Promise the Doctor

by Marjorie Norrell

  ‘Bring her along,’ Joy broke in, laughing. ‘I declare, you must have some Irish blood in your veins, Michael, the way you manage to persuade folks to agree to almost anything you suggest! Anyway,’ she concluded, the laughter vanishing as she rose, ‘if she belongs to a family like that they’re sure to live on Valley Road, and maybe we’ll seem a rough, harum-scarum lot if you do bring her here! The twins are a little boisterous at times, and Cousin Emma’s...’

  ‘A darling,’ Michael interjected. ‘You’re all darlings, every one of you! And Beryl’ll love coming to a real live bustling family where she’ll be sure of a welcome.’

  Real, live and bustling the family might be, Joy reflected as she went indoors in time to hear the telephone in the hall ringing but no one hurrying to answer, but there never seemed to be anyone around when she most needed them! Mrs. Wrenshaw was down at the bottom end of the garden picking blackcurrants for a pie. Wrenshaw was staking his chrysanthemums. Lana could not get to the phone, the twins were out somewhere on business of their own, and Aileen could be dimly heard pounding away on the almost silent electric typewriter. Her calls were switched through to her now, on the extension telephone they had installed, and Joy fully expected that this would be yet another client to add to Aileen’s already very full list.

  It was with a sense of real surprise and, she was amazed to discover, of genuine pleasure, that she heard Pete’s voice at the other end of the line.

  ‘May I come down for the day tomorrow, Joy?’ he asked after they had greeted each other. ‘Don’t worry about my ... bothering you again. I won’t. I just wanted to see how everyone is and to follow, up a hint I’ve had from that solicitor friend of yours, Mr. Belding. Seems I may have the chance of a good job in Vanmouth if I pass whatever test they set.’

  Joy told him they would all be delighted to see him, asked questions about the job, but he said he would show her the letter when, he arrived and they would ‘have a family pow-wow as we’ve always done’. She said they would be able to put him up for the weekend, and they parted with assurances on both sides that the weekend ahead should be an interesting and delightful change, and as she hung up, before she went to tell her mother and Jenny there would be an extra person for a few days, she realized how pleased she was going to be to see Pete again, someone who wasn’t part of this emotional mix-up which had seemed to grow around them since they first moved into Fernbank.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Joy was thankful she was back on day duty once more with all the promised activities which lay ahead where her family were concerned. August was drawing to its close, and the twins were full of stories gathered from a variety of sources in and about the town, of the new Technical College which they would begin to attend in September, and of the hopes and dreams they believed would be fulfilled through its staff and administration.

  She came home at eight-thirty that evening, to find a message by the telephone to say that Pete had called earlier in the day and said he would be along later that evening, but that he had an appointment to keep first and did not know what time he would be free.

  In the garden Lana was lying on her couch, her rug over her legs, and as she went out of doors Joy heard tile welcome sound of her sister’s laughter, and despite her tiredness her heart lifted in thankfulness. How wonderful of Miss Barnes to leave them this house and garden and the wherewithal to enjoy its amenities I How wonderful it was to have a doctor like Quentin Moyser, and two people like Amy Calvin and Hugh Tate to help along the good work! Small wonder Lana was showing improvement day by day, and as she crossed the lawn to where she could see a strange girl seated in the low garden chair by Lana’s couch, Joy breathed a silent prayer that the promise of this moment should one day be fulfilled, and Lana be walking, running and enjoying life with the rest of them, just as she used to do.

  ‘Even if it means she and ... Quentin will go out of my life together,’ Joy thought sadly, but as she drew up a chair for herself she knew she did not regret one moment or one incident that had gone since she first knew Fernbank was to be their home.

  ‘I told you about Beryl, Joy, remember?’ Michael was smiling as he performed the introductions. ‘She was shy at first, but I don’t think it will take her very long to get used to you all.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t.’ Joy took an instant liking to the tall, well-made girl with the sleek brown hair, the widely spaced dark grey eyes and the sensitive mouth. ‘I’m glad they’ve all been looking after you!’

