by Jane Arbor
“Of course,” said Lysbet quickly. “But how did she know so much about me?”
Richard looked at her appraisingly. “Well, you’re noticeable, you know. And I think Caroline is exceptionally aware of other women, if you know what I mean.”
Lysbet puzzled: “I ought to know her if she has lived in Fallsbridge for a long time. What is she like?”
“Caroline,” said Richard decidedly, “is the perfect ‘sugar and spice and all that’s nice’ original. She’s all white and pink and gold—like a birthday cake with all the candles lighted. Does she ring a bell?” he added with a swift change of metaphor which, however, Lysbet understood.
“—and she usually wears play-suits at the Club, doesn’t swim much and has a small boy whom she drops in at the shallow end of the pool from time to time, where she tinkles at him until she fishes him out again. By then he’s usually screaming,” she supplemented.
Richard nodded with satisfaction. “That’s Caroline.”
“You’re making fun of her!” accused Lysbet seriously. “She can’t help looking as delicate and fragile as all that!”
“Quite. And if she were ‘as delicate and fragile as all that’ one could forgive her much. But I’ve noticed that neither fragility nor delicacy have prevented Caroline from getting most of the things she wants—when she wants them.” There was a dry note to Richard’s voice which emboldened Lysbet to say: “You don’t really like her. But you’ve made her your secretary for all that! I don’t understand. After all, you have to work with her!
Richard looked up at her beneath ruefully knitted brows. “You know—I hardly understand it either! She wanted a job, told me about it, and almost before I had time to think what I was doing I had offered to take her on as coy secretary. She’s in the surgery now, being a secretary for all she is worth!” he added with a glance at his watch.
“But does she know anything about the work?” persisted Lysbet.
“As far as I can make out—not a thing. But she’s cheerfully willing to learn and I’m—not so cheerfully, I’m afraid—doing my best to teach her my methods.”
With a smile Lysbet shook her head and he shook his in response. “I know! Why, with a directory of secretary-dispensers and all the London agents at my service, did I have to engage Caroline?” He stood up, thrust his hands into trouser pockets and strode over to the window where he stood looking down into the courtyard far below.
When he turned round his tanned face beneath his fair hair was newly serious. “There wasn’t any reason of course,” he said, addressing Lysbet but seeming to be talking to himself, “there wasn’t any reason at all, except that if Caroline wanted help, or a job, I knew that I had to give it to her—for Adrian’s sake.”
Behind the sudden confidence there was a story of man’s friendship for man which, Lysbet realized instinctively, was not for her to probe.
She said nothing, but looked at Richard as he stood with his back to the bright sunshine beyond the window, and suddenly knew that she loved—yes, loved!—the quixotic loyalty of him, which went against even his own best counsels—for friendship’s sake.
Richard looked at his watch again and pulled down his coat in his characteristic gesture of returning to action.
“Sister’ll be sending in a chaperon,” he commented. “And I must get back to surgery.”
“Well, thank you for the double tea!” said Lysbet mischievously.
“Thank you in advance for the gingerbread. I shall hold you to that!” he threatened.
At the door he turned. “By the way, if they’ll let you squeeze in another visitor, I think Caroline would like to come to see you before you leave. She can introduce herself. I think she has something to say to you.”
“Of course I’d like to see her. But—‘to say to me’?” queried Lysbet.
‘So she says,” confirmed Richard. “And—I think I can guess what it may be.”
CHAPTER THREE
It was on the afternoon before Lysbet was due to go home that Caroline Ware was announced by Nurse Kaye as a visitor.
Lysbet, who was no longer confined to bed, was reading by the open window. When Nurse Kaye had departed to show Caroline up, she laid down her book and with the new deftness which her left hand was learning she powdered her nose hastily, peering critically into her compact mirror as she did so.
For some reason, though she had never particularly wanted to make her acquaintance at the Club, she wanted to meet Caroline Ware now. Ever since Doctor Guyse had suggested the visit, she had hoped that Caroline would come. Besides, she was faintly intrigued at his promise that Mrs. Ware had ‘something to say’ to her.
