My Surgeon Neighbour

by Jane Arbor

  She hesitated, then upon a sudden impulse which she scarcely understood replied, “Please, if you will.” It was market day in the town and the negotiation of the traffic took all her companion’s attention until they emerged upon a quieter street, when he gave a swift sideways glance at her and said, “I’m wondering, was your agreement to let me drive you home your way of whistling ‘Who’s afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?’ ”

  Sarah said crisply, “I don’t know any wolves.”

  “Don’t you? Now to me you have an air of being hounded by howling packs of them!” To this, before she could reply, he added, “This convalescent Home idea of yours must mean an awful lot to you, for you to defend it so fiercely.”

  “It does.”

  “Because you feel really dedicated, or because you see it as an escape-route from the discipline of hospital?” He paused. “The truth, please?”

  Sarah hesitated. Then, “Something of both, I think.”

  “Independence pretty sweet, eh? Next question—a cynic’s, I confess—is yours the genuine article, or merely the marking time brand?”

  “The ‘marking time’?”

  “Yes. The kind a lot of women parade as a virtue, when they’re really only waiting to be collected as some man’s wife, the mother of his children.”

  Sarah gasped. “I don’t know whether to answer you for all the women I know who love their careers, their work, or just for myself!”

  “Try ‘just for yourself. I’d be interested.”

  “Well then, I’m not just waiting for a man, any man, to come along and marry me. I want to make a success of my job first. At present that is the one thing I want to do. When I marry I should want that to be the one thing I must do.”

  “And supposing both your ‘one things’ happened to clash?”

  “I don’t think that could happen,” Sarah said simply. “When there’s just one thing that you know matters most to you, everything else takes second place.”

  He looked at her almost pityingly. “And you expect love, when it happens to you, to be as simple and clear-cut as that?”

  “I hope I shall know I daren’t deny what it asks of me.” She spoke with quiet conviction and was jarred by his sudden laugh.

  “You should hope rather that you may recognize it!” he advised. “Do you expect it to arrive one fine morning, neatly parcelled and labelled “For priority attention’? My dear girl, it’s far more likely to come cluttered up with kindliness or pity or habit—or even to come too late or for the wrong man.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’ll risk it,” she said, thinking how strange it was that in this brief abstract argument, their hostility had lessened. She was wishing the way home could be longer when he switched the subject again.

  “You see,” he said, “I’ve seen too much wastage in your profession not to be a bit sceptical about dedication to the job. Good nurses are beyond price; the time-markers have nothing but nuisance value. As for independence, I suppose you realize the self-discipline you’ll have to impose on yourself, once you’re your own mistress, will be a much harder taskmaster than any hard-and-fast rules laid down by someone else?”

  “I think so.”

  “I hope so. For instance, once you get going, have you faced that it’ll be a round-the-clock job; that you’ll have to have help on the professional side or you’ll risk losing your licence, supposing you weren’t able to give your patients proper care?”

  “I’ve got Martha, my great aunt’s maid. At first, at least, we shall manage.”

  “Illness? Holidays? All work and no play? No, I insist you engage at least some part-time nursing help.”

  “You insist, Mr. Mansbury?”

  He laughed shortly. “All right. Let’s say I’ll see the County Council gets a memo to the effect that you are understaffed, as soon as you are accommodating more than six beds. You’ll need an M.O. too. Have you got that in train yet?”

  “An M.O.? Oh, an official Medical Officer to the Home? Is that necessary? Couldn’t I call in—?”

  “Better appoint one. If you like, I’ll—” But he broke off there. The drive was over. They were level now with the front hedge of Monckton and as he slowed to set Sarah down, an open car, driven by a girl in a jauntily tied headscarf, swept past and stopped at the gate of Greystones. The girl got out and came back, meeting Oliver Mansbury at the bonnet of his car as, with a brief apology to Sarah, he alighted too.

  The newcomer slung an enormous crocodile bag down to the crook of her elbow in order to administer a pat to his coat sleeve. From great, artificially shadowed eyes she sparkled—there was no other word for it—up at him. “Hullo, Oliver,” she addressed him lightly. “Do I gather you’re glad to see me?” Her glance beyond his shoulder saw but ignored Sarah, now standing diffidently behind him.

