Doctors in Flight

by Meredith Webber

  He smiles wickedly and adds, ‘Keep up your strength!’

  I want to smile back, but once again, even in a joke, he’s emphasising the sexual nature of our relationship.

  ‘I bought the noodles and vegetables you enjoyed the other day. Two servings, as I’ll have that as well. And rice. And they had special dim sims Mrs Li made herself so I got a few of those as well.’

  He’s pulling food containers out of the plastic bag as he explains, setting them on the table, then getting plates and forks. He serves me rice, and noodles, adds two dim sims to the side of the plate and sets it down in front of me.

  I sniff hard, because he’s being kind, and I love him, and he’ll probably go away, if not now then soon, and if not soon then later.

  The love thing comes as a bit of a shock. I’ve suspected it, of course, because of the little hitches in my heart from time to time, and the way his kindness gets past my defences. I’ll have to think about this later, I realise as he serves his own meal then sits down to eat, telling me about the breech he delivered.

  ‘I was sure it would end up as a Caesar but the little blighter finally turned and popped out with hardly any further trouble. The midwife had tried turning him a couple of times, but he was stubborn.’

  ‘Maybe he needed a man’s hands,’ I say, and he smiles at me across the table.

  ‘Maybe,’ he agrees, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses.

  My heart squeezes so tight it’s like a hard, hurting lump in the centre of my chest. We’ve had this kind of conversation all week, the innuendos keeping both of us primed for love-making.

  That’s the kind of thing I’ll miss, I realise, and sniff again.

  ‘Maybe you’re coming down with a cold,’ he says, caring again, while I pray my eyes don’t start leaking and totally give the game away.

  We finish dinner—there are no leftovers so I must have been hungry—and he clears everything away, washes our plates and forks, then comes across to where I’m rooted to the chair.

  He squats beside me.

  ‘I’d offer to put you into your purple pyjamas and tuck you into bed, but we both know what would happen,’ he says, trailing the backs of his fingers down my cheek. ‘So I’m going to leave and I want you to go straight to bed. I’ll have to go back out to the property tomorrow, but I’ll call in when I get back to see how you are.’

  He kisses my cheek, tousles my hair with a feather-light caress, then walks away.

  I want to call him back, tell him I lied about the headache. I want to weep and wail and gnash my teeth that he’s actually gone because I lied. But deep down I know I need this time out. I need to think things through and be one hundred per cent sure of where I go from here.

  I’m willing to admit I’m so sexually attracted to the man—whether as a result of my mother’s genes or not—I’d do almost anything to stay in a relationship with him. But love has raised a whole new issue. Love can, and in this case inevitably will, lead to heartache, and is the sexual satisfaction worth the pain?

  Gran is a great believer in divine retribution and, although I’d never admit it to her, I have to wonder about it when I wake the next morning with a thumping head, a stuffy nose and a throat that’s been sandpapered during the night.

  ‘It’s more than just a cold, it’s flu,’ GR announces, hours later. He has called in as promised mid-afternoon on Sunday to find me shivering in bed. Being a doctor and up in these matters, he headed back to the hospital for a thermometer and has now read it as if my running a temperature confirms his diagnosis.

  ‘Or the plague. Or pneumonia,’ I moan.

  ‘Well, with any of those three I don’t want you near pregnant women or post-op patients so you’ll stay in bed. We’ll manage without you for a few days. I’ll get Phil to come over and take a proper look at you, get you started on antibiotics and arrange for someone to bring meals over from the hospital.’

  He tells me all this then bends over and kisses me on the lips.

  I protest about sharing germs with him, but all he does is smile and my heart soars at his niceness. While I’m sick, I tell myself, I won’t think about him not loving me. I’ll just enjoy whatever brings me happiness. I can, of course, do this, because it’s like eating chocolates without thinking about the calories. Women are born with brains able to compartmentalise such things, and I’ve had plenty of practice.

