The Waiting Room

by Bess Norton

  “Not in the same place, thank God. But he bumped it a fair crack on the edge of the sink. We’ve put him to bed. He’ll be okay, Lanna—not to worry.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “Oh, Alan—I’m so sorry!”

  He put his arm around me and hugged. “Let’s eat. We can’t do any more until he comes around. Dallas is with him.”

  “This would happen. Don’t we have enough trouble?” I lamented.

  I gave Alan his food, put Dallas’s on the hotplate and sat down again. “Shall I go up and let her come down?”

  He shook his head. “Not for a minute, love. I’d rather eat looking at you, if you don’t mind.”

  I went around the table and kissed him. “Me too, Alan.” I ran my fingers into his dark hair. “To think this was going to be the grand announcement scene, and here we are with the audience upstairs!”

  I brought him fruit and coffee and then went up to relieve Dallas. She was sitting on the wide windowseat in Simon’s room, watching him. I said, “Will you go down and have your lunch now? I’ll stay here. Is he conscious yet?”

  “No. I can’t imagine what you were doing to leave the place in that state!” She got off the windowseat and moved toward the door. “All right. You can stay with him. But let us know the moment he comes to.”

  I reached out to feel Simon’s temple. His pulse was quite strong. Dallas leaned forward and inclined her head. “Is that an engagement ring?”

  “Yes. I received it this morning.” Defensively I put my hand behind my back.

  “But it’s an opal!”

  “Yes. Don’t you tell me it’s unlucky!”

  She softened visibly. “I wasn’t going to. I just thought you were to have an emerald.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” I told her. “Alan knew I wanted an opal.”

  She actually smiled. “Alan? Well, I congratulate you! I hope you’ll both be very happy.” She held out her hard little hand. “Thanks. Now do go and eat, won’t you?”

  I watched her go and then stood looking down at Simon. His color looked a little better already. There was nothing I could do for him except to renew the wet compress Dallas had left on his head. The bruise didn’t look too bad to me, and there was no sign of any fracture. I sat down by the window to wait.

  He was quiet when Alan came up. "Listen here,” he said. “You’ve still not eaten. I do have eyes in my head, you know. Just you go down and eat, there’s the girl.”

  The brainwave hit me when I got down into the hall. I looked up the undertakers’ number in the book and rang them right away. Yes, they said, Mrs. Tarsh was to lie in their private chapel until the funeral. They had already called.

  Then I rang Johnson. He sounded glad to have someone to talk to. “I wonder if you could help us,” I said. “Mrs. Cox has scalded her hand, and—”

  “I’ll come right away, Miss!” he said eagerly. “With pleasure.” He must have run all the way. Panting he arrived at the kitchen door. “Be glad to have something to do, Miss,” he told me. “Now you just leave it all to me. I’ll do the dishes for you, and then I expect the coal buckets will need filling, won’t they? And isn’t this the day for cleaning the surgery?”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “How did you know?”

  “Oh, I’ve had many a chat with Jessie Cox. I can manage her job, Miss. You just leave it to me. I’ll soon have everything shipshape.”

  “Bless you,” I said. “Then I’ll go up and get on with doing my own room. I know it’s a morning job, but I never seem to get around to it until the afternoon. Oh, and will you answer the telephone while I’m up there?”

  He promised that he would, and I left him happily plunging his short arms into a sinkful of suds.

  I peeped into Simon’s room. Alan stood up quietly and came over to me. “About the same,” he told me. “Did I hear a masculine voice downstairs?”

  “You did. Johnson’s.”

  “What on earth—? Oh, clever stuff! You got him to double for Coxy, did you? Bright girl. I never thought of that. Do him the world of good. Keep him as busy as you can.”

  “I shall,” I promised. “That was the idea.”

  I stood looking down at Simon, hoping his lashes would flutter or that his hand might move, but he was still deep. “Not got compression, has he?”

  “No. Not a sign of it, so far. I think he’s gradually creeping to the surface. Give him another hour or so.”

