Just a Family Doctor. Caroline Anderson

and smiling at Claudia.

      She nodded, looking wan and exhausted against the white pillows. Allie wanted to cry for her. She wanted to cry for all of them, but she couldn’t, of course, so she smiled and hugged and dished out sensible advice and struggled on.

      Just like Jayne, she thought with sympathy, struggling on with her softened pelvic ligaments so that every movement made the two ends of her pubic bones scrape together at the synthesis, the join in the middle at the front. It wasn’t a joint anyone was ever aware of, unless something like this happened.

      It must be horribly painful and difficult, Allie thought with another surge of sympathy as she pushed the bed back to its place in the ward. Still, not for much longer. It would soon recover once the pregnancy hormones disappeared from her system.

      ‘Can I go and see who’s in the playroom?’ Claudia asked her, and Allie nodded.

      ‘If you want to. Take a paper hat with you, just in case you’re sick. Want me to introduce you to the others?’

      She shook her head. “S OK,’ she said pragmatically. ‘I’ll do it.’

      ‘She’s so independent,’ Jayne said in admiration, sinking into the big armchair by the bed. ‘You’d think she’d be clingy, but she’s not. She just gets on with it, no matter how awful. She’s got such guts—’

      Jayne broke off, her lips pressed together in a firm line, and Allie wondered what it must be like to have a child with CF and know there was a one-in-four chance that the baby she carried would have inherited the same dreadful and debilitating disease.

      She patted her shoulder, giving quiet comfort and support, and then left her to grab a few precious moments alone to rest in the comfy chair. Allie reckoned she’d earned it.

      She managed to slip up to the canteen for lunch, by a miracle, and was sitting propped up in an easy chair in the corner nursing a cup of tea when Beth strolled over.

      ‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said without preamble. ‘I saw him today in Outpatients. I had to cover. He is just luscious.’

      Allie didn’t pretend not to understand. ‘I know,’ she said glumly.

      Beth dropped into the chair opposite and gave her a curious look. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘I’m the one that should have the long face. At least he’s interested in you—he wouldn’t have noticed if I’d got six legs!’

      Allie laughed. ‘Beth, you’re silly. He’s going to be a GP,’ she added after a pause.

      ‘How wonderful. There are far too few of them out there.’

      ‘I don’t want him to be a GP. It’s so stressful.’

      ‘Isn’t that rather for him to decide?’ Beth said pointedly. ‘And anyway, what does it matter? He’s here now, he’s giving out all the right messages—you’d have to be mad to ignore it. Well, mad or dead or totally sexless.’

      Beth was right—and Allie wasn’t any of those things, at least not where Mark was concerned. Well—mad, maybe, but that was different.

      She finished her tepid tea and set the cup down. Happy ever after was probably a figment of the imagination, anyway, but there was no time like the present. Who said every relationship worth having had to end in marriage?

      She gave the bemused Beth a dazzling smile. ‘You’re a love. See you later.’

      And feeling much brighter than she had all day, she went back to work.