Her delicate heart of a face held shadows of pain. Frankie had never been terribly robust, she told Ross, folding a dress, then crumpling it down into her suitcase. "I'm not really surprised this has happened, but poor Bryony will be half off her head with worry."
"You could do with a drink, Fern." Ross went to get her one. Upon his return she was stepping into the skirt of a travelling suit, and he watched as she tucked in her blouse and jerked nervously at the zip. She accepted
the brandy and drank it with a grateful smile. Then she pulled on the jacket of her suit and Ross frowningly told himself that it would hardly be suitable for an English October. He strode to the built-in wardrobe, slid open the doors and lifted out the beautiful leopard-skin coat he had bought her in New York. "You'll notice the cold when you land in England." He spoke gruffly as he swung the coat about her shoulders.
Hope shot through Fern and she held her breath. "Say it . . . say you'll come with me," her heart cried out, but his hands fell away from her shoulders and he picked up her suitcase.
They drove to his aunt's so that Fern might say goodbye, called in at his bank for some English money, then stopped off at a Los Angeles restaurant for lunch. Women in smart, crazy hats sat at adjacent tables with big loose-limbed men. Their drawling voices carried to Fern and it came sharply home to her that all of this formed part of the pattern of her stay in California; that in a while the entire pattern would shatter into fragments when she boarded her plane for England. The moment came all too soon. It was breezy on the tarmac of the airfield and strands of Fern's silvery hair blew free, while Ross's jacket kept whipping back from his sweater.
"I'll be keeping in touch by phone," he said. His eyes were grave as he gazed down at her. "Don't worry too much about the boy, you'll probably find him lots better when you reach England."
People were boarding the plane and the air-hostess was gazing towards Fern. "Goodbye, my dear!" Ross held her for a moment, then she was climbing the steps into the plane. She didn't look back. She couldn't let him see the tears of anguish on her face.
"Let me help you, honey." The air-hostess sympathetically fastened Fern's seat-belt. "Partings are hell, aren't they?"
Fern couldn't speak, she could only nod her head. Then the plane was swooping along the runway, lifting into the air like a giant bird and flying her away from
Ross. Every second, every stifled heartbeat further and farther away. Fern sank back in her seat and with her face to the window she wept at last. The silent, terrible tears rolled down her face, for Ross had not said au revoir, he had said goodbye.
By the time the big Boeing purred its way over the Channel, Fern was feeling calmer and more braced. Tears had helped, as they are meant to, and now she told herself that Bryony and Rick needed her and she mustn't fail them.
When she stepped from the plane with the other passengers, a chill night air hung over the airport and she was glad of the warmth of her leopard-skin coat. She found Rick awaiting her, and one glance at his haggard, worried face strengthened her resolve to thrust her own troubles to one side.
"Hullo, my dear!" She kissed his cheek and they hugged one another.
His grey eyes dwelt on her face while her suitcase was checked through the Customs, then they hurried out to his car. Rick told himself that his wife's sister, if possible, was more beautiful than ever; the coat she wore was a fabulously expensive one and she unnerved him a little. Then he felt her tuck an arm within his and quick relief brought a lump into his throat. She was more beautiful, and the wife now of an internationally famous journalist, but still Fern, warm-hearted and ever ready to help those in trouble.
"I hope you didn't mind me cabling you, Fern?" Rick said. "I mean, it was convenient for you to come home, wasn't it? Your husband didn't mind?"
"No, Ross didn't mind."
Now they were driving away from the airport and to Fern her brother-in-law's Anglia seemed small and compact in comparison to the aggressive Mercury she had grown so used to travelling about in. Green fields under a dark, damp sky wafted their very English scents into the car, and Fern was moved. This was her land, and Rick was so poignantly British with his rather shy grey eyes and fairish hair going a little thin at the temples.
"Tell me all about Frankie," she said. "Is he in hospital at Maidenhead?"
"Yes. They've got him in the chest unit at the General. He's—he's pretty bad, poor little devil. Bryony spends most of her time at the hospital... oh, Fern, she'll be so much better now you're home. Aster's a good girl, but she gets so impatient with Bryony. You know how she is?"
