In Dr. Darling’s Care

by Marion Lennox

She should stop this conversation. She should stop it right now. But Lillian’s food was going down-the plate was well over half-demolished now. To haul her away from gossip would be criminal.

  ‘Besides…’

  Besides nothing, she told herself. She was doing this as a doctor reacting to medical need. Nothing more.

  ‘Besides what?’

  ‘Well, suicide would be silly,’ Lillian said. ‘This town needs him. Everyone says so. If he suicided then Birrini wouldn’t have a doctor.’

  ‘I guess not.’ There wasn’t an answer to that. Next time she was feeling like reaching for the pills she hoped that there was someone around to remind her that she was irreplaceable. Even if it was just as a family doctor…

  But maybe there was a real risk of suicide. ‘Mum says Emily and her mother have talked nothing but bridesmaids’ dresses for a year,’ Lillian told her. ‘She was having six bridesmaids and two flower girls. It was gonna be amazing.’

  ‘I guess it still will be amazing.’

  ‘If he goes through with it.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he go through with it?’

  ‘Because he’s living with you.’

  ‘Hey!’

  Enough. Lillian had eaten enough, and this conversation was getting entirely out of hand. She rose and rang the bell and managed an uncertain smile down at Lillian. Moving right on…

  ‘That was great, Lillian. You’ve eaten about half of what I intend to eat tonight. It was a really good dinner.’

  ‘Don’t ring the bell,’ Lillian told her. ‘I’ll be fine by myself. I won’t make myself sick.’

  She would. Of course she would. Lizzie had succeeded in distracting her enough to make her eat, but that was the easy part. The hard bit was keeping it down.

  ‘Sorry, Lillian, but you know the deal.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘No.’

  Lillian gave her a reluctant smile. ‘Oh, well…’ She shrugged. ‘If you’re going to be picky.’

  ‘I’m going to be picky.’ She touched Lillian lightly on the cheek. ‘I can almost see dimples, my girl. We’re succeeding. So you’re going to keep right on eating-and holding it down-until you have boobs almost as cuddly as mine.’

  Lillian sighed. ‘You can’t stay, can you?’ she asked wistfully. ‘I hate Mrs Pround.’

  Mrs Pround was the ward assistant. She wasn’t an ideal companion for a fifteen-year-old, but she had the huge advantage of having eyes like a gimlet. Lillian would never get her fingers down her throat to make herself sick while Mrs Pround was in a half-mile radius. She wouldn’t dare.

  But Lizzie was already backing out the door. ‘I’m sorry, Lillian, but I have a ward round to do before I find my own dinner,’ she told her. ‘I need to go.’

  ‘Will I do instead?’

  The door swung wide and Harry McKay and his wheelchair rolled smoothly to the bedside.

  ‘Um…how long have you been outside the room?’

  As a greeting it was a dead give-away, but it was all Lizzie could think of.

  ‘And why aren’t you on your crutches?’ she demanded, and he gave her a crooked grin.

  ‘The wheelchair is quieter. I can get places without being noticed.’

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘But…I said that about your fiancée.’ Lillian had clearly replayed their conversation really fast and the teenager was already feeling mortified. She was looking at Harry and her fragile self-confidence was crumbling while they watched. ‘I said… Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Hey, I heard you two discussing what a hunk I was,’ Harry told her, and puffed out his chest. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘But we-’

  ‘And I also heard you discuss boob enlargement. Even nicer.’

  ‘Will you cut it out?’ Lizzie was laughing. She picked up a magazine from the tray top and swiped him over the ear. ‘Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.’

  ‘I’m not an eavesdropper,’ he said, wounded. ‘I just had to lean against the door to rest.’

  ‘Right. You sat in your wheelchair and leaned.’

  ‘My right shoulder still carries the dent. Want to see?’

  ‘I’d probably see the shape of the doorknob indented in your right ear,’ she retorted.

  ‘We said-’ Lillian whispered, but Lizzie was having none of it.

