This was real medicine. Kirsty served herself pie-still warm-and decided maybe Kenneth needed pie instead of tranquillisers. If only it were that easy.
But for Susie and Angus it had been that easy. They’d been distressed and they’d been cured by a big dose of family.
Jake’s idea of everyone staying together was an excellent plan, she decided, and she wondered again about the difficulties of being a country doctor.
Jake had been upset that she knew more about palliative medicine than he did, but his cures were so much more diverse. He’d looked at this problem and he’d cured it by a case of lateral thinking. But…
‘How can you all just move into the castle?’ Kirsty asked, confused, and Margie raised her eyebrows in astonishment.
‘Wouldn’t you come here if you were asked? There’s not a person in this district who wouldn’t give their right arm for such an invitation. My Ben here and His Lordship go back a long way. They’ve been comparing pumpkins for ever. And with Ben’s arthritis we don’t get out all that much any more. When Jake rang and suggested it we thought, well, it sounds just like a holiday. Now you’re here, I’ll pop back home and get our night things…’
‘And water our veggie garden,’ Ben said from his cavernous chair.
‘It rained yesterday so there’s no need,’ his wife said serenely. ‘You see, no trouble.’
‘But… Jake…’ Kirsty said slowly. This was so far away from the city medical practice she knew that it seemed a different world. Jake was worried about his patients so he moved in with them? Unbelievable.
‘I think our Kenneth has put the wind right up our doctor,’ Margie said, watching her face and guessing her thoughts. ‘Mind, it’ll be good for him to be out here for a bit as well. His hospital apartment’s a dreary place.’
‘Why doesn’t he find himself somewhere nicer to live?’
‘Practicalities, dear,’ Margie told her. ‘When he first came he bought himself a lovely home a few blocks from the hospital but, of course, he’s the only doctor and if he’s called during the night then there’s no one to take care of the girls. Ben and I come in during the day but he’s an independent man. He doesn’t want a live-in nanny.’
‘So what does he do now?’
‘His apartment is a part of the hospital. When he gets called out at night, the nursing staff take over caring for the twins. Minimum disruption. But being by the hospital the girls need to stay quiet. No whooping downstairs like they do here.’ She pounded the pastry with a satisfied thump. ‘It’ll do them all good to get out of the place.’ She cast a cautious glance at Kirsty. ‘Mind, what the man really needs is a wife. But we’re not expecting miracles.’
‘I wouldn’t expect miracles either,’ Kirsty said flatly. ‘The man’s a loner.’
‘He thinks you’re a bit of all right,’ Ben piped up from his chasm, and Kirsty winced.
‘We all think Kirsty’s a bit of all right,’ Margie said, casting a severe look at her husband. ‘No matchmaking, Ben. You know it only leads to trouble.’
‘Trouble’s what’s life’s about,’ Ben said, with a satisfied yawn. ‘Life’s boring without it.’
‘Kenneth’s trouble,’ Margie retorted.
‘There’s trouble and there’s trouble,’ Ben said sagely. ‘Some comes looking for you and you run a mile. Some you go looking for yourself. I’d reckon our Dr Jake is right in the middle and he doesn’t know which is which. And neither do you, miss,’ he said obscurely to Kirsty. ‘Maybe it’ll be fun to stick around for a while and watch.’
To Kirsty’s surprise, what followed were a few really restful days.
Jake and his family moved into the castle but, apart from mealtimes, Kirsty hardly saw Jake. OK, she avoided him as much as she could and maybe he was avoiding her. If so, she wasn’t asking questions.
Kenneth seemed no trouble at all.
Jake reported that he’d sent him by ambulance him to Melbourne with a request for psychiatric evaluation. The authorities rang back and said that he seemed settled and rational, they could see no reason to hold him and they’d released him with instructions to maintain his medication. For a couple of days they expected him to return breathing fire, but there was no sign of him.
‘You could go home again,’ Susie told Jake over dinner on the third night, but she said it reluctantly. He heard the reluctance and smiled. He must feel how good this was, Kirsty thought. It was great for all of them. Angus and Susie were almost unrecognisable from the two invalids they’d been only days ago.