  ‘They couldn’t have been more kind or made me more welcome, no matter who I’d been,’ Beryl told her, smiling round. ‘I feel I belong already.’

  ‘That’s just as it should be,’ Joy said cheerfully. ‘Where’s Mother?’

  ‘Still working. She had some important papers she wanted to get off by tonight’s mail. She wouldn’t leave any of them until the morning. It’s her night on the town with her would-be boy-friend over the fence,’ Sylvia said flippantly, but Joy, knowing her young sister, knew this was the girl’s way of disguising how she felt about the proposed outing with Sam Bainbridge.

  ‘If Mother wishes to go then I’m all in favour,’ she astounded them all by saying, and even Michael looked astonished. ‘She’s had precious little fun, bringing the lot of us up without any help from anyone, and when all’s said and done, none of us is really a companion to her, much as we might try to be.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Michael said slowly. ‘I feel the same way about Dad. I know there’s nothing wrong in our feeling this way. It’s just that we belong to two different generations, and we don’t always remember it. Neither do parents. Our outlooks are so different, our values so changed.’

  The discussion might have gone on for a long time, but at that point the back door opened and Pete was giving his old call, just as he had been in the habit of giving it when he had returned to the house in Cranberry Terrace.

  ‘I did telephone earlier.’ He had crossed at once to Joy’s side. ‘Someone, Mrs. Wrenshaw, I think, took the message. I hope you ...’ He broke off, his sentence unfinished, and as Joy looked up at him to see what was the cause of the sudden silence she saw he was gazing at Beryl Lowe as though not certain his eyesight was all right. Beryl was staring back at him, a slow, painful colour rising in her cheeks and mantling her throat. Joy looked from one to the other, quite bewildered.

  ‘I ... do you two know each other?’ she demanded as neither appeared to be able to speak properly.

  ‘I ... we’ve met,’ Pete managed, and suddenly his old familiar smile was back on his lips and in his eyes, and Joy knew it was going to be all right whatever the cause of Beryl’s present apparent distress. ‘This is the young lady I told you I’d met the day we came to Vanmouth Court,’ he went on, adding to the mystification of everyone save Joy and Beryl, the one with the little pup on the end of a very long ribbon. Remember?’

  ‘I certainly do.’ Beryl’s eyes were shining and although the high colour in her cheeks had died down there was still a look of rosy contentment as she smiled up at him. ‘I’d never have caught Sing-Yen that day if you hadn’t acted so promptly.’ She paused for a moment, then added: ‘Did my father get in touch with you? I told him about you and he said he’d maybe be able to help.’

  ‘If your father is Mr. Lowe, then I’ve just left him and I start work with some Trust with which he’s associated, the week after next,’ Pete told them. ‘He was very pleasant.’

  ‘He can be,’ Beryl said briefly, glancing at Michael as though for confirmation, ‘but, like Michael’s father, he’s used to having all his own way!’

  ‘I got along all right with him, anyhow,’ Pete announced, ‘but from what I gather he doesn’t come into that side of affairs very much.’

  There was a general discussion in which introductions sorted themselves out as Michael, Beryl and Lana tried to make Pete see the position of the Benyon family where the Trust was concerned. Tiring of a conversation which could obviously get them nowhere at the moment, Joy
excused herself and went back into the house to see how much longer her mother intended to work. Quentin was just coming into the hall via the front door as she went through. He looked tired, she thought. He touched her arm, delaying her as she would have passed him and gone straight to her mother’s room. She had found it better, these last weeks, to keep out of Quentin’s way. Somehow it hurt too much to see him with Lana. Although she told herself it was because she did not want to stand by and see him hurt if Lana turned eventually, as she appeared to be doing gradually but surely, to Michael, the young man with so much money and such wonderful prospects in the fullness of time, she knew the truth was that she herself was beginning to discover for herself how painful unrequited love can be.

  ‘What ward are you on now, Joy?’ he startled her by his next question.

