AFTERWARDS Blythe wondered how she’d avoided passing out on the spot. To hear David’s name again so soon after she’d told her pathetic story—and to find he was coming here. Far too many shocks for one woman to handle!
But she’d calmly walked away, telling Cal to do his exercises, heading for the kitchen where she put the casserole in the oven and started peeling potatoes. Her preferred option would have been to head for her bedroom, climb into bed and pull the covers over her head, but Cal might have wondered about that!
Think, brain, think!
But ordering it into action had no effect. Her thinking powers were blotted out by memories of David, and the anguish he had caused her.
She’d leave—get the bus out of town.
No, she’d missed the bus. It had left today at midday and there wasn’t another until Wednesday.
Besides, she’d run from David once before. She wouldn’t run again.
But she wouldn’t go out of her way to meet him either. Why should she? She’d be busy and as the patients he’d be operating on were Cal’s anyway, he could handle any consultations necessary.
That was the answer. She needn’t see David at all.
Cal moved his arm, stretching the tendons in his shoulder, grimacing at the pain yet at the same time welcoming it as it took his mind off his colleague.
Surely he’d imagined Blythe going pale when he’d mentioned David Ogilvie’s name! And her hurried escape to the kitchen was nothing more than her usual habit of keeping things between them on a purely professional level.
Yet something in the air, a sudden tension, told him there was more to Blythe’s reaction than he could understand. He just hoped David Ogilvie wasn’t the man who’d caused such devastation in her life. The man about whom Cal had been harbouring murderous thoughts!
He finished stretching and went through to his bedroom, digging out clean clothes then throwing a toilet bag and his pyjamas into a small bag, ready to take back to the hospital.
He showered, relishing the warm water sluicing over his body after the dusty rodeo, though he wasn’t getting much better at shaving left-handed. Then, with the bag and walking stick in one hand and his bandage in the other, he went through to join his visitor in the kitchen. He dropped the bag by the door and held out the bandage to her.
‘I hate to be a nuisance, but would you mind wrapping it up again?’
Blythe took the bandage, but try as he may to read something in her expression, he saw only the way her lips pursed slightly as she concentrated, a trick he noticed all too often and which, at times, nearly drove him to distraction.
It was because her lips were so kissable, but for him to be affected by them at times when she was so totally focussed on her job was not good.
She finished, and gave his shoulder a little pat, then she frowned at his bag.
‘At the country recruitment talks I attended, most of the jobs on offer were hospital positions. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier, but shouldn’t the hospital here have a medical superintendent? A government-appointed doctor resident at the hospital?’
‘Yes,’ Cal told her. ‘It should. But because there’s always been a private practice here—Mark bought the practice from a couple when they retired—finding a doctor for the hospital has never been a priority. We’re not even classed as an area of need for doctors recruited from overseas, so if a foreign doctor wanted to work here, he or she wouldn’t get special consideration as far as qualifying to work in Australia goes.’
‘Because there’s already a doctor in the town?’ she queried. ‘That doesn’t seem fair.’
He grinned at her. ‘Any more than the scarcity of doctors in Africa is fair?’
Blythe saw the spark of laughter in his eyes and felt her heart judder in her breast. Oh, no, it certainly can’t be love, she told herself. She was done with love, and even if she wasn’t, Cal most certainly was. The judder must simply have been a different physical reaction to grey eyes rimmed with black, sparkling with laughter at her.
‘I’ll serve the dinner,’ she said quickly, giving herself an excuse to turn away from him.
The phone rang as they sat down, and Cal reached out his good hand to lift the receiver.
Blythe, thinking of Byron, watched him anxiously.
‘It’s OK—good news, in fact,’ he said, putting down the receiver. ‘A plane’s available to pick Byron up tonight. ETA ten o’clock so we’ve got an hour. We’ll need to go back to the hospital and make sure his notes are up to date, then get him ready for transport. It’s an RFDS plane so he’ll have a doctor on board for the trip.’
