by Rebecca Lang
'Yes. Just have a few more floor visits to do to see how my patients are doing,' John said, as they moved out of the immediate unit to an outer corridor to go to the staff coffee-lounge. 'What do you think of our new doctor, if that's not an unfair question?'
'He's a very good surgeon,' she said carefully, 'and very good with patients.'
'Yes,' he said. 'All reports are good so far. He's certainly living up to his reputation.'
John, who was tall and slim, yet muscular and fit, walked with ease beside her, matching his stride to hers.
'I don't think I told you that I knew Joel Matheson a long time ago when he was an intern here and I was a volunteer in the emergency department,' she said, deciding to tell him now in case it came out later, when it would seem odd that she had not mentioned it. 'He was a good doctor then.'
Although she had told John about Alec in a superficial way, she had not divulged the name of his father or the circumstances of his birth. All he knew was that she had never been married. Perhaps John would put two and two together at some point and decide that Joel could be the father of her son. The past was coming back to haunt her.
As they entered the coffee-lounge together, before John could comment further, she remembered the trouble she had got into in her youth by telling lies. The fall-out of that was still with her, so now she tried to be more up-front where necessary, finding how to do it in the most tactful way. She wasn't 'seeing' John, although she strongly suspected he would like that arrangement, and she considered that she did not have to give him any more details of her private life than she had already. However, a very astute man, he would perhaps pick up the inevitable vibes between herself and Joel, be they positive or negative.
'Just made a fresh pot of tea, Dr Montague,' a nurse said to her.
'Ah, that's what I like to hear,' Nell said. 'Thanks.'
The coffee-lounge, which was for the medical and nursing staff of the burns intensive care and operating rooms, held a few people in varying states of relaxation, drinking coffee or tea, reading newspapers, eating snacks.
Nell got her own mug out of the cupboard and poured herself some tea. As she relaxed back in a chair, with her aching feet up on a footstool, she reflected yet again on the strange quirk of fate that had brought her and Joel within each other's orbits again.
Bill and Joel came into the room just as John sat down beside her, and she had the distinct impression that he was going to ask her something unrelated to work. Joel looked from one to the other, his eyes harrow, then his gaze locked with hers for a moment before he turned away to pour himself a cup of coffee.
'How's our patient doing?' she asked Joel.
'Pretty good,' he said. 'We're hoping he can breathe on his own now.' For a short while their patient had been on a ventilator. 'Thanks again for helping me, Nell. I appreciate it.'
'My pleasure,' she said, meaning it. 'I shan't hesitate to make a similar request when I need help.'
'Don't hesitate,' he said.
Joel looked pale and tired, engendering in Nell a stab of fear as she assessed him. Was he all right? A helplessness that she had never experienced before momentarily blotted out all other thoughts and feelings. I still love him, she thought with certainty, and I most likely always will.
There was chatter in the room as the staff relaxed a little before going back to work. No one was looking at her, Nell decided as she glanced around, trying to control a trembling of her lips. Perhaps working with Joel was going to be more emotionally fraught than she could cope with easily, she thought. Today she had spent more time with him in the workplace than she had over the past two weeks.
Carefully she drank her tea, glad of its calming effect. In a few minutes she had to go to see some patients, before going home for the day. Those who were in isolation in the intensive care unit took a long time to see as she had to put on a protective gown, mask, latex gloves and hat, a different set in each room, in order not to transmit any sort of infection.
As she left the coffee-lounge, Joel followed her out and walked with her down the corridor to go out of the inner sanctum, as they called it, to the main burns area. At such moments he looked dear and familiar to her, Nell thought as she glanced at him. At other times he seemed like a stranger who seemed very preoccupied with his own deep concerns, too preoccupied to consider her or where she might be in his life, if anywhere other than as a colleague and mother of a child who was also his.
