‘I’d assume she has her reasons.’
‘Maybe.’
Silence. The laughter had faded completely, and for once Jonas had his face set in grim lines. He wouldn’t tell her unless she asked, Em thought, but, then, she was a family doctor. She was accustomed to asking hard questions.
‘And the reasons would be…’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I want to know everything about my lover’s family,’ she said primly, and got a wry smile for her pains.
‘Touché.’
‘So tell me.’
More silence. Anna’s house was on the far side of the headland to the hospital-about ten minutes’ drive. They were driving along the coast road. The moon was glinting off the sea, and the sound of the surf was thrumming into the open windows of Jonas’s lovely car. It was a night for lovers, Em thought inconsequentially. And Jonas had declared he was one.
But it was a lie. It had been said for a purpose-to achieve something. And that something was nothing to do with Emily.
‘My father was an alcoholic,’ he said at last, and Em frowned into the night.
‘Tough?’
‘Very tough.’ There was grit in his words, and a lifetime of pain behind them. ‘Our mother couldn’t take it. She wasn’t what you call a strong character. When I was twelve and Anna was nine, she met someone else and simply walked away. Leaving us with Dad.’
There was silence while Em thought this one through. She knew what an alcoholic parent meant-she had a couple of troubled kids in her practice for just that reason-and she didn’t like what she was thinking.
‘You want to tell me about it?’ she said at last, and he nodded.
‘Not much, but maybe I need to if you agree to play onside.’
‘You mean, pretend to be your lover.’
‘Pretend to need me.’ Once more that quick, inconsequential grin and Em’s insides did that funny lurch again. She loved this man’s smile. ‘Not that you don’t, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she said primly. ‘But just medically.’
‘And not in your bed.’
‘I have an ancient mutt called Bernard,’ she told him, making her mouth stern. ‘I rescued him from the pound when he was about a hundred which makes him about a hundred and ten now. He acts as my bedwarmer, and he’s all I need.’
‘Lucky old Bernard. Has he seen you with your hair down?’
‘Dr Lunn, are you going to tell me what the problem is with Anna, or are you going to let me out of the car?’ Em snapped. ‘I’m getting fed up here.’
‘Whereas I’m enjoying myself. And I don’t much want to talk about my father.’
‘But you need to tell me.’ She was a doctor, after all, and pressing a point home was what she was good at. It had to be if she was to survive a morning’s surgery without being swamped by inconsequential gossip.
‘There’s nothing much to tell.’ Once more the laughter faded, and Jonas concentrated on the road ahead. ‘My father was charming, handsome, kind, witty…’
Just like his son, Em thought, but didn’t say so.
‘And he was also an irretrievable drunk. He could charm anything out of anybody. Anna loved him so much that even if our mother had wanted us to go with her-which she didn’t-I don’t think Anna would have gone. She believed in him, you see. He lied to her over and over, and every time he let her down she made excuses for him. After our mother left, most of those excuses centred around me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He lied all the time,’ Jonas said bleakly. ‘Until recently-just before he died when he told me so much I didn’t know-I wasn’t aware how badly. But he’d promise Anna a party dress and then say I’d spent all his money that week. Or he’d swear he’d take her out for her fifteenth birthday and then tell her he had to be away because I was in trouble at university. I was paying my way through uni, taking every job I could, but Dad never told Anna that. Sure, she knew I worked, but Dad always implied all his spare money went to me. So there was nothing for her. Ever.’
‘Oh, Jonas…’
‘There was worse,’ Jonas said grimly. ‘But you don’t want to know. Enough to say that I was always the evil one. Dad treated me like that all the time. He blamed me for my mother going. It got worse when I applied to stop his pension and funnel it through social welfare. That meant Anna had at least enough to eat. And even as a student, some of the money I worked for went to him. But he hated it. He hated that I was in any sort of control.’
‘But someone had to be.’
‘As you say.’
She took this on board, thinking of another child she knew with an alcoholic father-one of her patients, and a child so much older than his years that she ached for him. ‘And then…’ she prodded gently.
‘And then Anna met Kevin-who was just like Dad.’ Once more, Jonas’s voice was filled with bitterness. ‘Kevin was handsome and he made her laugh and he drank like a fish. And he depended on her. Like Dad.’
He shrugged slowly into the dark. ‘Anna and I…we’ve been taught the hard way not to depend on people, but we don’t mind people depending on us. Like our parents. So she fell blindly in love, or she thought she did, and when I tried to intervene she hated me for it. And the more right I was, the more she hated me.’
‘That must have been hell!’
‘It was,’ he said bitterly. And then added, ‘It still is.’
‘She still holds it against you?’
‘I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘But I love my little sister, Em, and I’m doing everything I can to get her life back on track. Now Kevin’s gone I have a chance. Unless this bloody disease…’
‘Hey!’ Unconsciously Em’s hand flew across to rest on his on the steering-wheel. ‘Hey, Jonas, you know the odds. They’re very, very good.’
‘Yeah, but it’s a scary word-cancer,’ he told her, and she pressed his hand once more.
‘Try cyst, then,’ she said softly. ‘Until tomorrow.’
‘You don’t think it’s a cyst. It’ll be cancer and maybe it’ll have spread. Good things don’t happen to our family.’ His hands clenched and clenched again and again on the steering-wheel, and she could feel the strain in the muscles under her hand. ‘Good things don’t happen to Anna.’
‘I think they do,’ she said softly.
He gave a harsh laugh. ‘And how do you figure that one out?’
‘Because she has you,’ she said gently. ‘Because you’re with her every step of the way.’
‘She won’t let me be.’
‘As my partner, you can’t be anywhere else,’ she told him.
‘You agree-to play along?’
‘I agree that I need you,’ she said simply. ‘For as long as it takes.’
And that was that.
Only it wasn’t quite as simple as he had made out, Em thought as she lay waiting for sleep that night. Blessedly the hospital was quiet. Last night’s twins had been airlifted to Sydney, Henry Tozer’s gallstones, which had troubled both Henry and Em last night, had finally settled and peace reigned over the wards.
Bernard was snoring peacefully at the foot of the bed. All was right with his world.
Em should have done the same. Instead, she lay and stared into the darkness and wondered about the promise she’d just made.
If indeed Anna’s lump turned out to be malignant, then Jonas might well want to stay for her operation and afterwards, for the further weeks of radiotherapy and possibly chemo. Em figured it out in her head. It’d take at least three months, she thought. She could have him here for three months.
And all the time he’d be pretending he was staying for Em’s sake, and not Anna’s.
That was all very well, she thought, but where did that leave her?
Bernard stirred and whoofled in his sleep-which amounted to the ancient mutt’s complete exercise for the day. Em hauled him close and hugged his portly frame, but he was already asleep again. She arranged him back at her feet, like some huge, hairy pyjama-bag, then lay back and fingered her firmly braided hair.