The Doctor's Unexpected Family Read online

  Tom looked horrified. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘But even if they are, they’d have to appreciate the thought.’

  ‘True. And did he appreciate the casserole?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t laid eyes on him. I gave it to her. Suzy Screenwriter.’ Damn. ‘Suzy…Vaughan, it is. I got the feeling she might have thought it was, well, too home-made.’

  ‘But that’s what we’re about, Caroline. A country welcome, a home-made atmosphere. I know you think I’m going overboard on this.’

  ‘I don’t, really. I understand, Tom. I’m going overboard, too. I’d have appreciated a home-made casserole, if it was me. Probably they did, too.’

  ‘I’m not so concerned about her, to be honest.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Really, you’re right about her not finding employment here. We’re going to, seriously, have to hope that she drops out of the picture.’

  ‘Oh, no, that’s the one piece of good news. She’s going to write a novel, so that makes her much more portable.’

  ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ His face brightened. ‘Perfect!’

  ‘She’s excited about the prospect of solitude in Glenfallon, and the lack of distractions.’

  ‘Translation—the boredom?’ A twinkle appeared in Dr Robinson’s eye, beneath the big brows.

  ‘I’m pinning big hopes on that novel,’ Caroline answered, and her statement was punctuated by a knock at the door.

  ‘That’s him,’ Dr Robinson mouthed.

  Having had her curiosity and her expectations built up by several weeks of rumours concerning the new pathologist, not to mention a curly Irish accent on the phone and three days of worrying about the casserole, the kitchen supplies and the screenwriting girlfriend, Caroline found she was holding her breath and squeezing her hands into damp fists.

  They all wanted this new appointment to be a success. With the spectre of health-funding cuts and consolidation of services, Glenfallon Hospital needed to grow if it was to serve its community adequately. Declan McCulloch was just a single link in the chain, but to this department he was a crucial one.

  Tom cleared his throat. ‘Come in,’ he called, and the door opened.

  A tall, strong, easy-moving male figure appeared, with a face already smiling, and an air about him of already knowing how much he was wanted here. For some reason, Caroline’s heart at once began to beat faster.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IF ANYONE had told Declan McCulloch, this time last year, that he’d be walking into a small pathology department in rural Australia on a morning in mid-March for his first day on the job, he’d have laughed at them.

  Moving to Australia? When he’d finished his specialist training and was set up in London, making his parents proud? When he’d tucked himself beneath the wing of a successful professional mentor and was on track for a stellar career? No, thanks!

  But he hadn’t reckoned on Suzy, or on his own willingness to be, effectively, swept off his feet. The whole thing still surprised him, when he thought back on it.

  They’d met in a London pub. Across a crowded room kind of thing. ‘I’m a sucker for an Irish accent,’ she’d told him, in a very attractive accent of her own. She’d made all the moves. He hadn’t been used to that, and he’d liked it, loved her brash confidence. After so much hard work to get where he was in his profession, Suzy had brightened his world like an exotic cocktail on a tropical beach. He must have been restless without even realising it.

  They’d slept together immediately.

  Seriously! That night.

  Her idea. Her moves.

  He had been innocent enough, old-fashioned enough, that her willingness to take it so far, so soon, had shocked him. He would have been content to wait. He’d even wondered since that night whether he should have gone with a more cautious instinct to put on the brakes for a week or two. But how could he have politely declined such a dazzling invitation, when it had seemed to answer such a hunger in him?

  There was a wicked, competitive aura to their relationship, a sense that both of them were playing a delicious and sometimes dangerous game. Chess, or fencing. She’d mentioned Sydney only a few weeks after they’d met. ‘You’d love it.’ He hadn’t taken her seriously at that point. Not at all. Why on earth would a medical specialist want to leave London?

  And then she’d been offered the scriptwriting job for the drama series. Her agent in Sydney had told her she would be crazy to turn it down. She’d been trying to make a career as a playwright and screenwriter in London, but after some months nothing much had happened, while the work in Sydney had been a good, concrete offer that could lead to bigger things. She had taken her agent’s advice and accepted.

