Free George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt by Claire Rayner Page A

how old he’d made her feel.
    She sighed and got to her feet as she drained her tepid coffee to the dregs. She’d make a better cup when she gotback to the lab, she promised herself. There was work to be done and she really couldn’t waste any more time thinking about her own affairs like this.
    She had reached the doorway and was almost through it when Zack caught up with her. ‘Sorted out your anaesthetic problem?’ he said in her ear. ‘Though quite what pathology has to do with the gasmen I’m not quite sure.’
    ‘I’m thinking about doing some work on blood gases,’ she snapped, grateful for yet another lie that slid so easily from her lips. It was one of her major gifts, inventing useful fibs in a hurry, and this was one of her better ones. ‘Who else should I ask but an anaesthetist?’
    He fell into step beside her and she could do nothing to detach herself from him, apart from speeding up her own stride, which she did. He seemed not to notice.
    ‘One of the senior people who know more about what they’re doing,’ he said, amusement in his tone. ‘Like Heather Dannay. Or David Denton. Why that little mouse of a houseman? I have to hold his hand all the time.’
    She looked at him briefly. ‘He said he worked with you.’ She couldn’t stop her curiosity from bubbling up. ‘How is it
you
need a gasman?’
    ‘I’m trying implants for various forms of neurological damage,’ he said. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’
    ‘He mentioned it.’
    ‘He usually does.’ He laughed. ‘He seems rather proud of working with me. It makes a change from mucking about with epidurals in obstetrics and those eternal minor ops lists he gets lumbered with.’
    ‘Hmm,’ was all she said, and hurried on, but still he had no trouble in keeping up with her.
    ‘Are you trying to avoid me, George?’ he said rather plaintively after a moment. ‘You go and busy yourself with one of the duller junior doctors on the staff rather than share lunch with me, you’re going like the clappers now to get rid of me — why? What have I done? I thought we were friends.’
    She opened her mouth to reply, not at all sure what she was going to say. But she didn’t have to. They were by now crossing the courtyard, and someone was calling her name loudly from Ward Block B, where the surgical wards, including ENT, were.
    Gratefully she turned her head to see Jerry Swann running along the walkway to catch up with her. She had never before been so glad to see him and she greeted him with the widest of smiles.
    ‘Hi, Jerry! What’s up? Something urgent in the mortuary?’ He shook his head, looking at her portentously. She had never seen him so pregnant with news, she thought. ‘What is it, for heaven’s sake? You look as though someone pinched your winning lottery ticket!’
    He shook his head. ‘My dear!’ he said dramatically. ‘I’ve just come from seeing Sheila. And the poor creature’s been as sick as a dog, chucking up like fury, and Sister there thinks it was something she got from some chocolates that you — that were sent to her from the department. I mean, poisoned chocolates, would you believe!’

6
              
    George didn’t know how she reached the ENT Ward. She just found herself sitting there in Sister’s office, looking at the box of chocolate liqueurs on the desk, and trying to think clearly. Once she had seen Sheila with her own eyes, she had felt better; not that the poor woman wasn’t ill. She was. She lay in bed with an IV line up and her head turned to one side on her pillow, her eyes only partially closed — a particularly unnerving feature — but breathing with what appeared to be reasonable regularity.
    ‘She’s all right, doctor.’ Sister Chaplin, a tall red-headed woman in her forties with a pleasant manner that was very reassuring, had put a hand on her shoulder. ‘She’s going to do, you know.’
    ‘Do?’
    ‘Be all right. Get better. She’ll
do
.’
    ‘Oh. I — But I don’t