‘Moonlighting?’ he repeated, as he extracted a packet of crisps from his pocket. ‘I’m sorry, but—’
‘I understand you admitted Mrs Foster last night.’
To her surprise he suddenly looked very uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, and not a little embarrassed. ‘The switchboard got through to me by mistake.’
‘Then why didn’t you simply tell them I was on call, not you?’ Good Lord, was he blushing? No, of course he wasn’t. He probably hadn’t blushed since he was knee high to a grasshopper, but he certainly looked rather red. ‘Mark—’
‘When the switchboard said it was Mrs Foster, I guessed you wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to see her,’ he muttered, ‘and…well, I thought you looked kind of tired when you left yesterday, and you’ve got your kids to look after and everything, and…’ He shrugged. ‘Look, it was no big deal.’
But it was, she thought as she stared at him. He’d thought she looked tired so he’d taken the call for her. He’d noticed she was out of sorts so he’d volunteered to see Mrs Foster even though he must have been exhausted himself. It was what a caring husband would have done—or a lover.
‘I’m very grateful,’ she said awkwardly, and he smiled, a smile that sent a shiver racing down her spine.
‘Any time, Helen.’
So much meaning in two little words. So much promised, implied, suggested. Her mouth felt dry, tight, and she ran her tongue over her lips quickly, and saw something deep and enticing flare in his eyes.
‘Mark, I…’ Her heart was thudding so hard it was difficult to breathe, far less speak. ‘Mark…’
He was holding her hand. She couldn’t for the life of her remember how he’d got hold of it, but his thumb was tracing a gentle pattern on the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist. Up and down, circling, caressing, teasing, sending shivers racing down her spine, pooling deep down in her stomach, and she swallowed, hard.
He was going to kiss her. She knew instinctively that he was going to kiss her. Did she want him to?
No.
Yes.
She didn’t know.
‘Relax, Helen,’ he murmured. ‘Let it happen.’
And she did. Traitorously her head tilted sideways as he lowered his lips to hers. Even more traitorously her lips parted so his tongue could delve deep inside her mouth, and it was intoxicating, and enticing, and wrong.
This is wrong, her heart cried as she felt herself responding, yielding to the excitement of his lips. This is so wrong, she thought, hearing herself give a tiny groan as his hands slid up her sides to cup her breasts. Desperately she jerked away, her heart racing, her cheeks scarlet.
‘Helen—’
‘No,’ she said, seeing the confusion in his eyes, knowing it was mirrored in her own. ‘You shouldn’t—we shouldn’t—’
‘If I don’t kill Mrs Foster in the next twenty-four hours, it’ll be a miracle!’ Tom exclaimed as he slammed open the staffroom door. ‘Ye gods, she was the one who was wallpapering. She was the one who put her hysterectomy at risk, and yet whose fault is it she’s back? Mine, of course!’
‘W-would you like a coffee, Tom—or some tea?’ Helen said, getting jerkily to her feet, willing her legs to work.
‘Tea would be great. Hey, is that a spare ham and pickle sandwich?’ he added, his eyes lighting up.
She mumbled something in reply but it could have been anything. All she could think was that not only had she let Mark kiss her, she’d kissed him back. How could she have done that—how?
Tea, she told herself, forcing her feet towards the teapot. Pour Tom out some tea. Pull yourself together, and pour him out some tea, and pray—pray—that he doesn’t notice how much your hands are shaking when you give it to him, how flushed your cheeks must be.
He didn’t. He was too busy explaining to Mark why he had absolutely no intention of applying for the new consultancy post.
‘As I’ve told you before, I’d miss my ordinary Obs and Gynae work too much. Oh, I enjoy doing the occasional infertility stuff, but I wouldn’t want to do it full time.’
‘Not even for extra cash and status?’ Mark asked, and Tom shook his head.
‘The money might be attractive, but being called ‘Mr’ instead of ‘Dr’ isn’t the be all and end all for me. Look, if you think it would be such a good job, why don’t you apply for it yourself?’ he continued. ‘You fit in well here, and you’ve certainly got the qualifications.’
