“Good, that will give me time to get some of these notes written up.” Felicity sat at the desk and drew the papers towards her, then turned with a laughing glance to her companion. “Haven’t you anything to do?”
“Loads!” Philip laughed, then added more soberly, “I just wanted a word with you first—I want to be sure that you really understand—I mean about that MacFarlayne business—you do realize it wasn’t my fault, don’t you?”
“We’ve already had all that out, you know I don’t blame you. Now get along and let me do some work.”
“You certainly seem less annoyed than you were first thing,” Philip leaned forward and put an arm on her shoulder. “I’m sorry about all this, sweet, you know that, don’t you?” He dropped his arm quickly to his side as, following a light knock, the door was opened to admit a girl, a complete stranger to Felicity, but apparently no stranger to Philip Elver and extending her hand she advanced eagerly towards him.
“Why, it’s—it’s—now what is your name? I saw you in Out Patients, didn’t I? ... When Guy and I were brought in. What a nightmare it was! You were sweet about everything but I was so shaken that I don’t remember even thanking you properly. I don’t know how I’d have faced up to things without your help, you were a positive angel!”
The words might have been gushing and ill-chosen, yet Felicity found herself momentarily spellbound by the charm of the newcomer’s voice and by the startling beauty of the girl herself. There was no doubt that the stranger must be Guy Brenton’s fiancée and she was not to be left long in doubt as to the purpose of the visit.
“I came to see Guy.”
Philip, no doubt sensing that this might be the right moment to make himself scarce, nodded “Good-bye” and beat a hasty retreat, deliberately disregarding Felicity’s signs to remain. Left alone, Felicity turned her eyes towards the other girl. Her face beneath the small tilted hat was a perfect oval, the pale olive skin flawless. Her hair, drawn back from her face and twisted in a knot low in the neck, was dark and lustrous and emphasized the high forehead and the pencilled brows. The mouth was perfectly shaped, its bold scarlet in direct contrast to the pallor of her skin.
“Could I see Mr. Brenton?”
Suddenly realizing that she must be staring with unwarranted rudeness, Felicity lowered her glance and spoke. “I’m sorry, but foe the moment Mr. Brenton is forbidden “any visitors.”
“What absolute nonsense!” The girl’s tone was emphatic and held a note of irritation. “I was with him last night, I’m his fiancée, surely I have the right to see him when I wish?”
“When he is well enough, of course.” This girl’s air of assumption following the events of the morning, were like a spark to Felicity’s still smouldering anger. “I’m afraid it’s against orders and out of the question at present. Mr. MacFarlayne is most annoyed that by some oversight you were admitted last night.”
“How frightfully pompous you sound!” A heavy aroma of Chanel perfume seemed to fill the room as the other girl came towards Felicity, her small neatly gloved hand extended in greeting. “I suppose you are the Sister here. My name is Alaine Jason.”
“I’m Nurse Dene, Sister is on duty; if you care to wait until she gets back I’m sure she’ll see you and then she can explain the position to you herself.”
With a graceful movement Alaine Jason seated herself in the chair Felicity indicated. “I thought you looked too human to be a sister, too young and pretty too,” she remarked as she, in turn, appraised her companion. “What on earth made you take up nursing? You ought to be on the films with a face like yours.”
The outspoken remark made Felicity smile. “It may seem odd, but I like nursing and I’ve an idea I’d find film work dull.”
“Oh, I suppose every job has its compensations,” Alaine remarked conversationally and although Felicity knew that she should continue her work, she found herself compelled to listen as Alaine Jason chattered on. “I’m in pictures you know, starring in Fettle’s new film. My days are chock-a-block with rehearsals, that’s why I have to get along to see Guy whenever I can make it; it’s no good tying me down to times, I ought to be allowed to see him when I’m free.”
