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'Hi, Clay!' Jerry Claibourne accosted him, coming out of the OR suite just as he was going back in. 'I hear that you've sent in your curriculum vitae, and that I'm one of your referees.'

'That's right,' Clay said. 'And how do you feel about giving up, Jerry?'

'I'm about ready,' Jerry said ruefully, 'and Laura's even more ready. I guess we'll go on a good, long holiday—maybe a cruise. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you that.'

'I don't think I've got any illusions, Jerry,' Clay said with a grin.

'They hope to get this appointment settled well before Christmas,' Jerry said.

It was after seven o'clock when he got home that evening. There was a message from Dawn on his answering machine, inviting him to her place again. He waited for twenty minutes, a time of indecision, then called Sophie's number.

'Hi...it's Clay Sotheby,' he said when she answered.

'Hello,' she said. Silence.

'Um...' He cleared his throat. 'I was wondering if you'd like to come out to dinner with me soon. Maybe this Friday. We could even go to Guido's again.'

Her hesitation seemed so long to him that he, surprisingly, found himself sweating.

'Do you mind if we make it just for a drink?' she said. 'I don't think I'm ready for another long dinner date yet.'

'You mean with me?'

'Well...yes. But I do want to see you. Please, don't think that I don't want to,' she insisted quietly. 'I'm planning to take my daughter out on Friday, but I'll be free later on in the evening.'

'Great,' he said rapidly, going over in his mind all the sophisticated bars he knew. 'How about the Plaza Bar at eight-thirty? I could pick you up.'

'Could we just go to a pub?' she said. 'There's one near my place called the Pied Merlin. And you don't have to pick me up—I'd prefer to meet you there.'

'Sure,' he said, admiring the way she'd neatly exposed to him his tendency to organize other people, to keep control.

'That way,' she said, 'if you don't show up I won't be hanging around, waiting for you, and I'll just buy myself a drink. I know that pub quite well.'

'What makes you think I won't show up?' he said.

'You surgeons are notoriously unreliable when it comes to time,' she said. 'And I do speak from long experience. Work always comes first.'

'I'll be there. Eight-thirty, the Pied Merlin. What's a merlin, by the way?'

There was a smile in her voice. 'It's a bird, rather like a falcon.'

'Ah...a bird of prey.'

'Very apt, perhaps,' she said, laughing, 'given your reputation.'

'Sophie,' he said, admonishing her, 'the question is, which one of us is the prey? And does there have to be a prey?'

'I'm not going to answer that,' she said. 'I'll give you more details of how to get to the pub when we see each other in the OR on Friday.'

'Sure. I'm looking forward to it,' he said. 'Goodnight, Sophie.'

'Goodnight...Clay.'

Well, Sophie wasn't taking any chances with him. He grinned to himself as he hung up, then dialled Dawn's number. Her machine answered, so he left a message that he was exhausted, that he couldn't come over as he was planning to sleep.

Much as he'd enjoyed those brief physical interludes with Dawn, their relationship was one-dimensional and, never having been close, they were growing apart. Now he was bored, finding himself going through the motions because she appeared to want and need him. His principal feeling was one of relief at the growing distance. Physical release was no longer enough. And with a start, he realized that he was in danger of falling in love.

It took
Clay half an hour of waiting at the Pied Merlin to realize that Sophie wasn't going to show up. For one thing, he knew her to be punctual. For another, he had that gut feeling that one got after about fifteen to twenty minutes of waiting for someone.

His main feeling was one of concern that something might have happened to her to make her late. Although she could have just stood him up, he somehow didn't think so. The pub was crowded, with a high noise level. He stood at one end of the long curved bar, from where he could watch the main entrance, sipping a beer to make it last.

When he'd almost finished his beer, having decided to call Sophie, he saw one of the harried barmen answer a telephone behind the bar, and had a gut feeling that it would be for him.

'Is there a Dr Sotheby here?' the man yelled. 'Dr Sotheby?'

'Hi!' Clay yelled back. When the man brought over the phone and handed him the receiver he knew it would be her. 'Hello!'

'Clay?' It was her.

