‘That’s better,’ he told her. ‘Much better.’ Then, before she could guess what he was about to do, he lifted his palm to her cheek. His hand rested against her face-just for a moment. It was a gesture of warmth and strength and solidarity. It was a gesture that said she wasn’t alone.
She didn’t need such a gesture. She didn’t.
She backed away from him, and he let her go.
But then, as his car drove out of the driveway, as he headed off back to his medicine, back to his hospital, back to his outside world, her hand came up to retrace the path of his fingers.
There was still warmth there.
She didn’t need help.
But she stood and held her hand against her face for a very long time.
Richard slept. He woke briefly to eat the dinner Ginny prepared but he said little.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said when Ginny raised the matter of the letter, and when he saw she intended to push he simply turned back over on his pillows and slept some more.
How could you hit a dying man? She couldn’t. But the flare of anger behind her panic refused to disappear completely.
It was all very well for him, cocooned in his pillows, knowing he was leaving, accepting that any problems were hers and not his.
Emotional blackmail? Maybe.
She washed up, went outside and stared down at the lake. The sun set late here. It was still a tangerine ball behind low-lying clouds on the horizon.
It was an hour before Fergus was due back.
If she left and Richard woke up…
She walked across to his bed and stared down at him. Fergus’s words came back to her.
He wasn’t dying this week. He’d survived petrol fumes and fear without his oxygen.
‘You’re alive until you’re dead,’ she said softly, not knowing whether he could hear her or not but not really caring. ‘Richard, don’t do this to me.’
Silence.
Of course there was silence.
What to do?
There was no television in this place. No radio. It was all very well staring out over the lake until you die, she thought bleakly but she wasn’t dying.
She actually felt ever so slightly more alive at the moment than she’d felt for a while.
Was that something to do with a pair of caring grey eyes and the touch of fingers against her face?
Oh, yeah, let’s fall in love with the doctor, shall we? she said to herself, mocking. She’d do no such thing.
She very carefully kept herself free of relationships and Fergus was no exception. This feeling she had was nonsense.
She should sit and watch the sunset.
She stared at the sunset for three or four minutes. It was a very nice sunset.
Enough.
She turned back to the bed, to her sleeping brother.
‘I’m going over to Oscar’s to check his lambs and make sure his dogs have been fed,’ she told his non- responsive form. ‘I’ll be back in three-quarters of an hour. Don’t die while I’m away.’ She bit her lip and then added, ‘And if you do, it’s not my fault.’
CHAPTER FIVE
OSCAR should never have been permitted to farm. She should never have agreed to let him use their land to graze his cattle. She knew that as she trudged back over the paddocks. It was yet another burden on her heart, but at least the walk over the hills got a bit of air into her lungs and gave her a chance to take a little time out from the impossibility of what lay ahead.
And at first it seemed things were OK. Ginny checked the house paddock where she’d left her lamb who’d been stuck in the cattle grid. Everything there was great. The sheep there were surrounding the trough, as if not brave enough to leave it in case it drained again. Her rescued lamb was suckling from his resigned mother, his tiny tail wagging with the ferocious intensity of an avid eater.
One happy ending. Great.
She walked back behind the house, up to the paddock where Oscar kept his lambing ewes. She’d been there earlier that afternoon and had found six sad mounds of disintegrating wool, stories of lambing gone wrong.
There were ewes and lambs everywhere here. Lambing was almost at an end. She ran her eyes over the flock. Searching for trouble.
And, of course, she found it. There was one ewe down.
Why had she looked for trouble? she demanded of herself. Oscar had left his flock to their fate, letting nature take its course. So should she.
She couldn’t. She walked over and knelt by the ewe. The animal had gone past straining, lying on her side and panting, gazing ahead with eyes that were starting to dull with pain.
‘I’m not an obstetrician,’ she told the sheep, but she checked what was happening and winced. ‘Ouch.’
She couldn’t leave her. A bucket of hot soapy water might help Very soapy water. And a bit of luck…
She rose and Fergus was standing by the paddock gate, watching her.
‘Medical emergency,’ she said briefly, and walked across to meet him. He held the gate open for her and she passed him, aware that she smelt like sheep again and he didn’t. Aware that he was six inches taller than her. Aware that he had great eyes…
‘I didn’t think you’d leave Richard,’ he said.
‘I seem to remember you told me I might,’ she said. ‘Plus he’s sleeping. Plus we’ve run out of petrol. Why are you here?’
‘Same as you, I’d imagine. I thought I’d check on our lamb.’
Our lamb. It had a nice ring to it, she thought. A glimmer of humour in a day that had been singularly without any such thing.
‘He’s fine.’
‘So I see. But there’s a ewe in trouble?’
‘The lamb’s stuck. One foot out, nothing else. I need to find some lubricant.’
‘What’s your medical speciality?’ he called after her. She’d hardly stopped walking. He closed the gate behind her and now he caught her up as she headed into the house.
‘Emergency medicine,’ she said briefly. ‘Yours?’
‘I’m a surgeon.’
A surgeon. What was a surgeon doing in Cradle Lake?
No matter. Concentrate on the job at hand.
‘So if neither of us is an obstetrician… You reckon between us we can deliver a lamb?’
‘I reckon between us we can call a vet.’
‘No time,’ she said over her shoulder, reaching the ramp up to the veranda and shoving her way past interested dogs. ‘The vet comes from Marlborough and the ewe will be dead by then. She’s young. Too damned young to have been joined, I’d have said, but, then, I’m a doctor, not a farmer.’
‘You spent your childhood here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you farmed.’
‘So I did.’ They were through Oscar’s back door. She grabbed a bucket by the laundry trough and started running hot water. ‘Can you find a sheet or something that I can rip up to make a rope?’
