by Anne Durham
The R.M.O. said something else and marched off, obviously altering his mind about coming into Gwenny’s room at all. And then, to her surprise, the door opened and Catherine Allen came in.
She was carrying a vase of roses. She seemed to be surprised that Gwenny was lying there staring at her.
‘Oh,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘What are you doing, little one? I thought you were under!’
‘Who are those from? Those aren’t mine,’ said Gwenny, hating Catherine Allen for being on such terms that she could call the R.M.O. ‘darling ‘openly.
‘They must be, cherub, because they have on them a card marked “Gwen Kinglake”. You, I believe?’
‘Who are they from?’ Gwenny asked blankly.
‘No idea, little one, but you may look at the card if it helps you,’ said Catherine, smiling broadly and holding the card for Gwenny to inspect. But it didn’t help. The card was printed in block capitals.
‘The florist did that, no doubt,’ Catherine remarked. ‘It’ll be from a beau. Only men in love send a bouquet like this. What’s he like, cherub?’
Gwenny wished Catherine Allen wouldn’t call her silly names. Out of sheer perversity, she said, ‘He’s much older than me, but very distinguished-looking and quite rich.’
Catherine looked astonished. ‘When are we to see him? Does he know he can visit you any time he likes after two-thirty?’
Gwenny said sourly, ‘Do you think I’d have a rich man friend visit me in this place, looking as I do? Don’t be silly! Besides, he’s a secret from my parents, so please don’t tell anyone.’
That was belated, Gwenny thought sourly, and inept. It was quite clear that Catherine Allen was going to rush right out and tell everyone that the little one in E-15 was hiding a rich man years her senior.
Still, it scored off Catherine Allen and wiped the silly smile off her face, Gwenny thought.
Catherine lingered. ‘What does this rich man do for a living?’ she wanted to know.
‘Now do you really think I want to talk about him, nurse, now I’ve said he’s supposed to be a secret? Besides, hadn’t you better go and do the jobs you all get a rocket for not doing?’
Catherine grinned, ‘I suppose your sister has told you that. Not to worry—I collect so many rockets, one extra, more or less, won’t hurt me. Tell me, do you get disturbed by people outside your room at night?’
‘Which night, and which people?’ Gwenny snapped.
‘Oh, well, I was thinking. Other patients in this room get the idea that people are on the fire stairs. I know I said I’d come in that way, but it was only a joke, it was really!’
‘Have I said I heard you on the fire stairs?’ Gwenny said mildly.
‘No, but you might have thought you had,’ Catherine murmured, watching her.
Gwenny shrugged. ‘I haven’t, but if the R.M.O. likes to bring girls in that way, it’s no concern of mine.’
Catherine’s face took on a pretty mask of complete astonishment. ‘The R.M.O? Brings girls in that way? On the fire stairs? The old devil, wait till I see him again! I’ll have something to say to him about that!’ and she went out, still softly chuckling.
Gwenny stared puzzled at the door. That was too natural to be put on, that astonishment, yet obviously Catherine Allen was a consummate actress, because whoever else had been on that fire stair, she certainly had. There was no mistaking her voice and her footsteps, especially after she had told Cosgrove she was coming in that way from the dance. Gwenny supposed that any nurse who went out with the R.M.O. would do her best to protect him from gossip, if she wanted to go out with him again.
On that disturbing day, Arthur Peake drifted in. The R.S.O. had no real need to come into Gwenny’s room, but he did, with a nice friendly grin, and a nice engaging explanation of why he should want to come in.
‘I don’t want to cut any little bits off you—I just want to see what my friend Mark Bayfield has got in here, which seems of such interest. And now I know!’
‘Am I of such interest to him?’ Gwenny asked, with a frown. ‘Does that mean I’m going to be cured soon?’
‘Oh, come now, I didn’t say that, now did I?’ he protested, sitting by her bed. ‘In the first place, I doubt it, because you won’t come clean about what you’ve been up to! I know they all ask you from time to time, because I hear them saying so. How about confiding in me—what do you get up to in your spare time?’
