New Doctor at Northmoor

by Anne Durham

  ‘Who was it?’ Gwenny asked Cosgrove, who came in later with her meal.

  ‘That? Oh, that’s Catherine Allen,’ said Cosgrove, with a rather calculating grin.

  Catherine Allen. It sounded to Gwenny’s ears ever so slightly familiar, and she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that that name was going to have an impact on her life. Yet she couldn’t imagine why. Catherine Allen, the girl with the complicated love life! Gwenny could understand that. Catherine Allen’s full eager mouth had been trembling a little as she had looked at the houseman, and he had been hard put to it to keep his eyes on the leaping mercury while he measured Gwenny’s blood pressure.

  Catherine came to help Cosgrove make Gwenny’s bed that evening. Catherine was full of the coming garden party, and she spoke in that rather breathless husky voice, as if she found everything too exciting for words.

  ‘Are you going, Cosgrove?’ she murmured.

  ‘If I can get away. I like side-shows and things,’ Cosgrove said, giving her attention to her corners.

  ‘My latest heavy date’s coming,’ Catherine told them, and she caressed the words. ‘He’s a sweetie. Can’t manage his own affairs, poor lamb. Parent trouble, family trouble, boss trouble—the lot! But he adores me.’

  ‘They all adore you, Allen,’ said Cosgrove, without rancour.

  ‘Does anyone ever die in here?’ Gwenny’s clear little voice came suddenly, from below them.

  They looked down at her in astonishment. She saw they had forgotten all about her. She was just another bed for them to have to make. Cosgrove grinned delightedly, but Allen affected a shudder.

  ‘Horrid little one, don’t talk about such things,’ she begged, in her dreamy voice.

  ‘Why not? People do die, don’t they?’ Gwenny said sturdily.

  ‘Nurses have many superstitions,’ Cosgrove told her, now quite seriously. ‘And one of them is that if you mention death, someone dies within a three.’

  ‘Well, of course someone dies within three months,’ Gwenny scoffed, but Catherine Allen said quickly, ‘No, the three means hours,’ and she shuddered again. ‘We pretend it isn’t there, and with luck it goes away.’ Gwenny thought that was a very weak outlook and she wondered how it was that such a girl had started to be a nurse. She put her puzzlement to Catherine Allen, who observed cheerfully, ‘For the fun, little one. It’s a good life on the whole, provided one doesn’t take seriously the many scoldings. They used to take bets on me as to whether I’d get through a day without a rocket, but they lost their money. They gave it up. Not to worry. I don’t.’

  ‘What, not about anything?’ Cosgrove jeered. ‘Not even Big Brother?’

  Catherine Allen hesitated for a second, then said, breathlessly, ‘Same principle. If I pretend he isn’t there, he goes away. Anyway, I’m less than the dust to him, really.’

  ‘Let’s hope so, the things you get up to,’ Cosgrove said unfeelingly. ‘How are you going to manage on Saturday, when you go to that dance at the Royal?’

  Catherine Allen’s face creased up into one happy soft baby smile. ‘I’ve got a plan,’ she said. ‘These stairs, just outside ‘but the smile vanished, and she broke off, looking bothered as Cosgrove frowned at her and shook her head.

  ‘What stairs?’ Gwenny wanted to know, but they teased her about having big ears and both went out laughing.

  Gwenny was determined to find out, and got the information from the unsuspecting woman who cleaned her floor. She had pebble glasses and a lilac overall that fought with her florid complexion, and she admitted at once that it was only a disused fire staircase, and that the door was kept bolted on the inside. Gwenny felt better about the door being kept bolted, until she remembered that it had been part of Catherine Allen’s bright idea to use those stairs.

  The next time the R.M.O. came, Gwenny waited for the advent of Catherine Allen, but quite surprisingly she didn’t come, although she had been haunting Gwenny’s room until them. A dumpy junior with glasses and a very efficient pair of hands came instead. It was more restful, if less amusing, to have someone who didn’t spill, bang, or jolt the bed, as she performed the many routine tasks. Gwenny could tell the time of day by the jobs that were being done, and the R.M.O. was much amused when he asked her if she’d been asleep and for how long, when she replied promptly, ‘I was asleep from the medicine round to the second filling of water jugs.’

