A few minutes later, Caroline arrived for evening visiting.  Over Hilary's hospital bed, Caroline and Andy argued about who would drive her to Water Langley tomorrow, until Nurse Whittaker sent them out into the corridor, said they were upsetting the other patients.  On the contrary, Hilary had observed beady eyes looking on from every bed.  This was the most exciting thing that had happened on Feltham Ward for days.

Caroline returned alone, her eyes blazing.  “Well, Andy insists on taking you tomorrow!  He says he’ll meet you here at 8.30.”

“Where is he?” Hilary asked.

“Gone to ring his dad, about what happened today.  The police are really losing the plot, aren’t they?  And we Tories are planning to give the police a pay hike!  Well, well!”

“I'm sorry, Caroline.  I'm messing you around, asking you to take a day’s leave then not needing you to.”

Caroline shook her head.  “Don’t worry about it.  I had a terrible job getting my boss, Lucinda, to let me take a day’s leave, a month before the Election, and, when I turn up to work as usual tomorrow, she’s not going to complain, is she?  But are you happy about going with Andy?”

“Yes.”

“I'm worried about you and him.  Two years ago, he almost destroyed you.  And, now, with your broken arm, your broken head, and all your cuts and bruises, you’re a bit fragile.  You mustn’t get involved, Hil.  He’s with this Arabella.”

“No!  He chucked her!”

“Oh?  But even so… don’t get involved!”

“That’s what mothers say, Caroline.”

She was right, of course. 

The following morning, Andy met her in the ward and led her through miles of hospital corridors, then out into the open, a cold wind blasting through her sensitive, healing body.  Reaching Andy's car at last, Hilary, now exhausted, sank into the passenger seat, and, as they drove through London, she closed her eyes.  She didn’t need to sleep, but she was determined not to “get involved”.  She had to look after her own heart, because, as she had realised over these past two years in London, there was no one else to do it for her, but, as they got on to the A12, and the noise of the car engine settled into a constant tone, she dozed.  From time to time, she woke briefly to look at the signposts: Romford, Ingatestone, Margaretting, Galleywood, Chelmsford, Witham…  She fell into a heavier doze… And now they were stopping.  She forced her eyes open, to see rolling fields, fresh vigorous green shoots, in drilled rows, basking in the bright April sunshine.  The hedges too had burst into life, branches of tight white buds soaring up through last year’s faded stringy bracken.

“See where we are, Hil?” asked Andy.

She looked again.  Straight ahead, with healthy verdant rye grass growing up its posts, was the sign for Water Langley.

“Oh.”.  In the distance were the first houses in the village, modern red brick dwellings, like the home she had shared with her parents.

“I thought you’d like to be awake before we entered the village.”

“Suppose.” 

For a moment, they sat in silence, staring ahead of them, at the sign, at the houses, at a dog walking across the road.  “Hil,” he said, “I think we need to talk - about us.”

Did they have to?  She knew she mustn’t get involved, but did she have to have destroyed for her that tiny glimmer of sunshine?  She kept looking on ahead.  The doors of one of the redbrick houses sprung open and a young woman Hilary didn’t recognise was manoeuvring a pushchair through the doorway with jerky movements. 

“On Thursday night, the night you were attacked,” said Andy, “I'd been called out to a patient with pneumonia, on Balham Ward, and I was on my way back to bed when I saw you on the stretcher.  I just sat there, on your bed, for about an hour, in a state of shock.  I couldn't believe that anyone would do such a thing to you.  Then you woke up, got out of bed, tried to pull out your drip and demanded to go to the loo.”

Hilary drew in her breath.  “Did that really happen?  I thought that, with my head and everything, I'd dreamed it or imagined it!”

“It all happened, Hil.  Your head’s OK.  And, just before you went to sleep again, you know what you said… and what I said?”

Hilary didn’t reply.  Neither of them spoke.  They watched the young woman with the pushchair shut her front door, hang her handbag on the handlebars and set off down the road, her heels tap-tapping on the pavement, until her flared denims and red anorak disappeared round the corner, into the village, into Water Langley, into present-day Water Langley.

“Hil,” said Andy, breaking the silence again, “will you marry me?”

She swung round to look at him.  He had swivelled round in his seat to face her, his arm resting on the steering wheel.  “Yes, of course I will!”