‘You’re not very well up in your facts, Mr. Peake,’ Gwenny said sourly. ‘They haven’t told you that my life is one long round of spare time, and that no one cares whether I’m alive or dead, and that I go and bother complete strangers so I shall find someone to talk to, because it’s so lonely not being wanted.’
He looked rather taken aback, and then he laughed. He was another big young man, hearty, tough, strong, with the kind of ginger hair that has brown overtones and looks like burnished copper. Gwenny didn’t know whether she liked him or hated him, but she didn’t believe for one moment that he had come in exclusively to find out the cause of her illness,,
‘Oh, come now, you’re pulling my leg,’ he told her. ‘I’m serious, you know. People do things and get contaminated without realizing it. For instance, in my own field, a chap was experimenting with something and it splashed over his foot and I finished up with amputating it, but he hadn’t a clue as to what had caused the whole thing.’
Gwenny looked alarmed, so he said hastily, ‘Not that I’d have any excuse to do such a thing to you, my dear. But it is a viewpoint. Another point of view is the case of the old dear who was being treated for—well, never mind, the long Latin name won’t mean a thing to you—and it was discovered she’d caught a pox from one of her own diseased chickens. Do you like feeding hens, by the way?’
‘I loathe them,’ Gwenny said clearly. ‘Stupid things!’
‘Ah, well, that settles that, doesn’t it? Pity. I rather fancied trotting to our R.M.O. and telling him I’d solved his riddle all by myself, and handing him the answer on a plate.’
‘Is that how you are with each other? Making a joke of scoring off the other person?’ Gwenny was shocked and showed it.
‘I say, chuck it, dear,’ the R.S.O. begged. ‘You’re a doctor’s daughter. You know better than to look shocked at our good humour and funny little ways. Anyway, I’m about to be kicked out, it would seem.’
But he wasn’t. The nurse who came in was Catherine Allen, and she looked all gooey and receptive, Gwenny thought sourly; and frightfully pleased to see him, though hardly surprised. It struck Gwenny that they had arranged a rendezvous in her room.
Gwenny was quite indignant. ‘I want to sleep,’ she said, ‘so would you please go out, Nurse Allen?’
Catherine Allen merely smiled broadly at her. ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ she appealed to the R.S.O. ‘She gives me a verbal slap in the eye every time I come near her. You wouldn’t think it of her, would you? She looks such a dear baby!’
He agreed. ‘But the little frail types are often spitfires, you know.’ And he smiled at Gwenny in a pleased way.
‘Why don’t you both go out on the fire stairs if you want to talk to each other?’ she snapped. ‘Nurse Allen likes the fire stairs. She has parties out there with the R.M.O.’
That brought a surprised stare from the R.S.O. and then both he and Catherine Allen gave a surprised snort of laughter, and for some reason were choked with smothered laughter. Finally, they both waved to Gwenny and went out. Both immersed in each other, she saw.
What a lot they were! Catherine Allen was said to lead a very complicated love life, but that seemed to Gwenny to be the understatement of the year. She wondered what the R.M.O. would have to say if he heard that Catherine Allen was now keen on the R.S.O. That girl! It was the way she looked at men. It was awful!
They went all to pieces, just over one of those gooey smiles of hers, with her eyes all big and wondering and inviting. Gwenny hated her.
Tilda visited Gwenny that day, and took to coming i
n every day from then onwards. She looked much thinner than Gwenny remembered her, but she seemed friendly enough. She came in every day, presumably for someone to grumble to, about being caught here in hospital.
‘It isn’t as if there’s anything the matter with me beyond this arm,’ she complained, ‘and heaven bless us, I’ve been off a horse before now! It’s that R.M.O. of yours. He suspects internal injuries all the time. The other patients tell me so. The last R.M.O. threw them out as quickly as he could, to get beds for new patients, but not this one! It’s as if he’s praying for something unusual to come up, so that he has a new disease to play with—so the nurses say. Your sister Priscilla among them.’
‘Oh, Priscilla! Don’t take any notice of her,’ Gwenny said sourly. ‘She hates him. But then all my family do.’
