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'Then I won't see you for a long time,' Clay said, forcing a lightness to his voice, 'because I'll be away for the last two weeks of the month.'

'Oh,' she said. 'I'll miss you in the operating room.'

The mutual recollections of the way they had lain together on the bed, had kissed, in the on-call room was now in their eyes as they looked at each other, together with the awareness of the impasse between them. He refused to take the initiative, forcing himself to hold off, even though it felt unnatural to him, and she was taking her time about it so that he feared she didn't want him. The strain was telling on him.

'Only there?' he said softly, mindful of people around them.

'No,' she said, looking into his eyes and holding his gaze. 'Not only there.' She wore a pale blue scrub suit under a white lab coat, and her bright hair was loose, soft and shining. He wanted to touch it...

'Maybe you'll have dinner with me when I get back. Shall we say the first weekend in September...the Saturday?'

'Yes.'

'Sir...sir,' the surgical intern broke into their verbal exchange, 'could I ask you a few more questions about this hydatid cyst case?'

'Sure,' Clay said tolerantly, tiredly. Normally he enjoyed the rounds, enjoyed teaching. Today the demands of the uninitiated grated on his patience. Maybe he was a candidate for burn-out, he chided himself. 'September, then, Sophie,' he murmured to her as he turned away.

'Yes. Have a good holiday, Clay,' she murmured. 'You certainly deserve it.'

As she moved away from him he found himself thinking that he would miss her a great deal over the next month. Quite suddenly he saw the month ahead of him as being rather bleak, even the two weeks he would stay at his country cottage at the lake, boating, seeing friends, relaxing. His feelings were puzzling to him. In the past he'd felt entirely in control of any situation when he'd been attracted to a woman. Now he felt control insidiously slipping away from him, and he didn't understand it. In fact, he didn't know how he -was going to get through the time without her.

Clay
sat on the boat deck at his cottage, comfortably ensconced in a deckchair with his feet up on another, trying to read. Around the wooden deck the blue-grey water of the lake lapped gently, slapping against the pilings. He was alone now, having had several friends for lunch, people he'd known for years who also had cottages along the same shore of the lake. In other years, since knowing Dawn, he'd invited her up there for a few days during August. This year he hadn't asked her. Now he felt strangely detached from her and from his usual circle of friends and colleagues.

Once again he felt his attention to the printed word slipping so that he gave up the attempt to read and gazed out over the lake which looked mellow and calm in the late afternoon sun. He looked forward to an evening alone—a time of reading, listening to music, thinking.

Over the past week and a half he had been doing a lot of thinking, particularly about the pending decision of the search committee with regard to the new chief of surgery. So often over the past year or so he realized that he had come to think of himself as too old for certain activities, things that he'd enjoyed before... parties, dancing, meeting new women, generally having a good time when actual time permitted.

Now, alone at the cottage, he found a different view coming to mind. Instead of being too old for certain things, maybe he was really too young for what he had set himself to do. If he were offered, and then accepted, the chiefs job, he would be forty years old when his first five-year term of office was up. Then, if he accepted a second term, which was common, he would be forty-five. There would be little time for much other than work.

Clay sighed, closing his eyes against the low orange ball of the sun on the horizon. Those five or ten years of his life, the latter part of his youth, when he might be marrying and perhaps having children, would be given over to the furthering of his career. Up to that point, he realized now, he hadn't thought much about a possible wife or children. Now, oddly enough, they loomed large in his mind, those shadowy figures, however hard he tried to batten them down, to let the image of himself as Chief override them.

He tried to picture himself at age forty-five—a respected surgeon and teacher, his opinions requested, the university conferring awards on him for this and that. By then, perhaps, he would be grey-haired, tired, beginning to be an old fogey.

Restlessly he got up, taking his book with him, to go back inside. He poured himself a drink and wandered out to the back verandah to gaze once again at the water which was greying in the evening light. Maybe he should have gone to Europe this year—Italy, France—to get right away from the familiar. The job of Chief, he considered, was one that was perhaps best taken at age forty-five, not finished at that age. That probably made more sense.

