A Mother by Nature

‘So you ring your mum.’

She nodded miserably. ‘I’m sorry, Adam. I didn’t realise it would be so expensive.’

‘It’s as much as your wages,’ he pointed out, not unreasonably.

‘But some is you,’ she defended with truth, and he shrugged.

‘A little. Perhaps the first hundred pounds.’

She swallowed. ‘May I see it?’

He handed her the bill—the itemised section that ran to page after page—and she studied it in silence and handed it back.

‘Are you going to send me home?’

‘Do you want to go? Do you really want to go? Are you so unhappy? I don’t want you to be unhappy, Helle. It doesn’t help anyone—not you, not me, and certainly not the children.’

She nodded and sniffed. ‘I do want to go. I’ll miss the children, but I’m so lonely. It wouldn’t be so bad if you had a wife, it would be another woman to talk to. It’s different—I can’t talk to you like I could to a woman.’

Nothing would be so bad if he had a wife, he thought defeatedly, including his own loneliness, but it was out of the question. Lyn’s defection had scarred them all, and there was no way he was going there again.

‘I’ll ask my mum,’ Helle went on, miserably shredding another paper towel. ‘Maybe she’ll pay the phone bill.’

‘Never mind the phone bill. Just do me a favour and stay until I can get someone else, and then I’ll forget the bill—OK? Only stay off the damn phone in the daytime, please, until you go home. Deal?’

He wouldn’t understand women if he lived to be a hundred, he thought as Helle burst into tears. He found her an unshredded piece of kitchen roll and watched as she hiccuped to a halt and blotted herself up.

‘Deal,’ she said finally.

‘Good. Now, do you suppose you could get the children up in time for school today, please?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll wake them now.’

He ate a piece of toast, kissed the children hello and goodbye in one and left for work, his mind on his afternoon list. He had yet to meet the other members of his firm, the registrars and house doctors that were allocated to him in this new speciality that the Audley Memorial had set up.

Most hospitals had one or two consultants who tended to handle the paediatric work. It was unusual to find a post dedicated to it, and he was looking forward to the challenge. He understood they would take referrals from other hospitals within the region once his post was established—it would become the local specialist centre for paediatric orthopaedics, centralising treatment in Suffolk and making it more accessible for patients and their families.

That meant better visiting arrangements, which in turn meant happier patients getting better quicker. He approved of that.

Adam parked his car in the staff car park, then crossed it and palmed the door out of the way and caught himself all but running down the corridor to the ward. Idiot, he thought crossly. She’s probably not even there yet—and if she is, she’ll be busy.

She was. She was taking report, and he went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and made two mugs of tea. She wouldn’t be long.

‘Tea,’ he said, thrusting a mug at her, and Anna took it gratefully and drank it too fast, almost scalding her mouth. It was delicious—almost as delicious as him—and nearly as welcome.

‘I needed that. How did you know?’ she said with a smile as she drained it, and he gave a chuckle and made her another one.

‘I wanted to go through the notes of my afternoon list with you,’ he said over his shoulder as he stirred the teabag round. ‘I think you know some of the patients.’

She nodded. ‘Sure. Shall we go into the office?’

‘Have you got time?’

She grinned at him. ‘One of the nice things about this job is being able to delegate most of it! Come on, I can spare you ten minutes. The notes are in there still.’

She settled down in her chair, her knees propped up on the edge of the desk, her uniform trousers protecting her modesty. ‘Tell me about Karl first,’ she prompted, trying to concentrate on something other than his long, lean legs stretched out across the floor in her office and the casual way he slouched against her desk.

‘Karl? Oh, the lad yesterday. Robert let me assist—it was interesting. We plated it. When we got in there it was quite obvious that the bone had made no attempt to heal. The main reason seemed to be that it had rotated out of alignment, so we had to break the ulna as well to correct the rotation so we could line it all up properly. We plated both just to be on the safe side. It should be a better shape than it was before, anyway, so in a strange way it might have done him a favour. How is he now?’

‘Bit groggy. Quieter than yesterday, I gather. I think he had quite a good night. Was it very traumatic to the tissues?’

He shrugged. ‘Fairly. I would expect it to be quite sore for a day or two. It was obviously quite a nasty break—I had a look at the earlier plates. It seems likely that he tried to do too much too soon and twisted it out of position inside the cast. By the time it was noticed, it was too late.’

‘That’s what you get for trying to fix an active young hellion conservatively,’ Anna said with a smile. ‘They need everything screwed together because they all want a quick fix.’

‘Everybody wants a quick fix,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I think my au pair’s going to want a quick fix. I confronted her with the phone bill this morning and she announced she wanted to go home. I bribed her by offering to forget the phone bill if she’d stay until I’d got a replacement.’

‘And?’

He shrugged. ‘She says she’ll stay—for now, at least.’

Anna felt a pang of sympathy. ‘Was it horrendous?’ she asked, and he rolled his eyes.

‘Try four figures.’

Anna’s jaw dropped. For the life of her she couldn’t conceive of finding time to build up a phone bill that huge, never mind having anyone she wanted to talk to that much!

Well. Maybe that wasn’t true—not any more. She could imagine curling up in the evening and having long, cosy chats to this man—

‘Let’s talk about your afternoon list,’ she said, dragging herself back to earth hastily. ‘Who have you got that I know?’

‘A baby with congenital club foot? David Chisholm. I think he’s been in here. He’s about eighteen months.’

Anna thought for a moment. ‘David—yes, he has. I remember him. He’s had a couple of ops already to let out the short structures on the inside of the legs. He was very bad—worst case I’ve seen, I think, not that we’ve had that many. I thought they’d got quite a good result?’

Adam nodded. ‘That’s right, but he needs another op because he’s grown and the feet are turning in again.’

‘Aren’t they splinting it?’

He nodded again. ‘Yes, but it’s not keeping up. I’m going to release the tendons again—it’s fairly rare, of course, so you don’t tend to get that much practice at this sort of thing, but we’re learning new ways of dealing with it. Sadly, it’s never going to be quite normal, of course, and I haven’t met the parents yet so I don’t know what their expectations are.’

‘High, I think. Most parents’ expectations are high. They think we can sort out everything.’

‘Well, I’ll certainly try my best, but I’m only human,’ he said with a wry smile, and her heart hiccuped. Only human’s fine by me, she wanted to tell him, but she was being silly again.

One smile! she thought crossly. One smile and you keel over and submit! You’d make a good dog.

Anna tried to pay attention—she really did—but it was hard. In the end she was rescued by the arrival of a new admission, and she went to deal with him and escaped from the intoxicating and mind-bending cosiness of her office. She was busy for the rest of the day, rushed off her feet for most of it, and by the end of it she was feeling ragged.