Chapter 15
That same Saturday it was Alice’s first day off after a busy first week.
A sign read ‘triage’, just like a hospital.
Unlike a hospital, though, the Cairn Dhu Repair Shop smelled amazing: wood shavings, oil and metal, like the garage at Alice’s grandad’s house where, having retired young, everything was orderly and clean and he’d sand down old furniture and shine his vintage Jaguar XJ for hours at a time.
In addition, this place also smelled of warmth, coffee and baking.
It was shortly before lunchtime and there was a good smell of toasties in the air too.
She glanced with a little pang of longing at a group of women huddled on sofas, chatting around the stove fire, clutching steaming mugs.
It would be so nice to sit there with a friend and hear the ordinary little details of their life, a friend who knew nothing whatsoever about medicine so couldn’t talk about it.
She didn’t really have any of those back home, let alone here.
‘You’re the new doctor,’ said a man, and without waiting for confirmation, he extended a hand. ‘I’m Sachin.’
‘Alice,’ she told him. ‘I was wondering if the repair shop fixes medical equipment?’
‘I cannae say we have in the past.’ Sachin scratched his head. ‘But there’s nothing McIntyre cannae fix, in my experience.’
She looked along the rows of repairers at their desks in the big shed. ‘Which one’s McIntyre?’
‘Oh, he’s no’ in right now. Let’s see…’ Sachin scanned the room, eyes landing on the guy from the meeting.
Murray, was it? The one who’d been in charge of the funding side of the garden project.
Murray was watching a loud repair demo on his phone and occasionally looking worriedly at a set of electronic kitchen scales on his desk.
‘I maybe wouldnae look to Murray for help…’ Sachin said. ‘You can try Cary?’
Alice’s eyes followed Sachin’s towards the man who’d given her the apple, and there it was again, the great big grandfather clock with the door in its long chest opened up, its pendulum and chains showing, and Cary’s head practically inside the cavity.
An older woman stood next to him, peering inside as well.
‘Go on,’ encouraged Sachin with a jolly burst of mischievous laughter. ‘The doctor will see you now.’
Alice thanked him and tentatively stepped deeper into the darker recesses of the shed where Cary remained in deep conversation with the woman, or rather the woman was talking at him, saying, ‘The case was certainly made at a later date and in a style influenced by the Glasgow Art School and Charles Rennie Mackintosh but…’
Cary stood straight as a sentry when he noticed her approaching.
‘We meet again,’ Alice said awkwardly.
‘Hmm?’ The spectacled woman turned to observe her through startlingly thick lenses. Cary only smiled apologetically for what was to come.
‘The, uh, grandfather clock,’ explained Alice. ‘I’ve seen it before, I was just saying…’
‘Ah, now that’s a common misnomer,’ the woman said, lifting one large pair of spectacles to the top of her head to reveal a second pair underneath.
‘This is in fact a long case clock and rather an intriguing one at that, the mechanism being of Barbadian origin, possibly mid-nineteenth century. Its being manufactured in the Caribbean is in itself noteworthy.’ She turned back to admiring the inner workings of the thing.
‘It looks nice,’ Alice tried, unsure what else to say. ‘Got a nice… face.’
‘Dial, you mean,’ the woman corrected, without even a glance over her shoulder.
‘Are you repairing it?’ Alice asked Cary.
‘Hoping to. The clock itself belonged to my grandmother, and my granddad built the case. He was a carpenter too, like me.’
Alice looked at it with a stronger interest than a moment before. It was a lovely thing, with a brassy dial in the shape of a twelve-rayed sun and a smart long body of polished wood carved simply with lines, knots and stylised roses.
‘Rather na?ve woodcarving,’ the woman said in a voice that echoed inside the case, ‘but with its own charm, I suppose.’
‘Oh, uh, let me introduce Dr Bonnet,’ Cary said, seeming to remember himself. ‘And this is the town’s new GP, Dr Alice Hargreave.’
The older woman barely drew her face from the clock’s insides. ‘Very good.’
Unperturbed, Cary pressed on, explaining to Alice that, ‘Dr Bonnet is the repair shop’s new volunteer horologist.’
Not that the clock doctor was paying much attention.
She had her hands inside the cavity now, fiddling about, pulling at chains and putting Alice in mind of the emergency intestinal laparotomy she’d sat in on in her third week of training which had confirmed the surgical route was definitely not for her.
