George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (7 page)

She had snorted softly, her sleepiness banished suddenly. ‘Do I have a choice?’

He was silent for a moment and then said uncomfortably, ‘Well, I guess not, doll. But I’ll tell you what. I’m going to book us a holiday before I buckle down to all this. Just a week, maybe, in France or Spain? We’ll just get in the car, pip through the Tunnel, and then take the route south. How about that? Would you like a bit of French nosh and scenery?’

‘Before you start the new project?’ George said, rousing herself. ‘But I’m not sure I can get the time off that easily.’

‘Well, tell ’em you’ve got to. You haven’t had a holiday for ages.’

‘That’s true, but —’

‘So it’s high time. Tell ’em we’re off — oh — next week.’ He began to sing growlingly into her ear an old-fashioned version of ‘The Vagabond’s Song’, which burbled about ‘bed in the bush with stars to see, bread I dip in the river — there’s the life for a man like me, there’s the life for e-e-e-ever’, and she’d fallen asleep to it as to a lullaby.

Now she sighed, straightening in her chair as she tried to concentrate again. Life was just a little more complicated than it ought to be … She had to think of work and coping somehow until Sheila was back, and dealing with Zack next time she saw him, and … ‘Oh, hell!’ she said aloud.

By lunchtime when she’d finished her post-mortem and reported death from natural causes to the coroner’s officer, and had showered (scrubbing herself extra hard again with the memory of Gus’s teasing in her memory’s ears) she’d reassured herself that she was being as silly as Sheila was on one of her worst days. Zack Zacharius had only asked her out to dinner last night out of concern for her distress over Sheila (she refused to think about what he might want to talk about; it was probably something minor and just a ploy to get her to make a date) and there was no more to it than that. All was well; she’d just had a silly set of notions because Gus had been away a lot, but now he was back in his old sweet mode there’d be no more problems. If there had to be lonely nights over the coming weeks she’d manage them well enough. I’ll put in for a holiday in two weeks’ time, then, she thought as she crossed the courtyard on her way to the canteen and lunch. Then I’ll be ready whatever Gus comes up with.

Zack was loitering at the canteen entrance and his face lit up when he saw her, or so she thought. ‘Hello! How are you today?’ he said. ‘Feeling better? How’s the invalid?’

‘Oh, she’s doing fine,’ George said. ‘I saw her this morning, and Peter Selby too. He says she’ll be home in a couple of days. No harm done. You were quite right.’

‘That’s OK then,’ he said with high satisfaction. ‘We can
talk about other things.’ He tucked his hand into her elbow again, the way he had last night, and she stiffened against it. Last night when she had been distressed had been one thing. Now it was something other.

It felt like panic. It was quite absurd, part of her mind told her, but that made no difference. She pulled her arm away and said quickly, ‘Oh dear! I’m so sorry! I can’t share lunch with you today, I’m afraid.’ She looked over her shoulder and saw the long queue stretching into the canteen, normal at this time of day, and swallowed hard. ‘I’ve — er — I’ve arranged to eat with Dr — um —’ She scrabbled for a name as her glance raked the people in the line and finally seized upon a vaguely familiar face. ‘Dr Corton. About anaesthetics, you know. I’m sorry.’

And she went in a rush, her long legs swinging her coat behind her and her thick hair bouncing on the top of her head so that it nearly came apart from the bunch in which she’d pinned it up, to slide in alongside a startled James Corton and say a little breathlessly, ‘Do you mind if I jump the queue by joining you? Pretend we had a date to meet, you know? I’m in a mad rush and I’d be so grateful!’

To say that James Corton was shy would be like describing Mother Theresa as a tolerably well meaning old woman; the label just wasn’t adequate. He gulped at her, managed a sort of convulsive nod and then stepped back to let her slide in front of him. She had to share his tray, since she hadn’t picked up one of her own and was certainly not going back to fetch one in case Zack was still there at the other end of the queue (she didn’t dare look to see), and she chattered absurdly to Corton as she piled a plate with salad and slapped it on to the tray next to his own plate of sausages and chips. She thought that choice said all that needed to be said about him: he had the schoolboyish look that went with such a diet.

