Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit: Bachelor of the Baby Ward / Fairytale on the Children's Ward

Or perhaps he no longer felt attraction for anyone. Perhaps his adamant declaration that Hamish would be an only child was because he was still in love with his dead wife—that was a possibility.

In which case he should do something to dampen down his attractiveness, Kate thought gloomily.

He walked away and she looked through the window to where he stood, talking to Pete and Mrs Stamford, and though she couldn’t hear what they were saying, in her imagination she heard his seductive accent and knew ignoring the manifestations of attraction would be difficult to do.

Perhaps an affair—

He’s not interested in you!

One part of her head was yelling at the other part. She tried to remember back to lectures on the brain and which bits controlled what. She’d never been particularly interested in neurology and worked quite happily on the theory that half her brain did emotion while the other half did common sense. And while the common-sense half—maybe that part was more than half in her case—usually held sway, she knew once the emotion part was awoken, it could be difficult to ignore.

Double damn again.

‘You talking to yourself?’

The nurse sitting at the monitor looked up and Kate realised she’d sworn aloud.

‘Probably,’ she told the nurse. ‘Early dementia setting in.’

‘Not surprising, the work you do, anaesthetising tiny babies. I couldn’t do it. I find it hard enough to watch them on the monitor. I’m getting married next week and we want to have kids, but I’ll have to transfer out of the PICU before I can even think about it. Pregnancy’s scary enough without knowing all the things that could be going wrong with the baby!’

Kate watched the monitor and considered this. It was what she did, caring for babies during lifesaving operations, so she’d always seen the work as positive, but as Angus and the Stamfords left Bob’s room and she returned to it, she wondered if knowing the things that could happen would make pregnancy better or worse.

Better, surely, for there would be no unknowns.

But had she chosen it, subconsciously steered her career this way, because of the baby she’d lost?

No, that had been back in second year at university, before she’d begun her medical training, when medicine had still been only one of the options she’d been considering.

But her affinity for babies came from somewhere…

She shook her head, shaking away thoughts that had been safely locked in some dusty closet in her mind for many years.

‘You handled Mrs Stamford very well. Are you able to feel that empathy for all your patients’ parents?’

Angus appeared when Kate, some hours later, was in the surgeons’ lounge checking the operating list for the following day, baby Bob now in Clare’s care.

Kate turned towards him, but though looking at him usually produced a smile, this time it was forced.

‘That’s a strange question,’ she told him, still puzzling over the man who’d asked it. ‘I would think anyone would feel empathy for someone with a sick child.’

‘Perhaps!’ He shrugged off her assertion with that single word, as if to say he didn’t, but she’d seen glimpses of an empathetic man behind the cool detachment he wore like a suit.

Or maybe armour?

‘Not “perhaps” at all,’ she argued. ‘I bet you feel it or have felt it. In fact, I’d like to hazard a guess it’s because of the children you see with problems that you’ve decided not to have more children.’

‘You couldn’t be more wrong.’

The blunt statement struck her like a slap and she felt the colour she hated rising in her cheeks. He must have seen it, for his next question was conciliatory, to say the least.

‘But on that subject, you see these infants yourself, yet you still want to have children. Why’s that?’

He’d asked the question to turn the conversation back on her, Kate knew that, but it was something she’d been thinking about since talking to the nurse earlier at the monitors. She’d locked the memory of her unborn child back into that dusty closet where it belonged, but the other issue was, and always had been, family.

How could she explain the loneliness she’d experienced as a child, and the ache for family, accentuated this time of year as Christmas drew near? Oh, she had friends who always welcomed her, but Christmas was for families, and since she was a child, she’d dreamed that one day she’d be the one cooking the turkey—she’d be the one with the children…

Pathetic, she knew, so she answered truthfully—well, partly truthfully.

‘It’s more a family thing,’ she admitted. ‘I was—I was an only child of parents who had no siblings living in Australia so I had no cousins or aunts or grandparents. Then one day—’

‘When you were eleven,’ he interrupted, and she nodded.

‘—I was staying with a friend and we went to her grandmother’s sixtieth birthday party and I saw a family in action and knew it was what I wanted.’

