chapter Nine
In the event, meeting Tom wasn’t as straightforward as Chloe had anticipated.
She’d rung him from the town centre that morning and hadn’t been surprised when his phone went to voicemail. He was, after all, in the middle of a morning surgery. She left a brief message.
‘Tom, it’s Chloe. I realise you’re busy, so I’m sorry to hassle you. Could we meet up some time today for ten minutes? I’m happy to come to the surgery. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’
She went back home, leaving Jake with the other mum who’d said she was happy to look after him until after lunch, as she had a little boy herself of Jake’s age and the two got on well together. At the cottage Chloe drove herself to a solid hour-and-a-half’s work on the article, banishing all thoughts of Tom and his predicament ruthlessly from her mind.
One o’clock came, and went. Wasn’t Tuesday one of the days Tom worked a split shift, spending four hours at the practice and then picking Kelly up from nursery to spend the afternoon with her? In which case, he must have finished his first shift and would surely have checked his phone’s voice messages by now. She chided herself almost at once. He was a busy man, and had a lot else on his plate now in addition to his work. It was egotistical of her to expect that he’d give priority to returning her call. She told herself to be patient and get on with her work. There was time for another half hour’s writing before she had to go and pick Jake up.
The afternoon passed, Chloe losing herself to some extent in first a chat over a cup of tea with the woman who’d looked after Jake, and later an extended reading session with Jake. She noticed with delight that his ability to identify letters was growing rapidly. What was more, he was fascinated by books, to the extent that she sometimes struggled to pry him away from them at meal times.
At four o’clock Chloe checked her phone, saw that nobody had called, and decided to give Tom another try. He’d be with Kelly now, and although she was reluctant to intrude on his time with his daughter, she thought there was more chance of his answering than if she waited until later when he’d be back at work for the evening surgery.
It went to voicemail, again. She left a similar message to before, hoping she didn’t sound too desperate, like some sort of stalker. It occurred to her that if Tom was aware of the allegations against him – and he surely must be, by now, she thought – he was probably hardly in the mood to respond to a woman’s invitation for a meeting. Silently Chloe cursed herself for her short-sightedness.
She’d leave it, for today. If Tom didn’t want to meet her, or speak to her, that was his decision. Perhaps she’d try again tomorrow. But badgering him wasn’t going to help him at all, and would just make her look foolish.
And it was with that thought that Chloe’s instincts took over. Fortune favours the bold. She’d promised herself to offer Tom her full support, and that was what she was going to do. Propriety be damned. She scooped up Jake, who was excited when she told him they were going out for a drive, and set off in the Astra.
Chloe parked across the street from the surgery. One or two people were lingering outside, waiting for it to open its doors for the evening session. She checked the dashboard clock. A quarter to five.
She spotted Tom’s Ford turning into the street and pulling into one of the parking spaces reserved for staff at the side of the surgery.
Drawing a deep breath, Chloe climbed out, lifted Jake from his seat in the back and crossed the road. The staff car park was round the corner from where the patients were waiting, so they wouldn’t see her approach Tom.
He saw her as he was stepping out of his car, and Chloe was appalled by the expression that appeared on his face for an instant. He flinched, visibly, fear flaring in his features. A second later the expression was gone, to be replaced by one of wary politeness.
‘Hello, Chloe. Hi, Jake.’ He managed to waggle his eyebrows, something that never failed to send the boy into peals of laughter.
Chloe kept a respectful distance. She plunged right in: ‘Tom, I’m really sorry to ambush you like this. It’ll just take a second. But you haven’t been answering my calls. Not that you’re obliged to, of course, but I have to speak to you.’
He stood watching her carefully, still holding the car door open. Something changed in his features, as if he’d read something in hers that eased his wariness.
‘So you’ve heard, then,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, Tom.’ She’d prepared a set speech, but for a moment Chloe was at a loss.
‘It isn’t true,’ he said.
