Doctor Knows Best (3 page)

“Yes, I mean…yes, I know,” stammered Megan. “Goodnight.”

She sped on her way back to the nurses' home, a strange warmth pervading her being. At the same time she was cursing herself for behaving like a dumbstruck sixteen-year-old, just because he had held her hand.

Chapter Two

The next morning passed fairly uneventfully, at feast as far as Giles Elliott was concerned. His piercing blue eyes seemed to be everywhere and observe everything, but Megan noticed thankfully that he wasn't in such a fearsome mood as the one he had been in the previous afternoon.

“I was dreading this morning,” confessed Jamie Green, one of the senior house officers. “Yesterday I couldn't put a foot right, but today he has actually congratulated me for reading an X-ray correctly!”

He and Megan were busy in one of the cubicles, cleaning and dressing superficial lacerations on the legs of a ten-year-old girl who had taken a nasty tumble from her bicycle.

“Perhaps he's still tired after last, night,” said Megan. Then she grinned mischieviously at Jamie. “We had better be thankful for small mercies! There's no knowing when he'll strike again.”

“How is this young lady?” A familiar deep voice behind her made Megan jump. She and Jamie exchanged guilty glances, both hoping their conversation hadn't been overheard.

Giles Elliott picked up the casualty card lying beside the patient and quickly scanned the brief notes. “Hmm, I see you fell off your bicycle,” he said to the little girl.

“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes wide and dark against the pallor of her face. “Mummy will be cross, I'm not supposed to ride on the road.”

“Where is Mummy?” he asked gently, noting that there was no parent's signature on the card.

“She is on her way in,” Megan replied for the little girl. “We had to telephone her at her workplace. She had already left for work before Amanda here decided to ride her bike to school.”

“I see,” he said slowly. Then he smiled reassuringly at the anxious little girl. “You have been very lucky indeed—all you have got are some grazes and bruises. So if you promise me that you won't ride your bicycle again on the road, at least not until you are older, I'll try and persuade your mother not to be too angry.”

“I promise,” whispered Amanda, smiling at him gratefully.

Huh, your charm works on women of any age, thought Megan, watching him. He only had to smile and the child responded to him in much the same way Megan herself had responded. The only difference is
you
should be old enough to know better, Megan told herself.

As far as Amanda's mother was concerned, there was no need to worry. She was so glad to see her precious daughter in one piece that there were no recriminations for her breaking the rules. However, Giles Elliott made a point of emphasising that Amanda had promised him she wouldn't ride her bicycle on the road again. At least, not in the foreseeable future. Mother and daughter left the casualty department, the little girl's legs swathed in dressings as she held on tightly to her anxious mother's hand.

Giles Elliott stood beside Megan watching mother and daughter as they made their departure. “That's the problem of latch-key children,” he said with a sigh.

“Yes, I suppose it is a problem,” agreed Megan. “But if you are divorced, like Amanda's mother, a single-parent family trying to cope with work and a child, there is no alternative, is there?”

“No,” he agreed, a grim look on his face.

Something puzzled Megan. He seemed to take it almost personally, almost as if it was his own worry, but before she had time to dwell on these thoughts something happened that put the whole episode completely out of her mind.

A man in his middle fifties had come in with a sprained ankle—not a particularly bad sprain but it did need a support. After all the routine questions had been asked and his ankle had been X-rayed and examined by one of the junior doctors, Megan left a student nurse, who had plenty of experience, to put on the supporting bandage.

She was standing at the desk by the side wall opposite the patients' cubicles and was about to call in the next case, when the cardiac arrest signal went off on her bleep. Even as she turned around, before she heard the automatic voice over the bleep system, she saw that the man had keeled over, falling from the couch to the floor, pinning the young student nurse beneath him. She had obviously had the presence of mind to push the cardiac arrest button as they both fell.

For once everything went with clockwork precision. The anaesthetist on call happened to be in Casualty at that moment, so there was no delay in intubation, and after only half an hour a resuscitated patient, stable enough to be moved, was being wheeled up to the coronary care unit for observation.

