Christmas Knight Page 9

  ‘I haven’t had a t-tetanus needle f-for a while,’ Brian stammered, and Grant, wise in the way of patient denial, wondered just how serious the real problem was.

  ‘Are you planning some digging in the garden? Or are you around horses a lot?’

  The man looked startled.

  ‘No. Why? Are regular tetanus shots only recommended for people who will be in contact with horses? Can’t ordinary people get them as a precautionary measure? Doesn’t tetanus lead to lockjaw? That would be a terrible thing to get.’

  Especially for a bank manager, Grant thought but didn’t say.

  ‘I’m only filling in here,’ he said aloud, ‘so I’m not certain what’s kept on the premises. I’ll check with Vi if we’ve tetanus vaccine available. If not, I’ll write you a script, you can pick it up at the chemist and come back for the shot.’

  ‘Are you doing all the surgery sessions?’ he asked, and Grant, thinking maybe Brian would be able to pluck up the courage to talk about what really was wrong, said reassuringly, ‘Yes! Just for a week or so until Katie gets back on her feet.’

  ‘She doesn’t like being called Katie,’ Brian said earnestly, but it was the pink that washed into his ears at the same time that gave him away.

  ‘Yes, unfortunately,’ Vi said later, when Grant, after inoculating Brian against tetanus and sending him on his way, relayed his suspicions to her. ‘The poor man is hopelessly, besottedly, helplessly in love with Kate and she’s the only person in town who doesn’t know it. She says he’s being nice to her because she’s part of the bank family. Honestly, he moons around the place, mows her lawn on Saturdays, comes in for appointments on the flimsiest of pretences, rushes out to serve her when she goes into the bank, and she all but pats him on the head, like you would a favoured pet.’

  ‘I hope he isn’t married—making an idiot of himself like that!’ Grant muttered, failing to see the amusement that was shaking Vi’s frame.

  ‘No, he’s a bachelor. It makes it even funnier because he’s been in town three years now, and every unwed woman within kilometres—and a few married ones as well, no doubt—have made a play for him. We’d all begun to think he was gay when Kate arrives in town and, bang, Brian falls for her in a big way!’

  Grant frowned at his still chortling aunt.

  ‘Isn’t that baby awake? Shouldn’t you be taking her back to her mother?’

  He grabbed the next file, read out the name, and it wasn’t until he was heading back to the consulting room, the patient, Mrs Milward, on his heels, that he realised here was someone else he knew.

  He swung around.

  ‘Mrs Milward who taught me in Grade Two?’

  The woman beamed at him.

  ‘Fancy you remembering that! Though you always were a clever boy.’

  ‘But you left town,’ he said, remembering the big party at the school when he’d been a few years older.

  ‘I came back,’ she said simply. ‘When you find a place as nice as Testament, you know you have to come back.’

  Yeah, well! Grant thought, then he shoved the words way back in his mind, with the nursery furniture and second chances. Right now he had to concentrate on work.

  CHAPTER SIX

  KATE, feeling alive and well after the extra sleep and a long, hot shower, where she’d had time to wash her hair, met Vi halfway between the house and the surgery and took the baby from her, peering down into her daughter’s face as if to check she had the right child.

  ‘I don’t think she looks much like a Fiona, do you?’ she said, inviting Vi to join her in her scrutiny.

  ‘You can’t tell at that age,’ Vi said firmly. ‘But you can’t call her Fiona Fenton anyway. Too many “f’s”.’

  ‘You’re right. Will you tell Grant or should I?’ She heard the stupidity of the question and immediately repudiated it. ‘No, that’s nonsense. So’s this name-practising he’s carrying on with. I’ll just ignore him.’

  And on that eminently sensible note she headed for the house, where, as the baby—she wondered if Sophie would do—looked as if she might sleep for ever, Kate put her back in her crib and did some housework, finding pleasure in simple household tasks she rarely found time to do.