“Alaine Jason”—of course Felicity knew the name, she’d had wonderful notices in her first film, it had run for months in the West End. But there was one thing which Felicity couldn’t understand. What on earth could Mr. Brenton and this exotic girl have in common? Alaine Jason could surely have had her pick of men, what too had she found in Guy Brenton other than physical attraction? But perhaps more surprising still, how had she appealed to him? Appearance alone would surely never have captivated a man of Guy Brenton’s discernment and Felicity would have imagined that this girl’s glamour and excitability, betrayed by her every movement, would have been intolerable to a man of his disposition. Perhaps it was the magnetic attraction of opposites.
Almost as if she could read her thoughts, Alaine Jason spoke again. “I expect you are summing me up, wondering how I ever came to fall for such an intellectual serious type!” She rose from her chair and crossed to the window, fidgeted for a moment with a hideous pewter vase—a gift from a grateful, patient—then swung round again. “Guy is a poppet when you really know him, we first met at a Charity Ball.” She leaned forward, her hands resting on the sill behind her. “Do you know he was the very first man I’d ever met who behaved as if I didn’t exist! He ignored me ... I was furious!” She spoke with such forceful intensity that to Felicity it appeared as if she were acting a part.
“Really?” Felicity felt that the dramatic pause was, in a sense, her cue; she had nothing to say and she had no wish to be Alaine Jason’s confidante. With a brisk air of finality which Felicity hoped might have the required effect, she turned deliberately back to the desk. “You must excuse me, I have some work to do, you’ll find some magazines on the table and Sister won’t be long now.”
“I don’t think I really want to see her—not if she is anything like that old crow I saw last night—if I can’t see Guy now, when can I see him?” Her deep voice expressed the tension which her whole manner disclosed.
“I think it may be all right for him to have visitors by the week-end, why not come along on Sunday?” Felicity suggested.
“Oh, confound all these rules and things,” Alaine Jason took a slim gold case from her bag and handed it to Felicity. “Smoke?”
“No, thanks,” Felicity smiled as she explained. “Not on duty.”
“Another silly regulation. I don’t know how you stick it.” She applied a lighter to her cigarette then slowly inhaled. Dropping the case back into her bag she reseated herself in the chair and crossed one slender nylon-clad leg over the other. “It doesn’t look as if I’ll get my own way, So I suppose I ought to go.” She looked up and a gleam of fun sparkled in the depth of her greenish-brown eyes. “But I must finish what I was telling you—you know, about Guy and me. He wouldn’t run to form, so I was determined to make him! I got right down to it and believe me, it wasn’t easy! The whole trouble with Guy is that he’s too attractive. Girls fall for him on sight, so he adopted a ‘keep off it’ manner which became a habit. I soon saw through his technique and decided I’d play up to him. I pretended he bored me to tears, that his type left me cold. That did the trick! He fell for it hook, line and sinker!” She laughed softly at the recollection.
Felicity glanced surreptitiously at the clock. Alaine Jason’s frankness bewildered her, there was something inherent in her own nature which felt the disloyalty of such disclosures. She realized that there was no malice in the other girl’s remarks, that lack of restraint was second nature to her and that such discussions were everyday occurrences among her own friends. She hoped that Sister would soon make her appearance, she began to feel that Alaine Jason’s frivolous small talk was more than she could cope with.
“I don’t think Sister should be very long now.” Felicity could think of nothing more sensible to say to put an end to Alaine’s story. She dreaded
that she might launch out on other and more personal incidents. Felicity didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to listen, but she sensed that. Alaine was waiting to go on, enjoying making fun of what to Felicity was a serious and private matter.
“I don’t think it’s much good waiting anyway, you’ve already told me she won’t allow me in.” Alaine Jason sighed as she got up from her seat and not troubling to find an ash tray, stubbed out her cigarette in the saucer on the tray which Felicity had as yet had no opportunity to remove. “Oh, well, I may as well go. Sorry I can’t see him, but at least I’ve met you. I like you, in fact you aren’t my conception of a nurse at all, you must come along to, my flat some time, I’ll fix you a drink.”
“Thanks,” Felicity murmured non-committally.
