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But Ben was the closest to her in age. ‘Be nice to Guinevere,’ his mother had told him. He’d shown her how to make popcorn—and then he’d shown her how to catch tadpoles. White pleated skirt and all.
Yeah, well, he’d got into trouble over that but it had been worth it. They’d caught tadpoles, they’d spent the summer watching them turn into frogs and by the time they’d released them the day before she’d returned to Sydney, they’d been inseparable.
One stupid hormonal summer at the end of it had interfered with the memory, but she was still Ginny at heart, he thought. She’d be able to teach Button to catch tadpoles.
Um…Henry. Henry was sitting beside him, waiting to talk about his indigestion.
‘She’s better’n her parents,’ Henry said dubiously, and they both knew who he was talking about.
‘She’d want to be. Her parents were horrors.’
‘She wanted me to stay at the homestead,’ he went on. ‘For life, like. She wanted to fix the manager’s house up. That was a nice gesture.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘I have me dad’s cottage out on the headland,’ Henry said. ‘It’ll do me. And when I’m there I can forget about boss and employee. I can forget about rich and poor. Like you did when she were a kid.’
Until reality had taken over, Ben thought. Until he’d suggested their lives could collide.
Henry was right. Keep the worlds separate. He’d learned that at the age of seventeen and he wasn’t going to forget it.
Think of her as rich.
Think of her as a woman who’d just been landed with a little girl called Button, a little girl who’d present all sorts of challenges and who she hadn’t had to take. Think of Ginny’s face when the lawyer had talked of dumping Button in an institution…
Think of Henry’s indigestion.
‘Have you been sticking only to the anti-inflammatories I’ve been prescribing?’ he asked suspiciously. Henry had had hassles before when he’d topped up his prescription meds with over-the-counter pills.
‘Course I have,’ Henry said virtuously
Ben looked at him and thought, You’re lying through your teeth. It was very tempting to pop another pill when you had pain, and he’d had trouble making Henry understand the difference between paracetamol—which was okay to take if you had a stomach ulcer—and ibuprofen—which wasn’t.
Ginny…
No. Henry’s stomach problems were right here, right now. That was what he had to think of.
He didn’t need—or want—to think about Ginny Koestrel as any more than a colleague. A colleague and nothing more.
CHAPTER THREE
GINNY WORKED THROUGH until six. It was easy enough work, sifting through patient histories, checking that their requests for medication made sense, writing scripts, sending them out for Ben to countersign, but she was aware as she did it that this was the first step on a slippery slope into island life.
The islanders were fearful of an earthquake—sort of. Squid was preaching doom so they were taking precautions—buying candles, stocking the pantry, getting a decent supply of any medication they needed—but as Ginny worked she realised they weren’t overwhelmingly afraid.
Earth tremors had been part of this country’s history for ever. The islanders weren’t so worried that they’d put aside the fact that Guinevere Koestler was treating them. This was Ginny, whose parents had swanned around the island for years and whose parents had treated islanders merely as a source of labour.
She hadn’t been back since she’d been seventeen. Once she’d gone to medical school she’d found excuses not to accompany her parents on their summer vacations—to be honest, she’d found her parents’ attitude increasingly distasteful. And then there had been this thing with Ben—so the islands were seeing her now for the first time as a grown-up Koestler.
The island grapevine was notorious. Every islander would know by now that she’d been landed with a child, and every islander wanted to know more.
She fended off queries as best she could but even so, every consultation took three times longer than it should have and by the time she was done she was tired and worried about Button.
Button?
Where was she headed? She’d spent the last six months building herself a cocoon of isolation. One afternoon and it had been shattered.
She needed to rebuild, fast.
She took the last script out to the desk and Ben was waiting for her.
‘All done,’ she said. ‘Mrs Grayson’s cortisone ointment is the last.’ She handed over the script she’d just written. ‘This’ll keep that eczema at bay until Christmas.’
He grinned and greeted Olive Grayson with wry good humour, signed the script and watched the lady depart.
The waiting room was empty. The receptionist was gone. There was no one but Ben.
