Like Doctor, Like Son Page 11

  ‘And it doesn’t look as if it’s going to end any time in this lifetime,’ he admitted with a resigned groan. He dropped his head back and closed his eyes for a moment, but it didn’t take long before he realised that the knowledge already permeated every fibre. He had been in love with Faith Adamson for half a lifetime and that feeling wasn’t going to change even if he never saw her again.

  ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’ he demanded aloud, glad that none of his patients could hear him. At least the advent of mobile phones had made the spectacle of talking to yourself in public seem slightly less peculiar.

  But it didn’t solve his dilemma.

  Just because he had realised that he was in love with Faith, it didn’t mean that she felt the same way. Neither did it mean that a permanent relationship was possible between an ordinary general practitioner and someone as high profile as internationally renowned musician Faith Adams.

  In fact, going on past events, the last thing she wanted was a relationship with him. Look at the way she’d ended things between them the last time. It almost made him afraid to try again. That sort of pain wasn’t something he wanted to repeat.

  But the alternative wasn’t any better. Would he be able to live with the idea that the two of them could have been together if only he’d asked?

  Suddenly he remembered Constance Adamson’s pain-ridden demand…the last words she’d ever spoken before her body had finally succumbed to the awful disease she’d fought for so long. ‘Promise me…’ she’d insisted. ‘Promise that you won’t take no for an answer…’ And it was as if a bright light had switched on inside his head.

  At the time it hadn’t made sense, and she’d been beyond asking for explanations, but now…Was this what she’d meant? Had she actually been giving him her stamp of approval after all these years?

  The clock on the dashboard told him that there was no time to think about that now. It wasn’t something that could easily be answered while sitting in a car at the side of the road anyway. If there was an answer, he would find it wherever Faith was, and at the moment that was supposed to be the Butterfly Garden.

  ‘Hello, again, Dr Jamison,’ Nadia Price greeted him as he entered the front door a few minutes later. Quinn’s heart sank when he recognised Faith’s assistant, but before he could ask whether she was there in Faith’s stead, she’d turned to lead him through the entrance hall, talking all the way.

  ‘Laura Beckwith, the director of the Butterfly Garden, was hoping to be here to greet you, but there’s been…Well, something happened earlier today that’s put her timetable out. She’ll join us as soon as she can, but in the meantime I’ve been detailed to show you around. I don’t know how much you already know about the Butterfly Garden, but—’

  ‘Do I take it that Faith isn’t here?’ he interrupted stiffly, trying to swallow down his disappointment after all those hours of looking forward to seeing her again. It had become a horribly familiar feeling when she’d disappeared out of his life once before. He’d sworn then that he’d never give a woman the power to put him through it again, but here he was with the same woman, no less…

  ‘Oh, she’s here,’ Nadia reassured him, gesturing towards the brightly decorated corridor. ‘Both she and Laura will be joining us as soon as they can. If you would like to come this way, you’ll see the way the butterfly motif is continued along…’

  Quinn had worked too long and too hard to get to his present position in life to deal well with being thwarted, no matter how charmingly. On top of that, he’d spent the whole journey thinking about Faith—well, if he was honest, he’d spent most of his days and nights thinking about her since she’d returned to Rookmere—but he’d been looking forward to finally talking to her face to face and getting a few answers, not being fobbed off with…

  His frustration boiled over.

  With a couple of strides he’d overtaken the woman and planted himself in front of her, deliberately blocking her way.

  ‘Look, Nadia,’ he began heatedly, forcing himself to keep his voice down out of deference to the sick children nearby. ‘The whole point of me being here was for Faith to introduce me to Laura Beckwith so they could take me on a guided tour around the Butterfly Garden. If today was inconvenient, someone should have told me not to waste my time coming over here. Heaven knows, I’ve got more than enough work to do back in Rookmere.’

