The Doctor's Proposal (18 page)

It was also Spike's moment of glory.

The district's best jams and jellies, most obedient dog, highest sponge—and widest pumpkin—were all on show.

Angus was to open the proceedings.

He fretted for days beforehand. ‘I couldn't be doing it last year,' he told them. ‘I had pneumonia. But I'll be getting there this year if it kills me.'

It almost did. He spent two hours getting into his full Scottish regalia and at the end he had to have a wee lie down. Kirsty went into his bedroom and found him gasping without oxygen.

‘If you think you can open the festival dead, you can think again,' she told him, hooking up his oxygen tube and swiping his hand away as he tried to protest.

‘The Laird of Loganaich would never have anything as sissy as an oxygen cylinder,' he told her, and Kirsty gazed around the room, saw a discarded sash and wound the offending cylinder with the Douglas clan.

‘There,' she said. ‘The Laird of Loganaich would find it impossible to leave his loyal and appropriately clad companion behind.'

‘You'd be as bossy as your sister.'

‘No one's as bossy as Susie.'

‘Susie's staying on,' Angus said in quiet satisfaction. ‘She's promised. How about you, lass?'

Kirsty fiddled, adjusting the tartan.

‘You're marking time,' Angus said softly. ‘Waiting for what?'

‘To be sure,' she whispered.

‘He's sure.'

He was. Every day Kirsty saw Jake's certainty grow. He still didn't push her. He was simply her friend—the friend who laughed with her, who talked to her of her patients as she grew more enmeshed in this little community, who shared the love and laughter of his little girls…

‘You can't be keeping him waiting for ever,' Angus said, and Kirsty nodded, tying the sash with a defiant tug.

‘I know.'

‘So what's holding you back?'

‘It's like…I've been so self-contained for so long,' she whispered. ‘But now I'm happy.'

‘You'd be fearful that if you take the next step you'll compromise what you already have?'

‘My mother's death tore my family apart,' she told him. ‘My parents were in love, but after Mom died, Dad just…stopped. And Susie—she gave herself completely, and when Rory died she came close to dying as well.'

‘So you'll not go that last step.'

‘I…I will.' She knew she must. She loved Jake so much. But this last step…

‘It's a hard hurdle,' Angus told her, between deep breaths that replenished his oxygen-starved lungs. ‘But it's part of life, lass. You love and risk losing, or you don't love at all and then you've lost already. Deirdre and I had the best fun. Here I am left with just a bunch of plastic chandeliers and old Queen Vic in the bathroom—but I wouldn't be having it any other way. I had forty glorious years of my lovely Deidre, and here I am falling in love all over again with a wee mite called Rose who's twisted around my heart like…'

He paused as the sound of a horn sounded from the forecourt and wiped a surreptitious tear from his wrinkled cheek. ‘Enough. I'll be getting maudlin. But don't you be risking things by waiting too long, lass.'

No. She wouldn't.

All she had to do was say yes, she thought as she drove her cargo of Angus and Susie and Rosie in her baby seat—and Spike in a trailer in the rear—to the fair.

Jake was already there. Alice and Penelope whooped up to them the minute they arrived, big with all the news of girls who'd been deprived of their favourite people for a whole two days.

They talked, Jake chatted and joked with Angus and Susie, but all the time Kirsty knew Jake was watching her.

No, she thought. It was different. He wasn't watching her. He was just…with her.

She had to take this leap. She loved him. All she had to do was say yes.

But she stood apart a little. Part of this extended family but not quite taking this final step. Not quite.

Angus played his part in style. That choked her up. The bagpipes started, reaching a crescendo of drums and music that could have come straight from a grey Scottish gloaming. And then there was Angus's speech, full of wry humour, pulling in each and every one of the people present.

He truly was the laird, Kirsty thought, her eyes misting with love for the old man. His speech was hardly marred by his need for oxygen and the cylinder was inconspicuous behind him.

How long did he have?

Pulmonary fibrosis was a killer. Soon…soon.

Not now. She glanced up and Jake's eyes were on her. She met his look full on.

Soon.

The pumpkin judging was early on the agenda. At the appointed hour Kirsty and Jake brought the trailer round and hauled in a few hands to help tug Spike onto the judging dais.