‘I know it isn’t.’ She risked a step closer to him. ‘That’s why I wanted to speak to you. Tom, this is terrible. You must feel awful. Who’d do something like this?’
He seemed about to speak, but shut his mouth, still gazing at her.
‘I know it’s a clichéd thing to say, but – if there’s anything I can do, anything at all, please ask.’ She was dispirited at how trite she was sounding, how the bold, no-nonsense approach she’d intended was withering in the face of the utter anguish she could see was holding him in its grip.
The memory of the expression on his face when she’d first accosted him – the fear – caught up with her suddenly, and a shock of understanding came to her. ‘Tom… you didn’t think… I was the one who made the accusation, did you?’
He was silent for only a fraction of a second too long, but it answered her question. Of course; it made sense to Chloe now. His avoidance of her phone calls. His wariness around her now. He thought she’d taken offence after their kiss a week ago and was trying now to destroy his career and his life.
‘I didn’t know what to think, Chloe,’ he murmured.
She wanted to step closer to him, to embrace him (however awkward that would be, not least because she was holding Jake in her arms), to tell him she was sorry; sorry that she’d run away that evening last week and not been back in contact, sorry that she’d been so aloof with him over the last weeks and months, more or less spurning his offers of friendship; sorry that he was in the nightmarish predicament he found himself in. And she wanted to assure him that he wasn’t alone, that she’d help him in whatever way he could to fight this thing, clear his name.
But she didn’t, of course. She just stood and stared at him, helpless.
‘Tom, talk to me,’ she said. ‘Who’s been making these allegations? All I’ve heard so far is rumours, vague hints. I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘I don’t, either,’ he said, closing the car door as if he’d just remembered it. He had his jacket draped over a forearm, his briefcase in his hand. ‘I’ve no idea who’s been making the accusations. None whatsoever. But I’ll be able to read all about it in tomorrow’s paper. As will you, and every other living soul in this town.’
‘Which paper? Not the Gazette?’ Surely they weren’t ready to run a story yet, especially not after letting Tom have a chance to defend himself. that wasn’t Mike’s style.
‘No. The Pember Valley News.’ Tom starting walking towards the front of the surgery and Chloe had to fall into step beside him to keep up. Jake, seeming to sense the tension in the air, clung to her neck, saying nothing.
‘They doorstepped me this morning, asking if I had anything to say about the allegations,’ Tom went on as he walked. ‘I said I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then, this afternoon I got a phone call from one of the paper’s editors, saying they were going to run the story in tomorrow morning’s edition and did I have any comment. Again I said I had no idea what they were on about. So I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow, along with everybody else.’
‘Tom!’ Chloe said, trying to keep up with his brisk pace, almost pleading. ‘You have to get an injunction or something. Stop them spreading lies in print.’
‘But that’s just the problem, Chloe,’ he said, stopping and turning to face her, an expression of intense weariness written across his face. ‘I don’t know what they’re going to print. All I’ve heard is that a woman – I haven’t been told her name – has made an allegation of sexual harassment against me. I haven’t been formally accused of any wrongdoing, not by any regulatory body or by the police. It’s all, as you say, rumours at present.’
‘Then you need to sue them, Tom. Make them pay for whatever lies they print.’
‘I could do that, yes. But it won’t undo the damage. The seed of doubt will have been planted in everyone’s minds.’ There was a bitterness in his tone Chloe had never heard before, and wouldn’t have thought him capable of.
She felt utterly deflated. ‘What are you going to do?’ she managed.
He paused for a long moment, deliberating. Then he said: ‘I have to leave, Chloe. Leave Pemberham. Start again somewhere else as best I can.’
‘Tom –’ This time Chloe did reach out to him, unable to help herself. Her hand fell short of his arm. ‘Leave? All on the basis of some… rumour?’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said quietly, but not unkindly. ‘I know what this is all about. I know what’s going on. And the only course of action is to leave. For Kelly’s sake.’
He was right. Chloe didn’t understand. She couldn’t remember being more confused before in her life.
‘Tom,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘Please understand. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do this.’