‘If it’s OK with Angus, we might extend our stay for a few more days,’ Jake said softly. ‘The man still makes me nervous.’
‘And your kiddies would be having an excellent time,’ Angus said in satisfaction. ‘This place sounds as it ought to. Full of noise and life.’ He ladled out more of Mrs Boyce’s casserole. ‘There should be more of it.’
‘If you’re sure we’re not intruding…’
‘I’m hardly seeing you, Jake,’ Angus said bluntly. ‘The kids and the girls and Margie and Ben are intruding all over the place and I love it, but you’re never here.’
‘I’m working.’
‘Let our Kirsty share, then. She’s aching to.’
‘Kirsty’s helping.’
‘Not enough,’ Angus said bluntly. ‘Let her help with clinics.’
‘She did inoculations today.’
She had, Kirsty thought. She’d visited the local primary school and administered seventy inoculations. Sure, it had saved Jake a few hours so he could be home earlier to his kids, but it was hardly earth-shattering medicine.
She could help in his clinic. Her provisional registration was all in order, but there was a problem. Working in the clinic meant working side by side with Jake, and it made both of them nervous. They’d performed all the outstanding surgery, and now Jake was accepting her help only when it meant they worked apart.
Which was probably just as well, she thought and looked across to where Susie was teasing the twins into eating their vegetables. This was working out better than she’d ever dreamed. If Susie had a few weeks of this before her baby was born, maybe the depression could be put behind her.
Which was the important thing.
She returned her attention to her casserole, but suddenly she was aware that she was being watched.
Susie knew things were wrong. Her twin antennae had her asking questions Kirsty couldn’t answer. And Margie and Ben were very astute.
So was Jake. He’d heard the sudden stillness, and he’d heard the unuttered questions.
‘I need to go,’ he said, pushing his chair back abruptly. He placed a hand on each of his daughter’s heads. ‘I have evening clinic. Will you let Margie put you to bed?’
‘Susie’s reading me a story tonight,’ Alice told him. ‘Kirsty’s reading to Penelope. Tomorrow we’re going to swap.’
‘I can read to both girls if you need Kirsty to help you,’ Susie ventured, but Jake was already walking out the door.
‘I’m fine alone,’ he told them. And went.
The days dragged on. When Jake had said he was fine alone, he meant he was fine alone. It was as if since he’d admitted he needed help he’d backed off and changed his mind.
Between them they’d operated on Dorothy Miller’s veins, Mark Glaston’s skin cancer and Scotty Anderson’s osteochondroma, but they were small operations and all they did was give Kirsty a taste of what she was missing. She offered to do more, but the work Jake offered was minor.
‘Your major effort is to keep Angus and Susie healthy,’ he told her.
Fine. But Angus and Susie were taking care of each other.
Angus had hardly moved over the past few weeks. With his oxygen levels vastly improved, he was now ambulatory but he was still very shaky. About as shaky as Susie.
So he and Susie organised a track around the vegetable patch, where a railed wall gave them a handhold. Then they set themselves to see who could make it around the patch fastest.
As supervising medical officer, Kirsty was supposed to watch and pick them up if they fell over-but as races went, it would be faster to watch grass grow.
What was wrong with her? Kirsty demanded of herself after a week. Why was she miserable?
She should be happy. Susie was happier and healthier every day. So was Angus. There was no sign of Kenneth. The only reason the castle was still full of people was because everyone acknowledged how wonderful this arrangement was for Angus and Susie. Now the two little girls were tumbling with Boris on the grass in the late afternoon sun. The invalids were practising their walking. Ben had gone home to tend his own vegetable garden. Margie was cooking. Kirsty had a great book to read. God was in his heaven, all was right with her world-and all she could do was think about where Jake was.
She was going nuts.
‘I think I’ll go out and see Mavis,’ she decided when Ben returned and offered to take over race supervision.
‘Jake goes there most afternoons,’ Ben told her, grinning, but she decided dignity was the only way to react to his teasing.
