Page 60 of New Dreams for the Village Nurse
‘But you’ve settled? You like it there?’
‘I love it. The community has been so welcoming. I arrived under a cloud but that didn’t last. Now I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Thimblebury is home.’
‘It’s certainly picturesque.’
‘It’s more than that. It’s…well, it sounds cheesy, but I’d say living in the Lake District is almost a state of being. Like the landscape becomes part of your soul. I think I’d always carry that with me whether I stayed or not, and I’d always miss it.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Wow? It’s that good?’
‘You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. But don’t shoot me if you don’t end up feeling the same. Did you like Botswana?’
‘It’s a beautiful place and I sort of see what you mean about getting into your soul. I don’t think I’d want to live there again but I don’t think it will ever quite leave me.’
‘What made you decide to come back to England? You’d had enough or something happened to make you leave?’
‘I felt what I’d gone for I’d achieved. It had been a strange time in my personal life, but I felt as if I was coming to terms with that too. It just seemed like the right time to end that chapter and start a new one.’
‘And so you ended up in a tiny village in the middle of England.’
‘I must admit I never saw that coming. If you’d have asked me ten years ago where I’d be now in my life, I wouldn’t have seen any of this coming. Not Botswana, not here, not…well…’ He paused and cleared his throat, and then took a huge drink of his coffee. ‘Not losing my wife and our baby.’
Ottilie looked sharply at him. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I didn’t say – how would you?’
‘God, I’m…I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.’
‘I think that’s why I enjoy talking to you. I know you understand what it’s like. I’d like to think we’ll become good friends one day.’
Ottilie nodded slowly, uncertain what to make of it all. She wondered if Fliss knew, but he answered the question before she’d asked it.
‘I told Fliss about it when she offered me the job the other day. I asked her not to mention it to anyone else. I don’t know why really, but…well, it seems silly now to keep it a secret. It happened, and no amount of keeping it to myself will change that.’
‘Is it OK to ask what happened?’
‘Yes. Kiki is…wasJapanese. We met when I was newly qualified and it was love at first sight. At any rate, I like to think it was, but she used to tease me about that and said there was no such thing. She definitely took longer to fall for me than I did for her. Iris – our little girl – was five months old when it happened. They went to visit family in Japan and I stayed home because I had to work. There was an earthquake, and her parents’ building wasn’t one of those shock-proof ones like they have in Tokyo. It was the middle of the night and they would have been in bed. The building collapsed. Kiki and Iris never stood a chance. I blame myself every day for not being there with them.’
Ottilie’s eyes filled with tears and she rubbed them away. She didn’t want to cry in front of him because it almost felt like stealing his sorrow away, though the story made her desperately sad. The tragedy of losing Josh, that anger and despair it had brought had driven her to the lowest depths she’d been able to imagine, and yet Simon’s was so much worse. At least she hadn’t lost a child. She’d lost the possibility of children yet to come, of course, but it wasn’t the same at all.
‘But you couldn’t have done anything if you had been there.’
‘True, but I would have died with them and in the beginning I think I would have preferred that. Sorry…’ he added hurriedly, glancing at her with an expression like guilt on his face. ‘That wasn’t meant to come out. It’s not fair to burden you with?—’
‘It’s not a burden. I mean, I understand sometimes we wonder how much it’s OK to share. I can’t imagine what it must have been like. I lost Josh and it felt as if my world had ended, but I never…’
She didn’t know how to finish what she’d wanted to say. She’d never wished to be dead, no matter how low she’d been. She’d wished for Josh to still be there, that he hadn’t gone to work that day, that she’d somehow been able to save him where the emergency doctors had failed and many other scenarios, but not once had she wished she’d gone with him. She had wondered how she could carry on living without him many times, but that was a very different thing.
‘How long ago was this?’
‘Coming up to six years.’
‘So you went to Botswana after it happened?’
‘Not straight away. I tried to carry on for a while – threw myself into work and even tried to have some kind of social life. Friends were worried; they were always asking me to go to dinner or whatever, and it was like I was trying to fool myself that I could move on, that I could go back to a normal life. The wheels soon came off that plan. I realised there was no normal life, not any more. And then one of my colleagues told me about the medic placement scheme and I thought I might as well go for it. I thought if I was somewhere totally different and doing things for other people it might help me. Not to forget – because we both know you can never forget – but to stop me from thinking about it every minute of every day. Botswana wasn’t the first placement. I also did some work in Central America before that.’
Ottilie knew only too well what he meant. She understood the logic because it was the same logic she’d applied to her own situation. More time had passed for him, that was true, but listening to him now he didn’t seem any further in his healingthan she was. And she had Heath. She didn’t know if that was the answer for everyone, but Heath had helped her do what she hadn’t been able to do alone – and that was to see how life could be good again. Second chances did happen, and they might always have a bittersweet joy to them, but it was joy nonetheless. Simon hadn’t mentioned a partner and she got the impression there had been nobody since his wife. She knew he lived alone in Liverpool and that he hadn’t left anyone in Botswana he’d been close to in that way because she was certain he’d have said so.
‘I nearly packed in medicine altogether, you know.’
