Promise the Doctor

by Marjorie Norrell

  The twins were happily slipping into their routine of the new Technical College, afire with enthusiasm for their plans for the future which now seemed, to their inexperienced eyes, to be almost within their grasp. Pete was equally happily employed by the Vanmouth Trust, and although he said he felt a traitor in working for the company Joy was fighting, she laughed and told him to ‘get on with it. I understand from Beryl you’re doing fine and that you’ll soon have your own office and extra staff and that, it seems, means the first step to being on the board of directors.’

  Pete coloured with pleasure but made no comment. He and Beryl, Joy thought, were obviously made for each other and delighted in each other’s company. Michael was happy that the girl his father had hoped he would many and who had, instead, always been a very good friend but nothing more had found someone whom it was obvious she loved with all her generous heart and who in turn loved her with an equal strength.

  Only Lana and Quentin remained a puzzle to Sister Benyon, for try as she might, she could see nothing in Lana’s relationship with either the doctor or with the son of Sam Bainbridge which would help her to decide which of the two was Lana’s favoured suitor.

  ‘The funny thing is that they both appear content with the arrangement, whatever it is,’ she thought as she came home one evening to find, as usual, Michael and Lana engrossed in some intricate leatherwork, a handicraft Lana had recently taken up and appeared to enjoy.

  Joy had a night off that night, and as she pondered whether she ought to spend the evening washing her hair and then watching television, or to go to the theatre where a London company was staying for a week and putting on a play she had long wanted to see, the telephone rang.

  ‘It’s for you, Miss Joy,’ Jenny came through having answered the call, beaming all over her good-natured face. ‘It’s Doctor Quentin, and he seemed in a hurry.’

  Obediently Joy picked up the phone, and Quentin’s voice, disturbing as ever, reached her ear.

  ‘I’ve been given a present, Joy,’ he said quickly, as though a little unsure—as indeed he was—of her possible reception of his news, ‘a box at the theatre for tonight. It’s quite an occasion. The two stars are both amongst the leading lights in London, as you know, and Sir Ivor and Lady Manning are to be present this evening ... part of the play was written in and around Manning Court, it seems. I found out you were off duty. Will you come with me, please? We could make an occasion of it, and neither of us ever seems to have time off for fun...?’

  Joy hesitated just for a moment, then a burst of laughter from Lana and Michael decided her. Evidently neither she nor Quentin would be missed or needed, and impulsively she made up her mind. At least, she told herself as she cradled the telephone lovingly in her fingers, she would have one night, one evening, to remember!

  ‘Thank you for asking me,’ she said politely like a little girl. ‘I’d love to come!’

  ‘Wonderful!’ He sounded as though he really meant it, she thought in amazement. ‘Dress up, there’s a good girl. We’ll have dinner at the Silver Dolphin first and supper there afterwards.’

  Joy left the telephone and went slowly up to her own room to change. She took stock of her wardrobe, and for almost the first time in her life she wished with all her heart that she had spent a little more time and money on gathering together even half the quantity of clothes and accessories which Lana possessed in abundance. From below her sister’s voice floated up to her, and when she went to see what it was Lana required, it was to be asked why Quentin had telephoned at this hour of the day. It did not take long to explain, and Lana’s reaction was most puzzling so far as Joy was concerned.

  ‘Do you a world of good,’ she observed. ‘What about his surgery and so forth?’

  ‘Doctor Carstairs is standing in for him,’ Joy told her. ‘The only problem appears to be ... I haven’t anything in which I can dress up, not grand enough or too old, anyway.’

  ‘There’s a silver lame dress of mine, hanging, in a plastic bag in my wardrobe,’ Lana said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve only worn it once, and it’s one of those dateless affairs. There are all the trimmings and so on to go with it in the top drawer in the oak dressing table. It should just about fit you. And you’re fair. The touches of blue ought to be a bit deeper, but...’

  Joy began to protest, but Lana would not listen. She insisted instead that Joy went up to change and came down to show her the finished result.