  ‘We were discussing how old he was,’ she said. ‘So old he’s practically incapable of getting himself married. Which is why he bumped into my car. His sight must be fading, poor dear.’

  ‘Say it louder, girlie,’ Harry flashed. ‘My ear trumpet seems to have been mislaid. And I’ve mislaid my leg. I’ll lose my nose any minute. Come to think of it…’ He squinted. ‘Where is my nose?’

  ‘Sticking into places it has no right to be,’ Lizzie told him, trying not to laugh. She glared and fixed him with a look that said she knew very well he’d heard everything and he’d better watch himself. ‘Are you intending to stay with Lillian?’

  ‘I brought the Monopoly board.’

  ‘What do you reckon, Lillian? Can you face playing Monopoly with a man in his dotage?’

  And thankfully-blessedly-Lillian was chuckling.

  ‘Well, there you go, then.’ Lizzie left them to it, but as she made her way down the corridor to the patients who were waiting for her, she was aware of a sharp stab of regret.

  Monopoly. It was a game she’d never enjoyed.

  But tonight she really felt like playing.

  There were three casseroles and an enormous trout on the kitchen table when Lizzie walked through to the doctor’s residence two hours later. Phoebe was right underneath, gazing upward with hope.

  Harry was balancing on crutches. He was wearing a pink frilly apron and he was wielding a filleting knife.

  She stopped dead.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said faintly. ‘Don’t do it.’

  He looked up from his trout, bemused. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re not fit for surgery. The fish can keep his appendix. Put down the knife, Dr McKay, and move back from the table slowly.’

  He grinned. ‘Are you implying I’m a lunatic?’

  ‘Implying? No. Saying you are? Definitely.’

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of filleting a fish.’

  ‘Right. Like you’re perfectly capable of standing upright. All you need to do is overbalance and Phoebe gets it.’

  ‘So it’s concern for your basset.’

  ‘Of course.’ She walked forward and lifted the knife from his fingers before he could protest. She moved out of range, holding the knife behind her back.

  ‘Give me back my knife,’ he told her, glowering. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re wearing a pink apron.’

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m deranged.’

  ‘You’re a sick man, Dr McKay.’

  He glared at her, baulked, and she laughed.

  Where had this laughter come from? she thought. It had sprung up, unbidden, a constant in their relationship that refused to go away.

  ‘I’m warning you…’

  ‘Or what?’ Her eyes danced. From under the table Phoebe gazed from one to the other with an expression that said she was really confused. But hopeful.

  So what was new? Phoebe was permanently confused-and hopeful. Where food was concerned. She barked and emerged from under the table, trying her best to jump up on Harry’s combination of legs and crutches. It didn’t work. Jumping up for Phoebe meant getting her front legs three inches above the ground.

  ‘You traitor,’ Lizzie told her. ‘Leave him alone. The man is a knife-wielder, Phoebe. Come to Mummy.’

  ‘The man doesn’t have a knife. Mummy has the knife.’

  ‘So she does.’

  ‘Give it back.’

  ‘Don’t be a dodo.’

  ‘Is that your very best crisis counselling skill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’ll lead to a confrontation.’ With laug
hter deepening around his eyes, he leaned over and lifted the trout. ‘OK, Dr Darling, you asked for it.’ The trout was raised right over Phoebe’s head. ‘Give me my filleting knife or the puppy gets it.’

  She choked on laughter at that-and at the expression of pure hope in Phoebe’s mournful basset eyes. ‘The puppy would love it.’

  ‘What, a whole trout?’

  ‘And the rest. Honestly, Harry, you’re not stable and you know it. You can’t fillet. You shouldn’t even be standing up. Let’s eat one of these casseroles.’

  ‘When we can eat trout? No way.’

  ‘Then teach me to fillet,’ she told him.

  He looked at her, considering. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. If I can wear the pink pinny.’

  ‘I’ve got two. You’re on.’

  The time spent cleaning and stuffing the fish was probably one of the silliest half-hours she’d ever spent in her life. Dressed in his frilly apron, Harry turned into ‘Professor of Anatomy-Fish’ and proceeded to guide her though the incredibly delicate operation of preparing one trout for consumption.