‘Button…’ she started, and headed towards the kitchenette, but Ben put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.
It shouldn’t feel like this, she thought, suddenly breathless. Ben touching her?
For heaven’s sake, she wasn’t seventeen any more. Once upon a time she’d thought she was in love with this man. It had been adolescent nonsense and there was no reason for her hormones to go into overdrive now.
‘I hope you don’t mind but I sent her home with our nurse, Abby,’ he said.
‘You…what?’
‘Abby’s a single mum and the tremors happening when she can’t be with her son are doing her head in. So my mum’s taking a hand. Abby will be having dinner with us, so I suggested she and Hannah—my sister—take both kids back to our place. They’ll have put them to bed, and dinner’s waiting for us. Mum says there’s plenty. I have a few house calls to make but they can wait until after dinner if you’d like to join us.’
‘You…’
‘I know, I’m an overbearing, manipulating toad,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ve manipulated you into working for us this afternoon and now I’ve manipulated you into a dinner date. But it’s not actually a dinner date in the romantic sense. It’s Mum, Dad, whichever of my siblings are home tonight, Abby, Button and you. It’s hardly candlelit seduction.’
She smiled back, but only just. This was exactly what she didn’t want, being drawn into island life. She wanted to work on her vineyard. She wanted to forget about being a doctor. She wanted…
Nothing. She wanted nothing, nothing and nothing.
‘Why not medicine?’ Ben said softly, watching her face, and she thought almost hysterically that he always had been able to read her thoughts.
‘What…what do you mean?’
‘I mean I did some research when I heard you were back on the island. You’ve got yourself a fine medical degree. And yet…’
‘And yet my husband died of cancer,’ she said flatly, almost defiantly
‘And there was nothing you could do? You blame yourself or your medicine? Is that it?’
‘This is not your business.’
‘But you walked away.’
‘Leave it, Ben. I changed direction. I can’t let the vineyard go to ruin.’
‘We need a doctor here more than we need wine.’
‘And I need wine more than I need medicine. Now, if you don’t mind…I’ll collect Button and go home.’
‘My mum will be hurt if you don’t stop and eat.’
She would be, too.
She’d popped in to see Ailsa when she’d arrived back at the island—of course she had. Ben’s mum had always been lovely to her, drawing her into the family, making her time on the island so much better than if she’d been left with the normally sullen adolescent childminders her parents had usually hired on the mainland.
But she’d explained things to Ailsa.
‘I need time to myself—to come to terms with my husband’s death.’ To come to terms with her husband’s betrayal? His anger? His totally unjustified blame? ‘I’m done with relationships, medicine, pressure. I need to be alone.’
‘Of course you do, dear,’ Ailsa had said, and had hugged her. ‘But don’t stay solitary too long. There’s no better cure than hugs, and hugs are what you’ll get when you come to this house. And if I know our kids and our friends, it won’t only be me who’ll be doing the hugging.’
Nothing had changed, she thought. This island was a time warp, the escape her parents had always treated it as.
She wanted this island but she didn’t want the closeness that went with it. For six months she’d held herself aloof but now…
‘Irish stew and parsley dumplings,’ Ben said, grinning and putting on a nice, seductive face. His left eyebrow rose and he chuckled at her expression. ‘Who needs candlelight and champagne when there’s dumplings?’ He held out his hands. ‘Mum says it’s your favourite.’
She’d remembered. Ailsa had remembered!
‘And the kids are already sorting toys for Button,’ he said, and tugged her toward the door. ‘Come on home, Ginny.’
Home.
She didn’t want to go. Every sense was screaming at her to go back to the vineyard.
But Button was asleep at Ailsa’s. Ailsa had made parsley dumplings.
Ben was holding her hands and smiling at her.
What was a woman to do? A woman seemed to have no choice at all.
‘Fine,’ she said.
‘That doesn’t sound gracious,’ he said, but still he smiled.
She caught herself. She was sounding like a brat.