  ‘If there’s anything else you’d rather use in its place, do,’ she concluded magnanimously. ‘Before long I shall scrap that lot and start all over again.’

  Joy made no comment beyond thanking her sister. If Lana intended to ‘scrap’ all her lovely clothes, clothes she had insisted she needed when she had worked for a brief time on her chosen career, then that meant only one thing. She must have made up her mind to favour Michael, Michael who, whether by his own efforts or via his father, would have the money to enable his wife to ‘start all over again’ with all the expensive trifles Joy knew Lana considered so necessary in a well-dressed woman’s wardrobe.

  And if that were so, what of Quentin? Quentin who had done so much to restore Lana even so far as she had progressed to this moment, along the highway to health and happiness? And what of Aileen and Sam? How they would react to this unforeseen, at least so far as Sam was concerned, advent of a union between the two families?

  ‘Whatever’s worrying you, or whoever it is that’s on your mind right at this minute,’ Jenny looked up as Joy came through the door on her way to show Lana and Aileen how she looked in her borrowed finery, ‘take my advice and forget all about it. Go out and enjoy yourself. Think of the moment, not the past and not the future! Leave all your troubles, your own and anyone else’s here, in the linen basket. I’ll keep an eye on ‘em until you come back. I’ll make sure they don’t multiply, but for heaven’s sake leave ‘em! Haven’t you learned by this time that half the things folks worry about never happen anyway? And if they do, they seldom turn out to be as bad as we thought they might be!’

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ Joy agreed unexpectedly, and then, simply because her mirror had told her she was really looking her best, that the well-designed, well-cut dress did unexpected things for her trim figure and that the blue stones of the necklace, earrings and shoulder brooch brought out unsuspected depths in her blue eyes, she laughed aloud. ‘I’ll take your advice,’ she announced, ‘and forget all about everything but enjoying the evening.’

  It wasn’t too hard to do exactly that, she discovered. When he called for her Quentin’s eyes told her the mirror had not been in the least deceiving, and she squashed immediately the mental picture of how Lana had looked in precisely the same dress.

  Aileen and Sam, it turned out, were also going to the theatre. Sam had already booked two dress circle seats, but Quentin made no suggestion that they should share his box. They had a delightful evening. The meal at the Silver Dolphin was everything Joy would have expected in such a place, and the play was all the reviews claimed it to be, witty, light yet with a story well worth repeating, the acting superb. They saw Sam and Aileen, both evidently enjoying themselves, and during one interval they saw them chatting amiably with another couple, a strikingly dressed woman with a pleasant face and of about Aileen’s age, and a tall, shaggy-haired man who appeared to be in the best of moods.

  ‘I ought not to worry about Mother any more,’ Joy thought, watching them. ‘She’s finding her feet in Vanmouth as she never did in all her years at Wilborough. New friends, new work ... everything,’ and that knowledge seemed to help against the feeling of desertion which, seemed to have entered her mind unbidden ever since the trouble between herself and Sam Bainbridge had started.

  They looked for Aileen and Sam after the show, for Quentin had the idea that it might be a good thing to ask them to share their supper table at the Dolphin and to put forth a suggestion that part of Fernbank, perhaps the attics not used by anyone, could be leased off as offices of administration for
the holiday village, and a connecting way discreetly contrived between the hedge.

  ‘At least it might give him ideas as to how the two things could be worked together, your private lives as a family unit and his desire to house his administration separately from the rest of the village, but Sam and Aileen were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ Quentin suggested. ‘I just thought we might be able to talk things over amicably while he was so obviously in a good mood and enjoying a meal in pleasant surroundings.’

  ‘I still think it would be a mistake to mention it in front of Mother,’ Joy persisted, and Quentin said no more, instead he set himself out to be an entertaining and pleasant companion, always making himself remember he was in the company of someone evidently so dedicated to her profession that she had no time in her life or room in her heart for love.

  Sam and Aileen, however, had not gone straight home as Joy and Quentin had believed they must have done. They had accepted an invitation from the couple they had met earlier in the theatre, and who, Aileen had been pleasantly surprised to discover, were Sam’s partner and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Lowe, the parents of Beryl, the girl Aileen felt was now one of their own family circle.

