I daren’t stop him. I cannot stop him now.
He glances at the Aga. ‘The lamb looks as if he’s okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll take him back to Delila before I go.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sure that Alan will keep you up-to-date on their progress. If you’re interested.’
I stand there frozen to the spot, just about holding it all together.
Guy moves towards me, uncertain now. ‘Amy . . .’ He looks like he’s about to launch into another sensible speech about how I should run my life. Then he lets his arms fall by his side, a look of resignation on his face. ‘I hope that life back in London is all you want it to be.’
‘I’m sure it will be.’
He casts a look at Tom and Jessica still asleep on the floor. ‘Give the children my love. Tell them . . .’ His voice fails. ‘Tell them that I’ll miss them.’
And with that he scoops Stuart Little into his arms and heads to the door.
‘They’ll miss you too,’ I say, but Guy has already gone.
Chapter Ninety-Two
‘
Y
ou look like something the cat spat out,’ Cheryl told him.
‘Thank you, oh kind and wise receptionist.’
‘You look like you slept in those clothes too.’
‘I did,’ Guy said, then he went through to the examination room and quickly closed the door behind him before Cheryl had a chance to find out why.
If he was lucky, he told himself, he might be able to string this out until lunchtime before someone came in and told her that he hadn’t been home last night and that he’d spent the night at Helmshill Grange. Actually, lunchtime might be stretching it. A story as juicy as that would be round Poppy’s Tea Room by, say, Guy glanced at his watch, eleven o’clock at the latest. Until then it was his secret. Let the good people of Scarsby and district think what they would. No one really knew what had gone on between him and Amy. To be honest, he was a bit unsure himself. Last night he’d been convinced that they had a future together. This morning he was a man thwarted once again in love, watching the only woman he cared for drive away from him, and, frankly, he hadn’t a clue what he’d done to change that.
The consulting-room door was flung open. ‘Stick insect,’ Cheryl said as she ushered in an impossibly thin and concerned-looking family clutching a mesh enclosure, and slammed the door behind them.
Guy rubbed his hands together and checked his appointment schedule.
La famille
Felix now stood before him, according to his notes. ‘Now Mrs and Mrs Felix - what can I do for you?’
Mrs Felix pushed one of her two waiflike children forward. Another family that looked like their pet.
‘Twiggy’s not well,’ the little girl said, an unhappy tremble in her young voice.
Guy took the mesh cage from her and set it carefully on his table. He studied the forest of foliage inside the structure but, for the life of him, couldn’t see a stick insect in there. But then the stick insect or
carausius morosus
- to give the insect its correct title - was the master of disguise. Guy peered intently at the branches. Any one of them could have been Twiggy. ‘Can you just point Twiggy out to me, please?’ Guy said.
The girl and her family regarded him with disgust. As one, they pointed at the mesh. ‘There!’
‘Of course.’ Still looked like nothing but a bunch of twigs to Guy. ‘And what do you think is wrong with the little fellow?’
Again the scornful looks. ‘Twiggy’s a girl.’
‘Ah, yes. I can tell that now.’ Clearly, stick insects were not his specialist subject.Thankfully, he didn’t come across them often enough for it to be a problem. In this kind of rural practice it was more pertinent to know your way round the working end of a cow.
‘She’s listless,’ the mother supplied. ‘And off her food.’
A bit like the rest of the family perhaps, Guy thought. He removed the lid of Twiggy’s home and gently eased out the main branch. Sure enough, after a great deal of scrutiny, there between the leaves he managed to pick out the beautifully camouflaged and elusive insect.
He carefully lifted it out and balanced it on his hand. It was hard to tell, but it looked perfectly healthy to him. How exactly did you determine whether a twig with legs was unwell?
‘You haven’t changed her diet recently?’
Much shaking of heads.
‘These are very sensitive creatures,’ he intoned. ‘As I’m sure you know.’
Much nodding of heads.
Guy wracked his brain to think back to what he knew about stick insects when all he really wanted to do was think about the night he’d spent with Amy and the joy of holding her in his arms, even though it had been a very chaste encounter. And then try to work out what had gone so very wrong.