At the door, Alaine Jason spoke again. “Oh, by the way, I brought Guy some flowers, they are in the taxi, I’ll have them sent up. Give them to Guy with my love.” She paused again, extending her hand. “So long, I hope you are looking after Guy, he would hate being nursed by that old crow I met last night.”
Felicity shook the proffered hand. “Yes, during the day I am attending Mr. Brenton.”‘
“Good, I’m glad. You’re so easy on the eye, tell him from me that from the types I’ve seen around this place, he’s damn lucky!”
That was a message which Felicity could scarcely deliver but as she watched the slim beautifully dressed figure disappear into the lift, she was aware of an inward sense of amusement. That morning she had felt she could cheerfully have slain Guy Brenton’s fiancée for all the humiliation she had caused her, now she realized that Alaine Jason was one of those artless people who unintentionally caused trouble yet no one ever found the heart to censure them. She would probably go through life living on her own nerves and fraying other people’s! Felicity crossed back to the window and opened it wide—she must clear the office of the mingled smell of scent and tobacco smoke before Sister returned. Then she picked up the neglected tray and carried it to the small kitchen at the end of the ward. She was just setting it down when a porter appeared almost obscured by the flowers he carried cradled against his arm.
“Sent up by Miss Jason—says as ‘ow I was to give ‘em to you. You’d know what to do wiv ‘em.”
“Know what to do with them!” Felicity silently echoed the words as she unwrapped the massed blooms, then viewed them with consternation. There wouldn’t be enough vases in the entire hospital to hold them! They’d take hours to arrange and even when arranged, hours to keep fresh and watered! Picking up a spray of white lilac she held it to her face, its sweet intoxicating perfume awoke for a fleeting moment almost forgotten memories. Quickly she laid it aside, then with resignation settled down to her task.
CHAPTER SIX
Felicity was relieved when the next few days had passed. The excitement of Guy Brenton’s accident, the resulting chatter, were gradually dying down and life was resuming its normal routine. Even the humiliation of her interview with Matron was almost forgotten and she was no longer subjected to endless questions from her fellow nurses. The days had passed swiftly, and in their passing she had even begun to lose her unreasonable dread of entering Guy Brenton’s room, that self-consciousness in a patient’s presence, which was something she had never hitherto experienced.
On the whole, Felicity had to admit, Guy Brenton wasn’t proving a very formidable person to nurse; on the contrary she found him far more tractable to deal with as a patient than he had ever been on the wards. Sometimes she wondered whether Alaine Jason’s outspoken revelations had given her a new confidence; she had, perhaps unwittingly, painted such a clear portrait that subconsciously Felicity had begun to wonder what all the fuss was about? She had spent months implicitly following his dictates. The position was now reversed; as his nurse she had every intention of seeing that he followed hers! There was still one thing which gave her constant concern. Guy Brenton, although stronger, made no real headway, he spoke little, and certainly gave her no confidences, but she felt sure he harboured a deep anxiety about the future and must be suffering untold distress as to whether he would ever regain the complete use of his hand. She was certain that if he shared these worries they would surely be easier to bear, and, with any other patient, she knew she would have felt it to be part of her duty to persuade him to speak of his fears, to offer encouragement and so help to lighten the burden. Today the embargo on visitors had been raised and Felicity hoped that Alaine Jason on her visit that afternoon might prove the safety valve which she felt her patient needed. But would she? Felicity had been asking herself that question during the busy hours of the morning, it had constantly been recurring to her, but somehow, when she recalled her brief encounter with Mr. Brenton’s fiancée she could not place her in the role of sympathetic listener.
The day, for early spring, was warm, and Felicity, although she had two free hours, could not face the dusty atmosphere of the London streets. She had promised to shop with Diana, but with the intention of calling off the arrangement she tapped at Diana’s bedroom door.
Diana, her uniform thrown carelessly over the back of a chair, and clad only in a thin dressing-gown, lay full length on the bed. She agreed only too readily with her friend’s suggestion that the shopping expedition be deferred, and rolling over on her side appraised Felicity. “You look tired, don’t mind not going out, a rest will probably do us both much more good.”
