by Lilian Darcy
‘No one! There is no one at fault in this.’ Instinctively, he wanted to protect Aimee, and Rebecca read him clearly at once.
‘I can’t stand this!’ she stormed, pacing and punching at the air with her arms. ‘That you care so much about her you won’t even let me be angry with her. What is her problem that she can’t see what a precious gift you’re giving her? Why is she rejecting it? She doesn’t deserve to have you feeling like this about her!’
‘Rebecca—’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you need to hear this. I should keep my thoughts to myself on the subject, but it’s been going on for months now—’
‘I’ll handle it, all right?’ he told her, then managed a laugh. ‘It’s a little disconcerting to see my daughter attempting to mother me. Could you turn some of the maternal instinct of yours onto Harry, please, for the next four months or so?’
‘This isn’t just hormones, Dad!’ she muttered darkly.
‘Perhaps it’s the heat, then,’ Marshall suggested, determined to bring the subject to a close. ‘Help me get out of this vehicular sandwich and go back inside for a long, cool drink.’
‘Sure, if that’s what you want.’ She nodded stiffly.
And she claims it isn’t hormones! he thought, then said slowly, ‘Look, I’m—Yes, it’s not easy.’ His voice grew husky and he cleared his throat with some energy. ‘I wish things had worked out differently. It’s good to know that I have your support, but there’s nothing to be gained by talking about it, gypsy, so, if you don’t mind, we’ll close the door on the whole thing, OK?’
‘If that’s what you want,’ she repeated, but more softly this time. Then she stretched up and kissed his cheek.
His shoulders ached from wrestling with the steering-wheel by the time she’d guided him out of the tight parking space, and his shirt was stuck to his back with sweat before the car’s air-conditioning dealt with the built-up heat inside. At home, he passed a lacklustre afternoon, filling in time with a bit of gardening and almost welcoming the call-out he received at four to Hazel Cleary Lodge, where a ninety-four-year-old patient had fallen and was refusing to accept the strong possibility of a broken hip.
The agony she experienced when he tried to help her to her bed—‘If I can just lie down for a little while, I’ll be fine,’ she’d said—finally convinced her that she needed hospital treatment, and she was taken away by ambulance.
This outcome had to count as a success, although realistically her long-term outlook wasn’t brilliant, sustaining a fracture like that at her age.
‘Independent to the end,’ commented a caring member of the nursing-home staff. ‘Good luck to her! I do think the fighters like her have the right idea.’
Marshall agreed, and went home feeling that he ought to be able to apply those words to his own life, but he didn’t quite know how. Instead, he jogged. For miles.
‘You didn’t have to come in, Mrs Deutschkron. I would have been happy to come and see you at home,’ Marshall told his patient.
‘Ach!’ she answered in her usual way. ‘I wanted to get out. So sick of my walls!’
‘And you’re not feeling too good?’
‘It didn’t affect me so much the first time, but this time this—what do they call it? Cycle? It’s really bad.’
‘Yes, it can happen like that.’ Marshall nodded.
‘I am doing everything they told me at the hospital, but now there is this new thing, a feminine problem that is making me itch. I don’t know if it is connected with the chemotherapy, but it is Marianne’s and Jonathan’s wedding on Saturday, and I don’t want to be feeling this need that is not socially acceptable, all through the ceremony and the reception.’
‘Of course not!’ he said. ‘The wedding is just three days away. It’s on my calendar at home.’
Marshall had received a formal white and gold invitation for himself ‘and guest’, and had replied in the affirmative. Time passed too quickly, though. He hadn’t yet asked his ‘guest’, which was a piece of inexcusable procrastination. He understood what lay behind it. Aimee was the guest he wanted to invite, but he’d been stalling, foolishly, waiting until the time seemed right. Now the date had caught up with him, and he’d left it too late.
The problem didn’t concern Mrs Deutschkron, so he put it aside for the moment.
‘It sounds like a yeast infection,’ he told her. ‘That’s quite common in patients who are having chemotherapy. Your immune system isn’t working as well as it should because of the treatment. I’ll prescribe a cream and some pills.’