Blythe smiled as the tension drained out of her, but Cal had already turned away, thumbing the buttons on the phone handset then holding it to his ear.
‘Merice? Cal Whitworth. We’ve got an emergency airlift going out tonight. Plane ETA nine o’clock. Will you organise the volunteers?’
There was a pause, then he said thanks and disconnected.
‘Volunteers?’ Blythe echoed, but if she thought Cal would explain she was disappointed. He simply grinned at her, the mischievous expression causing more movement in her chest as her heart seemed to tug at its moorings.
‘You’ll see,’ he promised. ‘Now, eat up. We’ve got things to do.’
Cal went out to the airfield in the ambulance, with Blythe following in his vehicle. As they reached the outskirts of town and turned onto the main road which passed the airfield a few kilometres out of town, there were a number of other cars on the road. It was almost as if she’d joined a procession.
Wondering where they could all be going at this hour on a Sunday evening—late open-air church service? Full moon revels in some hallowed spot? Was the moon full?—Blythe continued to follow the ambulance. Then it turned off and she realised all the other cars were also heading for the airfield with her.
The ambulance pulled up by a small, corrugated-iron shed, and she stopped beside it and got out, watching in amazement as the cars continued on past the shed.
‘What’s this?’ she asked Cal as he climbed awkwardly out of the ambulance. ‘Do the locals have so little excitement in their lives they come out to see a plane land? Is that why you rang someone? To tell her to spread the news?’
Cal smiled at her again, then reached out and turned her around.
‘Look,’ he said, and she realised the cars were slowing down and seemed to be moving into set positions—some on one side of the runway, some on the other. But their headlights remained on, illuminating the narrow strip of concrete down which the plane would land.
‘No lighting in country areas,’ Cal explained. ‘The locals provide it.’
Blythe shook her head, unable to believe the number of things she took for granted as part of civilised life which simply didn’t exist out here in the bush. Yet these people made do. They worked with what they had, and lived rich, full lives.
The sound of an approaching plane made her look up, and she saw the car headlights reflecting off silver wings. Byron’s transport had arrived.
Cal handled the transfer of paperwork while Blythe watched the efficient way the patient was moved from one conveyance to another. His parents, who had arrived at the hospital shortly after the operation, were also watching anxiously. They would travel to Brisbane by car and Blythe didn’t envy them their thousand-kilometre journey, with worry eating at them every metre of the way.
Yet because emergency air services existed, Byron would be seen by a thoracic specialist tonight—less than twelve hours after his accident.
‘There he goes.’
Cal came to stand beside her as the plane took off.
‘You could have another trip out here in the morning if you like,’ he added. ‘Someone brings a car out from the hospital to meet the surgeon and his crew.’
‘I don’t think I’ll bother,’ Blythe said, hoping Cal hadn’t been able to feel the sudden tensing in her body. ‘I remember the back-up of patients we had last Monday, and I think Cheryl told me the first appointment was at eight tomorrow.’
The receptionist had said something like that but, whether the first patient came at eight or not, Blythe had every intention of being in the surgery and staying right there until any risk of seeing David was past.
‘Anyway, the patients this fellow will be seeing are your and Mark’s patients, so if anyone needs to liase with him, it should be you. Cheryl can run you over to the hospital.’
Was it tension he could hear in her voice? Cal wondered, as he listened to Blythe list all the reasons she needn’t meet the surgeon. Or was he imagining things?
Whatever—it was up to her.
Or so he told himself, trying to ignore a niggle of what must be concern for her, because it couldn’t possibly be jealousy.
She drove them home, but without any questions about the bush and medical services in outback areas, which seemed to accompany most of their travelling time. He assumed she usually asked because she knew of his interest in the subject, though sometimes it sounded as if she really wanted to know.