She kept her eyes on him as she spoke, daring him to laugh at her, wondering why the hell she was pouring out these things to a virtual stranger when she’d held them close inside her lonely heart for all these years!

He didn’t laugh, but nor did he respond, the silence tautening between them.

‘Besides,’ she said, determined to get back to easy ground, ‘why wouldn’t I want to pass on the genetic inheritance of pale skin and red hair—so suitable to a hot Australian climate.’

Now he did respond, even smiling at the fun she was poking at herself.

‘Ah, selective breeding. I do agree with that, but you could do that with one child—even be a grandmother with one child—so why children plural.’

Now Kate’s smile was the real deal, and she shook her head as she replied.

‘You’re a persistent cuss, aren’t you? We barely know each other and you’re asking questions even my best friends don’t ask. They just accept—Kate, yes, the one who wants kids. They usually emphasise the want and sigh and roll their eyes because they already have children and are often wondering why on earth they thought it was such a good idea.’

‘Which gets you very neatly out of answering my question,’ Angus said, but he didn’t persist and Kate was happy to let the subject drop, as memories of her father’s long illness and eventual death when her aloneness really struck home—no-one to share the caring, or share the pain and loss—came vividly to mind, bringing back the surging tide of grief she thought she’d conquered years ago.

Had her colleague seen something in her expression—a change of colour in her cheeks—that he held out his hand?

‘Come on, baby Bob is fine, and we’ve a full day tomorrow. I’ll walk you home.’

Kate considered arguing, making the excuse that she wanted to check the children on the next day’s operating list, but weariness was seeping through her bones and, dodging the hand he’d offered to guide her through the door, she led the way into the corridor.

Why did she intrigue him? And why so suddenly was he attracted, he who didn’t believe in instant attraction? Angus pondered this as they walked down the leafy street towards their houses. The summer sun was still hot, although it was late afternoon, and sweat prickled beneath his shirt, but that was nothing to the prickling in his skin when he saw this woman unexpectedly, or an image of her flicked across his inner eye.

‘Does it get much hotter?’ he asked, thinking an innocuous conversation about the weather would distract him from considering his reactions to his companion.

‘Much,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s only late November. Summer doesn’t officially begin until December, and February can be a real killer, but at least you’ve got a nice olive skin. You can go to the beach to cool off and not risk turning as red as a lobster and coming out in freckles the size of dinner plates.’

‘Dinner plates?’ he queried, smiling, but more, he feared, because she’d said he had nice skin than at her gross exaggeration.

‘Well, very freckly,’ she countered.

‘Ah, the great genetic inheritance you want to pass on to your children!’

She sighed and ran a hand through her tangled red curls.

‘I’m very healthy—surely that’s important,’ she pointed out.

It was a silly conversation but the children thing nagged at Angus. He could accept that it was natural for a woman to want children, but Kate’s desire seemed slightly out of kilter—more like determination than desire.

And he was obsessing about this, why?

Because he was attracted to her, of course!

Stuff and nonsense, as his mother would say. It was jet lag, not attraction—attraction didn’t happen this fast.

‘Can Hamish swim? He’ll need to learn if he can’t. There are learn-to-swim classes for children in every suburb.’

Had Kate been talking the whole time he muddled over attraction or had she just come out with this totally unrelated question?

Either way, he’d better answer her.

‘Need to learn?’ he repeated.

Her easy strides hesitated and she looked towards him.

‘I think so! There are far too many drowning fatalities of small children in Australia each year. No matter what safety measures are put in place, and what warnings are issued, the statistics are appalling.’

Something in her voice sent a shiver down his spine and he hurried to reassure her.

‘He can swim. Loves the water but has no fear, which is always a bit of a worry.’

She was standing looking at him, and he almost felt her shrugging off whatever it was that had bothered her earlier, although when he really looked at her, he saw the pain in her eyes.

‘Someone you knew drowned?’ he guessed, then regretted the casual question when all the colour left her face.

But she didn’t flinch, tilting her chin so she could look him in the eyes.

