Since retiring Danny had the time to visit Mrs Maudsley more often, but after a while he stopped telling Frankie where he was going. Irrationally he worried that his caring for Mrs Maudsley might show a weakness in him, as if he were unable to let go of that last remaining connection – as vague as it was – to an extraordinary couple who had changed his life so dramatically. Had Rosamunde and Michael not fostered and then adopted him, who knew what would have become of him?
He surely wouldn’t have been given the opportunities he had. He wouldn’t have met Alastair and Simon, or gone to university and met the woman who became his wife, and then there would have been no Jenna, their precious and most beautiful daughter.
He was a lucky man, no question.
But as if to remind him that the Grim Reaper could take that luck away at any moment he chose, Danny’s chest tightened and his heart gave a painful thud –Hah, I’ll give you luck, sonny!
Behind the wheel of his car, and concentrating hard on keeping his breath steady –in, out, in, out– he drove through the gates of Woodside and headed for home, where he would arm himself with a pair of secateurs and the wheelbarrow and pretend he’d been busy – not too busy, of course – in the garden for the last hour or so. He was banned from using the lawnmower; Frankie had seen to that.
This afternoon Frankie was at the Sewing Bee in Chelstead where she ran quilting workshops twice a week. It was during those sessions that Danny slipped away to Woodside. The fact that he had kept quiet about his visits for as long as he had made it all the more difficult to admit what he’d been doing. Better to keep things as they were, he reasoned, and wait for nature to intervene, when his ‘secret’ would die with Mrs Maudsley.
He would have to find something else to do with his time when that day came. For the most part he enjoyed pottering around at home, fixing things that had been waiting since forever to be fixed, and being with Frankie, but at the same time being careful not to get in her way. According to Frankie, Simon drove Sorrel mad by not having enough to do. Whenever Danny mentioned to Frankie that maybe he ought to do some kind of voluntary work, she urged him not to rush into anything and put his health at risk.
It was early days, was what he told himself whenever he and Frankie had this kind of discussion. In the circumstances it was understandable that she should be protective of him. For now he was still finding his feet in this new world of retirement, when the day stretched out ahead of him and was entirely his own with nobody making demands of his time.
Despite being at an age when retirement was clearly on the horizon, it had actually happened sooner than he thought it would. With no real specific plan in place he had foreseen going on with running the partnership of Wyatt Fielding Solicitors with Simon for some years yet, but fate had other ideas and put a stop to that when, out of the blue, he had collapsed in the office.
He’d been feeling vaguely out of sorts all that week, conscious of a hint of breathlessness combined with a spacey sense of not being quite with it. He’d put it down to tiredness, having had a run of nights when he hadn’t slept well, worrying over a client’s abusive husband who had taken to showing up at the office to harangue him. Twice the man had terrified Joan, their receptionist, by barging through to Danny’s office and threatening violence unless he stopped acting on behalf of his wife who wanted to divorce him.
It had been the first time anything like that had happened to Danny and had caused his heart to pound ferociously fast, at the same time feeling as though a strong hand had wrapped itself around that vital organ and squeezed it painfully hard. It seemed obvious now that he had ignored the blatant warning signs that something was seriously wrong, but he’d convinced himself that it was nothing to worry about.
The next day, when everybody but the cleaner had left the office for home, he had collapsed while on his way up the stairs to use the toilet. He’d been halfway up when he’d felt as though that iron grip of a hand had seized hold of his heart and suddenly the air was gone from his lungs and his legs gave way beneath him, and down the stairs he tumbled, banging his head as he went. When he came to, he was on a stretcher and being lifted into the back of an ambulance, which the cleaner, who had found him – God bless her! – had rung for.
He was kept in hospital for several days with numerous tests carried out on him, but then allowed home under strict orders that he was not to return to work for at least three weeks. ‘Treat this as a warning shot,’ he was told by a cardiologist who looked so young he should have been preparing for his A-levels, never mind qualified to perform heart surgery.