  ‘Of course, I realise how busy you are, but—’

  ‘I’ve already done my research into the hospice movement—I had to if I was going to fill in all those blasted forms to apply for government financing—so I certainly don’t need to waste more of my time with the “Beginner’s Guide” around the place.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t intending to—’

  ‘This meeting was Faith’s idea because she seemed to think that the Butterfly Garden was special in some way. If she believes that it should influence the way the Barton is developed, then the least she can do is turn up when she says she—’

  ‘Quinn?’

  Faith’s soft voice stopped him in mid-tirade. He whirled to face her, standing in the open door just behind him. He was ready to save Nadia the job of passing on his message by delivering it personally, but one glance at her face made his anger disappear.

  ‘Faith? What’s the matter? Are you ill?’ Reflexively, he reached out a hand towards her. She was so pale and shaky, almost seeming as if she was having to hold on to the door to remain on her feet. She seemed completely oblivious of his offer of help, waiting for the motherly woman behind her to wrap a comforting arm around her shoulders and guide her out into the corridor.

  ‘You’re Quinn Jamison?’ the woman said quietly as she shut the door behind them. It was more of a statement than a question. ‘I’m Laura Beckwith but, please, call me Laura. We don’t stand on ceremony much around here.’ She offered her free hand.

  Quinn murmured a greeting and shook her hand almost absent-mindedly, his eyes once more fixed on Faith.

  He was close enough now to see that her face seemed quite swollen and blotchy, especially around her eyes, but before he could ask if she was suffering some sort of allergic reaction Laura was speaking again.

  ‘I’m sorry about the delay, but it was unavoidable. If you’d like to come this way, we can start off in my office. It’s just around the corner.’

  Once more Quinn was left to follow, the questions piling up inside his head. He had almost reached overload by the time they’d gone through the apparently essential rituals of sitting down and making a decision between tea and coffee.

  The longer he spent in the Butterfly Garden, the more certain he became that there was something odd happening around him and that he was the only person in the dark about it. He didn’t like the feeling and being short of sleep made him especially short of patience.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to be rude, but this meeting was set up specifically at Faith’s request because she thought I ought to know more about what you do at the Butterfly Garden and the way you do it. Now, I don’t know what her connection with the place is, but—’

  ‘Oh, that’s simple,’ Laura said as she offered a plate of home-made biscuits around. ‘The Butterfly Garden probably wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for Faith’s support. We had all the same funding problems you encountered when we first started up, then the parents of one of our patients—a gifted young musician—contacted her to ask her if she would be willing to play in a fundraising concert.’ She turned and bent to cover Faith’s hand with her own and give it a squeeze. ‘She’s been absolutely wonderful and keeps in touch wherever she goes. This last tour, she was sending postcards at each stop so that Fliss—’

  She stopped suddenly, an expression of pain on her face, her bubbly chatter completely gone.

  ‘Is there something wrong, Laura?’ He was out of his seat in a flash, certain she was going to collapse at any moment. ‘Are you ill? Is there something I can do for you? Here, sit down.’

  What on earth was going on
here? First Faith looked fit to drop and now Laura looked almost as bad.

  ‘No, Quinn. There’s nothing wrong…with me, at least,’ she added, sinking gratefully into her own chair. She shook her head ruefully. ‘It’s stupid, really, bearing in mind what this place is and that this is what we have to be prepared for every day, but…We lost one of our patients just a couple of hours ago, and we’re all a bit…’ She shrugged, clearly lost for words.

  Suddenly, everything was clear.

  ‘It’s understandable,’ he said quietly. ‘It can hit you hard even when you know it’s inevitable and you’ve had plenty of time to prepare yourself.’ In spite of the fact that he was supposed to be able to distance himself from his patients’ problems, he’d never quite managed it either, and had been through the same emotions far too often since he’d started his training. ‘Did you know him long?’

  ‘Her,’ she corrected with brimming eyes, reaching into a hidden pocket for a crumpled handkerchief. ‘Fliss was here for two months, but we’ve known her family for about five years. Her twin died four years ago.’

