The Doctor's Mistress

‘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.’