Nurse Kelsey Abroad

by Marjorie Norrell

  The three of them spent every spare moment on making this, as Dorothy referred to it, “the dress of Staff’s life”, and indeed, when she was finally ready and waiting for Jim to call for her and escort her to the ball, Jane knew she had never looked so lovely.

  Dorothy, to Jane’s regret, refused to make herself anything new, although, as she had proved to Jane, she had been speaking the truth, her cases and drawers were crammed with many lengths of beautiful fabric.

  “My black’s good enough,” she insisted, and carefully pressed the much-worn black velveteen which, so Nurse Dawlish informed Jane, she had worn on every social occasion since her arrival in Seonyata.

  The black looked well, there was no denying the fact, but Jane sighed as she thought of the flame-red Crimplene she had seen tossed carelessly on one side, the daffodil-yellow crepe, which would have looked so well with Dorothy’s dark hair.

  She made no comment, though she was relieved to see Jim had thoughtfully brought an early rose which he ceremoniously presented to Dorothy, his eyes twinkling.

  “I thought you might wear black again,” he said gently.' Not, Jane noted ‘the black’, as though Dorothy had many dresses from which to choose. “I thought you might like to wear this with it.”

  Dorothy thanked him graciously and fastened the rose to her dress, then she turned to greet Jane as she came through the bedroom door to the living room. Jim didn’t say anything, but Jane saw his glance of astonished admiration gradually giving way to pride and undoubted real interest, even though he said no word. It was with a genuine feeling of pleasurable anticipation that she accepted his arm, and went down to where Kevin was waiting in the hall.

  The evening promised to be all Jane had hoped for and more. She had never yet been inside the Embassy, and was totally unprepared for the well-built, solid-looking building, the blue and white and gold, with the flashes of scarlet, which made up the magnificent furnishings. There was nothing extravagant or ornate, but everything, even the ash-trays, she noticed, were of good quality and of obvious value.

  Dr. Lowth had already warned her that the Embassy did not employ a large staff, but she was conducted to the ladies’ powder-room by a pleasant-faced girl, and on leaving her wrap and emerging into the huge hall, was met by a young man in evening dress, bearing a tray of champagne cocktails.

  Jane had never tasted champagne before and was a little doubtful of its effect upon her naturally exuberant self, but Jim laughed at her fears and toasted her briefly.

  “To your prolonged stay at St. George’s, Staff!” he said, and Kevin, along with Dorothy Wroe, echoed his words.

  The music was loud and gay. The orchestra, if so .it could be called, was a larger edition of the type of musicians who played at the Golden Fiddle. Kevin asked Dorothy to dance, and for a moment Jane stood and watched them, the girl so quiet-faced, the youth so obviously full of fun and enjoyment, then Dr. Lowth murmured, “Shall we?” and she was in his arms.

  She found it remarkably easy to follow him, and the fact that it appeared the only dances known to the assembly appeared to be either a waltz or a quickened version of the quickstep, both of which she knew quite well, was a real help. When the music changed to what was obviously a more traditional air, she stood for a moment uncertainly, but before Dr. Jim could say anything she found herself face to face with the husband of Madam Brentlov. Jane could not be rude, and when Jim smiled a deprecating smile and said he would be expected to do his duty, she watched him whirl away with another matronly figure she recognised as belonging to a lady who had been a victim of the epidemic.

  After that she scarcely spoke to him again all the evening. She couldn’t have said he was avoiding her, but he seemed to be fully occupied in dancing with every woman who had been inside St. George’s as a patient since Jane’s arrival, as well as a number of others she did not recognise.

  Kevin persisted in asking her to dance, even when the Brentlovs more or less added her to their circle. Somehow or other Kevin appeared to be persistently by her side, and although she liked him well enough she still could not rid herself of the strange feeling that she ought not to trust him very far.

  She glanced across the room to where Dr. Lowth was chatting with two or three obvious business men of the town. He caught her glance and for a moment a smile flickered across his face to be replaced almost immediately by a scowl of such ferocity she turned round to see what could be the cause of such a distinct change of expression.