At home Frankie watched over him constantly; Jenna too, having caught the first available train home to Chelstead when her mother had phoned her. The concern in their faces filled him with anguish that he had caused them so much distress, and so he had made light of what had happened.
‘A lot of fuss about nothing,’ he’d said with more bravado than he felt, but Frankie was having none of it and laid down the law that he was not to work the long hours he had been used to doing. That was when the word ‘retirement’ was mentioned, not in an abstract sometime-in-the-future kind of way, but as hard indisputable fact.
Funnily enough it was Simon who seized the bull by the horns and declared Danny’s heart attack a sign that it was time to sell the business to the firm of lawyers from Chelmsford who had been sniffing around them for the last sixteen months. ‘Look,’ Simon had said, ‘Alastair threw in the towel, why don’t we? I mean, come on, let’s have some fun while—’
‘Don’t you dare saywhile we still can,’ Danny had interrupted him. ‘And it wasn’t a heart attack I had, it was just a …’
‘A what?’ Simon had said.
‘A glitch. A small bump in the road brought on by that aggressive man putting the mockers on me.’
‘Call it what you bloody well want,’ Simon had said with a shake of his head. ‘I for one don’t want to have your death on my conscience because you wouldn’t retire. Come on, let’s sell up and take it easy. Who knows, we might follow Alastair’s example and chuck a few things into a rucksack and go travelling.’
‘Would that be with or without our wives?’ The thought of Sorrel roughing it with the bare essentials contained in a backpack was laughable to Danny. Frankie might consider it for a few days, combined with a walking holiday and a comfortable bed to fall into after a decent meal, but months on end away from home not seeing Jenna would be out of the question. As it would be for him.
The surprise to Danny was that Simon was ready to retire, having shown no previous indication that he’d been giving it any serious thought. He claimed he’d been mulling it over ever since Alastair had taken the plunge.
Orla’s death had also played its part in the decision they reached. Frankie said it had made them grow up, that they couldn’t kid themselves they were immortal anymore. Within their close-knit group, Orla was the first of their number to fall, which underscored the realisation that at any moment one of them could be next, and with that ‘bump in the road’ that Danny’s heart had given him, retirement – a chance to take it easy – seemed a sensible option.
All this had taken place in February and March of this year, while Alastair was in Sri Lanka. Danny had insisted that his ‘bump in the road’ be kept from Alastair, knowing that had he heard of it, he would have been sufficiently alarmed to cut short his travels and return home. It was what Danny would have done, had the boot been on the other foot.
He had been tempted to tell his old friend yesterday when Alastair had called with the news that he was back, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. Besides, there was plenty of time to bring Alastair up to date. When Danny did, he would make light of it, shrug it off as just one of those things. Not a word would he say of his deep-seated fear that he felt as though every day was a day that could be snatched from him, that he might not live to see Jenna marry, to walk her proudly up the aisle, or have the chance to play with any grandchildren.
He slowed the car and turning the steering wheel, he pulled onto the drive and surveyed the house before him with its prettily painted yellow walls and front garden planted with a combination of box hedge and lavender. Walnut Tree Cottage had been their home – their very happy home – since Jenna was a toddler, and once more he told himself that he was a lucky man. The words had become a mantra to him, and maybe if he said them enough Lady Luck would continue to bestow her generous favours upon him and fend off the Grim Reaper.
He was getting maudlin, he muttered under his breath while letting himself in at the back door. That’s what came of spending too much time at Woodside with the elderly and the dying. Thank goodness he had the weekend to look forward to, when they’d all be together at Linston End. Except, of course, there would be no Orla. It still took some getting used to.
But there would be Alastair, he forced himself to focus on. He had missed his old friend while he’d been away. Never had they been apart for so long. Initially there had been regular updates from Alastair, but then the informative emails tailed off until it was only an occasional photo accompanied by a wise crack of a comment.
‘I have something to tell you all,’ Alastair had told Danny on the phone yesterday.
‘He’s met a woman,’ Frankie had said when Danny had repeated this to her.