Caroline came in looking fragile and lily-like in particular contrast to the plump butcher-blue starchiness of Nurse Kaye who accompanied her. She was as petite as Lysbet had believed her to be and as pink-and-white as the doctor’s description of her. She had brought a bunch of magnificent sweet peas and she carried them gently cradled in the crook of her arm before laying them on Lysbet’s lap.
Watching her with the flowers in her arms as she crossed the room Lysbet thought swiftly and for no apparent reason: “She’ll look just like that, walking up the aisle when she marries again.” For no woman could doubt but that Caroline Ware would marry again one day: it could not, surely, be long before some man would feel impelled to offer the protection of his name to all that soignee fragility that was Caroline... (As for that hasty powdering of her own nose just now, it had done nothing whatsoever to meet this competition! But—was she in competition with Mrs. Ware? If so—why?)
She bent over the sweet peas, taking their scent delightedly before looking up and saying: ‘They’re lovely. Thank you so much. But you shouldn’t have brought them—”
Caroline sat down, took out her cigarette-case and offered one to Lysbet.
“My dear,” she said in her clear, bell-like voice, “I couldn’t very well do less. And I simply had to get R—I mean Doctor Guyse—to introduce me to you, as it were. Because, you see, I’ve got the most abject apologies to make to you!”
She blew a smoke-ring with skill and looked far from abject as Lysbet echoed: “Apologies? To me? What for?”
Caroline’s eyelashes were lowered until they brushed her cheeks. “Because I suppose I’m wholly to blame for your being here at all!”
Lysbet stared at her. “I don’t think I understand, Mrs. Ware?”
“Well, just as you were going to do that last dive—you had been doing some marvellous things, by the way!—I called Richard’s—oh, dear, I can’t remember to call him Doctor Guyse when we’ve been friends for so long! I called his attention to you. You see, we’d been talking business rather earnestly and he wasn’t paying much attention while you and Mr. Cooke were doing your stunts—”
(Oh, wasn’t he? thought Lysbet, piqued.)
“—so, as he’d been asking earlier who you were,” went on Caroline, “I said to him something like “Look at Lysbet Marlowe’ or I may have said simply “Look at Lysbet’, because I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve wanted to know you for quite a long time and everyone calls you Lysbet at the Club, don’t they?”
Lysbet nodded absently as she began to understand. “So it was you?” she asked. “I thought someone called my name, just as Barry and I were on the point of going off the board.”
“I’m afraid it was,” admitted Caroline. “I didn’t realize that my voice could carry so far. I mean, it’s not exactly strident, is it?” she added complacently. “But directly I saw you hesitate, I knew that I had put you off, and I hardly had a moment’s peace with my conscience until I admitted to Richard what I’d done and told him I’d like to come and tell you how sorry I was.”
“Don’t you think that he may have realized himself what had probably happened?” asked Lysbet interestedly.
Caroline shook her head. “I shouldn’t think so. I told you he wasn’t taking much notice of what was going on. Until, of course, he realized that you were hurt, and then he race
d like a hare. I’m afraid, you know,” she added sweetly, “that people aren’t nearly as interesting to Richard as patients are! He’s so terribly keen on his work...”
“Yes, I’ve realized that,” agreed Lysbet a little flatly. “But please don’t think any more about the other thing, Mrs. Ware. I’d hate you to go on thinking that my breaking my shoulder was all your fault. At that point, anything else in the world might have put me off in just the same way. And even Doctor Guyse has made it amply clear that he considers I was asking for the trouble that I actually got!”
“He hasn’t been rude? He can be—insufferably so. Shall I scold him for you?” asked Caroline with a pout and with an air of being upon the verge of a lapse into baby-talk.
“No. It doesn’t matter,” said Lysbet dryly. “He merely left me in no error as to what I deserved.”