  “Ready, Staff?” It was Kevin, feet tapping, his arms extended. There was nothing she could do but slip into them, and at the other side of the room Dr. Jim’s scowl deepened.

  Although she realised Dr. Lowth was doing his obvious duty, Jane found herself wishing with all her heart he would once more ask her to dance with him. Yet just as she thought he was crossing the room with that purpose in mind, she turned and found herself face to face with Karl Brotnovitch.

  Dancing with Karl, she thought with vague amusement, was rather like dancing with a bear in a uniform. No, not a bear, a tiger, held in leash. Jane wasn’t aware of holding herself in stiff resistance to him as he guided her round the room, but Karl was aware of it. He stopped abruptly and whispered in her ear, but in a voice Jane felt which must have been heard throughout the building.

  “Relax, Nurse,” he said. “Nobody can enjoy a dance with the demeanour of a poker! Listen to the music! Let your feet move with it ... that’s better! One might think I had come here simply for the purpose of arresting you!”

  “For what?” Jane tried to speak lightly, teasing him, but his cold eyes did not smile even though the corners of his mouth moved in the semblance of a smile.

  “Just to make certain you were ... safe!” he surprised her by saying, quietly and gravely, as though this were a matter of the utmost importance.

  “I don’t see why I should be in danger!” Jane protested, still speaking as lightly as she could. “I don’t know anything or anyone here, except for the people and doings of the hospital.”

  “Then you will also know nothing of those who work in the research laboratories,” Karl suggested quietly. “Or are some of them your patients?”

  “I ... don’t know.” Jane was startled for a moment, shaken from her attempted lightheartedness by the gravity of his voice. “I don’t know the occupations of all our patients, sir!” she said, a mocking note on the emphasis of the last word, which Karl completely ignored. “Why?” Jane was driven to ask. “Does it matter?”

  “Perhaps I wasn’t only thinking of patients,” Karl murmured as the music ended and people all around them clapped politely. “I think we shall stay where we are,” he suggested. “I do not have much opportunity for dancing. I should like to stay for the next one, please, knowing I may be called away at any moment.”

  Jane was relieved to hear it, but too polite to say so. She allowed him to take her in his arms and moved her feet in time to the music, but all the time she was conscious of the strength, the ruthless strength, of this man, the way in which his glance searched the room, so that she caught herself wondering who it was whom he sought to destroy.

  “Excuse me, please!” He stopped dancing, took his arms from holding her, and returned the salute of a man who had entered the room, threading his way between the dancers, until he stood before Karl himself. The man held out a note and said something, very rapidly, in Dalasalavian, so that Jane could not follow the trend of the conversation at all. With a completely set expression Karl took the note and tore it into tiny pieces, then he stuffed the pieces into his pocket, turned on his heel, bowed formally, apparently ignoring the fact that Jane had promptly clasped her hands behind her back like a little girl.

  “I had hoped to have the pleasure of acting as your escort back to the hospital,” he told her. “Now, I am afraid, I may be delayed for hours at the station, perhaps all night. Please allow me to express my regrets, Staff Nurse.”

  “It’s quite all right, thank you. I mean ... I’m sorry you have to w
ork when everyone else appears to be enjoying themselves,” Jane said in confusion, adding, because she did not like to see anyone—not even Karl Brotnovitch—look so sorry for himself, “I suppose that is what happens when one is a person of some importance in the community.”'

  “I knew you would understand,” Karl returned, and bowed once more before turning on his heel, beckoning to his man, and striding from the ballroom.

  Jane looked round for someone she knew, hoping with all her heart that Jim would have seen what had happened and come to her side, but although he must have witnessed the incident he was at the other side of the room talking with the Ambassador and one or two business men of the town, and merely smiled.

  Apparently no rescue was to be attempted from that quarter, and feeling, rightly or wrongly, that she had been made conspicuous as she had been Karl’s partner when the policeman came in, she looked round for Kevin, who also seemed to have disappeared.