  ‘You’re looking better,’ he said judiciously. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Marvellous. Honestly, it’s a long time since I felt so well. No peculiar pains, and I’d like very much to be wheeled to the window to see the garden party.’

  ‘Is that what you like—people, and stalls, and speeches and pretty clothes?’

  ‘No, not really, but it would be a change. Do you know what my range of vision is?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do,’ he said, and unexpectedly he got up to stand by her head and look. ‘Oh, I see your point. Yes, it is rather dreary—just the wall, the door and the little window in it. Well, just to prove to you that I’m not the cold callous individual you think I am, I’ll make special representations to Sister to have your bed moved so that you can see quite a lot outside. I can’t promise any comings and goings on the fire stairs because that staircase isn’t used any more. It used to be. Quite a lot of traffic up and down, but not any more. Still, in the other direction there’s plenty going on. You’ll be able to see the bridge across the grass, which leads to the Men’s Wing.’

  ‘What a thrill,’ Gwenny observed, but she thanked him, just the same.

  ‘And you’ll probably be able to just glimpse the visitors coming in at the main gate. You could do with a pair of field-glasses. That might be fun. Shall I see if I can get you some?’

  Suspicious as always, she countered: ‘Why? Why would you do that?’

  ‘A very base motive to get you interested enough to forget your own woes and help yourself to get well,’ he said, and got up to call a nurse, so that he could examine Gwenny.

  As he did so, his hand caught the diary and almost knocked it down. He stared at it, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, but all he said was, ‘Hello, where did you get that from?’

  ‘Present,’ Gwenny said. She had a mulish streak in her when he was asking a question, regardless of what the question was. She answered it as briefly and unhelpfully as possible, yet she couldn’t even have told herself why she felt like that.

  He looked as if he were going to ask outright who had made such a present to her, then altered his mind, and called the nurse.

  Gwenny thought he was angry. His face had that set, unforthcoming look which had been softened of late, since she had been in hospital. She couldn’t think why he should be angry, so she said, ‘My diary has good thoughts on every page. Aren’t you pleased that today’s adjures me to fight the good fight, whatever that may mean?’

  He finished his examination and grinned briefly at her, as if his thoughts just wouldn’t let him be serious. ‘You were born fighting, young lady,’ he said, walking off.

  They moved her bed within the next hour, and just afterwards the pair of field-glasses came up. No message came with them, and they were in an ancient leather case, and decently wrapped in brown paper. No one knew what it was until Gwenny, with trembling hands, opened the parcel. So he wasn’t so very angry with her after all, she told herself, and somehow that was important.

  They were heavy, but with rests in between she had a lot of fun watching nurses and men in white coats, porters and consultants, tread that path between one block and the other. The path led to a notice marked X-rays, and twisted round another way to a notice that said Nurses’ Home, and yet another way which had two signs on it: Residents’ Car Park and Path. Lab. Gwenny felt she ought to see quite a lot of happenings on that path, and also on the bridge above.

  The bridge was specially interesting. She discovered that the R.M.O. used it quite a lot, but always alone. She saw Matron go over the bridge with a portly bearded grey-haired
man, but she didn’t know that was Sir Giles Faraday, the R.M.O.’s uncle. She saw the efficient but bespectacled dumpy junior making double quick time across with some wet plates, without stopping to look at a single thing. And she saw Catherine Allen go wiggling across, with an admiring medical student behind her, and before long Catherine found that her shoelace was undone, which gave the student a chance to catch up with her and stoop to pick up something she had dropped. Then they walked across together at snail’s pace, talking and laughing.

  And she saw, from her bed, her own sister, walking with a young man. True, the young man wasn’t eating her with his eyes, as the medical student had ‘eaten’ Catherine Allen, but then Priscilla didn’t appear to be doing what Catherine had been doing—gobbling the student up.

