by Lilian Darcy
Perhaps if Marsh left Sydney, as he’d suggested he might, scaled down his life a little, but that possibility was too vague. There was nothing she could promise him.
‘Yes, I do know,’ she told him bluntly, contradicting her last uncertain words. ‘It’s not possible, Marshall. I won’t deny the attraction between us…Well, it would be pointless, wouldn’t it?’ She laughed jerkily. Forgive me, Alan, I’m ignoring all the good years you gave me, taking advantage of your faults when I say this. ‘But I didn’t very much enjoy being married the first time, and I’m very much enjoying my independence now. I have no desire to relinquish that in exchange for the dubious advantages of being your wife—’
‘I hadn’t realised you were so militant in your feminism.’
She ignored him. ‘And I imagine Rebecca, for one, would be very relieved to hear me say so.’
She closed her eyes and cursed the way her tongue had run ahead of her good sense. She hadn’t meant to mention Rebecca and, of course, he didn’t let it pass.
‘Damn, is this about Rebecca? I know she’s been—’
‘It’s not. It’s not. She and I simply share our scepticism about this, that’s all.’
He studied her, his eyes glittering and his hair standing wildly on end where he’d rubbed it with an agitated hand. ‘This is a side of you I haven’t seen, Aimee.’
‘No?’ She hugged her arms across her body. ‘Are you surprised at it? You must have realised I didn’t end what we had lightly, or without thought. We’re not in our twenties, Marshall. That fact is so important! We’re much wiser, thirty years on, and we’re far more laden with baggage, all the baggage of two complicated lives. I don’t believe, any more, that love conquers all, and I haven’t got the energy at this point—’ to her horror, she felt tears coming, beyond her control ‘—to keep arguing about it with you! I want to get to the hospital to see my daughter and her baby, Marsh. Please, accept that that’s my priority.’
He nodded, and the fight went out of him, to be replaced by his usual concern. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. This evening was supposed to help, wasn’t it? But it hasn’t, in the end.’
He sounded so bleak that she couldn’t let it go by, and told him warmly, ‘Oh, but it has helped! It did, until just now, enormously. I was too harsh.’
‘And I was cruel.’
‘Yes, you were.’
‘I’m sorry. And now we’ve both apologised, I suppose that’s all there is to say.’
‘I think so.’
‘Are you all right to drive?’
She had a tissue in her hand and was wiping her eyes. She had to be all right to drive, because she wasn’t waiting there for a taxi! ‘I’m fine.’
‘Let Bev know if you can’t come in tomorrow, and she’ll arrange for an agency nurse.’
Aimee nodded and let him open the front door for her.
‘Goodnight, Aimee.’
‘Goodnight.’
By focusing intently on the roadway, Aimee reached the hospital with the knowledge that she’d driven safely. Then, in the main foyer, she ground to a sudden halt, not knowing where to go. Sarah’s room? The recovery ward? The paediatric intensive care unit?
She asked a couple of helpless, incoherent questions at the desk, then waited for the woman on duty to phone through to the paediatric ward, feeling alone and drained and afraid that she would somehow let Sarah and Jason down tonight by not being half as strong as she wanted to be for them.
That scene with Marshall in his front hallway had drained her completely. She was devastated at the way he’d fought her, battling for his own vision of what they could have together. If he only knew how close he’d come to convincing her! The trouble was, her imagination was just as vivid as his, and it conjured up some very different scenes.
How would he handle a permanent breaking down of the closeness he had with his daughter, for example? Aimee knew how vital they’d been to each other thirteen years ago when Joy Irwin had been dying. She hated the thought of coming between them, especially when Rebecca was soon to give Marshall his first grandchild.
And how long would it take before her financial dependency on him turned into an emotional and practical dependency as well, in every aspect of their lives? The possibility was vivid and real, and she shuddered at the thought of repeating the pattern she’d had with Alan.