  More seriously and more urgently, she’d told him again, ‘You’d really love Sydney,’ and she’d painted her word pictures in such beautiful colours that he’d quickly gone from laughing at her—Sydney was out of the question!—to talking with her about how it could be managed. He had no personal ties to London. He hadn’t bought real estate. None of his siblings lived here. The closest was his sister Maeve, in Scotland.

  ‘And if it doesn’t work out, you can always come back,’ Suzy had said.

  True. He’d taken a two-year leave of absence from his position at the hospital. His boats were not burned.

  Oddly, the decision hadn’t been set in stone until they’d discovered that he couldn’t actually live in Sydney at all, or at least not for the first year or two, if he wanted to work at the same time. He’d always reacted badly to being told that something was impossible. The red tape surrounding the possibility of following Suzy to Australia had become a reason to carry through with the idea, not a reason to let it go.

  Suzy had flown home to start work on her TV series three months before he’d been able to wind up his life in London and join her. He’d then spent two summer months lazing on Bondi beach and playing housekeeper to her breadwinner while they’d got to know each other in a different environment, and now he was here.

  Ready for it, actually.

  He wasn’t from a moneyed background as Suzy was. He’d worked hard for everything he had, and he’d never taken a two-month break before. To be honest, after the first couple of weeks he’d had to consciously fill his days in order not to be bored. He’d learned to surf, learned to cook and had started to prepare for the onerous Australian exams which even a fully qualified London specialist couldn’t take lightly.

  And now he was here.

  ‘Declan!’ Tom Robinson said. He took three strides across his grey-walled and rather spartan office and held out his hand, pumped Declan’s heartily. ‘Good to see you! Settled in? Happy with everything? Finding your way around town? Do tell Caroline if you have any problems with the house, won’t you?’

  Tom indicated the woman who stood in the background. In strictest truth, this office wasn’t large enough to contain a background, but if there had been one, Declan had no doubt that Caroline would have been standing as deep in it as she could get.

  ‘Caroline Archer, Declan McCulloch,’ Tom added.

  Wearing a patterned navy blouse and plain navy skirt as a uniform, she had her arms folded across her chest in a gesture that said, Please don’t shake my hand. Her backside was pressed against the edge of Tom’s desk. Had the desk not been there, she would have backed herself as far as the wall.

  ‘In practical terms, she’s your landlady,’ Tom explained.

  I suppose I did look a little confused at the sight of her, Declan thought.

  He was more confused now. Dr Robinson had invited his new landlady in to the department to greet him on his first day at work? Why?

  ‘My parents own the house,’ Caroline explained.

  She was pretty when her cheeks were flushed. She had dark, straight, shiny hair folded up into a big clip at the back, green eyes and a figure that most women would consider too plump. Most men wouldn’t, since it was plump in all the best places.

  ‘Right,’ Declan answered helpfully.
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  ‘She’s also one of our cyto technicians, and a very good one, as you’ll soon discover.’

  ‘OK, now it’s all falling into place.’

  ‘Good,’ Caroline said. ‘I realised, of course, that I should have explained on the phone the other day.’

  ‘Well, I did recognise that it was a hospital number I’d dialled, but I had no idea it was going to be in my own department,’ Declan said.

  ‘Right, OK.’ She smiled. Tom smiled. Declan decided to smile, too, to blend in with the local crowd.

  ‘No problems with the house?’ Caroline said.

  ‘No, everything was fine. The chicken thing was delicious. You didn’t have to do that for us.’

  ‘We’re anxious to have you settle in comfortably, Declan,’ Tom said.

  Too anxious, and not hiding it successfully.

  Caroline thinks so as well.

  Their eyes locked together for a moment, and in hers he saw a pained expression that he understood. Relax, he tried to tell her with his eyes and his smile. Tom means well, and I can see that, and I’m not going to put you in an awkward position here at work, or with the house.