‘If I’m not required, I won’t go in,’ she said in her very smoothest professional manner.
‘You go in, girl, and see her anyway,’ Margie said firmly. ‘Ben, you keep your nose out of what doesn’t concern you.’
‘You will watch Susie and Angus?’ Kirsty asked, trying to ignore the pair of them. Two identical grins. Drat them.
‘It’s the tortoise versus the tortoise,’ Margie said, looking over to where Angus was considering taking a couple of steps without the rail and thus overtaking Susie. ‘How exciting. Of course we’ll supervise. Off you go, dear, and see if you can move a little faster than this odd couple. Dinner’s in an hour but if you don’t get back in time it’s no problem. I’ve made sausage rolls and there’s plenty.’
What was wrong with her?
She sat in her car and glowered at her own stupidity. It was a relief to be away from the castle. She needed time. She needed…
She didn’t know what she needed.
She slowed down and then pulled off the road to admire the scenery. The views here were fabulous. Dolphins were surfing in the waves just beneath the cliff-side road. That made her glower lessen. She watched in fascinated delight, but then the dolphins gave up on their surfing and disappeared off to wherever dolphins went. Life had to go on.
Mavis. She was going to see Mavis.
But when she reached the farm, Ben was proved right. Jake’s car was already there, and her glower sprang right back. Jake should be back at the hospital doing all his very important work that kept him away from the castle all the time, she thought savagely, and then she made a valiant attempt to regain some semblance of professionalism and thought maybe Mavis was in trouble.
And if Mavis was in trouble, then she, as consultant specialist, ought to be in there with her, instead of sitting out here glowering like a lovesick teenager. Her dumb emotions had no basis in logic. She had to stay in this place for a few weeks yet, so she may as well get on with acting normal right now.
Right. Normal.
She headed up the porch steps as Jake came out the front door, and she had to struggle really hard not to start glowering again.
‘Hi,’ she said, and he looked at her blankly, like he’d forgotten who she was.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I thought you asked me to stay in touch with Mavis.’
‘I did. But I thought you were back at the castle.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ she said crossly. ‘How’s our patient?’
‘Sitting up in bed with two grandchildren and a paint-a-Rembrandt-by-numbers kit,’ he told her, allowing himself to smile. ‘There’s paint everywhere and Barbara’s trying to act crabby. You want to see?’
‘I do,’ she said, and she even smiled back-but then she remembered who she was talking to and she stopped smiling. ‘But I won’t keep you. You’re obviously busy.’
‘Not so busy that I can’t enjoy your reaction to what you’ve done,’ he said, standing aside and letting her past. ‘You’ve done great, Dr McMahon.’
She flushed. She had to walk right by him and she flushed some more.
She needed to go back to the States, she thought desperately. She was losing her mind.
But she wasn’t losing her touch with her medicine. She walked into Mavis’s bedroom and stopped in astonishment.
The room was full of family. Mavis was propped up on pillows, with a grandchild on either side of her. The bed had been pulled out from the wall so the kids could have a chair apiece either side, and they’d added a few books to get the children-a boy and a girl of about five and seven-to the right height. A tray had been set up over Mavis’s knees to hold paints and brushes and canvas.
There was as much paint on the bedspread as there was on the canvas but no one seemed to be minding. Everyone looked up as Kirsty walked in, and everyone smiled. Barbara was by the window, and as she came forward Kirsty saw the faint glimmer of tears on her lashes.
But they weren’t tears of despair, she thought. The change in the sickroom since the week before was little short of miraculous. Pain was an absolute killer all by itself. It ruined lives before death. If it could be held at bay…
She’d succeeded. There was no need to ask. It was written all over Mavis’s face.
‘So you don’t need me to adjust anything?’ she said softly, doing a fast blink herself. Mavis’s smile broadened.
‘Oh, no, dear. I’m doing very nicely.’
It would change again, Kirsty thought. This disease was cruel and it was terminal. The bone metastases would be growing and the pain regime would have to be tweaked every day for as long as the old lady had left. But for now she was enjoying life, and Kirsty could keep tweaking the pain regimen.