‘My sister—she was only two. It was a long time ago, but you don’t forget.’

He reached out and touched her arm.

‘I’m so sorry, I really am. I shouldn’t have persisted.’

She rallied now, shrugging off the memories.

‘That’s okay, you weren’t to know. Things happen. But you can understand why I’m a wee bit obsessive about children learning to swim.’

‘Of course you are.’ He squeezed her arm where he was holding it, feeling her bones beneath the flesh. ‘Well, be assured Hamish will be fine in the water. We’re quite near the beach, I believe.’

Her smile caught him by surprise, as did his gut’s reaction to it.

‘Quite near the beach? You really were thrown straight in the deep end,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had time to work out your surroundings at all.’

Then, as if their previous conversation had never happened, she looked up at the sky, where the sun was heading slowly towards the west.

‘With daylight saving, it’ll still be light for a while. What if I pile you and Hamish and Juanita into my car and we do a quick tour of the neighbourhood. We can have a swim and finish with fish and chips at the beach—if Hamish is allowed to eat fish and chips.’

She was being neighbourly, possibly to banish memories his careless question had provoked, but the offer told him more about Kate Armstrong than she’d probably intended it to. She was the kind of person who would always put herself out for others. She’d had no need to go back into Mrs Stamford’s room that morning, but had known the other woman was in deep emotional pain and had decided to make one more attempt to help her.

Now she was offering to drive his little family to the beach.

She should have children! A giving person like Kate would be a wonderful mother. Angus remembered a book he’d read on parenting that explained no matter how hard a father tried he could never fully replace a mother. Something to do with wiring…

If Hamish had a mother, would that let Angus off the hook? Allow him to feel less, not exactly guilty, but disquieted about his interaction with his son?

He shook his head as if to shake away the notion. He was fine as a father, spent time with Hamish, did whatever he could for him…

‘Well?’ Kate demanded, and Angus pulled himself together.

‘We’d be delighted, and thanks to his early upbringing Hamish loves fish and chips. It’s practically a staple diet back home in Scotland.’

What was she doing? Was she mad, getting more involved with her neighbours instead of less? Kate left him at his gate and strode ahead, then found Hamish and a woman who must be Juanita sitting on her yellow sofa.

‘I thought I told you the backyard was for adventures,’ she scolded Hamish, although she softened the words with a smile.

‘This isna an adventure,’ he told her, four-year-old scorn scorching the words. ‘I’m with Juanita. We’re waiting for you to come home so I can—’

‘Introduce me,’ the woman said, standing and holding out her hand to Kate. ‘I am Juanita Cortez.’

She was a solid, olive-skinned woman of about fifty, Kate guessed as she introduced herself, and asked Juanita how she was settling in.

‘We are nearly there,’ Juanita replied. ‘Angus has sorted a kindergarten for Hamish and I’ve found an organisation for ex-pat Americans that meets once a month, and another place where I can go to play bridge, so I will soon meet plenty of people.’

‘Well done you,’ Kate responded, admiring the other woman’s nous in getting organised, but she was watching Hamish as she spoke, watching Angus swing his son into the air before depositing him on his shoulders, normal father stuff but somehow Angus was never looking at the little boy.

Not directly.

Seeing them together, so unalike, Kate wondered if Hamish looked like his mother, and therefore was too painful a reminder…

Oh, dear!

‘Come on,’ Angus said, ‘let’s get changed. Kate’s taking us to the beach.’

‘Are you, Kate? Are you really?’ the little boy perched on Angus’s shoulders demanded.

Stupid, this is stupid getting more involved with them, but something in the anxious young eyes made her reply immediately.

‘Of course. Get your swimmers, or whatever you Yanks and Scots call swimming costumes and meet me at the shed in my backyard in half an hour.’ Kate turned back to Juanita. ‘You’ll join us.’

Juanita looked far less interested in a trip to the beach than Hamish had been.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to stay at home. I need to send some emails to my family to let them know we’ve arrived and are settling in, then I must make some phone calls about the ex-pat organisation and bridge club.’