  Not that a glance and a quirk of the lips could achieve as much communication as that. Something must have got through, however, because she did relax and she looked grateful. She had a lovely smile—not dazzling but misty soft, quiet. It was a smile you could trust.

  ‘Well,’ Tom said, ‘let me take you round, show you the place, introduce you. Caroline, could you get out the slides for the case I mentioned earlier? The one I wanted to show him?’

  ‘Yes, the slide tray’s already on my desk.’

  Caroline let the two men leave first, and took a moment to wipe her damp hands on her skirt after they’d done so.

  ‘What on earth must he think of us?’ she muttered.

  Well, she could answer that question.

  He thinks we’re quaint and funny and well-meaning, and that he’s going to have to be very tactful and gentle with us, and of course he’s right. Meanwhile, what do we think of him? I wonder.

  He was certainly good-looking. He wasn’t as tall as Tom but he was better proportioned, with broad, strong shoulders and solid packs of muscle softening the contours of an otherwise lean frame.

  His eyes were a soft grey-blue, and his hair was the kind of brown that could secretly begin to turn grey without anyone noticing for a good while. Caroline was an authority on this issue, because hers wasn’t that kind of brown at all. It was too dark, the grey hairs showed, and she’d had to pick out a few of them lately.

  She was thirty-four, not anywhere near old enough for grey hairs. Dr McCulloch must be around the same age. If she hadn’t known he was Irish, she’d have guessed him to be younger, on the strength of his skin. An Australian man in his mid-thirties would have had crow’s feet, but Dr McCulloch didn’t. He had good skin—smooth, even toned, the slightest of tans and the subtlest of freckles, legacy of his first Australian summer, she guessed.

  On first assessment, too, he had an Irish charm that went beyond his good looks and might have seemed like a cliché. All Irishmen were supposed to be charming, weren’t they? Charming and silver-tongued. Except that the charm in this one was tempered by a degree of caution and inner quiet which made him seem a little bit different.

  Way too much to conclude after all of three minutes’ acquaintance. But first impressions did count. On the strength of this one, Dr Declan McCulloch would be all right. If he stayed.

  Leaving Tom Robinson’s office, Caroline heard her boss’s voice coming from along the corridor. He’d dropped back into his hearty, making-you-feel-welcome tone. She heard her fellow cyto tech, Natalia Akhmanov, give a laugh on cue. Like everyone else, she was doing exactly as ordered and trying far too hard.

  I’m going to start work, Caroline decided. I’m going to forget the man is even here.

  She made herself a cup of coffee, greeted Natalia as she came towards their shared office and sat down at her desk. She switched on her microscope and computer, and the hard drive began to hum.

  ‘This lot will keep us busy all morning,’ Natalia said.

  ‘And me all afternoon as well,’ Caroline agreed.

  Their in-box was already piled with slide trays. A high percentage of their work consisted of Pap smears, but there could also be urine, sputum and cerebrospinal fluid samples, all of them prepared and logged into the computer by lab technicians Mary, Julianne and Irena.

  They began their work in an atmosphere of focused silence. Down the corridor came the faint sound of laughter from the lab technicians, punctuating the tap of Natalia’s computer keys. A glass slide clicked and squeaked as Caroline slid it beneath her microscope.

  With an efficiency that came from years of practice, she rolled the control knob between finger and thumb, bringing different areas of the sample into view. Stained with red and blue pigments that ended up as a range of pink, purple and blue tones, the cells were oddly beautiful in the round window of light. If you didn’t know what they were, you might think they were fabric patterns or abstract paintings.

  It was her job to know what they were, however—to recognise tell-tale signs of abnormality in the structure or shape or staining of a cell. This was what she loved about her job—its sense of familiarity, its regular boundaries and just the odd occasion when it wasn’t familiar and the boundaries weren’t regular, so that she didn’t ever get too complacent.

  She spent ten minutes on the first slide, marking clusters of normal cervix cells with a tiny blue dot of acrylic artist’s ink. She would use white dots to mark any abnormal cells, but white wasn’t necessary on this test because everything looked fine. Their rate of abnormal Pap smears was, very roughly, one in ten.