Megan turned her attention to the student nurse. “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously. “I'm afraid there wasn't much time to enquire before.” The girl gave a nervous laugh. “Yes, I'm OK, but I must admit that I do feel a bit shaky now that it's all over.”

“You go off and have a coffee now,” Megan told her. “You look as if you could do with a break. Take a friend with you, we can manage without two of you.”

“Are you sure?” the student hesitated.

Megan looked around Casualty. All was quiet for the moment. “See for yourself,” she said. “Take your chance now, while you can. We may not be as quiet as this for the rest of the day!”

It was only after they had gone that Megan realised Giles Elliott hadn't been there when the arrest had happened. Pity, she thought ruefully, he would have seen us at our most efficient.

Jamie Green was sitting at the desk looking at some X-rays on the wall-mounted screen and Megan wandered over to him. “Pity our new consultant, Mr. Giles Elliott, wasn't around to see our efficient arrest team in action,” she remarked.

Jamie pulled a face and gave a resigned sigh. “Yes when everything goes with textbook precision there is never anybody to see it. Not anybody important, anyway.” He raised his eyebrows expressively. “But when something goes wrong, you can be sure you hit the headlines!”

“That's one of the hazards of medicine—the criticism is far faster in coming than the praise.” Giles Elliott had walked up behind without either of them hearing him.

Megan turned round quickly, feeling slightly irritated. He seemed to make a habit of looming up into conversations. It was irrational of her, she knew, to feel that way, particularly as he had been very pleasant. It was just that the sound of his voice made her jump and inexplicably sent her heart into a crazy erratic rhythm—and anyway, she told herself, trying to ignore the beating of her heart, she wasn't too keen on having a consultant looking over her shoulder, particularly when the consultant concerned noticed everything!

So her voice had a slight edge to it as she said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, I have work to do in my office. Now seems like an ideal time to do some catching up on my paperwork.”

As she walked past the now empty cubicle in Casualty and back to the office, she could almost feel Giles Elliott's piercing blue eyes boring holes in her back. Once in her office, instead of getting on with her paperwork as she should have done, and there certainly was a mountain of it to do, she sat, staring with unseeing eyes out of the window to the car park outside. The little alarm on her watch emitted a tiny high-pitched bleep, reminding her that it was on the hour. She glanced at her watch. Good heavens, twelve o'clock already. She had promised to meet her brother that day for lunch at one and that gave her only an hour in which to make some headway into the paperwork she disliked.

Sighing, she pulled the overladen tray towards her. This was one of the Sister's tasks she hated, but it had to be done. And, with a tremendous effort, by the time one o'clock came she had managed to make quite a sizeable inroad into it. So it was with a sense of well-earned relief that she pushed the tray away and set off to meet her brother.

On arrival at the canteen she could see Richard with some of his friends already seated inside. Hastily grabbing a salad lunch she queued up to pay for it, then joined her brother.

“Sorry I'm late,” she said, squeezing in beside him. “I was trying to get some paperwork out of the way.”

Richard grinned cheekily. “I still think the efficient Sister image doesn't suit you,” he said.

Megan aimed a friendly blow at him which he successfully managed to dodge. “I can't say I can imagine you being a dignified doctor,” she countered. “What useful work have you been doing this morning?”

“Well, for a change we actually did something very useful,” answered one of Richard's friends, Simon. “We laid out and numbered the specimens for a first-year anatomy spot test. I call that being very useful.”

“Oh well, in that case perhaps you can answer a question for me,” came a voice from the far end of the table. It was Rupert Grimes, a first-year medic whose elder brother was a third-year, hence the fact that he was lunching with them.

“Fire away,” said Simon with all the self-assurance of a third-year medical student, feeling infinitely superior to a first-year.

“What was the point of having that frog as item number four?” asked Rupert plaintively. “Was the Prof purposely trying to catch us out?”

At the mention of the frog, eight pairs of incredulous eyes swivelled down towards the end of the table where Rupert was sitting.

“Did you say frog?” Simon's voice rose in a disbelieving squeak.

