Chapter Eleven 10 January 2023
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We all preferred Watford Castle over the main palace, which was far too grand and required we be grand inside it.
At Watford, we kept a kitchen garden and said things like “I’m off to potter in the potager.
” There were rosebuds in tiny glass vases on every available surface.
We drank wine on mediaeval stone steps and watched the sun disappear behind the horizon.
I still had a few hours before the reading of Papa’s will, so I got out of bed and crept downstairs.
I found an old waxed coat and some wellies in my size and walked to the East Terrace, which led to a vast lawn, carved hedges and slumbering rose bushes that would explode in colour by spring.
The garden was a mathematical marvel, all right angles and discipline.
But beyond it were the wild, untamed oak groves where deer are allowed to roam. That’s where I wanted to be.
Just as I was about to set off, a springer spaniel emerged from the hall and ran loops around my ankles, looking for love. It was Granny’s dog Pudding, followed by the servant sent to walk off some of the dog’s frantic energy. He started when he saw me, and then bowed.
“Morning,” I said. “I can walk Pud if you like.”
“If it pleases you, Your Royal Highness.”
I trudged across the grass as Pud raced ahead of me.
The sun and chilled air felt wonderful, even with the heaviness of the funeral still lingering.
I had spent the few hours I was able to sleep dreaming of the crypt in which Papa and Louis were now sealed forever.
Surely they would wander across the heath at any moment, back from an early-morning ride, Louis’s cheeks blooming in the cold, Papa demanding his coffee tray.
When we reached the grove, Pud chased squirrels while I nestled myself in the giant smooth roots of an oak tree, as safe and strong as a parent’s arms. I pulled my phone from my pocket and made the call I had been putting off in thirty-minute increments since the day I arrived.
Ben answered on the sixth ring when I was about to give up.
“Well, hello,” my boss at the hospital said. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you.”
“Sorry.”
“Nah, don’t be. Sorry about your dad and your brother. How you holding up?”
“Fine,” I lied. I imagined him in his oxford shirt and navy trousers, at odds with the shaggy blond hair he refused to cut.
His stethoscope would be slung around his neck as he leaned against the nurses’ station and read a few charts while we spoke.
“I have to ask you a couple of logistics questions.”
There was a long pause, and I heard the bustle of the hospital taper off to silence. He was moving to an empty room where the nurses wouldn’t piece together the bits of our conversation and draw their conclusions.
“You’re dropping out, aren’t you,” he said.
“What? No.” I felt suddenly flushed. “All I want to know at this stage is how much leave a resident can take.”
“Five weeks a year, and you’re already down two,” he said, not giving me one inch, as usual.
“What happens if a resident loses their entire family and maybe needs time to sort things out?”
He was silent for a while. “Lexi, you know we don’t make exceptions. Even for you. You’d have to take the rest of the year off and then start your third year next January.”
“Has anyone ever done that before?”
“Sure they have. Usually it’s because they get pregnant or have a mental breakdown, but yeah.”
Sometimes I marvelled at the younger version of me who had been so desirous of this man I would press him against the wall of the stairwell in the middle of a shift.
I recalled those first frenzied interludes in his apartment, when I ripped the scrubs over his head and begged him to touch me.
All I’d wanted was the full weight of his male body.
I’d wanted him, even when he was bossy at the hospital, wrenching the endoscope from my hand and hissing, “You’re doing it wrong. ”
“Lexi,” he said. “What have I always said to you?”
“That the residency program is a huge expense to the Australian taxpayer, and I’m taking someone’s spot for my own vanity exercise, and inevitably I’ll drop out once I’ve proved whatever point I’m trying to make, and go back to where I came from?”
“I said that?”
“Yes, you twat.”
“Jesus, that’s mean,” he said, laughing at the atrocious bedside manner he displayed in all the beds he lay in and stood over.
“Other than that, what I always say is that you’ll be a doctor if you’re meant to be one.
If you need to take a year off to sort things out, you’ll pick it back up next year and it won’t be a problem. ”
I watched Pud stick her head in a pile of rotting leaves and inhale deeply, trotting forward as she followed her nose.
“You looked hot at that funeral, by the way,” Ben added. “Sorry, that’s probably not appropriate to say, but you did.”