And because he knew that what Creamunna really needed was a husband-and-wife doctoring team, he sometimes allowed himself to believe this and to dream that maybe…
Not that it would be a love match. He was definitely past that, but the physical attraction she’d admitted to wasn’t all one-sided, and common interests, a shared profession and physical compatibility should surely be a good basis for marriage.
Cal banged his head gently against the car window. He must be mad to be letting thoughts like that creep in. In another week his shoulder would be out of the restricting bandage, his ankle better, and if he couldn’t persuade her to stay until Mark returned, she’d be moving on.
In another week, with two good arms, he could hold her properly…
He banged his head again.
‘You OK?’
‘Fine!’ he lied.
Blythe pulled into the drive and turned off the engine, letting the night quiet settle around them.
‘What happened to your plane?’
The question was so unexpected he didn’t answer immediately.
‘I mean, afterwards,’ she added. ‘Do you just abandon it out there on Ted’s property and buy a new one?’
‘I arranged for it to be salvaged—guys go out and pick it up then they and the insurance company decide whether its fixable or if it needs to be replaced. What made you think of it now?’
‘The night, the sky, the stars,’ she said softly, waving her hand towards the windscreen and beyond it to the velvety, star-bright sky. ‘There’s a magic about a brightly starlit night that we forget about in the city, I suppose because we never see it.’
And magic in the pearly glow those stars can cast on skin, Cal thought as he watched her watching the stars.
‘I’d better get inside,’ he said, opening the car door and hustling himself and his stick out before she could come around to offer assistance. ‘Haven’t checked my emails all day and I’ve got to email the kids as well.’
Blythe watched him limp away, then slumped back into her seat and closed her eyes. Her mind was such a muddle of emotions she doubted she’d ever sort them out. Her mother had always said to take one day at a time—well, in Blythe’s life there was a rip-snorter of a day coming up tomorrow. If she got through it, she’d think about the rest later.
Or not think about the rest—just get her stay in Creamunna over and done with and move on with her life.
But the thought caused an ache where the judder had been earlier, and she knew, some time soon, she’d have to sort through the muddle in her mind.
* * *
The next morning went according to plan, as far as Blythe was concerned. She was on her sixth patient when Cheryl phoned to say she was driving Cal to the hospital but would be back shortly, and Helen, the nurse on duty, was manning the desk.
Refusing to think about the man Cal was going to see at the hospital, Blythe concentrated on the forty-five-year-old woman who was ‘feeling off’, as she put it, and wondered if it might be the beginning of menopause.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ the patient, Pat Carmichael, confided to Blythe. ‘I came to see Mark about it and ended up telling him I was getting headaches because I didn’t want to talk to him about it. Not about the personal things that are happening.’
‘Tell me the physical symptoms,’ Blythe prompted, and Pat listed the discomforts associated with menopause.
‘And mentally? Forgetful? Mood swings?’ Blythe asked, and Pat chuckled.
‘Mood swings sounds so much nicer than temper tantrums, which is how I’ve been thinking of them,’ she said. ‘The other day I yelled at my husband for putting dirty clothes in the washing machine when I’d just cleaned it. I mean, where else was the poor man to put his dirty clothes? And hadn’t I trained him to put them there, rather than on the bathroom floor, back when we were first married?’
‘How did he handle it?’
Pat smiled.
‘He put his arm around my shoulders, gave me a kiss, then suggested I come and see you. He said to make the most of it while there was a woman doctor in town, and I think a lot of my friends are doing the same thing. Mark and Cal are both nice guys and excellent doctors, but there are some things a woman feels better about discussing with a woman, aren’t there?’
Blythe agreed. She checked Pat’s blood pressure, which wasn’t high so didn’t offer any explanation for sudden temper tantrums, then, knowing Helen was busy on the reception desk, she took a vial of Pat’s blood to send away for testing.
‘I’ll have those results in by the day after tomorrow. Come back and see me then.’
