Chapter 16 #2
She rested her fingertips in the broad, taut gulf between his shoulder blades and dropped her head so her bandaged temple lay softly against his jaw.
This was the first time anyone had held her in a very long time.
Her insides seemed caught in a magnetic, tidal pull towards his warm body.
She curled her legs beneath her, shifting further into the nook he’d created for her, and they stayed that way for countless minutes, until their breathing fell into a shared rhythm and her eyelids grew heavy again. Sleep came for her once more.
‘Hospitals just let you go home in the middle of the night here?’ she asked as they walked slowly through the town, Hamish making sure to support her, even though she’d told him she wasn’t feeling dizzy at all now.
‘That wasn’t a hospital, just a doctors’ surgery, and we had to leave because they were locking up their out-of-hours emergency clinic. Plus, it’s only…’ he checked his phone, ‘eight twenty. Not the middle of the night at all.’
‘Ah! Got it.’
Yet, Hamish mused, it seemed days ago since he saw Florrie fall.
In fact, time and memory had been playing strange tricks ever since he’d received that letter announcing her imminent arrival, like Scrooge must have experienced on his long Christmas Eve night of visions.
What Hamish’s Christmas visitor could offer him in the way of redemption or hope, it was difficult to say, but he was beginning to think he was being taught some great cosmic lesson about not daring to wish for anything.
Flat plastic reindeers winked at them through the windows of the convenience store that also functioned as a post office during the day.
It would be closing any minute. Without speaking aloud their intentions, they both slowly ambled up to its door.
Inside, Hamish suggested they buy some ‘get well snacks’ and he insisted he pay for their crisps and Cokes.
‘Get some Cadbury’s too,’ Florrie told him at the till, and he bundled one of every kind onto the counter.
She picked a postcard from the rotating rack and added it to their haul.
It said ‘Christmas in the Cairngorms’ and showed a snowy mountain scene.
Hamish didn’t say anything about it but wondered if she wanted it as a souvenir of her visit.
As he was thinking this, he watched her waver. Then she put the card back on the rack.
The shop lights were glaringly bright in here and the jolly Christmas music over the speakers and the dancing Santa on top of the till (who occasionally dropped his trousers to reveal tartan shorts) felt unreal and garish compared to the sterile quiet of Dr Millen’s treatment room where he’d watched Florrie sleep.
Hamish was only glad it was an out-of-towner kid working the till tonight, and not Pauline who ran the place, or there’d have been an inquisition.
He also had thanked his lucky stars earlier this evening when he’d realised Gracie, the surgery receptionist, hadn’t come racing back to the clinic when the emergency call went out to the doctors.
They’d dodged another gossip bullet there.
All he had to do now was convey Florrie safely back to the repair shop, make sure she ate, and get her to bed, and he’d rest a little easier knowing he’d done all he could.
A thought struck him as he took their carrier bag of treats out into the chilly street, Florrie by his side.
‘I should have mentioned,’ he began, placing his free hand under her elbow again like it was the most natural thing in the world to support her.
‘I, uh, unlocked your phone while you were asleep.’
‘With my fingerprint?’
‘Yeah, sorry. I felt kind of bad doing it. You were so out of it, though, and Dr Alice told me I should inform your next of kin.’
She stopped sharply. ‘You went through my contacts?’
It had felt intrusive at the time, especially knowing how hard she’d tried to keep details about her private life from getting in the way of her obviously fake work persona.
She looked a little sick again.
He swallowed. ‘I found your mum on there, and I rang her. Shouldn’t I have?’
‘What did she say?’ Florrie’s face was frozen and paling rapidly, like she’d been caught doing something irresponsible.
‘She was worried, of course, but I assured her you were OK. I told her everything the doctors told me, and that you had to stay bandaged up for a couple of weeks, and how you’d need to do some exercises to get your range of movement back, and uh… that’s it.’
‘You told her I was in Scotland?’
‘Well, uh, I suppose so, yes. Sorry, have I got this completely wrong? Why do I feel like I wasn’t supposed to call her? She was red-starred in your phone as your emergency person.’
‘What did she say, when you told her I was here?’
Hamish thought back to the conversation which, admittedly, hadn’t gone quite as he might have imagined.
‘She asked where I was calling from, and I told her we were in Cairn Dhu medical centre, and she asked where’s that, and I said, the Cairngorms, where you’re doing your consulting job at my ski centre, and then…
’ The sinking feeling that he’d committed some unknown transgression only got worse the more he recounted the things he’d said.
‘…Then she was quiet for a bit, and she said something about had I phoned Max, and I said I didn’t know who that was, and she said not to worry, she’d call him. ’
‘Oh God.’ Florrie’s feet moved in zombie steps. ‘Hamish, I didn’t actually tell my mother I’d quit my job in Italy, or that I was here, working for my dad.’ She said it so resignedly and with such a heavy sigh, Hamish knew he was definitely in the wrong.
‘I shouldn’t have called her. I thought it was the sort of thing you do in an emergency, but of course, I don’t know you, or anything about you, really…’ He suddenly felt very presumptuous holding her arm.
Her eyes lifted to the dark sky as they walked on, saying nothing, but by the time they’d reached the edge of town and had to cross to the other side of the street, she seemed to have processed this second shock of the day.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she said decidedly. ‘That’s what happens when you try to keep secrets. They bite you on the ass.’
‘Can I do anything to help? To fix things? How bad is it? Is your mum going to be angry?’
‘No, not angry, much worse; she’s going to be disappointed, and hurt, probably. But I couldn’t tell her I was here.’