Maggie Kingsley - The Surgeon's Marriage

‘I’ll do the shopping. I’m OK—really I am,’ she insisted, seeing his frown reappear. ‘Now that Mark Lorimer’s starting work today, everything will be fine.’

And it would be, she told herself as she got out of the car and followed Tom into the hospital. With the department fully staffed again she wouldn’t be so tired all the time, and stupid, niggling little things wouldn’t keep irritating her. She knew they wouldn’t.

‘OK, cheer me up on a cold April day,’ she instructed Annie when she found the junior doctor in the staffroom, getting ready to go off duty. ‘Tell me the ward was quiet last night, that not one single emergency came in, then give me permission to go home.’

‘You don’t want cheering up,’ Annie protested. ‘You want a miracle.’

‘I know, but it was worth a try.’ Helen laughed. ‘OK, what’s the current situation?’

‘Mrs Foster burst some of her stitches last night. Apparently she was straining to pass a motion—Yes, I know,’ the junior doctor said as Helen groaned. ‘Not the brightest thing in the world to do when you’ve just had a hysterectomy, but there you go. Mrs Dawn accidentally dislodged her catheter at midnight—’

‘Oh, no.’

‘And—and,’ Annie continued, ‘just to add to the overall fun and excitement, Mrs Alexander suddenly developed a deep-vein thrombosis in her leg.’

‘Is she all right?’ Helen asked with concern.

‘Gideon’s put her on anticoagulants, and we’ve got her in compression stockings, but it looks like we could be in for big problems when she gives birth.’

It did. Mary Alexander was thirty-six weeks pregnant, and she’d only been sent in by her GP because he thought her blood pressure was a little high. A Caesarean might be the answer, but if the clot moved to her lungs during the operation…

‘I’ll have a word with her once I’ve done the ward round,’ Helen murmured, and Annie grimaced.

‘A word is probably all you’ll have time for. Honestly, Helen, I feel like I’m living at the hospital at the moment, and if Gideon hadn’t insisted on me employing a home help I don’t know how I would have managed with Jamie.’

Helen nodded. She could remember only too well how hard it had been when her own children were smaller, trying to juggle their needs and the demands of her job, and it was doubly difficult for Annie. Gideon wasn’t Jamie’s father, and although the little boy obviously liked the consultant, it would take time for him to accept his mother’s new husband completely.

‘Things will be better now Dr Lorimer’s here,’ she said encouragingly as she followed Annie out of the staffroom. ‘With the department fully staffed again—’

‘But he’s not here. At least, not unless he’s hiding in a cupboard.’

Helen came to a halt. ‘What do you mean, he’s not here? He phoned Tom from London last night to say he was just about to board the Glasgow plane.’

And to reminisce about old times, she thought, remembering the gales of laughter she’d heard coming from her husband when he’d taken the call.

‘Maybe he’s got lost between the airport and the Belfield. Maybe he’s taken one look at what passes for spring weather in Britain, and headed straight back to sunny Australia. All I know is—’ Annie bit off the rest of what she’d been about to say, and groaned. ‘Oh, Lord. Why do I know this means trouble?’

Helen turned in the direction of the junior doctor’s gaze, and her heart sank, too. Gideon was striding towards them, looking tight-lipped and harassed, and Tom didn’t look any happier beside him.

‘I’m afraid we’ve got a problem,’ the consultant declared without preamble. ‘Dr Lorimer’s still in London. Apparently Heathrow Airport’s fogbound, and though he’s hoping to make it to the Belfield by mid-afternoon, we’re not to hold our breaths.’

‘And?’ Helen asked with foreboding, sensing there was a very definite ‘and’ hanging in the air, and equally certain she wasn’t going to like it.

‘We’ve got a postpartum haemorrhage on our hands. I’m on my way to it now. Tom’s going to take my morning clinic, but that means—’

‘You want me to take Tom’s,’ Helen finished for him unhappily.

‘Sorry, Helen.’

So was she. She hated taking somebody else’s clinic at short notice. It meant seeing people ‘blind’, with scarcely enough time to read through their notes, but it couldn’t be helped. Emergencies were just that. Unexpected events that nobody could predict.

‘Look, would it help if I stayed on for a couple of hours?’ Annie said, beginning to unbutton her coat. ‘Jamie will be at the day-care centre by now—’

‘What I want is for you to go home and get some sleep,’ Gideon said firmly. ‘You’ve just finished a full night shift.’

‘Yes, but if we’re short-staffed—’

‘Home, Annie. Now.’

‘Three weeks married, and already he’s bossing me about,’ the junior doctor protested, and Helen laughed, only for her laughter to die when Gideon suddenly put his arm around his wife and kissed her.

It wasn’t a passionate kiss—the ward corridor was hardly the place for it—but as the couple drew apart a hard lump formed in her throat.

When was the last time Tom had looked at her the way Gideon was looking at Annie? When was the last time she’d looked at Tom with such obvious love in her eyes?

Good grief, woman, you’ve been married for ten years, not three weeks, a little voice protested at the back of her mind. You can’t expect either you and Tom to be still wandering round in that heady, crazy state of euphoria that couples feel when they first fall in love.