With an absurd sense of relief, he found himself smiling. 'The noise level is unbelievable in here,' he said, almost shouting. 'What happened to you?' Then it registered that she had spontaneously used his first name.

'I'm afraid I can't come, Clay,' she said. 'My daugh
ter isn't well, so I've decided that I can't go out. We were out together earlier and I think she had too much ice cream. I'm. sorry... Can we make it some other time? And sorry I took so long to call.'

'What's wrong with your daughter?' he yelled. 'Can I be of any help?'

'She's vomiting a bit, and has a stomach-ache. I think she'll be all right. I'm glad it's the weekend coming up,' Sophie shouted back.

'Well, you call me at home if there's anything I can do,' he offered, his disappointment more intense than he'd expected it would be. 'Otherwise I'll see you at work on Monday and we'll fix another time.'

'All right,' she agreed.

'And, Sophie...I'm sorry, too.'

He downed the remainder of his beer and left the pub. Well, he could use an early night.

When he got home there were two messages from Dawn, among others. Those messages from her troubled him, as did his own disengagement from her and the knowledge that they were the objects of speculation and gossip among a certain section of the hospital staff—those who had time for such things.

His attraction to Sophie didn't exactly add to his peace of mind either, especially when he realized that if they hadn't met socially at the fund-raising dance he would probably still be lusting after her from afar at work, not having the time or any real opportunity to do anything about it. Having held her in his arms, he somehow couldn't get her out of his mind. The fact irritated him.

The shrill clamour of the telephone buzzer woke Clay from a deep sleep, and automatically his hand reached out to it as he propped himself on one elbow and focused his eyes on the lighted dial of his digital clock. It was twenty minutes past two in the morning.

'Hello. Dr Sotheby here,' he said, instantly alert.

'Hello, Clay. Sorry to call you when 1 know you're not on call. This is Rick.' He added that last bit unnecessarily.

'What is it, Rick?' Clay said, subsiding back wearily against the pillows. 'Has that hydatid cyst decided to blow?'

'No, thank God,' Rick answered wryly. 'No, it's Sophie Dunhill's daughter. She's here in Emergency with her mother. As far as I can tell, she has acute appendicitis.'

Clay sat up quickly.

'The long and the short of it is that Sophie would like you to operate on the girl. I asked her if she would rather take her daughter to Children's Hospital, but she said no. And when I told her you weren't the one on call this weekend, she practically begged me to call you to see if you would come in. She knows you operate on children sometimes.'

'I see,' Clay said, his mind racing. 'Which anaesthetist is on call?'

'It's Claude. I've already contacted him, and I've alerted the nurses in the OR.'

'Good. Claude's had a lot of experience with children.' Clay switched on a light and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. 'Is the appendix close to rupturing?'

'I think it is,' Rick said. 'She has a fever, her abdominal muscles are tense, there's a lot of pain...with the typical pattern for acute appendicitis, and she has that typical flushed look. She's pretty upset, poor kid.'

'OK, Rick,' he said, 'I'll come right away. Get her to the OR stat. I'll examine her there before she has the anaesthetic. Claude will put down a stomach tube when she's under the anaesthetic—I guess maybe she still has food in her stomach.'

'Right,' Rick said.

'And, Rick, tell Sophie to wait in the OR coffee-room. I'll talk to her there later.'

'OK. The child's name is Mandy, short for Amanda, and she's six years old.'

In moments Clay had donned a loose sweatshirt and a pair of jeans which he always kept ready, then a pair of casual slip-on shoes, not bothering with socks. From a table in the front hall he picked up his medical bag and his car keys. From long practice, he knew how to be out of the house in a few seconds.

The motion-detector lights came on outside as he went to his car parked in the driveway, facing the street. A few more seconds and he was away.

When he arrived at the hospital he went straight to the surgeons' locker room and changed into a scrub suit, going through the motions while his mind was elsewhere, then put on his white clogs, the hat that covered his hair, his goggles and a face mask. There was no time to speak to Sophie first.

Once inside the operating suite, striding swiftly down the central corridor, he found that there were several other emergency operations in progress. Otherwise, the usually bustling place was more civilized and quiet than it was during the day.

