Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle (3 page)

‘Did the building project help the young men get work?’ she asked.

She was worming her way into his confidence but he couldn’t let a smile divert him, any more than he could let Caroline’s apparent interest in his building project distract him from the fact that she was here to disrupt his life.

Yet politeness meant he had to answer.

‘For some of them, it led to work.’ He kept his voice
carefully neutral, and looked at a spot over her shoulder as he spoke so he didn’t have to see the so-familiar curve of her cheek, the blue of her eyes, the silver of her hair, but he’d lost her attention anyway, the child coming dangerously close to the piles of books.

‘Don’t knock them over!’

Caroline’s cry diverted his attention from battles, danger, smiling eyes and building projects, but it had come too late to stop Ella spilling one of his piles of books.

‘Not reached the bookshelves-page of your how-to-build book?’ Caroline teased, kneeling to help Ella rebuild the pile.

And this time, perhaps because she was kneeling and might not see it, he
did
smile.

‘Furniture is a different world, far too complex for an amateur like me to tackle,’ he said, amazed he was able to have this ordinary conversation when his insides were churning and his mind battling to reject that this was happening. ‘We were gifted some furniture, not a lot, but enough.’

Caroline finished tidying the spilt pile of books and stood up, leaving Ella wandering around the stacks in much the same way as a child might play in a maze. Although every sinew in her body was tight, the tension in the room palpable, she had to keep pretending—to keep up her end of what was really a bizarre conversation, given the circumstances. She and Jorge together after four years and they were discussing building projects!

Better than arguing, she told herself, but at the same
time her heart ached for the time when she and Jorge would have laughed together over this strained and formally polite behaviour.

Laughed, hugged, kissed, made love?

But it was her turn to talk, not think!

‘Is there a big unemployment problem in the area?’

She left Ella with a warning not to touch things and crossed the room to the little kitchen nook, where he waited by the single gas ring for the kettle to boil. Picking up the gourd in which he had put the chopped-up leaves—were they called
yerba?
She tried to remember—for the tea, she turned it in her hands, cupping it and appreciating how snugly it fitted her hand, stirring the chopped dry leaves with the metal straw.

Eventually he answered, taking his turn in this painful pretence.

‘It’s a problem among the young people—the ones who choose not to go on to higher education,’ Jorge replied, though his inner reaction to her closeness and his fascination with the movement of her hands had delayed his reply too long. ‘In the beginning, working with the boys to make the mud bricks for the walls, I found it was a more satisfying form of physical therapy than working out in a gymnasium. Gradually it became a challenge to all of us, to build something with our own hands—something we could feel pride in. Yes, the hut is rough, the door is rough, but it is
our
hut and
our
door, and I, for one, cannot open it without a sense of perhaps not pride but satisfaction that I could, with only a little help, make myself a shelter.’

‘You started by making the bricks?’

Disbelief and admiration warred in her voice but the shrill whistle of the kettle stopped the conversation. He took the gourd from her, turning it upside down a couple of times to move the finer leaves to the top, then tipping it from side to side. That done, he poured in cold water to saturate the leaves and let it sit a minute on the table. The mechanical movement of his hands as he made the
mate
gave him time to think—time to tell himself her admiration wasn’t personal. She would be equally admiring of any man she knew had built his own dwelling.

Any man she knew?

He glanced at her left hand, certain he’d see a wedding ring.

No jewellery at all, but, then, she’d always shunned what she called fripperies. And if she’d married, Ella would have a father figure in her life, and there’d have been no reason for her to come.

He tipped the gourd once more so the leaves settled on one side of it, and carefully added the boiling water.

And while it steeped he shrugged off her admiration, making light of what had been a mammoth task.

‘It’s how people used to do it, and I cannot spend all my spare hours reading.’

‘Spare hours,’ Caroline replied. ‘I remember them, though the memory is hazy.’ She looked towards her daughter, then added, ‘Not that I’d swap Ella for even one spare hour.’