‘I’ve a job lined up in Canada, remember?’ Mark pointed out.
‘Yes, but that’s for a specialist registrar’s position, isn’t it?’ Tom argued back. ‘This would be a consultancy.’
Mark looked thoughtful. ‘I had the impression Gideon was hoping his brother-in-law might apply?’
‘David’s certainly not happy at the Merkland, but if you were to tell Gideon you were interested in staying on, I know he’d give your application very serious thought.’
Mark’s eyes slid across to Helen’s, and she knew what he was thinking. Did she want him to stay? The question was in his eyes as clearly as if he’d actually voiced it, and a month—a week—even ten minutes ago—she would have said go, leave, get out of my life. But now…
Now her mind was a whirl of conflicting emotions, and as Mark continued to gaze at her she could feel heat rising in her cheeks—guilty heat, betraying heat—and he smiled. A slow, understanding smile.
‘I don’t think staying on at the Belfield would be a good idea,’ he said. ‘It’s a tempting suggestion, but…No, I don’t think it would be a good idea. What I want—need—would only work if I moved to a different hospital, another country.’
‘We’re going to be sorry to see you go, aren’t we, Helen?’ Tom declared.
‘Good grief, is that the time?’ she exclaimed. ‘I have things—paperwork—to attend to.’
She was gone before Tom could stop her, and he swore under his breath when Mark left soon after, muttering something vague about having a patient to check up on. Dammit, couldn’t Helen at least have pretended to be sorry that Mark was leaving? The poor bloke would be gone in a fortnight, and it surely wouldn’t have killed her to have said something nice to him for a change.
The quicker their new consultant arrived the better, he thought vexedly. With a new consultant on the team he and Helen could take a holiday—a long, leisurely one instead of a snatched weekend grabbed whenever the operating schedule was low. They could go to the cinema, see one of those films the newspapers were always raving about, and maybe then Helen would be less stressed, less difficult to live with.
And she was difficult to live with at the moment, he thought with a sigh as he walked out of the staffroom and down the corridor. Everything seemed to annoy her recently. Like those damn flowers. Lord, but it would be a long time before he ever took Gideon’s advice about anything again.
‘Did your wife like her bouquet, Dr Brooke?’
He turned to see Doris hovering outside her office, and his heart sank. Helen had been right. He’d been a fool to ask Doris to buy them.
‘She thought they were lovely,’ he lied.
‘So they sorted out your little misunderstanding, did they?’ Doris continued, her eyes speculative, knowing, and he stiffened.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Enough said, Doctor.’ She smiled, tapping the side of her nose. ‘I’m just so pleased that everything’s all right. I confess I’ve been a little bit worried about the two of you, what with Dr Helen’s new hairstyle and her more stylish clothes, but she’s obviously realised that the grass isn’t greener.’
What grass? Tom thought blankly as Doris disappeared back into her office. What the hell was the woman talking about? So Helen had a new haircut, and was apparently wearing more stylish clothes. It didn’t mean…
That she was having an affair.
He burst out laughing. It was obviously high time Doris got out more, got a life. OK, so perhaps he and Helen seemed to be doing a lot of arguing but all couples
had disagreements. It didn’t mean anything.
Then why did she ask you this morning if you loved her? his mind whispered. Why did she get her hair cut, and why—if Doris is to be believed—has she bought herself a whole wardrobe of new clothes?
Because her old clothes are wearing out, he argued back. Because she fancied a new hairstyle for a change. And as for her asking me this morning if I love her…
The laughter on Tom’s face died. The night he’d invited Mark round for dinner she’d asked him afterwards if he’d ever been attracted to anybody else. She’d said that as they’d been married for ten years she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had. Had she been trying to tell him something?
Desperately he shook his head. No, of course she hadn’t been. Helen loved him as much as he loved her, and even if she’d wanted to have an affair she never went anywhere apart from the hospital or the shops.
Which meant it had to be somebody at the hospital.