'Hi,' he said to the assembled staff as he entered room four. The child was already on the operating table.

'Hi, Clay,' Claude Moreau spoke to him first. 'I dec
ided to give her the anaesthetic because she was in a lot of pain and I wanted to get that stomach tube down fast. We got one of the other staff-men here to verify the diagnosis with Rick. He thinks it's about to rupture.'

'Right,' Clay said. 'I'll get scrubbed.'

Rick and a scrub nurse were already scrubbed and ready for him, with the sterile set-up ready and waiting.

'You do the prep, Rick,' Clay said, 'and put on the drapes. I'll do the usual appendix incision, rather than a laparotomy incision.'

Rick and the nurse both nodded. Clay had just enough time to register that the child who lay on the table was small, thin and fair.

By the time he was gowned and gloved, the operating site was ready for him. All the instruments were small-scale, suitable for a young child. Clay positioned himself on the right side of the operating table, with the nurse and Rick on the opposite side.

'Knife, please,' he said.

When he very gently eased the appendix through the small, angled appendix incision in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen, they could all see that it was very swollen and inflamed, while the tip of it had a yellowish tinge, indicating that there was serious infection which could soon have caused the appendix to rupture. Once ruptured, the contents of the gut would have leaked out into the peritoneal cavity, causing peritonitis, a serious condition which in the bad old days before antibiotics had been a frequent cause of death.

All those things went swiftly through Clay's mind as he held the appendix carefully with tissue forceps.

'Wow,' Rick said, 'here's one diagnosis that's correct. Not a moment too soon, I would say. Well, that's
better than having a lily-white at nearly three o'clock in the morning, then having to rethink the whole thing.' Hp referred to an appendix that wasn't inflamed, in cases where the diagnosis had been wrong and the appendix looked small and almost white in comparison with what they were looking at now.

'Clamps and catgut ties, please,' Clay said, preparing to clamp the appendix, separate it from the tissues and piece of small bowel to which it was attached and tie off all clamped pieces before cutting them and lifting the appendix out. Then he would put it into a jar to go to the pathology lab, where they would confirm the diagnosis.

'Easy does it,' he said aloud. The last thing he wanted was for the appendix to rupture while he was getting it out.

'Rather you than me,' Rick murmured, as he carefully cut the ends of the catgut ties after Clay had tied several firm knots where he was separating tissue.

Clay turned to the circulating nurse. 'I'd like a little phenol to cauterize the appendix stump when I've cut it off,' he said, 'and a fine cotton-tipped swab. Before I do that, I'd like to take a culture swab for the lab— bacteriology.'

'Right,' the nurse said. 'I've got that all in hand.'

'I'll need a rubber drain, please, to leave in the incision when I'm closing up,' he added.

'Do you want her on IV antibiotics?' Claude asked.

'Yes.'

Later, when he headed for the coffee-room, he felt sober and tired. Yet he could only guess at what Sophie must be feeling, he acknowledged. The agony of having a sick child, waiting around while they had an operation, only came to him second hand. As he pushed open the door he wondered whether he would ever know first hand what it really meant.

Sophie stood up and faced him when he entered. The first things he noticed were that she was deathly pale and that she had very obviously been crying. Without thinking, he went over to her with a few quick strides and held his arms open to her. With no hesitation, she went into them, putting her own arms tightly around his waist, as though she were drowning. Before he gripped her he had a glimpse of her face, contorted with fear and grief. Then she was sobbing quietly against his chest.

'It's all right,' he said. 'We got it out in time. It was on the verge of rupturing. She's OK... All's well... She's in the recovery room now, hot in any pain.'

'Oh, my God...' she said brokenly.

'It's all right, honey,' he said automatically. 'You don't have to worry.' He found himself holding her very tightly, kissing the top of her head, murmuring soft words while she cried for several minutes.

'Sorry.' She pulled away from him. 'I…'

Clay pulled a handful of paper tissues from a box on a nearby table and handed them to her. While she wiped her face, he turned to the tea-making equipment in the room and filled an electric kettle, his back to her so that she would have a chance to compose herself. He wanted to sit down, pull her onto his lap and comfort her.