  The newcomer went on, “Surprised? Or glad? Or dismayed that I’ve taken you at your word and come down to see just how long you can put up with me? Always supposing that I behave myself, by your standards of course, if not by mine!”

  For some reason Sarah resented the easy familiarity of that; hoped Oliver Mansbury wouldn’t reply in kind, showing how very well he knew this girl, whose careless chic, from shoes to dangling mink stole, was a rebuff to all Sarah’s pride in her own looks.

  She was to be disappointed. Oliver Mansbury said enthusiastically, “Fine. Stay as long as you like. Kate will be delighted to see you. As surprised as I am too, for when you wrote you were convalescing from jaundice and it seemed a good idea for Kate to keep an eye on you for a few weeks, I hardly supposed you would come.”

  “Yes, well, I’m quite all right now, and I didn’t really relish the thought of your clinical eye on me, or Kate’s either, for that matter. But then I got bored and when one of my Voices suddenly said, “Jurice, go down to Fareborough and stay with friend Oliver until he turns you out’—it seemed as good an idea as any, so here I am.”

  “ ‘One of your Voices!’ ” mocked Mansbury. “Still using that gimmick to explain Jurice doing whatever Jurice has made up her mind to do? I’ve always thought it must be a relief to your Voices never to have to persuade you against your will!”

  They both laughed as at a private joke. Sarah, wanting to take her leave, cleared her throat. But at that moment the girl glanced back and up at Greystones. “It’s ages since I’ve been down,” she said. “And I thought Kate was planning expansion on a big scale; that your were proposing to overflow into that mausoleum next door?”

  “Oh, that?” The reference to Monckton brought to Mansbury a belated recollection of Sarah. He turned, his hand beckoning for her, as he said to the girl. “I’m afraid those plans are out for the moment. Instead we have a new neighbour. Miss Sanstead, meet a friend of mine, Miss Grey.”

  Jurice Grey acknowledged the introduction with the merest flicker of her eyelashes in Sarah’s direction.

  “Neighbours? How very cosy!” was her comment, making the relationship sound incredibly dull. Sarah limited her own greeting to a smile and a non-committal murmur, then thanked Oliver Mansbury for the lift and left them together.

  When she had gone Oliver said, “Drive on in. I’ll follow and bring in your bags.” But Jurice lingered and jerked a thumb in the direction Sarah had taken. “Cool cat, or dumb cluck? What’s the rest of the family like? About as matey as she is, or more? Or less?”

  “There isn’t,” Oliver told her, “any ‘rest of the family’. You’ve had all there is.”

  “That chick? You mean she’s on her own?”

  “Yes. She inherited the place from our antique neighbour who died, and she is hanging on to it like a leech.”

  “But I thought you meant to get it when the old girl died? Haven’t you made an offer for it?”

  “Several which I thought should be beyond her dreams of avarice, if she had any. But she won’t sell.”

  “Nonsense! Everyone has their price, and she’s only hanging out for hers.”

  “If I knew her price she should ha
ve it. As it is, she plans to set up as a Home for convalescent children just out of hospital, a scheme of which, right on our doorstep, Kate takes the dimmest view.”

  “Can you wonder?” retorted Jurice. “I’d say she has every reason, considering the wonderful reputation Greystone has. But how did I miss the type yonder? Schoolmarm or budding ward-sister, spoiling for authority, written all over your new neighbour, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No, there I can’t agree,” said Oliver judicially. “Not to the naked eye, that is. She’s pretty and fresh and skipping-young enough to look at. Without your glamor of course. But designed for living, definitely.”

  Jurice’s eyes narrowed. “Then why doesn’t she do it—live, I mean?”

  “Because for the moment, I gather, her idea of living is all tied up with her job. And if she’s speaking the truth, she finds it enough.” He broke off and drove Jurice towards her own car with a small push before getting into his own. “Run along now and I’ll meet you in my room for a drink in ten minutes.”