From the day of their marriage until just weeks before his death their bank accounts had been in his name only, and she’d never been able to spend a dollar without his approval. He’d given her a set amount for housekeeping each week, precisely calculated and precisely increased on occasion to keep pace with inflation, so that she was never left short but never had money left over to spend freely either.
He’d bought her clothing as gifts, or in the form of some cash pressed into her hand without warning and a decree, ‘Buy yourself a dress.’
Twice she’d made the mistake of coming home with something different—a woollen sweater once and the second time a pair of smart Italian leather shoes, which she’d wanted more than a dress, and he’d frowned. ‘You shouldn’t need shoes again this soon, should you? Navy? Did you really need navy shoes?’
‘Would you like me to try and return—?’
‘No, no, never mind.’ He’d waved the offer aside with the sort of irritable indulgence he’d showed to the children when they’d squandered their small amount of pocket money unwisely.
It might have been easier now, perhaps, if Alan had been more deliberately cruel and autocratic about it, but he hadn’t been. He had been, at heart, a kind man. He’d sincerely believed that a woman wanted to be treated that way, and he’d told her more than once, ‘It makes me happy to be able to spoil you.’
He hadn’t understood, and she’d never been able to get him to see, that he could have spoiled her occasionally without treating her on a day-to-day basis like a dependent child.
‘We’ll go to Surfer’s Paradise for our holiday this year…I’m going to buy a new car…The children should get bikes for Christmas…’ She’d never really been consulted, and the ‘don’t you think?’ or ‘if you agree’ at the end of each announcement had been a mere formality. She hadn’t known until after Alan’s death quite how much she’d felt imprisoned by all that.
‘I’ve rung P.I.C.U.,’ said the woman at the desk, drawing Aimee’s attention back to the present. ‘Your granddaughter is there with her parents, and you can go up, but only for a short while.’
‘Which—?’
‘The fourth.’ The older woman anticipated her question and gave her a sympathetic smile.
I must look as bad as I feel!
She took the lift, soothed just a little by the peaceful atmosphere of the hospital this late at night. There were few visitors about, and even fewer doctors. Most of the patients would be asleep, and all the non-urgent activities such as cleaning or physiotherapy wouldn’t resume until normal working hours.
The double doors leading to the paediatric intensive care unit were closed, and Aimee had to press a buzzer to gain admittance. The unit consisted of eight beds, each in its own separate and generous-sized cubicle, with a central nursing station where every one of the unit’s many monitors showed its reading in a single display.
Aimee saw Sarah first. She was dressed in one of her maternity outfits, a matched set of navy blue stretch leggings and a long A-line top, short-sleeved with a scooped curve of a neckline. Her dark blond hair was scraped back into the teeth of a big tortoiseshell clip, and her face looked clean and shiny and tired.
Jason stood beside her, and they were both helplessly rooted to the floor next to the baby’s warming unit. A nurse was there, too, in the middle of answering what must have been a question from Sarah.
‘From the tape they used on her skin in Theatre,’ she said, only the words came out as ‘teep’ and ‘skun’ and ‘therta’, because she was a New Zealander with a strong accent which was soothing and pleasant.
‘Hello, everyone!’ Aimee said s
oftly as she approached the group.
‘Mum…’ Sarah reached out her arms and laid her head on Aimee’s shoulder.
‘She’s back.’ No one minded that Aimee had stated the obvious.
‘Only just,’ Jason said. ‘There was some delay before they could start. I don’t know why.’
‘A more urgent operation,’ the New Zealand nurse, Sylvia, said.
‘More urgent. Can’t even imagine!’ Jason commented weakly.
‘How is she?’ Covered in iodine stains and tubes and wires and dressings, still not fully emerged from the anaesthesia, but that wasn’t what Aimee meant.
‘We got a good report,’ Jason said with an effort. ‘The fistula has been closed. And the gap between the two pouches of the oesophagus wasn’t too bad. Only a centimetre and a half. That’s good, they reckon. The smaller, the better. Less chance of the join springing a leak, and of her needing further surgery for constriction of oesophagus later on.’
‘What about the blockage in the duodenum?’