  The Lowes had booked a table at the Green Pagoda, the latest Chinese restaurant to be opened in the town, and had invited Aileen and Sam to join them. Sam ordered wine and’ the quartet were getting along very well, the meal well in progress, when Bill Lowe dropped what turned out later, Aileen decided, to be quite a bombshell.

  ‘Glad we ran into you tonight, Sam,’ He said, beaming. ‘I have a little something to celebrate, or rather we have,’ he beamed on his wife, ‘and it’s not much fun celebrating alone, is it? I never realized what a mistake it is to plan other folks’ lives along the lines you want them to go without consulting them first,’ he admitted. ‘I will say I’ve always been a bit dogmatic along those lines, but I’ve learned a lesson.’

  ‘In what way?’ Sam was toying with his glass and not really paying very much attention, but at Bill’s next words the glass crashed down on the table and he had sprung to his feet.

  ‘You know how we’d always hoped that one day your Michael and our Beryl would sort of unite the families?’ Bill said, quite calmly and without anticipating any adverse reaction. ‘That was all very well, but it seems the young folks have other ideas of their own. Beryl and that young man you have staying at your house,’ he glanced at Aileen, ‘came along this evening and asked our blessing on their engagement. We couldn’t say no. The lad’s a financial genius. I’ve already told him I’ll put him up for the board in due course.’

  ‘Lad? What lad?’ Sam’s face was crimson, and Aileen reached out a detaining hand as she saw his temper rising, but Sam was past caring. ‘Michael knows what we’d planned,’ he said fiercely. ‘What has he to say about all this? Or doesn’t he know?’

  ‘He’ll know all right,’ Mary Lowe smiled at Aileen as though including her in some conspiracy, Aileen thought worriedly. ‘Michael’s round at Fernbank too, every night, so Pete and Beryl tell us, so I expect he knew this was coming long before we’d any idea.’

  ‘Michael? Round at Fernbank?’ Sam could scarcely contain himself. ‘We’ll see about that!’ he said so angrily that even Bill looked more than a little taken aback, accustomed as he was to Sam’s outbursts of temper when things did not quite go in the manner he thought they should.

  ‘Steady, Sam,’ he began warningly, but Sam was past restraint for the moment.

  ‘Steady, is it?’ he demanded angrily. ‘And where will that get me, I’d like to know? There’s Cara, off to the hospital to train as a nurse, if you please, and that Ella Wilkinson saying she won’t come back unless I get rid of my “foreigners” as she calls the maid and the cook who’ve been with me just over a year! She says she’s not coming back to work as hard as she used to, and I’ve to get “proper staff”, whatever she means by that, before she’ll come back as housekeeper again! And now Michael...’

  He glared round the table for a moment, then his glance came to rest on Aileen. She was looking white and frightened, just as his first wife used to do when he had what she always referred to as ‘one of his brainstorms’. He could not be cross with Aileen or in her presence. She was someone different from any other person he had met in the whole of his life, and her opinion of him mattered more to him than that of anyone else. He would deal with this matter when she was not present, but deal with it he would, and in no uncertain measure.

  ‘I think we ought to be leaving,’ he said briefly, helping Aileen into her coat. ‘Sorry I haven’t had a drink with you on that so-called celebration of yours, Bill, but I’ll have to see what can be done about it first. Too many of my plans have been upset since Muriel Barnes left Fernbank to Sister Benyon,’ he said darkly, but Bill interrupted.

  ‘Pete put out a very good suggestion about the development of the other site down by the pier,’ he was beginning, but Sam was in no mood to listen.

  ‘Save it for a board meeting,’ he suggested. ‘Not the one where you propose this ... stranger, either! See you in the morning.’ And before Aileen and Mary Lowe could, as they had both intended to do, make plans to meet again, he had swept her before him and out of the restaurant into the car.

  Aileen was silent. She could think of nothing to say which might be of any help. She knew what it must mean to a man who had enjoyed having all his own way for such a long time to be set at bay by a slip of a girl like Joy, then to have his daughter-housekeeper suddenly embark on a career of her own, a career such as she had always wanted, where she could be of service to an unknown number of people throughout her working life.