  Once dusting, vacuuming and dishwashing were finished, she went back into the garden and picked some long strands of gaudy pink and white bougainvillaea, bringing them inside and filling three vases with the bright blooms. The house looked like a home again.

  ‘Which is what we need, sweet thing,’ she told the baby, who finally woke and demanded feeding now—immediately! ‘A home. Our home. Yours and mine.’

  ‘It must have been the sleep,’ she explained to Grant a little later, when he’d walked back to the house after surgery to find a salad lunch and crisp rolls awaiting him. ‘I woke up so full of energy I not only cleaned the house but, after the baby was fed, we shopped as well. I know you wanted to be part of that expedition, so I left the butcher for you.’

  Grant seemed puzzled—well, he seemed more stunned but as she hadn’t done anything to actually stun him, after all everyone shopped—she went with puzzled.

  ‘Mick Gazecki works there,’ she explained, thinking maybe it was the butcher part puzzling him. ‘He was in my year, but you’d probably remember him. Worst flirt in the world. He’s married now with about five little Gazeckis and even when I was hugely pregnant and ugly as sin with it, he carried on with the kind of winks and comments that made me want to hit him with his meat cleaver.’

  ‘Do you still have these murderous urges or was it part of being pregnant? Like cravings?’

  Kate considered the question for a moment. ‘I don’t think it was a pregnancy thing—I didn’t get cravings either.’ She grinned at him. ‘So you’ll just have to take your chances, won’t you? But I don’t have a meat cleaver, only a very blunt knife.’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ Grant said, though in truth he was less reassured—less assured as well—than he made out. He’d wandered back over to the house filled with a kind of low-key anticipation commensurate with sharing work talk with a colleague.

  Then he’d seen the colleague and been struck dumb. The transformation was surely more than a few hours’ sleep could have achieved. There had to be a fairy godmother, complete with magic wand, lurking in the background.

  Katie shone! From the top of her freshly washed head, ablaze with golden curls, to the tips of her freshly painted toenails, she gleamed with such radiant well-being he felt dull and lifeless just looking at her.

  Though there was little dull or lifeless about his physical reaction. No, sir!

  However, with the discussion centring on meat cleavers, now wasn’t the time to be admitting to any physical reactions.

  ‘You were supposed to be sleeping, not tidying the house or shopping.’

  He was aware he sounded cross, but couldn’t help it. Not that it affected her at all. She simply beamed at him and held out her arms as if for inspection.

  ‘I did sleep,’ she said, ‘then I washed my hair and shaved my legs…’ she raised a ridiculously long, tanned leg for him to inspect ‘…and cleaned the house and picked flowers and fed the baby and still had time to shop.’

  ‘In those shorts?’ The words were out before he could stop them, and Katie’s startled look, followed by a slight narrowing of emerald green eyes, told him exactly what she thought of the question.

  ‘And who are you to question what I wear? The fashion police?’ She pointed derisively at his shirt. ‘The final arbiter in suitable man-about-the-country attire?’

  Seething with the injustice of her words, and with her ingratitude and attitude and attractive legs, Grant scowled at her.

  ‘I was thinking it’s no wonder the local butcher leers at you!’ he said, then he saw her lower lip and remembered how Katie had always hidden any uncertainty or pain behind a show of bravado—the showier the better.

  ‘Oh, Katie, don’t cry. I didn’t mean it.’ Two strides took him around the table so he could
put his arm around her and draw her lush softness close to his body.

  She blinked away the tears, and the smile this time was soft and very genuine.

  ‘I really don’t want to cry,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’m not unhappy. I think there might be a link between milk ducts and tear ducts which would explain why nursing women become weepy at the slightest provocation.’

  She wriggled out of his embrace, which, given his body’s reaction and her attitude to Mick Gazecki and meat cleavers, was a good idea.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ she suggested. ‘And you can tell me all about your morning. Did Granny Russell come in? And who remembered you?’

  Grant returned to the opposite side of the table and sat down.

  ‘Everyone remembered me—well, not so much remembered me as remembered bad boy Bell. If I’d heard those words once more, I swear I’d have belted whoever said them.’

