The Doctor's Mistress

He went white, straightened like a released catapult and turned to Hayley, blind and helpless. Didn’t even recognise her. She wasn’t surprised. ‘What happened?’ he said. ‘What on earth happened?’

‘She has a partial thickness burn over twelve to fifteen per cent of her body.’ Hayley kept her voice calm and impersonal. He needed a clear report, not a lot of words wasted in sympathy. Not yet. ‘No facial or genital involvement. The other patient in the house with her appears to have had a CVA and she’s coming in a second vehicle. The other crew will be able to give you a better report on her status...’

‘A CVA? That’s my mother...’ Byron was paler than ever now. ‘Dear God, and the two of them were alone!’

They could all hear the sirens of the second ambulance now. Byron clearly didn’t know which way to turn next, his usual control and authority momentarily deserting him. His eyes looked wild, his lips were white, his fists were balled hard. Hayley ached with sympathy for him.

‘Tori must have been terrified,’ he whispered.

‘I think she wasn’t, Byron, not until she burned herself,’ she reassured him, using his first name without even thinking about it. ‘She was trying to make boiled eggs for lunch. She thought your mother was just having a little sleep on the couch.’

‘All right, yes. I guess that’s how she would intepret it, yes.’ His vision cleared suddenly, emphasising the golden glints in the depths of his eyes. ‘Hayley! Hayley Kennett! I’m sorry, I’ve only just...’ He gripped her arm.

‘It’s OK.’

She returned his gesture, squeezing the muscular forearm she’d seen so many times, tanned and dripping wet, at swim practice. With an arm like that, it felt as if he should be the strong one but, of course, he wasn’t today, not after what had happened. She didn’t waste time reminding him that she was Hayley Morris now. She hadn’t gone back to her maiden name after the divorce.

‘We don’t know how long she spent trying to rouse her grandmother,’ she said instead, as they covered the final few metres before entering the paediatric section of the emergency department. ‘Perhaps no time at all. She does seem to have taken the ‘‘nap’’ at face value. Her dress was wet all down the front, and there are burns on her thighs and feet, suggesting that she tipped boiling water over herself when she was trying to get the eggs out of the saucepan. We found the eggs broken on the floor.’

‘Mum’s all right?’

He stood back for a moment as they transferred Tori from ambulance stretcher to emergency department bed. Its fresh starched white linens were stretched smoothly across a firm mattress, and it was surrounded by equipment and supplies whose intimidating effect could only be partially offset by pictures of dinosaurs, landscapes and fairies on the walls.

‘She’s in the care of our second crew.’ Hayley repeated herself patiently. ‘Bruce McDonald is with her. He ruled out a heart problem and diabetes, secured her airway and was trying to stimulate her into waking up when I left. I can’t say any more than that yet.’

‘This is a nightmare!’ Byron muttered helplessly.

Then he turned to the A and E nurse, and was suddenly in complete control. Only on the surface, Hayley suspected. Only because he had to be.

‘Get whoever’s on call to come in now,’ he said. ‘We need a second doctor. Tori, Daddy’s here, sweetheart. OK, we need her on monitors. Hayley, how fast are you running that drip? You have her on morphine, right? How much? Tori, you’re fine, now. You were scared, weren’t you, and you were brave and just brilliant to phone the emergency number like that, and remember our new address. I’m so proud of you. Daddy’s going to have a look at your tummy and your feet now, OK?’

Hayley answered his questions, darting her responses into his uninterrupted flow of words. After recognising her, he hadn’t looked at her again. He had pulled a chair up beside Tori’s bed and hadn’t looked away from his daughter since he’d released that brief, almost painful squeeze on Hayley’s arm.

She stepped back with a reluctance that surprised her. Her role in this was over, apart from writing up her reports, but she didn’t feel ready to let go. She wanted to look after Byron, which was strange when they’d had so little contact over the years. He was so big and capable, so determined, strong-willed and confident. It was unsettling, heart-rending, to see him this vulnerable.

She wanted to make promises and assurances to him that she had no right to make. Things like, It wasn’t your fault. They’re both going to be all right. Don’t knock yourself out.