  She was turning in some relief to one of the younger members of the Embassy staff who had been introduced to her earlier by John Gamm who had made a point of renewing their brief acquaintance as soon as the St. George’s party had arrived. She had barely spoken more than a couple of words when suddenly, without warning, Kevin was back, appearing at her side so abruptly that anyone with a more suspicious mind than Jane’s would have jumped to the conclusion that he had purposely absented himself for a time and now deemed it safe to return.

  From that moment he attempted to take charge of her. One or two other people came and asked her to dance, but always Kevin seemed to be waiting for her. She looked helplessly in Dr. Lowth’s direction more than once, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to the appeal she knew was in her eyes.

  By the time the last waltz and the national anthems of the two countries had been played, Jane, almost without knowing why, was beginning to wish she had not come to the ball at all. It had all started off so well, she reflected as she put on her wrap and took a last careful look at herself in the powder-room mirror. She had felt Jim Lowth liked her dress. She had sensed he was seeing her as someone entirely different, dressed in a gown of shimmering silver and shots of colour, wearing make-up discreetly, and with her hair specially set by Dorothy. She knew she looked a very different girl from the one he had seen every day since she came to Seonyata, in her white and blue uniform and wearing her regulation dark stockings and flat-heeled, sensible shoes.

  Now, however, as he made his polite good-nights and escorted the little party out to his car, he looked once more the reserved, formal and polite Dr. Lowth whom she had at first encountered.

  He drove more quickly back to the hospital than he had driven out to the Embassy, and when he halted the car outside the block of flats where the nursing staff lived, he leaned over and opened the door.

  “Dr. Dean will do the round with me, Staff,” he said firmly. “You two girls get some rest. You haven’t, either of you,” courtesy, Jane supposed, made him include Dorothy in the sentence, “missed any one of the dances so far as I could see. You’ll be tired in the morning. Hurry to bed and get a good night’s rest!”

  Jane let Dorothy lead the way upstairs. The caretaker wasn’t asleep, even tonight. Suddenly she found it irritating that, no matter what hour she moved about the place, he was there. Impulsively she turned to the other girl.

  “Come in for a few minutes,” she suggested, “and I’ll make a pot of tea,” but Dorothy shook her head, smiling slightly.

  “I’m tired, Staff,” she admitted candidly. “And so must you be, even though I realise that just now you don’t think you’ll sleep. Just remember a man like Dr. Lowth isn’t used to having someone else take what he wants, even if he doesn’t realise he wants it. He’s still suffering from the amount of attention you seemed to be paying to Dr. Dean. I’m afraid I couldn’t keep him away from you, except when the Chief of Police came in and sort of took charge! I don’t know where Kevin went then, but he vanished, and I should imagine Dr. Lowth noticed that too. If it’s any consolation,” she smiled again, this time a more normal smile than Jane had ever seen her give, “I would say Dr. Lowth’s jealous. You’ll have to give it time, Staff. That’s about all!”

  “I wonder?” Jane said flatly, and turned to her own door. “See you on duty in the morning.” But when she had changed into her pyjamas and dressing-gown there seemed little point in making tea for one, and feeling unaccountably depressed by the ending of what had promised to be a perfect evening, she slipped into bed and lay wide-eyed, staring into the darkness, seeing only Jim Lowth’s face in her mind, until sleep overcame her and she slept soundly until Nurse Dawlish, as always, tapped on her door.

  The next day seemed strangely flat after the excitement of the Embassy ball. What she had expected Jane could not have said, but Jim did not even ask if she had enjoyed herself or mention their foregoing evening in any way. Instead he plunged into a long and complicated conversation of the new outpatients’ clinic he was hoping to have established before the next winter set in, and, she thought as she made her round of the first ward, for all the difference last evening had made it may as well never have happened.

