dressing, I think. Nurse?’
The nurse did the necessary work, then helped Olivia back on with her ruined blouse and departed. Dr Mitchell had retired behind his desk.
‘How are you going to get home?’ he asked, eyeing the tear.
‘I look a bit disreputable, don’t I?’ she said with a laugh. ‘But I’ve got this.’ She took a light scarf from her bag and draped it over the spot. ‘And I’ll take a taxi. Just as soon as I know that Dong is all right.’
‘Don’t worry about him. I never saw such a healthy child.’
‘I know,’ she said with a shaky laugh. ‘He’s a rascal, I’m glad to say. No power on earth stops him getting up to mischief. He couldn’t see the highest tree in the playground without wanting to climb it.’
‘And that can be good,’ Dr Mitchell said. ‘Except that other people have to pick up the pieces, and often it is they who get hurt. I was much the same as a boy, and always in trouble for it. But I only recall my teachers reproving me, not risking their own safety to rescue me.’
‘If he’d been seriously hurt, how could I have faced his mother?’
‘But he isn’t seriously hurt, because he had a soft landing on top of you.’
‘Something like that,’ she said ruefully. ‘But nothing hurts me. I just bounce. And I should be getting him back to school soon, or he’ll be late going home.’
‘What about when you go home?’ he asked. ‘Is there anyone there to look after you?’
‘No, I live alone, but I don’t need anyone to look after me.’
He paused a moment before saying, ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be too confident of that.’
‘Why not?’
‘It—can sometimes be dangerous.’
She wanted to ask him what he meant. The air was singing as though two conversations were happening together. Beneath the conventional words, he was speaking silently to a part of her that had never listened before, and it was vital to know more. She drew a breath, carefully framing a question…
‘Here I am,’ came a cheerful voice.
Suddenly she was back on earth, and there was Dong, trotting into the room, accompanied by the nurse with the X-ray.
‘Excellent,’ Dr Mitchell said in a voice that didn’t sound quite natural to Olivia’s ears. But nothing was natural any more.
As predicted, the X-ray showed no injury.
‘Bring him back if he seems poorly,’ Dr Mitchell told her, his tone normal again. ‘But he won’t.’
He showed her out and stood watching as she vanished down the corridor and around the corner. Closing the door, he reached automatically for the buzzer, but stopped. He needed a moment to think before he saw another patient.
He went to stand at the window. Here, two floors high, there was a close-up view of the trees hung with cherry blossom; the promise of spring had been gloriously kept, and still lingered.
Here in China cherry blossom was a symbol of feminine beauty; seemingly delicate, yet laden with hope and promise. Now he saw that wherever he looked it was the same, as fresh new life returned after the cold, bringing hope and joy for those who were eager to embrace it.
On the surface nothing very much had happened. Olivia Daley was strong, independent, concerned not for herself but those in her care, much like the kind of woman a medical man met every day. It might only have been his imagination that beneath her composure was someone else—someone tense, vulnerable, needing help yet defiantly refusing to ask for it.
He could hear her again, insisting, Nothing hurts me. I just bounce.
He wondered if she truly believed herself so armoured to life. For himself, he didn’t believe a word of it.
A few minutes they’d been together, that was all. Yet he’d seen deep into her, and the sad emptiness he’d found there had almost overwhelmed him. He knew too that she’d been as disconcertingly alive to him as he had been to her.
He’d smothered the thought as unprofessional, but now it demanded his attention, and he yielded. She was different from other women. He had yet to discover exactly how different, and caution warned him not to try. Already he knew that he was going to ignore caution and follow the light that had mysteriously appeared on the road ahead.
It was a soft light, flickering and uncertain, promising everything and nothing. But he could no more deny it than he could deny his own self.
‘Is everything all right?’ asked the nurse from the doorway. ‘You haven’t buzzed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said with an effort. ‘I just—got distracted.’
She smiled, following his gaze to the blossomladen trees. ‘The spring is beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Beautiful.’
They arrived back at the school to find Mrs Yen, Dong’s mother, waiting with a worried look that cleared as soon as she saw him waving eagerly.
‘Perhaps you should take tomorrow off?’ Mrs Wu, the headmistress, asked when they were finally alone.
‘Thanks, but I won’t need to.’
‘Well, be sure. I don’t want to lose one of my best teachers.’
They had been friends since the day Olivia had joined the school, charged with instructing the children in English. Now Mrs Wu fussed over her kindly until she went to collect her bicycle and rode it to her apartment, ten minutes away.
She had moved in six months ago, when she’d arrived to work in Beijing. Then she had been distraught, fleeing England, desperately glad to be embraced by a different culture which occupied her thoughts and gave her no time to brood. Now her surroundings and her new life were more familiar, but there were still new discoveries to be made, and she enjoyed every day.
She had a settled routine for when she arrived home. After a large cup of tea, she would switch on the computer and enter a programme that allowed her to make video contact with Aunt Norah, the elderly relative in England to whom she felt closest.
London was eight hours behind Beijing, which meant that back there it was the early hours of the morning, but she knew Norah would be ready, having set her alarm to be sure.
Yes, there she was, sitting up in bed, smiling and waving at the camera on top of her computer screen. Olivia waved back.
Norah was an old lady, a great-aunt rather than an aunt, but her eyes were as bright as they’d been her youth, and her vitality was undimmed. Olivia had always been close to her, turning to her wisdom and kindness as a refuge from the selfcentred antics of the rest of her family.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said into the microphone. ‘There was a bit of a kerfuffle at school today.’
She outlined the events of the