As Angus and Hamish had disappeared into their house, Kate assumed this would be okay with him, so she nodded to Juanita and hurried inside herself, worrying again because a swim was just what she needed to wash away the tension of the day. But on the other hand, letting Angus McDowell see her lily-white body in a swimsuit, especially on a beach full of bronzed bathing beauties, was a very embarrassing idea.

As if he cared what she looked like in a swimming costume, the common-sense half of her brain told her, though the sensible admonition wasn’t strong enough to stop a rather wistful sigh.

She changed into her swimming costume, pulled shorts and a T-shirt over it, then dug through the kitchen junk drawer in search of the car keys. She used the car so rarely, the keys got buried under spare change, receipts and reminder notices from the library—even an apple core, today, although how that had got in there, Kate had no idea.

Then out the back door, locking it, and casting a quick glance at her pots to check if they needed watering. Later—she’d do that later, because excited voices from the far end of her backyard told her Angus and Hamish had arrived.

‘We came down the lane,’ Angus explained, ‘although I’ve found the gate between the properties. I just haven’t had time to hack through the jungle to release it.’

It’s because he’s got this outer carapace of an easygoing man that I feel as if I’ve known him for ever, Kate decided as she unlocked the shed and turned on a light, revealing her father’s ancient old car. But all he lets people see is the outside…

‘That’s your car?’

Two voices chorused the question, the younger one excited, the older one full of disbelief.

‘It goes,’ Kate said defensively.

‘I think it’s super,’ Hamish announced. ‘Like something out of a storybook. Has it got a name?’

As a person who thought giving names to inanimate objects was stupid, Kate longed to say no, but if she did, the car would probably hear her and refuse to start.

‘My father called it Molly,’ she admitted, hoping maybe Angus, who was walking around it, examining it the way one would an antique, hadn’t heard, but just in case he hadn’t, Hamish made sure he knew.

‘Did you hear that, Dad? We’re going for a ride in Molly.’

He was patting the car’s pale blue paintwork, his little hands leaving prints in the dust, so Kate was squirming with embarrassment before she’d even opened the doors. She did that now, helping Hamish into the back seat, pulling down the booster seat and fastening the seatbelt around him, then getting in the car herself.

‘Molly?’ Angus queried softly as he slid into the passenger seat beside her.

‘My father named her.’ Defensive didn’t begin to describe how Kate felt, until she remembered—‘And if you want to borrow the car to visit your dog at the weekend, then I don’t want to hear another comment, thank you.’

Before Angus could reply, Hamish began chattering about McTavish and how much he would like a car called Molly, and the child’s innocent delight in the situation eased Kate’s tension, so by the time they’d driven around the immediate neighbourhood and arrived at the beach at Coogee, she’d even stopped worrying about Angus seeing her in a swimming costume.

He’d have been better not having seen her in a swimming costume, Angus decided as their chauffeur slipped out of her shorts and shirt, revealing a pale but perfect body. All of his mother’s figurines were decorously covered, so it wasn’t a similarity to one of them that sent his heartbeat into overdrive.

It must be the prolonged period of celibacy his libido had been suffering. His last female friend had fallen out with him six months ago over the amount of time he spent with Hamish. The argument had been fierce, mainly because Angus knew he spent the time with Hamish in an attempt to make up for what he didn’t give the child. Not love, exactly, for he loved him deeply, just…He didn’t know what the ‘just’ was, except that it was there—a missing link.

But the outcome of that argument had been that he’d decided it was easier to stay out of relationships for a while, especially as by that time he’d been offered the job in Sydney and had known he’d be moving on.

So, have a swim and settle down, he told himself, shucking off his own shorts and polo shirt, then following his son and Kate down to where green waves curled, then broke into foaming swirls that slid quietly up the beach.

‘These are big waves.’ The awe in Hamish’s voice made Kate smile. ‘In Scotland we have little waves and in America there aren’t any beaches.’

‘Not where you lived,’ Kate reminded him, forbearing to point out America had thousands of miles of coastline on two oceans. He was jumping the waves as they washed towards him, shrieking with glee, and Kate’s heart ached with wanting. To have a child, her own child—any child, she was beginning to think.