  ‘I’m sure fishermen don’t go to this trouble,’ she protested, but he shook his head.

  ‘No. Of course not, but we’re not fishermen, Dr Darling. We’re surgeons.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘Well, I’m a surgeon,’ he told her. ‘You will be as soon as you conquer gills.’

  ‘You’re a surgeon?’

  ‘Mmm.’ He seemed almost embarrassed.

  ‘A qualified surgeon?’

  ‘Yes. There’s some scales-’

  But she was distracted. ‘What’s a surgeon doing here? In Birrini.’

  ‘Practising medicine. Watch your scales, Dr Darling.’

  ‘But you don’t have an anaesthetist.’

  ‘Good noticing.’

  ‘So you practise your surgery on awake patients?’

  ‘I don’t practise surgery at all.’ All of a sudden the laughter left his eyes and she looked up at him in concern.

  ‘Then why are you here? In Birrini?’

  ‘I want to be here,’ he told her, his voice clipped and strained. ‘Now…back to the fish.’

  She could take a hint. He wanted the subject changed. Don’t probe, his voice had said, and she was a champion at not probing. Though there were some questions that had to be asked.

  ‘Tell me where you got these aprons,’ she begged, and the laughter flashed back again. It was the way he liked it, she thought. Light and shallow. Frilly apron shallow.

  ‘Emily was given six aprons at her hens’ night. Six different colours. All with frills. No one gave me anything as cool as that at my bachelor do. I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘She gave them to you?’

  ‘I pinched some,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t see why such fine couturier fashions should be the domain of women only.’

  ‘Emily knows you’re wearing them?’

  ‘Emily doesn’t know the half of it,’ he told her, and then under his breath he added a rider. ‘Thank God.’

  The trout was delicious. So was the vegetable casserole they had with it and the rhubarb pie that appeared just as they were clearing the dishes. The elderly man who arrived on the back porch bearing the pie beamed at the pair of them as they opened the screen door to greet him.

  ‘Mabel said you’d maybe appreciate this seeing the doctor’s off his leg.’ He produced a ham bone as well. ‘And this is for the pooch. Goodnight to the pair of you.’ And he disappeared as swiftly as he’d come. Birrini hospitality. Amazing!

  Even Phoebe was impressed. Lizzie’s dog was practically beaming with contentment. She lay on the porch and slobbered over her bone and Harry ate his pie and looked out at her with wonder.

  ‘Phoebe was your grandma’s dog?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘She’s not exactly a suitable dog for an old lady.’

  ‘My grandma wasn’t exactly a suitable old lady,’ Lizzie told him, smiling at the memory of the old lady she’d loved. ‘Grandma was a palaeontologist. World renowned.’

  ‘A…a what?’

  ‘A palaeontologist. She studied dinosaurs. Grandma spent her time travelling the world, collecting bones. It was only the last few years of her life that she was stuck in Australia. So Phoebe became the love of her declining years.’

  ‘Which explains Phoebe’s love of bones.’ Harry grinned at Phoebe who was attacking the ham bone like all her Christmases had come at once.

  Lizzie smiled, but she was still thinking about Grandma. The old lady’s death was still raw in her heart, and it was good to talk about her. ‘Grandma’s bones were generally a whole lot older than this one,’ she told him. ‘I spent my childhood dusting and sorting and figuring out which bone went where. Maybe that’s why I became a doctor.’

  He was watching her across the table, his face curious. ‘You lived with your grandma?’

  ‘I went to boarding school while she travelled. But, yes, I lived with her.’

  ‘Where were your parents?’

  ‘They were killed in a light plane crash when I was seven. I can barely remember them, but what I can…they were great. I loved them very much. That’s why I can’t change my name.’

  ‘You’d change it if you could?’

  ‘It’s a bit hard,’ she admitted, ‘to go through your life being a Darling.’

  ‘I guess it must be.’

