When he arrived Darren looked around the room at the dozen or more patients but did not immediately recognise me. Cautiously, discovering how to stand and move with the aid of the crutch, I made my way towards him. Twice he surveyed the room without spotting me, at last identifying me as I hobbled closer. Tactlessly he said, 'God, you look terrible.'
A taxi took us back to the hotel. My face was horrific. The flesh around my right eye was badly marked, blood had flooded the white of the cornea, my lower lip was swollen, and a dark grey bruise covered most of the left side of my face. A thin white dressing of some kind had been stuck over a cut under my chin. I would have to keep myself out of sight of the hotel guests as far as possible.
Anxiety was as much a problem as my physical condition. What if the two men returned? They had not been to the garden centre since that night when they tried to force their way in after it had closed. They might have come upon me in the avenue by coincidence, or they might have found out that I ran the hotel and been looking for me. They might be outside in the street at that moment watching and waiting. Suppose that, flushed with success after tackling me on my way to the bank, they were to come into the hotel demanding money?
When the second floor room had been vandalised, awful though the incident had seemed at the time, nobody was physically injured, and Tom had turned up after a few hours to sort out the mess. Now only Darren was around to help. What if the thugs attacked him?
Needing to rest I hobbled down to the basement where I made myself a hot drink and lay down, cautiously trying to avoid the most sensitive of my sore spots. My thoughts returned again and again to Tom. Had he been there, how much less desperate things would seem. Putting the receiver down on him like that when he rang from Portsmouth had been so final; it had been unfair after we had been together for so long. By nature he was completely different to the thugs who had attacked me. He might once have stolen cars, but he would never have deliberately hurt anyone. On the few occasions when he had been verbally aggressive, he had apologised freely afterwards. How hard the confinement of prison must have been for him, accustomed to moving from site to site for his work. Whatever he might have done in the past, what was the sense in our being apart now? Judging him so harshly had rebounded on me. The result was that I had made my own life a misery.