A Week in Winter(59)

‘Dai Morgan? That doesn’t sound very Irish,’ Henry said.

‘No, indeed, he came here from Wales as a locum thirty years ago when old Dr Barry was sick. Then poor Dr Barry died and Dai stayed. Just as simple as that.’

‘Why did he stay?’ Nicola asked.

‘Because everyone loved him. They still do. Dai and Annie settled in very well here. They had a little girl, Bethan, and she loved it all here. She’s a doctor too, now. Imagine!’

The next day, Dai Morgan called round to Stone House to check that the two ladies had no ill effects from their time in the cave. Chicky gave him coffee at the big kitchen table and left him there with Henry and Nicola, who were in between walks.

He was a big square man in his mid-sixties with an easy, reassuring manner and a broad smile.

‘Chicky tells me the pair of you are in the same trade as myself,’ he said.

Immediately they were guarded. They really didn’t feel like answering questions about what they had been doing and how their careers had developed. Still, they couldn’t be rude to the man.

‘That’s true,’ Nicola said.

‘For our sins,’ Henry added.

‘Well, I suppose there are worse than us out there,’ Dai Morgan said.

They smiled politely.

‘I’ll miss this place,’ he said suddenly.

‘You’re leaving?’ This was a surprise. Chicky Starr had mentioned nothing about that.

‘Yes. I only decided this week. My wife, Annie, has had a bad diagnosis. She would like to go back to Swansea. All her sisters live there and her mother, fit as a flea, aged eighty.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Nicola said.

‘Is it as bad as you think?’ Henry asked.

‘Yes, a matter of months. We’ve had second and third opinions, I’m afraid.’

‘And she has accepted it?’

‘Oh, Annie is a diamond. She knows what it’s all about. No fuss, no drama, just wants to be with family.’

‘But afterwards . . .?’ Henry asked.

‘I wouldn’t have the heart to come back here. Stoneybridge was the two of us. It wouldn’t be the same on my own.’

‘They love you here. They say you made a difference to people,’ Nicola said.

‘I loved it here too, but not alone.’

‘So when will you go?’

‘Before Christmas,’ he said simply.

They talked about him later as they sat in a mountain pub where black-faced sheep came and looked in the door. Strange thing for a man and his wife to have come so far away from their roots, stay so long and then go back in the end.

They still spoke of the Welsh doctor when they were walking over a long, empty beach and were the only people there. What could have persuaded him to stay in a small, lonely place like this where he knew nothing of the patients and their backgrounds?

They talked about him at night in their room with the waves crashing beneath the cliffs.

‘You know what we are really talking about?’ Henry said.

‘Yes, we’re talking about us, not him. Would we find peace in a place like this, just as he did?’

‘It worked for him. It mightn’t work for everybody.’ Henry was anxious not to get swept away.

‘But there might be somewhere, some place where we could be part of things, doing something rather than trying to get round a system.’ Her eyes were bright with hope.

Henry leaned over to her and put both his hands around her face. ‘I do love you, Nicola. Helen was right. I am a lucky person to have a happy life, and that’s because you are the centre of it.’

They found themselves more and more drawn to talk to Dai Morgan. He seemed to like their company. They didn’t give him any false comfort about his wife. They were less buttoned up, less watchful than when he had met them first, and slowly they told him of their hopes of finding a place, a community where they could make a difference; something, in fact, like he had done.

‘Oh, I’ve left a lot undone here,’ Dai Morgan sighed. ‘If I had my time over I’d do some things very differently.’

‘Like what?’ Henry didn’t sound intrusive. He sounded as if he wanted to learn.

‘Like a big bully from the new townhouses over there. I was called to the place twice. His wife Deirdre had some kind of vertigo, he said. She had fallen from a ladder once and from the car another time. Broken bones and bruises. It looked to me as if he could have beaten her. I didn’t like him but what could I do? The wife swore that she fell. Then the third time I knew. But it was too late. She didn’t recover.’

‘Oh, God . . .’ Nicola said.

‘Oh God, indeed. Where was my God, or her God, when that bastard came at her the last time? I didn’t speak before because I only had intuition and a gut feeling. Because I didn’t trust that feeling, Deirdre died.’

‘And did you speak then?’ Nicola’s eyes were full of tears.

‘I tried to but they shut me up. Her own family, brothers and sisters, said that her name mustn’t be tarnished in this way. She must be buried as a loved wife and happy mother, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense of her life. I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. But if I had it all over again I would have spoken the first time.’