Fern nodded.
Her older sister was an extremely efficient sort of person who had never been fully able to make allowances for Bryony's emotional, more highly strung temperament.
"This complication of Frankie's started just like a dose of 'flu," Rick said, slowing the car at a roundabout, then swinging on to the Maidenhead road, "but in a matter of hours he was really bad. He was put into an oxygen tent the moment the ambulance got him to the hospital. . . ." Fern heard the harsh movement of Rick's throat as he swallowed. "I—I think Bryony will just about go off her head if anything happens to our boy."
Fern pressed her brother-in-law's arm with sympathetic fingers. She loved Frankie herself, so she could well imagine his parents' agony of mind, their impotence at only being able to stand by, to watch and pray to God that their son, the small miracle they had created between them, was not going to be snatched out of their lives.
"Modern medical science is a very wonderful thing, Rick," Fern murmured. "I've seen some amazing recoveries made during my time as a nurse."
Rick was only half listening to her, his thoughts with his sick child.
"He was such an active youngster, Fern. Now it's enough to break your heart the way he lies so still in that white bed, under that glistening, transparent tent. So far away, though we sit close enough to touch him. On a journey all alone. . . ."
"My dear!"
"I-I'm sorry for speaking like this, but I can't with Bryony. I'd be scared of frightening her." "I understand."
It was late when the maroon Anglia pulled into the kerb in front of the council house in which the Scanlans lived. Bryony must have been listening for the car, for the front door of the house flew open and she came running down the path to the gate. She fumbled with it, then she and Fern were clinging to one another there on the pavement.
"You're back . . . oh, Ferny, you're back!" Bryony sobbed like a child, her ash-blonde hair clinging in wisps to her hot, tear-wet cheeks, her slim body trembling uncontrollably in Fern's arms. In a minute or so Fern and Rick managed to get the sobbing girl into the house. Rick went at once to the kitchen to make hot, strong tea. Fern removed her coat and noticed with shocked eyes the ravaged thinness of her sister's face. Her pret-tiness was eclipsed completely by her terrible concern for Frankie, and Fern could quite understand her brother-in-law's fears.
Poor little Bryony! She looked as though she hadn't slept for days. Her pale hair, always so attractively kept at one time, was tangled and uncombed. The white collar of her navy-blue dress was grubby, and her right knee was bursting through the broken mesh of her stocking.
Fern sat down beside her on the living-room couch and took hold of her trembling hands. "Bry, listen to me, dear," she gently said. "You've your husband to think about as well as your son. Rick, poor boy, hardly knows how to cope with you in this state."
"My Frankie's dying!" Bryony's head tumbled against her sister's shoulder, where it twisted and turned tormentedly. "D'you hear, Fern? My baby's dying and I can't bear it! Y-you haven't got a child. You don't know what it's like to bring one into the world, to hold him and know he's part of you. T-to kiss his bruises and make them better. To see him growing day by day." Then Bryony's voice was torn into shreds, rising wildly. "If my baby dies I shall want to die as well!"
Rick was coming into the room at that moment with three steaming cups of tea on a tray. Over Bryony's head Fern saw his loo
k of acute distress, the deepening lines in his cheeks. He had overheard his wife's cry and it had deeply wounded him. Much as he loved his child, Bryony held first place in his heart, but this was neither the moment nor the place for Fern to tell him, out of her professional knowledge, that his wife's hysteria was inducing her to speak so wildly and thoughtlessly.
Fern met his pain-filled eyes. "Has your doctor given Bryony any sleeping pills?" she asked. "She must get a little rest."
"She won't take them, Fern," he replied.
"Well, run and get them and we'll see." Fern smiled a little as she smoothed Bryony's hair back from her hot cheeks. Poor Rick was afraid to be firm with Bryony, but she wasn't. She had dealt often with people in her sister's state and was well aware that if Bryony's mind and body didn't get a little relief from tension, both would give way.
"I don't want to sleep," Bryony protested, as Fern made her drink some tea. "The matron of the chest unit might phone me ... I daren't sleep."