“You’re a ghoul.”
“Yes.”
There was a long pause.
“Why do I feel like you’re saying goodbye to me?” I asked him.
“Well… you hardly said goodbye last time, did you.”
“You dumped me,” I reminded him, though what had happened in his flat five weeks before was more complicated than that and we both knew it.
“Look,” he said, “if you want my two cents, I think you’re better than what they’re offering.”
“What, being Queen?” I asked, heat rising in my cheeks at the word finally spoken out loud.
“Yes. But it’s up to you. Just decide soon, would you? Trying to do rosters when I’m one resident down is a pain in my arse.”
“I will.”
“Goodbye, Dr. Villiers,” he said, but left us suspended in silence for a few moments before finally ending the call.
Ben had been a mistake that I enjoyed making.
After Louis and Amira’s wedding, when my family finally cut me off, sleep seemed to leave me entirely and I spent a lot of nights staring at the shadows on the ceiling.
I was more numb than upset, but there was a deep-rooted thought inside me, one that was waiting to be plucked.
If I took it by the stem and pulled, I knew the tears would come and they would never stop: I just want my mum, I just want my mum, I just want my mum.
My internship at the hospital had been all-consuming, but I was still restless for something I couldn’t name.
Ben, handsome, irritable and completely off-limits, seemed like a fine distraction.
The first time I felt his eyes on me, when Finn and I stood among the other hapless interns, his gaze lasted a moment longer than it should.
A crackling little current, a swell of something.
I couldn’t tell if he liked me or disdained me.
Two weeks after the wedding, I saw Ben at a bar in town and we ignored each other.
But I lingered in my booth until everyone I knew was gone, and he did the same, finally sliding into the seat next to me right before last call.
What am I doing? I thought later in the alleyway outside, running my fingers through his hair while I kissed him. And who would care?
I had told no one my secret, slipping into Ben’s flat a few nights a week and going home to my own bed before anyone noticed. A month in, Jack told me he was taking Paula north so she and her friends could blockade loggers from razing an ancient forest.
“Want to come?” he’d asked. We were standing at the sink and his fingers brushed mine as he handed me a dripping dish. “You don’t have to actually stand in the path of the truck. I usually just watch in case things go awry. Mum’s always pushing it a bit further than she probably should.”
“I would,” I said. “But… you know I can’t.”
He’d nodded, understanding as he always did.
Paula was constantly asking me to come along to protests and blockades.
She thought I was brave enough to wrap myself around a 200-year-old tree.
When it was still just a sapling, my ancestors had taken possession of the land, razing forests, slaughtering humans, building industries, until this giant was destined to be cut down in its prime, and made into tissue paper and woodchips.
But I would not embarrass my family by trying to defend it.
Even after they had cast me out, I was still too afraid of their ire to take a stance on a single thing.
“You’ll be okay on your own?” he asked quietly.
Jack seemed to be the only one who saw the blackness that had settled over me after the wedding.
He also knew me well enough not to try to talk to me about it.
Instead I felt his watchful eyes as I passed through the kitchen on the way back to the barn.
He was constantly giving me things unsolicited: homemade lattes, a morning bun just because, his unyielding devotion.
“Of course.”
With Jack and Paula gone for the weekend and Finn at the hospital, I had the property to myself.
I locked Ragu in his crate for the night and jogged down the dirt road so I could open the vineyard gates to let Ben in.
Ordinarily I would never have let him stay the night, but our exertions left us exhausted, and he had fallen asleep in my bed.
At dawn, I had hustled him out onto the sandstone verandah that ran from the cottage to my converted barn.
Jack was standing there with Ragu’s dinner bowl in his hand. All three of us stood frozen, like actors on a stage who had forgotten the next line.
“I thought you were in the highlands,” I said.
Jack was silent for a moment, his eyes moving from the almost forty-year-old man in an unbuttoned shirt over to me. “Uh, we all got arrested. So we had to leave early.”
I nodded, clearing my throat, absolutely dying to wrap this up before Ragu trotted around the corner and unleashed the almighty bark he reserved for men he didn’t know.
Ben shuffled towards Jack with his hand outstretched. “Hey. Ben. Lexi and I work together at the hospital.”
Jack nodded absently, taking his hand. “Hi.”