But she was just a casual friend from years ago, someone he’d yelled encouragement to and slapped on the back in congratulation. Someone he’d kissed just once, in the corner on a couch in the dark at a party.

It had lasted for, oh, at least an hour—a first, wonderful taste of the primal intimacy that a man and a woman could find together. Then a couple of days later he’d turned up at her front door to say something awkward about his imminent move to Sydney and not wanting to get involved in a relationship at the moment.

To tell the truth, she’d been relieved to hear it. At fifteen, just a girl, not a woman, she hadn’t been ready for a serious relationship with a university-aged boyfriend who already seemed to know exactly what he wanted out of life. For a few months she’d had romantic dreams about meeting up with him again when she was a mature adult—say, seventeen or eighteen—but then those dreams had drifted into insignificance, as a young girl’s dreams so often did, and at nineteen she’d met Chris.

The automatic doors opened again as Bruce and Paul wheeled Mrs Black into A and E. A second nurse came forward to take formal charge of the new patient. As Hayley sat at the desk at the A and E nurses’ station, she heard Bruce giving a more detailed rundown on Mrs Black’s condition.

‘Blood pressure one-sixty over ninety. Pulse eighty-seven. Oxygen saturation ninety-eight per cent.’

When she was leaving, she heard Byron’s voice again. ‘Where do we have beds at the moment? High Dependency?’ Then a few seconds later, decisively, ‘No, I’m not sending her to Sydney. We can treat her here. I’m not letting her out of my sight.’

Jim had moved Car Seven away from the ambulance entrance. Hayley took the passenger seat and they drove away at the leisurely pace which came as a relief after the urgency of earlier.

‘Want to call Dispatch and tell Kathy we’ll take that patient transport now?’ Jim suggested.

‘Yes, we’re much later than scheduled,’ she agreed, then spoke into the radio. ‘Dispatch, this is Car Seven...’

The numbers of the cars implied a large ambulance fleet, but since the lower numbers belonged to vehicles now retired from service this was deceptive. This rural area didn’t need a large fleet. There was one crew on station duty day and night, seven days a week, with a second crew as back-up on call. Very often, the back-up crew wouldn’t be needed for an entire shift.

Hayley and Bruce had been diverted from the non-urgent patient transport job earlier when the urgent call-out had come.

The patient transport in this case was nearly a two-hour job, door to door. They went to a dairy farm about thirty kilometres from town where an elderly man was ready for the local hospice, in the terminal stage of his illness. After delivering him there and handing him over to the hospice staff, they returned to Ambulance Headquarters at three o’clock, and the rest of the day went by with no call-outs. Jim and Paul had gone home, while Bruce joined Hayley to finish their shift at the station.

‘Wonder how that little girl and her grandmother are getting on,’ Bruce said after they’d signed out for the day. He added before Hayley could answer, ‘Going straight home?’

She had showered and changed into black stretch jeans and a soft blue knit cotton top. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I’m going to phone and find out how Max and Mum are getting on. If everything’s all right, I’m going back to the hospital.’

CHAPTER TWO

THE sight of his daughter in sleep was something that Byron had treated himself to every single day since her birth four and a half years ago. There was so much trust displayed in the way a happy child slept. The skin around her eyes and across her forehead was completely innocent of tension, and she slept on her back as if always prepared for the brush of his good-night kiss.

Watching Tori sleep was like a compass point in his life, he sometimes thought. It kept him on course. After Elizabeth’s tragic death, when Tori had been just six months old, the sight had become even more necessary, and even more precious. Sometimes it was the only time in a whole day when there was stillness and quiet.

The time when he wasn’t run off his feet at work, juggling six things at once, always the one people looked to for answers and solutions. When he wasn’t trying to remember the items on the shopping list he’d left at home, or fighting hospital administration over budgets and legal issues. He wasn’t swamped by onslaughts of Tori’s irrepressible exuberance and curiosity.

He didn’t have to say, Sit down at the table, Tori, we don’t stand up on a chair when we eat, or Don’t jump on the couch, love. You’ll break it and you could fall and hit your head on the coffee table, or Time to put your toys away now. Yes, it is, it’s almost bedtime!

