St Matthew's Passion: A Medical Romance (7 page)

I want you
, her voice breathed as if from far away.

Fin twisted awake with a cry. For a moment he heard a thumping in the stillness of his bedroom, before realising it was his heart trying to break free from his chest. His breathing came hoarse and guttural. The sweat was slick on his face and his bare chest and he noticed his fists were gripping sodden wads of sheet.

Lower down, under the bedclothes, he was painfully aroused.

He lay for a few minutes, swallowing to try to lubricate his dry mouth and throat, willing his pulse and breathing to slow down. Once his vital signs were back to normal, he realised he wasn’t going to go back to sleep any time soon, not under these circumstances. He swung his legs out of the bed and padded naked to the bathroom.

In the shower, Fin set the water to a few degrees above unbearably cold and turned the power up high. He grimaced as the stinging needles scoured the sweat from his body.

It had been so close. The tipping point had been reached, and although he could understand the reason for Melissa’s hesitation, Fin was certain she would have asked him up to her flat. He’d had to break the moment by saying goodnight and taking his leave, because he wouldn’t have been able to bear the look in her eyes if he’d turned her down, not just the immediate look but the hurt and shame that would linger there for the rest of her time working with him.

Fin knew, however, that that was only part of the reason he’d spoken before she could. If he was honest with himself, he was more afraid of what would have happened if he’d found himself saying yes to her.

He towelled himself dry; then, seeing it was already five-thirty in the morning, he decided he might as well stay up. He took particular care with shaving, concentrating on the quotidian task as if it were an especially complicated surgical procedure, in an attempt to focus his thoughts on something else. Just when he thought he’d got a grip, he peered at his face in the wall mirror and, unbidden, an image came to mind of Melissa stepping wet and nude from the shower behind him, her hair plastered darkly to her shoulders, her body completely exposed to his gaze...

Oh, for crying out loud, Fin
, he thought, and went to grab a tracksuit and training shoes, deciding on a punishing ten-mile run in the cold.

***

It was an especially nasty injury. The man had fallen against the sharp spike of a railing and his bowel had been perforated. Once the mess in his abdominal cavity had been cleared up, he’d need part of his bowel resecting and a colostomy to be created. It would in all likelihood be reversible, but the man had several months of unpleasantness ahead of him.

Melissa was by now, more than three months into the job, confident and experienced enough to handle this kind of procedure herself, and she took charge as the lead surgeon on the operation with smooth ease. She’d returned from her long weekend at her parents’ with renewed energy, not least because she’d had a chance to see her brother again. Since her return she and Fin had been getting along better than ever, an easy camaraderie having developed between them which made her feel if nowhere near his equal, then at least less like his junior colleague, which of course she still was.

Neither of them had mentioned a word about the night he’d given her a lift home. She’d woken the next morning feeling frustrated as hell, yet strangely delighted at the same time. No, nothing had happened, and yes, he’d been the one to say goodnight. But far from feeling rejected, she felt validated instead. He’d been aware of what she was on the point of asking, and he’d headed her off because he didn’t trust himself to say no.

She was prepared to wait. At least she knew now that there was a possibility, even a probability, that her feelings were reciprocated. For now, it was enough that some of Fin’s reserve towards her had disappeared, that she felt he was at last pleased with the work she was doing.

As Melissa pushed through the doors into the theatre where the man lay anaesthetised and ready for the procedure, she saw that the nurse assisting her was none other than Deborah Lennox. While primarily in charge of the post-operative wards, Deborah was also a qualified theatre sister and sometimes helped out with surgery to cover staff absences.

Deborah nodded to her, her eyes steady over the mask she wore. Relations between the two women had thawed a little since their clash several weeks earlier, though they remained coolly polite rather than friendly towards one another. They hadn’t mentioned the argument as if by silent, mutual consent. Deborah had herself been away on leave for the past couple of weeks and so Melissa hadn’t seen her for some time. 

Melissa made the initial incision and the operation began. It went as smoothly as might reasonably be expected, with the usual surprises including unexpected bleeding vessels which needed to be cauterised or tied off. Behind Melissa the anaesthetist sat on his stool and hummed tunelessly as he read a magazine. Melissa wasn’t one of those surgeons who needed music playing in order to operate, so there was no soundtrack.

She became aware of Deborah’s gaze upon her from early on in the operation, but managed to catch the nurse’s eyes only once before they darted away. Melissa also became conscious of a coldness from the other woman, as if the thaw of the last few weeks had been only a temporary reprieve.

Not again
, Melissa thought wearily.

In addition to the two of them and the anaesthetist, the theatre was populated by a junior doctor who was assisting Melissa and two junior nurses, one of them scrubbed up and helping Deborah carry out tasks such as suctioning while the other one performed jobs not requiring sterility, such as adjusting the light over the operative field. At one point the nurse doing the suctioning moved closer to get better access and her gowned hip nudged a clamp, which clattered to the floor.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered in terror. Melissa shook her head.

‘Never mind.’ She looked over at the second nurse. ‘Could you open a new one, please?’

On the other side of the patient Deborah’s eyes blazed. ‘Nurse, another clamp.’

Melissa frowned. ‘I’ve already –’

‘It’s for
me
to ask, Ms Havers. Not you.’

Melissa watched her for a long moment, then shrugged and applied herself to the field once more.

The rest of the procedure progressed without incident, and Melissa was the first out of the theatre, leaving the enthusiastic junior doctor, an aspiring surgeon himself, to suture closed the last layer of the abdominal wound. She degloved and degowned and went into the female locker room, which was otherwise empty.

Deborah came in a few minutes later and Melissa rounded on her.