“Well, of course there was that incident in the Club drive as well, wasn’t there?” inquired Caroline innocently. “I don’t suppose he let you off that, either. That was why he was asking me who you were—”
“Doctor Guyse said you wanted to say something to me,” put in Lysbet quickly. “Was this it?”
“Yes, of course. I had to get this apology off my chest before you went home.”
Lysbet said nothing for a minute or two while Nurse Kaye brought in her tea-tray and set it on the table beside her. She was expecting a slight sense of anticlimax. The doctor had promised that Caroline had ‘something to say’ to her. Was this rather exaggerated apology the whole reason for the other girl’s anxiety to visit her? Apparently it was. For Lysbet was modestly unconscious that Caroline had snatched at her first opportunity to know Lysbet Marlowe of Falcons—and what better chance had offered than this?
Lysbet said, changing the subject: “Doctor Guyse tells me you are acting as his secretary now?”
Caroline looked at her watch and grimaced. “Yes. I shall have to run in a moment. I’ve got to fetch Ian—he’s my little boy—from school before I go over to Richard’s for evening surgery.”
“D’you like the work?”
Caroline grimaced again. “All those white overalls!” she said expressively. “They do depress me rather. I never did look my best in kitchen-wear of any sort. And I’m still finding my way about the surgery gadgets. Richard gets a bit impatient—I can’t imagine how anybody who understood him less well than I do could hope to get used to his ways before he threw them out on their ear!”
“You’ve known each other for a long time?” asked Lysbet.
Caroline stood up, gathered her bag and gloves. “Ages and ages. I don’t suppose there’s a thing I don’t know about Richard, though the poor lamb may not realize it. That’s why, when he asked me to take on his secretary-receptionist job because he couldn’t find anyone suitable for it, I knew that although the work might be so much Greek to me, I was probably the best person for it, understanding Richard as I do . But look here, I must fly now!”
Lysbet held out her left hand with a nod of apology towards it. “I’m going home tomorrow,” she told Caroline. “But do come and see me again at Falcons. Your—Richard—I mean Doctor Guyse—will be coming out to see my shoulder now and again I daresay. Why not get him to bring you with him?”
“On a professional visit?” mocked Caroline. “Why, he’d have a fit at my suggestion! But I’d like to come under my own steam, if I may?”
“Yes, do. I’ll ring you up, shall I?” promised Lysbet. When her visitor had gone she found herself wondering how much, if at all, she liked Caroline Ware. She was lovely to look at of course, and she wanted to be friendly. But for some reason her air of possessive proprietorship of Richard Guyse was something which Lysbet found irritating. And why had Caroline been at such pains to emphasize that the doctor’s interest in Lysbet herself was far more professional than personal?
Did that matter? Of course it didn’t! But there had been the way in which Caroline had conveyed the information—so sweetly, so obliquely and so meaningly! Was it possible, thought Lysbet, embarking upon a daydream in which she had been indulging lately, that Richard—yes, he could be called Richard in a daydream!—did really like her a little bit that Caroline, who ‘understood’ him so well, knew it and had wanted to find out for herself what sort of a person Lysbet was?
Presently she remembered and had a quiet chuckle over the two very different versions of Caroline’s engagement as secretary-receptionist to Richard. On the one side there was his seeing it as a duty owed to his dead friend; on the other was Caroline’s making a virtue of the necessity of getting Richard out of a difficulty. Lysbet found herself in little doubt as to which version to believe. Richard had been so sincere—he wanted to justify it to himself. He had seen it as his duty, and quixotic and short-sighted though it might be, he had done it.
Lysbet closed her book, reached for the stout writing-pad and pencil with which she had been amusing herself lately, practising writing with her left hand.
In a shaky, childish roundhand she wrote a few words at random, looked at them critically with her head on one side, and re-wrote one or two with more care.
What a very useful thing ambidexterity would be, she was thinking idly as, almost without her violation it seemed, her pencil began to trace out another word. ‘R-I-C-H-A-R-D’ went the slow, faint scrawl across the paper, and then below it, at an uncontrollably upward tut—L-Y-S-B-E-T G-U-Y-S-E.