Every night when he came into her room before going to bed himself, just to look at the little form tucked under the covers, breathing so deeply and rhythmically and peacefully, he felt a fullness in his chest that was pure love.

He hadn’t thought there could be a stronger or deeper feeling for one’s child. Today, watching her in her white hospital bed in the high-dependency unit, with the summer light still bright and hot in the non-air-conditioned room at the end of the day, he discovered that he’d been wrong. There was a stronger feeling, and it came when love was mixed with fear. It weakened his limbs and made him light-headed and he hated it.

He’d almost lost her today. It reminded him too strongly of the way he’d lost Elizabeth four years ago in a tragic accident which for months had tortured and taunted him with pointless, impotent if onlys. He didn’t think that way about Elizabeth’s death any more.

Or not often, anyway. He’d accepted it.

She had received an invitation from her GP practice partner and his wife to fly with them in their light plane to Tamworth for a weekend of country music, line dancing and outdoor meals. Byron himself had insisted—maybe he’d been too high-handed about it—that she needed a break. She should go and he’d be fine with Tori, who had been a pretty exhausting child even then.

‘I’ll only go if I’ve expressed enough milk, and if we’ve practised with her taking a bottle from you,’ Elizabeth had said.

Don’t think about what would have happened if Tori had refused to take a bottle.

Tori had taken to the bottle with no trouble at all, and so Elizabeth had gone to Tamworth. There had been a mechanical failure. The plane had crashed into the wild country of the Dividing Range, near Barrington Tops. All five people on the aircraft had been killed instantly, but it had taken State Emergency Service volunteers and other rescue workers more than four days to locate the wreckage. When they finally had, it at least had provided a form of certainty and reality to the tragedy.

It had happened.

Now there had been another accident, and there was a new set of if onlys.

If only Elizabeth’s parents hadn’t decided to move north to Queensland to be closer to their other two children. Byron still felt uneasy about their move.

He wondered if Elizabeth’s mother had been unhappy about looking after Tori full time while he was working. If so, she should have said. Had that been the problem? It had seemed so sudden, and their reasons had been vague at best.

He had thought this many times over the past few months, hated this sort of powerless questioning at the best of times. He vastly preferred a situation where he could take action, and where he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

And was he wrong to have returned to Arden? It had seemed like the right thing to do. The obvious thing to do. An action he could take. He’d made his home and his career in Sydney mainly because that had been where Elizabeth had wanted to be. Theirs had been the kind of partnership where both of them had made willing sacrifices.

But then his widowed mother had been keen to see more of him and Tori, and had insisted that she’d be fine looking after her granddaughter while Byron was at work.

‘After all, she’ll be in preschool for three mornings a week this year,’ his mother had said. ‘I’ll get a break. And it’s not as if she’s still a Terrible Two.’

No, but she was a pretty full-on four and a half!

He should have insisted that it was too much for Mum. She’d looked so tired when he’d come home each day, but she’d kept saying that everything was fine, that she loved it, that Tori was no trouble. Since when had Tori ever been ‘no trouble’?

Even Elizabeth’s mother Monica, who was active and energetic and only fifty-four, would throw up her hands some days and say, ‘Take her home! I’ve had enough!’

Mum was sixty-eight.

In the bed, his daughter stirred and moaned, and Byron’s eyes pricked with stinging tears that he steeled himself not to give way to.

Victoria Louise Galloway Black had a personality even bigger than her name. She was so bright, so confident. Dangerously so, it had proved. She wouldn’t have thought twice about getting lunch on her own for herself and Grandma. Her favourite, of course, soft-boiled eggs with bread-and-butter fingers to dip into the runny orange yolk.

And he kept wondering about the ‘nap’, too. He knew that Mum and Tori watched children’s TV shows together on the ABC in the late afternoons. Play School and Madeline and Bob The Builder. Maybe today wasn’t the first time Mum had taken a nap on the couch. She often fell asleep in front of the television at night, he knew.

Did Tori regularly end up pottering around by herself, having ideas more ambitious than her small hands could manage, while Mum snoozed?

He should have insisted that it was too much...