Pat thanked her and departed, but when Blythe’s next three patients were all women, she began to think about what Pat had said. Perhaps the appointment of more women to country practice was something for Cal’s committee to consider.
Resolving to discuss it with him over lunch, she finished the morning session, only an hour after it should have ended, and crossed the garden to the house, wondering what surprise Mrs Robertson might have prepared for lunch.
It was quiche and salad, but as far as Blythe was concerned it might as well have been dog food. The first person she saw as she walked into the big kitchen area where they ate all their meals was David Ogilvie.
‘David told me he was an old friend of yours so I invited him for lunch.’
Cal had risen from the table as she entered the room and moved close enough to rest his left hand in the small of her back, as if ushering her to her chair. Now something in his voice as he made this unremarkable explanation made her look more closely at him.
I’m here for you, his eyes seemed to say, but as he had no idea who David was or how well she might have known him, she must be reading them wrong.
Unless bloody David had been talking!
She glared at her ‘old friend’, nodded her head and, for Cal and Mrs Robertson’s sakes, said, ‘David. Good to see you. How are things with you?’
Not holding out her hand to shake his but slipping into the chair Cal held for her, grateful he was there and that the chair had caught her before her knees gave out.
‘Great,’ David responded, then added fulsomely, ‘Even better for having seen you. Though I wouldn’t have thought a city girl like you would find much to interest her in a backwater like Creamunna.’
It was like watching a tennis match, Cal thought as his head swivelled to see how Blythe reacted to that remark.
‘Ah, but you’re not a woman!’
It wasn’t anywhere close to what Cal might have expected in an answer, but the smile and wink she threw in his direction as she said it begged him to play along with her, and he was pleased she’d turned to him for support.
‘So, you’re the flying surgeon,’ Blythe continued, when David, obviously put out by her reply, failed to pick up the conversational ball. ‘Cal mentioned your name last night. What fun for you, though I don’t remember it featuring highly in your plans back when we were studying.’
Cal had felt her tremble as she’d sunk into the chair. The ‘we were studying’ remark confirmed his guess that this might be the guy who’d let her down. Now, seeing the proud tilt of her chin and hearing the cool politeness in her voice, Cal felt like applauding. But instead he turned to the surgeon, who was smiling—but it was a weak effort.
Had he expected Blythe to fall all over him? Greet him with raptures of delight when he’d ruined her career chances and broken her vulnerable heart?
‘Oh, I thought it would be good experience, and I get to see most of Queensland. We cover an enormous area.’
David blathered on, blowing his own trumpet, exaggerating the excitement of what was usually just a series of consultations and operations in different towns on different days. Instead of travelling between major city hospitals, as a lot of surgeons did, he flew between smaller country hospitals.
Cal was tempted to point this out, but Blythe got in first.
‘And Joan—was it Joan, the nurse you married? And the baby? I suppose there’s more than one now.’
‘Jane—her name was Jane and we just had the one child. We’re divorced.’
The crisply delivered reply suggested that being married to Jane hadn’t brought David much joy, but as the tension in the air was growing by the second Cal wondered if he’d better step in.
He was about to ask David if he saw much of his child when Blythe beat him into speech.
‘I suppose you cheated on her, too,’ she said calmly, then eased a forkful of quiche into her mouth as if she hadn’t just delivered a swordthrust to their luncheon guest’s intestines.
‘Hey, there’s cheating and cheating, Blythe, you know that,’ David said, smiling the kind of smarmy smile which had, no doubt, had women falling at his feet for years. But beneath the smile, anger lurked. Blythe’s thrust had gone deep. ‘And in our relationship, you contributed to the problem. You were so damn focussed on studying for the surgery exams our sex life had virtually stopped. I could never understand how you came to fail, given all the work you did.’
Cal closed his eyes, certain murder would be done, but when he opened them, Blythe was calmly cutting a piece of tomato then settling it neatly onto her fork. She added a sliver of lettuce then lifted it all towards those tempting lips.