His smile was gentle. ‘I know it wasn’t, Chloe. I didn’t think it was, but seeing you now, I’m certain of it. and that’s why I have to leave.’
More bewildered than ever, she stood hugging her son, watching Tom disappear round the corner towards the entrance to the surgery. A faint, good-natured cheer rose up, presumably from the waiting patients, as he went inside.
***
For the second Tuesday night in a row, Chloe couldn’t sleep.
This time what was keeping her awake wasn’t the turmoil of confusing, mixed emotions, churned up from the silt at the bottom of her soul where she’d thought them long dead and fossilised. That was what she’d gone through last week, after the kiss with Tom. Tonight, she was being kept from sleep by a realisation far sharper, purer, better defined, one that she was unable to draw her attention away from.
Chloe had no idea what Tom had meant by his last, cryptic remarks about having to leave Pemberham because he understood what was going on, and because he knew she wasn’t the one who’d made the allegations. But she knew she’d find out; would have to find out. It was a challenge to be overcome, a problem to be solved, nothing more. She knew also that she had her work cut out for her. Because in the morning, her hunt for the truth would begin.
Chloe had come home with Jake, fed and bathed him and put him to bed after the customary story, then set to work. Not on anything to do with Tom, but on the article about the Stratwell estate and the town council’s neglect. She worked with single-minded purpose, allowing nothing to distract her until, after midnight, she’d given the manuscript a final read through, pronounced herself satisfied, and emailed it to Mike Sellers.
Tomorrow she’d be up with the lark and get hold of a copy of that grubby muckraking rag, the Pember Valley News, steel herself, and read with as dispassionate and forensic an eye as she was able the lies the paper had printed about Dr Tom Carlyle. And then she’d get to work investigating every single rumour, every sly distortion of the truth, and she would demolish them all. She’d bring down the paper and its editorial staff if need be.
She was one hundred per cent committed to proving Tom Carlyle’s innocence, because he was a decent man who was being made the target of a malicious smear. Because as far as she could tell, he had nobody else to stand by his side.
And because she loved him.
Yes, she’d admitted it to herself as she was driving back home to the cottage after the encounter with him outside the surgery that afternoon. The words had risen, unbidden, into her mind, and all of a sudden the world had shifted into pure, crystalline focus. For all Chloe’s constantly renewed commitment to self-honesty, she understood that she’d been living in a fog of self-delusion for the last few months, and most especially in the last week since their kiss.
She, Chloe Edwards, loved Tom Carlyle. The realisation, once out of the box, was never to be stuffed back in. And all of a sudden it didn’t matter that she’d been widowed for hardly longer than a year and therefore might be seen to be disloyal to the memory of her late, much-loved husband. It didn’t matter that Tom was a doctor, and that a doctor had allowed her husband to die.
She loved Tom Carlyle. And although she’d lost him, and he was going away, she owed it to him and to her love for him to clear his good name.
Lying in bed, Chloe thought it would be as well to focus on the negative feelings now, to give them free rein, the better to get them out the way so that they didn’t linger and distract her from what she needed to do in the coming days. Regret: that was one of the negative feelings, possible in the long run one of the most corrosive of all. In her case, the regret was for the way she’d allowed love, so potentially joyous and healing, to lie lonely and unrecognised under layers of guardedness and pride. And she had only herself to blame for it. She knew Tom was attracted to her; she didn’t know if he loved her. But if he did, or had, she couldn’t fault him for trying to get close to her in order to allow love to bloom. Chloe had been the stand-offish, cool one, always keeping him at arm’s length. He’d done his best, within the bounds of acceptable behaviour, to break through her reserve, and it was hardly his fault that he hadn’t been successful.
