The Silent Valley

by Jean S. MacLeod

  It would not have mattered very much if he had known, she thought as she accepted her coffee cup from Della. All that was over and done with now.

  Stuart supplied them with the details of their journey.

  'Doktor Frey will meet you at Zurich and take you to Oberzach,' he said, but Della was quick to protest.

  'There's really no need for that, Stuart. I know the way like the back of my hand.'

  'All the same,' he returned firmly, 'you'll be met.'

  'I see,' she answered bitterly. 'I may riot be able to stand the journey. That's it, isn't it?'

  'Not necessarily.' His voice was completely emotionless, his eyes steady and compelling on the wide amber eyes across the table. 'If you take things easily and don't rush around in your usual impetuous manner, Del, there's no reason why you shouldn't live almost a normal life at Oberzach.'

  'Almost!' she scoffed. 'Half measures all the time, Stuart. It's all you have to offer, isn't it?'

  'For the present, yes.' He would not evade the truth, even to please her. 'In a good many ways it's up to you, Del.'

  'And Miss Calvert, of course!' Della's smile in Jane's direction was a mixture of antagonism and affection. She wished quite frankly that she had no need for a nurse-companion, but she was willing to put up with Jane. 'She'll be the good, steady watch-dog, guaranteed to keep me from straying very far!'

  'I hope you're not going to look at it in that way,' Jane said, conscious of Stuart's swift glance in her direction. 'It would be much easier to co-operate, you know. It would make things more pleasant all round.'

  'That would be the sensible approach,' Sir Gervaise agreed, smiling a little. 'Stuart isn't putting you under lock and key, my dear,' he told Della, rising as she got to her feet with flushed cheeks and brightly defiant eyes. 'He's quite sure about this cure, and you know that it means a great deal to all of us.'

  His swift glance in the younger man's direction included Stuart in his statement, but Stuart made no sign of having noticed it. He was watching his patient, studying Della intently and frowning at some inner thought. Almost immediately, he shot up his sleeve and looked at his watch, saying that they must get back to Norchester.

  'I have an appointment at three,' he explained.

  'We'll see you this evening, though?' Della asked eagerly. 'You did promise.'

  'Stuart never goes back on a promise,' her father told her authoritatively, 'and he doesn't need to be on the end of a telephone these days, so we can be quite sure of an uninterrupted meal!'

  There had been satisfaction in his voice, a rather arrogant pride that his protégé was doing so well. Stuart, the consultant, would be a far more interesting person at Sir Gervaise's dinner table than Stuart, the general practitioner, would have been.

  Anger stirred hotly at the thought, and then Jane was criticising herself for the swift censure. These people were employing her and she owed them a certain loyalty.

  She came away from Friar's Cour, however with a distinct impression. Sir Gervaise Cortonwell was determined to procure Stuart for a son-in-law, and Della's present state of health was irking him as much as it did Della herself.

  Jane settled in the car beside Stuart for the journey back to Norchester with a sinking heart, and for a considerable time they remained silent. He drove looking straight ahead, and then he said, as if he had reached some impasse in his troubled thoughts:

  'This has got to come right, Jane—this business of Della's health. She's not the sort of person who could live her life by halves, and I wouldn't want her to. It's a damnable business all round!' he added vehemently. 'Thank God, though, it's not hereditary and we can work on it with a reasonable prospect of success. It's Della herself who is going to give us most trouble, I'm afraid, and that must be dealt with from the beginning—firmly and delicately. She'll shy off like a colt if she believes she's being browbeaten in any way.'

  'She's sensitive about it all,' Jane said. 'Do you really think I'm the right sort of person to go with her?'

  He turned from his contemplation of the road for an instant to look at her.

  'Why not? Your career has always meant a good deal to you, and Sir Gervaise and Della are apparently satisfied.'

  That was the main thing, then—Della's satisfaction, the care of Della and her eventual happiness which was linked so closely with his own!

  Jane felt her hands trembling and she clasped them more firmly over her bag.

