he was the sole doctor for a radius of twenty miles with only the back-up service of an understaffed cottage hospital behind him, was certainly no sinecure, Lyle Garnett decided tiredly as he folded his long frame into his shabby estate car.
When he had voluntarily given up the brilliant career specialising in micro neuro-surgery that had been forecast for him his friends had thought he was mad, and privately he tended to agree with them, but the involvement and commitment needed to succeed in that sort of field were not something he could give and bring up two children as well, especially not two boys as rebellious and difficult as Stuart and James.
It was because of his career that he had seen so little of them during their early years. Even before their divorce he and Heather had been living in semi-estrangement; he devoting long hours to the advancement of his career, and Heather constantly complaining about the two small children which had made the continuation of hers impossible.
The fact was that they should never have married. Heather hadn’t wanted to. When she discovered that their affair had led to a pregnancy she had wanted to go for an abortion, but he had been young and idealistic in those days and he had stubbornly held out for marriage. He had loved her then, or had thought he did, he acknowledged wryly, but what in effect he had loved had been a very young man’s dream of a woman, not the reality. He had wanted Heather to be the mother to his children that he himself had never known. His mother had been an actress, someone he saw very infrequently and whom he had yearned for desperately all his childhood. She had died when he was sixteen from a brain haemorrhage, and her death had sparked off his interest in medicine, filling in with a crusading and totally impractical dream of curing the world of all its ailments.
Time and reality had hardened that idealistic teenager into the man he was today, a world, and almost twenty years, away from that boy of sixteen. Now he recognised that for his own sake he should have allowed Heather to have her abortion. If he had maybe she would still be alive today … but that was an old guilt and one he had learned to live with in a way that he had never learned to live with his guilt towards his sons. He loved them but they were hostile towards him. They resented the fact that they had lost their mother and in her place gained a father who was virtually a stranger to them. He and Heather had divorced when James was two and Stuart four and Heather had died two years ago, running directly into the path of an oncoming car, having just had a row with him.
She had always had a terrible temper, something he had pushed to the back of his mind when as a young houseman of twenty-odd he fell in love with her, and when he had refused to take the children so that she could emigrate to America with her lover and take up the medical career she had been forced to abandon when she became pregnant, she had flown from his flat in such a fierce rage that she had never even seen the car.
She had been killed instantly, the driver distraught with shock; and in death she had achieved what she had not been able to achieve in life. He had had to take on the responsibility for his sons. Not that it had been a lack of love for them or reluctance to care for them that had prompted his refusal, merely the belief that their place was with their mother. But Heather had never wanted them. She had told him so often enough. And so he had had little alternative but to give up his career as a neuro-surgeon, and instead look around him for something less demanding and time-consuming that would mean he could take charge of his sons.
He had heard of this rural practice from a friend of a friend, and the local medical board had been astounded and delighted at the thought of getting such a highly qualified man for the job.
Within a month of Heather’s death he and the children were established in Sutton Parva, several miles west of Oxford, where his married sister and her family lived.
Justine had promised to do all she could to help him with the boys and had been as good as her word, but there were still problems. He frowned as he drove homewards. The boys were both rebellious and sullen; and being older than their cousin tended both to dominate and persecute him. Although he told himself that their bad behaviour sprang from insecurity and pain, there were times when he was so exasperated by them that he almost wanted to be able to resort to the old-fashioned parental hard hand in a place where it hurt the most. So far he had managed to restrain himself.
Added to all his other problems was the fact that as a widower and a doctor, not to mention what Justine called his ridiculously unfair share of good looks, he was constantly having to fend off the romantic and sexual overtures of some of his female patients.
It took him half an hour to drive home. The house he had bought from the previous doctor was large and rambling, with a garden that he made infrequent and haphazard attempts to tame.
Far from enjoying their country environment his sons never ceased bemoaning the lack of facilities. Raised as city children, even after eighteen months they were still not at home in the country. The new bikes he had bought them for Christmas were virtually unused, and obvious but nonetheless effective method of showing their dislike and resentment of him.
A large part of the problem was that Heather had never made any attempt to hide from the children how little either parent had genuinely wanted them, and they in turn were fiercely determined to show the rest of the world, especially their father and his family, how little they wanted him.
Even while he understood and sympathised with them, Lyle found they exasperated him.
He knew the moment he entered the kitchen that there had been another scene.
Justine, who like him had inherited the strong family profile and thick dark hair, was standing belligerently by the table, the silence thick and taut with angry resentment.
‘I’ve sent the boys upstairs,’ she told him without preamble. ‘I had to bring them back early. They tied Peter up in the garden and built a bonfire under him. They told me they were playing at Guy Fawkes.’ Her eyes darkened as she said unsteadily, ‘Dear God, Lyle, if I hadn’t caught them in time …’
She had no need to go on. He himself felt physically ill at the thought of what could have happened.
‘I can’t look after them for you any more, Lyle,’ she told him bluntly. ‘I know their problems aren’t necessarily their own fault, but I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. They need someone of their own.’
She watched sympathetically as her brother sat down; a big lean man, with a shock of thick dark hair, and eyes of a vividly intense blue, who at this moment in time looked older than his thirty-five years.
She loved him and she sympathised with him, but she could not risk the safety of her own dearly loved eight-year-old any longer with a pair of children whom she frankly considered to be beyond her ability to help.
‘God, Justine, what the hell am I going to do?’ He looked so tired and depressed that she was tempted to retract, but she hardened her heart against him.
‘Well, for one thing, this,’ she told him firmly, placing a folded newspaper down on the table in front of him. ‘Go on, read it,’ she demanded, waiting until he raised his eyes to hers in incredulous disbelief, finely mixed with anger.
‘You’re seriously suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, are you? That I reply to this ad from some crazy woman who wants a husband, sell myself?’
‘Why not? Other people do it all the time,’ she interrupted evenly. ‘Only they call it self-sacrifice. You’re a doctor, Lyle,’ she reminded him, hoping he wouldn’t guess how much she hated doing this to him. ‘But how long can you go on calling yourself that? How long will it be before all the problems you’ve got here occupy so much of your mind that you make a mistake? A mistake that could cost someone’s life?’
She was only echoing his own inner thoughts, but to do what she was suggesting! He put his hand to his forehead and found that he was sweating slightly.
‘I just can’t look after them any more,’ Justine pressed on. ‘I’ve got Peter to think of. They need someone of their own,’ she added more gently, ‘someone who can give them what you and I can’t.’
‘And you think this … this stranger, a woman who needs a man so