‘I’m sorry. It’s very generous…’
‘It’s you who’s generous,’ he said gently. ‘If you hadn’t helped I wouldn’t be getting any dinner, and Mum knows that as well as I do. So thank you, Ginny, and don’t feel as if by coming you’re beholden. Or even that you’re somehow putting your feet into quicksand. You can draw back. You can go back to your vineyard and your solitude but not before you’ve eaten some of Mum’s Irish stew.’
There were eight people around Ailsa’s kitchen table, and the kids were asleep on the squishy living-room settee just through the door. The children were still in sight of the table. They were still part of the family.
It had always been thus, Ginny thought. Not only had Ailsa and her long-suffering Doug produced twelve children, but their house expanded to fit all comers. Doug worked on one of the island’s fishing trawlers. He spent long times away at sea and when he was home he seemed content to sit by the fire, puffing an empty pipe.
‘I know you smoke it at sea, but not in the house, not with the children,’ Ailsa had decreed, and Doug didn’t mind. He regarded his brood and Ailsa’s strays with bemused approval and the house was the warmer for his presence.
Eight was a small tableful for these two, but the kids were mostly grown now, setting up their own places. Ben was the third of twelve but only the three youngest were home tonight. Becky, Sam and Hannah were fourteen, fifteen and seventeen respectively, and they greeted Abby with warmth and shoved up to make room for her.
Abby, the nurse who’d worked with her that afternoon, was already there. the nurse had impressed Ginny today, not only with her people skills but with her warmth. She looked at home at the table, as if Ben often had her here.
Abby and Ben? A question started.
Ben was helping his mother ladle dumplings onto plates. Doug hardly said a word—it was up to the kids to do the entertaining, and they did.
‘It’s lovely to see you again,’ seventeen-year-old Hannah said, a bit pink with teenage self-consciousness as she said it. ‘We missed you when you went.’
‘Ginny was Ben’s girlfriend,’ fourteen-year-old Becky told Abby, with no teenage self-consciousness at all. ‘I’m too young to remember but everyone says they were all kissy-kissy. And then Ginny went away and Ben broke his heart.’
‘Becky!’ her family said, almost as one, and she flushed.
‘Well, he did. Maureen said he did.’
Ginny remembered Maureen. Maureen was the oldest of the McMahon tribe, self-assertive and bossy. She’d come to see Ginny on the last night Ginny had been on the island, all those years ago.
‘You could have been kind. Ben’s so upset. You could say you’ll write. Something like that.’
How to say that she couldn’t bear to write? That even at seventeen all she’d wanted to do had been to fling herself into Ben’s arms and stay? That she’d talked to her parents about the possibility of university in Auckland but she hadn’t been able to divorce the request from the way she’d felt about Ben, and her parents had laid down an ultimatum.
‘You’re being ridiculous. The boy has no hope of making it through medicine—twelve kids—they’re dirt poor. Cut it off now, Guinevere, if you want to be kind, otherwise you’ll simply distract him from trying. You’re going to university in Sydney and if there’s any more nonsense, we’ll send you to your aunt in London.’
The boy has no hope of making it through medicine. You’ll simply distract him from trying.
The phrases had stung but even at seventeen she had been able to see the truth in them.
Ben had wanted so much to be a doctor. He’d dreamed of it, ached for it. Since he’d been fifteen he’d worked on the docks after school, unloading fish and cleaning them for sale. It was a filthy, hard job, and every cent of what he’d earned had gone to his doctor training fund.
You’ll simply distract him from trying.
And then her father had issued another ultimatum, this one even worse.
Okay. If she couldn’t study in Auckland…If she couldn’t be with him…
She’d made a decision then and there, a Joan of Arc martyrdom, an adolescent burning for a cause. She’d renounce him and prove her parents wrong. She’d tell him not to write, to forget her, to focus purely on his career. Then, when they were both qualified doctors, she’d come again, appear out of the mist, probably wearing something white and floaty, and the orchestra would play and…and…
She found herself smiling, and everyone at the table was looking at her oddly. Even Ben.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just remembering how romantic it was. Our first love. I hope your heart wasn’t broken for long, Ben.’
He grinned. ‘For months,’ he said.