  'I owe a great deal to Sir Gervaise,' Stuart said as the rooftops and spires of Norchester came into view. 'You know about that, of course. My career would not have been possible but for his help.'

  'And your own ability,' she reminded him jealously. 'You have done very well in a short time, Stuart.'

  His handsome mouth twisted in a wry smile.

  'Success,' he admitted, 'can be encouraging, but is it everything?'

  'It means a lot to you.'

  'I suppose it does.' His eyes had hardened and the momentary friendliness went out of his voice. 'Prestige and the constant shuffling for position! It's a demanding game, isn't it?'

  'But, apparently, worth while.'

  The underlying sting in her remark did not leave any trace. He was invulnerable, utterly impervious to hurt.

  'It's always necessary to find a get-out in life, Jane,' he said with measured impartiality. 'When an avenue apparently leads nowhere, we must look for the mot likely side-track. Exploring it often proves quite enlightening.'

  'And one is quite often surprised to find—compensation at the end of it?' she suggested in a voice which she hoped sounded as cool as his own.

  'The word doesn't appeal,' he told her immediately. 'Compensation always struck me as a second-grade sort of affair.'

  'Yet it could hold—kindness and tolerance, perhaps,' she said. 'Some people are forced to accept compensation of one kind or another in life. Perhaps it's one sort of "get-out", and at least it doesn't leave one quite so—vulnerable.'

  Her eyes were fixed on the cream circle of the steering-wheel and she saw his fingers tighten over it till the knuckles stood out white against his tanned skin.

  'I shouldn't consider you vulnerable,' he said, 'unless the past year or two has completely changed you.'

  'We're both so desperately changed, then!' Jane cried, struggling with the sob in her throat. 'You're hardly the person I knew ‑'

  He steered the car expertly among the first of Norchester's traffic.

  'Did you expect that?' he asked. 'A woman's recurring cry for faithfulness when she has been in the wrong will never cease to amaze me, Jane. What do you hope for? The lamblike quality of the adolescent male evaporates rapidly in the light of disillusionment, you know.'

  'We were old enough to fall in love!'

  'And young enough to part in a frenzy of reproach and bitterness,' he said. 'Why rake over the grey ash? We both appear to have got what we wanted out of life—or almost so.'

  His tone was almost impartial, making a plain and unemotional statement of facts, and Jane felt her throbbing pulses subside, her heart grow cold. Why had she forced this issue between them with that impassioned cry of hers? Why hadn't she allowed the past to remain dead and buried, as he wanted it to be?

  She dared not look at him. The sight of his compressed lips and indifferent eyes would be unbearable now. She was glad—glad that she would soon be leaving Norchester— leaving England, even if it was to go with Della whom he had come to love with a grown man's deeper passion. 'The lamb-like quality of the adolescent male evaporates rapidly in the light of disillusionment.' His words screamed at her, underlining the old bitterness, but the voice in which they had been uttered suggested the new ruthlessness in the man which even Della had come to recognise and respect. Stuart had thought that her love wasn't great enough to share the struggle of beginnings four years ago, and now he could send her out to Switzerland with Della without a qualm, to the very scene of his determined success. The irony of it, the unconscious cruelty, silenced her more effectivel
y than his studied indifference, and she was glad when he set her down at Heppleton and drove on towards the town.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hazel and Eric Bridgewater were married a week later in the church at Heppleton and Jane took a rather bewildered Linda to the sea for the duration of their short honeymoon.

  During that week she did her best to adjust her thoughts to the future, accepting her changed circumstances without bitterness. She had chosen the south Devonshire coast rather than the nearer Weston-super-Mare or even favourite Porlock because she did not want to be easily accessible from Norchester. She did not want Tom Sark to seek her out because of a feeling of indebtedness. Matron had evidently made no secret of the reason for her dismissal. Jane had met Clarrie Parr, in the High Street, and even Clarrie had been emphatic about that.