“But not indoors,” Felicity protested firmly. “Let’s go and sit on the lawn.”
“That’s a flattering term,” Diana laughed. “If you are referring to that strip of moth-eaten grass outside the Nurses’ Home, I think ‘back yard’ would be a more apt description.”
“I don’t mind what you call it, but at least it’s fresher than indoors. We’ll get a couple of deck chairs and sit in the sun.”
“What, like this?” Diana stuck one slender naked leg out from beneath the inadequate folds of her gown.
“No, you idiot, of course not, I’ll wait while you get into a dress.”
“O.K. I’ll get garbed respectably.” Diana slipped off the bed and rummaging in her cupboard produced a cotton frock. “This will do for now,” she decided, eyeing it speculatively. “I suppose I really ought to have gone shopping. I haven’t a decent thin dress to my name and if I don’t go out to buy one because it’s too hot, then I won’t want to buy one when it’s cold, will I?”
“You’ll buy it in anticipation,” Felicity explained with a laugh. Then added, “I’m not bothering to change, I’m on duty again at four. I haven’t the rest of the day free as you have!”
Ten minutes later the two girls were seated side by side on the small strip of garden behind the nurses’ dining room. Despite all the attention bestowed upon it, not only by the gardener who looked in once a week to mow the lawn, but by the many horticulturally minded nurses who had passed through St. Edwin’s, it still remained as Diana had said, little more than a back yard. Hemmed in by the London streets and the shade of the tall Hospital buildings, it got little sun but at least the small stretch of green was restful, and to Felicity the austere grey walls of the buildings surrounding it, now mellowed by the years, were not an unpleasing vista.
“How is Brenton getting on?” Diana enquired, then, without awaiting a reply, added: “Or should I say how are you getting on nursing him?”
“I was thinking only this morning,” Felicity began with some satisfaction, “I don’t think I’m doing too badly, he isn’t nearly so difficult as I thought he’d be, he still never says anything encouraging, but at least he doesn’t grumble.” She paused before continuing. Diana was so level-headed, so calm in her judgment, perhaps she might prove useful. “I wonder what you think?” she began tentatively, then went on, “I know he is worrying himself terribly about his hand, he never says a word but I know it’s on his mind. It’s a dreadful strain for him and yet there doesn’t seem anything that I can do to help.”
“How could you help, how could anyone?” Diana stated. �
��He knows too much, you can’t expect to put off a surgeon with pretty words. No one can help, so I shouldn’t bother your head about that.”
“Miss Jason is allowed to visit him today, I am so hoping she’ll take his mind off things, even if she can’t give any true reassurance.”
“From what I’ve heard lately about Alaine Jason I shouldn’t think she’d be much help.” Diana spoke with feeling. “I know you hate scandal and so do I, but I do believe this bit of information has more than a grain of truth.” Diana sat up in her chair and screening a match carefully between her hands applied a light to a cigarette before continuing. “It seems that Bill’s sister knows her— you know she is in pictures too. Perhaps it’s only jealousy but she told Bill that the Jason girl is about as changeable as a chameleon. Brenton is a catch, there isn’t much doubt about that, film work is pretty chancy and the opportunity of marrying him was too good to miss.”
“I can’t believe that,” Felicity contradicted. “She is an odd girl, very outspoken—perhaps that’s a stagy characteristic—but she seems to be making a career and name for herself without having to worry about marriage ties. She is so lovely, too, honestly Di, she is one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen.”
“Beauty doesn’t last,” Diana responded calmly, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Nor does fame—not these days, anyway—film stars are born—and die, every day.” She gave a significant pause. “I’ll tell you something else Bill said. It seems that on the night of the accident his sister was at the same party as Brenton; and the Jason girl; Brenton was apparently hating every moment of this party and was being just as hostile and awkward as we know only our dear Mr. Brenton can be. It seems that Alaine was pretty peeved about it and Bill’s sister says the atmosphere between them was definitely tense. Apparently our little Alaine had imbibed not wisely but too well and she and Brenton were just spoiling for a row.”
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