  But Jurice preferred to wait while he garaged his car behind hers, then tucked her hand beneath his elbow for their crossing to the house, neither of them aware that Sarah, from the staircase-window of Monckton, was suffering a pang of envy for their friendship.

  In the big echoing house she felt suddenly very much alone. Temporarily she and Oliver Mansbury had seemed to understand each other. But then the glitter and sparkle that was Jurice Grey had happened. And by now, she was convinced, she had been dismissed from his mind.

  She guessed he had cut short a suggestion that he should ask one of the local doctors to act as M.O. to the Home. But when she had waited for some days to hear from him, she took that problem to Dick. Or rather, when she mentioned it casually to him, he took it from her in his usual overpowering way.

  “I think I know just the chap for you,” Dick told her. “Name of Carrage. Young; only recently joined the Ackland—Berrider outfits as junior partner. He has a small boy but no wife in evidence, and when he came to my father a while back instead of Dr. Berrider, we both took to him. If you wrote to him and asked him to come and see you to discuss it, I’m convinced you’d like him too.”

  Sarah did at once. Later she was to find Dr. Steven Carrage’s manner was less ‘bedside’ in the accepted sense than it was a projection of real sympathy for his patients, allied to a confidence which ‘got over’ to them. And though that first interview was only a matter of his questions and answers and advice to her, she sensed at once that here was a man and a doctor she would trust.

  When he came a second time to bring a list of the things he recommended for her First Aid cabinet, she asked him to stay for coffee and they talked. Though he hadn’t been a St. Anselm’s man himself, he told her her training hospital was a fine place. He laughed with her over Monckton’s metamorphosis from a Victorian stronghold to the light, airy place it would be soon, and his approval of her plans and her hopes warmed her through. The next time he had his seven-year old boy Tony with him in the car, and when Sarah welcomed them both he confided something of their circumstances.

  In the big dayroom, Great Aunt Lydia’s former drawing-room, Tony, round-spectacled and enquiring, gravitated at once to the bookshelf of children’s books which Sarah had installed and was quickly deep in one of them.

  His father regarded him thoughtfully. “A bit of a problem, that,” he confided in Sarah. “I mean, his complete absorption in books to the exclusion of things most kids of his age care about. He could read almost anything at six, and now I’m torn between letting him discover books to his heart’s content, and mollifying all the well-meaning souls who prophesy woe. ‘That child needs keeping back. He’ll ruin his brain’.”

  Sarah laughed. “There are always people ready to say that, aren’t there? I suppose it’s because so many children are spoon-fed on TV that the ones who really prefer to get things from books appear as freaks of nature. But if Tony were mine—” her eyes went a shade wistfully to the bent bullet head with its downy fair hair—“I know I’d let him enjoy himself in his own way within reason. I’d think I was very wrong if I tried to force his interest away from books.”

  “Yes, well—that’s the way I lean too,” agreed Tony’s father. “But reading is essentially a solitary ploy, isn’t it, and sometimes I wonder whether I shouldn’t take him from it in order to make him mix more and play more—use his hands and his limbs and look about him at the real world instead of the one he sees through the printed page.”

  “But he’s happy, isn’t he?” Sarah asked.

  Dr. Carrage looked for a moment as if the question had not arisen in his mind. Then, “Yes, he’s happy enough, I think, though I’m afraid he has had too much of my company for too long. Until recently I was doing locum work, which has entailed our living in rooms and moving from place to place. And though I’ve a service flat now and a daily nanny, I still feel he is too much with grownups out of school hours.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” Sarah agreed, then added diffidently, “You know, doctor, I’d always welcome him here when he’s not at school. Say, after tea or on Saturdays or any other time when he’s at a loose end. He could read, or play with my babes to his heart’s content, and if his nanny could bring him, someone here could see him home.”

  “Or I could tote him myself either way,” his father put in. “You know, Miss Sanstead, that’s a very generous offer and I’m going to take you at your word and accept it. I may not have to trouble you with him often. But whenever I do, I shall know that under your eye he’ll be getting as much play-companionship as I could want for him. Believe me, I’m very grateful.”

