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'Dunhill,' she said baldly, standing up on both feet so he could see that she did look rather attractive in the shimmery blood-red dress.

'You must have another name,' he said.

'Sophie,' she said, showing no sign of unbending in her attitude, 'Sophie Dunhill.'

'Ah,' he said, 'Dunhill of the operating room?'

'Yes, the same.'

The abruptness on her part made Clay recall, rather vaguely, that they'd had a verbal exchange in the operating room two or three weeks before, which hadn't been particularly pleasant. It had been the result of some mild misdemeanour on her part when she'd been his scrub nurse for an operation which had, from what he remembered, been rather long and tense. He had reacted with bad temper, brought on by his having been up for most of the previous night. Was that it?

'Ah,' he said again. While they'd been talking, the music had come to an end again, then, as though on a special cue, the band started up with a rather maudlin tune, he thought...something about a woman in a red dress. Anyway, it was too good to miss, if he was to mend the remembered breach between himself and Miss Dunhill. After all, he did like to be on good terms with the people he worked with so closely in the rarefied atmosphere of the operating rooms.

'Please,' he murmured, putting his hands on Sophie's bare upper arms, 'this is too appropriate to miss.' With that, he steered her backwards the short distance to the dance floor before taking her gently into his arms, noting as he did so that the young intern and Suzie were locked together as one.

One does not have to be twenty-four or -five to be able to do this, he thought. To her credit, Miss Dunhill—he assumed she was a 'Miss' as she wore no ring on her wedding finger—schooled her features into a mask of impassivity. Even so, her reluctance was almost tangible. Although he held her lightly, with no hint of possessiveness or threat, she was stiff and unyielding in his arms. He racked his brains to think of exactly what had taken place in the operating room to engender such antipathy in this woman.

'For whatever I've done, apart from the kick just now,' he said, trying to cover all angles, 'I apologize most profusely.' In order to be heard above the music he had to put his lips close to her ear, where he had an absurd desire to kiss her neck. Perhaps he was getting frustrated in his old age. Usually he was in complete control of himself, and in control of a lot else besides.

Sophie Dunhill didn't reply.

It would be 'Ms Dunhill', Clay reflected; it was out of date now to call a woman 'miss', or maybe even to think it.

In the crush of the dance floor they were forced to move closer together, although it felt to him as though Ms Dunhill resented such intimacy. For his own part, he reluctantly felt the impression left by the luscious Suzie gradually fading, to be replaced by the more sophisticated and enigmatic reality of the woman in his arms.

'I also apologize,' he added, 'for anything of a boorish nature that I may say to you in the future, although I shall try very hard, of course, not to do anything of the sort—be boorish, that is.'

Quite suddenly he felt her relax, then realized that she was shaking with laughter. 'You're trying too hard altogether, Dr Sotheby,' she said, after a moment. Her voice had a melodic, soothing quality now, which he found attractive.

'Call me Clay,' he offered.

'No,' she said, controlling her amusement, 'I can't think of you on a first-name basis. When someone has been rude to me...unforgivably rude...there's no way I could ever think of them in a casual light.'

'Never?'

'That's right.' She was still smiling, he could see as he drew back a little to look at her, yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that she was smiling at him rather than with him.

'You sound very unforgiving, Ms Dunhill,' he said, drawing her gently against him in the crush as someone inadvertently gave him a vicious shove from behind. 'Or may I call you Sophie?'

'Don't bother, Dr Sotheby,' she said, stiffening slightly as he placed his cheek against the side of her head, which seemed the natural place for it, even though he had to sag slightly at the knees to be on a level with her. Her amusement was obviously reluctant, too.

'Your hair smells lovely,' he said softly, saying the first thing that came into his head.

While she remained silent as they moved slowly in unison to the music, Clay racked his brains again to recall the details of his transgression, following her own, in the operating room. There had been a lot of other cases since then, as well as other nurses working with him. Yes, that was it... He'd become irritable with her, had said something which had sounded sarcastic— although he almost never stooped to sarcasm—when she'd passed him a wrong instrument. She'd been his scrub nurse for a Whipple resection, a rather tricky and long operation on the pancreas, stomach and gut, generally done for cancer of the pancreas.