  “What about your calls? I’ll come and stay now, and you can get on.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I can’t, Alan. Don’t make me.”

  He frowned and left the room; a few minutes later he was back with a tray. “Look—scrambled egg. I defy anyone not to be able to let that slip down. And tea. Now get on with it.” He kissed me lightly as he went out.

  I did try. But even the egg he had scrambled so carefully wouldn’t go down. After I’d tried a bite, I went to the bathroom and flushed the rest away, so that his feelings wouldn’t be hurt. When I got back Simon’s eyes were open.

  For a few moments he simply looked at me. Then he put out one hand and I took it in mine. “Lanna,” he said. “You weren’t hurt, were you?”

  “Hurt?”

  “Didn’t I crash the car?”

  My lips were tight with tension. “No,” I told him. “You didn’t crash the car, Simon.”

  “But we were going to Abbots Bromley, weren’t we?” He frowned again and turned his eyes to look at the room. “Why am I in here?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I said slowly and clearly. “You slipped on the kitchen floor and banged your head.”

  It was no use. He wasn’t even listening. He was simply looking at me, looking at me exactly as he had in the inn at Lichfield, infinitely sweetly. I couldn’t bear it. I went to the landing rails and called Dallas. She came up right away.

  “He’s conscious,” I said. I stood back and let her go to him. “Feeling better, Simon? Head hurt?”

  “Yes, it does,” he admitted. “But Lanna—she isn’t hurt, is she?”

  She looked across at me and I made steering-wheel gestures and tapped my temple. Then she bent over him again. “No, Lanna isn’t hurt. She wasn’t there.”

  “She was! She was in the car with me, I’m sure. She ... Where is she?”

  “I’m here,” I told him. “Just you go to sleep again, Simon. You’re a bit muddled.” I ran my fingers over his face to close his eyes. “Go to sleep, my dear.”

  Out on the landing I said, “Well, you see what’s happened.”

  “Yes, it’s obvious. I think I’ll get Dr. Soames to come in and look at him. What an odd thing—but then, it’s just the sort of thing that can happen. Look, give him a shot of pethidine, will you? And I’ll see if Dr. Soames can drop in today. He’ll be at the hospital today—we might be able to persuade him.”

  I left Dallas on the phone and went to the dispensary for the pethidine. Simon hardly winced when I put the needle into his arm. “Pethidine,” I explained. “Relax, Simon.”

  After I had put the syringe away I went back upstairs and finished tidying my room, and Alan’s. Then I sat on the top stair, outside Simon’s room, where I could hear if he spoke to Dallas. She found me there nearly an hour later. “If you haven’t anything more to do,” she said, “you may as well keep an eye on him while I finish my round.”

  She made it sound very generous. I said, “Yes, I’ll do that. Perhaps you’ll ask Johnson to bring me a cup of tea when he makes one for himself?”

  Johnson came and went, and the sun began to go down, and still Simon lay quietly. And then, about half past six, when I was wondering where Alan was and who was taking surgery, he moved. I went over to him at once, and saw that his eyes were open. “Simon?”

  He looked straight at me. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I’d forgotten. She’ll never understand...” He closed his eyes and frowned weakly.

  He was rambling. I eased his pillow. “Go to sleep,” I said. “Everything
will be all right, Simon.”

  I watched him sink back into slumber.

  When Dallas came up with Dr. Soames, tubby and scrubbed-looking, she said, “Has he talked?”

  I shook my head. “Only rambling stuff.”

  She stood back to let Dr. Soames go to the bed, casting me a look that sent me scampering downstairs.

  Alan was just locking the surgery entrance. He looked dead-tired. “What’s all this?” he asked me. “I hear Simon’s been remembering things.”

  I nodded.

  He sighed heavily, and a frown line formed between his eyebrows. “All right. But if he remembers—well, where do we stand?”

  I held up my left hand. “This is your ring, Alan.”

  He held me close against him for a second, and then went up the stairs two at a time.