  They parted on that note, but before they met again Sarah’s thoughts frequently went back to Tony Carrage and his father. How blankly the man had met her query as to Tony’s happiness! It was something he clearly had not asked himself often. Yet surely Tony’s mother would have done and would have known the answer? Sarah’s quick sympathy went out to both father and son, to their lack of blessed human relationship which was their right but of which some cruel circumstance—separation? divorce? death?—had seemingly deprived them.

  The other problem posed to her by Oliver Mansbury was to be resolved, not by him nor by Dick, but in an unexpected and somewhat disturbing way.

  One morning, shortly before she was expecting her first small guests, Martha showed in a young woman, a Mrs. Cosford, whom Sarah knew to be employed as assistant housekeeper at Greystones, next door. Puzzled as to what her errand could be, Sarah’s “Yes, Mrs. Cosford?” invited her to explain it, which she did with some hesitation, her hands twisting nervously in her lap.

  “It’s like this, Miss Sanstead,” she said. “Mrs. Beacon engaged me as assistant to Miss Bucknall, the housekeeper next door, and sometimes I stand in as a nursing orderly too. Because I’m partly trained, you see. I meant to qualify, and I did two years in hospital. But then I had to go home to nurse my mother. When she died, I married, then lost my husband five years later, since when I’ve had to work.”

  Though she didn’t understand why she was hearing the story, Sarah asked, “You didn’t go back and finish your training?”

  “No. I had my little girl, Jean, she’s nearly eight now, and I was lucky to get a job at once where I could have her with me. But then my employers went abroad and I took this job at Greystones, where Jean couldn’t come. But my sister-in-law took her, and that was all right and I was able to see her quite often. But now Mary, my sister-in-law, has to take in her own mother and can’t keep Jean any longer.”

  “And so?” prompted Sarah.

  “Well, I explained all this to Mrs. Beacon, you see, hoping she would say she’d stretch a point to enable Jean to join me next door. But she didn’t. She said she was sorry but that I must see it was impossible and that if I couldn’t make other arrangements for Jean, perhaps I would prefer to leave.”

  “I see,” said Sarah quietly. “And have you other plans for Jean?”

  Mrs. Cosford shook
her head. “No. That is, not unless—Oh Miss Sanstead, this is rather difficult and you’ll probably think me awful to ask, but as I’m half trained and I worked for a lot of my time in a children’s ward in hospital, could you make use of me here to help you in your Home? So that—so that I could have Jean with me, because it needn’t be that she would have to have a room you would need for your patients. She could share mine, and of course she would go to school. You could take her keep out of what you would pay me. Oh dear, you must forgive me for asking. But when I heard Mr. Mansbury telling Mrs. Beacon that you would need someone besides Martha Gould—it was just an idea I had, d’you see?” she appealed.

  Sarah did see, but not without misgivings. “Well, I do need help and if you came to me, Jean could certainly come too. But you do see the difficulty that Mrs. Beacon might not care for your leaving her to come to me?”

  Mrs. Cosford’s eyes widened. “Why should she? She as good as gave me notice; put a pistol to my head!”

  Unconvinced and not relishing applying to Mrs. Beacon for a reference for her late employee, Sarah agreed slowly, “Well, as long as that was the way of it, that you wouldn’t be walking out on her, perhaps it’s all right. I’ll certainly consider it and ask you to come in later for briefing on the work if I want you.” She paused, then asked, “Did either Mrs. Beacon or Mr. Mansbury know you meant to come to see me, Mrs. Cosford?”

  “Not Mrs. Beacon. She has held herself a bit aloof, offended-like, since. But I did venture to speak to Mr. Mansbury and when he said he would go ahead if he were me, well, I did,” Mrs. Cosford admitted.

  “I see,” said Sarah again, then smiled and rose. “I think you can take it as more or less settled, then,” she added, and for the moment was amply rewarded by the gratitude in the other’s dark eyes.

  But before she had got around to applying to Mrs. Beacon for a reference for Mrs. Cosford the action was carried into her camp by another visit from Mrs. Beacon.