Lysbet stared for a second at her handiwork and then, with a little shout of laughter, crumpled the paper into a ball which she burnt at the flame of her cigarette-lighter.
“You are a young idiot!” she told herself. And there was no one to tell her that she shared that kind of folly with every girl who had ever learned what it was to be in love, to hope—and to find writing materials to her hand...
There seemed to be a kind of flowering luxury about Falcons on the day it welcomed Lysbet home.
It was not only a blossoming of the gardens, with their banked terraces and closely shorn lawns, but a gentle welcoming by the house itself, with its pleasant, cool rooms, though the casements were flung wide to the sun.
On the writing bureau in her own room stood a tall vase of flame-colored early gladioli, while on the corner of her dressing-table was a crystal ring-bowl holding a posy of tiny flowers which, at a glance, she realized Mrs. Tempest herself had arranged. No one else would have filled that bowl with such exquisite, minute care.
Her eyes went to it even before they were caught by the flamboyance of the flowers across the room. She turned impulsively to her aunt who had accompanied her upstairs, saying; “You did those—for me!”
Mrs. Tempest took off her hat, passed a hand over the deep waves of her lovely hair. “Of course, darling. It was either that or some bunting saying ‘Welcome Home, Lysbet’ over the drive gateway. And I thought you’d probably prefer something quieter! It is nice to have you back again, you know.”
“It’s lovely to be here!” Lysbet slipped her sound arm about her aunt’s waist. There was a slight darkening to, her eyes as she added seriously: “Sometimes I think you’re too good to me, Aunt Alicia. I owe you everything—”
There was no repulse to the girl’s embrace, but almost imperceptibly Mrs. Tempest had moved away before she said with a smile: “Nonsense. This is your home. You must always think of it so, and take everything which it has to offer you for granted. That’s what homes are for. And that’s what your Uncle Everard meant Falcons to mean to you. I’m doing for you only what I know he would have wished.”
The words were warm and kind, but for some reason Lysbet experienced a sudden sense of chill. She had never before been so conscious of her obligation to her aunt and to her dead uncle; until now she had indeed taken every item of the comfort and luxury of Falcons for granted and had scarcely ever been inclined to question her right to any of them.
What could have happened to her during the very few days since her accident? Was it possible that these new, disturbing thoughts had arisen since her meeting with
Richard Guyse—or with Caroline Ware, who had a small boy to support and who worked for her living—or even since her realization that the two of them—Doctor Guyse and Mrs. Ware—formed, by their work together on the same job, a kind of team, however imperfect? Did she perhaps envy Caroline, partially because her work made her independent, but even more because she was in a position where she could serve Richard?
With none of this very clearly defined in her mind Lysbet smiled back at her aunt’s reflection in the mirror. “I still think that you’re too good to me,” she said. “But I won’t talk about it if you would rather I didn’t. Would you like to see how dexterous I am with one hand?”
Mrs. Tempest sat down on the bed and watched her niece with amusement. When she rose to go she said: “Well, lunch won’t be long before it’s ready, darling. I’ve got two of the dear old biddies from the Garden Party Committee coming for it. By the way, when do you expect to have a call from your Doctor Guyse? Did he see you before you left the Hospital this morning?”
Lysbet shook her head. “No. But he said he would be coming over to see me some time during the next day or so. And die hospital physiotherapist has given me some exercises to do, to get my shoulder supple again.”
Mrs. Tempest turned with her hand upon the door knob. “Well, when he comes, you’d like to ask him to stay to luncheon, I daresay. Couldn’t you ring him up and find out when he is likely to be calling?”
Lysbet was bent over the task of fastening the clasps of the dressing-case which she had just emptied; the dark curtain of her hair had fallen forward over her face, hiding the childish flush which rose in her cheeks. “I—oh, I don’t think I’ll do that, Aunt Alicia. He probably doesn’t know just when he can come. Doctors don’t, do they? I mean, they’re always so busy and all that!”