Ship's Surgeon

by Celine Conway

  “Thank you ... thank you. May we take her now?”

  Deva said quickly, “Doctor Bill promised I would leave the ship holding his arm, and I insist on it!”

  There were indulgent protestations from the Sinhalese men, but she had her way. Bill took her down to a long white car and sat her inside it. He bowed to a thickish dark woman who looked as if she was normally imperturbable but now was crumpling her face in an effort to restrain her tears. Pat ran back to her cabin for her hat and bag, exhorted a puffing Mrs. Lai to get a move on and sprinted down the gangway. She met Bill at the foot of it.

  Quietly, he said, “Get her into bed and stay with her till I come. The heart will stand all this, but I’m not so sure about the nerves. Got a sedative with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She may not want to take it, but if there’s any trouble pop it into one of those sickly sweetmeats she’s crazy about.”

  “I will.”

  There was a moment when it seemed he might say more, but it passed. He nodded and went up the gangway. Pat discovered, to her relief, that the first car was full and she would have to occupy the second with one of the uncles and Mrs. Lai. No one suggested waiting for Deva’s luggage; presumably an agent had already been detailed to take care of it.

  Pat looked up at the ship, saw Kristin and Vernon Corey staring downward, and drew a shaky breath. She couldn’t think about Kristin, not yet.

  They drove away from the Walhara, Mrs. Lai beside the driver, to whom she talked quietly in Tamil, and Pat in the back with the middle-aged Sinhalese man. He was very polite, pointed out places of interest and was pardonably proud of the modern shops in Chatham Street. It was a lovely city, Pat thought; old and new crowded together in tree-lined streets which were full of colour and noise. Chromium gleamed from long sleek cars, rickshaws weaved among them drawn by skinny brown men in drab dhotis, and there were bicycles galore. The pavements were crowded with turbaned men in white and women in vivid silks, and as they left the newer shops and entered narrower streets, Pat saw stores festooned with Indian rugs and scarves.

  They left the city, drove on tarmac between tall palms and tree ferns to Mount Lavinia, where the Wadias lived. And lived splendidly, Pat discovered.

  Their house was a long and very ornate one-storey building set on a hillside in an incredibly gorgeous garden. From the terrace round the house one could see a wide and beautiful tropical scene with signs of other houses here and there, and always there was that startlingly brilliant garden just below. The humid heat drew rich colour from the ground as if by magic.

  They sat just inside a dim lounge which was open on one side to the terrace, and were served with tea and little confections. The parents gazed hungrily and full of love at the imperious Deva, who talked too much. Her brothers came in, two older and one younger than Deva, and they greeted her affectionately and marvelled at her English. Only once, shyly, did any of them look at Pat.

  When Pat had finished her tea she said, “The doctor felt that Deva should go straight to bed, and stay there today. She’s been very excited, and she needs rest now.”

  Mrs. Wadia nodded. Her English was poor and she was afraid of seeming impolite. She called Mrs. Lai from the back of the house, and in a few minutes Deva was lying on a pretty white bed in a room which was three walls and a veranda overlooking the garden. She was so tired that she swallowed a capsule without a word. Pat sat in the veranda and soaked in the view. The air was hot and languorous, Deva’s own native air. The house, Deva had once told her, could be closed right in during torrid weather; it was then that they were grateful for the air-conditioning system which her father had installed some years ago.

  A barefoot servant brought lunch. Rice with curried chopped vegetables, fish in a pink sauce, seed-biscuits, grated coconut and a bowl of tropical fruits: mangoes, red bananas, litchis and tangerines. Pat ate a little while Deva slept, and when the tray had been taken she dozed herself. In such an atmosphere it was easy to slip into a state of semi-consciousness.

  It was Mrs. Lai who roused Pat. “Doctor Norton is here, Miss Fenley. He is speaking to our doctor, but I thought you would like to wash before tea.”

  “Yes, I would. Thank you.”