Another negative feeling was frustration, and this time the feeling was directed at Tom. How could he throw in the towel like this, planning to pack up and move away on the basis of a few scurrilous rumours? He’d sounded completely sincere when he said they were baseless, so why didn’t he stand his ground and fight for his name? Why was he giving in like this? Yes, the next few days and weeks were going to be highly unpleasant, and people were going to talk behind his back. His life in Pemberham, and his work, were going to be made exceedingly difficult. But people were decent and reasonable, on the whole, Chloe believed. Given time, and the evidence, the community would come to understand that Tom was the victim of an injustice, and would learn to trust him once more. Running away, as he was intending to do, would just make people more suspicious that he was guilty, that there was no smoke without fire.
The third negative feeling Chloe acknowledged within herself was anger: a slow, simmering fury that she’d last experienced in the months after Mark’s death, when the evidence had become clear to her of the incompetence of the doctor who’d misdiagnosed him. This time round her anger was less focused, directed towards a murky, unknown person who was bringing the allegations against Tom, and towards the Pember Valley News for taking part in this witchhunt. Of the negative emotions, this was probably the most useful. As long as she didn’t let it heat up to a point at which it affected her judgement, Chloe could use it to sustain her when things became difficult, as they no doubt would very quickly.
Her thoughts kept returning to the love she felt for Tom. Like a brilliant, multifaceted diamond it shone and sparkled before her, mesmerising her, lulling her finally into sleep.
***
Tom was a walker. As a child he’d rambled in the hills around Pemberham, and as a moody teenager, feeling rejected and misunderstood by every other human being on earth, he’d used to wander the streets on his own at all hours, thinking to himself, trying to make sense of a confusing world. Even later, when he’d been at medical school in London, after an especially stressful day’s work or a more-than-usually exhausting on-call shift, his favourite and most effective way to unwind was to stroll alongside the River Thames for miles or head through one of the city’s parks, relishing the simple pleasure of locomotion, and of course benefiting from the exercise in the process.
Since Kelly had been born his opportunities for solitary walking had of course been limited. Kelly was a lively, active child, and was more than happy to go for rambles in the countryside, which he enjoyed. But having to keep a constant eye on a four-year-old who was liable to race off at the slightest provocation meant that Tom couldn’t indulge in the sort of untrammelled, free-form thinking he’d found so comforting and useful before.
He could have done with some solitary walking time now.
Instead, with Kelly tucked up in bed, the dishes washed, and every other possible opportunity for distraction exhausted, he stood in the middle of the living room and gazed around him. He looked at the trappings of country life, some inherited with the house, some added by him, still others contributed by well-meaning visitors anxious to help him fit in to his new life. There was the hand-carved sideboard he’d snapped up for a song at a local auction. Here was a matching set of antimacassars and doilies, terribly twee for his taste but donated by the ladies of the local Women’s Institute and therefore on obligatory permanent display in case any of the good ladies dropped in to visit. All reminders that he, and Kelly, had left one life behind and adopted a very different one here in Pemberham. A simpler, more satisfying one.
And now, a mere eight months after they’d arrived, he was going to have to uproot them once more.
He wandered about the room, picking objects up, studying them as if for the first time. One print on the wall caught his attention: a Turner watercolour, showing an impressionistic ship in the centre of a violent storm at sea. He knew the feeling.
During the day his suspicion had been growing as to what the malicious allegation was all about, but he hadn’t allowed his speculation full rein until after he’d met Chloe in the car park outside the surgery. Up until that point, he’d entertained the notion that she might just possibly be the person who’d phoned the paper. One look at her face, at the horrified way she reacted to his anguish, persuaded him that she had nothing to do with it, and he immediately felt ashamed that he’d ever considered such a thing. From that moment on, he’d realised what was going on.
Rebecca was behind it. She’d made plenty of veiled threats, dropped hints on at least two occasions that her gloves were coming off, that she’d get custody of Kelly back come hell or high water. He’d dismissed all this as histrionic bluff. Well, he was discovering now just how far she was prepared to go, and he knew this was only the beginning of the trouble he faced.