  ‘You might have to borrow Mick’s meat cleaver!’ she teased, as Grant tackled his salad with enthusiasm. Sublimating one hunger with another? ‘Though I’m sure they think of bad boy Bell with affection, whereas their Katie Fenton memories are recalled with shock and much tut-tutting. I imagine my return, pregnant and unmarried, led to a spate of “I told you she’d come to no good!” comments among the locals.’

  ‘But you’d have known that before you came—you’d lived in country towns long enough to know how they operate.’

  She had her head down, slicing soft pink ham and pushing it onto her fork, so he couldn’t see her face as she replied, ‘Yes, I did know that, but Testament still felt like a place where I could make a home for myself and the baby. The town’s big enough for there to be good schools, yet small enough for most people to know each other. As a single mother, I thought that was important—that the baby, as she grew, would know the names of the people in the street, and they’d know her and look out for her. I knew once the original tutting stopped, the locals would gradually come to accept me—and they’d know the baby from her birth, so she’d be a local. What I did miscalculate—’

  She stopped and Grant wondered what had happened.

  Had to know.

  ‘What?’ he demanded.

  She shrugged and a rueful glimmer of the radiant smile he’d seen earlier lit her eyes.

  ‘Well, down in the city I was always hearing about the unemployment crisis in the country and I assumed, when I got here, it would be easy, finding a nanny for the baby. I didn’t want a professionally trained person, just a nice grandmotherly type who’d had kids of her own and knew which end did what. I’d employ her during my working hours and have a couple of high school girls on standby for weekends and after hours, and all would be well.’

  ‘Didn’t happen, huh?’

  Kate shook her head, the glimmer gone, leaving her eyes more sad than sober.

  ‘One woman came in response to my ad, and she’d have minded the baby, but wouldn’t do washing or even the lightest of housework. I didn’t want her washing down the walls, just throwing a few nappies into the machine. I mean, with a baby this size who sleeps all the time, what was she going to do all day? And she wanted more money than trained nurses make at the hospital.’

  ‘And no one else applied?’

  Kate shook her head.

  ‘Vi’s got feelers out, but so far she hasn’t come up with any solution. I just hope there’s not some kind of embargo in place, because I turned down the first applicant.’

  Grant shook his head, puzzled by the reaction as he, too, knew of the unemployment problems in regional areas. More than puzzled by the scrunching feeling around his heart as he’d listened to the doubt and hesitation in Kate’s words.

  It was probably pity. Pity for an old friend was acceptable—almost obligatory in fact. Though with an old friend like Katie, it was probably best she didn’t see it—pity would be the last thing she’d accept. Visions of the meat cleaver rose obligingly in his head.

  ‘So what are you going to do if Vi doesn’t come up with someone?’ he asked. There was more to this knight business than he’d originally thought.

  ‘While she’s little I can manage. Take her to the surgery or on calls when it’s not too hot to have her in the car. Tara’s available after school and at weekends and once school finishes next week, she’ll come when I need her through the eight weeks of the Christmas holidays.’

  ‘And then?’

  Katie shrugged but the smile reappeared, sparkling in her eyes and seeming to shine in her skin.

  ‘I’ll have to get a city girl up here, and won’t that stir the locals? As well as an unemployment problem here, there’s a woman shortage. I’ll have every young bachelor in town and out of it hanging around—like when a new clutch of female schoolteachers arrives. I could possibly set up as a marriage agency as a sideline—bringing young women to town on a regular basis, checking their household and baby-minding skills, then marrying them off with a good reference.’

  ‘Not very good for Rose, all those changes in her life.’

  ‘Rose?’ Katie shrieked. ‘I thought we’d ruled out flowers, days of the week, months of the year, seasons and anything that sounds like a mood or emotion.’

  ‘You suggested Rose,’ Grant retorted. ‘Anyway, there are some nice names included in that sweeping embargo. And I thought you hated lists, and here you are, listing all the no-nos to me.’