She insisted on paying for both of them, since the girl on the till would, she knew, make very heavy weather of sorting out separate bills for the contents of one tray, and the last thing she wanted was any sort of delay or fuss to draw more attention to them (they had already had a couple of black looks from people who had been pushed back in the queue by her intervention). He tried to protest, but she would have none of it and, still chattering, led him to a table on the far side of the massive canteen space, which had all the ambience of an aircraft hangar with none of the charm, where she sat with her back to the room as though that would make her less noticeable.

Beneath her chatter, she castigated herself. She was behaving foolishly. The trouble was she found Zack interesting, the sort of man who, pre Gus, she would have fancied and made a distinct effort to get to know well. Very well, even.

Pre Gus she had been, and she had known it perfectly well, a woman who was extremely susceptible to masculine beauty. And personality and wit and charm. Frankly, as she had told herself once, long ago, after yet another of her hopeful relationships had foundered, she liked men too much as male creatures rather than as people. She was a goddamn pushover for them. Despite her very real championship of feminist causes and her frequent irritation with male domination of almost everything (well, perhaps not everything, but certainly a hell of a lot) she found male attention irresistible.

And Zack fancied her. Of that she was in no doubt, and it alarmed her. She had been genuinely in love with Gus Hathaway for a long time now, two and a half years. He had spoken of marriage and dammit, they nearly had done the deed. Would have done, had she not backed down. He still intended to marry her, she knew, and she also knew that she intended to marry him — eventually. Yet she could still be attracted to a man who was attracted to her, and it was a damned nuisance, to put it at its very least. A downright shameful one if she was to be as honest as she should be with herself.

She became aware of James Corton’s steady gaze on her and broke off. She had been chattering about last night’s party and how dull it had been, and she had probably repeated herself several times; now she smiled at him rather ruefully.

‘Hell, you must think I’m really crazy,’ she said. ‘I make a pest of myself pushing in and then talk your ears off. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, not at all, not at all,’ he said.

She looked at him with sympathy. He was sweating slightly, a faint mist of dampness glowing across his rather
narrow forehead and darkening the roots of his fair hair. He had lashes and brows of the same lightness which gave him a sandy look, but he seemed agreeable enough. About thirty, she hazarded, and still low on the ladder to success in his career.

‘So tell me,’ she said, making an effort not to look over her shoulder and to stop thinking about her confusion regarding Zack. ‘How’s life in the Gas Fight And Choke Company?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ He looked startled.

‘Hey, don’t tell me I get to explain an English joke to an English person! Someone told me when I first came to work here. There used to be a company in London selling gas and coke and so forth called the Gaslight and Coke Company. Like, sixty years ago or more? And anaesthetists came to be called Gas Fight and Choke people. I thought all anaesthetics people knew that.’

He went a sudden scarlet, the colour leaping across his face so fast that she could see it happen, and the sweating increased; with his rather protuberant greenish eyes, she thought, he looks like a freshly boiled kitten. ‘I suppose I’d heard it and forgotten,’ he mumbled.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said kindly. ‘Anyway, it’s a very old joke and perhaps it just doesn’t mean anything to younger people in the field. So, do you like anaesthetics?’

‘Er, well, yes,’ he said and she stifled a tinge of irritation. Talking to this chap was like walking over a ploughed field in high-heeled pumps. ‘I mean, it’s the speciality I’ve chosen.’

‘Ah? Then you’re staying in it? I mean, you don’t see this as a step on the way to something else?’

‘Like what?’ He looked genuinely puzzled and she explained patiently.

‘The pain people — the consultants who run pain clinics and deal with intractable pain problems as well as terminal pain — aren’t they always anaesthetists?’

To her relief he became a little more animated. ‘Not all of them. There’re neurologists in it as well. And some pharmacologists,
of course. There was an interesting paper on the use of sodium channel blockers in the alleviation of chronic pain in one of the journals recently …’ And he began to talk earnestly about the article, as though, George found herself thinking in some amusement, he’d learned it by heart in order to impress his superiors. He was after all a very junior gasman, which would account for some of his tension as he talked to her. She sometimes forgot how intimidating a junior could find a consultant, even one as relaxed and as easy to talk to as she knew herself to be. It was rare that she stood on her dignity or reminded anyone of her status; but he was new of course and wouldn’t really know that.