The remarks bothered Jorge, for all he was trying to do was keep the conversation determinedly neutral—coolly polite, nothing more. She’d sounded wistful, as if genuine regret lurked somewhere behind the words.

‘You have so little time?’ he asked, dropping a silver straw into the
mate
then pausing for an unseen guest to try it before handing the gourd to Caroline.

She lifted the gourd, and sipped through the straw, grimacing slightly at the taste, or perhaps the heat of the drink.

‘I pass it back to you, is that right?’ she said, and, knowing she’d remembered something as simple as the
mate
ceremony of sharing made his heart go bump again, but though the barriers he’d erected around his heart were as rough as the walls of his hut, he knew he had to keep them intact, heart-bumps or no heart-bumps!

His mind tracked back to the previous conversation—the question Caroline hadn’t answered.

‘You have so little time?’ he asked again.

It was all too weird, Caroline decided, standing in a little hut not unlike the one they’d shared in Africa—although that one had been round and roofed with palm fronds, not corrugated iron—with Jorge beside her, asking polite questions—exactly as it had been when they’d first met.

S
HE
shook off the memory and steeled herself against the attraction that still tingled along her nerves when she looked at him or heard his voice. Best to consider his question—to answer him.

Best to forget the past and all its joy and pain …

‘I work, I come home, and I try to be a good mother. Like all working mothers I feel guilt that someone else spends more time with my daughter than I do, so I probably overcompensate. Then, when Ella goes to bed, there are always business things to take care of, or articles to read or write—you know how it is, keeping up with the latest developments, hoping you’ll find something to help a patient you’ve seen recently.’

He turned to face her so the scar on his cheek was fully visible and it was only with an enormous effort she resisted the urge to lay her palm against his damaged skin, as Ella had done earlier.

‘You said your father left you money. You must have no need to work.’

She smiled at him and waved her hands around the hut, pleased to have such a bland, harmless topic of conversation to occupy her mind and distract it from
the suggestions of her body—suggestions like moving closer, touching him.

‘And I’m sure you’re not so impoverished you needed to build your own hut, so you, at least, should understand. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort to train me for the job I do. I wouldn’t feel right to just stop doing it, especially when there are areas where doctors are still desperately needed. I’ve been working in an inner-city practice where patients are a mix of trendy twenties, urban aboriginals, homeless youths, prostitutes, Asian migrants and long-term street people. Probably not unlike this area you work in, although, from the article I read, most of your patients are the indigenous Toba people, so you don’t get the same mix.’

Pleased with herself for answering as if the tension in the air between them wasn’t twisting her intestines into knots, she kept going. Talking was better than thinking. Unfortunately for this plan, Ella chose that moment to knock over a second pile of books.

‘Oh, blast,’ Caroline said as she hurried towards the mess, but Jorge was there before her. ‘I really should control my daughter better.’

The words were no sooner out than she realised how stupid they had been.

‘Our daughter,’ she amended, but knew it was too late. She was kneeling now, directly in front of him, looking into Jorge’s deep brown eyes, eyes she’d once fallen right into and drowned in, losing her heart, soul and body to the man who owned them.

And because she was looking, she saw the pain, read
it as clearly as words written in white chalk on a black background.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, though for what she wasn’t certain.

For the lost years?

For him not knowing he had a daughter?

For hurting him by not showing enough love that he could have depended on it four years ago, depended on it enough not to have written that email?

Though surely pride had written that email—his pride, not her lack of love.

She didn’t know.

He stood up without a word, walking back to the kitchen where the
mate
sat on the small kitchen table. Leaving Ella to restack the books, Caroline followed him, picking up the gourd and taking another sip, trying to get back to polite conversation because anything else was too painful.

‘It must be an acquired taste,’ she said, handing the gourd over to him and hoping he’d think she’d been considering
mate,
not love and the pain it caused as she’d sipped. ‘And obviously very popular! We saw people drinking it everywhere—walking along the street in the city, even waiting at bus stops.’

