who looked exclusively after children—from tiny babies to young adults—needed skills above and beyond the normal skills of other doctors. They had to be infinitely patient, and precise. They needed to be flexible and able to cope with the unexpected without blinking—which was why Nicolette had been surprised when told that Dr Le Saux demanded order. They also needed the utmost manual dexterity and a steady, steady hand. But the skill they needed above all else was that of communication—not something she would have automatically put at the top of his list of qualities! Children were famous for clamming up when questioned about their illness, and it took a special kind of adult to coax information out of them.
Extraordinary, then, that this man, who on first impressions Nicolette would have ventured had a real problem with communication, should have this little boy eating out of his hand.
There was silence while he listened to the chest sounds, punctuated only by his brief instructions to Simon to breathe deeply. And when he raised his dark head there was something approaching a smile on his hard face.
‘Good,’ he pronounced. ‘The chest sounds clear. Looks like all trace of that nasty Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection has gone.’ His eyes narrowed in Nicolette’s direction as he mentioned the rather virulent strain of bacteria to which cystic fibrosis sufferers were particularly susceptible. ‘Have we had any sputum results back, Staff?’
Nicolette nodded, heartily glad that since her early days as a staff nurse she had got into the habit of reading and memorising all the patients’ results that came back. And earlier she had tackled the pile on the desk that had included Simon’s. ‘The result of the third specimen came back this morning. With the all-clear.’
‘Excellent.’ Dr Le Saux smiled. ‘Like to go home, Simon?’
The boy’s face lit up. ‘Oh, can I?’
The paediatrican threw his hands up in mock-astonishment. ‘But I thought you liked being here,’ he teased gently.
‘I do—it’s just that home is—’
‘I know, Simon,’ interrupted Dr Le Saux in the gentlest of voices. ‘Home is better. How’s that stick insect of yours?’
‘It’s had a baby,’ said Simon proudly.
‘But I thought it was a male?’
‘So did Mum!’ grimaced Simon.
Nicolette giggled, and both of them looked at her, and both joined in with her laughter, and there was something so. . .so. . .startling about the transformation which came over the stern doctor’s face when he actually allowed himself to laugh that Nicolette felt suddenly breathless and it took a huge effort to keep her mind on the job and not on that disarming smile of his. ‘So w-when would you like Simon discharged, Dr Le Saux?’ she stumbled.
‘How about tomorrow morning?’
Simon raised an irresistibly appealing face up to the doctor. ‘How about today?’
Dr Le Saux turned a cool, questioning gaze towards Nicolette. ‘Is that possible, Staff?’
‘That depends on whether Simon’s mother can be contacted, but I’m sure it can be arranged. But we’ll need to get in touch with Pharmacy soon if we’re to get Simon’s drugs to take home with him.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll go and write them up now,’ he said briefly, and swung the curtain back.
Nicolette rang Simon’s delighted mother from the phone on the central nursing station.
‘Discharged, you say?’
‘That’s right,’ said Nicolette happily.
‘But that’s marvellous—we thought he’d be in at least over the weekend!’
‘He’s responded to the drug regime far better than we anticipated,’ Nicolette told her.
‘Dr Le Saux tried something new,’ confided Mrs Lomas. ‘He said he thought it might pay dividends.’ She gave a sigh. ‘That man is an absolute saint!’
‘So I believe,’ agreed Nicolette drily, with a shameless disregard for her own feelings on the subject!
‘I’ll be right up to collect Simon,’ Mrs Lomas promised eagerly. ‘I can be there in about fifteen minutes, Staff.’
‘Now hold on a minute!’ laughed Nicolette. ‘It’ll probably take us a couple of hours to get everything arranged. Why don’t you ring the ward before you come up? He can have his tea first—say, about three-thirty?’
‘OK, Staff Nurse, three-thirty it is,’ said Mrs Lomas happily, then lowered her voice. ‘And tell me, have you any idea what I could buy Dr Le Saux as a thank-you present? He must be fed up with chocolates and whisky, but we always like to get him a little something. We’re so grateful to him.’
What about a one-way ticket to Australia? thought Nicolette with grim humour. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t expect anything, Mrs Lomas. I think he’d like you to spend the money on Simon!’ She said goodbye, and put the phone down.
Nicolette assumed that the saint-like Dr Le Saux had gone into the doctors’ office to write up Simon’s prescription, but she was wrong, for she found him in Sister’s office, sitting at one end of the large desk, his dark head glinting deep red lights, bent over the pharmacy form he was completing.
Leander looked up as she entered, and frowned. Lord, but she was a distracting vision, was the unbidden thought which flew into his mind. She really shouldn’t be allowed to walk around like that, he decided a touch ruefully. All that clean, healthy skin and shiny eyes and hair—she looked as if she should be starring in an orange-juice commercial! He ruthlessly killed the thought stone-dead and levelled his gaze at her critically.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he said irritably, as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation. ‘Can’t you do something with your hair?’
Nicolette thought that she must have misheard him. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she queried faintly.
‘Your hair,’ he scowled. ‘Do something with it, for pity’s sake. It looks awful!’ How easily the lie slipped off his tongue.
Awful? thought Nicolette indignantly. It was untidy, true. Extremely untidy. But awful? She conveniently chose to ignore the fact that if it had been anyone else but Leander le Saux suggesting that she ‘do something with it’ she probably would have laughed and agreed with them. As it was, since it had come from a man she scarcely knew, who had already been ruder to her in less than an hour than she could remember anyone being in her whole life before, mad indignation began to sizzle away inside her, like an egg frying On a hot pavement.
She narrowed her blue eyes. ‘How dare you make such personal remarks to someone you’ve only just met?’
His frown deepened. ‘And how dare you walk around the place looking like Medusa?’
‘Like who?'
‘You heard,’ he snapped unrepentantly.
‘Oh!’ She bit her lip in outrage as she pulled the clip out of her hair, causing it to tumble unfettered to her waist. She scarcely noticed that the movement seemed to have arrested him, because she whirled round to fling at him, ‘It’s a pity I’m not Medusa,’ she raged loudly, ‘because I would have taken great pleasure from turning you into stone, Dr Le Saux!’
He opened his mouth to reply, when a female voice of authority interrupted them from the open doorway.
‘Staff Nurse Kennedy?’ came a high, disbelieving voice, and Nicolette found herself looking up in horror, into the set features of the senior specialist nurse manager.
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