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'Isn't it what you want?' he asked raising his eyebrows.

'Well, I don't usually think of staff-men as friends— they have too much leverage,' she said, looking him straight in the eye. 'I prefer the interns and the residents. Now, Rick Sommers is someone I could call a friend. But if you like, Dr Sotheby, we'll go through the motions. Now I have to go to prepare for the next case.'

'Are you scrubbing for my laparoscopic cholecys
tectomy?' he asked. The next case was the removal of a gall bladder with the aid of a special fibre-optic scope that would show the image of the interior of the abdominal cavity on a monitor.

The advantage of this method was that the patient didn't need to have a large abdominal incision. There were only two tiny incisions of less than an inch long, through which he put his scope and his cannula which gave him access with his instalments to the abdominal cavity.

'No,' she said, letting go of his hand. 'Cathy is going to scrub. I'm circulating.'

'See you in there,' he said. 'I'm going to see Mike Dolby.'

'I hope he's all right,' she said. 'That was a very interesting case.'

'I expect he'll do well,' Clay said, 'even though Crohn's disease can recur in the remaining sections of the gut. We'll do an operation to reconnect the cut ends of his gut when any residual inflammation has died down.'

Sophie nodded, aware of the treatment for the disease. While Clay went to the recovery room, she hurried off down the corridor to room four.

Mike was very groggy, barely able to open his eyes as he lay on the stretcher in the recovery room, one of a number of recovering patients. He would remain there for at least three quarters of an hour, until his condition was stable, before being transferred to the general surgical floor. Monitors were recording his vital signs of pulse rate, blood pressure and temperature. He was breathing in oxygen via plastic tubes.

'The operation went well, Mike,' Clay said, bending down close so that the patient could hear him. When Mike managed to open his eyes and focus on Clay's face, an expression of recognition dawned. 'Everything's OK. I took out a piece of the gut, and the ileostomy is only a temporary thing. You'll be feeling good in a few days.'

Mike indicated that he understood by giving a slight nod. An expression of relief superimposed itself on his tired face as his eyelids slowly shut again.

'I'll talk to you later when you're more awake,' Clay added, giving his patient's shoulder a squeeze before walking away.

Now he had to detach his thoughts from this patient to focus on the next one on the operating list, the one with gall-bladder disease. The previous case had gone as well as he could have hoped for. Although the gut had been in a mess, with a number of adhesions, he'd been able to resect a portion of it fairly easily and make the temporary opening through the abdominal wall.

There was every indication that this would be a good day. As he strode back briskly to room four he felt gratified, too, that he'd exchanged those few words with Jerry Claibourne. They'd indicated that everything regarding his own future was right on track.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Clay was able to leave the OR and make his way to the hospital cafeteria for a quick nutritious snack, before going on to his private office in the Medical Arts Building next to the hospital, where patients would be waiting to see him. Surgeons seldom stopped for a proper lunch when they worked in the operating rooms. A lot of food left one sleepy and less able to summon up the high level of concentration that was required. Consequently, when they got out of the place they were often suffering from hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar.

In the corridor outside the cafeteria he was waylaid by Suzie, the emergency nurse he'd met at the fund-raising dance.

'Oh, Dr Sotheby,' she exclaimed, 'just the person I want to see!' She was as ebullient as before. 'You'll never guess!' In her uniform of pale blue scrub suit with a matching long-sleeved jacket over the top, she looked delectable, ripe for the plucking, Clay thought as he looked her over, even though he suspected that she had already been plucked.

'Try me,' he said, conscious that he had only half an hour before he was due to see his first patient in his office.

'You've won a blind date!' Suzie gushed, as though she were conferring a knighthood on him. 'Isn't that just great? You can go out for a great dinner with a great girl and forget all about this place.'

'Oh hell,' he said. 'Too many greats there.'

The nurse's face was blank with amazement. 'What do you mean?' she said. They stood against the corridor wall while people hurried past them in both directions. Overhead the loudspeaker paged doctors.

