From S2e6. If you have been following my recent chapters you will notice that I skipped S2e5. I had planned to write something, but then I read the entry in Doctor Turner's Casebook about Nora Harding and decided that Dr. Turner's journal entry said it all.
Patrick was called to the Master's In Arms and quickly assessed that the landlord, Mr. Masterson, was in an advanced stage of heart failure.
He was a man who had lost everything, except his daughter. Still he was too stubborn to appreciate the one child he had left. Grief and loneliness had eaten at him until there was nothing left, but a sad, pathetic, old man.
Patrick felt a kin to the old man. Here he was making an evening house call to a room above the pub when all he had was at home waiting for him. Recently he'd made an effort to be there for his boy. Tim needed a Dad, not a grieving old man.
Patrick too had lost all, except his only son. He had lost his wife and had held on to the grief at the expense of living. Without a change, he would have been destined to end up like Mr. Masterson in his own old age. The problem was that Patrick had changed and opened his heart, but still his future seemed equally as lonely. He had finally started living again only to find himself longing for what he couldn't have.
He felt as if he had lost a woman that was never his. He had done the unforgivable, but wanted -no needed forgiveness. The day Sister Bernadette accompanied him to city hall, he wanted to ask for that forgiveness, but in their silence the words in his mind felt hollow.
Never had he been more desperate to speak then when he left Sister at Saint Anne's. Still he had no place to say the words, he wanted to say. Any words, he said, would be just as unforgivable as his impulsive action in the parish hall.
Feeling as lost and sorrowful as he had during his wife's illness and passing, he stopped on his way home for a cuppa. He should have returned straight to London -to his son, but he needed a few moments to himself.
The events of the last two days played in his mind -the elation over the turn out, the pleasure of working in the van with Sister, the shock at seeing her x-ray, the devastation of telling her, the surrealness of examining her. Being so close to her slender back, he imagined if he brushed her skin, it would feel like velvet. Then there was her silent resolve and the vulnerability and fear hiding behind her crystal blue eyes.
Patrick groaned. His tea had grown cold and it was time to return to Poplar. He still didn't know how he would tell Tim about Sister's illness. It was so soon after he had lost his mummy. Worse Patrick wasn't certain how he would carry on without her presence in his sad life.