‘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 naïve 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’tthink 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 ofhip hip hoorayas 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.