  ‘And you?’ she asked, and Harry looked a question. ‘Tell me about you. Where are your parents?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘They weren’t here for the wedding,’ she said. ‘At least, they weren’t here when you were injured. You mostly seemed to be surrounded by Emily’s family.’

  ‘I don’t have a family.’

  ‘They’re dead?’

  ‘I just don’t have a family.’

  That was all he was telling her. They finished eating and then she shooed him outside to sit on the porch while she did the dishes. He protested, but she was adamant. As she cleaned up the kitchen she was aware of him-watching her.

  What was it with him? When she’d first met him she’d thought of him as a carefree young family doctor about to be married. Now…there were depths, she thought. Shadows.

  She shouldn’t probe. She should let him be. As soon as Phoebe had her pups she’d be out of here, and this man and the little community he cared for would mean nothing to her any longer.

  Don’t get involved. That’s what her heart was screaming, but she wasn’t listening. She finished cleaning and then walked outside to join him.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ The night was clear and crisp. From the back porch you could see right across the little township down to the sea beyond. The sea was almost half a mile from here, but the moon was full and a ghostly sheen was washing over the waves.

  Beautiful.

  ‘I’m not thinking of cold,’ Harry told her. ‘I’m thinking I’m really pleased to be back home.’

  ‘It’s not much fun being in hospital.’

  ‘It’s not much fun being in the city.’

  She looked at him curiously but he was a million miles away. He’d propped his crutches by the rail and had sunk down onto an ancient cane settee. He didn’t look the successful young doctor now, she thought. He’d discarded the apron-thankfully. He was in his shorts and battered sweatshirt and his leg with the brace on was resting on a stool in front of him. But it was more than his clothes and his injured leg, she thought. He was gazing out at the sea and his whole demeanour… The way his eyes creased as they gazed out into the distance. The lines at the corners of his eyes. The way his hair was tousled and casual and…

  ‘You look more like a farmer than a doctor,’ she told him, and he looked up at her, startled.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re just…at home, I suppose.’

  ‘I am,’ he said softly. He gazed out at the bushland and the lights of the tiny town between here and the sea. ‘I tried the c
ity once but it’s a dog’s life.’ Then, as Phoebe stirred and wuffled at his feet, he smiled and put a hand down to stroke her floppy ears. ‘OK, Phoebe. I wouldn’t condemn a basset to it either.’

  ‘Hey, the city’s not so bad.’

  ‘You’ve always lived there?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You should try this.’

  ‘I thought that’s just what I was doing,’ she said cautiously, sitting herself down beside him and staring seaward as well.

  ‘But you’ll leave.’

  ‘Of course I’ll leave. When have you rescheduled the wedding?’

  ‘We haven’t yet.’

  Lizzie thought about that. ‘I’d imagine Emily would be anxious.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She frowned. ‘You are still getting married?’

  He stared out to sea. ‘Yeah. Yeah, of course we are.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Um…is there anything you’re not telling me?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I think I have the right to know,’ she said. ‘I was employed as a locum while you were on your honeymoon. Do you still want me to stay?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it. I can’t stay here indefinitely.’

  ‘Yes, there is. When are Phoebe’s puppies due?’

  ‘In two or three weeks.’

  ‘You can’t leave before they’re born.’

  ‘No, but-’

  ‘And you can’t leave while you have newborns. I’m sure your obstetrician would advise against it. That’s two weeks before birth and six or eight weeks with puppies. It should give me time to get back on my feet.’

  ‘And have a honeymoon?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She thought about it. It was the strangest night. She was sitting on the back porch with a man she hardly knew, yet the setting was so intimate that she felt like she’d known him all her life.

  She certainly hadn’t!

  She slid off the settee onto the floorboards. Phoebe slithered forward over her knees and pushed her big head up under Lizzie’s hands, searching for a scratch. Out in the bush a mopoke was calling, slow and mournful.

  She didn’t feel mournful, she thought. She felt at peace.

  ‘I didn’t mean to slam into your car,’ Harry said softly, and she turned to stare up at him.