Читать книгу The Doctor's Mistress - Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy - Страница 8

‘MUMMY’S on roster today,’ Max told his preschool teacher, Karen, on a Wednesday morning in late March. ‘That means she’s staying all morning.’

‘I know. It’ll be fun having Mummy, won’t it?’ Karen agreed, smiling across the top of the little boy’s mid-brown head at Hayley.

‘What do you need me to do, Karen?’ Hayley asked. She hadn’t been the parent on roster at preschool before, although she’d done it several times the previous year when Max had attended a junior play school for two short mornings each week.

But before the teacher could answer, they were both distracted by the sight of Byron Black stepping up to the veranda, with his little girl’s hand in his. He was so tall that he almost had to duck to clear the low veranda ceiling, and there was something about him that had already drawn more than one pair of eyes.

‘Excuse me, Hayley,’ Karen said. ‘This is little Tori Black, and it’s her first day. She’s... uh...had a rather difficult time.’

‘That’s fine. I know Tori. And her dad,’ Hayley said.

She couldn’t help watching the pair as they came through the door. In the bright morning light, Byron looked anxious at first, as if wondering whether Tori was ready for this yet. His reaction made sense. It was six weeks since the little girl’s accident, and her burns didn’t show, but beneath her pretty purple sundress there would still be significant scarring, as well as areas of reddened skin like latticework where she’d recently had her grafts.

Karen went forward to greet them, while Hayley dropped to the carpet to help Max with his jigsaw puzzle of a cat. She was well aware that her thoughts were focused on Byron and Tori more than on the wooden pieces scattered over the carpet in front of her.

‘I did this one every day last week,’ Max said. ‘I know it off by heart.’ Which explained why he didn’t actually need her help at all. ‘Ear. Tail. Other ear. Head. Paws,’ he said, his fingers snapping each piece unerringly into place.

Being superfluous to Max’s puzzle-doing, Hayley felt less guilty about her continued awareness of Byron and his daughter. She had gone to the hospital to visit Tori and Mrs Black one more time, two days after the accident, and had given Tori a three-dimensional puzzle set, but Byron hadn’t been there at the time. The handovers she’d made in the A and E department since then had been made to other members of staff.

She’d heard some news of him, though, via another ambulance officer who had also known him during their high school years.

‘He’s started going out with Wendy Piper, who’s my wife’s GP,’ Paul Cotter had said. ‘Good luck to them, and I hope he likes horses!’

‘Dr Piper’s my GP too,’ Hayley had replied cautiously. In Arden’s compact health-care system, this meant that Dr Piper also worked at the hospital in certain capacities, including regular rosters in the A and E department. ‘But I hadn’t heard about her and Dr Black.’

‘Oh, she and my wife are friends as well. Rhonda’s agisting a horse for Wendy at the moment, too, so they meet up in a muddy paddock sometimes. Have a good gossip, I expect.’

Karen showed Tori where to hang her small pink backpack, where to put her piece of fruit and where the toilets were. Byron hovered just behind them, alert for any potential problem. Leading the little girl over to the puzzle shelf, the preschool teacher then said encouragingly, ‘Why don’t you choose one and your dad can help you with it?’

‘I’m good at puzzles. I love puzzles. I don’t need help, but he can join in,’ Tori corrected firmly.

‘Would you like to join in, Dad?’ Karen said, with a smile in her voice.

‘Love to!’

There! He’d also smiled now at last and it was amazing how much it changed his face. The warmth was something you could have heated your hands by. There was a generosity in it, too. Share my pleasure, it seemed to say. Love and loss weren’t the only emotions that touched this man through and through. Hayley found that she was smiling as well, although he hadn’t even looked at her yet.

Byron managed to find a space on the carpet that was big enough to accommodate his long legs and sat down, while Tori chose a puzzle. He caught sight of Hayley and they both said hello. Max noticed, and informed Byron, ‘Mummy’s on roster.’

‘Will she need some help?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you staying?’ Hayley guessed.

He shifted a little closer, and spoke quietly. ‘Yes, it’s probably not necessary, but her graft sites are still tender, and—Well, I just wanted to stay for her first day, that’s all.’

‘You can cut up the children’s fruit,’ Hayley suggested, ‘and then it won’t feel as if you’re just hovering.’

‘That’s a good idea.’ He looked relieved. ‘It’ll be good to be involved, at least this once. Mostly she’s going to be brought here and picked up by her home day-care mother.’

‘Is that working out well?’