  ‘Women’s Medical,’ she told him. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the two cases I sent in yesterday might very well turn out to be poliomyelitis,’ he said soberly. ‘I wasn’t sure at first, but Dad says he’s certain now the symptoms are developing. We’re sending them up to the fever hospital at Maryhill, and the three men who were admitted on Saturday. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but we may very well have a scare on our hands.’

  ‘What’s being done?’

  ‘Well, we’re fixing up centres, of course, for vaccination and distribution of the “sugar lump” vaccine. That’s under way already. We’re taking samples of every patient reported in the area, save for something simple like a broken arm or leg,’ he smiled, ‘but you get the general picture.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ Joy nodded. ‘How long since there was any sort of general vaccination of the public in Vanmouth?’

  ‘Approximately two years ago,’ Quentin told her. ‘The new mothers, of course, are all advised to take it in the stride of babyhood, and I must admit most of them do. It’s the young people who either didn’t bother at all or only went part way with the prevention we’re worried about. And the older age group, the up to forty-fives. Some of them have queer ideas as to what three drops of vaccine on a homely-looking sugar lump can do to prevent this sort of thing happening. By the way’—again that anxious glance—‘what about all of you here? The Benyon family, so to speak?’

  ‘We were all vaccinated or had the requisite dose of sugar two years or so ago,’ Joy answered promptly. ‘We should be all right.’

  ‘Does that include Lana?’ was the next question, and Joy was relieved to be able to nod her head, giving the affirmative.

  ‘Nurse Brown saw to that,’ she said. ‘They were all most efficient, and I have to hand it to them, they couldn’t insist, of course, but they were extremely persuasive!’

  ‘Good.’ Quentin straightened his shoulders as though a weight had been lifted from them. ‘That takes a load off my mind,’ he grinned. ‘I really think we’re beginning to see some good results where Lana is concerned now. It would be a pity for anything to happen and put her back ... further than where she was when she came to Vanmouth.’

  ‘It would indeed,’ Joy agreed. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her. Now I must go and stop Mother working. She’s going out tonight, and unless I go along she’s going to be in one mad, mad rush to get there, and I’m certain it isn’t good for her.’

  ‘It most certainly is not,’ Quentin agreed. ‘Tell her I say so. She works far too hard on this new venture of hers already. Surely it isn’t as vital to the family’s existence as all that?’

  ‘Not now,’ Joy acquiesced. ‘But I rather feel she wants to prove something to herself. She’s always had this dream of a bureau of her own, and now the dream has come true she has to prove it wasn’t just a dream but a worthwhile reality. We shouldn’t starve,’ she smiled faintly, ‘even if she went back to a part-time job as a typist or book-keeper somewhere, but I think I understand how she feels, and providing she doesn’t overdo things I shan’t interfere. She was always a career woman—fortunately for the rest of us—rather than a housewife, but she hasn’t made such a bad job of both, in my opinion. Now we have the Wrenshaws, and Cousin Emma’s so much better with the sun-ray treatment you’ve been giving her up at the clinic, I feel it only fair that Mother should have her fling at seeing what she can do to build up the sort of thing she’s dreamed of for so long.’

  ‘Well, keep an eye on her, Joy, and on the rest of them too, there’s a good girl. And’—again that lovely smile which she would have liked to believe was for her alone but which she was convinced was the face he normally turned to all his patients to encourage them—‘make sure you take care of yourself!’ he added. ‘That’s an order!’

  ‘Certainly, Doctor.’ Joy smiled in return, bobbing him a mock curtsy, and she did not notice as she walked briskly away that the smile faded from Quentin’s eyes as his glance followed her trim figure and that he heaved a sigh before turning to continue making his way out to the others.

  ‘I simply can’t understand Joy,’ he had told his mother only the previous evening. ‘She ... that night we first met, when she’d done such a good job with the laddie who’d come a cropper from his bicycle, I could have sworn she felt the same instinctive ... I don’t know how to put it, but the same sense of “belonging” that I told you I felt the moment I set eyes on her But she seems to avoid being alone with me whenever I go to the house. She never stands to talk or say anything more than the usual things about patients, Lana or the family. It’s as though she’s erected a wall between us, invisible but still there and completely unscalable.’