The other strong candidate for the job, Jeff Willoughby, was a wimpy sort of guy in personal relationships, the sort of man, Clay considered, who seemed to have been born middle-aged. Maybe he would be a better candidate for the job because in the operating room he was decisive and certain, while outside it he was diffident and mouse-like, the sort of man who wouldn't know what to do with a woman if he'd found himself in bed with one.

Clay sighed again and downed a mouthful of his drink. Who was he to judge Jeff Willoughby? After all, it was only educated guesswork based on close observation. He could be wrong. And he, Clay, had a reputation for sleeping around, which wasn't strictly true, since he never had more than one woman at a time, and that one current woman, Dawn, had not given him the pleasure just recently, although from no lack of trying on her part. He and Dawn were history, he knew that.

From there his thoughts strayed to Sophie Dunhill, as they had frequently during this holiday. He was missing her. What he had with her wasn't really a relationship. They'd worked together for quite a long time, had recently been out for one good meal, then several times for drinks. It was only in recent weeks, too, that he'd gradually become more and more acutely aware of her. It was odd how you saw someone every day, took them for granted, then something happened that brought them into sharp focus, as it were, so that you wondered how you could ever have spent so much time in the past more or less ignoring them, treating them like a cog in the machine. What a waste it had been.

Her image haunted him now, as did the scenes of the night her child had been ill. Holding her close to him in that narrow bed, in the mean room that he'd seen, as though for the first time, through her eyes, he'd felt an intimacy he'd never felt before ...and he'd felt wanted in a way he hadn't experienced before. Perhaps, he saw now, he hadn't allowed himself to experience it, that something which had been sweet, delicate, lovely... something apart from the sexual attraction that he felt for her, yet in a way a part of it.

Because of her anxiety, that attraction had been held in abeyance. Now he longed for her, for a completion that might never happen.

He decided to get an early night, to sleep on some of the indecision that had haunted him over the past week or two, perhaps longer. Sometimes he wondered if he was finally cracking up, as he'd seen certain of his colleagues do over the years.

In the morning he had come to a decision...

Back in Gresham on a weekend at the end of August, Clay found that the summer heat had dissipated, leaving the city pleasantly temperate.

As he dumped his bags in the hallway of his house, he saw that he had twenty messages waiting for him on his answering machine and decided to ignore them for now. A least half of them would be from Dawn, he surmised. The time had come for them to end formally what had already ended from his point of view. The inconsequential nature of what he'd had with Dawn seemed now to be pointless, although he couldn't have said exactly why.

As he was cooking himself supper a little later, the initiative was taken out of his hands by a ring at his doorbell and the appearance of Dawn on his doorstep.

'At last,' she said, her eyes flashing angrily at him from her beautifully made-up face. As usual, every hair on her immaculate blonde head was in place, her gold and pearl earrings completing the usual picture of superbly controlled sophistication. 'I thought you'd gone to bloody Timbuktu.'

Since Dawn seldom used foul language, Clay knew that she was—perhaps justifiably—extremely angry at his lack of availability. At the cottage he'd often ignored the telephone when it had rung. She was wearing the full-length mink again. 'Ah,' Clay said mildly, 'the old fur coat trick again?'

'Don't be bloody facetious,' Dawn said, as soon as she was inside the door, having pushed past him. Before he had an inkling of what she would do next, she'd drawn back her arm and delivered a stinging slap to his cheek, so unexpected that he staggered back.

'Why did you do that?' He ground out the words after a moment. 'Have I done something to you?' Indeed, he had done nothing just lately...maybe that was the problem. He'd had other problems to cope with.

'You know you bloody have!' Dawn snarled through clenched teeth, her face pinched and ugly in anger. 'You've withdrawn from the chief of surgery job. You might have told me you were going to do that.'

Seeing something of the light, Clay began to recover more quickly than he might otherwise have done. 'Calm down, Dawn,' he said, trying to defuse what looked to be a pending major blow-up.

