Marion Lennox - The Doctors’ Baby

‘And I’ll take my shoes and socks off.’ He grinned and bent down to do just that. ‘Mind, this is no small concession. It’s not every woman I’d take my shoes and socks off for.’

‘You know, I guessed that?’

He looked up at her and his smile widened.

‘Of course you did,’ he told her. ‘We’re partners, after all. And a woman needs to know a lot about her partner. Even if it is only a partnership for a month.’

THE paddle was a long one-strolling about half a mile away from the town, walking through the small breakers at the edge of the surf. Magically, Em’s beeper stayed silent. It was as if the town had thrown its worst at her over the past twenty-four hours, and knew its doctor was close to breaking point. She needed this break more desperately than she even guessed herself.

The moon was completely up now. They should go home. Em should go to bed.

‘But Anna never has the children in bed until nine,’ Jonas told her. ‘It’s no use turning up there to talk to her before that. She simply won’t listen. And paddling does the soul just as much good as sleeping.’

So they walked. Rather to Em’s regret, her hand was released, and they walked side by side, as two friends might have.

Two good friends.

It had to be good friends, she thought, because their silences weren’t uneasy. They fell into step and splashed through the shallows in unison, and the sensation was like a balm to Em’s troubled mind. She could feel the tension easing out of her, disappearing into the coolness of the surf and washing out to sea.

This was…special.

Em didn’t speak, but she soaked it all in-the night, the lovely feel of surf between her toes and the moonlight. And somewhere in that walk her feeling of desperation, of absolute weariness and of isolation, all fell away, and she knew that tonight, babies and emergencies permitting, she’d sleep like a child.

Jonas had granted this to her, she thought, and for that she was incredibly grateful. She still wasn’t sure how it had happened, but when the headland met the sea in a rocky outcrop and paddling became impossible, she turned to him impulsively.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘For what? For taking a beautiful woman for a walk along the beach?’ He smiled down at her. ‘It’s been my absolute pleasure.’

A beautiful woman…

How long since anyone had called her that? Em thought. Grandpa had, and so had Charlie, but they’d called her beautiful since she was three years old. Back at medical school she’d had a couple of boyfriends, but since moving to Bay Beach… There simply hadn’t been time for boyfriends.

No time to be called beautiful?

She grinned wryly at the thought. I should stick that in my diary, she decided, because the thought, silly though it was, was still delicious. Allow time to be described as beautiful.

‘What’s funny?’

Em smiled up at him, and then resolutely turned her face back along the beach to where Jonas had parked his car. He was driving her tonight, and that in itself was novel. ‘Nothing. It’s time for us to go and see Anna.’

He fell into step beside her. His trousers were wet to the knees-he’d rolled them up but they’d been splashed anyway and it was too warm a night to care about a spot of wetness, and the surf felt great. Em’s dress was soaked almost to the thighs but, like Jonas, she didn’t care. She was feeling so light-headed she could almost float.

It was weariness, she told herself. Or reaction to Charlie’s death. Or…something!

‘You won’t tell me the joke?’ he demanded.

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,’ he said, and before she knew what he was about his hand caught hers again and swung. ‘Because I just succeeded, and I want to know how to do it again.’

‘Succeeded?’

‘In making you smile.’ He twinkled down at her. ‘When I first saw you, I thought, I bet that woman has the most magical smile-and she has. Now there’s only one thing more I want to know.’

It was impossible not to ask the obvious. ‘Which is what?’

‘What your hair looks like unbraided,’ he threw back at her, and she gasped and lifted her spare hand defensively to the hair in question.

‘You’ll wait a while for that.’

‘Why?’ Jonas sounded curious-nothing more. Still his hand held hers and it felt good. It felt…right.

‘Because, apart from when I wash it, my hair’s unbraided for about five minutes a day,’ she said with asperity. ‘I rebraid it every night before I go to bed, so it’s ready for emergencies.’

‘You mean…’ he said slowly, looking at her out of the corner of his eye with a look she didn’t quite understand. Or didn’t quite trust. ‘You mean, if I was on call for you, so you wouldn’t be at risk of an emergency call, then you’d sleep with your hair unbraided?’

This was a ridiculous question. But he was waiting for an answer. Em kicked up a spray of water before her-for heaven’s sake, she was acting as young and as carefree as a schoolgirl on her first date-and she tilted her chin and told him.

