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'Lord, no! No self-respecting nag would have me on its back. Since I injured my spine ten years ago I've put on a lot of weight. I go on diets, but never stick to them; I like all the forbidden foods.'

Anna sympathised, and their talk from then on was confined to keeping fit. It wasn't until they were out on the pavement, and preparing to part, that Miss Benson asked if Anna would be going to the Marriners' party. 'It's a fortnight today, as I'm sure you know...' She was being waggish again. 'My invitation came yesterday, via Imogen, she can invite a friend the same as everyone else.'

'My grandmother and I will both be going,' Anna told her, fastening her shoulder-bag and looping it into place. The strap dragged on her cotton top, pulling it way from her neck—a very youthful neck—and Amy Benson sighed as she carefully asked:

'And will you be bringing a boyfriend with you?'

'Actually, no, I'll be partnering Alex—that's the arrangement—and I fully expect that Prue, my grandmother, will be joining up with his father. Prue has been to their parties before; she's a valued customer.'

'Should be an interesting evening,' Amy observed, and Anna agreed. She thanked her companion for the coffee, the usual goodbyes were said and then they were going their separate ways—Amy to the car park and Anna to Grants Department Store food hall to get some goodies for Prue.

Being Saturday, it was crowded and people were jostling in the aisles. Making for the queue at the fish counter, where a boater-hatted youth was slapping plaice and salmon and sole and cod cutlets onto the scales, Anna's eye was caught by a man in blue jeans and white open-necked shirt, coming away from the head of the queue, wire basket in hand.
Simon!
Pleasure speared through her as he saw her and came to talk. 'What a place to meet!' she managed to laugh.

'But, then, I'm fond of fish,' he said solemnly, making her laughter more genuine.

'What about Mrs Gill...doesn't she do your food shopping for you?'

'Most of it, yes, but I like to keep my hand in, you know.'

She nodded, but the queue was lengthening and he pointed this out to her. 'Better get in it, hadn't you, or you'll be here all day?'

'True,' she said, not wanting to move, not wanting to leave his side, but how ridiculous—how pathetic—to feel this compulsion to stay, especially when he was tactfully prompting her to move away.

Unwillingly she took her position in the queue and he grinned a goodbye and went off in the direction of
Wines
. Anna sighed and felt bleak.

She was still a long way from the head of the queue when a shrill cry that was all but a scream tore through the hall. It had come.. .was still coming.. .from the third aisle along, which displayed sauces and soups. Shoppers froze in their tracks, turning startled faces in the direction of the noise. Anna acted, and fast.

Rounding the corner and entering the aisle, she ran towards a girl who was lying on the floor, moaning and holding her arm which—grotesquely bent—showed prongs of bone sticking up through the flesh. And at first that was all Anna saw as, feeling herself slipping in a spilled mess that was some sort of oil, she crawled on all fours to reach her.

'It's all right, it's all right, I'm a nurse and I can help you. Please don't try to move or you'll slip again... Yes, I know your arm hurts. I'm going to gently support it and keep it out of this mess.'

She managed to do so, the shouts of the girl and the murmurs of the crowd which had gathered round filling her ears. 'Someone get an ambulance!'

'It's been sent for,' she heard, and thank heaven—
thank heaven
—there was Simon!

He was kneeling by the girl, asking her name and soothing her in that special, practised way he had—and not a moment too soon for, just as Anna was registering that the girl was hugely pregnant, she shrieked again.

'It's the baby... I've started... The baby's coming!' Water gushed between her thighs. She sat blocked against Simon's legs, Anna fighting to keep her arm still and hearing Simon telling her, tense-faced, that everything would be all right; that an ambulance was coming and she'd be at the hospital in a trice.

'My husband,' she cried, 'he's at... We live...' She gasped out a number just as the ambulance crew arrived with their stretcher, and the crowd moved back to let them through, one irate woman shouting,

'That oil was spilled ten minutes ago... Ought to have been cleaned up... Ought to have railed the floor off till it was safe to use!' The manager and supervisor, standing by, came in for a beration. Getting up from the floor as the stretcher was raised, Anna and Simon followed it out.

'I'm going with her.' Simon climbed into the ambulance.

