Chapter 6
HENRY
Henry didn’t want to go to the party. He hated all the false joviality surrounding Christmas, but it was a new job and his boss, Stanley, had insisted he went.
‘You’ll have fun,’ he’d said, clapping him on the back, like they were old chums. ‘All the higher echelons of society will be there. Plus trustees at the hospital. You can do a bit of hobnobbing.’
Henry hadn’t become one of the top surgeons at the private hospital where he worked to ‘hobnob’.
If he’d wanted a job like that he would have been a lawyer.
But he’d looked up into Stanley’s shiny, plump, expectant face and acquiesced, even if he would rather have gone back to his little rented flat in Marble Arch to immerse himself in the first and special editions of his favourite books and drown his sorrows with a bottle of Chablis.
So now here he was, wearing a borrowed dinner jacket, in the back of the taxi as it darted through the ice-coated London streets towards Kensington, squashed between Stanley and his garlic breath, and another colleague, Rupert something or other, who wouldn’t shut up about advances in cosmetic surgery.
The radio was playing that annoying Christmas song by Shakin’ Stevens, although he could hardly hear it over Rupert sucking up to the boss.
The party was being held at the V&A Museum, and when Henry got out of the taxi he stood and gazed up at the building with its beautiful intricate mouldings and arches.
The entrance was lit up against the dark night, casting a blue hue onto the frost-covered steps, and despite his reluctance to socialize, he marvelled at how far he had come in the last decade.
He had escaped his dull little Hampshire town in the middle of nowhere and the father he’d always been so afraid of.
Through sheer hard work and intelligence, he’d managed to gain a place at medical school at Cambridge and change his life.
Now he was here he just wanted to keep his head down, earn money and his freedom, and exist under the radar.
‘Come on, slowcoach,’ called Stanley, and Henry steeled himself, as he’d taught himself to do in childhood, to follow them inside.
It was a posh do and the jacket was too tight, the fabric pulling across his back and around his armpits.
A string quartet was playing Christmas songs, and uniformed waiting staff were weaving in and out of the crowds carrying silver trays covered with fancy foods he’d never heard of.
Someone thrust a glass of champagne into his hand as soon as he entered the room, and Stanley, a hand firmly on his shoulder, directed him to different ‘influential’ people, but it wasn’t long before he found himself adrift, as he always did.
He stood in the corner and watched all these people effortlessly work the room.
It crossed his mind that he’d never felt more alone.
He couldn’t do this, he thought. He was a strange, messed-up jumble of nerves and demons and trauma.
He wasn’t a proper functioning person. It was something that ate away at him when he was alone, burrowing into his mind, like a flesh-eating parasite.
At school the other boys had thought he was weird.
At home his father hated him. At medical school he kept himself to himself.
He studied hard, worked his way up the ranks, but he never socialized.
One of his deep-seated fears was that he’d never had the chance to form a personality.
That, despite being handsome, he was too buttoned-up. Too strange.
He’d been ten years old when he understood that his mother wasn’t coming back. He’d adored her and, so he thought, she him. Yet she’d walked out of their lives without a backward glance, leaving him alone with a man who should never have been a father.
It was no wonder that he found it hard to form relationships with women.
He’d had a few girlfriends over the years.
Nothing serious, just a string of flings with beautiful women who wanted to change him.
To save him. Yet he had nothing in common with any of them and this had made him feel even more alone.
That all went through his mind now, like a galloping horse, as he stood there with his half-empty champagne glass. He should leave. He was never going to be the kind of protégé that Stanley was after. He was a good surgeon, but he was no networker. He lacked the charm.
And then he saw her.
She was standing by the door, alone, in an emerald gown, low-cut at the front, which showed off her long white throat and the diamond necklace that shimmered in her full cleavage.
Her auburn hair was swept up in a Grace Kelly do and she looked as lost as he felt.
In that moment it was as though all the air had been sucked from the room, everyone else fading into the background.
Even the music seemed to stop. He’d never experienced that feeling before.
It was more than her beauty that attracted him.
Yes, she was stunning, but he recognized something in her. Something that was mirrored in him.
She must have been aware of his gaze because she turned her head towards him, her eyes meeting his, and he inhaled sharply, his stomach dipping with a sudden hungry desire that was almost painful.
Their eyes locked, only for a few moments, but it was enough time for him to feel it. The certainty that she was his other half. The woman he had been missing for all of his thirty-one years.
He’d never believed in love at first sight.
Until now.