‘So it might,’ she whispered. Just how much had her small son noticed?
‘There you are, then,’ Rosa said, and beamed. ‘Benjy, do you want your mama to read you a bedtime story first, or do you want her to go straight after dinner?’
So she went. She hadn’t the least idea why she was going, but there were four bulldozers forcing her to go, Rosa and Doug and Benjy-and Ben.
What right did Ben have to propel her to do anything? she demanded of herself, trying to be angry. Trying to be anything but deeply in love with him. But how could she be angry? He’d never been anything but honest with her. And now he’d been the means of sending her to this place, and already Benjy was looking better, the terrors of the past few days becoming something they could face down together.
Regardless, the desire to be angry was still there. The track was easy to follow in the moonlight, but it was steep. She was puffing with effort and kicking stones in front of her as she climbed. Anger was a much simpler emotion to concentrate on than anything else. Anything else was just too darned complicated.
‘Just pity the snake that gets in my way,’ she said out loud, and then she thought, Lucky it’s not Ben who’s here, the toad. Pushing her around…
It wasn’t working. She tried a bit harder to justify it-and couldn’t-and suddenly it was Jacques who was before her.
She’d hardly been able to think of him until now, but suddenly it was Jacques she wanted to kick.
Jacques had seemed caring and compassionate and loving. He’d wooed her for years and she’d finally let herself agree to marry him.
‘And you were a criminal,’ she said into the darkness. ‘You rotten, deceiving toe-rag. You bottom-feeding maw worm.’
She tested out her vocabulary a bit more. That led to frustration. She didn’t have the words to match her anger.
Nancy Sinatra’s song came into mind, an oldy but a goody-‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’. She hummed a few bars and then broke out in song, setting up a squawk in the undergrowth as night creatures were startled out of their peaceful activities.
‘Sorry, guys,’ she told them, but she sang some more, and suddenly she wasn’t thinking about Jacques any more. She was thinking about Ben.
‘Well, I don’t need you either, you macho army medic.’
Anger faded. She did need Ben.
But he didn’t need her.
But then she reached the top, a rocky outcrop at the height of the ridge. Here, for about twenty yards in either direction, no trees grew. She could almost see her island from here, she thought, and she found herself scanning the horizon, looking for home.
There was a rustling in the bushes at the edge of her rock ledge. She turned and a pair of tiny wallabies had broken cover, maybe for no other reason than to look at her. They gazed at her for a long moment. Finally they decided she was harmless and started to crop the mosses at the edges of the rock.
The sky was vast and endless. The moonlight shimmered over the water. Behind her was the mountain range dividing the coast from the hinterland. It looked as if the whole world was spread out before her.
She felt tiny. Insignificant. She turned to the two wallabies, awed and wanting to share. ‘Does this spot put you in your place?’ she asked them. They gazed at her, not answering but taking in every detail of what was obviously a very interesting specimen.
‘Yes, but a specimen of what?’ she whispered.
Ben had sent her up there. ‘I’m under the same moon,’ he’d said. She let his words drift, and they felt OK. Her island was under the same moon she was under right now. Ben was out there somewhere, caring for her island.
The awful feeling of being bereft, without anchor, without purpose slowly melted.
‘Trouble is, he’s been under the same moon since the first time I met him,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t get him out of my mind.’
Do you need to?
Maybe we can be friends, she thought, and for a moment felt so bleak that she winced.
But the night wasn’t going anywhere. It seemed like she couldn’t go down the ridge until she’d thought this through, and the wallabies were waiting for answers.
‘He’s a good man,’ she told them, and they looked as if they might agree. ‘He sent me up here.’
It was a bit of a one-way conversation. She needed a bit of feedback, she decided, so she turned back to conversation with herself.
You should have sorted this out seven years ago, she told herself. You know you should. You should have told Ben about Benjy. You should have taught Benjy to care for Ben, and you should have given Ben access. Other parents do that. And maybe you could have even grown to be friends.
It would be good to be Ben’s friend.
You don’t want to be Ben’s friend.
Yes, I do, she told the night, fiercely answering her own accusation. Ben walks alone but that doesn’t make him any less of a person. He’s a wonderful man and he’ll make a wonderful father. Just get things in perspective.
Like how?
Like telling yourself to be sensible. Like admitting you find Ben seriously gorgeous-heck, you know that already. You’ve had his baby. There’s no harm in admitting how sexy you think he is. And if he wants to be part of Benjy’s life, you’ll see him lots.
That was a good thought. It was even a great thought.
And you can stop feeling guilty, too, she told herself. It wasn’t that you were looking for a replacement for Ben that made you accept Jacques. If Ben hadn’t been in the back of your mind you probably would have married Jacques a long time ago, and where would that have left you?
Her eyes widened at that. ‘So Ben saved me from marrying Jacques,’ she whispered. ‘Good old Ben. Maybe I should tell him.’
She grinned. She thought about it a little longer, and it felt…OK. ‘I’m giving myself my own psychotherapy here,’ she told the wallabies. ‘Courtesy of Ben.’
She rose, stretched and gazed out to sea. Ben was over there. Just over the horizon.
‘I love him,’ she told the silence. ‘Now I just have to learn to like him.’
You can do that.
‘Yes, I can,’ she told the wallabies, and she grinned at them both and turned to take the track down the ridge. ‘I might have to come up here a few times and talk to you guys again but, hey, you’re cheap. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a holiday to start.’
How the hell had she done all this?
Ben had told Lily he had the medical needs of the island totally sorted-which wasn’t quite true. He and Sam were both working full time and they never reached the end of the queue.
‘Do you think these people have been saving their dramas for the last forty years, just waiting for us to arrive?’ Sam asked a week after Lily had left. ‘I thought medicine in a war zone was hard. This is ridiculous.’
‘There is a financial issue,’ Ben said thoughtfully. He’d talked to Gualberto at length now, and he had a clear idea of the problems Lily was facing. ‘When Lily first started here there was no money for decent medical facilities. No one’s looked at the broader picture since they found oil.’
‘Lily won’t have had time to look. She’ll have been too busy to think past the next case of coral poisoning.’ Sam lifted his day sheet, summarising his daily patients, and winced. ‘Do you have any idea-?’
‘How many times islanders cut themselves on coral and get infected? Yes,’ Ben said. ‘I saw six cases yesterday myself.’
‘Maybe we could bomb the hell out of the coral,’ Sam said morosely. ‘That’d fix it.’
‘There speaks a surgeon. If it hurts, chop it out.’
‘You got any better ideas?’
‘I have, actually,’ Ben said. ‘Use some of the oil money. Set up a first-rate health system, with a state-of-the-