There wouldn't, Anna realised, be room for her—not with the nurse in there as well—so, telling Simon that she would pick up his shopping and bring it to the hospital, she re-entered the store, where the manager asked her if she'd seen the girl fall.

'No, I didn't, but there were a number of people who must have!' She didn't mean to sound short, but his staff, and certainly his supervisor, had been shockingly remiss.

'Will she be all right.. .the young woman?' The manager's face was white. He kept wringing his hands and assuring Anna of irrelevant things like paying for a new pair of jeans—hers were oiled from the knees down. 'We won't charge for your shopping, either, nor for your friend's.'

'My friend,' she told him, 'is a consultant gynaecologist—it was lucky he was here—and I'm a nurse, so that was lucky too!' There was nothing like praising oneself. 'And I haven't done any shopping, but I'll take Mr Easter's and tell him it's a present from the management and that you'll pay for his trousers as well.'

Out in the street again, with Simon's crab and wine in one of the store's plastic bags, she walked to the hospital in her stained jeans and crossed the yard to Cas. Almost before the doors slid back she was hailed by George, one of the ambulance crew, who told her that the girl had given birth in the ambulance. 'She gave a yell enough to wake the dead and the kid shot out, straight into Easter's hands—even he looked taken aback!'

'Is she all right. .? I mean, with a quick birth like that.. .of course it was the fall...?'

'Seemed so; wasn't losing much blood; she's up in Maternity now.'

Over George's epauletted shoulder Anna caught sight of Simon getting out of the lift and made her way towards him, holding out the plastic bag. 'With the compliments of the management.. .crab and wine intact!'

He smiled ruefully, taking the bag. 'Thanks for bringing it.' They sat down on two chairs by the wall. 'The baby's a boy,' he said, 'born in the ambulance—a six-pounder and healthy. Sister Webb's got him in hand. Bill's looking after the girl.'

'How is she?' Anna enquired. Simon was wearing a white coat, most likely, she thought, to cover his shirt. No baby was born without mess.

'So far, so good. She's young and strong, but that arm will take some fixing. She'll need deep anaesthesia, so just as well the baby came first or the poor little devil would have come out fast asleep!'

'She ought to get compensation—she should sue the store. It'll be very difficult for her, trying to look after a young baby with her arm in a plaster—a
long
arm plaster—perhaps for several weeks.'

'You're right, of course...' Simon looked reflective, then he tapped Anna's arm '.. .but you and I,' he said briskly, 'have done our good deed for the day. It's time we went home. I'll ring for a taxi, assuming, of course, that—like me—you came into town on foot this morning.'

'I did. I like to walk when I can.'

'But not in deshabille!' he grinned, and looked down at himself, then crossed the department to phone.

They didn't sit close in the taxi, yet there was intimacy of a sort. The little space of seat between them, Anna thought, was no division at all—not when there was this feeling of oneness, of being in total accord. At this moment I know that what I'm feeling he's feeling too. Oh, why can't this ride go on and on, and never ever stop? Yet they
were
stopping, or at any rate slowing, for here was Romsey Road.

'Yes, at The Gables, please; it's marked on the gate,' she heard Simon call out to their driver. Simon's hand came out and covered hers, then he raised it to his lips— an old-fashioned, courtly gesture, which was in no sense an embrace. Yet, once again, it felt like one. His mouth was soft and warm, lingering on her skin for a heart-stopping second and leaving her with just enough breath and strength of mind to say goodbye to him.

Over the weekend their protégée, Gillian Fox, had her arm plated and screwed and encased in a long-arm plaster, but she came through the ordeal well, delighting in her young son and in the presence of her husband who never left her side. Anna saw her briefly on Monday before going on duty, met the baby and was thanked profusely for all she and 'that doctor' had done.

As to the gynae ward situation, it was relatively unchanged, but both Mrs Dunbavin and Mrs Gordon were being discharged that afternoon. Mrs Dunbavin, who had been more relaxed since she was moved to the top of the ward, confessed that she was half dreading going home. 'It's not that I don't want to be with my husband.. .1 do, very much.. .but in here I feel protected and safe, just in case things start going wrong.'