‘What exactly is your problem?’

Deborah stood, hands on hips, squaring off. ‘As I said, it’s not for you to be telling my staff what to do.’

‘Oh, come on.’ Melissa felt the anger rising again. ‘I didn’t
tell
her to do anything. I
asked
her if she could please replace a piece of equipment. You ask the junior doctors to do things all the time and I don’t get all upset about it. What’s really going on? What’s eating you now?’

Deborah opened her mouth, then held her breath for a moment before expelling it in a long, slow sigh. ‘I warned you.’

‘Warned me what?’

‘I told you to watch yourself with Mr Finmore-Gage.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Again a pause. Deborah said, quietly: ‘Two or three weeks ago. Someone saw you get into his car late at night.’

The words were like individual blows, and for a second Melissa was stunned. ‘Who?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Somebody in the car park, who told somebody else. Now everyone knows.’

‘Oh, for the love of –’ Melissa was so angry she didn’t know where to look. ‘He was giving me a lift home. It was two in the morning, we’d both been working late, and I’d missed the last Tube. I can’t believe people are reading something into it.’

‘Can’t you?’

Melissa thought about what the nurse had just said.
Now everyone knows
… Were she and Fin grist to the department’s gossip mill, then? Was every friendly greeting followed by a knowing smirk behind her back?

Deborah stepped a pace nearer, not close enough to be belligerent. She said, her voice still quiet, ‘You see what happens. People hear things, they spread stories. Authority is compromised, and with it morale suffers. The department suffers, and so in turn do the patients.’

Melissa pressed her fingertips against her forehead and massaged the skin. ‘I know that, Deborah. I understand. But I’m telling you, there’s nothing to gossip about. He gave me a lift home. That’s all. Nothing happened between us.’

‘Whether or not that’s true, it’s beside the point. You should have been more careful. Of course it’s going to be interpreted only one way.’

‘It was just a lift home.’ But Melissa knew there was no point in arguing. Deborah’s mind was made up.

Deflated, Melissa turned to go. Now she’d have to be constantly on her guard, watching her colleagues for signs that they were talking about her. She’d misinterpret innocent comments, would pore over every facial expression. It was no way to work.

A thought struck her. Well, she could limit the damage. She turned back to Deborah.

‘One thing. I don’t want to find out that you’re stoking the fire. Spreading rumours about me or Fin, however grounded in reality you believe them to be.’

The nurse rolled her eyes, sighed. ‘For heaven’s sake, girl. Haven’t you heard a word I’ve been saying to you? Of course I won’t go aggravating an already difficult situation. Why would I want to make things any worse than they are?’

Because you’re jealous of me, and you want me gone, or at least neutralised
, Melissa thought. She said nothing, instead giving a curt nod and turning on her heel.

Whatever Deborah’s motivation, Melissa thought as she headed to the wards, normally Melissa would have heeded any warnings that she was putting her reputation in jeopardy. Reputation was essential, along with clinical acumen, in order to get anywhere in the cutthroat medical hierarchy. To be told that she was being gossiped about because of some action of hers, even one that had been misinterpreted, would usually have made her especially cautious in the future. But it was a mark of how much she’d changed, even in the last couple of months, that she was less bothered than she felt she ought to have been.

Because, in truth, she didn’t want to back off. Didn’t want to put emotional distance between herself and Fin, not even for the sake of her career. And besides, wasn’t there more than a grain of truth in the gossip? Nothing had happened between her and Fin after she’d climbed into his car… but it very nearly had. In fact, she was increasingly certain it
would
have, if Fin hadn’t intervened when he did.

As she set to work on the ward, reviewing the patients’ medication charts, Melissa shook her head inwardly. Being a trauma surgeon in the making was a complicated life by anyone’s standards. She hadn’t realised her life could become even more complicated.

Chapter Five

Fin had been a doctor and in particular a trauma surgeon for long enough to be able to maintain a calm demeanour in the face of human suffering, but that didn’t mean an especially nasty injury couldn’t provoke a wince within him. He peered at George Harrow’s face as the man sat propped up on a hospital bed. Harrow was sixty years old and had the tough, level-eyed features of a stoic, though he must have been in a great deal of pain.

A fisherman, George Harrow had been out on the Thames with friends some distance upriver, taking advantage of the early morning quiet. One of his fellow anglers had cast his line a little carelessly and the hook had caught Harrow in the corner of the mouth, tearing his cheek open. They’d arrived as a group, four damp, grizzled men smelling of tobacco and fish, Harrow with a filthy handkerchief pressed to the side of his face.

‘It’s just a scratch, Doc,’ he said. Fin peeled away the rag as carefully as he could. Some scratch. The hook had cut through the cheek’s full thickness.

The wound needed extensive cleaning and coverage with a course of antibiotics. Most of all, it needed painstaking suturing. This wasn’t a simple scrape on a thigh or a back. Both the mucosa inside the mouth and the outer skin of the face required stitching involving different materials, and with enough skill that scarring would be minimal, both for cosmetic reasons and so that there was no distortion inside the mouth which might affect Mr Harrow’s eating or speech in the future.

Fin considered the options. St Matthew’s had a plastic surgery department, with surgeons specialising in cosmetic repairs. But Fin himself was skilled in such repairs, and for all but the most severe cases the plastics boys were happy for him to do the job. It lightened their work load, for one thing.

Then he had an idea. It was very early in the morning, and the first casualties of the rush hour traffic chaos hadn’t started to pour in yet. The department was quiet. Fin called across to one of the nurses: ‘Rachel, could you ask Ms Havers to pop in for a moment?’

‘Miz who?’ growled Harrow, and winced at the pain that talking evidently produced.