is it?’ She brushed the other cheek and then realised what he’d seen. ‘This?’ Sophie made the well-worn joke that she used whenever anyone noticed her eyes. Opening and closing each one in turn, she described a circle in the air with her finger, intoning a spooky melody.
He had such a nice smile. One that could get her into trouble if she wasn’t very careful. ‘You have heterochromia.’
‘Yes. I wear a contact lens in my brown eye for filming, so it doesn’t look weird.’
‘It doesn’t look weird. It’s…’ He shrugged, seemingly at a loss for words.
‘I was born with it. It’s just a pigmentation thing, nothing else.’ Sophie was aware that heterochromia could sometimes be the result of an injury, and she didn’t want him getting the wrong idea.
‘It’s beautiful.’ Clearly his mind was on the aesthetics, rather than any medical implications.
Suddenly, even though neither of them was moving, the space between them seemed to close. As if all the air were being sucked out of the room, and they were being forced together by some trick of physics.
Then the vortex seemed to throw itself into reverse, and he drew back. ‘The patient’s probably dead by now.’ He gave a regretful twist of his mouth, and Sophie’s heart lurched.
‘No one ever dies in a film unless the script says so. We’ll perform a medical miracle.’
‘Be my guest.’ He sat back onto his heels, waiting for her to make the next move.
Suddenly she felt strong. She knew exactly what to do next. ‘Thirty compressions and two breaths?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But I have a second qualified person available.’ She took the risk of testing her recall a little further.
‘In which case?’
‘One delivers compressions and the other rescue breaths. We switch every two minutes or so to avoid getting tired.’
He grinned. ‘So we’ll take it from the top, then?’
Sophie took a breath. Yes. It all came to her, like a well-understood routine. She checked for a response again, coming to the same conclusion as she had before. He helped her position the dummy, and she tilted its head back, ready to deliver rescue breaths.
‘You start with the compressions.’
He nodded, doing as she’d told him, counting aloud when he got to twenty-five. She gave the rescue breaths right on cue, and he nodded his approval, starting the compressions again straight away.
‘Do you want to try a switch?’ He was concentrating on what he was doing and didn’t look up at her.
‘Sure. On your signal.’
The switch was perfect. Almost without thinking, Sophie fell into the lifesaving rhythm, picking up the compressions where he’d left off, using her body weight to help give her the amount of pressure that the doctor had applied. They carried on for five repeats and then switched back again.
‘Perfect.’ He finally sat back on his heels.
‘Not so bad for an airhead, you mean?’ She gave a half-smile to indicate that he could take that as a joke, if he chose.
‘You said it…’
And Sophie knew beyond a doubt that he’d thought it. He hadn’t been able to disguise the surprise in his eyes when she’d shown she really did know how to perform CPR.
‘My father’s a doctor. He taught us all what to do in emergency situations. I’ve never had to do it for real…’ She couldn’t keep the trace of bitterness from her tone. Her father had always assumed she’d become a doctor, and instead she’d taken up a profession that had no value in his eyes. His only response to the news that she was making this film had been a back-handed compliment, saying he was glad she was at least pretending to do something useful.
‘Well remembered, then.’
He smiled, and pleasure trickled across the dull pain of rejection. Sophie wondered whether he’d adjust his opinion if he knew that she was still searching her mind for his first name. Dr Taylor seemed a little formal, since they’d just saved the life of a props dummy together.
‘As you already have a good idea of how to resuscitate someone, you understand the theory behind it all.’
‘Yes.’ Sophie nodded. When he put it that way, she supposed that she did.
‘Which will stand you in really good stead for this.’ He got to his feet, producing a copy of the medical techniques document. She’d studied her copy for hours, hoping that she might retain at least some of it. ‘I guess you haven’t had much of a chance to look at it.’
‘No. Not really.’ He was giving her a way out, and Sophie took it gratefully.
He grinned. ‘I guess that’s my job. It gives a detailed description of how resuscitation was carried out in the nineteen-forties—which is a little different from the way we do it now.’
‘They did chest compressions but no rescue breaths.’ A fragment of fact suddenly popped into her mind.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve managed to find a couple of old training films on the internet. But it may be easier to just try it ourselves.’ He knelt down next to her. ‘Do you want to start with the compressions?’
‘Okay.’ Sophie could do that. She already knew how to do compressions. This morning was going a lot better than she’d expected it to. No tantrums needed to cover her lapses in memory, and the doctor seemed to be going out of his way not to spring anything unexpected on her.
‘Right, then.’ He flashed her a grin. ‘Here we go…’
The morning’s work had been a success. Starting with what Sophie knew and then using gesture and movement to reinforce the new information seemed to have worked. The atmosphere on set lightened considerably as she sailed through her scene that afternoon, even managing to bestow a few smiles on her co-star and the crew.
Joel, the director, spared a nod of satisfaction for Drew, clearly pleased with his tutelage. Carly gave him a beaming smile when she thought no one else was looking, and Sophie ignored him completely.
Even though she clearly didn’t want to think about him unless she absolutely had to, Sophie dominated Drew’s thoughts. He watched her carefully, and as dispassionately as he could. And the more he watched her, the more he realised that he knew what was wrong, and that she was trying desperately to cover it up.
THE FOLLOWING DAY didn’t start well. The script had said rain, but real rain seemed to be a problem, and an unscheduled downpour had stopped filming for a while. Rumour had it that Carly was confined to her room at the hotel with a stomach bug, and Sophie’s face was set in a hard, concentrated frown. She avoided him as if he had something