‘Wonderfully well. She’s been going to Robyn’s for two weeks, and I’ve heard only glowing reports from both of them. I even,’ he confessed, ‘dropped in unannounced last week. You know, you hear stories about bad childcare...’

‘I know.’ Hayley nodded.

‘But Robyn had Tori and the other two she looks after, plus her own little boy, out in the sandpit, making roads and gardens out of twigs. All their sunhats were on, and she was making them a healthy snack. I felt like a heel for checking up on her in such an obvious way.’

‘Hadn’t you thought of an excuse for your visit?’ she teased.

‘No.’ He grinned wryly. ‘I’d squeezed it in between working out next month’s A and E doctors’ on-call roster and following up on a problem we’ve been having with some equipment. I had to take time off work because of Tori’s burns, and things have been hectic since I started back, so I just wasn’t thinking. Kicked myself for not at least handing over a spare pair of socks or something.’

‘Since the day-carer is a parent herself, she’ll understand.’

‘She did understand! Instantly! Might have been less embarrassing if she hadn’t! Doting father, caught red-handed in an act of flagrant worrying.’

Hayley laughed. Despite that fleeting look of anxiety as he’d entered the preschool, he seemed a hundred times more relaxed than he had been six weeks ago. More confident, too—confident enough to mock his own feelings. The softer, happier expression suited his face, and the confidence suited his voice. It was lazy, deep and rich, lacking the harshness of fear and agitation she’d noticed that day in February.

‘How is your mother?’ she asked.

His face fell a little. ‘She’s still in rehab, but progressing well. Taking a few steps with a frame. Saying a few words. Feeding herself, left-handed. It’s going to be a long road, and we haven’t made any plans yet, but she’s motivated and that’s a huge plus.’

‘It is,’ Hayley agreed.

‘Your mother looks after Max, you said?’ His interest seemed genuine, and she remembered that from the past as well. He probably wouldn’t have described himself as a good listener, but he genuinely was.

‘Yes, and Dad pitches in, too,’ she explained, ‘with bedtime stories when I’m on a late shift, and trips to the playground. I couldn’t manage a paramedic’s hours without them.’

Chris’s parents lived locally, too, but unfortunately they weren’t very interested. Even during her marriage, Hayley had never been very close to them.

‘They’re in good health, obviously,’ Byron said, still talking about Hayley’s own parents.

‘Very, thank goodness,’ she answered. ‘Dad’ll be sixty next year, but you wouldn’t know it.’

‘My in-laws are like that,’ he said. ‘Monica’s coming for a visit next week. Tori can’t wait, and I’m looking forward to it, too. She’s a terrific woman.’

There wasn’t much time to talk after this. The children packed away their puzzles and had group time and news. With a preschooler’s short attention span, these things didn’t last long. Then it was time for ‘activities’—all the craft and play tasks which were so important in building a child’s fine motor skills. Karen asked Byron if he could help one child at a time on the computer as they learned to manipulate the mouse and played a shape-matching game.

Hayley was fully occupied in writing names on paintings and pegging them out to dry, as well as helping Karen and her assistant in encouraging the children’s ideas and reminding them to take turns and share. She was still aware of him in the room, however, his deeper voice a low counterpoint to the high-pitched tones of children.

More aware than she wanted to be, if she was honest. He’d already betrayed the fact that any attraction on his part was reluctant. Not wanted. With Chris still talking on the phone about ‘getting back to what we had’, Hayley didn’t—shouldn’t—want this awareness either.

Next came a session of singing and drama, and Byron asked Hayley, ‘Where’s this fruit I’m supposed to cut up?’

‘There, on the sink in a bowl. Ask Karen about how to do it, because some things get peeled and some don’t, and there are particular ways she likes it cut.’

‘Who knew fruit was this complicated?’ she heard him mutter to himself at the sink a few minutes later, as she was wiping down the craft tables. She had to smile.

Yet he didn’t look nearly as out of place as many fathers she’d seen in a setting that was mainly the province of women and young children, despite his height and imposing build.

Chris, for example, didn’t always find the right tone. He tended to use a high-pitched, overly sweet voice, and say, ‘Wow! That’s incredible!’ a lot, when he didn’t really mean it.

‘It’s just a block tower, Daddy,’ she’d heard Max say to him once. ‘I can make much better ones than that.’

‘Talk to him like a person, Chris, for heaven’s sake!’ Hayley had lashed out at him one day.

‘OK, I know. I’m not used to it, that’s the trouble. Every time I see him, he’s grown. I never said I’d be good at this, did I? You sprang it on me. That’s why the whole thing fell apart. We weren’t planning on having kids for another five years.’