'You'll be seen in Outpatients' Clinic and kept a close eye on,' Anna told her. 'Lots of patients feel as you do for, even though you've only been in here a very short time, you've become hospitalised. The world outside seems unnerving—even frightening—but that will soon pass. Why, by this time tomorrow you'll be wondering what on earth you worried about.'

Her husband, a young sandy-haired man—bone-thin with a huge grin—wheeled her out to the lifts at teatime. 'I've missed her a lot,' he said, flushing almost as pink as his shirt as he shook Anna's hand.

Anthea Gordon's husband was older and not so likeable. 'Tell the surgeon that if she's not pregnant by this time next year I'll sue him,' he said. He was joking, but in very bad taste, Anna thought, catching sight of Anthea's strained white face. Had he no sense of timing at
all?

By lunchtime on Tuesday five new patients had been settled into their beds—two hysterectomies, two prolapses and one fibroidectomy. All underwent surgery on
Tuesday and it was Wednesday before Simon, with Meg in attendance, made his appearance in the ward.

His main concern was for Mrs Chapman, the fibroidectomy patient. He had managed, with consummate skill, to do as she wished and removed her fibroids whilst retaining her uterus. Her blood loss, however, even with the use of a myomectomy clamp, had been alarming, necessitating her being on transfusion for some hours post-op.

'Why she wants to hang onto her uterus at her age is beyond me,' he said. Doris Chapman was fifty and beyond child-bearing age.

'Women are funny that way, sir!' Meg retorted before Anna could speak and say very much the same thing— although not so pertly, perhaps.

It was unusual, she thought, for him to be impatient on the ward, not that a single trace of this showed as he went from bed to bed, saying goodbye to some of the patients who were due for discharge.

He was off on a week's holiday to his parents in Cornwall, starting from five o'clock. Bill Corby would step into his shoes and be glad of the chance, but Simon would be missed... I shall miss him and I can't deny it, Anna thought as she watched him pull up a chair by Mrs Chapman's bed, taking time to reassure her that she wouldn't need to go back on transfusion; that her fibroids were all gone; her uterus was repaired and perfectly healthy and very much in place.

'Now, we're going to put you on a high-protein diet— plenty of meat and fish, plus an iron supplement and all the fluid you can drink. This will help continue the good work started off by the transfusion. Once the red part of your blood is up to 10 or 12 g you'll be feeling a great deal better.. .better than you've felt for years.'

'I put you to a lot of trouble, didn't I?' Her nervous fingers moved over the strip covering the venepuncture wound.

'That's what surgeons are for, Mrs Chapman,' he smiled, and got to his feet, leaving Meg and Anna to follow him to the doors.

'He's due for a break,' Meg said, when he'd gone up to Maternity to liaise with Bill.

'Yes, I know.' Anna nodded, whilst wondering if, after their supermarket adventure, he would come back to say goodbye. He did come back, but brought Bill with him, and they did a short round together. After which it was a simple case of 'Bye, Anna; see you tomorrow week!' with Bill grinning behind his back, sticking his thumbs in the air.

Well, for heaven's sake, what did you expect? Anna asked herself, watching the two of them—one short and one tall—making their way to the lifts. What did you expect him to do—take you for a drink and say that he wished you were going with him? You must be out of your mind. I shall be more settled and calm without him. Bill and I get on all right. A week will soon pass; a week is nothing. How annoying it was that even before he had set off she was wishing him back again.

'It's not so exciting without Mr Easter coming onto the ward,' Shirley Dobson, the agency nurse, remarked later. Jean Ross agreed with her, whilst even little May Fenn said she'd be glad when he came back and mislaid his pen again.

Meanwhile Bill coped manfully with everything that came up. 'He's a grand surgeon,' Meg Brodie declared— she had a soft spot for Bill. 'One day he'll be as skilful as Simon, and he's wonderful with the babies up in the care unit... Rose Webb will tell you so.'

The week passed. Patients were discharged; new ones were admitted, and when Simon returned only one of the old ones remained in the ward—Doris Chapman, who had had a slight setback in the shape of a bladder infection for which Bill had prescribed Penbriton.

'If her specimen is clear by the weekend I think we can let her go home,' Simon said, walking ahead of Anna out into the corridor. It was as she made to turn into the office that he swung round and asked how she was.