She went to some pains now to make him more comfortable. She questioned him on the research he was talking about and though he seemed able to do little more than quote the article he’d read back at her, he was clearly interested. So she shifted her tack; got down to talking personalities. Might make him more comfortable, she thought.

‘How do you get on with the rest of your firm?’ she asked. ‘They seem a pleasant crew.’ It was a clear invitation to gossip.

He didn’t accept it. ‘Oh, everyone’s very nice,’ he said a touch woodenly. ‘Most helpful.’

‘Good.’ She smiled brightly. ‘And the surgeons, too? I’ve heard that Le Queux can be a right bastard in the theatre.’ It was what some of her stiffer colleagues would label a ‘poor show’, she knew, to encourage junior staff to speak slightingly of their seniors, but why shouldn’t they? Everyone else did. ‘And Mayer-France.’

Corton primmed his lips a little. ‘They’re fine,’ he said, looking down at his plate. He’d eaten very little of his schoolboy lunch, she noted, and bent her own head to eat in order to encourage him. This was really getting to be more than a little effortful, she thought a touch irritably. Damn Zack Zacharius! And knowing that it was unfair to blame him for her present situation didn’t make her feel any better.

‘I — er — don’t work much with the consultants,’ Corton
said then, seeming aware of her irritation. ‘I mean, Miss Dannay does most of their lists so I hardly know them. I usually look after the registrars’ lists and, of course, routine obstetrics. And Dr Zacharius and stuff like that.’

She lifted her head, a forkful of cole-slaw arrested halfway to her mouth. ‘Oh?’

He seemed to relax a little at her interest. ‘Mmm. They won’t let me do the really complicated stuff for a while yet, will they? I’d like to work on cardiological anaesthetics really. It was because of — of my father, who had a cardiac condition, that — well, anyway, he wanted me to go into medicine and anaesthetics seemed — and then of course when he had to have his operation and he died they said it was as much the anaesthetic as the surgery that — so I thought then I’d like to learn cardiac anaesthesia.’

‘I’m sorry to hear of your father,’ she said after a moment. ‘It’s often the case that it’s a family experience that shapes up your own view of your career.’

She remembered with sudden painful clarity her own mother, oblivious of who she was or why she was and probably even where she was, over there at home three thousand miles away in Buffalo, in the care of her old friend Bridget Connor, and wanted to weep. Her Alzheimer’s disease had never made George want to work with the demented, but it certainly made her interested in the condition.

She reached across the table now and touched Corton’s hand. ‘It’s not unusual. I’m sure you’ll get there, with such an — example.’

He flashed a smile at her, which made him look even younger, if that were possible. ‘Thanks. But it’ll take a long time for me to be able to do that. So much to learn.’ He slid into silence and she returned to her own plate. After a while she spoke with studied casualness.

‘So you do obstetrics and — who else was it, Dr Zacharius? But I thought he was a researcher? How come he works with an anaesthetist?’

‘Oh, it’s for his experiments.’ Corton put down his fork and leaned forward with some eagerness. ‘He’s looking for a therapy for some of the degenerative neurological conditions you see, like motor-neurone disease and Parkinson’s. Even posttraumatic nerve injuries. Paraplegics and so on.’

Again he sounded as though he were quoting and she looked at him consideringly. Had he too found Zack an attractive and powerful personality? Was that the cause of his shyness with her, a need that responded to men rather than women? It would explain a good deal, she thought. It also made her feel rather foolish, the way she had felt at school when she discovered that another girl had a crush on the football hero she had picked out for herself.

‘So, what experiments does he do?’ She shouldn’t be asking that, she thought then. I have to keep Zack at a distance, not make enquiries about his work. But if I don’t, how can I talk to him about it when I next see him? But I’m not going to see him again. Am I? ‘That use anaesthetics, that is. I’d imagined his research was all linked with drugs.’

‘Oh, not at all.’ Corton was well away now. ‘He’s been trying different sorts of implants to the brain, you see. Sometimes he uses drugs, but mostly he uses tissue.’ He stopped suddenly and seemed to draw back. ‘But you’d better ask him about that. I can’t really explain.’