  ‘It’s not the plague,’ Phil, one of the residents at the hospital, tells me. It’s Monday afternoon and he’s got the lab tests back from the swab he took of my throat the previous afternoon. ‘It’s the flu and unfortunately it’s the new strain that’s got everyone edgy. No deaths so far in Australia but overseas—’

  I interrupt at this stage to tell him I’d just as soon not know about mortality rates for a disease I happen to be suffering from right now. I also express my dissatisfaction with the supposedly clean country air I’ve been breathing.

  ‘How could deadly flu germs get out here?’ I demand, albeit croakily.

  ‘You probably brought them with you,’ he tells me. ‘You’d been hanging around hospitals in Brisbane, and it’s been quietly incubating since you got here.’

  My throat’s too sore to tell him I didn’t ‘hang around’ hospitals in Brisbane but worked in one with women who were there to have babies, not die of flu.

  I make do with a glare that grows fiercer when he follows up this conversation with the announcement that he’s putting me in hospital.

  ‘In isolation. I don’t want you infecting half the town. It’s a good thing they thought of an isolation room when they built the new hospital, isn’t it?’

  He’s so cheery I want to throttle him with his own stethoscope, but I know if I sit up so I’m close enough to get my hands on it, I’ll probably faint. In fact, I feel so bad that, though I refuse to be wheeled across to the hospital in a bed, I do agree to a wheelchair.

  ‘I’ll send a nurse and an orderly to help you. You stay in bed until they get here. Don’t worry about your toilet things,’ he tells me. ‘Gregor said he’d get them later and bring them over.’

  So much for discreet! Or would Phil assume that because I work for GR he’d know where I keep my toothbrush?

  I’m in the passion-killer pyjamas, of course, but they’re so sweaty, the gowned and masked nurse who puts me to bed in the isolation room removes them, gives me a sponge bath, then produces a silky, lace-trimmed black nightdress which she proceeds to slip over my head.

  ‘That’s not mine,’ I tell her, and her eyes twinkle so I assume she’s smiling behind her mask.

  ‘I know,’ she replies, ‘but the hospital had a wealthy tourist who was hospitalised here last year and, although she was full of praise for the service and treatment she received, she was appalled at the collection of hospital gowns we give out to people who don’t come prepared. She sent us two dozen, all gorgeous, but as people usually bring their own we don’t often get a chance to use them.’

  I’m sick, remember, so this probably seems more bewildering than it would if I was well, so I don’t argue. I’m in isolation anyway, so no one will see me in a garment that would look more at home on an actress trailing up the red carpet on Oscar night.

  Refreshed by the wash, and with the cool silk smooth against my skin, I drift off to sleep.

  ‘Please, don’t tell me you had that nightdress hidden away somewhere in your belongings when all I ever saw you in were the passion-killers.’

  GR’s sitting beside me when I open my eyes. He’s masked and gowned but his eyes, though twinkly with the joke, look anxious.

  ‘Or that you wore it for Pete but only wore the pyjamas for me,’ he adds in a sterner tone.

  ‘It’s hospital issue,’ I tell him, then remember something else. ‘And I don’t think I wore anything at all with you.’

  I know he’s smiling because his smile always makes my skin tingle. To distract myself I look towards the window. It’s dark outside.

  ‘I must have been asle
ep.’

  ‘For more than twenty-four hours. Phil says the antibiotics could do that. Knock you out. But I think he’ll be as pleased as I am to know you’ve finally woken up.’

  ‘Like Sleeping Beauty,’ I suggest, and smile at him. ‘Only with short red hair and freckles. Sleeping Not-so-Beautiful, they’d have to call me. Though probably at the moment I’m more like Sleeping Downright Ugly.’

  ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ GR says.

  ‘No, you think I’m sexy—it’s sexual attraction,’ I remind him, and he looks a bit startled. Then Phil, apparently alerted by a nurse than I’m conscious, appears and GR says goodbye.

  What with the mask, he couldn’t have kissed me, so I really shouldn’t be disappointed.