'I really don't want to do that,' Clay said. 'I'd like to back off and let someone else "win" in my place. It isn't really my thing.'

'You can't do that, Dr Sotheby—' Suzie was incredulous '—since you've all been carefully vetted and paired. It will be quite all right, you know, because you meet at a certain table in a restaurant—the owner's in on the scheme. It's all prepaid. You just go in there and your date will be sitting at the table. You have a super meal. It's at Guido's, that's Italian.'

'I really don't think...' he said, leaning wearily against the wall, thinking that he wanted to pick his own women, not have one picked for him. 'Look, I didn't want to do this from the beginning. I didn't think I'd win. I just wanted to donate money.'

'If this meal doesn't work out, it's no skin off your nose,' Suzie said. 'You just have a nice meal, say how nice it was to meet her, put her in a taxi and, bingo, that's it. If you don't want to see her again, you don't have to. But you might...' She left the possibility hanging.

Clay shrugged in resignation. As a last resort he could always phone the restaurant on the night and say that he'd been called to the operating room. That would be mean, but at least the woman, or girl, would have a good meal on the house.

'We'll be in touch...from the fund-raising committee with the finer details,' Suzie assured him as she turned to leave. She moved her eyebrows up and down suggestively and gave him a last arch look, before marching off down the corridor.

Clay sighed as he pushed his way through the double doors of the cafeteria and strode towards the banks of serving counters. The last thing he needed, or wanted, was a blind date, even though he did say it himself. An objective opinion might have said differently. Now he had twenty minutes in which to eat something and get himself over to the Medical Arts Building, he saw irritably as he looked at his watch. In a moment his mind became busy with all that he had to do.

Tomorrow he had the medical advisory committee meeting at seven-thirty, which met once a month to talk about matters related to patient care and other urgent hospital matters, and on Thursday morning he had the
surgical teaching rounds in the lecture theatre at the hospital, also early in the morning. They tried to have rounds every third week, although his surgical team wasn't always the one presenting a case or two.

This time, Rick Sommers and two of the interns were going to present the case of Mike Dolby. At the operation today the hospital photographer had taken some very good pictures of Mr Dolby's gut, the mass of adhesions. Those would make very good and dramatic slides for the rounds. The term 'rounds' referred to the literal ward rounds of patients which doctors used to make in the old days, going from bed to bed with an entourage of junior doctors and the nurses in charge of the wards.

Clay pondered that mental image briefly. These days they stayed put in one place and looked at slides and received a talk about an interesting case—far less time-consuming, although it meant that things were less and less hands on.

Automatically he helped himself to a tray and selected some items of food which he could eat quickly. The brief meeting with Suzie had unsettled him. The very concept of a blind date irritated him slightly, a feeling he recognized as coming from his own understanding that his life was centred almost totally on work and on the progress of his career. To get ahead in his profession there was no other alternative. Those who relaxed too much, who were not absolutely up to date and on the ball, slipped behind. It was just as well that he loved his work and, without being conceited, knew that he was good at it.

'Hi, Clay. How goes it?' A colleague accosted him and joined him at a table.

Thrusting aside a slight feeling of dissonance which his own thoughts had engendered, Clay turned with relief to the prospect of talking about familiar subjects. 'Great,' he said, 'just great.'

For once he found himself very glad not to be on call when he let himself into the house at about seven o'clock that evening, glad also to find the little cat waiting for him. He'd had a cat flap built into the back door that opened onto the large back garden so that the cat could come and go in the months of good weather.

'Hey, Victoria,' he said, kneeling down to stroke the cat. 'Pleased to see me, eh?' Purring rewarded this simple effort of affection. 'Come on, food.' He led the way into the kitchen, where there was a tantalizing smell of something good being kept warm for him in the oven. Alice, his housekeeper, who came daily to clean and tidy the place, also cooked supper for him each week night and prepared meals for him to keep in the refrigerator for the weekend.