‘They’re going to wait on that. They’ll be feeding her through an IV for a few days, then they’ll do a test.’
‘With dye?’
‘That’s right. It’ll show up on a screen, and they’ll be able to see if it keeps on going out of the stomach and into the intestines, or if it stops.’
‘Mum,’ Sarah said, ‘I have to learn to express my milk.’
‘I can try to help, if you need me.’ Aimee had had some training in this area.
‘They have a lactation nurse here. But once I’m discharged…We don’t have any of the stuff. The pump and the bottles.’
‘We’ll work it all out,’ Aimee soothed. ‘I can phone around, go and buy things.’
They all stood there for some minutes more, just watching the baby, and Aimee heard Sarah murmur in a foggy voice, ‘She’s beautiful.’
She was too. Bonnie’s fighting spirit, and her future promise most of all, but her little head, as well with its downy little cap of black hair, its tiny chin and nose, its high, square forehead and skin that was going to be creamy and fine-pored and fabulous when it wasn’t rashy and red from the tape and yellow-stained from the iodine.
The scars on her chest, though they must be huge and raw at this stage, beneath the dressings that covered them, would eventually stretch and fade as Bonnie grew.
Aimee ached to touch her. She ached even more for Sarah and Jason, who were permitted the contact of a single hand but not yet the full joy of being able to cuddle her in their arms. How long would it be?
‘What happens next?’ Jason was asking the nurse, the helplessness in his voice an aching contrast to his manly build and his patent intelligence.
‘Try and get some sleep, all of you,’ Sylvia answered. ‘That’s what we want this little princess to do. She’s had a big first day, and sleep is the best healer.’
They stayed a little longer, watching Bonnie begin to stir and grimace and startle, then Jason and Aimee accompanied Sarah back to her room.
‘Want us to go or stay?’ Jason asked his wife tenderly, kissing her forehead.
Lovely man!
Aimee felt another surge of emotion. Thank goodness my daughter is married to the right man!
‘Go, I think,’ Sarah answered him. ‘I need to sleep. The nurse said it’ll be hard to express milk if I’m stressed or fatigued or distracted.’
She gave a dry laugh, and neither Jason nor Aimee needed her to explain the reason for it. Just how on earth was she supposed to be unstressed and undistracted?
‘Will we see you tomorrow, Mum?’ she wanted to know.
‘Of course. Not sure when, but as much as I can. Night-night, love.’
Aimee kissed Sarah and hugged Jason, then left him to say his own private goodnight, but he caught up to her at the lift and they walked to the car park together in silence, before parroting some more repetitive phrases to each other that couldn’t begin to express the depth of what they felt.
Reaching home half an hour later, Aimee entered her new flat without even noticing its bland and slightly shabby paintwork, its ugly light fittings and the irritating hum of the fridge in the cramped kitchen. Did any of that really matter?
No! No! It was the people in her life who mattered. Sarah and Jason and the boys. Her parents in Queensland, whom she must phone first thing tomorrow with a full report on the day’s events. Most of all, at the moment, the new being who had entered the world just today.
Would there ever be a safe place for Marshall in her heart as well? At the moment, she couldn’t see it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘SO OF course I just kicked myself for the rest of the day for changing my mind at the last minute. If I’d backed Sunset Raider instead of Galway Bound, I would have won over $1200 on the trifecta, though, of course, I did do quite well on Race Three with the quinella. Grape Juice and Falsetto, but they were the favourites so they didn’t pay all that much. And the only thing that really cheered me up was the rugby. Are you a fan?’
‘Of course,’ Marshall answered gallantly, though he didn’t live or die by sports results of any kind.
He was doing his best to find this new acquaintance fascinating and attractive, since he knew he was supposed to, but it was hard work. People shouldn’t matchmake unless specifically asked to do so, he concluded. He liked his son-in-law Harry’s parents, but would have enjoyed this Sunday barbecue at Rebecca’s more if they hadn’t brought divorced Diana Wetherill and introduced her in such a suspiciously casual way.