  As if that were not enough, she thought as the car drew up at the gates of Fernbank, Beryl was not to marry his son and unite the two business partners and their families as Sam had hoped she would.

  ‘I ...’ she began as she turned to get out of the car, but Sam gave her a grim smile.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ he said with rough gentleness, ‘none of this is between you and me. God willing, nothing ever will be. But’—his anger was not gone and there was a glimpse of it in the hand which smote the steering wheel—‘I’ll have to break my word. I promised your daughter I’d never mention Fernbank to you again, and I’m doing that right now. Tell her, tell her from me,’ he said emphatically, ‘that I refuse to be flouted at every turn of the wheel,’ and before Aileen could think of any words in which to answer him, the engine roared into life and he was gone.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  When Joy and Quentin returned to Fernbank it was to discover a distressed Aileen had arrived home some three quarters of an hour or so before them. Lana, surprising everyone by her competent direction of affairs, had asked Jenny to brew a pot of strong, sweet tea and tried in vain to persuade her mother to take two of the small tablets Quentin had left her for relief of pain.

  ‘I don’t want or need anything,’ Aileen insisted again, quite quietly but very firmly when Quentin and Joy tried to persuade her to take them. ‘I’m perfectly all right. Sam is the person we should all be worrying about.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t possibly do that, not right at the moment,’ Joy returned. ‘I think he has only himself to blame if he makes himself ill by his bad temper. What on earth he means by saying he’s being “flouted” goodness only knows. I’m only keeping my word to Miss Barnes, and because it helps all of us to stay here! It’s only because he can’t bear not to have everything his own way that he goes off like this. A spoiled child has exactly the same reaction.’

  ‘Except that Sam Bainbridge isn’t exactly a child,’ Quentin muttered, wishing he had his bag with him and could have given Aileen something to calm her nerves. Not that she appeared to be in need of anything, he was bound to admit. For the first time he was seeing the Aileen who had brought up her family unaided, coped with crises of all descriptions without turning a hair, just as she was apparently doing at this moment. ‘Where’s Michael?’ he added, looking
round.

  ‘He went off with Pete and Beryl to look at a house they’ve seen in another part of the town,’ Lana told him composedly, ‘and he said he was going to have an early night.’

  ‘Maybe just as well, from what your mother says,’ Quentin commented, thinking it might give Sam time to cool down a little if he saw nothing of his son that evening. ‘This isn’t exactly the time to invite more trouble ... it’s a good thing we didn’t ask them to join us and listen to your suggestion,’ he added to Joy.

  ‘What suggestion?’ She looked up from the sandwiches she and Emma, at the latter’s suggestion, were compiling to ‘fortify’ everyone, as Emma phrased it. Emma, Joy often smiled, always flew to food of some description in any family crisis, and she had to admit it often helped. ‘Using the attics we’ve closed up, you mean?’ she defined. ‘That’s done with,’ she said firmly. ‘I wouldn’t give him the right to enter a dog kennel on the premises, even if we had one.’

  ‘That isn’t like you, darling,’ Aileen protested, but half-heartedly, and Joy’s response was the instant smile her mother could always call to her lips, and when she spoke it was in a less indignant tone.

  ‘I know,’ she said, but still firmly, ‘but that isn’t the point. He gave me his word that he wouldn’t mention Fernbank to you again, and see what’s happened? He sends a message to say “he won’t be flouted at every turn of the wheel” ... well,’ she banged down the last of her pile of sandwiches on to those already on the plate and looked defiantly at Aileen, ‘this time he’s gone too far. I was prepared to compromise, to help if I could. Now I won’t budge an inch. He can do what he likes,’ she said briefly, ‘bring bulldozers and all the rest of his mechanical equipment if he wants to, and I expect he will if he’s going to put in that private bathing pool for the village as he says he is, but I won’t give way an inch, not an inch!’ she repeated firmly, ‘upsetting you again like this!’