled and his whole face was transformed, the joy of discovering that the baby was hanging in there so obvious that even a relative stranger like Eve seemed touched by the moment.

‘Oh congratulations, that’s amazing.’ Her voice sounded thick with emotion, but Danni was struggling to get any words out at all. Instead, she hugged him hard for at least twenty seconds, before she let him go and was finally able to respond.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you take the day off?’

‘Because that would have ended up with you taking on even more work, and I’m not having that.’ Aidan wagged a finger at her and grinned. ‘You know there’s not an agency nurse on the planet who can match up to me.’

‘That’s true, in more ways than I can count.’ Danni laughed at the look of mock outrage on her friend’s face, seconds before the red phone started to ring, notifying them that a trauma call was on the way. ‘Looks like it’s just as well I’ve got the A team on today.’

‘I’m on it already, boss.’ Aidan gave her a mock salute, and moved to answer the call. There was a serious emergency on the way and, until it was dealt with, that was where the focus of everyone involved needed to be.

The trauma call was for a thirty-year-old male called Freddie Summers who’d fallen over twenty feet whilst working on the roof of a building. He’d been unconscious at the scene and incoherent following the accident. The paramedics had stabilised him, he’d been intubated and sent in for a scan almost as soon as he’d arrived at the hospital. Shortly after the call about Freddie, there’d been another trauma alert, this time about a road traffic accident involving several casualties, and the plan for Danni to stick to light duties had to be put on hold. Eve had proven every bit as adept at coping with the drama of amore serious situation as Danni had hoped she’d be, but they’d barely had a chance to talk for almost two hours. Freddie was still in the department with his family at his bedside, awaiting a space in theatre and ITU, where he’d need to go as soon as a bed became available. The scan had shown a severe head injury, which looked as if it could be life changing for both Freddie and his loved ones, and Danni just hoped the neurosurgeon would be able to do something that would make a significant difference, although sadly not even the most skilled surgeon could perform miracles.

She was on her way back through the department, and finally able to catch her breath, when she spotted Eve coming out of one of the cubicles. She was just about to call out to her new colleague, who was about twenty feet ahead of her, to check how she was doing, when Freddie’s heavily pregnant wife, Lauren, who they’d met when he was admitted, suddenly appeared in the corridor in front of Eve.

‘He’s not going to get better, is he?’ There were tears streaming down the young woman’s face, her mascara creating rivers of black as she stood in front of Eve, desperate for an answer that could give her some hope. But Eve seemed to have frozen to the spot.

‘Do you even care!’ Lauren began hammering her hands on Eve’s chest, but she still didn’t react, even as Danni caught up with them.

‘That’s not going to help anyone.’ Catching hold of one of Lauren’s arms, Danni had to weave her head to one side to avoid being struck by the woman’s other fist as it flew upwards. But then all the fight seemed to go out of her.

‘No one’s doing anything. He’s just lying there getting worse and worse, and you’re letting him.’ She was sobbing so hard it was difficult to make out what she was saying, but Danni foldedher into her arms, the two of them standing awkwardly bump to bump, as Eve remained rooted to the spot.

‘He’s being kept stable, and he’ll be taken into surgery as soon as there’s a theatre available. It will be within the next hour.’ It was a promise Danni could make, because she’d been there when Freddie’s options were discussed, and the team had considered whether transferring him to another hospital might get him into surgery sooner. In the end, the decision had been taken for him to stay at St Piran’s, because the air ambulance had been on another job when the emergency services had been called, and there were no beds available in the nearest specialist units. There was only a very small neuro-surgical team who operated out of St Piran’s, but they’d been able to call enough members of the team in. That didn’t make the waiting any less hellish for his family.

Isla and Aidan had rushed towards Danni, clearly worried that something was going to kick off. But she silently mouthed over Lauren’s shoulder that it was okay, and they backed off, watching from a distance, ready to step in if she needed them.

‘I can’t do this on my own, I can’t have this baby by myself. I need Fred, we’re a team and if he’s, if he’s…’ It was a sentence Lauren couldn’t finish and Danni wished with all her heart that she could reassure the other woman that she’d get her husband back, exactly the way he had been that morning, but there was a very good chance that their lives had changed forever.

‘The surgeons deal with these kinds of head injuries all the time and there are rehabilitation services which can make a huge difference too. Right now, the important thing is that he’s stable and ready for his operation. But you need to take care of yourself and the baby too. It won’t help Freddie if he’s got to worry about the two of you.’

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