Page 59 of New Dreams for the Village Nurse
‘True, but sometimes you need caffeine. Do you want one?’
‘I don’t like coffee either, and the tea from those things is usually disgusting. I suppose if there’s hot chocolate it’ll probably be OK.’
‘Chocolate… right.’
Ottilie watched him punch numbers into the machine. He was restless, up and down on the balls of his feet as he waited for their drinks to be dispensed. It was strange – she’d never seen him like that before. At the surgery he’d always been relaxed, confident, reassuring. They were in a stressful situation, yes, but surely nothing more stressful than he’d encountered before during his career. He must have seen far worse and more worrying cases than this.
As he turned back, she tore her gaze away, suddenly feeling guilty for staring at him. He handed her a drink in a plastic cup.
‘It’s nice to see they still put this stuff in cups so thin the top layer of your skin is burned off on contact,’ she said as she took it, and immediately had to put it on the floor beside her chair.
‘Yes, why mess with a perfectly good tradition?’
Simon seemed to be more resistant to the heat of his drink. But even then he winced as he took a sip.
‘Is that because it’s so disgusting or because it’s boiling?’ Ottilie asked.
‘A bit of both. But it will wake me up, which is the point.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t need the taste buds on your tongue anyway.’
Simon relaxed into a tired smile. ‘It’s good Stacey has you here.’
‘You too.’
‘I didn’t do anything except show up and be useless.’
‘You didn’t need to show up at all. Not many would have done, knowing it was all in hand and not in their remit to do it anyway.’
‘I feel as if itisin my remit. I am going to be one of Thimblebury’s GPs, after all. I owe it to my patients to do what I can, even when that’s not much. The only reason I haven’t been more involved is because it’s out of hours and I wasn’t there to see him first.’
Ottilie frowned. They were meant to have an out-of-hours service and someone should have been on call. That was supposed to be Fliss. It would be a difficult conversation, and Ottilie might seem to be overstepping the mark, but she’d have to say something about it when she next saw Fliss, because she wouldn’t be able to leave it. She was meant to be available for an emergency like this, and while Ottilie understood that she had Charles to worry about, that fact remained. And perhaps she’d have only sent them straight to the hospital once she’d seen Mackenzie, as Simon had done, but to Ottilie that wasn’t the point.
‘I’m so glad you’re staying on,’ she said. ‘Thimblebury is lucky to have you.’
‘I don’t know about that. I feel lucky to have Thimblebury right now. I wasn’t looking forward to moving on again. I mean, I know that’s part of the deal when you’re a locum, but I didn’t really want to be a locum long-term. It’s a pleasant surprise to get a permanent job so quickly in such a nice place.’
‘You don’t feel it’s going to be too quiet for you then?’
‘Quiet is appealing these days. I had a lifetime’s worth of excitement in Botswana. I can do quiet for a bit.’
‘Was it stressful?’
‘Challenging is more like it. I was working in a very cut-off rural area. Not enough equipment and what we had was oftenunreliable. If you’re lucky enough to live in a city there’s actually a decent system – the government there have invested hugely in improving it over recent years – but that system is yet to reach poorer areas.’
‘I take my hat off to you. It must have taken guts to go.’
‘Going was the easy bit,’ he said, taking a sip of his coffee. ‘What I left behind…’
Ottilie waited for him to finish his sentence, but he didn’t. Instead, his gaze went somewhere she couldn’t see. What she was beginning to see was tragedy, somewhere in his past, something that had made him run from his old life all the way to Africa. She saw it because she’d lived it herself. She’d been running from her grief when she’d first come to Thimblebury. Everyone had wondered how she’d had the guts to leave everything and everyone she knew behind at such a time, but for Ottilie, staying was so much harder that it was an act of cowardice, if it was anything at all.
After a few moments of silence he turned to her. ‘You’re a relative newcomer to Thimblebury, aren’t you?’
‘Last year.’
‘Fliss tells me you lost your husband. Is that why you moved?’
Ottilie reached for her drink. It had cooled a little and she was able to wrap her hands around the cup, the synthetic aroma of cheap chocolate seeping into her head. ‘I couldn’t stay in Manchester. I worked at the hospital where he died. There were too many bad memories everywhere I looked. People would say to me that there would be good ones too, in time, that I’d be able to see them again, but I didn’t have the strength to wait for that day. I just woke up one morning and thought:I don’t want to be here. So I looked for a job and found my house, and that was that.’
