The Doctor's Unexpected Family Read online

  Still speaking with enthusiasm about his department, Tom walked Declan McCulloch along to his new office. Caroline turned gratefully back to her work.

  After four hours and a couple of trips along to the lab or across to Tom’s office with questions, a spot high on her spine had begun to ache and she was ready to tackle some stretching exercises before lunch. New ergonomic chairs were on order, but they hadn’t arrived yet. Natalia often had problems with her back, too. It was tiring to spend so many hours over a microscope, and they couldn’t afford to let aches and pains compromise the accuracy of their screening. The task took full concentration.

  She leaned back, arched her spine, pushed her wheeled chair away from the desk and stretched her arms behind her. At that moment, Tom and Dr McCulloch came past the cyto techs’ office, stopping in the doorway. Her un-selfconscious and cat-like stretch was suddenly on public display.

  ‘I’m taking Declan to lunch in town,’ Tom said. ‘I think he’ll be pleasantly surprised at the standard of the Glenfallon Bakery, particularly if we go through into the Old Bank section.’

  ‘Lovely!’ Caroline answered, then almost bit her tongue.

  Just how lovely could everything in this town get?

  ‘Would you like to come?’ the Irishman suggested. His smile twinkled in her direction.

  Flustered, she answered, ‘Thanks, but I’m already booked for the hospital café with Natalia.’

  Dr McCulloch shrugged, clicked his tongue and quirked the corner of his mouth downward. ‘That’s too bad.’

  Caroline realised too late that his suggestion hadn’t been just a piece of politeness. He’d actively wanted a third party to water down the intensity of Tom’s overpowering enthusiasm.

  Oh, Tom, you dear, desperate man! We’ll be lucky to keep the poor bloke for six months at this rate, she thought as her boss shepherded the new recruit out of the department and down the stairs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘I SHOULD have said no to Tom,’ Caroline muttered to herself, as she pulled up in front of her parents’ house at just after five. ‘I should have used Josh as an excuse. I really don’t want to be doing this!’

  ‘Declan left early,’ Tom had told her half an hour before. ‘He had more unpacking to do. Just drop in on your way home, very casually, could you? To make sure everything’s all right? You can mention the barbecue idea, too. Natalia’s happy to have it at her place, she says.’

  ‘You couldn’t mention it to him yourself tomorrow?’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ Tom had replied decisively, ‘in case he makes other plans.’

  ‘Or by phone?’

  ‘Much better in person. Flexible, though, Caroline. If he wants Suzy included, and if she’s not coming down this weekend, suggest the next.’

  ‘All right,’ she’d answered, feeling Tom’s urgency and understanding it, even though she knew he was going about this all wrong.

  She really didn’t have an excuse not to call in on Dr McCulloch, unfortunately. Josh had gym after school on Mondays, and a joint science project to work on with the same friend, Rohan, who also went to gym. Rohan’s mother had suggested that she pick both boys up and that Josh stay for dinner after he and Rohan had worked on the project.

  Not that Declan McCulloch knew about this plan, so she could fib if she needed to—if lurching through her script about the house and the barbecue invitation just got too horribly awkward—and could use Josh as an excuse. It was one of the rare benefits of being a single parent.

  And with luck the man wouldn’t even be home…

  He was.

  ‘Hi,’ she bleated, when he appeared at the door in answer to her knock.

  ‘Hi, yourself.’ Although he flashed a crooked smile, he didn’t look particularly overjoyed to see her.

  Naturally enough.

  He’d changed out of his professional trousers and shirt and wore a pair of ragged, snug-fitting jeans, athletic shoes and a black T-shirt, obviously with the intention of hefting boxes around. Caroline didn’t know if Suzy was still in town, hefting boxes too. Either way, her own presence was an intrusion.

  ‘Come in,’ he added, after a moment.

  He wore his hair longish on top and it rippled in lazy, untidy waves over his nicely shaped head, mussed up by the work he’d been doing. He had a dust mark on his cheek, and he must have felt it because he pulled a white tissue from his back pocket and brushed at it, frowning, as he waited for her to speak.

