cynical. But… a closed book? A difficult man to read? Melissa found it difficult to square Emma’s description with the warm, open-faced man she’d met that morning. Perhaps he preferred not to talk about his private life in the work setting, which again was fair enough. But that wasn’t the same as being hard to read.
Maybe Emma simply hadn’t worked closely enough with him to be able to form much of an impression. Melissa, on the other hand, hoped to work very closely indeed with him, and not in any lewd sense. There was only so much you could learn from textbooks or even from hands-on experience of surgery. The most profound learning, she knew, came from an apprenticeship, from being at the right hand of a master and modelling your practice on his.
Reinvigorated by lunch and by a new excitement about the world opening up before her, Melissa cleared away her tray and left the canteen with Emma to face the rest of the day’s onslaught.
***
Fin stood on tiptoes, arched his back, flexed his neck from side to side. No matter how much he practised, how experienced he became, he could never prevent the knots of tension forming in the muscles of his neck and upper back during the long hours over the operating table. Squash twice a week and a daily run along the river didn’t do the trick either, whatever other benefits they might impart. No, the knitted-together muscles had to be actively loosened up at the end of each working day. Which was every day, really.
It had been a killer of an afternoon. There’d been two major cases he’d had to deal with: one a serious crush injury to the chest following a head-on car collision, and the other a damaged lower leg caused by a high-tension power cable that had snapped. The second he’d managed in collaboration with his orthopaedic surgeon colleagues, and together they’d saved the young man’s leg. The businessman in the car crash had been less fortunate. The injury to his mediastinum was too great and he’d expired on the operating table, two hours after the efforts to save his life had begun.
As always, Fin had stripped off his surgical gown and latex gloves in the scrub room with a sense of deep personal failure. It was completely irrational, he knew. The injuries he saw were often so extreme that anywhere else the patients would have had no chance whatsoever of survival. Here, at St Matthew’s, they had at least a fighting shot. And often they did make it. Fin didn’t dwell on personal statistics but he knew his success rates were some of the highest in the world.
But like all good doctors – like all professionals worthy of the title in any field of human endeavour – Fin knew that a certain amount of self-doubt was necessary in order to stay at the top of one’s game. You needed the nagging fear that possibly, just possibly, you weren’t good enough. That your failure to save a patient’s limb, or life, was because you’d messed up somewhere. Too much of this feeling would paralyse you, of course. But complete and unbridled self-confidence was arrogance, and arrogance crippled growth.
Fin glanced at the clock above his office’s window. Nine forty p.m. A few minutes’ more limbering up, then perhaps half an hour applying himself to the paperwork that infiltrated every hospital doctor’s life like weeds. Then he’d call it a day.
He’d propped his foot on his desk to stretch his hamstring when the knock came at the door. Startled, he almost lost his balance.
Then he remembered. Of course. He’d asked his registrar to drop by.
‘Come in.’
She stepped into the room, still wearing her white coat. He watched her cast a quick glance about his office. Amused, he wondered if she was surprised at its modesty. He’d been offered a larger, flashier one with a view over the river and had declined. He didn’t need those kinds of trappings to feel secure. Besides, he rather liked the cluttered, academic look of his surroundings: shelves crammed to bursting with box files and stacks of journals, cosy overstuffed armchairs flanking a matching sofa.
Fin nodded at one of the chairs and she sat, uncertainly. He sank into the one opposite.
‘Melissa. Hello. Quiet day at the office?’
It broke the ice. She smiled, her expression changing from one of faintly nervous seriousness to a warm, almost playful look. He studied her. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back into a