The Doctor's Special Touch

No, she thought bleakly. She wasn’t. But she may as well reassure him that she wasn’t pretending to practise medicine.

‘If anyone arrives with broken legs or snakebite, you can be sure I’ll send them to you,’ she told him. ‘As I hope you’ll send anyone with muscle soreness to me.’

‘You expect me to refer people to you when you call yourself a doctor?’

‘Don’t be elitist.’

‘Don’t indulge in deception.’

‘I’m not!’

‘Look, Ally…’

This was going nowhere. ‘I have work to do,’ she told him. ‘Your paint is drying.’

‘You can’t do this.’

‘Watch me.’ She sighed. ‘You’re just upset because my sign is bigger than yours.’

‘Some of us have ethical standards.’

‘Well, bully for some of us,’ she snapped. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have a sign to write and I’ve just decided it needs work. It needs to be bigger.’

He stared at her for a long moment. But there was no more to be said. They both knew it.

Finally he turned and stalked up to his surgery door. He disappeared, slamming the door behind him.

He left blue footprints all the way.

Ally was left staring after him. What to do now?

Nothing, she told herself. There was nothing she could do. Just get on with it.

‘Whoops,’ she said again. She took a deep breath—and then grinned into the morning sun. Whether she had Darcy Rochester’s approval or whether she didn’t, she was home again and nothing and no one was going to interfere with her happiness.

CHAPTER TWO

THROUGHOUT the next few days Darcy worked on as if she wasn’t there. Well, why not? What did a massage therapist have to do with him?

Nothing.

The fact that the entire population was talking about her was none of his business either.

At least he had work to distract him from a woman who was dangerously close to being distracting all by herself.

In truth, he’d seldom been as busy as he was right now. The fine autumn weather broke the afternoon of Charlie Hammer’s funeral, meaning the fishing fleet couldn’t leave port. The town’s fishermen decided en masse that if they were in port anyway they may as well kill time getting their assorted ills seen to, swelling his already too-long patient lists.

Then the little community in the hills above the town—alternative lifestylers who didn’t believe in getting their children immunised—were hit by an epidemic of chickenpox. As he had three kids with complications and parents who agonised and discussed ad nauseam every treatment he advised—and then refused to let him treat them anyway—he was going quietly nuts. But going nuts wasn’t on the agenda. If he stopped calmly discussing treatments with these parents, if he stopped negotiating that at least they keep track of fluid balances—if he lost his cool—then these kids wouldn’t make it to be insurance salesmen or astrophysicists or whatever else kids of dyed-in-the-wool hippies became if they survived childhood.

Then there was the added complication of the entire town trooping by to see Ally’s much talked-of new premises. While they were there, they remembered they may just as well pop next door to the doctor’s surgery and make an appointment to have their sore elbow seen to, or talk about Mum’s Alzheimer’s—and see for themselves just how Dr Rochester was taking this new arrival.

Doris Kerr had obviously spread the fact that Darcy hadn’t reacted with pleasure to Ally’s arrival. His reaction had gone down like a lead balloon. Every single patient commented on the hive of industry next door to his surgery. Many of the long-term town residents—those who remembered Ally from childhood—took pains to tell him how wonderful it was that a little girl they’d clearly held in affection had finally come home.

And their message was clear. ‘Don’t mess with Ally Westruther. Even if her sign is bigger than yours.’

Fine. He wouldn’t mess with Ally Westruther. He didn’t want to think about her. But not thinking about her was impossible, too.

Even among his staff… Betty, his receptionist, got teary-eyed about Ally at least twice a day.

‘Oh, Dr Rochester, I’m so pleased to think that little mite has finally found her way home,’ she told him. ‘And to have another Dr Westruther in town… It seems so right.’

He grimaced but somehow he refrained from saying, ‘She’s not a doctor.’

He thought it, though.

What had she said? Contact my university and ask.

OK, so she probably did have some sort of doctorate, he conceded, and maybe he’d been being petty, suggesting it was in basket weaving. But you couldn’t get doctorates in massage. He knew that. He’d checked. He’d checked five minutes after he’d unsuccessfully tried to clean his shoes.

So the doctorate she was using to promote her massage business must be in something esoteric—like the mating habits of North Baluchistan dung beetles or the literary comparison of Byron and Tennyson or…or something, and she couldn’t make a living so she’d turned to massage and was using her doctorate to attract patients.

That was a guess, he conceded. Nearly everything was a guess when it came to Ally. As much as the locals were pleased to see her, no one knew what she’d been doing in the last twenty years or so.

‘Her mother brought her home to her grandpa when she was tiny,’ Betty told him, unasked, as she was sorting patient records he needed for the afternoon. ‘There was a really unhappy marriage and her father went to jail. I can’t remember all the details but I know old Doc Westruther wouldn’t speak of him. Her mother didn’t stay very long—she disappeared and no one knew where she went—but when she went she left the little girl behind. Then suddenly the old doc died and her father turned up to claim her. There were so many people who would have taken her in but her father just said, “She’s my kid and she comes with me.” There was nothing we could do about it. No one knew where her mother was. I remember her father dragging her into a beat-up old jalopy and Sue, her best friend, wailing at the top of her lungs. I saw them leave town. Her little face was pressed against the car’s back window and…well, the memory never left me. I wondered and wondered. Her father seemed brutal.’

Brutal. Darcy was trying to concentrate on reading Mrs Skye’s patient notes. Elsie Skye’s gout had been playing up and she was coming to see him for the third time. If the treatment he had her on wasn’t working then he needed to think about reasons. What blood tests were appropriate? This level of gout might even indicate malignancy. He needed to check.

But Ally’s face still intruded. He thought about the way she’d reacted to his initial blaze of anger. She’d flinched. A brutal father? His move to reassure her had maybe been appropriate. ‘That’s dreadful,’ he conceded.

‘So don’t you think you might have acted a bit harshly yourself?’ Betty probed. ‘Doris said you were mean.’

That was a little unfair. ‘I was not mean. She spilled paint over my shoes. They’re permanently blue.’

‘Like you can’t afford to buy new shoes.’

‘Most receptionists,’ he told her, in a voice laced with warning, ‘would be sympathetic to their boss when someone threw blue paint at his expensive shoes.’

She grinned. Betty was sixty years old; she’d been receptionist to the three doctors who’d taken care of Tambrine Creek in living memory; and she knew every single patient’s history backward. She was invaluable and she knew it. So she could give as much cheek as she liked.

‘I’m more likely to be sympathetic to Ally,’ she retorted. ‘She needs it. Her grandpa was a harsh man and we worried that her father was worse. I don’t think she’s had it easy.’

‘She shouldn’t call herself a doctor.’

‘Will you get off your high horse? You know as well as I do that if she puts up a sign saying simply, “Ally Westruther, Massage”, every second fisherman’s lad will take it the wrong way and she’ll be fighting them off with sticks.’

He hadn’t thought of that.

‘And she’s got nothing.’ Betty was pushing inexorably on. ‘The boys have been helping her set up. She didn’t want anyone to help, but this bad weather has everyone bored and they’re more than keen to help. So they’ve insisted. Her room downstairs looks nice now. They’ve painted it and she has a lovely massage table and a big heater and everything you’d want. But Russ Ewing blew a fuse when he was sandblasting her front steps and he had to go upstairs to change it. She hasn’t invited anyone up there and now we know why. She’s sleeping on a mattress on the floor. She’s got nothing.’