  Quinn couldn’t think of anything to say. What could you say about such a double tragedy?

  No wonder she’d seemed a little flustered, almost as if his visit had been sprung on her unexpectedly. Her brightly coloured tabard with its distinctive butterfly motifs was slightly skew, as if it had been hurriedly donned.

  Now that his brain had something to work on, he realised that such an event would explain the strange tension he’d picked up in the air ever since he’d entered the Butterfly Garden. Then he wondered if it might also explain Faith’s sudden departure yesterday, although why she should have been especially affected by this child’s death…

  Unless…

  ‘She wasn’t your daughter, was she, Faith?’ he demanded, a sick pounding suddenly filling his head as he waited for her to answer.

  Was she married? Divorced? He had no idea. Her marital status had never been mentioned in any of their late night conversations and the fact that there had been no general publicity about it meant nothing. Her recording persona, Faith Adams, was notoriously reclusive and, for all that he was in imminent danger of becoming every bit as captivated by her as he’d been sixteen years ago, it certainly didn’t mean that she felt the same way. In spite of the intimate feeling to their midnight conversations, there was really no reason why she should have confided any of her secrets to him, even the fact that she had a desperately sick child.

  The thought was a painful dose of reality after his fanciful ideas that there might be something left between them that they could build on.

  ‘No,’ Faith said in a noticeably waterlogged voice, and one fear was put to rest. ‘Fliss wasn’t my daughter, but she was such a wonderful little girl that I often wished she was.’ There was a hitch in her breathing, further evidence that she’d cried many tears since he’d last spoken to her. ‘I first met her when Felix—her brother—came here about five years ago and she was…’

  ‘She was amazing,’ Laura continued when Faith faltered. ‘Her twin had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia—a particularly aggressive dose—and she insisted on being at his side every step of the way, through chemotherapy, radiotherapy, remission, relapse…’

  ‘She did her own research into the disease,’ Faith continued huskily. ‘She knew they were searching for matching bone marrow for him and weren’t having any luck finding anything close enough to chance a transplant. As soon as she realised the significance of being his twin, she insisted on being a donor at nine years of age. She knew it was a last resort and that his body had already been seriously weakened by the disease, but she was completely devastated when he had a massive infection and relapsed almost straight away. It was just a matter of weeks then before he died.’

  ‘And Fliss?’ Quinn prompted. ‘What was the cause of her…?’

  ‘The same bloody disease!’ Faith ground out as escaping tears made silvery tracks down her pale cheeks. ‘Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.’

  He was shocked. With an annual incidence of only four hundred or so cases of the disease in children under fifteen in the whole of Britain, what were the chances that two children in the same family should be struck down? And with her twin gone…

  ‘Couldn’t either of her parents be the donor for her?’

  ‘Her mother was the closest, but even if she’d been ideal, her own health problems prevented her from being a donor,’ Laura explained. ‘And we couldn’t find another donor in time.’

  The silence in the room was heavy with unspoken regrets for another young life lost.

  ‘Another butterfly,’ Faith whispered, and Quinn realised anew just how appropriate the name was for the facility—the fact that the children here, like butterflies, had such short lives.

  All the more reason why those brief lives should be made as pleasant as possible, he thought with renewed determination to make a success of the Barton.

  ‘So, Laura, has Faith told you anything about what we’re going to do with her mother’s bequest?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Laura exclaimed, clearly relieved at the change of topic. ‘She’s told us all about what’s going to happen at the Barton. We were flattered that she thought you ought to come and have a look around here to help you clarify your ideas about the conversion.’

  ‘There was no flattery in it,’ Faith said firmly. ‘The Butterfly Garden is second to none. I’ll be delighted if the Barton can achieve even half of what you do here, Laura.’

  ‘It will be different because the Barton is going to have a second string to its bow,’ Quinn pointed out. ‘The respite care facility is something the Butterfly Garden doesn’t have.’