‘More pills!’
‘I know. Tedious. But it should do the trick by Saturday and save you from embarrassment and discomfort. Hopefully the plan your oncologist has you on will help with the nausea by Saturday, too.’
‘Yes, because I have foolishly chosen to wear a shade of pale green which at this point will rather too closely match the shade of my face!’
Mrs Deutschkron was looking noticeably thinner and weaker, though it was clear her spirit hadn’t deserted her. She wore a smart trouser suit, as well as some very bright chunky jewellery and a big silk scarf folded into a triangle and knotted around her shoulders.
She’d come by taxi, she said, because Marianne was too busy with wedding preparations and work pressure to bring her, and she seemed quite content to contemplate returning home by the same means.
Marshall wasn’t as enthusiastic. It was three in the afternoon, which was the shift change-over for Sydney taxi drivers, it was raining heavily and the wait even to get through on the phone to make a booking could be horrendous at such times. Also, Mrs Deutschkron needed to visit the chemist to get her two prescriptions filled.
‘Our practice nurse will take you home, via the pharmacy,’ Marshall promised Mrs Deutschkron, and the feeble brevity of her protest before she accepted the offer told him what an effort she was making to disguise how ill, weak and uncomfortable she felt.
‘Wait in the waiting room,’ he told the elderly woman. ‘She’ll be along in a minute.’
Ducking out of his office while Mrs Deutschkron gathered her bag and umbrella, he found Aimee in the treatment room, taking blood from a patient who was due for major surgery the following week.
‘Lovely veins,’ she was saying, her fingers gentle in the crook of Russell Cartwright’s arm. He was a rugby player in his mid-twenties, hairy of leg and thick of neck, and he was as scared as a kitten, Marshall noticed as he hovered in the doorway.
Aimee had noticed, too. ‘You would swear some people’s veins actually hide when they see me coming,’ she chatted on cheerfully and deliberately, and she had the needle inserted and the blood filling the syringe nicely before her patient even had time to wince and hiss. ‘There, that’s all we need,’ she finished a few minutes later.
‘You mean, that’s it?’ Russell questioned, as if he couldn’t believe he’d got off so lightly.
‘I can take some more if you think you’ve got too much of the stuff,’ she teased.
This earned a hasty, ‘No, thanks.’ Then he lumbered off as fast as decently possible.
Aimee didn’t say anything, just looked up at Marshall and waited to hear what he wanted. This was the way they most often seemed to communicate now. No words wasted. Reading each other effortlessly.
‘All right if I get you to run Mrs Deutschkron home?’
‘Of course.’
‘Could you stop off at the pharmacy, too, on the way? I’ve prescribed her a couple of things for a yeast infection.’
‘Feeling it this time?’
‘Badly, if I’m any judge. The nausea, and now this infection. And the wedding’s this Saturday.’
‘Oh, what a shame!’
‘I’ve been invited,’ he told her abruptly, ‘And guest. Meant to tell you weeks ago. Would you like to come?’
Aimee hesitated, then heard Rebecca’s voice a little farther along the corridor. ‘See you again next week, then, Mrs Colson.’
‘Yes, I w
ould,’ she answered Marshall quickly. ‘That would be lovely.’
Rebecca was following her patient towards the waiting room, and a quick acquiescence seemed like the safest way to change the subject.
But Marshall went on, ‘It’s at three. I’ll pick you up.’
Rebecca passed by at that moment. She didn’t say anything, and then Aimee and Marshall both heard the clatter and the little cry that came from his surgery.
He disappeared from the doorway, and she heard him ask, ‘Are you all right, Mrs Deutschkron?’
‘I have very stupidly dropped my umbrella.’
‘I’ll pick it up for you, Mrs Deutschkron,’ Aimee said, and she stepped into the situation, retrieved the umbrella from beneath Mrs. Deutschkron’s chair and helped the ill woman out of the surgery and along the corridor.