No, of course it didn’t, he told himself savagely. Helen wasn’t having an affair. She loved him. She did.
Does she? the insidious little voice persisted. Are you sure about that?
Of course he was sure. He was.
And yet as he walked towards the ward he felt a cold chill wrap itself around his heart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘OH, HELL,’ Tom muttered. ‘The cancer’s not just in Mrs Merrick’s cervix—it’s spread to her vagina and uterus as well.’
Helen’s eyes met his over her theatre mask. ‘Is it operable?’
‘I can perform a radical hysterectomy, taking out all her pelvic lymph nodes and part of her vagina, but whether that will be enough…’ He swore under his breath. ‘How did it get to be so advanced? Cervical smears are supposed to detect cancer in its early stages.’
‘She hasn’t had a smear since her last son was born, and he’s seven.’
He shook his head. ‘Let me guess. She was always too busy to go for a smear. She had things to do—her sons to look after—and when she started bleeding between her periods she thought it would stop—go away—disappear.’
‘Something like that.’ Helen nodded.
‘Why won’t women ever learn?’ he exclaimed. ‘Bleeding between periods is never something to be ignored, and how long does a cervical smear take? Half an hour tops. One half-hour visit and her GP would have picked up the abnormal cells and we could have killed them before they had a chance to develop.’
‘Do you want me to start cancelling some of your less urgent ops?’ the theatre sister asked, motioning to one of her staff to start laying out the instruments he was going to need for Mrs Merrick. ‘Give you more time with this one?’
‘Could you see if you can cadge me some extra operating time first from any of the other departments, Sharon?’ he answered. ‘I really don’t want to cancel anyone’s operation if I can help it.’
‘Don’t forget you’ve got a clinic this afternoon, Tom,’ Helen reminded him. ‘And I can’t take it for you,’ she continued before he could suggest it. ‘Gideon’s already asked me to do his ward round because he’s got a meeting with Admin.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ he flared. ‘We shouldn’t need to cancel anybody’s operation because of lack of time and operating staff. Well, I’m definitely not cancelling the pelvic repair—the poor woman’s leaking urine like a sieve. And I’m certainly not cancelling the ovarian cyst.’
‘What about Mrs Foster?’
He said something unprintable about Mrs Foster, then shook his head. ‘I’ll have to squeeze her in somehow. Heaven knows what damage she’s possibly done with her wallpapering activities. OK, we’ll do Mrs Merrick, the pelvic repair, the ovarian cyst and Mrs Foster. Sharon, if you wangle me some extra operating time we’ll do the D and C, the sterilisation and the prolapse. If not, they’ll have to be cancelled.’
‘You’re never going to be finished for your two o’clock clinic even with those cancellations,’ Helen pointed out.
‘If my clinic starts late, then it starts late,’ he said tightly. ‘Sharon, get on the phone and see what you can do for me.’
The theatre sister hurried away and Barry, the anaesthetist, looked up from his monitors. ‘Mrs Merrick’s well under, Tom. Ready to roll whenever you are.’
‘I’ll be a hell of a lot readier when we get our new consultant,’ Tom said as he reached for a scalpel.
He expected Helen to say ‘Amen’ but she didn’t. In fact, she’d been remarkably offhand about the addition of a new member of staff since Gideon had given them the good news on Tuesday. Oh, she’d said it was marvellous, tremendous, would make such a difference, but he had the oddest impression that she was just saying the words, that her thoughts were elsewhere.
Probably working up the courage to tell you she doesn’t love you any more, his mind whispered as he made an incision into Yvonne’s abdomen.
No!
The word seared through his brain so loudly that for a second he wondered if he’d actually said it out loud, but nobody in the operating theatre looked up, nobody gazed questioningly at him.
Damn Doris and her insidious innuendo, he thought savagely as he parted the skin round the incision he’d made. These thoughts—fears—would never have occurred to him—not for a second—if she hadn’t placed the seed of doubt in his mind, and now it was there, working its poison, twisting everything Helen had said and done recently.