  ‘Look, I won’t,’ she answered. ‘I just dropped in to make sure everything was working properly, and that you and Suzy are happy. With the house,’ she added, as if he might otherwise have thought she was asking about the state of their relationship.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘Suzy went back this morning. She has script meetings the rest of the week. But, no, we’re fine, there’s hot water coming out of the taps and cold air in the fridge, and what more could we need?’

  ‘Good. That’s great.’

  ‘Oh, but one thing. Is there somewhere I can store our boxes once they’re empty?’ His accent stretched the last word out, and made it flutter on his tongue. Caroline could have closed her eyes and listened to him speaking the way she listened to music. ‘Up in the ceiling? Or is the garage dry enough when it rains? I’ll flatten them, and they won’t take up a lot of room, but I want to hang onto them.’

  For the next two years.

  Until he and Suzy moved back to Sydney.

  Tom was chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow on this one.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she answered vaguely, washed with a flood of disappointment, for Tom’s sake. ‘I think the garage stays dry and, yes, there’s a big hatch in the laundry ceiling. Wherever you like.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘There’s a long aluminium ladder in the garage. You could lay that flat on the concrete and sit the boxes on top. That would let some air circulate underneath, keep the damp and the beetles from getting to them.’

  ‘I’ll do that, that’s a good idea. Thanks.’

  Caroline could see that, as far as he was concerned, the conversation had reached the end-game.

  ‘Um,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to invite you to a barbecue.’

  ‘Supposed to?’

  ‘Tom. Well, we discussed it. All of us. At Natalia’s. A welcome from the department, a chance to meet some other people from the hospital, as well as our families. This weekend, or next, depending on whether Suzy’s down, because, of course, we want to welcome her as well, make her part of the—’

  Stop, Caroline.

  ‘I’m not sure when she’ll be down, unfortunately,’ he said. A small furrow had appeared in his forehead between a pair of well-separated brows. It gave him a forbidding look, and suggested the strength of will that lay beneath the polite, accommodating manner. ‘It depends on her rewrites, whether they’re major or minor, and when they’re due, and whether she has to have another meeting about them. Writer stuff. Can I let you know?’

  ‘Let Tom know.’

  ‘Could you let Tom know, as well, Caroline, that he can relax a little bit?’ His expression stretched into an appeal, almost causing a dimple in one cheek. ‘I’m feeling somewhat—’

  More than somewhat, she could tell.

  ‘Oh, swamped, smothered, I know!’ She pressed her hands to her face, cheeks burning. ‘Please, let me apologise on his behalf. He means well, but sometimes he can’t let things go. Please, take it with a grain of salt, and don’t let it put you off, because we’re all so much hoping that you’ll settle—Oh, crumbs! Bloody hell! I’m doing it too now, aren’t I? As bad as he is!’

  She looked up at him, gave a desperate, upside-down grin and spread her arms in a helpless gesture.

  ‘Hey, now,’ he said gently, his voice like sweet milk, fresh from the cow. ‘This is ridiculous. Why don’t you come in? Seriously, and have a glass of wine. Or a beer, if you’re that way inclined. I have both.’

  ‘No, I—’ Can eas
ily pretend that I have to pick up Josh.

  ‘I mean it. Sorry I didn’t insist on it at first. I shouldn’t tar you with Tom’s brush. You won’t spend the next hour impersonating a Glenfallon travel brochure, will you?’

  ‘Oh, no! Did Tom—?’

  ‘Quite a long travel brochure, too. Three-quarters of an hour, over lunch. Wineries, olive groves, Carrawirra National Park…’

  ‘Oh, no, how dreadful!’

  She laughed, because he was laughing, too. His eyes looked more blue than grey when he laughed, and they twinkled. Thank goodness he had a sense of humour!

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and she followed him into the house, while he did a terrible, hysterical imitation of Tom’s educated Australian voice extolling the delights of Glenfallon in fluent brochure-ese. ‘Nestled in the rolling hills that slope towards the fertile green of award-winning vineyards lies—White, red or amber?’ he interrupted himself.

  ‘Oh, white. Would be lovely.’