‘Maybe I didn’t want to pass,’ she said calmly.
Lips closed around the lettuce and tomato, her mouth moved as she chewed then swallowed.
‘Maybe I decided I’d been mistaken in the calibre of people who went in for surgery. Maybe I decided I’d rather clean out pig swill than be a surgeon.’
She bent her head again and chose a morsel of quiche this time, continuing to eat carefully and calmly, as if David’s reply—indeed, David’s presence—was of complete indifference to her.
‘Lovely lunch, Mrs R., but I’ve really got to fly. Can you put the rest in the fridge for me for later?’
She pushed away her plate, stood up, eased herself away from the table and said a polite goodbye to David. Then she bent and dropped a kiss on Cal’s head.
‘See you later, handsome,’ she said, and with a little wave of her fingers departed.
‘You didn’t tell me the two of you were an item,’ David said, his tone of voice suggesting this omission was a sin. ‘Why I was ever tempted to stray when I was with her, I don’t know. I don’t have to tell you she was dynamite in—’
‘I don’t discuss my private life or my friends with anyone,’ Cal said, cutting off any further reminiscences. He wondered just how badly the town would miss the flying surgeon if Cal punched him in the mouth and David refused to return to Creamunna in the future.
Cal held his fire—and his fists—then made an excuse of work to do to get away from the man.
‘You can take the car back to the hospital and leave it there. Someone will drive it back here later.’
But after David had departed, and Cal replayed the lunchtime conversation in his head, he had to give the points to Blythe.
‘Heaven forbid I should ever do anything to deserve your ire,’ Cal said, as they sat on the back patio that evening, watching a small flock of rainbow lorikeets play in the water from the garden sprinkler. ‘And people say women are the weaker sex!’
Blythe grinned at him.
‘I should think you guessed he was the guy I was telling you about—the one I was engaged to. Poor Jane, I feel sorry for her, being caught up with such a loser. I didn’t know until later that she was pregnant when he broke it off with me, and do you know what really made me mad? He gave her my ring. The one he’d bought for me—the one I’d chosen!’
She took a sip of her drink, then smiled again.
‘But if I’d been her and knew that, I’d have been even more furious. Yes, my sympathies are definitely with Jane.’
‘Aren’t women’s sympathies usually with the woman in cases of men and women falling out?’
Cal had stood up to top up her soft drink, and was standing by her chair when he made this remark.
‘Certainly not,’ Blythe told him, looking up so she could see his face. ‘Every time I think about you and Grace, my heart practically bursts with pity for you. I know you made it sound as if she and Chris couldn’t help what happened but, whether they fell in love deliberately or not, nothing would have made it easier for you.’
Cal smiled at her and brushed his hand across her hair.
‘Don’t let your soft heart ache for me, Blythe,’ he said. ‘I got over all of that a long time ago, and now I find I love my new life, and I look forward to the challenges ahead. There’s so much I can do out here, whereas at home, back at Mount Spec, it was only going to be more of the same for ever. Oh, I would have introduced new blood lines into the cattle herd, looked into breeding programmes, stuff like that, but it would only have been building up the company’s wealth and assets, whereas here, and with the rural medicine committee, I feel I’m achieving something worthwhile.’
He laughed at himself, adding, ‘Will you listen to that garbage? You’d think I see myself as the new Albert Schweitzer. I don’t, of course, but I might be able to make a small difference.’
Blythe believed he’d make more than a small difference—he was that kind of man—but if he thought he’d diverted her from personal matters, he was mistaken.
‘You say you’re over it all, yet you’re determined not to marry again,’ she reminded him. ‘Doesn’t fit, Dr Whitworth.’
‘You’re one to talk,’ he retorted. ‘One bad relationship with a sleazeball, and you’re going for loveless sex from now on.’