“Yes,
frog
,”
repeated Rupert even more plaintively. He consulted a scrap of paper. “Yes, specimen number four, I've got it written down here.”

“That wasn't a frog, you fool,” burst out his brother. “That was a bladder! My God, you're going to do well if you can't even identify pickled specimens!” The end of his sentence was lost in the great gale of laughter that suddenly swept around the table.

Poor Rupert blushed a shade of beetroot red from the roots of his hair to his neck. Megan felt sorry for him, but even she couldn't help laughing helplessly along with the rest. At last the laughter subsided and he shrank down in his seat, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Megan took her handkerchief from her uniform pocket and wiped her streaming eyes, and as she did so she suddenly sensed, rather than saw, that she was being observed.

Almost as if she were a puppet on a string she felt her head turn in the direction of the gaze. Her large brown eyes, still sparkling with laughter, met the steel cold disapproval of ice blue ones. Giles Elliott stood, tray in hand, regarding the hilarity at the table with a distinct air of disdain about him. Hostility surrounded him like a physical aura.

Megan felt her hackles rise in annoyance. What right had he to look so damned supercilious? She was off duty, for the moment anyway, and could laugh with whom she pleased. Defiantly she tilted her chin, flashed back a look of equal disapproval from her expressive brown eyes and turned her back towards him. Later she saw that he was sitting at a table with some very elderly consultants, and she couldn't help feeling a little touch of satisfaction when she saw he was looking decidedly bored.

Serves you right, thought Megan, knowing full well through the hospital grape-vine that the particular consultants he was sitting with had only one topic of conversation, money. Apparently, so it was rumoured, they had the private practice at the local nursing home sewn up between them. Well, they had nothing to fear from Giles Elliott, if what he had told her earlier was anything to go by, and he certainly had little in common with them. They were all years older than him.

Megan left the canteen, avoiding meeting his eyes as she walked past his table, and made her way back to Casualty. The afternoon passed quickly. A succession of minor accidents were admitted, some patients arriving under their own steam, others being picked up from road traffic accidents and being brought in by ambulance. But there was nothing serious, just cuts and grazes, sprains and a broken arm—enough, however, to keep all the staff constantly on the go. Then a little boy was brought in by his mother with a plastic bullet lodged up his nostril. He had well and truly shot himself up the nose as he had been playing with a toy gun!

Giles Elliott was called and decided to attempt to remove it in Casualty to avoid unnecessary trauma by admitting the toddler into a hospital ward, and he asked Megan to assist him. After a few moments, though, he laid down the nasal forceps and turned to her.

“It's too firmly lodged. Get an ENT surgeon down to have a look, will you? I think he will probably need to be admitted and have it removed under a general anaesthetic.”

The ENT surgeon arrived and agreed with Giles Elliott's opinion. Megan was not sorry to see the back of the rumbustious youngster. It had been quite a task trying to prevent him from swarming under, or climbing up, anything and everything in sight. He toddled away happily, not in the least bit worried, in the direction of the ward area, clutching his mother's hand and with the plastic gun, the cause of all the trouble, still firmly clenched in his other fist.

“An hour with one three-year-old boy and I feel quite exhausted. It must be old age,” said Megan to Giles Elliott with a laugh. Then she added, “Would you like a cup of tea? I have a kettle and a teapot in my office.”

“Yes I would, Sister. I'll be along in five minutes.” His answer was positive and immediate.

As she was making the tea Megan wondered what on earth had possessed her to ask him to her office for tea, especially after the way he had glowered at her at lunch-time! However, she took great pains with the tray, setting it out carefully with the best cups she kept for special visitors and putting some chocolate fingers onto a small side plate.

Giles Elliott knocked and came in, his tall frame seeming to fill every spare inch of the room. “This is nice,” he said, settling in the armchair reserved for her visitors, stretching out his long legs in a relaxed fashion before him.

Suddenly Megan found she was ridiculously nervous and it was with a great effort that she poured the tea and milk and passed him the sugar, feeling that if she relaxed one iota the cup would clatter uncontrollably around in the saucer.