'I want an explanation,' she shouted.

Nevertheless, perplexity vied with the sudden sharp glimmers of insight in Clay's mind as he stood looking at Dawn. Such insights were assisted to their conclusion by the pain in his cheek where she'd slapped him. A few things began slotting into place like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle.

'How do you know?' he said. 'I've only told Jerry, and I told him to keep it confidential until I can write to the head of the search committee.'

'Have you forgotten that I take Jerry's memos, that I type his letters? I'm his bloody personal assistant, for God's sake.' Dawn shrugged out of her coat and flung it on a chair. Clay was relieved to see that she was fully clothed underneath; he didn't want the fury of rejection added to her present fury. 'Jerry keeps nothing secret from me...nothing.'

'Is that so? You're using the word "bloody'' a little too often, Dawn,' he said. 'It's losing its efficacy. And I don't see what my withdrawal has to do with you. It was my very private decision.'

'You really don't know, do you?' she said contemptuously, a jeering note in her voice, as she stood before him, swinging her black snakeskin bag restlessly, as though she would like to hit him with it.

Clay shook his head. 'No,' he said. But even as he said the word, he suspected that he'd guessed correctly. The thought sickened him and he felt his own anger building up. A cold, cynical realization came to him— Dawn had a vested interest in his future, in his being Chief of Surgery. She had ambitions towards a vicarious participation in it. Sophie had suggested that the gossip had said as much. That could only mean one thing.

Perhaps other people had seen it coming quite clearly, including—God forbid—Sophie herself. He himself was perhaps the last to see it. Now here it was, staring him in the face—Dawn's naked ambition rather than her naked body, but he didn't doubt that the two were linked in a very serious way.

Clay swallowed, trying to control his sense of betrayal. It was clear that she didn't love him, but on the other hand he didn't love her. 'Perhaps we should sit down and talk,' he said tightly, indicating by a sweep of his arm that they should go to the sitting room, instead of standing in the hall.

'No,' she said. 'Don't think you're going to deflect attention from what's happening. I want to have it out here and now.'

'And what is happening, Dawn?' he ground out, his voice dangerously controlled and quiet. 'Spell it out for me, please, in words of one syllable.' He looked unflinchingly into her narrowed, angry eyes. As he looked, he wondered how he could have found her personally attractive, sexually desirable.

When Dawn opened her mouth, then closed it again, he could see her thinking that she would be damning herself if she came out baldly with what she obviously wanted to say. 'Don't you think you could have discussed this with me first?' she said at length, her voice quavering. 'After all, we've been seeing each other for about two years.'

'Very casually,' he reminded her, 'and that's about the length of time I've had an idea that I might be Chief—because Jerry put the idea into my head. Was there a memo about that, too, Dawn? Was that when you decided to take an interest in me? A very personal interest?'

The expression on her face told him that he was pretty close to the truth. 'So you fancied yourself allied to the chief of surgery,' he stated. 'You couldn't have Jerry, so you would get me. Carry on, Dawn. You take over the story.'

'And why not?' she said defiantly. 'Two years! Two whole years of my life. Doesn't that count for anything?'

'Not when it's calculated.' He was cold with anger, his face stiff with the effort of control. He wanted to rave at her to get out, to leave him alone—to hope that he would never see her again.

'I've given you everything,' she stated. 'I deserve to be the wife of the chief.'

'Have you?' he said quietly. 'Everything you've given me, Dawn, I've given you back in full measure, and more.' That much was true. 'You can't say I've taken advantage of you. The score was clear from the beginning—a mature, equal relationship, give and take, with no future plan. Wasn't that it?'

Clay recalled how she'd seduced him at a Christmas party when he'd been hazy with too much alcohol. At the time he'd known it had been calculated when she'd led him to a bedroom and he'd discovered that she'd been wearing nothing under her beautiful lace and bead sheath dress. He hadn't cared then, had been a very willing participant, usurping her initiative, taking her at face value. That had been the beginning of their so-called relationship.