‘Poor old thing’s got a dicky ticker!’ Dr Bonnet guffawed at her own joke, while inspecting the pendulum.
‘Maybe Alice can help with that?’ replied Cary, indicating the stethoscope around Alice’s neck.
Bonnet, however, didn’t think this was an amusing suggestion.
‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Alice, snapping back to the reason she was here. ‘I was wondering if this was fixable? It seems to be broken after my train journey.’
‘May I?’
He waited until she handed over the stethoscope, putting it in his own ears, checking if any sounds could be heard from his wrist.
‘It’s just a cheap one,’ Alice told him.
He asked how long she’d had it and she told him less than a year. ‘I lost my other one, cost Dad a fortune.’
That day, her mum, dad and Bastian had pulled her up front at her graduation party in the big marquee in the back garden – her superstar surgeon brothers, Si and Rich, hadn’t made it home for the celebrations – and a hush had fallen as she’d opened the gift box.
She’d hung the stethoscope around her neck to a burst of applause and a cry of ‘three cheers for the Doctors Hargreave!’ Her parents had waved away the chants of hip hip hooray as the music started up again and Bastian had looked delighted, as though he was somehow included in the chorus.
Sometimes she wondered whether he wanted to be her father’s son-in-law more than he wanted to be her boyfriend, he’d admired her dad so much.
While everyone at her party had fallen to chatting, her dad had pointed out where he’d had her name engraved on the stethoscope’s metal stem and he’d glowed like summer sun upon her.
His approval meant everything to her at the time, and on that day, at that party, in front of all of her parents’ friends, she had enjoyed a rare chance to bask in it.
‘I’m pretty sure it got cleared away with a bunch of medical waste after a messy night on call in F1 general med,’ Alice said, regretting her lost gift. ‘Never saw it again anyway.’
‘There’s no sound at all through these earpieces?’ Cary said, still attempting to listen to his own pulse.
‘Not much.’
‘Let’s take a closer look,’ he said, leading her to his repair desk, leaving Dr Bonnet to appraise the clock alone.
‘Shall I scrub in?’ Alice said, and incredibly, Cary laughed.
With Cary’s lovely, generous, easy laughter ringing in her ears, she came to a fresh realisation.
If she ever attempted a joke with Bastian, he’d either ignore her or – if he found it irresistibly funny in spite of himself – he’d stifle his laughter by adopting an ironic, superior look, as though she was such a silly thing.
Why not just laugh along? she used to think.
She’d seen Bastian do it with other women too, and he’d one-up anyone who told a joke in front of him, adding his own, determined to get the last word and the last laugh, and it usually worked.
People generally found him hilarious, rarely seeming to recognise the trait as domineering.
It had been, she’d only just this second come to realise, something that had irritated her.
Cary’s eyes were sparkling, his cheeks staying sweetly rounded, having formed little gleaming pinch points under his eyes.
Maybe Cary didn’t feel the need to be the funniest, smartest person in the room and was content to acknowledge humour in her?
Whatever it was, she liked how it felt. She wanted him to do it again.
‘Your tubing’s not airtight,’ he said, cutting short her thoughts.
‘Huh?’
‘See here?’ He was pointing to the tiniest fracture in the rubber. ‘I’m assuming that for sounds to travel along the tube it needs to form an airtight seal?’
‘I guess so.’
Cary was examining the shelves behind him, pulling out boxes, peering inside.
‘I think the rubber’s gone brittle from wearing it next to your skin,’ he was saying, immersed in his task, finding a small box and opening it, perching on the stool, pulling the lamp down to illuminate his hands.
It took all of five minutes for him to make the repair using a quick-drying flexible adhesive smoothed thinly over the perforation.
While he worked she explained how she’d also lost the little holster that had held her stethoscope safely at her hip, having not been allowed to wear it around her neck in training, blathering about it being a safely thing.
Satisfied the seal was dry, he handed it back. ‘If you write down the model number, I can order you a replacement tube and fit it, but will this do for now?’
She fitted the earpieces.
‘Here.’ Cary offered his wrist.
‘Oh!’ She’d meant to check upon her own body, but since she had a willing volunteer, why not?
‘Thanks. It’s actually easier if I first feel for a pulse manually…
’ She pinched the wrist he had offered her.
‘…And then I do this.’ She lifted the round resonator to his chest, pausing to get his permission before touching it to the linen of his shirt front exposed between the two lengths of a muted plaid waistcoat, finding the correct auscultatory spots, the way she’d learned from hours of practice.