  ‘Already chilled.’ He opened the fridge and flourished a bottle. ‘Verdelho. Suzy and I did a winery tour yesterday, so it’s local.’

  ‘The Leader Buslines tour, was it? Some friends and I did that last year.’

  ‘I thought it was only for tourists.’

  ‘It is, but we did it anyway. It shouldn’t be just for tourists. It was a lot of fun, and we learned enough about wine for me to pretend I know what a Verdelho is.’

  ‘You know about as much as me, then. Sun-room?’

  She’d noticed coming through from the front door that he and Suzy had the rather small, dark lounge-room set up as his study, since Suzy had nabbed the room with the garden view for hers. Now, coming into the sun-room, she found that this was where they intended the focus of the house to be, and it worked well this way.

  They had their music system set up as well as a television. Couches, armchairs and end-tables were casually arranged to face the French windows that opened onto a paved patio. On the patio, they’d placed a gas barbecue and some freshly potted orange trees with the nursery tags still attached. They must have bought them on the weekend.

  Declan’s time in Glenfallon might only be temporary, but he still considered it worthwhile to create a feeling of home here. Caroline liked that. It gave her a tiny bit of hope on Tom’s behalf.

  As if he’d read her mind, Declan asked, ‘Tell me about Tom. Tell me why he’s persecuting me like this.’ He grinned to soften his statement, and she grinned back, finding his face very easy to watch.

  As she mentally scrambled to put her answer together, he sank into the striped and padded cushions of a cane couch, and leaned forward to the coffee-table where he’d placed the wine. Watching knotted arm muscles stretch out, and lean fingers twist the corkscrew, she told him simply, ‘He’d like you to put down roots and stay forever.’

  ‘He must know that’s unlikely.’ The cork came out of the bottle neck with a resonant thlop, and straw-coloured wine gurgled into the two stemmed glasses. Like a wine waiter, Declan gave a deft twist to the bottle so that it didn’t drip, and set it on the long, low coffee-table beside a wooden bowl filled with what he probably called ‘crisps’.

  ‘Rationally, yes,’ Caroline answered. ‘But we need two pathologists now. Tom himself…’ She hesitated, weighing Tom’s request for confidentiality against the need to explain his over-the-top behaviour. ‘Will obviously have to retire eventually, and he cares too much about the department to be able to contemplate leaving it in the hands of someone who’s not right. Or, worse, leaving before there’s a replacement in view at all.’

  ‘Given the chronic shortage of medical specialists in rural Australia, right?’ He stood up and stretched across the coffee-table to give her the wine. She took care that their fingers didn’t touch.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It seems like a nice town,’ he offered.

  ‘It is. It’s lovely. But I can see that your personal circumstances don’t fit what Tom wants. I’ll try to make sure he doesn’t persecute you any further.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. As long as I’ve got someone to share a laugh with when he starts on the Tidy Town of the Year routine.’

  ‘Me? Laugh with me?’

  ‘If you don’t mind.’ He sat down, and their eyes met once more and held for a moment.

  ‘I never mind a good laugh,’ she told him. ‘But I’m fond of Tom. Don’t be unkind.’

  ‘I’m sorry that you think I would.’

  ‘I don’t think that. Not necessarily. But I don’t know you very well yet, so…’

  After an hour, she knew him better, although she couldn’t have described very clearly what she’d learned. That he listened well. That he took his work seriously. That he liked its measured pace, and the opportunities it offered for solitude.

  ‘You don’t like actual, breathing patients?’

  ‘Oh, I do. Patients—people—are fascinating. But I can overdose on them if I’m not careful. The other specialty I considered was emergency medicine, but it was too…potent, or something. I thrived on my emergency stints during training, but in the long term it would have burned me out. Pathology is about puzzle solving, and pattern recognition. There’s a satisfaction to it. Very cerebral. Very organised. Well, you’d know. You must have become a cyto technician for similar reasons.’

  ‘I became a cyto tech because I’d dropped out of medicine and I was disgusted with myself.’ The wine had gone to her head. She shouldn’t tell him this stuff. ‘I’d planned on being a doctor for so long, but I couldn’t juggle it with Josh when he was a baby.’