‘Yes, I know. Your Laurence was telling me. Why do you suppose it is that the R.M.O. wants to do your family harm? Has he got real cause to hate them?’
‘I don’t really think he does, you know,’ Gwenny said. ‘That’s funny—I never thought of that before! No, I think it’s my family who hate him. Well, you can guess why!’
‘No, I can’t. Not really. You tell me,’ Tilda invited.
‘Well, Laurence wanted the job of R.M.O. here,’ Gwenny said unwillingly.
That amused Tilda. ‘Silly boy, he isn’t good enough. I shouldn’t think any hospital would have him for R.M.O. I think he’d be better mucking out stables, if you ask me.’
‘Who, our Laurence?’ Gwenny was shocked.
‘That’s right. Oh, I’m batty about him, but I’m bothered if I’d like to think that he was the only doctor within miles. I suppose—’ She looked at Gwenny consideringly. ‘I suppose he’s never said, in passing, how much he cares for me?’
Gwenny said, generously, ‘He’s mad enough about you to make my parents pretty wild. I hope I’m not being tactless, but you know what they’re like. I mean, they do rather expect him to attend to his work and not keep nipping over to your people’s farm to waste time in the stables with you!’
That seemed to please Tilda very much. ‘You’re being as tactful as a load of old bricks falling on me, but never mind, Gwenny! It’s sweet music in my ears.’
It pleased Tilda so much that she came to sit with Gwenny the next afternoon too, while the garden party was on.
‘Don’t you want to go out there with the rest of them?’ Gwenny asked in surprise.
‘Not allowed to. I might like a go at the rifle range, but I expect it’s pretty well watered down, being on hospital premises, but it’s definitely out for me,’ Tilda said.
‘Laurence is coming, I think,’ Gwenny ventured.
‘At least, I got the impression he was, from something my mother said—or was it my father? I don’t know, but anyway, if you want to slip off and see my brother, I don’t mind.’
Tilda saw Laurence, from Gwenny’s window, but of course she couldn’t go down. ‘I wonder if he’d come up these fire stairs to see me, if I could attract his attention?’ she murmured.
‘What can you see?’ Gwenny asked wistfully.
‘Not much. People wandering through to the back lawns where the side-shows are, but the well-dressed part of it is down below, of course. Funny, how people put on their maddest clothes and try to behave all special, at these hospital affairs, isn’t it?’
‘There was a pair of field-glasses,’ Gwenny offered. ‘I had them and they took them away from me, the day my mother came and upset me. If you were to go and ask Sister, she might lend them to you, if you made it clear they weren’t for me.’
Tilda thought it a good idea. She hobbled out and came back with them in triumph.
For a girl with a buckled arm and leg she was in amazingly good spirits, Gwenny considered. But then wasn’t it the way with these horsy people? Get half killed on the hunting field and hobble about in plaster for weeks and they still look as if everything’s wonderful, but some malignant fate is keeping them trussed up and unable to mount a horse’s back. Gwenny lay and considered the horse lover, but as usual got no further. They were an alien race and she had never understood her own brother Laurence getting caught up in a passion for a horsy woman.
Tilda gave a running commentary of what she could see from the window. ‘I can see Arthur Peake, your R.S.O. Do you like him?’ And without waiting to hear if Gwenny did like Arthur Peake, she continued, ‘I seem to have lost sight of Laurence, but I can see your sister Priscilla, with a tall thin young man with fair hair.’
‘And glasses?’ Gwenny wondered.
‘That’s right. A rather square face. He looks tough.’
‘Daddy used to talk about him. He rather liked him. It’s Ralph Milward, the casualty officer. I only met him once. He doesn’t say much,’ Gwenny mused.
‘I can see your mother. Will she be coming up?’
‘I doubt it. She’s probably here to meet any influential people she can get interested in her good causes. I wash she’d just be at home baking and sewing and comfortable things like that. She’s so energetic and she gets so bitter if people don’t run round in circles about her old ladies.’
Tilda snorted. ‘Her old people loathe her for what they call her unwarrantable interference, but I expect you are well aware of that.’