  All three of them came down together. Dr. Soames looked pink and satisfied. Alan was saying, “Right, sir. We’ll fix that. I’ll phone right away.”

  They shooed the man out the front door, and then Alan came back to the telephone, where I was still standing. “Well?” I said.

  “We’re to send him back to the hospital just for observation. But he seems to think that—pethidine apart—Simon’s rational enough.” He began to dial.

  Simon lay with his eyes closed as I gathered the few things he would need. It was when I was collecting his brush and comb from the dressing table that I saw the ring-case, heart-shaped green velvet, with the Jewel Casket printed in gold. It was exactly like my own. Consumed with curiosity to see whether or not the emerald Mrs. Cox said she had seen was not just a figment of her imagination, I clicked the case open. It was empty.

  I frowned and set it down again. Behind me, Simon said thickly, “I’ve given it to her...” and then subsided again.

  I wanted to ask, “Given it to whom?” But I hadn’t the heart. Feeling a little sick, I finished packing his bag and took it down into the hall.

  Johnson had gone home, the ambulance had been and gone, and Dallas had gone down to the Cottage Hospital to see a casualty, before I had a chance to talk to Alan again. In the dusk, we took the lawn chairs into the yard where it was cool, and he gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. “Come clean, love,” he suggested. “Feeling guilty?”

  “I don’t know,” I turned to face him. “I don’t feel the same about Simon as I used to, if that’s any help.”

  “But does he feel the same about you?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid he does. He looked as though he did. I’m frightened, Alan.”

  “I’m frightened, too. I’m not afraid for you, I’m afraid of you. Of what you might feel was your—well, your duty, as it were. If you think Simon needs you, I’m sunk.”

  I laughed shortly. “I’m not so unselfish as all that! I’m not the self-sacrificing kind, Alan. Don’t have any exaggerated ideas about that. I want what I want, too.”

  “And what do you want?” I realized how careful he was being not to touch me, not to influence me.

  “I don’t know just now. I’m too tired to think.” And then I looked down at the blue glow of the opal on my finger. It was darker than ever in the gloaming.

  After a while Alan stood up, very tall and dark against the turquoise sky. “When you know what you want,” he said shakily, “you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

  I couldn’t say anything. I sat there for a long time after he had gone in. It was quite dark when I took the chairs inside. Before I went up to bed I rang the hospital to inquire about Simon. I got what I deserved—“fairly comfortable.”

  Next morning they said the same thing. Johnson was vacuuming the consulting room. When I put the receiver down he said, “Any news of the doctor, Miss?”

  I shrugged. “He’s about the same, I think. We may hear more later, when Soames has seen him again.”

  “I expect you’ll be going to see him, will you?”

  There was no reason why I shouldn’t. If I knew Johnson, he was quite capable of managing the house for the morning. “Could you prepare lunch, if I do?”

  He nodded eagerly. “I could make up a nice salad and a pudding,” he suggested. “About half past one?”

  “Will you? Bless you, Johnson. Then I’ll go over after breakfast.”

  “Over where?” Alan asked, coming up quietly behind me.

  I swung around. “I thought I’d call and look at Simon ... or are you going?”

  “No, I shan’t have time.” His eyes were searching my face. “If you want to go, maybe you’d better.”

  “I think I should.”

  He watched Johnson go back to his polishing, and then he took both my hands in his. “I love you,” he said simply. “I love you enough to fade out—if that’s what you want.” He was very pale.

  Shaking my head dumbly, I ran to fetch his bacon from the hotplate. Dallas came down and poured coffee for herself, and when she had taken it away Nurse Green hurried in, her blue hat askew and her face drawn. “I’ve only just heard,” she said abruptly. “How is he?”

  I let Alan tell her. I sat there wordless, myself, blinking incredulously. Nurse Green was committing a dreadful professional sin. She was wearing jewelry with her uniform. A square-cut emerald, in fact.

  Nobody rang to tell us that Simon was on his way home. None of us had expected him. And even if we had, we had no idea he would just come walking in under his own steam.