"Stop being a baby and drink a little more of this."
Rick came into the room and Fern took the tiny bottle of sleeping pills out of his hand. A couple of them were then popped into Bryony's mouth and forced down with tea before she fully realized what Fern was up to. She gaped pop-eyed at Fern, for so had she often dosed a rebellious Frankie, spooning cough medicine into his mouth even as he opened it to protest. "Ferny," she wailed that old childhood name, "y-you're different. You've got like Aster and you're bullying me."
"No, I'm not," Fern said practically. "I'm still the same as I ever was, but I've never had occasion before to use my hospital ward tactics on you."
Bryony stared at her sister with big blue eyes that were slowly glazing over as the sleeping pills began
to take effect. "You are different," she said slowly. "I don't think you're very happy, Fern. .. ."
Then her words trailed off, her head drooped, and Rick carefully lifted her and carried her to bed.
Fern tiredly reached for her handbag and lit herself a cigarette. She sank back in the couch and experienced a sudden choking sadness. "We're all grown up now," she thought. "We three sisters are women now and life has thrown its coils firmly and inescapably about us. Poor Bryony may lose her child. I have lost Ross, and Aster, for all her ability to cope with external problems, is not happily married to George Taylor. No woman who marries just for position and money can ever be truly happy."
Fern let her mind drift back over the past, to the evening when Aster had said in that crisp, secretarial voice of hers: "Look, you two, I'm going to marry my boss. He's rolling in cash and I don't feel much inclined to be just a sweet, suburban bride living in a potty little council house. I'm fond enough of George, and love is an overrated emotion, anyway."
So Aster had married her boss, head of a big biscuit company. The wedding had been an enormous affair and Fern and Bryony had been two of the bridesmaids. It was at Aster's wedding that Bryony had met Rick, who was working, then, for the firm of interior decorators who modernised the big hilltop house which George Taylor bought for his bride. Rick was now in business for himself. Fern liked Rick. He was steady and dependable, and he adored Bryony.
Fern watched the upward eddying of her cigarette smoke.
Bryony would suffer terribly if she lost Frankie, but she wouldn't really want to die as she believed now. The mainspring of a woman's life was the man in it, Fern thought, as she edged her cold feet a little nearer to the glow of the electric logs, and Rick would be standing by.
A little later, undressed and in bed in the Scanlans' guestroom, Fern lay staring into the darkness, wondering rather wistfully if Ross was missing her just a little.
CHAPTER TEN
THE following day there was a telephone call from California, and Fern's legs turned to cottonwool when Rick called her from the kitchen, where she was preparing the evening meal. Bryony had been at the hospital most of the day and upon Fern's firm advice she was now taking a restless nap on her bed.
"Here you are." Rick handed over the receiver with a brief wink, then he discreetly made himself scarce.
For several moments the line was a blur of intrusive noises, then the warm burr of Ross's voice was right against Fern's ear. "Hullo, Fern. Hullo . . . are you there?"
"Hullo, Ross." She sank down into a chair beside the telephone table and it was wonderful to hear his voice. "I can hear you very clearly."
"The line your end is a bit shaky . . . now tell me everything. How is the child progressing?"
They talked mainly about Bryony's trouble, which was of course understandable, Fern told herself, while her heart thumped longingly in her chest and he failed to say what she was dying to hear. That he missed her and wanted her back with him as soon as possible.
"I'm darned sorry to hear the boy is so desperately ill, Fern," the warm sincerity of his voice made her eyes swim with tears. "How is your sister reacting?"
"N-not too well."
"Well, it's natural enough she should be feeling so upset. One's children are something a bit special, aren't they?"
Fern gazed at the paper on the wall in front of her and the patterns seemed to swirl away from her, then to come slowly back into focus. In that infinitesimal moment she had remembered a certain look of rejection in Ross's eyes and been hurt all over again.
They talked for a while longer, then he was saying :
"Now take care of yourself, honey, and you know I'll be rooting for young Frankie."