Gwenny wasn’t, so she didn’t say she had thought anything about it.
‘And your father is around, looking angry as usual. You know, if I didn’t think it a quite daft idea, I would think your father was aching to get back into hospital service again. Am I daft, do you think?’
Gwenny didn’t answer that one, either. She was sorry to hear that her father had made it so obvious to others.
‘But he needn’t worry,’ Tilda went on, half to herself, as she searched the crowds below for a sight of Laurence. ‘He’ll never get back here, not if your R.M.O. knows anything about it.’
That did arouse Gwenny. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Because the Bayfield family just about run things around here,’ said Tilda. ‘I’m just glad they don’t reach out their grubby little hands and interfere with my interests. Oh, I know they prevented Laurence from coming here ‘
‘I never understood how,’ Gwenny breathed.
Tilda shrugged. ‘It was a matter of Boards and Committees. After all, Sir Giles and his wife are on just about everything. Well, Sir Giles is your R.M.O.’s uncle, s; ‘
Gwenny took that like a bucket of cold water over her head. She lay there thinking about it, and it came on her all of a sudden that ‘my nephew ‘whom, the consultant had been chuckling over was Mark Bayfield all the time, and she hadn’t even realized it. What had he said about his nephew that day, when he had accused her of suffering from nothing more than simple hysteria? She couldn’t remember, because at the time she had thought his nephew was someone else, someone she had met but not known. She lay there thinking furiously about it and so missed what Tilda was saying. She realized that all was not well when Tilda turned sharply from the window, her usually white face flaming with anger.
‘So it’s true, then! What a mug I am to think your Laurence could be soppy over me! And I thought the Bayfields weren’t going to touch me!’
‘What are you talking about?’ Gwenny demanded. Tilda put the glasses down and hobbled to the door.
‘Your dear Laurence is down there enjoying himself with your R.M.O.’s sister!’ she snapped, as she went out.
CHAPTER VIII
Gwenny didn’t even know that Mark Bayfield had a sister. She lay there thinking about it, and the next time Cosgrove came in, she tackled her.
‘What sort of family has the R.M.O. got? A big one?’ she asked, in an innocent little voice.
Cosgrove gave her a sharp look. ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ she said, and started to laugh. ‘If you want to know anything about his family, you ask him yourself, duckie. Don’t drag me into it. There’s enough gossip over him and the time he spends in this room—though I must say you and he didn’t sound very matey the last time it
was my unenviable job to stay in here all the time!’
And that was as far as Gwenny got in that quarter. She tried one or two other nurses, framing the request for information in different ways. But no one would say. One nurse frankly said she didn’t know enough about the Bayfields to venture any opinion, and the other—of whom Gwenny had artfully asked if Sir Giles had a daughter—said she wasn’t in the least interested in the domestic pursuits of the consultants and that Gwenny had better tackle Sir Giles about it herself.
She gave it up, but as the next visitor was her brother Laurence, it rather put it out of her head. Laurence looked odd, like a small boy caught out in some mischief.
She said so, and he grinned amiably, which wasn’t a thing she had expected.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘I’m in the dog-house. Not unusual, I suppose, but it really is a bit thick. You see, Tilda’s mad with me now!’
‘Yes, so I heard,’ Gwenny said drily.
‘Then you know why, I suppose,’ he said glumly.
‘I suppose you were being more cordial than necessary to a relative in the other camp,’ she said sourly, and as she herself was very much divided against the R.M.O. for never having mentioned that he had a sister, she could afford to be receptive towards her brother for once.
‘Well, the thing is,’ he said, putting his hands on the rail at the end of her bed and preparing to confide in her, ‘I was having a good old laugh with her, and I just so happened to have my arm round her waist, but Tilda ought to know that with a chap like me that doesn’t mean a thing!’
‘Better watch out,’ Gwenny observed, with feeling. ‘The R.M.O. may not feel too happy about it either, if he hears. Didn’t I gather from someone or other that he personally kept you from getting the job you wanted, in this hospital?’