A woman?
Charlotte.
What was Charlotte doing here?
He opened his mouth to speak but her whisper cut across the room. This must be what had woken him.
‘Malcolm?’ It was an urgent whisper and brought a whisper in response.
‘Charlotte.’
Charlotte glanced at Joss but he didn’t stir. As far as she was concerned, he was one of the several old men in the nursing home, settled down early for his routine bedtime.
Joss wasn’t settled at all.
The plot thickened…
He fixed his eyes firmly shut, told himself to ignore the itch on the end of his nose-itches only seemed to happen when you had to be still-and strained to listen.
‘Are you OK?’ She was shuffling forward. She’d only been out of bed a couple of times since the Caesarean and her stitches would be pulling. She moved awkwardly forward with another nervous glance toward Joss.
Joss tried an obliging snore and wuffled a bit, like he was eighty.
‘No.’ That was Malcolm from the next bed and Joss could hear the pain in his voice. ‘I’m not OK. Hell, it hurts. I damn near killed myself. Of all the…’
‘Why did you come?’
‘I had to see you, of course. I wanted to make sure you didn’t tell…’
‘Didn’t tell Amy?’ Charlotte’s voice broke on a sob. ‘Of course. I was stupid to think you must want to see me.’
‘I did.’ Joss could hear him making an effort to placate her and he could imagine the man putting a hand out to touch the woman as she reached his side. They were so close…
He could just reach out and tweak the curtains…
The curtains around the beds gave an illusion of privacy. Behind them the two could imagine they were alone. As they did. Maybe Malcolm didn’t know he was here, and Charlotte believed that he was asleep.
‘I wanted you so much,’ she was saying.
‘So I came.’
‘You almost killed yourself.’
‘Yeah, I was a fool. But I wanted to see our daughter.’
‘Not a fool. Oh, Malcolm…’
Yeah, he’s a fool, Joss felt like saying, but he showed great forbearance and didn’t. Sheesh, the weather was easing! The ferry could be up and running by morning. He’d needed to see his daughter, so he’d risked her being fatherless?
He’d risked Joss being lifeless!
And…
But something else was bothering Malcolm. ‘You didn’t tell Amy?’ The guy was in deep pain, Joss thought, listening to his voice. He should pull back the curtain and check his obs and give him pain relief.
Not yet.
‘I didn’t tell Amy,’ she repeated dully. ‘I wanted to. That was why I came here in the first place. I was sitting outside her house, waiting for her to come home. I knew, you see. I asked at the post office and they said she knocked off at two and came home for a couple of hours. I’d come too early so I had to wait, because I wasn’t brave enough to come here. Only then I went into labour and panicked and tried to drive home. And I crashed. Then…when I was here and Amy was so nice…I couldn’t tell her. I tried to but I couldn’t. I’d thought…if I could only get her alone, I could explain.’
‘Explain what?’
‘That we’re in love,’ Charlotte whispered. ‘That I was carrying your baby. That we want to marry.’
‘But we don’t want to marry. We can’t. Not yet.’ It was an urgent demand. Charlotte must have completely forgotten that there was someone in this bed-or else she didn’t care-and Malcolm surely hadn’t realised.
‘Of course we want to marry. You have a daughter. Surely you want to acknowledge her. And you don’t love Amy.’ She was verging on hysterics.
‘Charlotte, remember our plans. I’m engaged to Amy and it’d be stupid to break it off. I’m all she has.’
‘But you love me.’
‘I can’t break off the engagement with Amy. You must see… That’s why I came the way I did. I thought no one would be at the harbour mouth in this weather. I’d park the boat by the old moorings and come in when Amy wasn’t around. Sunday afternoon there’s always so many old folk visiting I wouldn’t be noticed. I could avoid the staff and just ask one of the oldies where you were. I had to stop you from being stupid.’
‘Stupid-to tell her we’re in love?’
‘Charlotte, no.’ The intensity was too much for Malcolm, Joss thought. He could hear the desperation in the man’s voice. He should get up and stop this-tell Charlotte that Malcolm was in no state for visitors.
He did no such thing. Not yet. He waited.
‘It’s the money,’ Charlotte said flatly, and Joss heard Malcolm draw in his breath. The money. Of course. ‘You still think she’ll marry you and then you’ll get a share of all the money she inherits. That’s why you panicked and rode that damned speedboat into the rocks. You didn’t trust me to be quiet. When you rang last night and I was so upset… I might have known you’d do something stupid.’
‘You weren’t being logical last night,’ he told her wearily. ‘You weren’t making sense. Charlotte, this is all about our future. Our baby’s future. Amy’s worth a fortune and if I marry her, if I support her for the time she’s trapped in Iluka… Charlotte, it’ll set us up for life. Even if I only get my hands on ten per cent of what she’s worth, it’ll be enough. It’s only at weekends. You know she can’t leave Iluka. During the week we can be together, like we always have been.’
‘And our baby?’
It was too much. Malcolm gave a grunt of sheer exhaustion. ‘Charlotte, I can’t think. Not now… Please.’
It was time for the physician to call, Joss decided. He might be riveted to this conversation but he didn’t want Malcolm to collapse.
The sciatic nerve was a hell of a nerve to insult. Malcolm would be in pain for months, and Joss thought it couldn’t happen to a nicer person. He took a deep breath, rose and twitched back the curtain.
They stared at him in the dim light. He must look quite a sight, he thought. Surgeon in hospital gown, having slept off the effects of coming close to drowning.
They didn’t look too flash themselves. They might be as old as he was but they looked for all the world like two silly kids in trouble.
Malcolm closed his eyes-he didn’t know who Joss was and his body language said that he didn’t much care. Joss gave him a searching look and rang the bell. OK, the man had treated Amy like dirt but he needed morphine.
‘I’ll get you something to ease the pain,’ he told Malcolm, and then he looked at Charlotte. Charlotte knew who he was, and he could tell by her dawning horror that she’d figured he’d heard everything that had happened.
His argument wasn’t with Charlotte. She was as much a victim here as Amy was. Maybe more.
‘You need to go back to bed,’ he told her gently. And then, as Amy appeared at the door and looked in bewilderment from Joss to Charlotte to Malcolm and finally back to Joss, he said, ‘Amy, here’s Charlotte ready to go back to bed. Can you bring me ten milligrams of morphine for Malcolm? Then maybe you could go and tuck Charlotte in. She has something to tell you.’
Then, as Malcolm jerked into awareness and started to speak, he held up his hand.
‘Leave it,’ he told Malcolm. ‘You’ve done enough damage as it is. I risked my life saving you and now I’m not sure why. For now, Charlotte has a choice. She tells Amy what I’ve just overheard-or I do it for her.’
The helicopter arrived an hour later to collect Malcolm. It landed on a newly gravelled patch at the back of the golf course, the rain had miraculously stopped, the wind had eased back to moderate and the landing was easy.
Iluka was back in touch with civilisation.
‘You can go, too,’ Amy told Joss. It was a subdued Amy who’d returned from seeing Charlotte to hand him a