  I close my eyes, and try to re-orientate myself. Pretend headache Saturday evening, real headache Sunday, into hospital Monday, sleep…

  This is when I realise it’s Tuesday and we all know what that means. But GR visited me and, what’s more, he stayed until it must have been way past time for Lydia to be serving dinner. You see how much more kindly I feel towards her when GR’s with me, not her! Didn’t mention the dustbin, did I?

  By Thursday Phil has decided I’m not going to be Bilbarra’s first flu-death statistic and agrees I can go home—which means back to the old nurses’ quarters. Gran, who phones me daily, is still acting home help for Charles but promises to come back and look after me.

  I point out that this isn’t turning into much of a holiday for her, but she won’t listen. I decide I’m still too weak to argue, and that GR will have to work out the logistics of our relationship—with Gran back in the quarters—if it’s survived flu and hospitalisation.

  This is a reasonable question seeing as I’ll be back in the passion-killers unless I steal at least one of the sexy, elegant nightdresses I’ve been wearing while incarcerated. I’m considering this—if I’m wearing one when I go home, they can’t expect to get it back immediately, can they?—when the nurse appears with freshly laundered lilac pyjamas—yes, the ones with the huge purple hearts.

  GR calls in that evening, talks to me, talks to Gran, tells me to hurry up and get stronger as he’s missing me at work.

  I’m looking straight at him so know he means just that—no innuendo, no suggestion of missing anything more than my assistance.

  By the time I return to work on Monday, I’m frustrated, confused and heartsick. It’s over and I know it. It was a quick and hopefully very discreet affair, only now it’s me worrying over the discreet part because I’d hate the whole hospital to know just how quickly he tired of me.

  ‘Tired?’ he asks, as he drives back from the airfield that evening. Michael was at a conference so I did the anaesthetic work while GR operated.

  ‘A bit,’ I admit, though tiredness is the least of the sensations and emotions running amok in my body.

  ‘You’ll have to be careful. Really look after yourself, Blue. You know the complications that can follow flu. Things like congestive heart disease.’

  ‘Gee, thanks for reminding me,’ I say, wondering if it’s because he thinks I might become a permanent invalid that he’s gone off me. Pathetic, isn’t it? I’m desperate for a reason for things to be over other than he’s tired of me.

  He pulls up outside my ‘home’—there are no lights on so I assume Gran’s gone back to Charles’s place. His wrist’s still in plaster and he can’t get help. Anyway, GR cuts the engine and turns to face me.

  ‘I know you didn’t plan on getting sick but sometimes things happen for the best,’ he says, voice very serious so I know the ‘this is it’ conversation is about to happen.

  He touches his finger to my temple and brushes at a bit of hair.

  ‘It gave me time to think,’ he adds, and though I want to yell at him to get on with it—to get it said—I also want to savour every minute of his company, even if it is the last time we sit like this.

  Even if my heart is leaking blood through cracks that widen with every word he speaks.

  ‘I know we haven’t known each other very long, so it’s unfair of me to ask you to make any kind of definite commitment…’

  He’s lost me! I frown at him, trying to make sense of what he’s saying. There are phrases like ‘maybe we should see where it goes’ and sentences like, ‘Even though I’ve waited, thinking that I’d know, I don’t want to confuse strong sexual attraction with love.’

  I can feel my frown deepen so much I’ll have permanently etched furrows on my forehead. He was right—I should have been a dermatologist, then I could have done my own botox!

  I know I’m only thinking frown lines to quell the panic bubbling inside me. GR’s stopped talking and is looking expectantly at me. I must be still frowning, for he says, ‘Is the idea so repugnant to you?’

  ‘What idea?’ I demand, needing it put into plain English.

  He half smiles.

  ‘The idea of our mutual attraction perhaps being more than simply physical.’

  He touches my face again and runs his thumb across my lips.

  ‘Seeing if it might actually be love. Seeing where things will lead.’ Then he adds the clincher. ‘Perhaps to marriage?’

  My mind goes blank, then starts up again at a thousand revs a minute.

  ‘But you wanted someone tall and dark and unemotional, and my eyes leak,’ I remind him. ‘And then there’s the dustbin, and I don’t know who my father is, and listening to your Uncle Charles I know your family is very proper and they mightn’t like you marrying someone without a regular father. And anyway, you don’t approve of women O and G specialists. I’d have to stop practising when I have babies and then there’ll be a shortage.’

