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THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLOTTE

Lilian Darcy

When nurse Lucy Beckett’s daughter Charlotte makes a new ‘best friend’ at school, Lucy is shocked to discover that the friend is Ellie, daughter of Dr. Malcolm Lambert, whose dying wife was nursed by Lucy six years ago. Now Lucy and Malcolm are working together in A&E, and she is horrified to realize that the attraction between them is a strong as ever. But how can she keep him at bay when their daughters are determined to be ‘sisters’…

'You're
going to ring Ellie's house
right now,
aren't you, Mummy?' The pleading, persistent little voice came from right in front of the cupboard which Lucy needed to open in order to extract a saucepan.

'Yes, love,' she answered absently, then, too late, realised what she'd said. She tried to backtrack. 'That is, not exactly
right
now, but in a—'

'But you
said.
And you'd do it in ten minutes, which means you're twenty minutes late.'

Not for the first time, Lucy reflected that having an extremely intelligent child could be a mixed blessing. Charlotte was only five. It might have been easier on a single parent if she weren't so adept at doing things like subtracting ten minutes from half an hour to leave twenty minutes, and keeping track of every hasty parental promise ever made to her.

'All right, then, darling heart...' It seemed easier to capitulate and make the promised phone call.

After all—with a twinge of remorse—she
had
'said', and she did try to teach her daughter that one's word was one's bond.

'Here's the number. But I think I got the five back to front. Ellie says I did.' Charlotte thrust a grubby scrap of paper into Lucy's hand and led her, with a very crumpling grip on her skirt, to the phone.

Suppressing a sigh, Lucy picked it up and dialled, while Charlotte stood an inch away, gazing upwards
with huge, hopeful blue eyes. The instrument rang eight times at the other end, and Lucy was just about to conclude with guilty relief that Ellie and her parents weren't at home when there was a click and the sound of a male voice.

Definitely a male voice, although what exactly it had said beyond 'Hello' Lucy didn't know, as the potatoes had just boiled over on the stove and the front doorbell had pealed, masking the words.

Flustered, and forgetting her phone etiquette entirely, she demanded distractedly, 'Um, is that Ellie's dad?'

'Yes, it is.'

'Well, uh, this is Charlotte's mother from school... No, don't answer the door, love. I'm not sure who it could be. But could you switch off the front burner on the stove? And as you might know by this time, she'd love to have Ellie over to play, and I thought—'

The doorbell pealed again, and the sudden hiss and splutter of steaming potato water onto the gas flame made Charlotte squeal and back away, giving Lucy further cause for remorse about her daughter. She really shouldn't have asked a five-year-old to tackle the stove, not with her own experience in rural emergency nursing. She knew only too well how easily a child could get burnt.

'Don't worry about it, Charlotte,' she instructed quickly.

Abandoning the potatoes to their fate, she focused on the phone conversation, and somehow she and Ellie's dad stumbled through an arrangement. Perhaps fortunately, it sounded as if there was almost as much chaos at the other end of the phone as there was at hers, but through it all they managed to agree that Ellie would come home after school with Charlotte tomorrow.

'Lovely!' Lucy said, and Charlotte correctly interpreted this as reason to start jumping up and down, excitedly clapping her hands.

'Oh, goody, goody,
goody!'

Over the noise, Lucy heard, 'As you know, Ellie usu
ally
has a babysitter before and after school. Jenny has mentioned you very favourably, by the way.'

'Yes, we've chatted several times at bell-time over the past two weeks,' Lucy agreed.

But it was possible that Ellie's father hadn't heard this.

'Go
and let the cat out, would you, please,
Ellie? He sounds
a
bit desperate,' she heard him
saying.
Then he add
ed into the phone,
'So
you'd like one of us
to
pick
her up? What time did you say?'

'Six?'

'Great!'

The doorbell rang again, and the potato water had now put out the gas flame completely. Lucy could smell gas already. Could she possibly stretch the phone cord far enough to reach the stove and—? No.

Meanwhile, Charlotte had bounced off into her room on the urgent mission of organising her toys ready for Ellie's visit.

'Oh, no! Too late! What a disaster!' Lucy heard at the other end of the phone. The final exclamation expressed her own sentiments rather nicely.

Clearly, neither harried parent wished to prolong this conversation. A minute later, she'd said a distracted goodbye, put down the phone, re-lit the gas and told the woman at the door that, thanks very much, she was
not
interested in glancing through her sales catalogue, either now or 'at her leisure' in order to have the opportunity of purchasing a range of innovative products at stunning value.

Two minutes after that, she'd caught her breath enough to realise that she still didn't know Ellie's last name, or her address, or the names of either of her parents. Not exactly the sort of parental vigilance she was happy with after only a month back in this city and with Charlotte less than two weeks into her school career.

Still, the whole thing seemed all right. Ellie's babysitter, Jenny, a woman in her early fifties, seemed caring and competent and nice. The little girl herself, too, just a tiny fairy of a thing, was obviously a well brought up and well cared for child.

Lucy sighed. She'd been a single mother for a long time. Effectively since Charlotte's conception, in fact. But living all of that time at her parents' farm with all their support and care had by no means prepared her for the inevitable reality of the new life she'd recently embarked on.