Ms Dunhill, he recalled, had worked with him on quite a lot of other occasions and had seemed like an excellent scrub nurse, yet on that day she'd somehow been distracted. Although he'd apologized at the time, as had she, a certain amount of damage had been done on the human relationship scale. Once a surgeon gained a reputation for boorishness, no one wanted to work with him, even though they were often forced to do so—there was an 'atmosphere'.

Since then he'd taken pains to restore his good name. After all, this was the twenty-first century and one couldn't easily get away with high-handed behaviour for long. Not that he wanted to, of course; he wasn't some sort of tyrant. That particular patient had been discharged home quite a while ago.

It had been a long operation, he recalled... 'Give me one of those long, angled Lahey clamps,' he'd said to the scrub nurse, Sophie Dunhill, as he and his surgical team had stood over the patient on the operating table, where the exposed abdominal cavity had been held open with large self-retaining retractors so that they'd been able to see deep within it. There had been little sound in the operating room, other than the muted workings of the equipment which had supplied the anaesthetic gases and oxygen to their patient.

When he had glanced at the instrument which the scrub nurse had placed in his hand he'd seen that it had been the wrong one. Very similar, but wrong. There had been a tenseness in the OR—they'd all felt it and reacted to it in different ways.

'Hell,' he'd said then—unforgivably, as he saw now. 'Not that one. I want the Lahey, please. It has a more sharply curved end. Surely you know it?'

'Sorry...yes, of course.' Quickly the nurse had taken the offending clamp from his hand and given him the right one.

Instead of leaving it at that, his irritation and fatigue had goaded him to add, 'We all feel like falling asleep, Nurse, but, please, don't do it until we've finished the operation.' Instant regret, of course. No one had laughed, or even sniggered. It wasn't the done thing to get a laugh at someone else's expense. He hadn't known what had got into him, it had been so out of character.

'Sorry,' she'd whispered again, at which he'd felt like a boor.

At the end of the long operation, when he'd seen his patient wheeled on a stretcher to the post-anaesthesia room, he stayed behind to speak to the nurse. Still wearing her soiled surgical gown, her cap, face mask and plastic goggles, she was clearing her used instruments off the wheeled table where they'd been set out for the operation. It did occur to him that she'd kept her mask on so that he couldn't see her face clearly, and she kept her head lowered as he approached.

'I want to apologize for what I said,' he began, putting a hand on her upper arm so that she was forced to stop what she was doing. 'I'm not usually that irritable. I'll put it down to the fact that I was up for a good part of the night.'

The nurse shrugged, turning to face him so that he could see her large, vulnerable eyes behind the goggles, eyes that were tired and fraught with the stress of the job. They were beautiful eyes, too...

'I'm sorry as well,' she said softly, looking down again. 'Of course I know what a Lahey clamp is. I...I just had a momentary lapse of concentration. It shouldn't have happened, I know, and I don't want to make an excuse... It's just...'

'What?' he prompted when she hesitated.

'Oh...nothing really,' she said quickly. 'It won't happen again, Dr Sotheby, if I can help it.'

'Forget what I said, if you can,' he urged.

She nodded and turned away, back to her work, while he left the operating room feeling far from easy in his mind for having made what seemed like an inadequate apology. He'd been doubly chastened by the look of strain on her face. During his student and intern years he'd seen and worked with enough irascible surgeons—commonly known as assholes—and had witnessed impotently their
modus operandi,
to fear becoming that way himself.

They were walking and talking examples of the corrupting influence of power, while a few of them were simply spoiled children in adult bodies who would never grow up, given to temper tantrums. Often in those days he'd been on the receiving end.

There was a strong possibility, he mused as he walked to the surgeons' change room in the OR to have a shower, that when the current Chief of Surgery, Jerry Claibourne, stepped down after the maximum ten years in the position, he, Clay, would be nominated for the job. Jerry himself made no secret of the fact that he was the front runner for the position. From that, it was probable that he would actually get the job, although not without opposition from a few people who were in competition with him, some of whom thought him too young for the job.