‘I might.’

‘But it’s not definite.’ He sounded so disappointed that she almost chuckled out loud.

‘I probably would,’ she said, just to placate him. Or just to make him smile.

And she succeeded. ‘That’d make me feel so much better,’ he told her. ‘If I get called out to someone’s ingrown toenail, and I’m whittling away at rotten nail at three in the morning and smelling some farmer’s stinking feet, it’d make me feel a whole heap better knowing that my partner was sleeping at home with her hair splayed out all over the pillow…’

‘And with her dog beside her and her door firmly locked!’ She said it as a reaction, like she was slamming her hand on the lock right now!

‘Really?’ He sounded shocked at the thought of such distrust, and Em could contain herself no longer. Her laughter rang out over the waves. This man was ridiculous. Deliciously ridiculous, but ridiculous all the same.

‘Yes, Dr Lunn, with my door locked,’ she told him. ‘Do you think I’m naïve or something?’

In answer, the hold on her hand tightened even further.

‘You wouldn’t have to lock the door,’ he said virtuously. ‘Because I’d be out chopping up toenails.’ And then his voice flattened. ‘And, no, Dr Mainwaring,’ he told her, and his voice was suddenly deadly serious, ‘I think you’re all sorts of things. But I definitely don’t think you’re naïve.’

He’d caught her right off her guard. She wasn’t ready for seriousness. ‘Jonas…’

‘Emily…’ He matched her tone of uncertainty exactly, and it was all she could do not to laugh again.

‘You’re impossible! Jonas, we need to see Anna.’

‘So we do.’ He sighed. ‘So we do. But we can come back here another night. No?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What sort of answer is that?’ Once more his voice had changed and now he sounded indignant. It was impossible not to laugh.

‘It’s a safe answer,’ she told him, and then because suddenly she didn’t feel safe in the least-she felt very, very exposed-she hauled her hand from his and started to run. ‘I’ll beat you to the car, Jonas Lunn,’ she called.

She ran.

Rather to her surprise, Jonas didn’t follow suit. Instead, he stopped dead, and watched her flying figure in the moonlight, racing up the sandhills toward his waiting car.

And his smile slowly died.

‘I wonder if I’m being really, really stupid here,’ he asked himself-but there was nothing but the moon and the surf to answer him.

Jonas had been right.

Anna was terrified and ready to back out, and it took his and Em’s combined persuasion to keep her on track.

‘We’ve made the appointment.’ Jonas went through it slowly and surely. ‘And we’ve organised everything else that needs to be done. You drop Sam and Matt at school and take Ruby to Lori’s, and then I take you to Blairglen for the tests. If we’re delayed-if you need more tests than a mammogram and biopsy-then Lori will collect the children and give them their dinner.’

‘But they’ll put me straight into hospital. If it’s cancer-’

‘They won’t,’ Em said strongly, and put her hand out to cover Anna’s. The woman was trembling. This fear was the culmination of a month’s imaginings, Em thought. How much better it would have been if she’d just confronted the thing head-on when she’d first found the lump, rather than wait until it had built into this icy terror.

‘Anna, a few days now will make no difference to the outcome at all,’ she told her decisively. ‘No matter what the results of the tests are, there’s time to come home and think about it. Savour the feeling that it’s just a cyst. Or come to terms with the fact that you have an early breast cancer before you need surgery. Either way, no one’s going to rush you into something you’re unhappy with.’

Anna looked desperately from her brother to Em and back again.

‘But Jonas has already spoken to Lori about taking the kids long-term.’

‘That’s just so, if the worst comes to the worst, you know you can face it,’ Em told her, and received a grateful glance from Jonas for her pains. ‘Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It’s my personal creed and I remember it every time my phone rings.’

There was a pause while Anna thought that through. Then…

‘That must be terrible,’ Anna said slowly, for the first time looking at Em and really seeing her. ‘I hadn’t thought about it before, but now… It’s the not knowing that’s the worst, and in your job all the time there’ll be not knowing. Like that awful tractor accident last week. You had to deal with that, didn’t you?’

‘It was dreadful,’ Em said gently. ‘At the time it was frightening. But once I knew what I was dealing with, the fear faded as I worked through what had to be done. That’s exactly the same as you. Tomorrow you’ll know what you’re dealing with.’