  It was nice having the glasses. Gwenny saw her father coming in, and he hadn’t got her mother with him.

  It seemed a long time before he arrived at her door, and he said he could only stay a little while because he had a couple of patients to see.

  ‘Do I know them?’ Gwenny asked idly.

  ‘I suppose you do,’ he said, and seemed unwilling to say much about them.

  He said instead, ‘How are you feeling, my dear? What made them turn your bed round?’

  For no very good reason, Gwenny was reluctant to tell him why. All she could think of was that her father might not like to know that he was under observation from her window, while he was walking all the way from the main gate. So she said, ‘I daresay it was because I complained about looking at blank walls. I complain a lot, you know.’

  ‘Not you,’ he stoutly averred. ‘I never heard you complain before, my girl. Now tell me, is there anything you want at all?’

  ‘What have you got?’ she quipped, and grinned at him.

  ‘Nothing much, I’m afraid. I’m a very inadequate visitor. On the way in, I noticed everyone else had brought flowers or fruit or something. Are you allowed sweets?’

  ‘Oh, no, nothing so interesting. I tell you what I would rather like, if you can remember to bring it next time. There’s a little book on nursing on one of your shelves in the surgery. I meant to ask you to lend it to me before. Would it be one that Priscilla had?’

  ‘I daresay. What do you want that for?’

  ‘I was interested. The medical dictionary will do, if you can’t find it.’

  He snorted with unwilling laughter. ‘Now I’ve heard everything! You’ll be telling me you want to be a nurse next.’

  She didn’t fall for that one, but she did ask him, suddenly, hoping to take him off guard, who those two patients of his were.

  Her sudden question did have the desired effect, but she wasn’t sure afterwards whether she was glad or not. ‘They’re from Sansoms,’ he said shortly.

  ‘From Overberry Farm?’ Now Gwenny was really surprised. ‘Who?’ It mattered to her very much. She was friends with Willy Murray, who was learning to milk, and who wasn’t quite as old as she was, and she was also friends with old Tom Lilley, who had been shepherd at Overberry since she was born. She couldn’t bear to think of anything happening to those two.

  ‘Dick Sansom,’ her father said curtly. ‘Your brother Laurence’s fine friend.’

  ‘Dick? What happened to him?’ she gasped.

  ‘The new hunter kicked him,’ her father said, still, she noticed, in that curt, angry voice.

  ‘And who was the other person?’ she persisted.

  ‘His sister.’

  ‘Tilda? What on earth happened to her?’

  ‘She happened to be on the hunter at the time and it threw her.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, dear,’ said Gwenny. ‘Are they badly hurt? Silly question—I suppose they are.’

  ‘In point of fact, they aren’t. They were both damned lucky. Broken arm and broken leg respectively, but I’ve got ‘em in under observation, in case of internal injuries. Well, you never know, and I’m not going to have it laid at my door for not being careful in their case.’

  He went soon after, without having explained why he should be so angry about those two, or why he should have said that.

  Gwenny sighed, and took up her diary to record her father’s visit. The sight of the diary reminded her of another man’s anger—the R.M.O.’s. Really, men were the end, the way they got wild without any explanation, she thought disgustedly. She didn’t want the R.M.O. to get angry over small things like this, that she didn’t understand. She felt she could bear it if it was something big and important, that she could expect him to be angry about. At seventeen, her mind was still uncomplicated enough to be impatient with the strange little things that magnified themselves in the minds of older people.

  She opened the diary and felt for the pencil on its long cord, and again that folded slip of paper fell out.

  This time she rescued it and spread it open to read it.

  Tears spilled over her lids, and her throat constricted, as the full meaning of the R.M.O.’s anger became quite clear. The note was from him: not for Gwenny herself, since he hadn’t known she was going to be the recipient of the diary, but to the person he had sent it to—and that, so far as Gwenny could see, was her sister, Priscilla.

  CHAPTER VI

  All good things come to an end, the note read, but they very often leave memories to treasure. In the hope that this token will help keep those memories ... and it was signed ‘Mark ‘.