‘It takes two, Chris.’

‘Are you saying you weren’t the one who got careless?’ he’d answered, his voice rising.

That’s right, she remembered now. Her criticism had led to one of their worst arguments and, though she’d fought hard for her own point of view, she had to concede he had been right about some things. Unconsciously, she had got careless, hadn’t she? She’d foolishly thought that a baby wouldn’t be a problem for them.

Complicated. Love, parenthood, divorce. All of it was complicated.

At the end of the preschool session, Hayley saw an attractively dressed woman with red-brown curls waiting outside the gate, and realised that it was Dr Piper.

‘How’s the play-dough?’ Wendy Piper said to Byron.

‘Sticky.’

‘Yuck!’ It was cheerful, but there was an edge.

Tori looked up at Dr Piper gravely, holding her father’s hand. She didn’t say hello until prompted by her father. Hayley slipped past them with Max, who said a cheerful, ‘Bye, Tori.’

‘Bye, boy!’ she answered, and added in a stage whisper to Byron, ‘I haven’t learned his name yet. I’ll learn all their names adventurely.’

Oh, ‘eventually’! In Tori’s innocently self-important tone, it had been a cute mistake.

‘I’m going to show you my horses today, Victoria,’ Dr Piper said, with bright yet distant friendliness. ‘After we’ve been to a nice seafood restaurant for lunch. Do you like prawns?’

‘No, they have feelers and eyes.’

Hayley suppressed a giggle. Perhaps she ought not to be enjoying the miscommunications between doctor and four-year-old, but she was!

‘Let’s go home, Max,’ she said, ushering him to her car and getting out her keys.

She wasn’t due at Ambulance Headquarters for her shift until just before six that night. Her service worked a standard ‘four on, four off’ roster—two day shifts, followed by two night shifts, and then four days’ break. It was workable, as a single parent, but only with her own parents’ tireless support.

‘Bye, Hayley,’ Byron called out after her, as she strapped Max into his seat belt. Dr Piper echoed his words with a brief, uncertain smile in Hayley’s direction. Possibly Dr Piper hadn’t recognised her out of context.

‘Thanks for the wisdom about the fruit,’ Byron added. ‘Apparently I still did the banana wrong, but I think Karen’s forgiven me.’

‘What was that about?’ Wendy asked him in a possessive yet lightly amused tone.

But Hayley didn’t hear his answer, because she’d closed the car door.

* * *

The strident ring of the hotline at Ambulance Headquarters broke into what had been a quiet shift. Hayley had been watching television and getting sleepy at almost eleven o’clock. She hadn’t been able to decide whether to head off to an uncertain night’s sleep in one of the stand-down rooms, or to curl up in the reclining chair where she currently sat.

The hotline suggested she wouldn’t have to make the choice.

Bruce got there first, and reported succinctly when he’d put down the phone, ‘A prang on the highway near the state border.’ Their station covered the isolated area that straddled the border between Victoria and their own state of New South Wales. ‘It sounds serious. One car, two injured.’

Hayley fought off sleep and lethargic muscles, pulled up the overalls she’d peeled down to her waist and was ready to go. Bruce took the wheel, and she was happy with that. It was an isolated, winding stretch of highway. Not an easy drive in the dark.

‘What else do we know?’ she asked as they pulled out of the driveway, sirens already whooping.

‘A passer-by phoned it in on his mobile, but he had to drive a fair way beyond the crash scene to get within signal range. He’s going back to the scene now, so he can flag us down. Says the car’s hard to spot from this direction. He didn’t actually witness the crash and isn’t sure how long ago it happened.’

‘So it might have been several minutes before he even got there.’

‘Longer, on that stretch of road, on a weeknight.’

‘Did he check them out?’

‘He has no first-aid or emergency training so he was reluctant to do anything.’

‘Which was the right thinking. How near the border?’

‘Don’t know. Dispatch didn’t have any more details. They’ve got the second crew on standby. We’ve got road rescue and police on the way, too.’

‘So it could be forty kilometres?’

‘Fifty, if ‘‘near the border’’ means on the Victorian side.’

‘I hate that stretch of highway!’

Hayley shivered. She’d driven it many times over the past couple of years, taking Max to visit his father in Melbourne.

Once out of town, on the Princes Highway, heading south, Bruce brought the car’s speed up to the edge of safety. It was a Thursday night, just over a week after Tori Black’s first day at preschool, and the road was deserted. The shadows of the eucalypts reared strangely in the powerful headlights, and the road’s many bends made it anything but a relaxing drive.