‘BP 120 over 80, temp normal, heart rate normal,’ Barry announced, adjusting the dials on his monitors.
Tom nodded. ‘Clamps, please.’
Helen handed them to him, and he shot her a glance. If Doris was right, surely he would have noticed—seen the tell-tale signs?
He wasn’t naïve. He knew that some of the staff at the Belfield were involved in affairs. Affairs that almost always began because as medics they all saw so much pain and heartache in their work, and it was often easier to talk to a colleague than to anybody else. But the only men Helen saw regularly were himself, Gideon and Barry. She saw Mark, too, of course, but considering she was barely civil to him he could discount him immediately.
‘Drain,’ he demanded.
Helen eased the suction into place and a frown pleated his forehead as he watched her. Haematology. She went down to Haematology a lot, and yet when Mark had asked if she could hurry up his blood tests on Mrs Dukakis, she’d been strangely reluctant to go. Was that because she felt an attraction towards the head of the department?
Oh, get a grip, Tom, he told himself. The head of Haematology’s sixty if he’s a day, with a paunch you could rest your coffee-cup on.
‘Sorry, Doctor, but no luck with the extra operating time,’ Sharon said as she rejoined them. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t care to repeat what some of the departments said when I asked.’
Helen chuckled, a deep throaty sound that tore at Tom’s heart.
Perhaps he should just ask her outright. Say ‘Look, are you having an affair?’ But did he really want to know if she was? Did he really want her to tell him she didn’t love him any more? She was his whole world—had been since the day he’d met her—and without her…
‘Sorry, Sharon,’ he muttered as the instrument she was holding out to him slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor.
‘No problem, Doctor,’ she replied, selecting another one.
Helen clearly thought there was. Helen looked puzzled, and he knew why. In all the years he’d been a surgeon he’d never dropped an instrument. Never.
Concentrate, Tom, he told himself, concentrate. OK, so you’ve hardly slept for the last two nights with Doris’s words running round and round in your head, but an operating theatre’s no place for private worries. There’s too much at stake, and in Mrs Merrick’s case it’s her whole future.
‘What are her chances?’ Helen asked after he’d performed Yvonne’s radical hysterectomy, removing her pelvic lymph nodes and as much of her vagina as he hoped was necessary.
‘I don’t know,’ he said weari
ly as he followed her into the changing rooms to grab a quick shower and a set of fresh theatre scrubs before their next patient was wheeled in. ‘She has four children, you said?’
‘The oldest is fourteen, the youngest seven.’
He stabbed his fingers through his hair. ‘Radiotherapy will help but…Realistically I’d have to put the chances of her still being alive in five years at fifty-fifty.’
‘I’ve heard worse odds,’ she said gently, and he grimaced.
‘It’s so unnecessary, Helen, so damned unnecessary. If only she’d gone to her GP sooner—the minute she noticed the bleeding. If only she hadn’t kept putting it off.’
‘Saddest words in the world, aren’t they?’ Helen murmured, pulling her theatre top over her head. “If only.”’
I don’t love you any more are even sadder, he thought, his eyes drawn to the high curve of her breasts encased in a white lace bra, the darkened tips of her nipples just showing through the fabric. She was so beautiful—so very beautiful. When had he last told her that?
He couldn’t remember, and maybe that was the trouble. Maybe he’d assumed too much, taken too much for granted over the years.
‘Helen—’
‘We’d better hurry up and shower,’ she interrupted. ‘Your pelvic repair job’s down, and if you want to do the ovarian cyst and Mrs Foster as well…’
She disappeared into the shower cubicle without waiting for his reply, and unhappily Tom stared after her. When they’d first got married they’d actually shared a theatre shower once. It had been against every hospital rule but, then, so had a lot of the things they’d done in sluice rooms and store cupboards. They hadn’t cared. They’d been so much in love, so happy. How had it all gone wrong?
It hasn’t, his heart insisted. She still loves you as much as you love her. You’re just overreacting, panicking unnecessarily.
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