  ‘Your son? He’s—?’

  ‘Eleven. Twelve, soon.’

  ‘OK.’ He nodded.

  ‘If I’d been sensible, I would have deferred for a couple of years, but instead I pressed on, took my third-year exams on zero sleep and failed in spectacular fashion. I guess my—Realistically, my marriage had already begun to self-destruct even before he was born and—Gosh, Verdelho packs a punch, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A nice one.’ He grinned. His eyes twinkled and locked her in their beam of dancing Irish light.

  ‘No, not nice at all,’ she said. ‘Very tricky. Because I’m not telling you about my divorce, I’m telling you about my job. I didn’t want to feel like a complete fai—Well, I wanted to be connected with medicine in some way—a satisfying way—so I ended up doing a science degree part time, and then the two-year training course for this full time. I moved back here about four years ago, and have been peering down microscopes under Tom Robinson’s guidance ever since.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. His eyes were still twinkling.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t usually get tipsy on one glass of wine, and give people the unexpurgated story of my life.’

  And I don’t want you to think I’m this awful, sozzled divorcee who doesn’t know when to go home.

  She stood, and put the empty glass down.

  ‘I topped it up,’ he said. ‘You didn’t notice, I guess.’

  ‘Topped it up? On my empty stomach? You devil.’

  ‘I’m not. But you’re right, I should have asked if you wanted it. Innocent mistake. Hey, could you show me that ladder before you go? You said it was in the garage, but I don’t remember seeing it.’

  ‘Oh, Dad’s probably got it resting up on the rafters. That’s a nuisance. I’ll help you get it down. If I can have a very big glass of water first.’

  The water helped a bit. They went out to the old-fashioned detached garage, and Declan tackled the big, stiff padlock on the wooden doors with much more authority than Caroline herself could have mustered at the moment. Blame the wine.

  He hadn’t troubled to put his car inside. Instead, it was sitting on the apron of pale grey concrete in front, a late model Audi, shiny and dark blue.

  ‘Should I keep the car in the garage?’ He must have seen her looking at it. ‘So far, I’ve been lazy about it, with no remote-control doors.’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you it’s safe in the driveway…but I t
hink it probably is, in this street. It’s far enough back from the road that it’s almost out of sight in the dark.’

  Darkness was, in fact, beginning to fall. Maybe she’d been here more than an hour. Declan—he’d said please call him that—swung the doors open and Caroline found the light switch. As a child, she’d considered this garage horribly spooky and still approached it cautiously in case of spiders.

  ‘Yes, it’s up there.’ She pointed. As well as the ladder, Dad had stored piles of old timber across the rafters, ready for Dad-type carpentry projects which he could only describe in the vaguest terms and which rarely materialised. If he and Mum moved to the Gold Coast permanently after their open-ended trial run, Caroline would have to be very firm with him about getting rid of the wood and not taking it with him. Mum would go nuts.

  ‘How do we get it down?’ Declan asked, peering up at the ladder.

  ‘Stand on the workbench. I mean, I will. And I’ll pass it to you.’

  ‘No, I’ll do it.’

  He’d climbed onto the built-in workbench beneath the windows before she could protest. His body moved efficiently, like an athlete’s, and the fabric of T-shirt and jeans stretched across his back and thighs. Caroline found herself staring at him, appreciating the male strength, the lack of fuss, the confidence, the whole way he moved. He began to slide the ladder across the beams and she caught her wilful gaze and controlled it just in time.

  ‘It’s probably filthy up there,’ she told him.

  ‘No! Really?’ He lifted his hands, grinned and showed her palms already greyed with dust and grease.

  ‘Oh, worse than I thought! I’m sorry.’

  ‘And me in my best clothes, too. Actually…’ He studied her and frowned, his gaze sweeping up and down. She felt herself flushing, self-conscious about the final couple of kilos she still hadn’t shed on her diet, the tired blouse she’d been wearing all day and the full breasts beneath, which should belong to some sensual cinematic siren not to a divorcee mother of one in an Australian country town. ‘You’re the one in the nice clothes.’

  ‘I won’t wipe my hands on my skirt.’