‘It is a custom not only in Argentina but all over South America.’

Caroline smiled but she knew it was a sad effort, memories of the past hammering in her head as they both tried gamely to keep the stupid conversation going.

‘Strange, isn’t it,’ she said quietly, ‘that we who talked about everything under the sun should be reduced to
tourist-talk? But now that Ella has found her land legs after the journey, perhaps it is time for you to meet her properly.’

She turned, calling to her daughter, who’d selected a book with a red cover, settled herself into a tattered armchair and was reading herself a story from it. As it was almost certainly in Spanish and quite possibly a lurid medical text, Caroline wondered what Ella would choose to make of it. At the moment she was hooked on
The Three Robbers,
which also had a red cover, so possibly that was the story she was telling herself.

‘Ella!’

The little girl looked up from the book as Caroline said her name.

‘Come over here and meet Jorge properly.’

Caroline pronounced his name as best she could, although she’d never fully mastered the deep-throated ‘h’ sound that was more like an x than the English pronunciation of
g.

Ella came to stand beside her, her lips moving so Caroline knew she was trying out the name.

‘Hor-hay?’ she queried, and to Caroline’s surprise Jorge knelt in front of her and politely shook her hand.

‘It is a hard name for you to say,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps before long we can find something else for you to call me, something easier.’

‘My
name is easy,’ Ella, ever confident, ever up for a chat, told him. ‘It was my grandma’s name—the grandma I didn’t know. I knew my other grandma but I don’t really remember her very much because she went to be a star in heaven when I was only two.’

The child’s innocent remark made Jorge glance up at Caroline and saw pain whiten her cheeks, the wound of her mother’s death still raw, but the child—Ella—was talking again and he turned back to her, fascinated by the resemblance to his younger self, captivated by a small person who was now telling him about the big plane that had flown up in the sky.

‘Not high enough to see my two grandmas who are stars,’ she explained seriously, ‘but too high to see down to the ground except when we went over some mountains before the plane came down again. Mummy says you used to go walking in those mountains and maybe when I’m a bit bigger I could go too.’

Not all the words were crystal clear but her story still came through, each syllable tightening a band around his chest, the innocent chatter of the child all but suffocating him.

‘Mummy talked about me?’ he asked, though he knew it was wrong to question a child this way.

‘She told me lots of stories about her friend Hor-hay who worked with her in—’

She broke off to look up at Caroline.

‘Where was it, Mummy?’

‘Africa,’ Caroline supplied, and the restraint in her voice suggested she’d have preferred to put her hand over her daughter’s mouth to stop the revelations rather than helping out with the conversation.

‘Afica!’ Ella declared triumphantly, then she pointed at the gourd, still in Jorge’s hand. ‘Can I have some of that?’ He passed the gourd to her, letting her hold it but
keeping his hand on it as well. He was vaguely aware of Caroline’s anxious ‘Is it cool enough now?’ but mostly he was swamped by unnameable—even unfathomable—emotions as, for the first time, he shared
mate
with his daughter.

‘Yuk!’

So she didn’t take to it, but that mattered little. She would, in time, grow accustomed to the taste.

In time?

Was he seriously considering getting involved in this child’s life?

How could he, living as he did, virtually a hermit?

But even as the objection surfaced he remembered that his bare existence in this place where he felt most at peace was coming to an end—and soon. Nine days from now the local government was taking over the clinic, and he was returning to Buenos Aires to be with
his
father, to live with the man who had first taught him the strength of love.

Ella was telling him an involved tale about a doll Caroline had made her leave at home, but the words barely penetrated, his brain swamped by the revelation that peace might be achievable in other places if the right elements were in place—elements like a wife and a child…

Not without love, common sense reminded him. In his search for peace after the accident he’d tried relationships without love, and peace was the last thing they had brought him.