A Nurse in Crisis

by Lilian Darcy

  She repositioned it, which wasn’t quite as stressful for Bonnie as getting it down in the first place, but it came close. When Rebecca and Aimee were finally able to take Bonnie back to the car, they were both tense and drained by the whole thing.

  ‘She doesn’t seem to like the tube, does she?’ Aimee said.

  ‘Most babies don’t like tubes, especially as they start to get older and more aware,’ Rebecca answered. ‘Have Sarah and Jason been given an estimate on when it can go?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I suppose it depends on her weight gain, and how well she learns to suck.’

  ‘Those things, and how much she’s affected by the reflux,’ Rebecca agreed. ‘A big feed all at once is going to come back up more readily than the slow, continuous feeds she gets through the pump and tube.’

  Aimee felt her eyes tearing yet again. ‘It’s so hard,’ she said. ‘I never had to go through anything like this with a baby. They’re both handling it so well and, as for Bonnie, she’s already a heroine…’

  Bonnie fell asleep in the car almost at once, tired out by crying, and when they reached Summer Hill the two women each took one side of the baby capsule’s handle and carefully carried her upstairs without waking her. There was a degree of silent co-operation between the two of them that hadn’t been there before, and it was like a soothing balm to Aimee’s soul. She didn’t dare to think beyond the simple hope that it might make things easier at the practice, however.

  Once upstairs, she said quietly to Rebecca, ‘We’ll leave her in the capsule, shall we? On my bed? She looks so peaceful I don’t want to move her to the bassinet.’

  ‘I’ll help you reattach and set the pump.’

  ‘Jason wrote it all down for me. Thanks enormously for coming to the hospital.’

  ‘It was no problem, Aimee,’ Rebecca said, and again there was a sense of peace and trust and respect between them.

  It was cramped in Aimee’s bedroom as they settled Bonnie on the bed and reattached and set the pump. The milk began to snake its way through the tube. While Aimee was still watching its progress rather anxiously, she stepped to one side without looking and knocked Rebecca, who was bending a little to watch Bonnie, sharply in the cheek with her elbow.

  ‘Oh, lord, I’m so sorry!’

  Rebecca had straightened and was pressing a palm to her cheek where it obviously hurt.

  ‘No problem,’ she managed, then blurted out rather too frankly, ‘There isn’t room to swing a cat in here. Why didn’t you get a bigger place?’

  Like Rebecca, Aimee was too tired and distracted to think before she spoke. ‘Yes. Nice if I could have afforded it,’ she said bluntly.

  Before Rebecca could say anything in reply to this, the phone rang and it was Sarah, her tone high and impatient and worried.

  ‘This is the fourth time I’ve phoned, Mum, and you haven’t picked up. We’ve been frantic.’

  Aimee told the story, and had to summon a truckload of diplomacy and maternal wisdom to argue Sarah and Jason out of abandoning their plan to eat out, now that they’d finished painting Bonnie’s bedroom walls, and coming straight over to take their baby home.

  Sarah finally conceded. ‘She’s been looking like she might do it at any time, the way she flaps her arms and grips anything that gets into her little fists. I know it’s not your fault, Mum, but I feel terrible for her that I wasn’t there when it happened. Oh, hell, I’m going all shaky.’

  ‘Go out to dinner,’ Aimee soothed. ‘She’s fast asleep now, and the feed is going in as it should. I know you wanted to get her room done, and you have, but that wasn’t the only priority and now you need the break!’

  In the background, Rebecca signalled to Aimee that she was about to leave. She’d been standing patiently during this conversation, trying not to listen. That, of course, was impossible in this one-bedroom flat, and Rebecca in the best of circumstances would have seemed too radiant and energetic for the place, like a tropical bird trapped in a cruelly small cage.

  Over the past few minutes she’d been prowling, looking out at the uninspiring view from the window, bumping awkwardly into the heavy couch as she stepped back to admire one of Aimee’s new prints.

  Acknowledging the younger woman’s signals, Aimee mouthed, ‘Thanks!’ Then she watched Rebecca leave, a thoughtful expression apparent on her vibrantly pretty face, surrounded by her mass of hair.