Honey! It was as though his lips caressed her for a fleeting, heavenly moment, turning her bones to water. "Take care of yourself, Ross," she replied shakily. "Be sure to eat regularly. Don't live off coffee and sandwiches while you pound your typewriter all day."
She heard him laugh. "I'll be okay. Delilah brought down a basket full of chow just today."
"Dear Delilah!" Fern's exclamation was heartfelt. "Give everyone my love, won't you?"
He assured her he would, added that he would be phoning her again on Monday, then they bade one another goodbye.
Frankie's condition continued very poorly all over the weekend and one of the doctors admitted to Fern, upon learning she was a nurse, that the child was very gravely ill. The crisis of his illness should occur within the next twenty-four hours and he would have a hard fight before him.
After Fern had talked with the doctor she couldn't face sitting with Aster and George Taylor in the waiting-room, where Aster would keep saying that Bryony would be better if she didn't insist on being in the same room with the child. He didn't know she was there and she was distressing herself unnecessarily.
Fern walked out of the back entrance of the chest unit and made her way to a garden near the Outpatients' Department. There she sat on a rustic seat in the twilight and listened to the muffled roar of traffic beyond the hospital's high walls. Life was a very rich gift and only when death stepped close were its riches fully disclosed. Life! Made manifest by each restless movement of the hidden birds and wind-tossed leaves in this garden. Made wonderful when two hearts beat in unison in an embrace. Made miraculous by the perfection of a child's hand.
Fern did not move from that rustic seat for over half an hour, then at last she was calm again and able to return to the chest unit.
Hospitals at night are strange places. Their tiled corridors, sterile operating theatres and mutedly lit wards seem to be haunted by the many pains which drugged or restless slumber holds at bay until dawn rolls back the sombre blinds of night. Then the lamp is extinguished on the night sister's desk and there is an increasing stir of activity as patients wake in the wards and nurses come on duty with their cloaks flying like banners as they race across the hospital quadrangle.
A hospital is a world apart, like a liner at sea, or a star in the sky.
A hospital is at once a battlefield, a place of prayer and a haven of hope.
The small side ward in which five-year-old Frankie Scanlan lay fighting for his life was all three that night. For many hours science grappled with that fa
celess scavenger called death . . . and who can say if it was science or the prayers of a boy's loving parents that finally routed the scavenger? All that was certain was the fact that when dawn's light tip-toed into the room Frankie was at last peacefully sleeping, and there was a faint, faint hint of colour in his waxy cheeks.
Bryony burst into tears in Rick's arms, while the doctor walked tiredly, yet elatedly, to the waiting-room to tell those who sat there that the child had survived the crisis of his illness and now stood a chance of making a complete recovery.
Within a week or so Frankie was beginning to sit up and take notice. When he first realized that his Auntie Fern was sitting beside his bed, his blue eyes grew big as saucers, then he smiled with delight and snuggled his cheek against her hand . . . and how could she help but remember another, much bigger boy who had often done the same thing?
And thinking of Ross, how could she stop a clutch of terror at her heart at the growing infrequency of his phone calls?
By the time Frankie was well enough to be taken home, prior to his convalescence, the crisp voice of the telephone exchange operator was no longer asking for
Mrs. Kingdom, to tell her a call was coming through from California.
Only Fern's innate courage made it possible for her to bear the pain, the terrible and lonely sense of loss. She knew Bryony and Rick had noticed the cessation of Ross's phone calls, and when Bryony tentatively approached the subject, Fern admitted outright that she wasn't returning to America.
"Our marriage just didn't work out, Bry," she said. "I love him, but he doesn't love me."
And so it came about that when Frankie's convalescence was discussed, Aster's husband, with an unexpected burst of generosity, suggested that Bryony and Fern take the boy on a cruise to the Mediterranean at his expense. The sea air would work wonders for the little lad, George said. For his mother as well, he added laughingly, giving Bryony's still rather wan cheek a playful pinch. He had a bit of a weakness for pretty little Bryony. She was less aggressive than his wife, and he had always mistaken Fern's reserve for a species of superiority. She was dashed beautiful, of course, but not exactly the encouraging sort. Not a kitten you could playfully pet.
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