Changes happened, however, and in this case the changes were largely positive ones. Mum and Dad had made the reasoned decision that they were getting too old for the hard work of the farm. Dad didn't have the strength and stamina that he used to.

Lucy's older sister was happily married to a farmer and settled elsewhere, so there was no point in dying to keep the property in the family. Accordingly, Mum and Dad had sold it for a good price to a neighbour who was eager to expand his own holding. Then they'd made the big move from rural western New South Wales to a beachfront cottage in the pretty little town of Narrawallee on the south coast.

Their biggest concern at first had been Charlotte's and Lucy's future but, as Lucy had explained to them, she'd seen her own move away from the area, with her daughter, as increasingly inevitable over the past six months or so. Charlotte really was very bright and hungry to learn. At some stage in her future, she'd need far more than the local country schools could provide, and the move might as well be made now when she was young enough to adjust easily.

So here they were in Canberra, where Lucy had trained and worked as a nurse for several years, and Mum and Dad were less than three hours' drive away. She planned a weekend with them down at their new place very soon. Charlotte would love the sea, which she hadn't seen since she could remember.

it wasn't the same as having her parents under the same roof, Lucy reflected. It would necessitate far more planning and efficiency on her part from now on.

And I haven't even started work yet. It's all going to get even more complicated after Monday...

Once dinner was on the table, then eaten and cleared away, however, Lucy was a little ashamed of her lack of courage. The summer evening was cooling nicely outside, thanks to a fresh breeze which came in a generous flow through the house's open windows. Charlotte was in the bath. There were some gorgeous salmon pink clouds banked high in the paling sky. Canberra had beautiful sunsets.

Lucy had a regular eight-till-four shift lined up in the accident and emergency department at nearby Black Mountain Hospital, starting Monday, which would mean that Charlotte could settle into a consistent routine of before and after school care at Lachlan Primary School, where she thus far appeared to be very happy, two weeks into the new school year. Mum and Dad had helped in the purchase of this very pleasant three-bedroom house just two minutes' drive from the school, and Charlotte already had a 'best friend' there, little Ellie. There was really very little to complain about.

And as long as Ellie's dad doesn't think back on our conversation, decide I must be far too scatterbrained to have his daughter under my supervision and cancel the whole arrangement...

Evidently he hadn't. The next afternoon at three, two little girls emerged from their classroom hand in hand, looking remarkably similar in their green cotton check uniform dresses, both with beaming smiles—smiles which must scarcely have left their faces for the next three hours, judging by the sounds emerging from the back garden, from Charlotte's room and from the dining room at snack time.

Apart from preparing the said snack and responding to a beseeching appeal for 'just one bucket of water in the garden for our game', Lucy herself was almost entirely superfluous to the girls' entertainment. This allowed her to finish painting a bookshelf in the living room, prepare a tuna casserole for dinner and go over once more the orientation material she'd been given by the hospital in preparation for starting her new job next week.

This time, when the doorbell rang at six, she wasn't on the phone, nothing was boiling over on the stove, and the girls were still happy in the back garden. She also knew it would be Ellie's father at the door, not an unwanted saleswoman with a catalogue.

It was hardly surprising, then, that she opened it confidently, ready to smile, invite him in and find out the trivial little detail of his name as soon as possible.

Not necessary, this last part, she found, when her stunned regard took in the details of the man on her
doorstep. Tall. Dark. Grey-eyed. Dynamically built, yet with enormous sensitivity in his thirty-six-year-old face. Dressed in dark grey trousers and a pale grey shirt— conservative, well-tailored clothes that moulded easily to the body beneath. She knew his name already.

In fact, they each recognised the other at once. Six years really wasn't a long time. For Lucy, the shock was wee a totally unexpected dousing with icy water. She felt an immediate, instinctive and quite unnecessary urge to protect herself physically by wrapping her arms across her chest or sheltering behind a piece of furniture. as if he represented a bodily danger.

For him... Malcolm... the reaction was apparently less intense. Or at least he was better at concealing it. After a moment of stunned silence, he was the one to recover his equilibrium and speak first.

'Lucy?' His voice betrayed just the tiniest note of huskiness. 'Lucy Beckett?' He searched her face for a moment, then stepped back a pace and glanced upwards at the house, as if it could instantly teach him more about her circumstances. 'Or...presumably it's not Beckett any more,' he amended.

'No, it's still Beckett,' she corrected quietly.

'Right. Right.' He swore mildly under his breath. 'But you
are
Charlotte's mother?'

'Yes. And, of course, it's Malcolm, isn't it?'

As if the issue was as casual as her words had sounded! And as if she was really in any doubt! He hadn't changed very much. She was simply buying time. For what, she didn't know. Nothing could overcome the impossible, uncomfortable reality of this meeting. My God, she'd cared for Charlotte's new best friend Ellie as tenderly as a mother when the tiny girl had been just a few weeks old!

Only her name hadn't been shortened back then. Dr Malcolm Lambert and his dying wife had called their newborn daughter Gabrielle.