‘I’ll bring my car to the side entrance,’ she went on, ‘and Andrea will walk you out to meet me.’
It took half an hour to drive to the chemist’s, get the prescription filled and deliver Mrs Deutschkron home, by which time the elderly lady was almost too exhausted to stand. Aimee phoned the practice to let them know that she would be absent longer than expected, then helped Mrs Deutschkron to bed. She was due for some tablets, so Aimee helped her take those, then prepared a can of soup and a cup of tea for her.
‘I’ll be better after a sleep,’ Mrs Deutschkron insisted. ‘And Marianne said she would be here at six.’
Two hours away. ‘Is she staying the night?’
‘She will if I ask her to.’
‘Please, ask her to,’ Aimee suggested firmly, and didn’t receive a protest.
Back at the surgery, there was some good news on young Aaron Lloyd, the boy who’d received the needle-stick injury in his school playground in early August. A second blood test for HIV had shown up negative, confirming that there had been no lasting effect from his fall. Rebecca reported this outcome to Aimee, and looked as if she had something else to add, but then she apparently thought better of it.
The same thing happened several more times over the next two days, until finally Aimee could stand it no longer.
‘If there’s something you want to talk about, Rebecca,’ she told the younger woman in the practice kitchen late on Friday afternoon, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d do so, instead of keeping me in the dark like this.’
‘It’s not really my business,’ Rebecca said slowly. But it was a token protest. It was clear that she considered it very much her business and had quite a bit to say on the subject.
Is it simply a personality clash? Aimee wondered. Rebecca was fiery in spirit, all her moods fully felt and fully expressed. Aimee’s temperament was steadier, but in any other situation she could very easily have appreciated and enjoyed Marshall’s daughter’s passion enormously.
I want so much to be able to like her…Oddly, she’d sensed more than once that Rebecca felt the same.
‘Please, make it your business if it will help,’ Aimee said to Rebecca carefully now.
‘Don’t condescend—’
‘I’m not!’
‘OK, I will say it, then. I want to know why you’re going to Marianne Deutschkron’s wedding with Dad,’ Rebecca muttered forcefully, her eyes ablaze and her wild hair beginning to escape from its colourful clip. ‘Why, Aimee? Do you actually enjoy rubbing salt into his wounds? He cares about you. You must know that. What do you gain from stringing him along like this when apparently you don’t reciprocate what he feels?’
Rebecca shook her head and seemed close to tears.
‘I just don’t understand, Aimee,’ she went on. ‘And I want to ask you, if his well-being means anything to you, please, don’t go to that wedding!’
Aimee could hardly speak. She was burning all over at the intensely felt speech from Marshall’s daughter, which no one else could have heard. Rebecca had spoken throughout in a very low voice, but that didn’t take anything away from the passion in what she’d said.
‘I knew,’ Aimee managed at last, ‘but I hadn’t realised your feelings were so strong. Of course I won’t go to the wedding.’
‘It’s not just the wedding,’ Rebecca began.
‘I realise…I understand…’ Aimee cut in clumsily. ‘But that’s a start, and it’s all I can offer you at the moment.’
‘I see…’
‘No, you don’t. You couldn’t possibly. But I’m doing my best.’
Not trusting herself to say another word, Aimee fled the kitchen, convinced that the painful exchange had only made everything worse.
Nonetheless, as soon as she reached home about an hour and a half later, she picked up the phone and dialled Marshall’s number. Best get this over with. He should be home by now, she hoped, but later on he might disappear for his jog, and she had the idea that he’d been taking rather a long time over it just lately.
He answered on the fourth ring, and she realised at once that she should have prepared her excuse beforehand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she began immediately. ‘I’ve realised I won’t be able to come to the wedding with you tomorrow after all.’
There was a tiny pause, then a thoughtful, ‘Ah.’
Another pause followed, longer this time. She could picture him at the other end of the line, standing by the hall table and fingering the stretchy spiral cord of the phone as he spoke, as she’d seen him doing so often at the practice. Perhaps he was cradling the instrument against his shoulder while opening the day’s mail, as he often did at work. Or perhaps he was focused on the call more intently, as she was.