'Will your mother be looking after Alec at the moment?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said. 'Right now he's at a summer day camp, an art camp, and he gets picked up and brought back home by a special bus. During the school year he comes home on a school bus, to my parents' place, then I pick him up from there. He often has supper there. For some mornings I have a part-time housekeeper who arrives early and oversees Alec, getting him onto the school bus. It's a fine balance, a juggling act, keeping him supervised...but I'm not complaining.'
'Sounds like a good arrangement,' Joel commented.
Knowing that she was protesting too much, at pains to assure Joel that Alec had not been neglected, she nonetheless could not stop herself from explaining. 'Yes, it's a great arrangement, secure,' she said. 'Alec likes it and my parents like it, although I do sometimes worry about how we'll cope when he gets into his teens and doesn't necessarily want to do what he's told all the time.' She chuckled, trying to make light of something that was a worry to her. 'People I know with teenage sons and daughters are forever warning me.'
In a quiet side corridor, with no one about, Joel stopped and took her arm. 'Is there anything between you and John Lane?' he asked baldly.
'No, not really,' she prevaricated. 'He's a nice man with whom I sometimes go out for a drink or a meal.'
'And?' he said.
Nell flushed. 'There is no "and",' she said, annoyed that he could get beneath her guard so easily. 'We're not lovers, if that's what you think, although, to be honest, I think he would like us to be.'
'Would you?'
'No,' she said honestly. 'I don't think so. The difference in our ages would maybe be all right for a while, but not for very long. I find that I want to think long term. I'm not very good at temporary arrangements where men are concerned, that's what I've found.'
'Is that so?' he said quietly, looking at her intently with raised eyebrows in such a way that her flush deepened. She might have been the sixteen-year-old who had first set eyes on him, so vulnerable did she feel at that moment.
'Yes, it is,' she said emphatically.
'And have you had much experience?'
'No, I haven't. John would like to marry me, I suspect, if you must know,' she said. 'He hasn't actually asked me, but as good as. But that's not likely to happen...although sometimes. I think I'd like to be able to work part time to spend more time with Alec before he gets to the age when he doesn't want to spend time with me, before he gets into those teen years that I'm dreading.'
'Marriage isn't a way out, Nell.' Joel said. 'Sometimes it can create more trouble than it solves.'
'How do you know?'
'I haven't been going around with my eyes and ears closed,' he said.
'I know,' she admitted. At the same time, she sensed that marriage to John would be very comfortable in many ways.
'I hope you'll tell me before you contemplate marrying someone...now that I've found I have a son,' Joel said. 'I know that I have no legal claim on him, but I would like to be part of his life and I think he wants me in his. I don't want any other man to take him away from me.'
'I thought you had stepped off the face of the earth,' she said, her emotions suddenly very much on the surface. 'For all I knew, you could have been dead.'
'Would you have cared?' he asked tersely.
'Yes, I would have,' she said, facing him. 'Shall we go on? I have some work to do.' She had almost been on the point of telling him that she loved him. It had also occurred to her over the last few weeks that she should propose marriage to him, if he
would not do it himself, because she had an increasing sense that that was what she wanted, what would be best for all of them. Or maybe they could simply live together.
Joel took her arm and forced her to a halt. 'Can we at least agree on that point?' he asked, his expression tense. 'That you'll talk to me before you get into any relationship?' She did not see any affection there for her in his tense regard.
'If it matters that much to you, Joel,' she said, 'maybe we should meet to discuss this one weekend when we're both free. Come for supper, come for an afternoon, maybe on a Saturday, and we'll take Alec and the dogs for a walk through the ravines.'
'It matters,' he said. 'I'll contact you about it soon.'
'By the way, John does know I have a son,' she said carefully. 'They haven't met. John's been very good to me, giving me time off when I want it to be with Alec.'
'Presumably he doesn't know about me and you?'
'No.'
Joel let go of her arm. 'I'll come to the floor with you,' he said. 'I have a couple of patients to see.' With a sigh, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his lab coat as he walked beside her, as though he could not trust himself to refrain from forcing her to make a promise.