As he put out cat food for Victoria, the telephone rang. The call-display unit showed him that the number belonged to Dawn Renton. Reluctance vied with a kind of odd relief that it was her. Right now he felt that he could use the company of a woman, yet at the same time he had a desire to be alone with the simple company of an affectionate, grateful cat. He let the phone ring four times before he answered, trying to decide. 'Hi,' he said. Dawn knew that he would know who was calling. 'How are you?'

'Better for hearing your voice, Clay,' Dawn said huskily, in that very careful diction she had, always wanting to make a desired impression. Dawn was a sleek, blonde woman, plumply feminine, big-breasted, who dressed in designer clothes that suited her position as the personal assistant to the chief of surgery.

'I was hoping I could see you,' she added, careful to keep any hint of demand out of her voice, as she liked a man to think that really he was taking the initiative, whereas she manipulated situations and people with admirable expertise to get what she wanted. Except in the case of Jerry Claibourne, of course... She had made a play for him and hadn't succeeded, knowing full well that he adored his wife and his four children, that he was 'very married', as the saying went.

With good grace, Jerry had kept her on in her job, partly because she was a good personal assistant and partly because he knew that she wouldn't have the slightest effect on him personally. He had been that confident in his own feelings, and Clay admired him for it tremendously. Because she had made a play for Jerry, Clay felt for Dawn, beneath his superficial sexual attraction to her, a cold, unbending core of reserve which he hadn't been able to shake. Was he being hypocritical? He didn't think so, because they both knew exactly where they stood with each other. Or, at least, he thought he did.

In Dawn, too, there was a hard core. He knew that she wouldn't settle for anything less than she had set her heart on. At the moment she wanted something from him. Hers was a studied femininity that didn't seem to reach all her responses. Clay didn't delude himself that what they had together would lead to anything really comfortable for now, they suited each other.

'Sure,' he said, trying not to make the hesitation obvious. 'Would you like to come here? You could eat with me. There's something good in the oven that I
haven't investigated yet... Hang on a second.' He opened the oven door and looked at the casserole there. 'Looks like chicken. Mmm,
coq au vin.
I've got wine in the fridge.'

'I'd love to,' she said. 'I'll be there in about twenty minutes.'

While waiting for her he went for a shower, even though he'd had one at the hospital. They would make love, he felt sure. Funnily enough, he considered as he stood under the water jet, he'd never had Dawn in his bed. Usually they ended up on the sofa in the sitting room, or they met at her place. There was a reluctance in him to offer her the intimacy of his bed, a place where he retreated for ultimate privacy. Odd, that. Maybe it was a measure of his reluctance to get really involved with her, or with any woman.

Generally he didn't mind a woman taking the initiative—it was frequently a turn-on—but if there was obvious calculation or manipulation about it he felt in himself an instant steely withdrawal. Sometimes Dawn was borderline. She'd been quite upfront about what she wanted from life in general, from a lover, from a husband. With him her ambition was tempered by the fact that she genuinely found him attractive, a strong turn-on...so she said. But beyond that he didn't have any illusions—the man she wanted was Jerry. That much was obvious by the way she lit up when she was in the same room with Jerry, the way her eyes followed him.

She came alive with him, too, Clay considered without vanity as he dried himself...but he'd made it clear that he wasn't available for anything permanent. Right now his career was all he could cope with, and that wasn't about to change if he were to take over Jerry's
job. At least he was honest with her, and she seemed to accept that. He didn't want her to feel that she was being used in some way. Sometimes he felt it was the other way round—her appetite for him seemed insatiable.

Absently he splashed himself liberally with a delicate, musky cologne which he knew Dawn liked, then plugged in his electric shaver. He hoped that she knew the score as well as he usually assumed she did. Still, he wanted to be careful...

When the doorbell rang he'd already dressed again in casual, loose pants and shirt, and had laid two places at the dining-room table, complete with wineglasses.

'My God!' he said as he flung open the front door and looked at Dawn standing on the covered porch, framed exotically between the two white Romanesque columns that flanked it. 'Isn't that a bit hot for June?' His eyes went over her incredulously.