  She read it and re-read it, her face wet with tears. Why couldn’t Priscilla have said that there was something between them? Why let the family believe that he had merely snubbed her and that there was nothing beyond that?

  He came in before Gwenny had time to mop her face. He stood looking at her and at her hand, sliding over the edge of the bed to drop the screwed up ball of paper on the floor. Someone would clear it away, and that was all it deserved, she told herself fiercely.

  In doing so, her arm caught the diary and that toppled over and fell to the ground. He bent to pick it up.

  ‘Leave it, please,’ she said, between her teeth. ‘It’s of no importance. I don’t want it.’

  He bent and picked it up, all the same, and placed it in its open standing position, as he had seen it before.

  ‘It’s a useful record of the nice things that happen from time to time,’ he observed mildly. ‘I suppose it’s no use asking how you came by it?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll tell you,’ she said fiercely. ‘It was given to me, and there was a note in it, and if I’d known about that note, I would never have accepted it, never—never!’

  ‘How emphatic!’ he said, with his half smile. ‘I suppose you threw the note away.’

  ‘Yes, I did. It wasn’t for me, and I didn’t intend to read it. I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Would this be it?’ he asked, bending to retrieve the ball of paper, which he was well aware she had been reading when he came in.

  She closed her eyes. That heavy black square handwriting was Mark Bayfield’s. She had seen it on his notes as he stood with them in one hand, pinned to a board, and talked to Sister or Sir Giles. She wanted badly to have a note from him in that thick strong handwriting, a note as intimate as that one seemed to be which had been in the diary, and she was hating her sister with every scrap of her being.

  Mark Bayfield smoothed out the screwed-up ball and read it aloud, slowly and thoughtfully, and somehow in his reading of it the intimacy she thought she had seen in it fled. It was just a polite note, giving some small gift to terminate something.

  He said as much. ‘I remember writing the note, but not giving the diary, and I’m just wondering whether it was the diary that I gave at all,’ he said coolly. ‘Anyway, it’s come to your hands, and no one else appears to want it, so why not keep it?’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ she said thickly.

  ‘Pity. Useful thing to have, a diary. Especially one like this, with sayings in it. Here’s a cheer-up thought for tomorrow!’ and he read aloud: ‘And the night shall be filled with music, and the cares that infest the day shall fold t
heir tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away! He looked down at her, but she obstinately kept her eyes closed. ‘I always did rather like old Longfellow,’ he murmured.

  ‘I don’t,’ she muttered.

  ‘And why not, pray? I should have thought that sort of quotation might be a little help and comfort.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she jeered softly, ‘like that other one he wrote which goes something like: Trust no future, however pleasant!’

  ‘That’s hardly fair. You’ve taken it out of context,’ he said, but he looked at her with new respect. ‘You like poetry?’

  ‘Yes. Not the poetry that’s in some diary you once gave to my sister Priscilla, though. You did give that diary to someone, didn’t you?’

  Because she still kept her eyes shut, so that she shouldn’t watch his face, she missed his start and look of blank surprise. But she heard the nettled tone in his voice as he said, ‘In point of fact, yes, but it was not to your sister Priscilla that I gave it. Nor the note.’

  ‘I don’t believe that, Dr. Bayfield.’

  ‘I can’t help that. Any use asking how it got from her to you?’

  ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ she stuttered. ‘She came to visit me. She’s in this hospital, working. She brought me some presents. It isn’t like her, and I was thrilled. There were—oh, well, you won’t want a list of them, but that thing was among them. She just pushed the package at me and went.’

  ‘I see. Well, my dear Gwenny, I did not give her that diary, and if I told you who I did give it to, I’m quite sure you wouldn’t believe me, but do read the note again. It really does mean what it says—that, and only that. And it wouldn’t be to a young woman, I assure you, because I’m too old a campaigner to put anything into writing. In the world of hospital, notes do tend to drift into the wrong direction and end up in the wrong hands,’ and he got up and went, but the momentary pressure of his hand on her arm remained with her, sending tingles all up her arm and all over her body, making her angrily call herself names for caring one way or the other.