and the water boiled with bubbles. They discarded their clothes with little exclamations at the freezing air on their skin, then slid into the pine-scented heat. They sat back, submerged to their chins and sighing with satisfaction.
After a minute Kitty asked meaningfully. ‘So?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’ Kitty was the family news-gatherer and lieutenant to Finch’s mother in the battle to persuade Finch to commit herself.
‘Okay. Ralf asked me to marry him. I said no.’
Kitty groaned. ‘Finch! Why not?’
‘I’m not in love with him.’
‘You gave a good impression of it. I thought you were nuts about him.’
‘No. Not nuts enough, evidently.’
Kitty tucked a tendril of damp hair into the knot on top of her head. ‘You could have all of this. All the things you like best, with a guy who adores you.’
‘Perverse, aren’t I?’
She wondered if James and Kitty had embarked on their partnership because they saw each other as offering all the things they liked best. There was no note of envy in Kitty’s all this, either. James was a successful investment analyst and well able to provide for his family. They even had two-year-old twin girls, who were staying for the weekend with one of their pairs of adoring grandparents. All three of Finch’s brothers were notably successful. Marcus, the eldest, was an architect like his distinguished father and Caleb, the youngest, was a marine ecologist and film maker. His most recent film, about the pygmy sea-horse, had sold around the world. All three were married, with good-looking wives and attractive children.
Finch raised one knee out of the bubbles. The air was bitterly cold and she hastily submerged it again.
No wonder her family thought she was different, difficult. But surely it was less of a contradiction than it seemed, to reject all the things you like best? By which, she supposed, Kitty meant mountains and unlimited skiing, and probable financial ease, and a man who loved her and didn’t threaten her.
Because by settling for them, and no more, you chose an ordinary life.
She was fearful of what might lie ahead of her out in Nepal. But she also tasted the fear with the savour of anticipation.
Kitty rolled her head against the pine walls of the tub. ‘Poor Ralf. Was he devastated?’
Finch considered. On the whole Ralf didn’t go in for devastation. ‘No.’
‘But he does love you, you know.’
‘Yes.’
Finch had been in love only once in her life and it was not with Ralf.
‘How does your knee feel?’
‘Don’t evade the issue with doctoring.’
‘I wouldn’t dream.’
Kitty laughed and reached out to touch Finch on the arm. ‘We all want you to be happy.’ All of us, the Buchanan clan.
‘I am happy,’ Finch said softly.
After Kitty had clambered out of the tub she sat for a few minutes alone, looking up and searching for the stars through the drifting curtain of steam.
The next afternoon Ralf flew the three of them in the helicopter down to Kamloops for their return flight to Vancouver. He walked with Finch to the departure gate, and when the flight was boarding James and Kitty tactfully went on ahead.
‘You know where I am.’
Finch hesitated, ashamed to find that at this last minute she was tempted to retract everything she had said in exchange for the promise of comfort and security. Ralf was large and strong and, in retrospect, reassuring. She squeezed down hard on the impulse. ‘Of course I do.’
He kissed her – not on the mouth but on the cheek, as affectionately as if he were James. ‘And call me, when you can.’
‘Of course I will.’
It was finished, both of them knew it.
Isn’t this what you wanted? Finch’s interior voice enquired impatiently.
He stood back to let her walk away. She turned round once to look at him, lifted her hand, then marched forward.
She took her seat in front of Kitty and James. Kitty made a small sad face, turning down the corners of her mouth, and James nodded calmly. The place next to Finch was empty and as the little plane climbed and disconcertingly rocked through the layers of cloud she thought about the man who had made himself her neighbour on the way up from Oregon. My wife is a nervous flier, he had said presumptuously. She had forgotten his name.
Breathing as evenly as she could, Finch rested her head against the seat back. This time the day after tomorrow she would be airborne again. All her expedition kit was double-checked, packed, labelled, waiting in her tidy apartment. The medical supplies she had ordered with George Heywood’s authorisation were already with the main body of expedition stores in Kathmandu. There remained only two more days and dinner with her family to negotiate.
‘Everything looks fine,’ Finch told her last patient of the day, as she peeled off her gloves. They chatted while the woman dressed and agreed that they would continue with the hormone replacement therapy for a further twelve months. A routine consultation, at the end of a routine afternoon surgery. At the door, the woman asked her, ‘When will you be back?’
‘Three months, give or take.’ Finch smiled. The knot under her diaphragm was so tight now that it threatened to impede her breathing. ‘Anything you need in that time, Dr Frame will be here to look after you, of course.’
‘Good luck,’ her patient said and Finch thanked her warmly.
She went to the bathroom and took a quick shower, then changed into a dark-blue dress with a deep V-front. She put on earrings and made up her face. It was time for her farewell dinner with the family. Marcus and Tanya would be there as well as James and Kitty, and to complete the party Caleb and Jessica were flying all the way up from San Diego where Caleb was working on a film about mother whales.
Finch locked up the surgery and drove herself to the North Vancouver shore, to the house in which Angus and Clare Buchanan had brought up their children. She parked her Honda in the driveway behind Marcus’s Lexus and let herself in through the back door. There was no front door, as such. The long, low, two-storey house had been designed for his family by Angus himself. The bedrooms and bathrooms and Angus’s study were on the lower level, and a dramatic open stairway led to the upper floor. Almost the whole of this space was taken up by one huge room with a wall of glass looking over a rocky inlet and southwards across a great sweep of water and sky towards Victoria. This early evening the room seemed to melt into an expanse of filmy cloud and sea spray.
Finch’s parents and James and Marcus and their wives were sitting with their drinks in an encampment of modern furniture near the middle of the room. Angus and Clare collected primitive art, and their native American figure carvings and huge painted masks from Papua New Guinea