  It was almost half past eight, and suddenly the flat was silent. Aimee realised that she was hungry. Knowing that the baby might wake at any time, she made herself a quick cheese and ham omelette and ate it with fingers of buttered toast, a tiny salad scarcely worthy of the name and a cup of tea.

  Then she tiptoed into the bedroom and spent fifteen minutes simply gazing with unashamed love at tiny Bonnie Louise, letting her thoughts drift at will until they suddenly snagged against the realization that she had no idea, as things stood, whether she was going to Marianne Deutschkron’s wedding with Marshall the next afternoon or not.

  Marshall himself wasn’t in a similar state of doubt, apparently. He phoned her at nine the next morning, and there was something about his voice and manner—a combination of authority and confidently expressed tenderness—which she hadn’t heard since the beginning of August.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re coming after all, Aimee.’

  ‘Yes, I…I’m glad, too.’

  ‘Rebecca told me about Bonnie pulling out her tube last night.’

  ‘Oh, it was awful. It was good to have Rebecca there. I’ve already thanked her for staying, and for coming to the hospital with me, of course, but when you next speak to her—’

  ‘She doesn’t need any more thanks,’ he said firmly. ‘It was the least she could have done. We had a good talk last night.’

  ‘Did you?’ she answered automatically.

  He’d given a weight to the statement which suggested that his talk with Rebecca had been important, but Aimee couldn’t imagine why. It would be nice if the hostility between herself and Marshall’s daughter had finally been ironed out, but it didn’t make a big difference to the state of their own relationship.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at two-twenty, shall I?’ he went on. ‘The wedding is at Seaforth House, in Randwick, at three.’

  ‘I’ll be ready.’

  She was. Ready, and nervous, and aware that her dress looked like the six-year-old model it was. Not badly dated in style, as its silhouette was classic and clinging, but not quite the right length and not as crisp and fresh in its colours as it could have been, after numerous launderings.

  A new one had not only been ill advised from a budgetary point of view, but had also been something she knew she would regret on a more personal level. Just as, when Marshall appeared at her door, she was already regretting that she’d agreed to go at all.

  He looked impossibly distinguised in his charcoal-grey suit, with its crisp white shirt beneath an understated silk tie in a subtle print. The shade of maroon in the silk exactly matched the maroon in her dress, and they would have looked like quite a stylish couple if they’d been a couple at all.

  He almost behaved as if they were a couple today, and it disturbed her. Although he didn’t kiss her at her door, didn’t touch her at all, there was an unmistakable heat to his regard and a potent and deliberate aura of sensual virility to the set of his body. He didn’t have to tell her, in some perfunctory way, that she looked good. His opinion on the matter was written all over his face, and he didn’t seem to care in the least about this openness.

  What had happened to him in twenty-four hours?

  ‘Let’s go…’

  ‘Yes, there’s no need to ask you in, is there?’ Aimee said as she closed the door behind her, hearing the breathlessness in her voice and knowing he’d heard it, too.

  He didn’t answer, just gave a tiny nod and stood back to let her lead the way down the breeze-filled open concrete stairway. She felt his hand very lightly in the middle of her back, but it didn’t linger there, and she had
to fight the need to turn to him and invite a greater intimacy of touch. Was he doing it deliberately? It felt that way.

  They didn’t talk much during the half-hour drive. He seemed content to make the occasional observation about neutral things. The traffic. The weather. She wasn’t sure why she had such a strong sense that he was biding his time, or what the source of the potent new confidence in him was, but she felt that the ground beneath her feet was, metaphorically, as unstable as a fault line in an earthquake-prone landscape.

  She almost blurted out something agitated and edgy about boundaries, limits they’d set, respect for her decision, but since he’d actually said and done nothing to challenge what she’d told him about their relationship three months before, she didn’t know how to begin and held her tongue.

  The wedding was everything Hilde Deutschkron had been hoping for to crown her last months of life. Seaforth House was a gracious old mansion, recently renovated and converted into an elegant function centre, complete with lush and perfectly manicured grounds where the 150 guests were free to wander.