  ‘Can you put the Mitchell case into the multi-header for me, Caroline?’ Dr Robinson said behind her, fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Of course.’ She went to the larger microscope in the middle of the room, switched it on and slid in one of the series of slides showing seventy-two-year-old Roy Mitchell’s cerebrospinal fluid. The multi-header microscope had four eyepieces, and was used to review abnormal samples as a group.

  ‘I love the view from our windows, here, Declan,’ her boss said behind her, as she looked into the eyepiece and searched for the most interesting area on the slide. ‘The morning light through the eucalyptus trees, and the sunsets we sometimes get.’

  For heaven’s sake, Tom, stop selling the place to him! she wanted to say. Stop trying so hard!

  Instead, she tried too hard, herself, to get the slide positioned quickly, as a way of getting Tom to stop rhapsodising about sunsets. Damn! She’d flicked the slide tray’s control too far around and lost the section she was looking for.

  Filling in time, Tom said to the new pathologist, ‘It’s an unusual case, Declan, and I thought you might like to have a look at it. You’ll find, you see, that even though we’re a small department we do get a wide range of interesting things to look at. Some very nice stuff. There’s more patient contact than you’d get in a large hospital or private lab, too, and—Anyway,’ he interrupted himself, ‘let’s take a look at this lovely sample. Caroline?’

  ‘Almost got it, I think.’ Disciplining herself to forget that Declan McCulloch’s hip, clad in dark linen blend, stood just beyond her peripheral vision, she concentrated and positioned the slide at last. ‘There!’ She pushed her chair back in relief and stood up, guessing that Tom would want the central control position now.

  Her boss had crowded so close behind her, however, that she had to sidle past Declan McCulloch before he and Tom could sit down. Declan’s legs brushed her skirt. He apologised, and so did she.

  Seated, he peered into one of the multi-header’s auxiliary eyepieces, waiting for Tom, and she watched his neck stretch as he leaned forward. His hair finished above his collar in little waves that looked soft against his skin, and the knobs of his vertebrae were straight and even.

  Apparently, Tom wasn’t happy with
the particular cell cluster she’d chosen, and twiddled the positioning knob for some seconds before he found what he wanted. Declan sat opposite her, peering into another eyepiece, while Natalia took up the last available position. They all enjoyed the opportunity to look at interesting slides as a group.

  ‘Ah, yes, now, this one’s better,’ Tom said. He rolled another knob between his fingers, bringing up a tiny, bright golden arrow to indicate the group of cells he was looking at. ‘Declan?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Lovely.’

  His tone made Caroline think of the Queen on a royal tour, politely admiring a floral arrangement created in her honour. How quaint, he was probably thinking, that these colonial medical people should try so hard to provide him with interesting examples of malignant cells on his very first day.

  ‘Except, of course, that this patient is not going to live beyond the end of the year,’ she said in a mild tone. She stood up from the multi-header and went back to her own microscope. She brought up her current case on the computer and began to key in the required information without troubling to see how the two doctors had taken her statement.

  She’d aimed it at Tom. He really couldn’t talk about a slide like this being ‘a lovely sample’ in the hope of impressing the new man. But her comment had actually sounded more like a criticism of Dr McCulloch’s use of ‘lovely’, although she’d recognised the gentle mockery in the Irish pathologist’s voice and knew he’d echoed his new boss deliberately.

  ‘You’re right, Caroline,’ Dr McCulloch said behind her, and she turned from the screen to face him, swivelling on her wheeled chair. ‘They’re not just cells. There’s a doctor out there with some bad news to break when he gets the report on this one, Tom.’

  ‘Not necessarily a local doctor either,’ Tom answered, oblivious to the mild reproach. ‘We have a large catchment area here. Some days you’ll speak on the phone to a GP who might be a hundred miles away, or more, which is probably not an experience you’ve had in London.’