  Someone else who seemed to be unusually depressed that day was Kevin Dean. For the first time since she had come to St. George’s Jane saw him really down in the dumps, as he expressed it, and without any of the usual smiles or jokes with which he was wont to lace his conversation. For the first time, too, the twinkle was absent from his blue eyes, and when he caught up with Jane walking along one of the long passageways, he grumbled, as he had never done before, about the folly of being so far away from home, and all the things and folks one can best get along with.

  Depressed herself, Jane listened to his grumbles and, she realised later, added a few of her own. All the same she had no intention of behaving in anything remote from her usual manner, but when he said suddenly: “We’ve never had an evening out together, have we, Staff? You’ve always been on duty or sewing or something. What about tonight? I know Nurse Wroe’s doing the rounds, she told me so this morning. Won’t you let me take you round a little and see if we can’t dig up a little fun of some sort or other?”

  Jane would never have agreed, but she was disappointed in the fact that Jim had pushed her off with Dorothy the previous evening, not even making the excuse of wanting her to go round the wards with him! Plainly he couldn’t care what she did or whom she went around with, no matter what he had said of Kevin Dean earlier. Anyhow, she told herself, she was only responsible to him where hospital matters were concerned. What she did with her free time, her private life, was her own concern, much as she wished he might also make it his!

  “I’d like that,” she said briskly. “What time, and where do we meet?”

  “I’ll pick you up at the flat,” Kevin grinned. “Remember—you’re not allowed to go wandering around Seonyata alone or without an escort. I’ll be round about eight. See if you can dig up a little number as fetching as the dress you wore last night, will you?” he asked cheekily. “You looked stunning.”

  “I’ll try,” Jane smiled, but the words, and the smile, were as so much dust in her mouth. It was always pleasant to be appreciated to be admired, but how much better, how much more welcome it would have been had the words been spoken by James Lowth!

  She was ready at eight sharp, wearing a royal blue sweater and a cream-coloured woollen checked skirt which she’d bought last winter and never worn much before coming to Dalasalavia. Kevin whistled as he saw her.

  “I think your hair’s out of this world,” he exclaimed, “and my name isn’t Karl Brotnovitch! I hate to imagine what you might be doing to that man’s blood pressure!”

  “He looks as though he can control that as well as he controls everything else,” Jane joked, and was instantly ashamed of herself. Karl was merely doing his job, no matter what that job entailed. As a stranger and a foreigner it was none of Jane’s business as to what he did or how he chose to set about it. She had, she decided, no righ
t to criticise, and wished all the more, that she hadn’t even so much as implied criticism when she saw how greatly Kevin laughed at the little sally.

  She took her place beside him in the small car and they set off through the darkened streets at a pace she was certain both Dr. Jim and Karl Brotnovitch would have frowned upon. There were, however, no alarming incidents, and although she had not the faintest, idea where they were going she saw with a sense of shock Kevin had halted outside the doors of the New Thought Club.

  “We’re not supposed to go in there, are we?” she queried, but he only laughed and, taking her arm, propelled her inside.

  “Most of my friends hang out here,” he told her, and stopped to speak to the youth who stood by the inner door. The young man gave Jane a searching look and then a bright smile, and within minutes they were admitted to a long, low room overflowing with young people, with the air thick with tobacco smoke, noisy with the twanging of a dozen stringed instruments of a kind Jane had seen nowhere else but in Seonyata.

  Before she knew much about it they were the centre of a small, gay group where everyone appeared to know everyone else and have a great deal to say. Jane, knowing so little of the language, was at a loss, but there appeared to be a great deal of excitement. One young man was speaking loudly, vehemently, gesticulating as though to emphasise his points which all appeared to be of a somewhat violent nature.

  “What’s this?” she whispered to Kevin as he brought two drinks to the table. “Some sort of revolutionary movement?”

  “Not really,” he told her, grinning. “They’re just fed up, that’s all. What sort of life is there for any of them here? Work, work and more work, and all they can see at the end of it is getting older and older, as their parents have done before them! They’re a lively lot. They deserve something better, but the country’s not wealthy enough yet to do any of the things which need doing...