his consulting room.
‘Take your trousers off and lie down,’ she instructed, scrubbing up her hands and sorting out the lignocaine injection and the tetanus booster.
‘I get a feeling of déjà vu,’ he commented, kicking off his shoes and removing his trousers.
‘Just shut up and lie down,’ she said irritably. She didn’t like the way he made her feel, not one bit. She was never irritable—never. He brought out a side of her she didn’t even know existed, and it was a side she didn’t think she liked. However, he seemed to hit all the wrong buttons all the time.
She picked up the lignocaine syringe and got Matt to check it.
‘Don’t mix them up,’ he warned, a thread of laughter in his voice.
‘Serve you right if I did,’ Polly replied, and resisted the urge to plunge the needle into his leg unnecessarily hard. After injecting the local anaesthetic into the area around the wound and disposing of the syringe, she picked up the other and asked, ‘Where do you want the tetanus booster—gluteus maximus?’
He rolled over sharply, eyes laughing. ‘No way! I want to be able to sit down. Here will do. I’m going to be limping anyway.’ He pointed to his thigh and watched as Polly slapped his leg, swabbed it and injected it with practised ease.
‘Not bad,’ he said mildly, ‘but was it necessary to slap me first?’
‘Technically, no, spiritually, yes,’ Polly replied, dropping the syringe into the sharps bin. ‘Right, let’s get you sewn up, Dr Gregory.’
He rolled on to his stomach, propped his chin on his folded hands and mumbled something.
‘What?’
‘I said I’m sorry. I should have told you who I was, but I was enjoying your ministrations and I was afraid you’d flounder if you knew who I was. I didn’t mean to tease you at first, and in the surgery…’
‘… it was just too good an opportunity to miss. I know. Right, hold still. Is it numb?’
At his nod, she removed the butterfly plaster, swabbed the wound and carefully trimmed away the softly curling hairs around the area. Then she inserted the suture needle, drawing the ragged edges of the wound together. ‘I’m going to do two, I think. It’ll be neater. Not that it’ll show with all this fuzz.’
‘I’ll be devastated if I’m scarred, Polly. I’ll hold you personally responsible,’ he threatened.
‘You are in a very vulnerable position,’ she warned him. ‘If I were you, I’d be very quiet!’
Just then Mike Haynes popped his head round the door. ‘Ah, there you are. Very neat, Polly. Well done. Don’t forget to fill in the paperwork so we can claim!’
Polly smiled. Oh, no. This one’s on me,’ she said with a light laugh.
‘Can you give me a minute when you’re done, Matt?’ Dr Haynes asked, and Matt nodded.
‘We won’t be long.’ Polly tied off the suture, clipped it neatly and covered the wound. ‘Let me see that tomorrow, and I’ll change the dressing,’ she told him, disposing of the refuse and stripping off her gloves.
He slid off the couch and dressed quickly, then on the way past, he dropped a quick and meaningless little kiss on her lips.
‘Thanks, Polly.’
His smile held his apology, and Polly smiled back her forgiveness. In truth, she couldn’t have done anything else, because something inside her had come alive at his kiss, and she couldn’t have stopped the smile if her life depended on it.
THEY met up again at three for the ante-natal clinic, and Polly had an opportunity to see Matt Gregory in action. She found it a real eye-opener.
Far too young to assume a paternalistic attitude, with his warm, open smile and solid bulk he just became everyone’s favourite brother. He asked searching personal questions with gentle understanding, said nothing trite or patronising, and managed to refrain from avuncular pats or the worse alternative, chilling professional distance.
He treated the women in his care with respect, interest and a touching tenderness, as if what they were doing was somehow special—which of course it was.
Polly was impressed. She didn’t think she had ever seen anyone so human before.
Ms Harding, the liberated elderly primip, was dealt with without any faux pas on Polly’s behalf and with humorous efficiency by Matt, and she was pleased to meet Sarah Goddard, the woman who was going for a home delivery.
When she showed Mrs Goddard in to Matt after weighing her and checking her BP and urine, he asked Polly to stay. As she watched his strong, sensitive hands moving deftly and with infinite care over Mrs Goddard’s swollen abdomen, Polly felt some strange emotion rise up and clog her throat.
The baby, resenting Matt’s interference, squirmed and kicked, and Matt and Mrs Goddard both laughed, a warm, intimate laugh that made Polly feel left out. The thing, whatever it was, that had come to life inside Polly when Matt had kissed her turned into full-blown jealousy for a brief instant—so brief that Polly didn’t even have time to recognise it, but she was aware of a tiny flash of pain which she attributed to a frustrated maternal urge.
Sighing, she turned away and busied herself laying up the instrument trolley with swabs, gloves, KY jelly, speculum, cervical spatulas and the like.
Polly wanted children. She had no particular image of herself, either as a nurse or as a woman, but she knew that men—not all, certainly, but enough—found her reasonably attractive. With her nut-brown hair curling in unruly tangles around her head, and her warm brown eyes in what she saw as an honest but unremarkable face, Polly was as far removed as she could be from her ideal of the Nordic blonde which she imagined was what turned men on. Her breasts were too full, her hips too rounded, although her waist was neat and her stomach flat and firm. She was too short, too squat, and altogether too homespun for perfection, but she knew she had a warm heart and a loving nature, and her one affair had been filled with affection and humour.
Martin had emigrated to Australia, and the choice for Polly had been simple—go with him, as his mistress, or stay. He had never asked her to be his wife, and Polly felt he probably never would unless he was pushed—but she didn’t want to push him. Somewhere inside the practical, cheerful and warmhearted woman everybody loved to know was a passionate, romantic girl who wanted to be swept off her feet.
No matter that it was unrealistic. Polly knew that in the end she would settle for a kind man and set up a loving home based on mutual affection and respect. She didn’t ask for fireworks. She had learned long ago that they were a figment of romantic fiction. All she asked was that some time, before she was too old, she should find a good man to settle down with and raise a brood of chicks. And the young and attractive Mrs Goddard, with her mother-earth good looks and the smooth mound of her burgeoning pregnancy, was a reminder that time was ticking by.
Squashing the thing she now recognised as jealousy, she helped the woman