  'We all think it a pretty poor show, especially since we know who was on duty in the office that morning,' Clarrie had said. 'Tom Sark is letting you take the rap for him, and Matron is shielding him for some obscure reason of her own. Come to think of it, though, he always has been her particular white-haired boy!'

  Tom had tried to get in touch with her. He had telephoned the house twice and Hazel had taken a message for Jane. He wanted to see her. Would she telephone Conyers? But Jane did not want any further contact with Conyers before she left for Switzerland. She told herself, too, that she did not want anything more to do with Tom. The best that could be said for him was that he was weak and irresponsible.

  She took Linda Jane back to Norchester at the end of their holiday with a mind no clearer about the future than it had been on the day of her first meeting with Sir Gervaise Cortonwell at Friar's Cour. Her confusion was understandable, for the simple reason that events had moved so quickly, carrying her with them with all the impetuosity of swift destiny. She felt that the road she was taking now had lain before her long ago, as it had in very truth, but she knew that she would travel it with a sadly chasted heart.

  A week before they left England she went to Friar's Cour at Sir Gervaise's invitation. She would stay there, he had decided, and get to know Della thoroughly before they set out for Zurich.

  Jane was wise enough to see that it would be impossible to force a confidence, and during that first week she did establish some sort of contact. An understanding was perhaps the better word, for it seemed to Jane that her patient had wrung from her a mute agreement not to probe. Confidences there might be, but the time for them was not yet.

  By moving out to Friar's Cour, Jane had successfully avoided a meeting with Tom Sark. It had been quite deliberate, and even on the eve of their departure she did not think that Tom knew where she was. He had evidently not connected her in any way with Stuart or the Cortonwells.

  Della had suggested a farewell dinner for that evening and would not be gainsaid.

  'It will upset me much more if I don't have it,' she declared when her father had raised the possibility of undue strain and excitement so near their departure. 'And Stuart will be on hand to keep an eye on his patient!'

  Jane should have been prepared for the fact that Stuart would be one of Della's guests—probably her most important guest—but the tell-tale colour stained her cheeks at the sound of his name and she caught Della looking at her with a frown between her brows.

  'How well did you know Stuart before he went to Switzerland?' Della asked, studiedly casual as they mounted the wide staircase together. 'You never speak about him, yet he told me once that you were old acquaintances.'

  The blood drained slowly out of Jane's cheeks and she was glad that the main lights had not been switched on so that Della could not see the sudden trembling of her lips.

  'That's about—how it was,' she managed. 'Old acquaintances. When Stuart first qualified he was at the City General and I was a probationer there. One is very raw at that stage.'

  And you hurt each other in some way, Della guessed. A man doesn't go rigid and stubborn with animosity unless a hurt has gone deeper than he will admit. But she left the matter there.

  Jane took longer over her dressing than she should have done, recognising her reluctance about meeting Stuart, the recoil in her when it came to saying good-bye.

  He was standing before the fireplace in the hall when she finally went down, tall, suave, apparently unconcerned that the time had come for parting with Della, and she recognised his iron control as something which he had forced upon himself in the past few years.

  His eyes held hers as she moved slowly down the last few stairs, but the guttering candles in their high sconces gave them unfathomable depth, etching the shadows more strongly along the line of his angular jaw and about the firmly compressed lips.

  His scrutiny told her nothing, his acceptance of her less.

  'If there's any last-minute advice I can give you,' he suggested, 'let me know.'

  'About Della?' The control in her voice was surprising, even in her own ears. 'No, I think we understand each other quite well.'

  He smiled ironically.

  'Woman to woman! Does it answer better that way? You know I would never presume to offer you advice on your own future.'

  'You've done that in a way,' she countered. 'You offered me this job.'

  He did not contradict her this time nor stress the fact that she was entirely the Cortonwells' choice. Instead, he looked down into the fire, thrusting at a blazing log with the toe of his immaculate evening shoe.

  'I'm sorry about the blood-transfusion business, Jane,' he said unexpectedly. 'It was unfortunate that it should have happened that way. I understand you stood between young Sark and a severe reprimand from the Governors.'

