He had to leave. He’d had fallen into the habit of dropping in to see Stan Harper every Saturday evening so now he helped check out Henry’s use of the walking-frame and his ability to get from the bathroom to the bedroom and back to the kitchen, and then it was time to go.
‘Tess will take good care of you, sir,’ he told Henry. ‘And the district nurse will drop in on a daily basis.’
That was what they’d arranged. Also Matt, Jacob Jeffries’s eldest lad, was coming each weekday morning-ostensibly to do some work on the fences around the house but in reality to keep a quiet eye on Henry for the first few weeks of his convalescence. That meant Tess could keep her morning clinic going and, as Henry grew stronger, she could take on more.
‘You’re not staying now?’ Henry demanded, pulling himself out of his pleasurable haze to realise what Mike intended. ‘Hell, you have to stay, boy. I asked Tess especially to cater for all of us. She’s cooking a roast.’
‘I am, too,’ Tess said proudly. ‘Roast pork.’
Mike’s eyebrows hit his hair. Pork? Surely he’d still counted eight babies.
‘You’re kidding!’
Tessa’s eyes crinkled in laughter at his tone. ‘Don’t even think it,’ she told him. ‘Perish the thought. This is a nice anonymous leg of pork bought from a nice anonymous supermarket. Donated, I’m sure, by a nice anonymous pig. I brought it in at dead of night so Doris wouldn’t see, and I swear I’ll bury the remains at dead of night, too.’
‘Very wise.’
‘So you will stay?’ Tess grinned down at her grandfather and then back to him. ‘I’ve bought a can of dog food for Strop, and for us I have everything Grandpa ordered. Apple sauce. Butternut pumpkin. Roast potatoes and fresh peas, with lemon meringue pie to follow…’
‘Lemon meringue pie…’ Both men were now staring at her, their faces reflecting disbelief, and Strop was looking just plain hopeful. Bother the dog food!
‘Hey, I’m not just a pretty face.’ And then Tess relented and chuckled. ‘Well, to be honest, Mrs Thompson made the pie for me, but the rest is mine. Do stay, Mike. We’d both like you to.’
He hesitated, but he was lost. Lemon meringue pie… Lemon meringue pie and Tessa… And Strop would break his heart if he hauled him away from these smells.
‘Stan only needs a social visit,’ he said slowly. ‘I guess I can drop in tomorrow.’
He couldn’t.
At eleven the next morning he finally arrived at Stan Harper’s farm-and Stan was dead.
‘It must have been a massive infarct,’ Tessa said softly. It was Monday morning. She stood back from the autopsy table and looked across at Mike. She’d insisted on doing this. There was no way she was letting him do the autopsy on his own. ‘There’s no doubt,’ she told him now.
‘No.’
‘Time of death, late on Saturday night?’
‘How about late afternoon Saturday,’ he said heavily, and Tess winced. ‘No. There’s no way we can say that.’
‘There’s no way we can say it was definitely later.’
‘OK.’ Tess crossed to the sink and started washing, watching him out of the corner of her eye. ‘I’ll accept that. It might have happened late Saturday afternoon.’
‘When I should have been there.’
‘By the look of this damage, there’s no way you could have helped, even if you had been there,’ she told him. ‘The artery’s completely blocked. You know as well as I do that this wasn’t a minor, recoverable heart attack. If he’d been in the best-equipped hospital in the world, I doubt he’d have been saved.’
‘But there were no signs… Apart from the pain, which we couldn’t pinpoint. The electrocardiograph was normal. I tried to get him to go to Melbourne and see a specialist but he wouldn’t.’
‘That was his choice.’ Tessa’s voice was flat and devoid of emotion. Her eyes were calmly watchful.
‘I should have insisted.’
‘And he would have refused.’
‘At least I should have been there.’
Here it was. The crux of the whole matter.
‘Are you saying if you’d been there you might have saved him?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ He turned his face away and stared sightlessly at the bare wall. ‘Who can say? He’d run himself down. He wasn’t eating. If I’d spent more time there…bullied him into eating…’
‘Instead of spending time with me,’ she said softly.
‘That did have something to do with it.’
‘The fact that I’m taking so much of your workload that you have more time than ever before has nothing to do with it? The fact that if I hadn’t been here, sharing your work, you might never have had time to pay any social visits at all?’
But he wasn’t listening. ‘I should have been there on Saturday evening,’ he said solidly. ‘I shouldn’t have stayed on with you and your grandfather. I knew Stan was expecting me.’
‘He wasn’t expecting you. You’d called when you could. It was only because I’ve been able to give you free time that you’ve been able to go at all.’ Tess sighed.
‘Mike, Stan may well have been dead already if you’d arrived on Saturday afternoon-or he might even have been fine and then died after you left. There’s no sign of previous scarring here. Apart from the chest pain, which you couldn’t pin down on examination, there was no sign of such a massive problem. This was an act of God, Mike. It has nothing to do with you.’
‘I should have been there.’
Silence. Tess dried her hands and pulled off her lab coat. Then she crossed the floor and took his hands in hers. He stared sightlessly down at her, his heart bleak.
‘Mike, is this our disaster?’ she asked softly.
‘What…?’
‘Will you hold this against us?’
He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t.
‘I should have been there,’ he repeated dully. How could he say anything else? It was all he could think. He’d let Stan down. He’d broken his vow. He’d known this would happen.
‘Do you really believe that if you didn’t love me then Stan would still be alive?’
But he couldn’t answer. His face was cold and bleak and hard, and it reflected how he felt.
‘I don’t know, Tess,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that-’
‘That you want me to go away?’
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he knew what he had to say.
‘Yes, please,’ he said.
Silence.
‘I knew this would happen,’ Tess said softly-finally-and the pain in her voice was clear for him to hear. ‘Aren’t you pleased now that you didn’t make another vow? Aren’t you pleased we’re not married?’
She walked slowly out of the room and closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT followed was an interminable month when Mike tried to pick up the threads of his life where he’d left off.
There were two sides to his life, he decided. Pre-Tess and post-Tess.
Pre-Tess had been bleak and hard. Post-Tess was just impossible.
He worked on two levels. On the surface he was efficient and calm and under control, but underneath he was so churned up he was wondering just how on earth he could cope.
Maybe it would get better in time, he told himself over and over. Maybe he’d get used to Tessa around the place and he’d stop wanting her in his bed at night. Strop was back on his pillow, and that was all the company he could allow himself!
Maybe if he stopped seeing her every time he turned around it might solve his problems.
That wasn’t going to happen. Tess was settling further into valley life every day she worked here. She soon carved herself out a routine, coming in to do clinics every morning and taking her share of house calls in the afternoons.
Often she took Henry with her on her house calls. They purchased a reliable little truck between them, and the sight of the old man and the flame-headed young lady doctor, beetling around the valley roads, soon became a familiar sight.