The vet scratched his head and blew out a perplexed breath.
‘Do you think it needs an MRI scan?’ the family quaked as one.
‘No, no,’ Guy said. ‘That would cost an absolute fortune.’
‘Nothing is too much for our Twiggy,’ the father declared solemnly.
This was probably the type of guy who would rush into the blaze if their house was burning down to save Twiggy. Guy sighed wistfully. If only someone cared about him so much. Now that it seemed he might have stumbled across such a person, she was currently heading away from him down the M1 motorway.
Last night he’d thought that perhaps he and Amy could have tried to have a long-distance relationship, but was that really ever going to be viable? Didn’t distance put an unsurmountable strain on even the best of partnerships? How could he begin to woo her (to use an outdated term), with more than two hundred miles between them when he couldn’t even manage it in the same village?
Guy looked down at Twiggy perched on his hand. Perhaps he should give all this up and go in hot pursuit of his love. Say goodbye to the moors and set up a highfalutin practice in a well-heeled area of London - preferably close to Amy and the children - where he could spend his days in a cosy consulting room examining the stick insects of the rich and famous, fixing the broken legs of £4 hamsters and charging £400 for the privilege. He could treat chihuahuas wearing cerise pink coats, and Bengal cats with diamond collars, and not spend half his life with his arm up a disgruntled cow’s bottom.A dedicated emergency vet service would deal with all of his out-of-hours calls while he went home at five o’clock, rediscovered the joys of cooking, started watching all of the soaps and spent an entire night in his own bed and not in a draughty barn with an arsey farmer who was reluctant to pay his bill.There was a certain appeal in that even though it wasn’t what he’d joined the world of veterinary practice to set out to do.Would it be worth considering, so that he could be near to Amy? Guy stared out of the window to catch a glimpse of the rolling moors that surrounded Scarsby.Trouble was, it was just so damn beautiful here. Leaving would be nigh on impossible. Could he simply walk away after it had taken so long to build up his reputation in these parts? Would his assistant want to buy out the business? He was young, still inexperienced in many areas. Would it be too much for him to handle? Could Stephen even get the money to enable him to take over? Would Amy even want him to do that? After what she’d said this morning, it seemed unlikely.
‘What shall we do, Doctor?’
The question from Mrs Felix pulled his mind back to his meagre stick insect knowledge. ‘I think Twiggy may be dehydrated,’ he said, after feigning deep thought. ‘The symptoms are classic. Take her home and spray her enclosure regularly. Keep an eye on her and come back in a few days if there’s no improvement.’ Though quite what he’d do if they did reappear, he wasn’t exactly sure.
There was a collective sigh of relief from the Felixes and Guy lowered Twiggy gently back into her home. He ushered them out of the door, wearing his best professional smile, but he knew that it didn’t reach his heart. Cheryl gave him a look to turn water to ice as she caught his eye. As soon as she was out of the way he’d check the diary to see when his next weekend off was rostered. He needed to go down to London and examine Hamish to see how he was getting on with his fixator, if nothing else. Who was he kidding? He was simply trying to conjure up an excuse to see Amy again. While his receptionist continued to try to freeze his blood with her stare, he could do nothing but think how he could make things right again.
‘It’s nothing serious,’ the family told Cheryl with obvious joy before they left.
He only hoped that this wasn’t one of those cases where the Felix family would turn up next morning with Twiggy flat on her back on the floor, legs in the air. That, like the woman you love leaving town for ever, was always a bad start to the day.
‘What’s up next?’ Guy asked, rubbing his hands together keenly.
‘Mrs Harris.’ Cheryl nodded across the reception area and sure enough the good lady and her lovely dog, Megan, were sitting there waiting patiently for him.
‘Hello, Megan.’ Guy bent to stroke the dog. He had a terrible flashback to what had happened last time the poor animal had paid them a visit. A close encounter of the Hamish kind, that’s what. Guy shuddered to think of it. Instead, he smiled at the bitch’s owner. ‘What seems to be the problem this time, Mrs Harris?’