Byron heard a soft movement behind him and turned, expecting it to be Tori’s nurse, come to carry out her scheduled set of observations. Instead, it was Hayley Kennett. Except, no, she wasn’t Kennett any more, he remembered vaguely. She’d married Chris someone. Only...wasn’t she divorced now? Someone had passed on that bit of news to him. So perhaps it was Kennett again, after all.

He ransacked his brain, trying to fill in the landscape of her life in more detail, but couldn’t do it. He also felt bad that he hadn’t recognised her at first today. She had always been one of the nicest girls at swim club—fun-loving, hardworking, competitive and zestful, with a body as sleek as a seal’s and no falseness in the way she’d congratulated those who’d been more successful than her.

He wasn’t surprised that she’d succeeded in the demanding career she had chosen. The NSW Ambulance Service often received over a thousand applications for every advertised trainee position. Odds like that wouldn’t have scared Hayley off.

‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘I wanted to see how she was getting on. And your mother.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you today.’ He touched her hand briefly. It was pleasantly cool.

She shook her head, and her dangling earrings caught the light. ‘You had other things to think about.’

‘Thank you for being there.’

‘I was just doing my job.’

‘You’re not doing it now, though. You didn’t need to follow up.’

‘I wanted to.’

‘I really appreciate it, Hayley.’

It was the sort of thing that you said anyway, but he discovered, as he tasted the words in his mouth, that he really meant them. What was this new feeling that had been nagging at him lately? Whatever it was, the sight of Hayley made it diminish immediately. Something uncoiled inside him, and the perpetual tightness at his temples and in the back of his throat slowly and fractionally eased.

‘How’s Tori?’ she asked.

They both looked down at the sleeping child. Byron knew that she was the most beautiful child in the whole world, with her creamy skin and long lashes and fine, blond-streaked light brown hair. He accepted that there was perhaps a tiny hint of parental bias in his opinion, and that other people didn’t think the same way, but that was their problem!

‘We pulled her through the real danger—the shock—and she’s stable now,’ he said. ‘Kidney output is good. We’re still giving her a lot of fluid, high pain relief. There’s very little full-thickness burning. She’ll only need a couple of small grafts, which I can take her to Canberra for. Thank heavens. I keep thinking, if she hadn’t known how to dial OOO... If she hadn’t remembered our address...’

‘But she did. Those what ifs are dangerous, Byron,’ Hayley said. ‘What if she hadn’t burned herself at all, and she’d gone on thinking that your mother was just having a sleep? Your mum could have lost her airway while she was unconscious and choked to death. Maybe Tori’s burns have saved your mother’s life.’

‘Don’t follow it any further.’ He shook his head, his closed mouth firm and tight, then added, ‘You’re right. I’m thinking too much, when action is what I prefer. I checked on Mum a few minutes ago, across the corridor, and she’s asleep as well. Otherwise I’d take you across, so she could thank you. I mean,’ he revised, ‘she’s not talking yet, but she was squeezing my hand earlier.’

‘That’s good.’

‘She’s looking a lot better than she did at first. Look, have you eaten? Would you like to grab something? What is it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just after six? We could...catch up, or something.’

Dear Lord, what was that odd little thread in his voice? he wondered. Was it shaking?

‘Uh, well, I was about to head home,’ Hayley answered him reluctantly.

She saw the disappointment in his face at once, and guessed its source. He was restless, anguished. He didn’t want to eat with just the company of his own tortured thoughts tonight.

‘But I could hold off on that,’ she added quickly. ‘Just for an hour or so. My son’s with my mother.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he answered. ‘No, please, keep to your plans.’

‘Look, I’ll phone her, OK? Max is probably fine to stay a bit longer. He’s very comfortable at Mum’s, and she was going to feed us anyway. I’m not rostered tomorrow, and I’m taking him to his first preschool session. He and I get to see plenty of each other.’

‘Tori’s starting preschool, too. Supposed to be,’ he revised in a bleak tone. ‘Is your son going to Arden North?’

‘Yes, it’s just around the corner from us.’

‘And it’s halfway between my place and the hospital. I live at—Well, you know where I live.’

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ she offered. ‘So dramatic and cleverly designed. You must have enjoyed getting it right, and once you’ve got the garden going...’