  Jane's nails dug into the soft flesh of her palms in an effort at control as he continued to watch her, his searching gaze steady on her quivering mouth.

  'You were in love with him, of course.' His words came, weighted with conviction, impossible to deny. 'His career meant a lot to you.'

  No more than yours did once, she wanted to cry, but was silent in a moment given only once in a lifetime, the moment that slips so silently from us to be pursued for ever by the senseless plea for another one.

  Before she could make even one gesture of protest Della had hailed them from the stairs, Della, tall and ethereal-looking in deepest black, the auburn lights in her hair like flame under the candles, her amber eyes denying the chill that lay close against her heart.

  After that Jane had no chance to speak to Stuart alone, even if she had been able to think what to say to him. He believed her to be in love with Tom Sark and probably that would be a relief to him. They had both found compensation for the past.

  Stuart was at the airport to see them off. He stood beside Sir Gervaise when the last farewells had been said, when Della had clung to his arm and asked him how long it would be before she saw him again.

  'I need your particular brand of courage, Stuart,' she had told him unashamedly. 'You're always so reliable in an emergency.'

  'There aren't going to be any emergencies,' he assured her in the kindest way possible. 'If there are, I shall get through to you somehow, but don't forget that you're going to the man who taught me all I know.'

  'I'll get through to you somehow!' The words burned themselves steadily into Jane's mind as she stood, in turn, with her hand in his. It was a lover's promise.

  'I'm counting on you, Jane,' he said quietly. 'At the moment I can't get across there myself, but you'll have all the support you are likely to need from Doktor Frey.'

  Professionally businesslike, his grey eyes searched hers with a hint of demand in them which she could not understand. Payment in full?

  Was she doing this for Stuart? Was she going because he wanted it?

  The engines revved, blotting out thought for a moment, and she took her place beside Della in the plane. I wish we needn't wait, she thought. I wish this parting could be clean-cut and swift. Yet her eyes clung to the tall figure on the tarmac standing so stiffly erect beside the man to whom he owed so much.

  When t
hey moved at last. Stuart did not wave. He stood bareheaded in the cold November sunlight, watching the plane rise before he turned abruptly away to wait for Sir Gervaise beside the latter's car.

  They touched down at Zurich with a flurry of snow in their faces.

  Out on the wide airstrip blurred figures were hurrying to and fro, a gangway was wheeled into place, and the first passengers got down and ran for shelter.

  In the waiting-room, with the blissful warmth of central heating thawing their numbed limbs, they looked about them for their guide, and almost immediately a small, thickset figure in a black greatcoat came towards them.

  'It is Miss Cortonwell I am to meet,' he announced. 'You will excuse me if I have made a mistake, yes?'

  Della assured him that there was no need for apology and introduced Jane. Albert Frey studied her with frank and unembarrassing curiosity.

  'So!' he said. 'You are both very young—of an equal age! That is good. My friend, Doktor Hemmingway, rarely makes a mistake. He is so sure, always, of what he will do.'

  He glanced at them for corroboration and Della encouraged him with a nod.

  'You seem to know Stuart very well,' she said.

  'First of all,' Doktor Frey said, his keen blue eyes unobtrusively on his patient, 'we must go somewhere to eat. Is it that you have not been in Zurich before?'

  Jane shook her head.

  'I have never been out of England until now.'

  Della had not answered the doctor's question, and Jane remembered her saying that she knew Zurich 'like the back of her hand'.

  The doctor led them to his car, bundling them in out of the snow, which was now falling thickly. It obscured everything, but once they had reached the town Jane sat forward in her seat, peering out at the lofty buildings and wide squares as they passed until they turned into a main thoroughfare where linked trams clattered by in nerve-racking insecurity. People were hurrying along the pavements with downbent heads and obscuring umbrellas, but she would have loved to be out in the snow under that white flurry of gigantic flakes which was rapidly clothing the pavements and monuments in a mantle of purest white.