‘You said you’d lost your good stethoscope and the clip it hung from. Now you can keep that one safely on your consulting room desk, if you wanted to.’
‘Youmadethis?’
He nodded.
‘For me?’ She hadn’t been given a present quite this nice in… well, ever. ‘Why would you do that?’
Cary looked a little blank and skittish for a moment, as if he might have made a mistake, before saying, quite plainly, ‘Because we’re friends.’
A wave of something difficult to pinpoint washed over her. Was it shyness? No, not quite. A feeling of overwhelm? Because someone was being kind and gentle with her? It had made her suddenly shaky and emotional.
She considered hugging him, which is what she really wanted to do, but he was all the way behind his bench and seemed planted there, so instead she demonstrated how her stethoscope fitted perfectly inside the box and closed the lid, turning the gift in her hands, having to hide the burning feeling behind her eyes.
She hadn’t actually cried since she got here, not even when things felt very bleak, which they still often did, and she wasn’t going to cry now in front of her first and only friend in Cairn Dhu.
‘I absolutely love it to bits!’ she said, and he seemed very happy with that.
An intrusive little thought piped up. Bastian would hate Cary making her this beautiful, special thing.Good!she told it right back.
‘Did you get your clock fixed?’ she asked, gesturing to the long case that had been pushed against the wall out of the way.
‘No.’ Cary shook his head sadly. ‘Plenty of time, though.’ Then he sniffed a laugh at what he’d said. ‘It needs some new parts for the mechanism. Dr Bonnet’s making them herself. Is it weird to you, hearing her called doctor, when you’re an actual doctor?’
Alice thought about this. ‘Nope, not really. Doctor isn’t solely a medical title. In fact,Physicianis probably more accurate for me. I’m guessing Dr Bonnet has a doctorate in clocks?’
‘Horology, aye.’
‘There you go then. She earned the title like anyone else who uses it.’
‘Do you want to see her properly?’
‘Dr Bonnet?’
Cary laughed, just at the same moment Alice was realising her mistake. He’d meant the clock.
‘God, sorry, of course.’ If she hadn’t become almost immune to mortified feelings during her medical training, she might have wished the ground would open up and swallow her. ‘Show me. I’d like that.’
The first thing Alice noticed about the clock was the beautiful simplicity of its case.
‘My grandfather was a cabinet maker,’ Cary told her as the pair stood before it.
‘He built this?’ Alice ran a tentative hand down the glossy wood, which had a honey darkness and even darker rings when viewed close up.
‘He did, but the dial and mechanism were made in Barbados, we think, where Granny was born. Nobody seems certain how long it was in the family before it came to Scotland in nineteen sixty.’
‘She brought it here?’
Cary nodded.
Alice searched her brain, trying to work out what it meant. ‘She was part of the Windrush generation?’
‘Well, personally she didn’t call herself that because she didn’t emigrate on that exact ship, theEmpire Windrush; she travelled overland, through Italy then France, and arrived in England by ferry before the NHS posted her in Scotland. Nursing.’
‘With your grandad?’
Cary paused, like he was debating whether to go on.
‘It’s OK, forget it. I’m just being nosey.’