Although it was a baby her arms ached for…

‘Want to go out deeper?’

Angus scooped up his son and strode towards the curling waves.

Presumably Angus could swim.

Kate watched them go, the ache still there—stronger if anything. It was all to do with family. Were Angus and Hamish a family? Was the base of family solid beneath the little boy? Had it not been solid in her case, even before Susie drowned? Had her family been doomed to disintegrate like so many families did these days, even before Susie died?

She could see the pair in the deeper water, ducking under waves, and remembered times, after her mother died, when she and her father had come to the beach. He would take her out into deep water and throw her over the waves. He’d loved her, Kate had no doubt of that, but it had been a detached, distracted kind of love, the kind one might give to a specially favoured pet, the concept of family perhaps as unfamiliar to him, another only child, as it was to Kate.

Enough! She dived beneath the next wave, surfaced for a breath, then dived again, coming up beyond the breakers, feeling the water wrap around her body, cooling and soothing her, reminding her of all the wonderful things in her life, counterbalancing the aches.

A good wave was coming, rising up above the others, curling early. Swimming hard she caught it and rode it to the beach, aware of passing Angus and Hamish on her way. She lay where the wave had left her on the sand until an excited little boy joined her.

‘Will you teach me to do that, will you, Kate, will you?’

Kate rolled over and smiled up at him.

‘I surely will, champ,’ she said. ‘Next time I’m at the shops I’ll get you a little boogie board. It’s easiest to practise on that in the shallows, then I can take you out in front of me on my bigger board. One day when you’re older, if your Dad decides to stay in Sydney, you might learn to surf. See the people at the far end of the beach, standing up on their surfboards?’

‘Can you do that? Can you teach me that?’

His excitement had him hopping up and down, splashing her with water.

‘There are better teachers than me, for board surfing,’ she told him, sitting up and looking around for Angus. Perhaps she should have asked if he could swim! Then his body, sleek as a seal’s, slipped onto the beach beside her.

Angus sat up and shook the water from his hair.

‘I didn’t catch it way out where you did,’ he said to the woman he’d been watching since she was deposited on the sand, a slim white mermaid in a green bathing suit. ‘I just surfed the broken bit. It’s been a long time since I caught a wave—student days at St Ives in England, an annual summer pilgrimage.’

He’d flopped onto the tail end of the wave to stop thinking about her, but now, this close, not thinking of her was impossible. The beautiful skin, so fine and pale he could see the blue veins in her temples, and in the slender lines of her neck, then the fiery red hair, darker now, wet and bedraggled, framing her face like a pre-Raphaelite painting.

‘Kate is going to teach me how to ride on the waves,’ Hamish announced, and now colour swept into her cheeks.

‘I wasn’t sure if you knew how. He asked me, but of course, you’re a surfer, you can teach him.’

‘Maybe we could both teach him.’

Angus heard the words come out and wished there was some way he could unsay them. How could he include someone else in his family before he’d made sure it was a family? It had obviously embarrassed her, as well, for the colour in her cheeks had darkened, and she stood and headed back into the water.

‘I’ll just catch another wave.’ The words floated back over her shoulder before she dived beneath the breakers.

‘Can I do that? Can I?’ Hamish demanded, so Angus put thoughts of pale-skinned mermaids right out of his mind and concentrated on teaching his son to dive beneath the waves.

‘Time for a shower and something to eat?’

Angus and Hamish, the diving lessons over, were sitting on the beach, making sandcastles, when the mermaid surfed right to their feet, lifting her head to ask the question.

‘We can shower up on the esplanade,’ she added, pointing towards the road, then, as if that was all the information he would need to realise the swim was over, she stood and walked back to where they’d left their towels and clothes. Angus hoisted Hamish onto his back and followed, thanking Kate as she picked up their clothes and handed them to him.

‘There are changing rooms if you don’t want to put your clothes on over your swimmers,’ she said, ‘but I find it’s cooler to stay wet underneath, and as we can eat our fish and chips in the park, it doesn’t really matter.’