‘OK, so we’re both wimps,’ she conceded, then she remembered what she’d wanted to talk to him about, and changed the subject, mentioning Pat and the number of other women patients she was seeing.
‘I know,’ Cal said. ‘I was thinking the same thing myself only yesterday. The ideal situation for practices like this is a married couple medical team. Can you think of incentives we could offer that might entice young married couples—or even older married couples—to come to the country to practise?’
‘Transport would be a start,’ Blythe said. ‘You know how people who work for the government and bigger international companies and are sent overseas get a free trip home once or twice a year. Or they can use their trip to fly family members to visit them. Could you finance air fares from places where there are airline services? Maybe charter trips for people in places like Creamunna? Charters are expensive and cheap air fares don’t exist in country areas, so if the government, or a private agency, provided funding for travel, that would be one less cost the couple would have to bear. I think fares for the kids to travel to and from boarding school as well—that kind of thing.’
‘It’s a good idea and I’ll follow up on it,’ Cal said, but though he’d listened to Blythe’s suggestion and knew it was a good one, the major part of his mind was stuck in another groove. Back in the ‘marrying Blythe for the good of the community’ groove it had jolted into the previous evening.
Marrying Blythe wouldn’t hurt his sex life any either, and he suspected it was that option which was deepening the groove.
He was wondering what she’d say if he suggested it to her when Mrs Robertson called them in for dinner, but the thought remained lodged in his brain, so it was almost inevitable it would eventually escape.
They were up to dessert, a sticky banana pudding and ice cream, and he was going demented watching her spoon food into that mouth. Had Grace’s eating habits ever attracted his attention?
Had he had to watch every spoonful slip between her lips?
‘If we were married, we’d be a husband and wife medical team, and with an outside income I can afford air fares to the city any time you wanted to go. I don’t suppose you’d like to marry me.’
That stopped the movement of the spoon halfway to the lips.
‘To ensure Creamunna has two doctors? I don’t think so.’
Blythe shook her head and the spoon continued its journey, but when she’d finished the mouthful she didn’t immediately begin work on the next selection. Instead, she looked at him, and an almost imperceptible wrinkle of a frown creased the smooth skin of her forehead.
‘And aren’t you kind of jumping the gun here? You won’t need another doctor if Mark comes back. I’d be redundant.’
Oh, I doubt you’d ever be that, Cal wanted to say, but realised that was his mind in the other groove again.
‘Besides, you don’t want to marry again, remember, and I wouldn’t like to be cast in the role of sacrificial lamb if you’re making the decision purely for the good of the community. I’d be an obligation and you’d grow to hate me within months—and hate the community too, most likely, for forcing you into the situation.’
She waggled her thankfully empty spoon at him.
‘You should think these things through more carefully before blurting them out. A man could get into trouble that way. I can think of a dozen women, including a couple of nurses at the hospital who sigh as you limp by, who’d say yes so quickly you’d be at the altar before you knew which way was up.’
Blythe put the spoon back down in the bowl, her appetite completely gone. She thought she’d handled the astonishing conversation remarkably well, considering it was the second bout of evasive verbal action she’d had to take in one day.
When Cal had first mentioned marriage, the juddering had started again—in fact, her heart had flopped around in her chest like a just landed fish in the bottom of a dinghy. But though she talked big about no-strings-attached sex, there was a bit of her, tucked deep inside where dreams dwelt, that knew marriage, for her, would have to be the real thing. She’d want love, and Cal certainly wasn’t offering love.
And she’d want to have her loved one’s children, and he’d already pushed ‘family’ into the BTDT basket.
She sighed, then looked up to find him watching her, the grey eyes narrowed as if he was trying to peer into her skull.
‘That was some sigh,’ he said. ‘Want to talk about it?’
‘I was thinking, if I keep eating Mrs R.’s desserts, I’ll have to book two adjacent seats on the bus when I eventually leave town. I’ll be too big to fit into one.’