  I’m not halfway through the list when he leans forward and interrupts in the worst—best?—possible way. He kisses me, so I kiss him back, and it’s ages later, when we’re squeezed into the narrow bed again and he’s stroking his fingers across my belly, that he says, ‘How did dustbins come into your list of reasons why you couldn’t fall in love with me? Are they some kind of recurring theme in your life?’

  ‘I didn’t say I couldn’t fall in love with you,’ I tell him. ‘Just couldn’t marry you.’

  The mention of marriage must divert him, because he leans over and kisses me gently on the lips.

  ‘I haven’t asked you yet,’ he says, then he untangles himself, swearing quietly about the inconveniences of my accommodation—even without Gran here—and suggesting I move in with him.

  ‘And let the whole town know what’s going on?’ I screech.

  ‘Would that be so bad?’

  He says it quietly, as if my reaction has bothered him, but I know it’s just the narrow bed and having to get up and go home. I’m reasonably certain he hasn’t thought this through.

  And even if he has, I haven’t. I mean, I love the man, I’m sure of it, but he’s not sure, and if it turns out it isn’t love for him, then what do I do? Move back in here and have people feel sorry for me?

  ‘You think about it,’ I tell him. ‘About the consequences.’

  He’s dressed by now and sits down on the bed.

  ‘You mean what people might say if you move out again?’

  ‘Why me?’ I demand.

  ‘Because it’s my house,’ he says, and I can hear him smiling.

  ‘But you might ask me to go, or I might have to go because I know it isn’t working—because I turn out not to be the love you’ve been waiting for.’

  This is not a cheery thought, but one of us has to face facts.

  ‘We’ll talk some more,’ he says, kissing me goodnight, then standing up and walking quietly away.

  I slide out of bed and pad barefoot across to the louvres so I can see him cross the car park to his car, and see his face as he opens the door and the inside light comes on.

  He’s a serious man, not much of a talker, a wonderful doctor and the man I love.

  Heart scrunching in my chest, I think about what he’s asked of me, and I realise th
at while I could have continued the affair just as an affair—could have enjoyed every sizzling minute of it because I believed that’s all I’d ever have from Gregor—this new idea is something entirely different. This is putting my heart at risk in a way an affair would never do, because with an affair my heart—and mind and other bits of me as well—had to accept from the start that it would end.

  That’s the whole point of affairs—they’re not total, forever-and-ever-type commitments.

  I’m tired and know I should be in bed, but my mind’s racing with conjecture—with pros and cons and hopes and fears.

  It’s the fears that win in the end. The biggest fear is that he won’t find me lovable. Sexy, yes, mildly amusing—his lips quirk at my jokes—a good rider, but lovable’s miles away from those things. The fear is not entirely Pete’s fault. It might just have been coincidence that we knew each other for six years before we moved in together, then it was only six weeks later that Claudia made his bells ring.

  And I can’t help thinking of my mother. Going back through the dates on the postcards Gran kept, I’ve always known she must have been at least four months pregnant when she left Argentina. Did my father not want the child? Not care about her? Or, four months into the relationship, did he find her unlovable?

  ‘I don’t want to shift in with you,’ I tell GR, climbing into the car beside him the next morning.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he says, so easily I have to wonder if he isn’t relieved.

  By the time we’re pulling up at the roadhouse I’ve stewed over it for so long I have to ask.

  ‘Did you think about it and decide it wasn’t a good idea? Is that why you’re not arguing?’

  He turns towards me. I’m sure it must be the glasses that make him do surprised so well.

  ‘Why should I argue? It’s your decision and I respect that.’

  ‘So we can keep seeing each other?’

  Little smile!

  ‘We can hardly help it, can we? We work together.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT’S TUESDAY, so we’re back in Amberton to see Mel. This time a tall, blond man is with her, introduced as Angus, still in shock at the thought he’s going to become a father of four.