  ‘She has had a great deal of responsibility for a long time, dear,’ had been Celia’s answer. ‘I know her mother has done wonders for the family, but she couldn’t have done what she has done without her daughter’s help, and she takes all her responsibilities very seriously indeed. That much was apparent at the very beginning.’

  ‘She still has a right to a life of her own,’ Quentin grumbled, ‘but she never seems to think about that. I suppose, one day ...’ He had not concluded his sentence, but there had really been no necessity to do so. Celia and her son understood one another very well, and she had known precisely what he meant.

  ‘Yes,’ she had said quietly, ‘one day ... maybe before very long now. Just be patient a little while longer. She’s a girl worth waiting for!’

  He couldn’t agree more, Quentin reflected now as he went out to the others, and with an effort he dismissed Joy and his own hopes and dreams to the background of his mind. There would be time for that later, he told himself, once this job, this task he had set himself to accomplish was an accepted fact. In the meantime he wished he had reminded her to see that everyone—herself included—had plenty of rest and did not take their relaxation in the more crowded parts of the town.

  Unaware of his concern for her welfare, Joy had gone into her mother’s small office where a tired-eyed Aileen was putting the cover on her machine for the day. A neat pile of work ready for the post lay on her desk beside her, and she was just about to stamp the envelopes as Joy opened the door.

  ‘Let me do that.’ Joy crossed the room and, as she had expected, found her mother’s neat pencil figures of the amount of postage necessary ready on the top right-hand corner of each envelope. ‘You hurry along and get ready for your date! Take your time. I shouldn’t worry about keeping Mr. Samuel Bainbridge cooling his heels for a few minutes. Might do him good!’

  Making a wry face at her daughter, Aileen laughed and left the room, knowing she could confidently leave the finishing off, the posting and any tidying up of personal bits and pieces to Joy. What she would have done without the girl in the years gone by Aileen shuddered to think, but her heart was a little heavy as she thought of the near-quarrel between Joy and the man she, Aileen, knew she could grow to love and to trust, the man who, she was aware, had already decided to pursue his ‘courtship’ of herself, maybe, she reflected abruptly, because in that way he hoped to be able to persuade Joy to change her mind about Fernbank.

  ‘She mustn’t,’ Aileen whispered to her image in th
e min-nr, ‘not even if it means he and I quarrel instead! Joy would feel she had let old Miss Barnes down, and she’d never be happy again. And beside all that, Fernbank has been such a wonderful adventure for all of us ... given all of us a different outlook, a different way of life!’

  She dressed quickly but with unusual care. Even as she applied her light make-up she smiled as she reflected that at her age it seemed a little ridiculous to set out deliberately to make a man give in to what he would surely class as a ‘woman’s whim’. ‘I don’t care if he does,’ she told herself defiantly. ‘I shall try to talk him out of it, tonight and any other time I have the opportunity to do so. How lovely if I could come home tonight and tell Joy it was all over and settled, and that Sam was going to do without Fernbank, that he’d found an alternative way of doing whatever it is he wants to do!’

  But it was late when Sam’s big car delivered her at the gate of Fernbank. The household was almost in darkness, and as she fitted her key into the lock, signalled to him as he waited at the gate that she was all right, and let herself into the house, Aileen knew she had failed in what she had set out to do. Sam had talked of his ‘holiday village’, that was true, but nothing would move him from the conviction that Fernbank was needed to complete his plans.

  ‘I’ve had another part of the bay offered to me,’ he had said over dinner. ‘Well, not to me exactly, but to a member of the Trust. I don’t think you’ll know where I mean, but it’s the part known locally as Sandside, just beyond the pier. There’s a fair-sized hotel with it. Place hasn’t been let this year. Its last owners couldn’t make it pay, and we could get it at our figure. But ...’ he had banged the table with a large, emphatic hand, ‘I’ve set my heart on Fernbank and that corner. And when Sam Bainbridge sets his heart on anything, he usually gets it!’