Marion Lennox - Bachelor Cure

‘Hey, I’m not just a pretty face.’ And then Tess relented and chuckled. ‘Well, to be honest, Mrs Thompson made the pie for me, but the rest is mine. Do stay, Mike. We’d both like you to.’

He hesitated, but he was lost. Lemon meringue pie… Lemon meringue pie and Tessa… And Strop would break his heart if he hauled him away from these smells.

‘Stan only needs a social visit,’ he said slowly. ‘I guess I can drop in tomorrow.’

He couldn’t.

At eleven the next morning he finally arrived at Stan Harper’s farm-and Stan was dead.

‘It must have been a massive infarct,’ Tessa said softly. It was Monday morning. She stood back from the autopsy table and looked across at Mike. She’d insisted on doing this. There was no way she was letting him do the autopsy on his own. ‘There’s no doubt,’ she told him now.

‘No.’

‘Time of death, late on Saturday night?’

‘How about late afternoon Saturday,’ he said heavily, and Tess winced. ‘No. There’s no way we can say that.’

‘There’s no way we can say it was definitely later.’

‘OK.’ Tess crossed to the sink and started washing, watching him out of the corner of her eye. ‘I’ll accept that. It might have happened late Saturday afternoon.’

‘When I should have been there.’

‘By the look of this damage, there’s no way you could have helped, even if you had been there,’ she told him. ‘The artery’s completely blocked. You know as well as I do that this wasn’t a minor, recoverable heart attack. If he’d been in the best-equipped hospital in the world, I doubt he’d have been saved.’

‘But there were no signs… Apart from the pain, which we couldn’t pinpoint. The electrocardiograph was normal. I tried to get him to go to Melbourne and see a specialist but he wouldn’t.’

‘That was his choice.’ Tessa’s voice was flat and devoid of emotion. Her eyes were calmly watchful.

‘I should have insisted.’

‘And he would have refused.’

‘At least I should have been there.’

Here it was. The crux of the whole matter.

‘Are you saying if you’d been there you might have saved him?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ He turned his face away and stared sightlessly at the bare wall. ‘Who can say? He’d run himself down. He wasn’t eating. If I’d spent more time there…bullied him into eating…’

‘Instead of spending time with me,’ she said softly.

‘That did have something to do with it.’

‘The fact that I’m taking so much of your workload that you have more time than ever before has nothing to do with it? The fact that if I hadn’t been here, sharing your work, you might never have had time to pay any social visits at all?’

But he wasn’t listening. ‘I should have been there on Saturday evening,’ he said solidly. ‘I shouldn’t have stayed on with you and your grandfather. I knew Stan was expecting me.’

‘He wasn’t expecting you. You’d called when you could. It was only because I’ve been able to give you free time that you’ve been able to go at all.’ Tess sighed.

‘Mike, Stan may well have been dead already if you’d arrived on Saturday afternoon-or he might even have been fine and then died after you left. There’s no sign of previous scarring here. Apart from the chest pain, which you couldn’t pin down on examination, there was no sign of such a massive problem. This was an act of God, Mike. It has nothing to do with you.’

‘I should have been there.’

Silence. Tess dried her hands and pulled off her lab coat. Then she crossed the floor and took his hands in hers. He stared sightlessly down at her, his heart bleak.

‘Mike, is this our disaster?’ she asked softly.

‘What…?’

‘Will you hold this against us?’

He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t.

‘I should have been there,’ he repeated dully. How could he say anything else? It was all he could think. He’d let Stan down. He’d broken his vow. He’d known this would happen.

‘Do you really believe that if you didn’t love me then Stan would still be alive?’

But he couldn’t answer. His face was cold and bleak and hard, and it reflected how he felt.

‘I don’t know, Tess,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that-’

‘That you want me to go away?’

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he knew what he had to say.

‘Yes, please,’ he said.

Silence.

‘I knew this would happen,’ Tess said softly-finally-and the pain in her voice was clear for him to hear. ‘Aren’t you pleased now that you didn’t make another vow? Aren’t you pleased we’re not married?’

She walked slowly out of the room and closed the door behind her.

WHAT followed was an interminable month when Mike tried to pick up the threads of his life where he’d left off.

There were two sides to his life, he decided. Pre-Tess and post-Tess.

Pre-Tess had been bleak and hard. Post-Tess was just impossible.