She was a perfectly pleasant person, in her early fifties with auburn hair and some comfortable but not overabundant poundage settled on her hips, and there were many men who would have been delighted to find a woman so devoted to rugby and cricket and radio racing broadcasts, as well as regular flutters at the local betting agency. Unfortunately, he wasn’t one of them.
‘Another satay stick, Dad? Diana?’ Rebecca asked.
‘No, thanks, gypsy. I should be heading home soon, I expect. On call. You know how it is,’ he said in an aside to Diana. She nodded and smiled sympathetically.
Rebecca knew him too well to argue the point. She also knew perfectly well that he was simply making an excuse. His on-call at the practice could be covered just as well from Harry’s and Rebecca’s house in Surry Hills as it could from his own place just a few kilometres away.
In a city practice like this, most people went to the accident and emergency department at the hospital if they needed to be seen urgently. The two nursing homes covered by himself and his partners were the most likely sources of a call-out, as the elderly residents were frail, confused or infirm and didn’t find it easy to travel.
‘If you need to, Dad,’ Rebecca told him lightly, then busied herself with offering barbecued satay sticks to the rest of her guests—Harry’s parents, the young couple from the house next door and Harry’s sister and her husband and two daughters.
Under cover of all the action, Marshall quietly left. He tipped a wink and a quick word of thanks to his son-in-law, then went through the house and out the front door.
His car was parked a little farther along the street, squeezed into a space that would take some manoeuvring to get out of. As he reached it he saw that the problem was even worse than he’d thought. A smaller car had left since he’d taken the space in front of it, and a larger car had squeezed in behind him instead, just fitting between his rear bumper and a driveway.
He sighed. It was hot in the street in the early afternoon sun, and he’d need help if he was going to get out without scraping one of the cars that had him so nicely sandwiched.
‘Boxed in?’ It was Rebecca, who must have followed him out of the house.
‘Yes, did you already know?’
‘No, that wasn’t why I came out.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Just checking that you were all right. Was Diana getting on your nerves?’
‘No, she was fine. Would have been,’ he amended more honestly
, ‘if I hadn’t known I was expected to…to…You know.’
‘Sorry. Rhonda’s idea, not mine. I told her that—’ She stopped, and began again. ‘Well, I told her you weren’t interested in any sort of—’ Again she broke off, then accused heatedly, ‘But Aimee’s leaned on you a lot over the past couple of weeks since Bonnie’s birth. Is it really so hopeless? I can’t believe she’s deliberately taking advantage of—’
‘I don’t know what she’s doing,’ Marshall heard himself admit. ‘I wouldn’t say she was leaning on me. She and her family have been through a huge ordeal with Bonnie. First there was the discovery that Bonnie did have the second blockage in her duodenum and needed surgery to correct that. Then the setback when she got an infection. Sarah’s had a struggle to express enough milk, and then to get Bonnie to keep it down.’
‘She has reflux because of a weak valve, I suppose.’
‘Exactly. They’re hoping now that she’ll be discharged next week, but they’re still not sure. Aimee’s talked to me a lot about it. We’ve given her time off. But it’s nothing special, Rebecca. I’m happy that she looks on me as a friend she can turn to, that’s all.’
‘Garbage, Dad,’ Rebecca accused impatiently. ‘That is not “all”! You want a hell of a lot more than that from her, and she’s hurting you, and I can’t stand to see it. It makes me so angry!’
She reached up to pat his shoulder, and the growing bump of her pregnancy nudged his lower stomach. She had passed the halfway point now, but hadn’t yet reached the critical weeks when the baby would be just viable if born. Aware of the long-term health risks for very premature babies, as all doctors were, Rebecca was counting the days with extra tension until she reached the safer milestone of the third trimester.
‘That isn’t fair, Rebecca,’ Marshall soothed her. ‘Please, don’t blame this on Aimee.’
‘Oh, so who do you suggest I do blame it on?’ Her frown was black, her colour high, and she was clearly spoiling for a battle.
