‘You been away?’ Samuel asked, and Pepper nodded.
‘Portugal.’
‘Mate, that sounds lush. You look as if you’ve been smooched by sunshine.’
And other things . . .
‘Thanks,’ she said, stretching out her bare arms and admiring the soft caramel hue. ‘It went past so quickly. I felt like I’d just got to know the place before we had to leave.’
‘Holiday blues?’ he asked, and she smiled.
‘Something like that.’
They continued to chat for a few minutes about all the usual things – work, weather, what TV series they had binged on recently – and Pepper found herself wanting to tell him about Finn. Why, she didn’t know – it wasn’t like the two of them were all that close. Perhaps she simply had a severe case of mentionitis. In an attempt to steer the subject her way, she asked Samuel if he’d had any more dates lately.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘A second one with the girl I told you about before.’
‘And?’ Pepper flicked a coin up into the air.
Heads Finn will call tonight, tails he won’t . . .
‘Queen side up!’ Samuel declared. ‘Nice one.’
Pepper tossed her two-pence piece into the water, watching as it sank down to join the others. All those wishes. When she and Bethan were little, they used to tell each other everything; whisper secrets to one another after lights out, share stories and giggle with their fists stuffed into their mouths in case their parents heard them. Bethan had always been a fragile child, even before the accident, and Pepper could remember how much she loathed letting her sibling out of her sight. She felt as if she always had to be two steps behind her baby sister.
Until the day she wasn’t.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said, forcing herself back out of her momentary gloom. ‘Is there going to be a date three?’
‘Nah.’ Samuel aimed a kick at a stone, sending a cloud of dust up into the air. ‘I’m a busy bloke, so if I’m not, you know, feeling it, I don’t think there’s much point wasting my free time.’
‘I thought you believed in letting love grow?’ she teased. ‘None of that thunderbolt crap for you, right?’
‘All right.’ Samuel folded his arms. ‘Don’t get me wrong – I am a big believer in lust at first sight. But if you don’t have that, you’re probably never gonna have the other. That’s the way I see it.’
‘I guess in an ideal world, you’d be after both,’ she said, giving him a sidelong look.
‘Hang on a mo,’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you met someone? Ah, no – you have, haven’t you? You went and had yourself a holiday romance.’
Pepper laughed in surprise.
‘Is it that obvious?’
Samuel bent down so he could examine her face.
‘Afraid so – your eyeballs have turned into hearts.’
‘Funny.’
‘Come on then – spill.’
So Pepper spilled. She told him about Finn walking past her on the steps, how he’d turned around and asked for her number, how she’d been unsure of whether or not to contact him, only for fate to intervene yet again, and put him beneath the very same tree that she had chosen to shelter under. Samuel kept his arms folded as she explained about Belém, then raised an eyebrow when she told him what Finn had said about the stars wanting them to meet.
‘How do you know he doesn’t say that to all the girls?’ he joked. Then, seeing he had upset her, hurriedly added, ‘I’m only pulling your chain.’
‘I know it sounds soppy and mad,’ she admitted. ‘But it didn’t feel that way when I was there – it just felt, I dunno, like he had always been there, waiting in the wings. I just had to meet him.’
Samuel smiled then, but he was no longer mocking her.
‘If that’s the case,’ he said, ‘then you’re lucky. I had someone like that once, a long time ago. But she left. I lost her.’
‘Her loss,’ Pepper countered, but Samuel was shaking his head.
‘Believe it or not, I was going to be a doctor,’ he told her. ‘I went to medical school, did all that. I was good, too – I was known as “Steady Hands Selassie”. Everyone thought I would become a surgeon one day, including me.’
‘Good name,’ she said. ‘What changed your mind?’
Samuel chuckled. ‘Thanks for assuming it was my choice,’ he said. ‘And not down to the fact that I messed up or something.’
‘You don’t seem the type to fail.’ Pepper regarded him for a moment. He was a doer, she could tell. A man who got things done – the opposite of a ditherer. It was a trait he shared with Finn.
‘If you’re not willing to fail, you’re not ready to succeed,’ he said gravely.
‘Deep,’ she drawled. ‘Did you just make that up?’
‘Nah.’ Samuel grinned. ‘I saw it printed on the wall of a gym once.’
The clouds had started to huddle together since they’d been talking, their white plumes reminding Pepper of a gaggle of geese, and she shivered.
‘Do you mind if we walk – I left my cardigan in the car?’
They took the long route back towards the big house, past the wildflower meadow and The Maltings’ resident pair of donkeys, both of whom stuck their furry faces over the fence. Samuel delved in his tracksuit pocket and unearthed a packet of Polos, scratching each animal behind its large floppy ears as they crunched away.
‘Truth now,’ he said. ‘I bloody loved being a doctor. I loved the pace, I loved how demanding it was, that no two shifts were ever the same. I didn’t even mind the lack of sleep. I think I thrived on it, you know. Junior doctors get into a sort of competition with each other and themselves – who can last the longest, score the best cases and cope most admirably with an emergency. I saw a lot and learnt so much. When I look back now, it feels like it wasn’t even me doing those things, you know? Three years sped past in a mad sort of blur, and I was at the stage where I had to make a decision about my speciality, and my future. And it was then that it struck me.’
Pepper was about to ask what the ‘it’ was when he continued talking.
‘I realised that all the best work I’d done was not the medical stuff – putting lines in, stitching bashed-up faces and setting broken bones. It was the other stuff, the hand holding and the listening. The people stuff. Often, you see, a kind word can heal far better than a pill or a bandage. Oi, don’t make that face. I know what you’re thinking – that all this makes me sound like some sort of new-age hippy type.’
‘On the contrary.’ Pepper shook her head. ‘I was thinking that I agree with you.’
‘My doctor mates wanted to get patients through the system as quickly as possible,’ he went on. ‘Whereas I wanted to spend time with them, follow up with them. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point over the past ten years or so, we have all stopped talking to each other, and I reckon we’ve stopped listening, too. There’s too much interference,’ he added, making circular motions around his head that were brisk enough to alarm the donkeys. ‘Too much noise.’