He worked on two levels. On the surface he was efficient and calm and under control, but underneath he was so churned up he was wondering just how on earth he could cope.

Maybe it would get better in time, he told himself over and over. Maybe he’d get used to Tessa around the place and he’d stop wanting her in his bed at night. Strop was back on his pillow, and that was all the company he could allow himself!

Maybe if he stopped seeing her every time he turned around it might solve his problems.

That wasn’t going to happen. Tess was settling further into valley life every day she worked here. She soon carved herself out a routine, coming in to do clinics every morning and taking her share of house calls in the afternoons.

Often she took Henry with her on her house calls. They purchased a reliable little truck between them, and the sight of the old man and the flame-headed young lady doctor, beetling around the valley roads, soon became a familiar sight.

‘I don’t know how you managed without her,’ Mike was told over and over, and only he knew that he’d managed a darn sight better without her than with her. He was tearing himself in two!

‘We were fine by ourselves,’ he told Strop, but Strop’s big, mournful eyes looked more mournful than ever, and his tail didn’t wag at all. He hadn’t minded sharing his Mike with Tess-and Tess was a dab hand with a can opener.

Mike’s pain couldn’t go unnoticed, especially by Tessa.

‘You’re being a dope,’ she told him bluntly, six weeks after Stan’s death. It was eleven at night. She’d come in to see a patient she’d admitted to hospital that afternoon, and came past the kitchen door to find him cooking himself bacon and eggs again. ‘You’ll kill yourself on that diet, and you’re still working too hard.’ She stood in the doorway and glared. ‘You know damn well I want more work, Mike Llewellyn. Give it to me.’

‘You can’t work full time and look after Henry.’

‘Henry’s getting better every day. He’s almost independent now.’ She hesitated and then walked all the way in, sitting down at the table while he cooked. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m leaving, if that’s what you’re hoping. Mike, I’m not going away. If anything, I’m getting closer. Henry and I have decided to sell the farm.’

‘Sell the farm!’ That rattled him.

‘We love it but we don’t need sixty acres,’ she told him. ‘And, living out there, I’m too far from the hospital. It was Grandpa’s idea. There’s a great little place down by the river just half a mile from here. Grandpa’s been to see it and he loves it.’

‘But he loves his farm.’

‘So do we both. But we love being together more. This way we can stay together. Just me and Grandpa and Doris the pig…’

‘And the eight porky babies?’ He couldn’t help himself. Mike’s eyes twinkled and Tess twinkled right back.

‘Come out and see our babies some time. They’re what you might call good-dooers. Even Doris is feeling the strain. We may keep little Mike-or rather big Mike-but that’s about the limit.’

‘I see.’

‘Mike…’

‘Yes?’

Tess hesitated and then sighed. ‘You’re still blaming me for Stan’s death-right?’

‘No. I’m blaming me.’

‘That’s worse.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ he said stiffly. ‘It’s the way it is.’

‘So you’re intending to stay solitary for the rest of your life? And keeping on working just as hard as you can?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Well, it’s a really stupid plan,’ she burst out. ‘Just crazy. Do you think your mother would thank you for doing it? For grudging me every piece of work I can get my hands on and for turning your back on a really magnificent love life? What with me and Grandpa and Doris and Strop, who could ask for more? And for running yourself into the ground because you’re so damned miserable you’ve stopped looking after yourself?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘No, it’s not,’ she snapped. ‘You should be eating three solid meals a day, with a nice family routine. Like with me and Grandpa and our appendages. Even with a couple of kids.’ Tess flushed and then managed a smile. ‘Well, if Doris can have little Mikes, I don’t see why I can’t. And as for living on bacon and eggs…’

‘I like bacon and eggs.’ Mike flipped his egg out on top of his bacon and stared down at it. Then he shoved the whole plate away. Suddenly he didn’t feel like anything at all.

And Tessa’s voice suddenly lost its aggressiveness. ‘You’re OK, aren’t you, Mike?’ Her face creased in sudden concern. ‘You’re not sickening for something?’

‘No.’

‘So you’re not dying of a broken heart?’ Her words were flippant, but her face was still worried. ‘Mike, are you losing weight?’

‘No.’

‘I reckon you are,’ Tess said slowly. Her eyes narrowed as she checked him out. ‘In fact, I’m sure you are. And don’t tell me. You don’t really feel like that eggs and bacon.’

The plate lay before them, untouched. Mike hauled it back before him and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Yeah. I do. OK?’