Byron shook his head. ‘It’s not beautiful to me at the moment. Stupid to blame the house for what happened!’

‘Pizza?’ she suggested, to change the subject. He looked as if he wanted to veer away from it—like a racing driver taking a tight turn.

‘Sounds good.’ It was automatic, and Hayley guessed that he didn’t care what they ate.

‘I’ll ring Mum and Max from my mobile when we get outside,’ she said. ‘Want to take my car?’

‘Whatever...’

She suspected he might have more male ego at stake on the issue normally, but tonight he either didn’t care or he realised, as she did, that he was too preoccupied to be safe at the wheel. The latter, probably. She somehow had the impression he’d become a man who kept pretty close tabs on his own emotions.

‘Something’s come up,’ she said to her mother on the phone. ‘Could you handle it if I’m not there till about seven-thirty or so?’

‘We’re fine. Not a problem, I hope?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

It was almost comical to watch Byron folding himself into her small car. Chris always refused to drive with her at all. ‘That thing? I’d rather walk! Come on, look at me! Do you think I’d fit? We’ll take my car.’

Byron was tactful enough not to comment on the dimensions of the car. Perhaps he didn’t care tonight. He had his knees tipped sideways and pressed hard against the door, and a painfully tight frown on his face.

Hayley didn’t try to talk to him as they drove. He probably wanted to make this quick, and he might well end up regretting that he’d asked her. She’d seen enough of the way people behaved in a crisis to know that moods could swing back and forth like the boom of a runaway yacht in a storm.

There were two pizza restaurants in Arden, and she picked the closest, able to park directly in front of it because it was early and a weeknight.

‘Whatever you like’ was his preference in toppings.

Helpful! But she didn’t want to push, didn’t want to waste time and energy over something that trivial. Suddenly remembered the pizza nights they’d had after swim meets and confidently told the man behind the counter, ‘Large ham and pineapple, please.’

‘Take-away?’

‘No, to eat here, thanks.’ There! Easily dealt with!

There were four tables at the back. Plastic tablecloths. Postcard-style prints of Sicily on the cheaply panelled walls. Red vinyl tiles on the floor. The place wasn’t glamorous.

And it could have been the bottom of a stairwell full of garbage cans for all Byron cared, Hayley realised.

She was swept with a churning wave of tenderness for him. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you could only feel for the man who used to be the boy who’d given you your first real kiss. They’d never had a falling-out. Life had just swept them off in different directions. Heaps of the girls at swim club had had crushes on him, but he’d been too focused on his goals to even know it, and too honorable to have taken advantage of those silly female hormones if he had.

And now he’d grown up. He was a man in every sense of the word. Thirty-four years old, successful in his profession, with a physique that had more than adequately filled its adolescent promise. He had known a man’s joys, and the unique grief of losing a spouse which didn’t touch most people until they were well into old age.

Without thinking about how he might interpret the gesture, she stretched her arm across the table and covered the back of his hand with her palm and fingers, chafing his warm, smooth skin gently.

‘She must be an amazing little girl, Byron,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her properly at preschool. Maybe Max will have met his match at last.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it!’

He laughed and gave his hand a half-turn so that his fingers met Hayley’s and actively returned her touch. He squeezed her fingers, then stroked the ball of his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. It was slow and hypnotic. Shouldn’t have been erotic as well, but it was, and suddenly Hayley remembered in exact and vivid detail just how good that kiss of theirs had been, sixteen years ago.

Slow, questing, exploratory. Not a prelude to a more intimate goal, but the goal itself. Just to kiss. Just to hold each other. Just to melt inside. She had mussed up his hair. Those short, dark strands weren’t spiky at all, but soft and slippery and clean.

He had slipped his hand beneath the hem of her top and the waistband of her jeans to touch her skin. It must have taken him half an hour to reach her breast. He’d caressed the neat, firm swell the way he was caressing her fingers now, slowly and without demands.

‘It’s good to see you again, Hayley,’ he said at last. It sounded as if he meant it, but it was clearly an effort all the same.

‘Mmm, it was a good time in our lives, wasn’t it?’ she answered. ‘Those years in swim club? We had fun.’