Now, on the dance floor, with Sophie Dunhill in his arms, all those details of that day came back to him. It had seemed at the time that she'd been about to give him a reason for her distraction during the operation, then had decided not to do so in case it had sounded like an excuse. It had occurred to him that she hadn't been the sort of nurse who'd presented excuses.

With her in his arms, with the scent of her hair in his nostrils, he wondered what that reason had been, and he felt again a sharp regret concerning his outburst. Usually he let things go after a while, which was the only way to survive. They generally didn't nag at him in this way. Maybe he was becoming more self-aware in his old age, and again he wondered at the sense he had of time passing.

There wasn't often time to think about the deeper issues of life, his ultimate mortality. He was so busy that he had to focus on the issues of the day, and those of just a few weeks ahead... with the ultimate goal of being Chief of Surgery at University Hospital, Gresham, Ontario.

'It's a great turnout, isn't it?' he commented, drawing back to look at Sophie's face. 'The hospital sure needs all the dollars it can get.' That was certainly true. With the government budget cuts, the hospital was struggling, like a lot of other government-funded institutions.

'Yes,' she said, smiling, biting her lip so that it wouldn't show too much. Her expressive eyes were looking at him very perceptively from under lowered brows.

'Trying too hard again?' he said.

She nodded. 'Doesn't matter. It's quite sweet really. Makes a change.'

'Trying too hard comes from too much work and not enough play, I guess,' he said. 'You lose that easy facility with women.'

'Do you, Dr Sotheby?' she said.

A little nonplussed, he fell silent, concentrating instead on the physical pleasure of her company. When the dance ended she pulled back immediately. 'Thank you,' she said formally.

'Hey, Dr Sotheby, may I have the next dance?' It was Suzie, coming between him and Sophie. 'You were so generous with your donation, I feel I have to make sure you really enjoy the evening.'

'Nice of you,' he murmured, smiling at the girl who evidently saw no irony in her own words, when he had been enjoying himself quite adequately.

'Goodnight Ms. Dunhill,' he said to his erstwhile partner.

'Goodnight.'

A crescendo of sound from the band drowned out any further exchange, and Suzie began shaking and gyrating in front of him. With a quick look heavenward for the benefit of the retreating Ms Dunhill, who looked bemused, as well as very lovely in her red dress, he joined in. It was one of those dances where you didn't have to touch your partner. For some odd reason he found that he was glad.

Later, when Clay left the dance hall, which was located on the main floor of the nursing and medical staff residence, it was the image of the woman in the sleeveless red dress that stayed with him. He found an internal telephone to make the calls to his senior resident and to the emergency department. All was clear, they reported to him.

It was a beautiful warm night, just right for early June, when he emerged from the building to walk up the quiet side street past the hospital to get to the parking lot where he'd left his car.

As he drove up the empty street and turned the corner slowly, a right turn at the traffic lights onto a main street, he saw a lone woman standing at a street-car stop and recognized her immediately. She wore a light wool coat over the red dress. Surely she shouldn't be going home alone by public transport, even though it wasn't particularly late. He noted that the street was empty of pedestrians.

He slowed down and cruised to a halt in front of her. 'May I give you a ride home, Ms Dunhill?' he offered, leaning over and opening the passenger door, not really sure why he was bothering in the face of her barely disguised antipathy to him. At the back of his mind he had a vague idea that he had to prove something to her.

'It's all right,' she said, bending forward so that she could speak to him through the door. 'I'm going to get the street-car.'

'You might have to wait a long time,' he said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. 'There's nothing coming.'

Hesitant at first, which didn't do anything for his ego, she got in beside him. 'Thank you,' she said, glancing at him quickly then away, unsmiling. 'I live near Linden Park. I hope it isn't out of your way.'

'No, I can go through there,' he said. Linden Park
was a poor area of the
city which was in the process
of
being reclaimed, albeit slowly. It was currently a mixture of some gentrification and some pockets of run-down housing, but with a certain overall charm and character.