  The ceremony, conducted by a civil marriage celebrant, was romantic and carefully thought out, a mixture of traditional vows and classic poetry spoken by the celebrant and the bride and groom, and wonderful singing by a friend of the bride.

  Marianne looked gorgeous in an ankle-length ivory silk dress, cut with simple flair. She carried red roses that matched the crimson taffeta of the two bridesmaids’ dresses, and her dark hair was swept up into a Grecian knot at the back of her head. Jonathan was clearly wondering how he’d been lucky enough to find such a bride, and Hilde smiled like a beam of pure sunshine all through the ceremony, while tears raced each other down her cheeks, hopelessly blotting her make-up.

  Aimee cried, too, and Marshall teased her about it in a murmur as the ceremony came to an end. ‘Is it genetic or something?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she sniffed in reply, grinning. ‘You should have seen me at Sarah’s and Jason’s wedding. Honestly, you can’t imagine how satisfying it feels. It’s one of the best things about being female, that I’m allowed—’

  ‘Expected, even?’ he suggested.

  ‘Expected,’ she agreed, ‘to cry at weddings.’

  ‘Will I have to escort you outside to recover? There’s a break for us guests while the principals submit to ritual photography.’

  ‘I’ll recover in the powder room first,’ she said. ‘Then, please, do escort me outside. I’d love to see those wonderful gardens.’

  There was an unconsciously wistful note to her voice. She missed the garden at Woollahra.

  Marshall was waiting for her at the glass-panelled side door when she emerged, her eye make-up fully repaired. Hilde Deutschkron was still at work before the mirror, holding the professional wedding photographer at bay until she was presentable.

  The two women had laughed at themselves, and Hilde had been so overwrought that Aimee had had to help her open her pill bottle to extract the dose of painkiller she was due for. She was already looking very tired, and would have to use a wheelchair soon in order to get through the long afternoon and evening. Aimee guessed that her condition would deteriorate rapidly after today, which had provided Hilde’s reason for fighting for life since August.

  ‘I’m still intrigued by the phenomenon of your tears,’ Marshall said as they went down the slate steps and along a gravel path edged by roses in full bloom.

  ‘Don’t get me started again!’ Aimee laughed, trying to ignore how emotional she still felt. It could just be Marianne and Jonathan, of course. Or Hilde. It really had nothing to do with Marsh.

  ‘I won’t,’ he promised. ‘But tell me if I’ve got it right. Is it the solemnity of it? The weight of the public commitment they’re making? The holiness?’

  ‘All that,’ she agreed. ‘And the beauty of it. The love that goes with it. The innocence of their courage.’

  ‘You’re wondering if they really understand what “for worse” can mean?’ he suggested quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Far better to face the worst together, though, isn’t it, Aimee?’ he said in a low voice that trembled with meaning.

  They’d reached the most secluded corner of the garden, a stone-paved area, slightly sunken, where there was a white wrought-iron table and several matching chairs, screened from the house and the rest of the garden by a thick bank of grass green agapanthus plants, their tall flower stalks budding with bluish-purple flowers but not yet in full bloom.

  ‘Not always,’ she answered him. ‘By no means always, Marsh.’

  He moved closer to her and took her hands in his, and sudden understanding lit up like a flash of lightning inside her. Two things she was now sure of. Firstly, that he’d brought her to this spot quite deliberately because of its privacy. Secondly, that he now knew—or had guessed—a good part of why she’d turned her back on what they could have had three months ago.

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ he said.

  His fingers slid up her arms, brushstrokes of sensation all along the sensitive skin. He was looking down into her eyes, his face serious and searching, strong and confident, all at the same time.

  ‘You don’t know,’ she protested feebly. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he agreed. ‘Not all of it. But it’s to do with money, isn’t it? Your financial situation?’

  ‘It’s not something I—’

  ‘Everything was going fine,’ he went on, ignoring her attempt to block him.