  It was cool in the lounge when Pat entered it. Long glass doors shut off the hot terrace, and the gracious room, with its curly patterned wicker chairs and gay silk cushions, its fine Kashan rugs covering sea-green tiles, its bamboo cage of parakeets, was like a set for an oriental film. The tea tasted scented but not unpleasant; certainly the small cups, daintily covered with tiny Indian flowers, added to its enjoyment. At last Bill broke away from the doctor and said it was time they left. There were sincere protests from the Wadias, but Pat stood up with him.

  “I’ll see if Deva is awake, to say goodbye.”

  Deva was stirring, but there were clouds of sleep in her eyes. “Don’t go, Pattie,” she murmured. “You and Doctor Bill ... please stay.”

  Pat was quivering. She leaned over and kissed the delicate brow. Bill passed a hand over the dark hair and soft cheek.

  “Goodbye, old timer,” he said. “I’ll call and see you next time I’m this way.”

  Pat said nothing; she got out of the room, went through the prolonged goodbyes to the family and walked to the car between Bill and Mr. Wadia. Another goodbye, and the car moved away. Pat leaned back in her corner of the back seat, eyes smarting, her face averted. Bill was in the other corner, and between them on the seat lay a white cardboard box.

  “That’s yours,” he said. “A gift of silk from Mrs. Wadia; she was too shy to give it to you.” Pat didn’t move. He reached over and put an envelope on her lap. “Deva’s father gave me your salary cheque. He wanted to double it, but I said you wouldn’t like that. They feel that nothing they might say or give you is adequate.”

  She slipped the envelope into her pocket, looked out of the window. “I want no gifts.”

  “That’s what I told him.”

  There was silence after that. Palms towered on either side, but occasionally they caught sight of distant green hillsides and a stretch of hot blue sea lapping at a bone-coloured beach.

  “Haven’t seen much of Colombo, have you?” he said eventually. “Women go for the Pettah—oriental bazaar stuff—but you look too played out for it. Don’t happen to have a swimsuit under that dress, do you?”

  “No.”

  “We could probably buy one easily, if you fancy a swim?”

  She shook her head. “I’d just as soon go back to the ship, thanks.”

  He leaned forward and spoke to the driver, and presently they took a side road which led to a small wooded headland. The car stopped, and heat pressed in like a blanket. But standing among the trees and looking down over a yellow beach, Pat felt a breeze. Lithe, dark-skinned boys were surf-riding, but no one lounged on that grilling, shadeless beach. A little way out at sea catamarans sat squatly, an occasional diver sliding over into the water from one of them to spear a fish.

  “They do pearl-fishing on the north-east shore of Ceylon,” Bill said. “Pity there’s no time for you to make a tour.”

  “Maybe I’ll manage it on the return journey.”

  He gave a slight shrug. “Maybe. Are you going to cable your uncle before we leave?”

  “No, I’ll get Sparks to send it tomorrow, or even the next day. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t cable till Fremantle.”

  There was a silence. Bill leaned against a palm, his hands in the pockets of his trousers. He was in mufti, a light tropical suit, a white shirt and blue tie, and he looked bronzed, and more aggressive than he sounded.

  “Are you always sad when you relinquish a patient?” he asked.

  “No, I’m happy for them. I’m particularly happy for Deva, but ... well, she has been rather special.”

  “She’s been in danger, too, and come through without knowing anything about it. I wondered if we ought to have told her father, but I think perhaps it was wise to say nothing. Thornton and Pickard w
ill lie low for a bit before trying to escape from Pakistan, and they’re not likely to come this way now. Deva is safe enough, anyway, in the heart of her family. Pity to spoil her homecoming for them with fears.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You’ve done very well with her.” He stared away at the sea for a moment. “I had lunch on board with the Skipper. The company wants to compensate you for that nasty incident, and he asked me to tell you that a stateroom is at your disposal for the rest of the trip, and the same goes for the return journey, if you decide to go back to England in the Walhara.” He paused. “Was that your original intention—to spend about ten days in Melbourne and get the same ship back?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it, because I wasn’t absolutely sure, till today, that it wouldn’t be necessary for me to stay in Ceylon for two or three weeks. But it sounded sensible, though I rather think I’d prefer to return on a different ship. By Melbourne I shall have had enough of the Walhara, and I might like a quicker trip home.”

  “What about the financial side of things?”