  ‘That wasn’t a list—it was a statement. Lists presuppose an order—a first, second, third.’

  Grant chuckled.

  ‘I can’t believe this! Was there ever a time we didn’t argue?’

  She shook her head, so the bright sunlight streaming into the kitchen made glints of gold dance through the curly tresses of hair. An almost overwhelming urge to run his fingers through it—to feel the warmth where the sun was touching—made him wonder, yet again, if the knight thing had been such a good idea.

  He reminded himself of why he was here and began to ask questions about the hospital, eventually wondering what it had been like from a patient’s point of view.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Katie muttered, when he asked the question aloud. ‘Though to be fair, I didn’t get much chance to test things out.’

  She sighed, then, with the honesty he’d always admired in her, added, ‘When Paul left, I intended going to Craigtown when the time came, then the baby was early, and to give Sister Clarke her due, she’s a wonderful midwife, but I discharged myself as soon as possible. It was driving me nuts—all their “plural” stuff. We should do this and we should do that and how are we feeling today. I know I was still the size of two normal people, but there was only one of me, and a not very happy one at that.’

  Grant found himself laughing, imagining Katie’s ire at such behaviour.

  ‘But admit it, Katie, you’ve probably done it yourself. We’ve all been guilty of it at some stage of our careers.’

  ‘Not me!’ she retorted. ‘Not once—never!’

  And Grant laughed again, but this time with the sheer pleasure of being with her again, with the old Katie who’d stood up for herself—and all her friends—and who’d been willing to take on the world, if necessary, to defend what she saw as right.

  ‘I guess you told them what you thought of it as well,’ he said, when his laughter had died down sufficiently for him to speak.

  ‘Well, yes, I did. I wasn’t feeling particularly well. You don’t, you know, after a long labour during which the entire support staff have done the “we” thing. So when someone came in before dawn next morning and said it was time for us to have a nice sponge bath I told her what I thought of people who couldn’t use a patient’s name, and that individual patients were singular not plural, then I told her where to stick her sponge, picked up the baby and came home.’

  ‘And you wonder why no one wants to work for you?’

  He’d meant it as a joke, which he regretted as soon as he saw the stricken look on her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, hoping to make amends, ‘but you must admit, yo
u probably didn’t leave them with the impression you’d be a cheerful, happy, easy-to-get-on-with employer.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she admitted, ‘though I’d forgotten all about that little tantrum until now.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘When I think about it, I must have looked a right sight. Because the baby had come early I hadn’t taken a bag to the hospital, so I was wearing a hospital-issue gown, one of those that comes together on one shoulder and down one side with Velcro, and it was flapping open, the baby was ready for a feed and screaming, and I couldn’t find where they’d put my shoes so went barefoot, then foolishly left the path and stepped on every pebble in the backyard so I was hopping about like a madwoman.’

  ‘Then, no doubt, you had to go back and face them all to reclaim your clothes.’

  She nodded, cheeks becoming pink at the recollection.

  ‘Had to go back to see a patient, in fact, though I did get dressed and put on sandals before I went. Sister Clarke did her “really, Dr Fenton” thing and told me the nurse I’d yelled at was so upset she’d had to go home, and that had mucked up the nursing schedule until two thousand and ten.’

  ‘Sister Clarke obviously hasn’t improved,’ Grant said, with such empathy in his voice Kate felt something, probably left over from her youth or perhaps to do with the loneliness she’d been feeling, tug at her heart.

  But whatever it was, she had to ignore it. Grant was an old friend, and it would be good to have him—or anyone—here for a while, to help with the work while she adapted to life with the baby and the Health Department appointed a new hospital doctor. But he’d be going away again, so getting too dependent on his friendship would be a bad thing, and feeling heart-tugs for someone who had a Linda-Chlorinda stashed away back in the city was an even worse thing.

  Thinking about Grant’s fiancée made her stomach tighten, but she couldn’t help but wonder…

  No! Wondering about anything connected with Grant’s personal life was definitely off-limits. Think of something else. Anything!