“We’d have to get married in August,” he added, as if this might cause her to change her mind, “between when I finish my house officer post at West London and when I start my next post.”

She was smiling.  The muscles in her face were pulling into a wider and wider smile, and still not wide enough, for Andy, whom she had always loved, had never stopped loving, whom she would love for ever.  “August?  We ought to get on with it, I suppose!  We could get married on our birthday, on 4 August.  4 August is actually a Saturday.”

“OK,” he said, reaching over to kiss her.  He rested his arm around her shoulders.  “I'm not hurting you, am I?”

She put her, uninjured, left hand around his neck and drew him into a long kiss.  “You never hurt me.”

“But I did hurt you,” he said, his face creasing into a frown.  “In fact, I made a right mess of our relationship, didn’t I?”

“Oh, it wasn’t just you.  I was pushing it, wasn’t I, at Malaga Airport?”

“Well, yes.  It was a bit scary, you wanting us to get engaged at the age of twenty-one, but then the whole world fell apart immediately afterwards.”

“I was so needy.  I was such a drain on you.”

“You’d just lost your mother.  Of course you were needy, and everybody else in your life had disappeared off the radar, your father, your grandmother.  Caroline was in America and you and she weren’t speaking anyway.  I was the only one left.  OK, I felt pretty inadequate.  I knew how awful you were feeling but I didn’t know what to do or say.  I think I would’ve coped.  I think I would’ve grown up very very quickly – if it hadn't been for the things going on with Robert at the same time.”

“Andy, it doesn’t matter.  None of it matters now!” 

“It does.  It does matter.  I got myself into a such a state about Robert.  Everything seemed so glaringly obvious to me, but nobody else could see it, wanted to see it.  I'd worked out that Robert was autistic, during my first term at St Luke's, when I was a new, green, eighteen year old medical student.  I tried to tell Mum and Dad but they just laughed at me.  Mum actually said, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!”  Nobody in the family wanted to admit that there was anything wrong with Robert.  He was at Cambridge, brilliant, etc. 

“You remember that time we went to the Langley Angel, how there were all these old blokes, having a lock-in, talking about my Granddad Pullen?  How he used to have rituals, check the locks at the church two or three times during the evening, and how he obsessed about Communism?  I’m bloody sure Grandad Pullen was also probably autistic, although Dr Priestley, who Robert sees at the Maudsley, won't comment on a patient he’s never seen.  Then I looked at myself, you know, lining up the glasses in the pub, getting really anxious, letting things like flickering lights really annoy me, wondering if I was reading people’s facial expressions correctly.  Hil, I kept thinking I was autistic too.  Did you realise that?”

Hilary drew in her breath.  “You’re not autistic!”

“Once you get something like that in your head, you can't get it out.  This time last year, I was doing my psychiatric placement at the Maudsley and I plucked up courage to ask Dr Priestley’s secretary if I could go and see him for five minutes.  Dr Priestley put me through some of the tests he’d done with Robert - just a few of them, before he told me that no way was I autistic.  I was so relieved.  I felt a complete prat but I was so glad I spoke to him.  Then he said I was depressed.  Well, I knew that.  I do suffer from depression.” 

“I've read about autism.  When you work in a library, you get to read all sorts of things.  I read that autistics don’t like touching other people.  But I remember what you were like when you used to go to the Lang Brook!  You couldn't keep your hands off me.  You’re not autistic.  You’re one of the most tactile people ever.  I wished you’d talked to me about it before.  I wish you’d let me say that to you.”

He sighed.  “I was reading up about autism too.  Some of the time you thought I was revising for exams and doing coursework, I was just in the library reading about autism.  I kept reading about how autistic people find relationships difficult and… I got it into my head that I shouldn’t be with you because I was autistic.  I'm so sorry, Hil.  When I found out I wasn’t, it was too late.  Then there was Arabella.  I heard about how she asked you really personal questions on the ward, at the top of her voice.  She got a right dressing-down from Mr Tinsley for that, and then I chucked her a few minutes later.”

“Poor Arabella.”  Hilary felt she could be generous to anyone right now.

“Maybe.  I don’t want to talk about Arabella.  I’ve forgotten about her already and I want you to.  OK?”

“Yes.”

He pressed her hand, the uninjured one.  “It’s you and me that matter now… for ever.”