  “I can manage.”

  “I know,” he said abruptly, “but you’re not so well lined or you wouldn’t be going to Melbourne at all. Your return fare was paid only to Ceylon.”

  She tapped her pocket tiredly. “I’ve already paid for the trip to Melbourne and this money will take care of the rest. I shan’t have any hotel bills or other expenses, even if I’m away from England for three and a half months, and I’ll start working as soon as I get back. In fact, if I’m lucky I might work my way home.”

  Bill shifted against the palm and said nothing for some minutes. Pat’s hand closed over the reassuring bulk of the envelope. Two hundred pounds in English money was more than she had ever owned at one time. It would see her through.

  At last he said, “It takes a week or so to Fremantle. You’d better get plenty of rest.”

  “I intend to, Doctor. And perhaps you’ll thank the Captain for me and tell him I’d prefer to stay down on B Deck. I’ll feel more comfortable.”

  Bill straightened sharply. “You’re full of prickles and too damned independent to accept anything from anyone. I know you resent the way I behaved on the night we left Bombay, but I happen to rather more than resent being used as a padded wall by a girl on the rebound. So we’ll forget it, shall we?”

  “It’s forgotten,” she said a little tightly. “Do you mind if we go now?”

  They got back into the car and drove, without speaking, into Colombo. They stopped outside an hotel whose front entrance blazed with flowers. Bill tipped Mr. Wadia’s driver and sent him back to Mount Lavinia, and nodded up towards the wide veranda of the hotel. “We’ll have a drink,” he said curtly.

  They sat in the terrace, watching tourists and Sinhalese in the gardens. Pat drank a tall glass of iced lemon laced with gin, and Bill had whisky on the rocks. They sat at a small table near the low wall, could have looked straight into each other’s eyes, touched knees, held hands. But both sat withdrawn, heads turned towards the massed blood-red canna lilies, the yellow and black tiger flowers, the billows of white and pink bougainvillea, the stone paths where women in saris wearing bright jewels walked like gay birds with their white-clad men.

  It wasn’t just indifference between them, thought Pat, suppressing a shaky sigh. It was enmity. If there had been no twins to consider, nothing to compel her on to Melbourne, she would have got up and left him, and taken a taxi back to Mount Lavinia. In time, she told herself, she could have forgotten Bill Norton; it was all a matter of will-power.

  But when he called a taxi she got into the back seat with him. Slightly ahead of him, she walked up the gangway and on to the familiar deck of the Walhara.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The first couple of days after Ceylon were surprisingly flat; not for the other passengers, but for Pat. Perhaps in the East one is imbued to some extent with oriental fatalism, or maybe the heat blunts the edge of one’s emotions and senses. But after two days of travelling south it was cooler, the ocean lost its brilliant oily swell and became more crisp and turbulent. A few of the newer passengers went down with seasickness, and games on the dipping and rising deck provided surprising results.

  It wasn’t stormy; the few clouds were patches of cirrus touched with flame at dawn and sunset. The nights were lovely; clear and cool and starlit and yet still softly reminiscent of the tropics. They were exhilarating.

  Pat did almost nothing. She sat with a book she didn’t read, or talked with people whom somehow she hardly came to know. She learned about people’s business and home life in Australia, about Queensland farming and luxury living in the suburbs of Brisbane. She was invited to stay with at least three families, and was dogged for a while by a young man who told her he had decided never to marry unless he found a girl with green eyes who’d take the risk with him. Yet neither people nor atmosphere really got through to Pat. She felt withdrawn and burned out, neither hopeful nor apprehensive.

  At intervals she re-read the cable she had roughed out, added or deleted a word, and slipped it out of sight again. Even after Fremantle there would be five or six days to Melbourne; there was no hurry, none at all. That was life just now. Deceptively smooth and unhurried, with something underneath that Pat had neither the energy nor the will to delve into; something disturbing and ominous.