She’d either phoned in the allegations herself, or - much more likely - had put somebody else up to the job. Tom wouldn’t know until more details emerged in the Pember Valley News tomorrow. But he supposed an actual accuser would come forward to be interviewed, and that couldn’t of course be Rebecca. she’d be there in the background, however, pulling the strings.
The allegations would turn out to be baseless, of course. Nobody would be able to prove anything. But, equally, Tom himself wouldn’t be able to prove his innocence. He wasn’t required to according to English law, but people’s minds didn’t always work as tidily as that. An absence of proof of guilt didn’t necessarily mean proof of innocence. Probably Tom would face no disciplinary action, and there’d be no stain on his record. But people would point fingers, and gossip. Every contact of Tom’s with a female patient would be subject to the closest scrutiny. And people had long memories, especially in a small country town. Tom’s reputation would linger, perhaps even after he was dead and gone. He’d be forever known as that doctor who there was all the fuss about.
So Rebecca’s plan was a masterful one. It didn’t matter whether Tom was innocent or guilty. He assumed that she’d file for custody while the scandal was breaking. Now, his previously unblemished record as a parent would count for very little. Now, the court would see a young mother fighting to wrest back custody of her little girl from a doctor accused of sexual misconduct with a patient. Tom wouldn’t stand a chance. And even if he invested every penny of his money, every second of his time, in appeal after appeal, the resulting legal wrangle, played out against the backdrop of the investigation into his professional conduct that would be featured regularly in the local media, would put him but most of all Kelly through unimaginable stress for weeks, possibly months. It would shatter the girl’s innocence, warp her fragile, developing emotional self. And, most devastatingly of all, ruin forever the trust a child was supposed to have in her parents and in the idea that they were kind, loving people in whom she could always rely.
No. Rebecca had clearly thought this through from every angle. She’d won. Tom had to recognise that. Rebecca would have to have custody of the girl. The best Tom could do now was limit the damage the whole affair was going to cause, and to continue to play as big a part in his daughter’s life as he possibly could.
Which meant leaving Pemberham and following Kelly wherever her mother took her. If Rebecca had been serious when she’d talked about moving to France, Tom would have to go there too. He spoke schoolboy French, nothing more. He had little knowledge of the Gallic system of medicine, though he supposed it couldn’t be vastly different from Britain’s. But all of that was immaterial. Wherever Kelly ended up, he, Tom, had to be nearby. For his daughter’s sake; but, Tom had to admit, for his own as well. Because worse than anything he could imagine, worse than losing his job or even his licence to practise medicine, was the idea of being separated from Kelly.
He’d miss the surgery here in Pemberham. He had in his eight months at the practice developed fond attachments to his colleagues, most of all Ben Okoro, his fellow GP. He had a genuine liking for the vast majority of his patients and their families, for the range of personalities that made up his population. He’d miss the often frantic but workable way of life he’d set up for his little family unit.
And he’d miss Chloe. God, how he would. The thought stabbed through him, white hot, searing. Suddenly all the guilt he’d felt after their kiss last week, all the reasons he’d told himself as to why their getting together would be a bad idea, evaporated in the heat of his desire for her. He realised all at once that he’d looked forward to catching a glimpse of her every day over the last month or two, that a smile and a wave from her could delight him unduly and sustain his mood through the day, that a full-on conversation with her was as cherishable as gold dust.
She didn’t share his feelings, that was clear, even if there was a degree of simple animal attraction there. So leaving Pemberham had, in a perverse way, its advantages, at least as far as his love for her was concerned. To remain would be forever to be wounded by her presence, so near and yet so out of reach. And one day Chloe would find a man of her own, perhaps a local fellow. To see her with this hypothetical man, however decent he was - and Tom was sure she’d choose a decent one - would be too much for him to bear.
Tom went into Kelly’s room and sat by her bedside, watching the rise and fall of her chest as she slept, so peaceful, so utterly without guile. His throat constricted so that he thought for a moment he’d have to flee before his choking woke her.
Oh, Kelly, he thought. What are we doing to you?
He knew that he, too needed sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, perhaps one of the longest of his life.