  I was alone, ironing handkerchiefs in the kitchen, when he arrived. I stood staring at him across the big scrubbed table. I had singed one of his best Irish linens before I collected myself enough to set the iron on its heel and say, “You’re back, Simon!”

  He nodded. “Yes, I’m back.” His eyes held me. “Lanna—we must talk. I’m in the most frightful mess...”

  “Yes.” I switched off the iron and led the way into the sitting room. I sat in a small armchair and lit a cigarette. “You talk,” I said. “I’ll listen. But don’t pull any punches.”

  He sank into his own big chair on the other side of the hearth. “I don’t know what to do, Lanna. Or what to say.”

  Whether or not he knew what to say, he went ahead and said it. Beginning all over again with Midge. And the way he’d loved me right from the start and still did. Then we came to it. “It seems like a dream now,” he told me. “It was all quite logical at the time. I had it all worked out. I needed a wife—just like that—and I set out to find one. In cold blood. You turned me down, so I proposed to the next on the list. Marion Green. Seemed to me she was the next best thing...”

  “And she accepted?”

  “Yes, she accepted. Once she knew you weren’t interested.”

  “But I—”

  “I know, Lanna! Don’t rub it in! God, don’t I know? And now you. She says you and Alan—”

  “Yes.” I showed him the opal. “It’s true, Simon.”

  “I came right away, as soon as they’d let me get up. Lanna, what are we going to do?”

  “What can we do?”

  He was beating one fist in the other palm and biting his lip; strained lines were about his mouth. “It isn’t too late. We have to sort it all out now, before we go any further. It isn’t fair to any of us. Lanna, I married a second-best once before, remember? Not again. And you—will you be happy?”

  “What about Marion?” I said. “You can’t just drop her!”

  “She isn’t in love with me, Lanna. She was in love with Tony Brandon, and she’s never forgotten him. I’m a second-best for her. It’s all wrong...”

  I twisted my ring around and around on my third finger and thought furiously. Alan loved me and I couldn’t let him down. But Simon loved me, too. It all depended on me. It was more than I could handle.

  “Come here,” he said softly. He held out both arms.

  I remember, at school, making patterns with iron filings on a sheet of paper, with a horseshoe magnet. That was how it was with Simon. The mixed-up scatter of emotions that was me disintegrated and reformed itself into an S-shaped pattern obediently. I had
no more chance than those iron filings of remaining unaffected or breaking his heart thudding against mine—both racing—when Dallas strode in.

  She stood in the doorway and frankly stared at us; then she came on in and shut the door behind her. “I guess you’ve some explaining to do,” she told Simon.

  Releasing me he turned to face her. “Yes? About what, Dallas?”

  “Why—” she gestured wildly with her hands—about everything! First you’re not supposed to be here. Or are you? And second I understood that Lanna was—”

  “Engaged to Alan? She is. Until she decides not to be.”

  Dallas whirled around on me. “Then you’d better make up your mind, shouldn’t you? I think it’s disgusting, all this...”

  Simon walked over to the door and opened it wide. “It doesn’t very much matter what you think, Dallas,” he told her quietly. “And I shall be back on duty tomorrow. You’d better pack, I think.”

  She went.

  I looked out at Alan’s broad back as he idly swung his club among the white daisies on the lawn, and I think there was some, kind of explosion in my head. Certainly that was how I felt. I was so stretched between the two men that something had to snap. “I want to go away for a while,” I told Simon tensely. “I must, Simon. I can’t take much more. I have to think—” I looked wildly around the room. “There’s nothing that Johnson can’t do. Simon, let me go.” I took in a deep breath. “Now!”

  Even while he was nodding, saying, “But of course...” I was out of the room. Ten minutes later I was heading south in the Metropolitan.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A light was burning in Sister Gregory’s office as I walked across the empty parking lot, and I tapped on the window. She was not even mildly surprised. Maybe, I thought, that is the difference between experienced nurses and other people—they have lost most of their capacity for surprise and flutter.