Had she been surer of him, she would have told him then and there that no other man would be right for her, that he was what she wanted. As it was, it seemed that the ball was in his court and he would maybe never return it to her.
CHAPTER SIX
The next two weeks were hectic at work. Nell was thrown together with Joel every day, in all the intensity and stress of the job they had to do, during which she saw and felt him watching her, as though he wanted to assess her, get to know her, in the shortest possible time. Subtly, he watched her with John.
With churning emotions, Nell realized, or thought she did, that Joel did not necessarily want her himself, but he didn't want anyone else to have her because she was the mother of his child.
They sweated over horrendous cases in the operating room, as well as the more routine ones, were on call together frequently at night for burns emergencies. They conferred about the best treatment for their patients, they spent coffee and tea breaks together. Very gradually she was getting to know the mature Joel, and he her.
Yet they were seldom alone with each other at work. What they did was very much a team effort. In many ways this supportive work ethos helped them to do what they had to do, yet as time went by Nell found that she was longing more and more to be alone with Joel, was aware of the tension building up in her to an almost unbearable degree, to get something sorted out between them.
So it was with relief that she responded to him one morning towards the end of the second week when they were momentarily alone at the scrub sinks in the operating suite, prior to their next case. 'We're both free this weekend, Nell,' he said, speaking hastily before they could be interrupted. 'How about if we make an effort to get together, with Alec as well?'
'That would be great,' she agreed. 'Spend the day with us on Saturday. Come for lunch and stay.'
Joel nodded, just as their privacy was invaded by other staff members coming to scrub for cases. A peace of sorts came over Nell as she went through the motions of her job automatically. They were going to talk about what would be best for Alec, and maybe something would come out of it that was good for them too.
Nell slept late on Saturday, as did Alec, both needing the rest. The ingredients for a simple lunch had been bought the evening before, on her way home from work. Having got up at half past six to let the dogs out to the garden, then back in again, Nell went back to bed.
Later, she and Alec prepared lunch—three kinds of quiche and a large mixed salad, with a tangy hors d'oeuvre of sliced mango and sliced avocado with fresh lime juice poured over, which she knew from experience Was very refreshing on a hot day. It was a beautiful day, so she planned to eat outside on the patio.
'I know I've asked you this before, several times,' she said carefully to Alec, 'how do you like having your real father in your life? I mean, what has changed in your feelings since you first knew he was here in Gresham?'
'Well...it's good,' he said, screwing up his face in concentration, striving to get the meaning right. 'It was something I wanted, and now it's happening. He's a nice person. I don't know what I would have done if he wasn't a nice person. I just wish...I wish we knew what we were going to do in the future... how it's going to work out. You know, whether we're going to be a proper family. It's a bit weird, waiting to see what's going to happen.'
'I know what you mean,' she said. 'I feel the same way. It's something we can't really rush. We've got to get to know each other, because we've got to get it right.'
'Yeah, I know,' he said, sounding very mature. 'Will you get married, do you think?' He sounded so wistful and tentative that Nell gave him a quick hug and kiss.
'I don't know...I really don't know. It's what I hope for.'
When the door bell rang at twelve o'clock she was carrying cutlery and glasses outside. 'Will you go to the door, Alec?' she said, rather unnecessarily, as he was already running into the front hall.
'Mum! Mum!' He was back moments later. 'Dad's brought his cat in a basket. He's a special cat because he won't come unless you whistle "Good King Wenceslas".'
'What?'
Alec repeated what he had said.
'Oh, that's odd,' she said, smiling at the imagery and struck forcefully by his use of the word 'Dad'. That was the first time he had called Joel 'Dad'. He had said it as though he had hardly been aware that he had said it, which signified to her that he must have been thinking about Joel in that way for a while, not just in an abstract sense of knowing that Joel was his biological father.