  ‘Not because we didn’t want it,’ Laura interrupted. ‘Even if we’d had the finances to set it up, we just don’t have the space for it here.’

  ‘Well, space is something that the Barton has plenty of,’ Faith said wryly. ‘Acres of it.’

  ‘And I’ve had some thoughts about those acres,’ Quinn said. ‘A way to make them financially productive without changing the essential nature of the place. What would you think about converting the old stables into a livery yard?’

  ‘A livery yard?’ He could hardly blame Faith for being surprised. The idea had come to him last night out of nowhere while he’d been staring up at the ceiling trying to sleep.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy—we’re supposed to be setting up a combined hospice and respite care facility, not a riding establishment—but just listen for a minute and see if you think it makes sense.’

  He paused to wait for her nod of agreement while he marshalled his arguments.

  ‘As you said, the Barton’s acreage is one of its assets. It has to be maintained one way or another if it isn’t to deteriorate and it could always be leased to neighbouring farmers for grazing, or whatever. But it happens to be right in the middle of some beautiful countryside that is absolutely ideal for horses and riding.’

  He certainly had their attention now. All three women seemed intrigued with where this was going.

  ‘People will pay good money for their animals to be cared for during the week so that they can enjoy them at weekends, and if the person running it is also qualified to teach as part of Riding for the Disabled—’

  ‘Our children would be able to go riding during the week, if they’re still able,’ Faith exclaimed delightedly. ‘And even if they aren’t, they could enjoy being taken out to watch the horses. They’d have the chance to touch them and feed them…’

  ‘It would be something that the families could enjoy, too. Siblings, especially,’ Nadia pointed out. ‘It’s something that would blur the lines a bit between the sick member of the family and the rest of them. I think it’s a brilliant idea, Quinn, especially if it can become a steady source of income. Have you got any projected figures for it? Would it be very expensive to set up? How long would it take before it started helping to support the Barton?’

  ‘Hey, give me a chance to answer the fir
st question before you ask the next dozen!’ Quinn exclaimed with a laugh. ‘I can see why Faith takes you everywhere with her.’

  For several seconds there was a startled silence but before he could comment on the look that passed between Nadia and Laura there was a tap at the door.

  While Laura went out into the corridor to speak to the member of staff, Quinn had to confess to Nadia that he had absolutely no figures to support his idea.

  ‘But I do know that there used to be horses at the Barton and that, apart from the fact that some of them are used for parking cars these days, the stables are virtually as they were when the last horse left.’ He carefully avoided looking at Faith in case she was sharing the memories of the time she’d shown him around them, and the conversation they’d had about some of the activities that could go on in a barn full of hay.

  ‘I also know about the possibility for income from such a venture because one of my patients was moaning about the fact that there are no decent livery yards around Rookmere, and that the nearest one charges astronomical prices.’

  ‘Well, that gives me enough information to be getting on with,’ Nadia said, clearly delighted. ‘We really need to find long-term ways of bringing in a steady income year on year, so the facility won’t be so dependent on charitable handouts and fundraising. We don’t want to have to keep pushing a ninety-year-old Faith out onto the stage to do yet another concert in her Zimmer frame when the bills come in.’

  Faith chuckled at the idea, but Quinn knew that she took the consideration seriously when she added, ‘Right from the start, we need to set the whole thing up in such a way that it will be able to continue without being crippled by money worries. I know the estate’s fairly extensive, but I’d still rather avoid the prospect of having to sell off parcels of land to developers every few years to keep the doors open. If that happened, the outside world would gradually encroach on the Barton until it lost all its peace and tranquillity.’

  Quinn couldn’t agree more.

  As a teenager, he hadn’t been able to help being envious of the gracious home and surroundings that Faith had been brought up in, but he’d hidden his real feelings by dismissing its out-of-date opulence. It was only with maturity that he’d really been able to appreciate what a priceless heritage it was.