There were yells of appreciation.

‘He has to win,' Kirsty said.

‘Thanks to Dr McMahon and her magic medication,' Jake said, grinning.

‘Is an IV line illegal in pumpkin circles? Like doping in sport?'

‘We cut the stalk away,' Jake said. ‘The evidence is rotting in Angus's compost patch. And I doubt they've invented a urine test for pumpkins.'

And then there was another cry of awe and they turned—to see another pumpkin being hauled across the judging area.

A huge pumpkin. Vast!

Bigger than Spike?

‘Whose…?' Kirsty breathed, and a head bobbed up from behind the pumpkin and beamed.

Ben Boyce.

‘Hi,' he said, and he looked at Angus and his beam darned near split his face.

‘You—you…' For a moment Kirsty thought Angus was heading for apoplexy. She moved toward him, but Angus's face was recovering his colour, turning the healthy red of true indignation. ‘You traitor!'

‘Why traitor?' Ben said—all innocence. ‘I grew my pumpkin in my back yard and you grew yours in yours. What's the harm in that?'

‘You helped with my pumpkin!'

‘So I did,' Ben said. His wife was firmly tucked by his side and he was walking with a step that was almost sprightly, totally at odds with the gnarled appearance of his arthritis-affected bones. ‘It wouldn't have been sporting not to have helped.' He beamed again as his pumpkin was hoisted onto the scales. ‘Her name's Fatso, by the way,' he told them. ‘And she's a better doer than Spike. Thirstier.'

Angus gasped. ‘You don't meant to tell me you used IV lines.'

‘Of course we did,' Ben said. ‘When you started using them I got some medical advice. We watched Doc McMahon do yours and my Maggie's a nurse. We owe you a vote of thanks, Doc,' he told Kirsty, who choked.

Unnoticed—or maybe noticed but unobtrusive—Jake's arm came around her waist.

‘Fatso will have to win,' Susie was saying. She lifted Rosie out of her baby sling and perched her small, wrinkled person on top of the pumpkin. Cameras went wild. ‘Oh, Angus, do you mind very much?'

Angus was glowering at his friend. ‘Of course I mind,' he barked at Ben. ‘Whippersnapper. That's eight out of twenty times you'll be beating me. You wait until next year!'

Next year.

Kirsty blinked. This from a man who just weeks ago had intended to die.

‘It's a date, then,' Ben said. ‘Same time next year, Angus Douglas, and it's a bottle of your best Scotch against one of Maggie's fruit cakes that I'll beat you again.'

‘Done.'

General laughter. Angus slapped his friend on the back and they headed to the refreshment rooms—probably for one of Angus's whiskies.

Laughter being the best medicine?

Tomorrow being the best medicine.

‘It's time for the mother-daughter sack race,' someone announced over the loudspeaker.

Jake's hand dropped from her waist.

He moved over to where Alice and Penelope were admiring the pumpkins. ‘Let's go find a lemonade, girls,' he told them.

All around them women were sorting themselves into groups. Kirsty watched for a few minutes. This seemed to be a general mother-daughter sack race, the only rule being that mothers and daughters had to be in the same sack.

The sacks were piled high, a huge assortment of weird-sized sacks.

The mother-daughter combinations were extraordinary.

There were ancient mothers with almost-as-ancient daughters. One mother had three daughters. One mother had five daughters! Mavis was there, Kirsty saw in astonishment. She'd been wheeled along in a wheelchair. Now someone was frantically cutting holes in a sack for her wheelchair, and Barbara was preparing to climb in with her. There was also Barbara's daughter and two more grandkids Kirsty hadn't seen before.

‘Hey, I can do that,' Susie said. She'd come in her wheelchair—only because she still needed a walking stick and she couldn't carry Rosie or stay upright very long without it. ‘I'm a mother, and if Mavis can do it, so can I.'

‘Yahoo!' someone yelled—it was Mrs Grey from the post
office, wielding a vast pair of scissors. She picked up a sack and prepared to chop wheel holes. ‘You and Rosie'll knock 'em dead, girl.'

Susie and Rosie would race.

Mother and daughter.

