Angel Kate by Anna Ramsay Page B

keep his little princess safe in her ivory tower. 'Just drifted apart,' he said, thinking of his new love, a sweet-natured blonde whose impressive soprano was proving a hit in the new West End musical he was backing.
    Obstinately Kate had clung to wistful memories of those days when they were all three of them together. When she married it was going to be for keeps, however rich and famous they both might be.
    Wealth and privilege made a soft cushion for a young girl's life. School holidays were usually spent in Munich with her mother and her kindly if absent-minded new step-father. And Olwen moved in with Archie and his daughter in their Eaton Square home.  
    But the ivory tower crashed to the ground one September day when Kate was twenty-one and doing catwalk at Somerset House for Rico Bianchi's autumn collection.
    Archie Wisdom, there in the front row as always, Olwen at his side wearing cream Chanel,  slumped in his gilt chair, stricken with a massive heart attack.
    Kate ran panic-stricken to her dying father. Crouching on the ground  with no thought for the fabulously expensive dress she was crushing, she was completely useless. She didn't even have the most basic knowledge of first-aid.
    A doctor was called—but by then it was too late.
    The event was widely reported.
    The bulk of the estate passed to the new young widow and Kate's own inheritance was a small fortune in itself. But it came with the loss of her beloved father.
     For Kate, this was the wake-up call and she was ruthless in her determination to change what she now believed to be a trivial useless life. So she left London. She didn't even bother to tell her Chelsea set she was going to do RGN training, but headed for the first hospital prepared to take her application seriously.
    Several hospitals had already turned her down. It wasn't easy to persuade Directors of Nursing that a catwalk model was serious about three years of hard graft.
    Here at St Crispin's, Mrs Harris had been more perceptive than most. So Katie Wisdom, Top Model, became simply Kate Wisdom, student nurse, subdued and single-minded shadow of her former happy-go-lucky self. Without the magic of the makeup artist, her neat regular features were never recognised. Her hair was scraped back and twisted into a knot, her slender figure disguised in sensible uniforms.
    At the start Kate's contemporaries found her distant and solemn.  She didn't smile much and she didn't gossip and she wasn't interested in the hospital's social life, disappearing like a mysterious shadow at the end of a working day. She was different. They knew she lived out. Left  her padlocked cycle near the Nurse Education block and went straight home after studying all day.
    And the way she walked and the poised angle of her head … Wisdom was definitely not Student Nurse Average.
    And it was hard-going for a twenty-two year old used to soft living. The first few weeks felt like never-ending torture. Sometimes it all seemed too much for someone unused to real hard work.
    She couldn't bear the sight of blood; felt faint when injections were given. There were times she was on the verge of quitting.
    But slowly she toughened up, adjusted to the pace and began to think of herself as a born nurse. She loved looking after sick people, especially the children and the frail elderly patients. And she was becoming friendly with a doctor who seemed to be everything she'd come to respect in a man: dedicated and hardworking, far more interested in pathology than in the sort of pursuits that entertained the like of Mike Filing in off-duty hours.
    In Kate's estimation you'd go a long way to discover a more decent, dependable partner than James Mallory.
    *  *  *
    Apart from the seductively perfumed lotion -  which only she knew about - Kate's appearance was much as usual when she wheeled her cycle up the path.
    'I'm late,' she whispered to the gnarled old apple tree as she knelt in the brilliantly green wet grass, gathering a