No, her heart whispered, but surely I should be able to remember when he last told me he loved me. Surely I should at least be able to remember when we last made love.

Her heart contracted and, unable to bear looking at the couple any longer, she began walking down the corridor, only to discover Tom had come after her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming to an awkward halt. ‘Did you want to talk to me about your clinic?’

‘What I’m more interested in—more worried about—is you,’ her husband replied. ‘Helen, what is it—what’s wrong?’

He looked anxious and perplexed, but as she stared up at him she also saw that he looked completely exhausted, and a wave of guilt surged through her. He’d been working so hard at the hospital recently—much harder than she had been—and yet here she was, feeling sorry for herself just because they hadn’t made love in ages. And it was as much her fault as his. ‘I’m too tired, Tom’ had become her stock reply to any overture he might have made recently.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said swiftly. ‘I’m just thinking about your poor friend, stuck in London—’

‘But you looked so pale just a minute ago,’ he pressed. ‘Quite white, in fact.’

‘That’ll teach me to forget to put on any make-up.’ She smiled, trying to lighten his mood, but it didn’t work.

‘You don’t hear me when I’m talking to you,’ he continued. ‘You’re tired all the time, and now your colour’s coming and going. Look, perhaps you should let me examine you, give you a thorough check-up.’

‘You just want an excuse to get my clothes off,’ she said, her brown eyes dancing, ‘and you don’t need one. We’re married, remember?’

‘Helen, be serious.’

‘Life’s too short,’ she insisted. ‘Tom, I’ve been thinking—why don’t we hire a babysitter the next time we both have a weekend off? We could head off somewhere romantic like the Isle of Skye. We haven’t been anywhere alone for ages, and—’

‘Do you think you could be hitting an early menopause?’

Her jaw dropped. ‘Do I what?’

‘I know you’re only thirty-two,’ he continued thoughtfully, ‘but it would certainly explain your mood swings, your abstraction and fatigue—’

‘Tom, I am not starting the menopause,’ she snapped. ‘If I look tired, maybe it’s because I am tired. Tired of cooking and cleaning. Tired of constantly tidying up after you and the kids, and tired of being expected to be a super-efficient SHO into the bargain.’

The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them, and she bit her lip. She hadn’t realised she’d been feeling so put upon and taken for granted lately, but now she’d said it she knew it was true. It might have been better, though, if she’d couched her complaint in less confrontational language. Her husband clearly thought so, judging by the dull flush of colour sweeping across his face.

‘Tom—’

‘Sorry to interrupt you, Doctors,’ the department secretary declared, ‘but it’s twenty past nine, and your clinics were supposed to start at nine.’

‘Our clinics will start when we’re ready to start,’ Tom replied, his voice uncharacteristically brusque. ‘Until then I’d be obliged if you’d allow us some privacy.’

Doris looked crushed. She also looked curious. Very curious.

‘That wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do,’ Helen protested the minute the woman had gone. ‘Doris is the biggest gossip in the hospital, and just because you’re angry with me—’

‘I don’t think this is the time or the place for a discussion about our private life, do you?’ he said stiffly.

Oh, really? she thought. Well, she wasn’t the one who’d started it with all this stupid talk about the menopause. She wasn’t the one who hadn’t been pulling her weight at home.

‘Fine,’ she said, her voice every bit as taut and cold as his. ‘Then perhaps you could consult your diary and pencil me in for a day when it would be convenient.’

And before he could reply she walked into his consulting room and slammed the door shut.

The menopause. He had the nerve to suggest that her tiredness and irritability might be due to the menopause. That would teach her to marry a gynaecologist. One mention of being tired and fed up, and her husband’s mind had immediately gone into diagnostic mode.

Well, his mind could just come right out of diagnostic mode, she decided, sitting angrily down at his desk. She might not have known how aggrieved she’d been feeling, but now that she did know she could see it was time he pulled his weight at home—way past time.

And way past time for her clinic to start, she realised with a muttered oath as she caught sight of the clock on the wall.

‘Forget it, Helen,’ she told herself, pulling the stack of files on the desk towards her and hitting the intercom button. ‘Think about it later, but right now forget it.’

And she managed to until her last patient turned out to be Jennifer Norton.

‘I’m feeling fine, thank you, Doctor,’ Jennifer said as she eased herself up onto the examination table. ‘In fact, now I’ve got over the morning sickness, the only thing I want is for my husband to stop fussing over me.’

Lucky you, Helen thought, but she didn’t say that.

‘You can’t really blame him for fussing,’ she said instead, wrapping the blood-pressure cuff round Jennifer’s arm. ‘You gave us all a big fright back in February.’

Jennifer had. At just eight weeks pregnant she’d been rushed into the department with vaginal bleeding, and as her pregnancy was the result of her fourth IVF treatment the signs weren’t good. Luckily the bleeding had stopped, but Jennifer still had a long way to go.

‘You’re fourteen weeks pregnant now, aren’t you?’ she murmured, watching the blood-pressure gauge.

‘Fourteen weeks gone, only another twenty-six to go.’ Jennifer laughed a little nervously. ‘Is it OK—my blood pressure?’