‘Everything all right, I hope?’ he asked at last.
‘It’s fine,’ she said.
‘Bonnie, too?’
I could use her as an excuse.
But it wouldn’t have been the truth, and she didn’t dare take advantage of the darling little girl’s precarious progress. Superstitious perhaps, but she’d never forgive herself if Bonnie had a setback. She’d been discharged from hospital last Saturday, and was due here at the flat in half an hour so that Sarah and Jason could paint the nursery and then go out for a meal. It would be the first real break they’d have had together since Bonnie’s birth as they’d spent so much time at the hospital and Sarah had had a lot of trouble with learning to express her milk successfully.
‘Bonnie’s doing well,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing like that, Marsh. I simply realised I shouldn’t have said yes. Not when—that is, I wish Mrs Deutschkron’s daughter and her fiancé every happiness in the world, but you and I—’
‘Does this have anything to do with Rebecca? With something she said?’
Aimee hadn’t expected the question, and was already too churned up inside to find a way of avoiding an answer. ‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘What did she say?’
‘Quite a lot, but what it amounted to was right. It’s…hard enough, seeing each other at the practice. There’s no sense in heaping on the punishment. I’ve—I really must be firm about it from now on, Marshall. Take Rebecca to the wedding instead.’
She expected him to argue, but he didn’t, and they both limped to a stilted end of the conversation.
Marshall stood in the hallway with the phone still in his hand for a good minute after the call, debating his options. He reached a decision by default. He couldn’t accept inaction, therefore he could only storm round to Rebecca’s and demand to know how and why she’d upset Aimee in the way she obviously had.
Could this be the root of the whole problem? he wondered. Was Aimee afraid of coming between him and Rebecca because of Rebecca’s unaccountable dislike of her?
It was only a short drive from his place to Surry Hills, and he found his daughter and her husband in the middle of cooking their evening meal, though he had a strong feeling that they’d already been distracted from their task even before he’d appeared on the scene.
Harry had lipstick smeared on his cheek, and Rebecca’s top was caught up at the back. On their stove a pot of water boiled merrily with the lid o
ff and nothing in it at all.
Marshall didn’t care what he was interrupting.
‘Harry, I’d like to speak to my daughter alone, if you don’t mind.’
He didn’t make the slightest effort to disguise the ominous resonance to his tone or the flash of intent in his eyes. Some weeks ago, he’d had such a very satisfying image in his mind of himself throwing Aimee across the saddle of his wild black stallion and galloping off with her into the fortress of his medieval castle.
In the absence of stallions and castles of any description, he’d now reached the point where he intended to behave just as masterfully with no appropriate props whatsoever. It might not resolve the situation to his satisfaction, but it would have to at least provide a valve from which some of the emotional steam within him could escape!
‘I’m out of here,’ Harry agreed cheerfully. He knew his volatile wife rather well, and refused to see the heated appeal in her eyes. ‘I think you’re in trouble, Rebecca,’ he told her. ‘But I’m sure you can deal with it! I’ll go for a walk.’
He disappeared through the front door less than a minute later, singing a cheerful, tuneless song under his breath. Rebecca cast one final, alarmed look at his retreating form, then gave up on his support and turned to face Marsh, evidently deciding that attack was the best form of defence.
‘I don’t appreciate being treated like this, Dad,’ she began. ‘There’s nothing we can’t talk about in front of—’
‘Rebecca!’ Marshall was in no mood to have the tables turned on him tonight. He loved his daughter with all his heart, but her pregnancy-heightened feelings weren’t on the agenda at the moment.
‘I don’t know what you said to Aimee today,’ he began, leaving her in no doubt that interruptions wouldn’t be tolerated. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been saying to her…or communicating to her through your crystal clear body language…over the past three months and more. But you’re going to start by apologising to her for questioning her acceptance of my invitation to go to Marianne Deutschkron’s wedding, and you’re going to take it from there.’