  As always in roughish seas, the doctor was kept busy; Bill was even dining alone, taking no more than fifteen minutes to refuel before he returned to the surgery. He didn’t go to the film show or even look in on the dancing the following night. Pat wondered, dully, how he was feeling about leaving the Walhara at Fremantle. No doubt already he was mentally on his way to Suva, where he’d practise and lecture on modern tropical medicine. The three trips on the Walhara had meant nothing more to him than a pleasant way of filling in the four or five months until he was due to report in the Fijis. He had relieved another doctor who had been happy to take the time off to get married and settled in England.

  The third night, the young woman lawyer dined again with Bill, and the night after that it was Avis and an Australian couple. Not Avis alone, of course. Bill wanted no more private sessions with women who clung. He did enquire politely, at some time during each day, whether Pat were feeling fit; and she always gave him the same reply, “I’m fine, thanks, Doctor.” And smiled and walked on. It wasn’t a positive kind of pain that Pat felt when he spoke to her, just a deadly ache. She wished she could take a sleeping draught which would carry her right past Fremantle and Bill’s departure. After their first Australian call, she was sure, she would begin to get back her spirit.

  When Vernon Corey came and sat beside her one afternoon, she felt the first stab of genuine fear. But he was alone and smiling genially.

  “You’re a quiet one, I must say. We seem to see less of you since you lost that patient of yours. I expect you’re resting up.”

  She nodded. “I miss Deva, and I’m not used to being entirely without a patient. Doing nothing for a change is probably good for me. Is ... is Mrs. Fenley all right?”

  “She got insect bites in Ceylon that made her neck unsightly—that’s why she stays in her cabin so much. She says she would look an idiot walking about in a scarf, but I don’t see it. It worries me that she won’t come out for air. I believe she’s really unwell.”

  “I’m sorry. Has she seen the doctor?”

  “Yes. He gave her some lotion and a shot against toxins. I told him she seems out of sorts and he said she may have a pronounced allergy where certain insect poisons are concerned.” He frowned anxiously. “I feel responsible for it. Kristin wanted to travel by air, but she came along for my sake. I didn’t want us to be parted for so long.”

  “I shouldn’t worry. If it were anything serious the doctor would have told you.”

  “Yes, he would, wouldn’t he?” He seemed grateful for the trite reassurance. “I’m not a nervy type—far from it—but it does seem sometimes that I may have pushed my good luc
k rather far. You know, waiting so long and then finding a woman as beautiful and intelligent as Kristin.” He gave a self-conscious laugh. “You probably think I’m crazy, talking to you like this.”

  “Of course not. But I think Mrs. Fenley is lucky, too—in finding you. You might easily have been married ten years ago.”

  He was quite shy with women; for that reason alone Pat could warm to him. Now, he made a brief gesture with his hand. “I didn’t even think about marriage till I met Kristin a few months ago. After we’d been out together a few times I couldn’t think of anything else. I can’t imagine life without a woman to share it now.”

  “That’s as it should be, isn’t it? I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  He looked down at the deck between his feet. “I hope I’ve enough about me to keep Kristin happy,” he said, without much expression. “She hasn’t been used to my sort of life, and socially she’s a cut above the Coreys. I hope she’ll get along with our friends.”

  He was doubting it, now that he was nearer home. Or perhaps the new passengers who had embarked at Bombay had been received with adverse comments by Kristin. Pat was more tempted than at any time during the voyage to tell him the truth about Kristin; that she was no more well-bred than the Coreys, and that her heart would never match theirs in size and warmth. With a stab of pure compassion for him she wondered how he would feel if, one day, he were to hear the true facts about the woman he loved. What had Kristin said? That it wouldn’t matter so long as she’d been married to him for some time before he heard them? Something like that. But it would matter, to a man like Vernon Corey. He might be a big ox, red and clumsy, but there was an almost endearing ingenuousness about him, an innocence of deception and intrigue. He was smart at ranching and in business, but in the world of women he was a babe.

  “I think you’re brooding too much,” she said. “Shall we find two others and play deck tennis?”

  “I’d like to, but I think I’d better get back to Kristin. I said I’d just take the air for five minutes and come back. If I’m away for long she gets rattled.” He gave another self-conscious laugh as he straightened. “I’m only just learning how to handle her. I’ve gentled colts and calves, but you can’t go the same way about it with women. They’re complex.”