Kirsty went to help—and then she paused. There were lots of people helping Susie.

She looked across the fairground and saw Jake retreating.

He was leaving. He was taking his girls to the lemonade stall so Penelope and Alice would ask no questions.

Questions like why didn't they have a mother?

He wouldn't push, she thought. He had a twin by each hand, gripping hard, and the slumping of the girls' shoulders said they were aware of what was happening and they hated it.

If she called out…

Could she?

Why not? Why on earth not?

The rest of her life started now.

‘Alice,' she yelled. ‘Penelope!'

They turned. They all turned.

Alice and Penelope looked hopeful.

‘Do you girls want to come in a sack with me?' she yelled—and every person there knew exactly what she was saying. Every person in the fairground knew their local doctor, and almost every one of them wished for exactly this.

Jake was standing motionless. Expressionless. She dared give him no more than a fleeting glance but in that moment she knew she'd crossed some invisible line, and there was no going back.

‘You're not our mother,' Alice called, straight to the point like any four-year-old should be.

‘No, but a mother-daughter sack race is fun,' Kirsty called back. ‘So I thought…I could be a friend who's a sort of mother-when-you-need-me.'

How about that for a declaration? she thought, breathless. Even her twin was hornswoggled. Susie and her chair were
halfway into her sack. Susie sat with her mouth open, and the twins stared with their mouths open, and Kirsty thought, There are far too many twins.

There's too much emotion.

But not for long. People were starting to cheer. Someone— Ben?—hauled an extended-family sack from the pile, and the twins dropped their father's hands and ran. They dived into Ben's proffered sack, whooped around the bottom for a bit and then stood, sack pulled to their chins, with a gap left in the middle.

‘This is your place,' Penelope told Kirsty. ‘In the middle.'

‘That's where all the best mothers go,' Susie said softly from beside her. ‘Jump right in, Kirsty, love. Heart and all.'

So she did. The next minute she was in the sack with the twins, lined up in a row stretching right across the fairground.

The assortment was stunning. There were womenfolk from Rosie's age to Mavis's age, and everything in between. Mothers of all shapes and sizes.

Alice and Penelope were beaming and beaming, but not Kirsty. Kirsty stared straight ahead while Jake stared at the ground. Kirsty caught a glimpse of Angus patting him on the shoulder, and all of a sudden she felt like crying.

There'd been enough tears.

‘Go!'

They were off. Jumping, running, wheeling, tumbling, mothers and assorted daughters, up to four generations in the one sack, all making their way any way they knew how to get to the finish line.

The menfolk were roaring encouragement and advice. Angus had forgotten all about his lack of oxygen, his dicky heart, and he was cheering fit to burst.

Kirsty and Penelope and Alice were concentrating. ‘We have to jump in step,' Kirsty gasped at their third tumble. There were some fast movers here but the fastest were being handicapped in all sorts of ways: dogs racing across their paths—including Boris!—people falling over; an ex-marathon runner
and her sprinter daughter being held back by the local blacksmith who simply darted over and stood on a corner of their sack until his wife and kids passed them by.

‘We're jumping, we're jumping,' the twins were yelling. ‘Watch us jump, Daddy.'

‘Go on,' Kirsty heard herself scream. ‘We can do this.'

She could do this.

Of course she could. And of course they did. They reached the finish maybe eighteenth, maybe nineteenth, but gloriously in the middle of the pack and not at the back. They watched in a muddle of sacks and contorted bodies and frantic laughter as someone rushed forward and proclaimed Susie and Rose—
Susie and Rose!
—as the winners. In their chair they'd been out front by a mile, and second were Mavis and Barbara and assorted granddaughters. Someone was laughing and saying that next year the wheelchairs had to be nobbled, but not this year. This year the wheelchairs were the winners.

There were more winners than wheelchairs.

Kirsty lay on the ground and hugged her girls to her and Boris bounded over and licked her face, and she wondered how she could feel any more of a winner than she did right now.

Then Jake was there.

He was crouching down, lifting her out of the puddle of children and sack and dog—
doctor performs incision of sack with precision and style
—hauling her against him and laughing and kissing her and smiling his pride and his joy for all to see.