shook her head. “S OK,’ she said pragmatically. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘She’s so independent,’ Jayne said in admiration, sinking into the big armchair by the bed. ‘You’d think she’d be clingy, but she’s not. She just gets on with it, no matter how awful. She’s got such guts—’
Jayne broke off, her lips pressed together in a firm line, and Allie wondered what it must be like to have a child with CF and know there was a one-in-four chance that the baby she carried would have inherited the same dreadful and debilitating disease.
She patted her shoulder, giving quiet comfort and support, and then left her to grab a few precious moments alone to rest in the comfy chair. Allie reckoned she’d earned it.
She managed to slip up to the canteen for lunch, by a miracle, and was sitting propped up in an easy chair in the corner nursing a cup of tea when Beth strolled over.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said without preamble. ‘I saw him today in Outpatients. I had to cover. He is just luscious.’
Allie didn’t pretend not to understand. ‘I know,’ she said glumly.
Beth dropped into the chair opposite and gave her a curious look. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘I’m the one that should have the long face. At least he’s interested in you—he wouldn’t have noticed if I’d got six legs!’
Allie laughed. ‘Beth, you’re silly. He’s going to be a GP,’ she added after a pause.
‘How wonderful. There are far too few of them out there.’
‘I don’t want him to be a GP. It’s so stressful.’
‘Isn’t that rather for him to decide?’ Beth said pointedly. ‘And anyway, what does it matter? He’s here now, he’s giving out all the right messages—you’d have to be mad to ignore it. Well, mad or dead or totally sexless.’
Beth was right—and Allie wasn’t any of those things, at least not where Mark was concerned. Well—mad, maybe, but that was different.
She finished her tepid tea and set the cup down. Happy ever after was probably a figment of the imagination, anyway, but there was no time like the present. Who said every relationship worth having had to end in marriage?
She gave the bemused Beth a dazzling smile. ‘You’re a love. See you later.’
And feeling much brighter than she had all day, she went back to work.
HE DIDN’T ask her out again until the weekend, and she was beginning to wonder if her imagination had read more into their relationship than was warranted.
If you could call it a relationship.
Maybe she’d presumed too much from their slight acquaintance. Maybe Anna was more appealing to him than he’d let on—although there was no sign of anything blossoming there either, she thought, and told herself that the only reason Mark had shown so much interest in her was because he was lonely in Audley and didn’t know anyone else!
So she put it out of her mind, and carried on with her work and tried not to notice when he was around, but it was pointless. Her radar wouldn’t switch off, and she was constantly aware of every breath he took when he was on the ward.
Still, her patients were a good distraction, and she tried to concentrate on them.
Little Claudia Hall was doing all right on her antibiotics, despite feeling sick, and her mother and father had taken over her antibiotic therapy and were giving her the injections through the catheter in her arm. It saved the nursing staff a job, and her parents were already so involved with their daughter’s care that they were utterly reliable.
In any case they were probably more knowledgeable about her condition than many of the staff on the ward, and like so many parents these days, wanted to know everything and not be kept in the dark. Furthermore they explained everything to Claudia, so that she could be in control of her treatment.
As Jayne said, ‘She’s Claudia first, and CF second. All this treatment isn’t for the CF, it’s for Claudia. She has to understand it and condone it and accept it. It’s her body, not yours, not mine. She has to make the choices, and if she’s given some control, it helps her to deal with it.’
However their philosophy could only help so much. One of the hardest things was also one of the simplest, in comparison to the other things she had to endure. Every third day of her gentamycin therapy, she had to have pre- and post-gentamycin blood tests to make sure that her fragile little system was able to cope with the drug.
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