The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

streamed down the glass. It was almost nine o’clock and still not fully light.
    Monday morning – a full list of appointments, two drugs reps, calls, an afternoon antenatal clinic, and Hannah to be taken to the dentist after school … and she had hardly made a denton the preparations for Christmas. But none of this troubled her very much, set beside the fact that Karin McCafferty had an appointment.
    Cat let the blind slats drop back together sharply. I can’t do it, she thought – and it was a feeling so rare that it alone worried her.
    Karin McCafferty was forty-four, a patient who had become a friend when Cat’s mother, Dr Meriel Serrailler, had engagedher to redesign the garden at Hallam House.
    Cat saw her now – tall, with red hair that sprang from her head, a long, oval, creamy-skinned face. She had a face that was plain, in an oddly memorable way. Karin had given up a high-powered career in banking tobecome a garden designer and plantswoman, a change that had transformed her, she said. Her new career had blossomed along with her hardy plants.An upmarket garden magazine had recently featured her work and one of her gardens had been shown on television.
    Karin – great company, interested in a multitude of things as well as gardens. She and Mike McCafferty – a dull man Cat thought – had been married for twenty-two years. No children. ‘We went down every route and side route but no go; IVF had a much lower success rate then and I alwaysknew that it was my known children I wanted – I couldn’t have adopted.’
    Sam Deerbon adored Karin, though Hannah was wary of her. ‘She’s bossy.’
    ‘Too right I am,’ Karin had said when told.
    Karin McCafferty. The X-rays and report from the oncologist at Bevham General were on Cat’s desk.
    ‘You shouldn’t let patients become friends,’ Chris had said the previous evening. Perhaps he was right, butdetachment was not something Cat had ever been good at. She took the problems and pain of her patients to heart, and the joys as well, and she would not like to be any different. But then came the hard confrontations, as this one with Karin was going to be.
    Her desk telephone rang. ‘It’s nearly quarter past.’ Jean in reception.
    ‘Sorry, sorry … wheel them in.’
    She pushed Karin’s results to oneside. Before that, fourteen other people needed her full attention. She turned to smile at the first of them, coming through the door.
    Iris Chater had aged since her husband’s death. But Cat knew, watching her walk disconsolately into the room,that the process was reversible. At the moment, the shock and stress of bereavement, the tears, lack of sleep and unaccustomed loneliness had crumpledher, drained her of all vitality. But she was not too old for time and rest to heal and restore her. Now, she sighed as she sat down. Her eyes had the flat, inwardly focused look of the recently bereaved.
    ‘How are you coping?’
    ‘I’m managing, Doctor, I’m not too bad. And I know Harry is best off now. I do know that.’ Her sad eyes filled with tears.
    ‘It’s hard. Of course it’s hard.’ Cat pushedthe box of tissues across her desk.
    ‘I keep hearing him in the night … I wake up and I can still hear him breathing. I feel him with me in the room. I suppose that sounds daft to you.’
    ‘No, it sounds normal. I’d be worried if you said it wasn’t happening.’
    ‘I’m not going mad then?’
    ‘Definitely not.’
    The question they never failed either to ask, or to leave in the air unspoken between themfor the doctor to pick up. Iris Chater relaxed, and her face took on a little more colour.
    ‘Apart from missing Harry, how’s your own health?’
    ‘I’m just tired really. I can’t eat much either. It comes and goes.’ She shifted about in her chair, picked her bag up from the floor and put it down again. Cat waited.
    ‘Harry lost his appetite.’
    ‘I know. He lost it because he had cancer, and he’d hada long struggle. You’ve lost