This was what his life could be like if…
Stop. Don’t rush her, he warned himself. You know her background. She’s pathologically scared of the marriage-and-family bit. Let her get used to this, then maybe, just maybe, she’ll consider trying something like this permanently.
‘Having fun?’ he asked lightly as he walked into the living room.
‘We’re doing seaside music,’ Billy told him. ‘Look, Uncle Toby, we’re making waves.’ The little boy was waving the scarf up and down, in perfect time to the music.
‘Very creative,’ he said to Saskia. ‘Maybe you should switch specialty—we could do with someone like you in Paeds.’
An odd expression—one he couldn’t read—flitted across her face. Then he wondered if he’d imagined it, because she smiled. ‘I can’t take the credit for this. Billy learned it at preschool music class—I’ve taken him a couple of times when I’ve been off duty.’
He hadn’t known that. This really wasn’t what he’d expected from Saskia, but he liked this side of her. The side she kept hidden. It made him wonder what else he had to discover about her after all these years.
‘You can do music with us, Uncle Toby.’ Billy rummaged in a bag and presented Toby with a white scarf.
‘Sure.’ He sat down and joined them. ‘I like this music.’ It wasn’t Saskia’s normal style. She normally listened to rock. Loud and fast. Just like Saskia herself.
‘It’s Ludovico Einaudi—Le Onde. “The Waves”,’ she explained. ‘Think yourself lucky we’re not doing Saint-Saëns’ “The Aquarium” from the Carnival of Animals.’
‘Aunty Saskia made us some special seaweed for music class, out of a dustbin bag. And shiny fishes,’ Billy said. ‘You have to hold the fish and dance to the music.’
Toby raised an eyebrow. ‘You kept that quiet. What else are you hiding, Saskia?’
To his surprise, she blushed. ‘Nothing. Hey, Billy, do you want to sing your new Christmas song to Uncle Toby?’
‘Yeah!’ Billy stood up and started to sing ‘Christmas Shamrock’ to the tune of ‘Frère Jacques’.
‘Shamrock?’ Toby whispered in Saskia’s ear. ‘Since when has shamrock been Christmassy?’
‘They’re doing world cultures at nursery,’ Saskia muttered back.
Billy finished up with a rendition of what he called the ‘Sneezy Song’—‘When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney’—with a little bit of prompting from Saskia when he forgot the words.
They both clapped him when the song ended, and he beamed. ‘I can sing it to Mummy tonight.’
‘You certainly can.’ Saskia smiled at him, and turned briefly to Toby. ‘It’s my turn to cook tonight.’ She hugged her godson. ‘Billy, do you want to draw a picture for Mummy with Uncle Toby while I cook tea?’
‘I’ll get the felt pens!’ the little boy said gleefully, and raced off to fetch them.
‘I’m doing pasta,’ she whispered to Toby, ‘so I can disguise vegetables in the sauce. Tomorrow, it’s your turn to come up with a clever strategy to get him to eat something other than chicken nuggets. I told Lyd we’d do the impossible.’
‘You would,’ Toby said, resigned. ‘Right. I’m going to draw Billy a super rocket. And we’re going to call it after you.’
‘Oh, ha.’ She grinned, and headed for the kitchen.
As soon as Saskia was out of Toby’s view, she massaged her fingers and took some painkillers. Was this a flare-up? And would the flare-ups become more frequent as time went on? she wondered.
‘Not going to happen. It’s not.’ If she could stop the disease in its course by sheer will-power, her hands would stop hurting right now.
She flexed her fingers. Unfortunately, will-power wasn’t going to cure rheumatoid arthritis. And there wasn’t much chance of getting a cure in her Christmas stocking either. Damn, damn, damn. She’d managed in Theatre earlier today without any problems. But, right at this moment, no way could she have held a scalpel. She couldn’t have supervised a junior surgeon either—because if the younger doctor got into a mess, she wouldn’t be able to step in and take over.
She was going to have to resign. And soon. For her patients’ sake.
But medicine was her whole life. If she gave it up completely, what would she do? How would she fill the empty hours?
It took her ages to chop the vegetables for the pasta sauce. But she persisted—no way was she giving in. She wasn’t ready to give in.
Just as the sauce started to bubble, Billy bounded into the kitchen and shoved a piece of cardboard into her hand. ‘We made you a card,’ he announced.
‘“To the best aunty in the world. Love Billy,”’ she read. There was a picture of a flower on the front, coloured in bright pink and purple, and Toby had drawn Billy’s name in dots for the little boy to join up. Shocked by the tears that rose to her eyes, she blinked them back, hard. ‘Thank you,’ she said, crouching down to give Billy a hug.
The sauce was a success, too. She’d put it in a blender so there were no tell-tale lumps of vegetables. Billy ate his meal without a hint of protest, and scoffed more garlic bread than anyone else. He also managed to get garlic butter in his hair and spaghetti sauce over his face—even behind his ears.
‘Bathtime?’ Toby suggested.
‘Yep. You’re in charge tonight. I’m doing the washing-up.’ She didn’t want to share the chores with him in case he noticed just how long it was taking her to do things—and then asked awkward questions that she didn’t want to answer.
‘Both of them together?’ he asked, looking nervous.
‘C’mon, you’re the paediatrician. And you must have bathed your godchildren at some point.’
‘Nope. You and Lyd always do it.’
True. Saskia adored bathtime with the children, playing splashing games, then wrapping them in a towel ‘like a sausage roll’, as Billy called it. She loved Helena’s gummy smiles of delight as she splashed, the clean, baby-soft scent of the children’s skin after a bath, the way Billy’s hair stuck up in tufts. She loved giving them their milk, a cuddle, a story, tucking them into bed and then reading another story, because she couldn’t resist Billy’s huge eyes and cute smile when he asked so nicely for just one more.
But tonight she physically couldn’t do it.
‘You’ll enjoy it,’ she said, forcing herself to sound happy and bubbly, the Saskia Hayward that everyone at the hospital knew. The super-focused doctor, who partied at night and burned the candle at both ends.
As Toby took the children upstairs, Saskia’s smile faded. It wasn’t going to be that way for much longer. In fact, it’d get to the point where she wasn’t going to be burning candles at all.
Laboriously, she washed up. By the end, she knew that drying up would push her just that one step too far. The dishes could just air-dry tonight.
She couldn’t resist going to see how Toby was getting on. To her amusement, he was on his knees next to the bathtub, holding Billy’s plastic frog and joining in with Billy’s version of ‘Five little speckled frogs’. She couldn’t help grinning at the gusto with which Toby sang ‘Yum, yum’ about the delicious flies the frogs were eating, and ‘Glub, glub’ as the frogs jumped into the pool.
Toby looked just like any other father enjoying bathtime with his kids while giving his wife a break from childcare.