The lady looked round, concerned, and lowered her voice to a whisper even though there was no one else but him and Cheryl in the waiting area. ‘I think Megan’s “with child”, Mr Burton,’ she intimated. ‘And I’ve absolutely no idea how that happened.’
But, unfortunately for Guy, he did.
Chapter Ninety-Three
W
hen we arrive in London the light is fading and it’s bucketing down. So much for the milder climate of the south. It’s taken us hours to crawl here across Town, grid-locked in traffic from the north of London - nearly as long as it took us to whizz down the motorway from Yorkshire.
Whilst trying not to tear out my hair, I drive round and round and round, hoping to find a parking place for the Land Rover. Eventually, we find one miles away from the flat and I’m going to have to be out here at some ungodly hour in the morning to move it before the clampers come along. I’ll have to get on to the council about a resident’s parking permit first thing tomorrow, before I am given a yellow boot.
Milly Molly Mandy has made the journey an interesting one by puking up all the way here.The car pongs of cat sick. Hamish hasn’t stopped barking since Birmingham, unlike the children who stopped speaking to each other shortly after we passed Leicester Forest Services.This was shortly after my younger child stopped crying about leaving Stuart Little the Lamb behind.
As the flats of Lancaster Court have a no pets policy - in capital letters on the lease agreement, I seem to recall - I’m going to have to move heaven and earth to get Mils and Hamish inside unseen. How would I have fared with a damn lamb? Pet smuggling won’t be so difficult in the case of a small cat cage, I think. Our feline friend will simply get a towel thrown over her. But how the hell am I going to get a great lump like Hamish indoors without any of the neighbours noticing? The dog wags his tail at me as if reading my thoughts. ‘Oh, Hamish,’ I say, a note of exasperation creeping into my voice. ‘What am I going to do with you?’
I have all this to worry about - and yet has anyone given a thought to what might be going on in
my
mind? No. I have driven away from my husband’s dream life, riven with doubts and wracked with guilt.
‘Come on,’ I say to the kids. ‘We’re here. Just a short walk to the flat.’ Well, short-ish. At one point I thought we were going to end up parking back in Yorkshire. How had I managed to forget all these delights in the months that I’ve been away?
Out of the car and I get the scabby car blanket from the boot and throw it over Milly Molly Mandy’s cage. She miaows in complaint and I know that I’ll get a set of claws in the leg later when I’m least expecting it as repayment for her undignified treatment. Tom hauls Hamish out onto the pavement and the dog immediately wees up the parking meter we’ve stopped next to and then barks out his relief to anyone who cares to listen. He gives a cursory chew at his fixator which is still firmly in place and we set off towards the flat, me and my ragamuffin bunch of companions looking like we’ve fallen off a flitting. As we get round the block from the apartment, I shrug out of my coat and throw it over Hamish, who promptly shrugs it off.
‘No, no, you silly dog,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve got to wear it. We need to disguise you to get you into the flats.’ I pull the coat over him again. This time he tolerates it. Fantastic. I stand back and regard him. Great. Now he looks like a dog disguised as a dog in a coat. Sighing, I think, Sod it. We can’t go through this every time he needs to go out for a wee - unless we only take him out in the dead of the night. Now there’s a thought.
I clamp my hand over his muzzle in an attempt to stop Hamish signalling our arrival with his customary barking as we cover the last part of the street and head up to the front door. The block looks much more utilitarian and drab than I remember and my spirits don’t lift. We have no choice now that we’ve come this far though and, with that thought in mind, we go inside.
Once we’re in the flat, I’m relieved to see that Serena has done a great job with the furniture. On first glance it doesn’t look too bad, even though there are a load of cardboard boxes piled into the living room and there’s not much space left on the kitchen floor either. Give me a couple of days though and this will be looking fine and dandy. Oh goodness, I do hope so.
Tom and Jessica hang behind me. ‘Are we really going to live here?’ my daughter asks. ‘It’s not a joke?’
‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘It’s only for the time being, but this is where we live now.’ She looks as if she’s about to burst into tears. ‘You said you liked it when we looked round.’
‘I didn’t
like
it,’ she insists. ‘But it wasn’t as horrible as everywhere else.’