  She could have struggled out of his arms, but knew somehow that it wouldn’t have been enough. He would have come after her, held her again, demanded answers, challenged her with searching and perceptive questions. Nothing was going to fob him off today.

  ‘Going fine,’ he repeated. ‘What we both felt was so strong and good, and then you had some news. I could sense it right from that Saturday after we’d slept together when you phoned me and cancelled my idea of meeting again that weekend.

  ‘You were like some creature that had been dealt a blow. You turned in on yourself. Yes, I could sense it, but I thought that you’d eventually tell me what had happened and I’d be there to help. I thought it was Sarah and the baby at first. Then you ended it completely, and that hurt so much that I couldn’t think straight for a while.’

  ‘Oh, Marsh…!’

  ‘A long while! Tell me, Aimee! You owed money, you’d got deeply into debt somehow. You had to sell your home. Rebecca told me that your new flat, attractive though you’ve made it, isn’t exactly generous in proportions.’

  ‘No, it is rather small.’ That was as much as she dared to concede.

  ‘But why on earth did you think it mattered?’ Marshall said, betraying a degree of helplessness for the first time. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m simply not going to allow such a stupid, venal commodity as money to interfere for one second longer with what we have, and if that’s as bad as the “for worse” is that you’ll be thinking of when we get married and make those vows to each other in front of those we love, then…then…’

  His fluency deserted him finally and he groaned as he abandoned inadequate language and pulled her face towards him with impatient hands. Aimee gasped as his mouth met hers. She tried to turn away but he wouldn’t let her. The touch of his lips was hot and urgent and imperious, and she couldn’t help responding with a passion just as strong.

  The fabric of their clothing swished together and she felt the hardness of his thighs through the silk around her own legs. His arms enclosed her and his hands moulded the shape of her back then caressed the curve of her behind, making the fabric slip higher.

  He lifted her off the ground, covering her face with kisses and swinging her around, disorientating her and throwing her off balance so that when he put her down again at last she had to cling to him.

  ‘Marry you? I can’t marry you!’ she moaned shakily at last.

  ‘You can, and you will, unless you can tell me that there’s something else in the way, Aimee! Is
there something else?’

  ‘No. Yes! It’s not “only” money. It’s…it’s…Oh, this is hopeless!’

  ‘It isn’t,’ he said, and his sudden calm was like a shelf of dry rock in a heaving sea. ‘On the contrary. It’s actually full of hope, that we’re talking about it, and that I’m getting a chance, at last, to shoot down in flames anything you can throw at me. Take your time, Aimee, and talk, please! We’ll walk if you want to. Leave, even. They’ll hardly miss us.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave. Or walk. This spot is—’

  ‘Private,’ he agreed, reading her thoughts.

  He seized a chair and spun it so that the edge of its seat nudged the back of her legs. She sat down, then he pulled one up for himself and sat facing her, pressing his knees against hers and taking both her hands so that she had no choice but to look into his eyes and…

  ‘Talk!’ Marshall commanded again, his thumbs making an acutely sensitive exploration of her hands and fingers.

  ‘I’m broke, Marshall.’

  ‘So I’m beginning to understand.’

  ‘But I’m not in any real debt.’ Aimee lifted her chin and gleaned some pride from that. She was paying off those awful credit card bills a little more each payday. ‘The house was never in my name. The children don’t know that. They don’t realise what’s happened…’

  She explained every one of the secrets she’d been keeping, protecting Peter, protecting Sarah and Thomas and William. ‘And Rebecca and Simon, too,’ she finished.

  He looked completely astonished. Horrified. ‘What on earth does this have to do with them?’

  ‘Your inheritance,’ she answered.

  ‘My—’

  ‘It’s common knowledge around the practice. You can’t ask people like Bev and Chrissie not to talk. It’s well meant. The money from your father-in-law. I’ve known all along how Rebecca felt, how she distrusted me. How much worse would it have been if she’d had to see me walk into marriage with you and a huge share of the money her grandfather left which is supposed to go to her and Simon? I’m not a gold-digger.’

  ‘Oh, lord, of course you’re not!’