Kirsty could keep tweaking until Susie delivered her baby and she left.
‘You’ll train me before you go,’ Jake said softly, and she knew he was thinking the same thing. And it slammed into her all over again-that Jake seemed somehow to share her thinking. The knowledge was extraordinarily intimate. More, it was just plain extraordinary. She saw him smile, and she wondered how it was that she could meet such a man when he wasn’t interested. When she lived half a world away. When she didn’t want involvement. When the whole thing was ridiculous.
And she wondered whether he knew she was thinking that, too.
‘Of course I’ll run through the latest pain management regimen for this sort of disease with you,’ she said, a trifle distractedly. She managed to smile at Mavis and turned determinedly away from Jake. ‘Can I interrupt the painting to do a quick check? Do you have any sore spots?’
‘My hip’s bothering me a little,’ Mavis admitted. ‘But it’s so much better than last week that I don’t like to complain.’
‘The squeaky wheel gets the oil,’ Kirsty told her, still trying her best to ignore Jake. If dumb platitudes filled the uneasy silence, then he’d get dumb platitudes, but platitudes weren’t going to stop her being acutely aware of him every minute. ‘Dr Cameron, why don’t you take these two aspiring artists for a walk?’ she said desperately. ‘Then their grandma and I can have a discussion about a sore hip.’
She could still help. Once Jake left she relaxed. Not only did she assist Mavis with her hip pain, she spent some time talking about the future, reassuring the old lady that the pain could be kept at bay for as long as it took.
‘We may have to change the cocktail over and over again,’ she told her. ‘But we can. Even when I go, I’ll leave instructions as to what to do in the future, and I’m always on the end of the phone. And Dr Cameron is good. He was about to phone for help from a city pain specialist when I arrived, and if I leave he’ll still do that.’
‘I wish you could stay,’ Mavis said wistfully, but Kirsty thought there might well be six months or so left to the old lady-maybe even more-and she could make no promises.
The sun was losing its warmth when she left. She checked he
r watch and realised she’d dawdled too long on the way there. They were expecting her back at the castle for dinner.
But when she went out to the veranda there was another patient lined up. Jake was sitting on the veranda steps with a farmer by the looks of him, a man in his sixties or early seventies. The man glanced up at her, grinned, a gap-toothed grin in a battered and not-so-clean face.
‘This’ll be the other doc,’ he said in satisfaction. ‘Two for the price of one. Barbara said Doc’d be coming tonight and I watched the road for his car. Now I have the pair of you.’
‘Herbert lives just over the rise,’ Jake said dryly, with a look that was almost apologetic. ‘Herbert, this is Dr McMahon. Herbert doesn’t like clinic because he doesn’t like waiting.’
‘The missus makes me have a bath before I go to clinic. A man could waste a whole day on a visit like that,’ Herbert said indignantly. ‘Me leg’s a bit of a mess and the missus said she’d drag me in tomorrow regardless. But now I’ve found you…’ He beamed. ‘If you could just fix me up.’
He hauled up his trouser leg and revealed a gory haematoma, with a long jagged gash in the centre. There were angry red weals leading up the leg toward the groin. It didn’t take a brains trust to realise this injury had taken place some days before and had been ignored.
‘So what happened?’ Jake asked. They had an audience. Barbara was standing watching, holding a child by each hand. These were farm kids, Kirsty thought in wry amusement. A kid from Manhattan might well faint, but all these children showed was fascinated interest.
‘Blasted heifer kicked out as I was putting her into a bail last Monday,’ Herbert said sourly. ‘It was her first time in. I should know better by now and keep myself out of the way, but I’m getting slower in my old age. Anyway, the missus saw it last night and had a pink fit and said the leg’d drop off if I didn’t see you. So I’m seeing you.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you might come to the hospital,’ Jake said, but he sounded amused more than annoyed and he didn’t look surprised when Herbert shook his head.
‘The leg’ll have to turn black before that happens.’
The Doctor’s Proposal Page 11
