The Doctor's Mistress. Lilian Darcy

numbers of the cars implied a large ambulance fleet, but since the lower numbers belonged to vehicles now retired from service this was deceptive. This rural area didn’t need a large fleet. There was one crew on station duty day and night, seven days a week, with a second crew as back-up on call. Very often, the back-up crew wouldn’t be needed for an entire shift.

      Hayley and Bruce had been diverted from the non-urgent patient transport job earlier when the urgent call-out had come.

      The patient transport in this case was nearly a two-hour job, door to door. They went to a dairy farm about thirty kilometres from town where an elderly man was ready for the local hospice, in the terminal stage of his illness. After delivering him there and handing him over to the hospice staff, they returned to Ambulance Headquarters at three o’clock, and the rest of the day went by with no call-outs. Jim and Paul had gone home, while Bruce joined Hayley to finish their shift at the station.

      ‘Wonder how that little girl and her grandmother are getting on,’ Bruce said after they’d signed out for the day. He added before Hayley could answer, ‘Going straight home?’

      She had showered and changed into black stretch jeans and a soft blue knit cotton top. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I’m going to phone and find out how Max and Mum are getting on. If everything’s all right, I’m going back to the hospital.’

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE sight of his daughter in sleep was something that Byron had treated himself to every single day since her birth four and a half years ago. There was so much trust displayed in the way a happy child slept. The skin around her eyes and across her forehead was completely innocent of tension, and she slept on her back as if always prepared for the brush of his good-night kiss.

      Watching Tori sleep was like a compass point in his life, he sometimes thought. It kept him on course. After Elizabeth’s tragic death, when Tori had been just six months old, the sight had become even more necessary, and even more precious. Sometimes it was the only time in a whole day when there was stillness and quiet.

      The time when he wasn’t run off his feet at work, juggling six things at once, always the one people looked to for answers and solutions. When he wasn’t trying to remember the items on the shopping list he’d left at home, or fighting hospital administration over budgets and legal issues. He wasn’t swamped by onslaughts of Tori’s irrepressible exuberance and curiosity.

      He didn’t have to say, Sit down at the table, Tori, we don’t stand up on a chair when we eat, or Don’t jump on the couch, love. You’ll break it and you could fall and hit your head on the coffee table, or Time to put your toys away now. Yes, it is, it’s almost bedtime!

      Every night when he came into her room before going to bed himself, just to look at the little form tucked under the covers, breathing so deeply and rhythmically and peacefully, he felt a fullness in his chest that was pure love.

      He hadn’t thought there could be a stronger or deeper feeling for one’s child. Today, watching her in her white hospital bed in the high-dependency unit, with the summer light still bright and hot in the non-air-conditioned room at the end of the day, he discovered that he’d been wrong. There was a stronger feeling, and it came when love was mixed with fear. It weakened his limbs and made him light-headed and he hated it.

      He’d almost lost her today. It reminded him too strongly of the way he’d lost Elizabeth four years ago in a tragic accident which for months had tortured and taunted him with pointless, impotent if onlys. He didn’t think that way about Elizabeth’s death any more.

      Or not often, anyway. He’d accepted it.

      She had received an invitation from her GP practice partner and his wife to fly with them in their light plane to Tamworth for a weekend of country music, line dancing and outdoor meals. Byron himself had insisted—maybe he’d been too high-handed about it—that she needed a break. She should go and he’d be fine with Tori, who had been a pretty exhausting child even then.

      ‘I’ll only go if I’ve expressed enough milk, and if we’ve practised with her taking a bottle from you,’ Elizabeth had said.

       Don’t think about what would have happened if Tori had refused to take a bottle.

      Tori had taken to the bottle with no trouble at all, and so Elizabeth had gone to Tamworth. There had been a mechanical failure. The plane had crashed into the wild country of the Dividing Range, near Barrington Tops. All five people on the aircraft had been killed instantly, but it had taken State Emergency Service volunteers and other rescue workers more than four days to locate the wreckage. When they finally had, it at least had provided a form of certainty and reality to the tragedy.

       It had happened.

      Now there had been another accident, and there was a new set of if onlys.

      If only Elizabeth’s parents hadn’t decided to move north to Queensland to be closer to their other two children. Byron still felt uneasy about their move.

      He wondered if Elizabeth’s mother had been unhappy about looking after Tori full time while he was working. If so, she should have said. Had that been the problem? It had seemed so sudden, and their reasons had been vague at best.

      He had thought this many times over the past few months, hated this sort of powerless questioning at the best of times. He vastly preferred a situation where he could take action, and where he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

      And was he wrong to have returned to Arden? It had seemed like the right thing to do. The obvious thing to do. An action he could take. He’d made his home and his career in Sydney mainly because that had been where Elizabeth had wanted to be. Theirs had been the kind of partnership where both of them had made willing sacrifices.

      But then his widowed mother had been keen to see more of him and Tori, and had insisted that she’d be fine looking after her granddaughter while Byron was at work.

      ‘After all, she’ll be in preschool for three mornings a week this year,’ his mother had said. ‘I’ll get a break. And it’s not as if she’s still a Terrible Two.’

      No, but she was a pretty full-on four and a half!

      He should have insisted that it was too much for Mum. She’d looked so tired when he’d come home each day, but she’d kept saying that everything was fine, that she loved it, that Tori was no trouble. Since when had Tori ever been ‘no trouble’?

      Even Elizabeth’s mother Monica, who was active and energetic and only fifty-four, would throw up her hands some days and say, ‘Take her home! I’ve had enough!’

      Mum was sixty-eight.

      In the bed, his daughter stirred and moaned, and Byron’s eyes pricked with stinging tears that he steeled himself not to give way to.

      Victoria Louise Galloway Black had a personality even bigger than her name. She was so bright, so confident. Dangerously so, it had proved. She wouldn’t have thought twice about getting lunch on her own for herself and Grandma. Her favourite, of course, soft-boiled eggs with bread-and-butter fingers to dip into the runny orange yolk.

      And he kept wondering about the ‘nap’, too. He knew that Mum and Tori watched children’s TV shows together on the ABC in the late afternoons. Play School and Madeline and Bob The Builder. Maybe today wasn’t the first time Mum had taken a nap on the couch. She often fell asleep in front of the television at night, he knew.

      Did Tori regularly end up pottering around by herself, having ideas more ambitious than her small hands could manage, while Mum snoozed?

      He should have insisted that it was too much...

      Byron heard a soft movement behind him and turned, expecting it to be Tori’s nurse, come to carry out her scheduled set of observations. Instead, it was Hayley Kennett. Except, no, she wasn’t Kennett any more, he remembered vaguely. She’d married Chris someone. Only...wasn’t she divorced