It seemed strange to her, bringing with it a dissonance, a feeling of wanting to share her son with his father, and not wanting to at the same time.
Joel came through to the kitchen, carrying a large wicker basket that had a lattice door at one end through which they could see a large black cat with yellow eyes which was glaring out at them. Much to Alec's delight, the dogs barked at the cat and the cat in turn yowled and hissed in a most threatening manner.
'Hi, Nell.' Joel grinned at her and kissed her on the cheek. 'I thought Alec would like to see Felix again, and vice versa.' At that point, the cat gave out a particularly angry wail of protest as one of the dogs shoved her nose very close to the door of the basket, making them all laugh.
'I'm not so sure you're right there about the cat liking it,' Nell said.
'Bring him out on the patio, Dad,' Alec said excitedly. 'Maybe he would like to be outside.'
'Sure,' Joel said. 'We can't let him out of the basket, but I know he'd like to be outside. He hates living in my apartment, so the sooner I get a house with a garden the happier he's going to be. I may just leave him with my parents.' As Alec went out ahead of Joel, carrying the cat basket, Joel looked back at Nell and raised his eyebrows in silent comment about the new word 'Dad', while Nell raised hers in reply, saying nothing. Progress was being made.
'You've made a hit, bringing Felix here,' she said to Joel, as they both stood on the patio moments later, watching Alec staggering around the garden with the large wicker cat hamper, before finally putting it down under the shade of a tree, sheltered from the hot sun.
After lunch—during which Alec had chattered practically non-stop to Joel about school, his friends, his summer art camp that he was going to—they prepared to go for a long walk with the dogs. Felix was deposited in a secure room in the basement, together with a box of soil as a toilet, some food and water.
'Will he be lonely?' Alec asked Joel as they set out.
'I expect he will,' Joel said solemnly.
'When I get back, can I have him in my room for a while?'
'If your mum agrees,' Joel said.
Joel and Nell exchanged glances. This was the nearest they had come to feeling like parents together, supporting their son and each other.
After a very enjoyable and long w
alk, and an early supper of leftover quiche and baked potatoes, when Alec was ensconced in his room with the cat, the door firmly shut, Nell and Joel sat on the patio having a cool drink.
'We have a few things to talk about,' Joel said softly, 'and we may as well do that now, as I suspect that such interludes may be few and far between over the next weeks. Although I hope we can get into a habit of walking your dogs on the weekends that we're not on call.'
'Mmm,' she said, nodding her head. 'Over to you.'
'I want your assurance that you won't marry without discussing with me what my role is to be with Alec,' Joel said, sitting opposite her, apparently relaxed, yet she sensed a tension in him that was immediately echoed in her. 'I assume that you would anyway, but I want to hear you say it.' By that remark he apparently ruled out marriage for them as a couple with a cold finality. He had, after all, said so before.
Nell took a deep, tremulous breath. Now was the time to get everything out into the open. This moment was, she knew, a test of her maturity. There were to be no more half-truths and hesitations. There was no point.
'Joel...' She cleared her throat. 'Before I answer that question I...I want you to know that I love you, I would like to be with you. There isn't anyone else I want to be with, and it's not just because of Alec. I doubt that I could take anyone else seriously, especially now that you've come back into my life...' Her voice trailed off.
Joel was staring at her, squinting against the bright, early summer sun, his expression unreadable. 'I wouldn't say that I came back into your life exactly,' he drawled after a long moment, his reaction difficult to interpret. 'Not in the way you seem to mean. If you remember, I told you that I was planning to come back to Gresham to be close to my parents.'
'Well...yes, but...here we are, Joel,' she said hesitantly, her sang-froid deserting her in the face of his apparent unmoving calm. To her, he was once again rejecting her.
'Yes, indeed, here we are,' he said huskily, a slight smile softening his otherwise sober features. Nell got the impression that he was trying very hard to control that softness. 'Is that a marriage proposal?'
