The Waiting Room

by Bess Norton

  She went to the door and looked back. “I’ve no patience with you,” she said wearily. “You’ll find out, Lanna. I can’t convince you, because I know I’ve an ax to grind. Obviously. You’ll have to work it out for yourself. You’ll have to accept Simon as he is now—or do the other thing.”

  What, I wondered, was the other thing?

  CHAPTER TEN

  I had to wait until Alan was in surgery before I could talk to Simon alone. He was lazing in a lawn chair on the grass when I went to him. Smiling up against the low sun, he held out one hand to me. “Come and sit down.”

  When I was settled on the grass beside him, with my face turned away, I said, “Simon, I want to ask you something.”

  “Ask away, Lanna.” He put his fingers on the nape of my neck and ran them into my hair, making me shiver. “What is it?”

  “You knew all along about Mrs. Tarsh’s house, I suppose?”

  He sat up straight and his fingers stopped moving. “No, not until you told me.”

  “Didn’t Alan tell you? Didn’t he tell you before you wrote to Marion Green? You mentioned it to her, I thought.”

  His face told me nothing, but he began to stroke me again and leaned back. “Surely not. I can’t have. And why should Alan tell me?”

  “But did he?” I pushed his hand away and faced him. “Simon, don’t you see? I must know!”

  “Darling, what difference does it make?”

  He smiled down lazily, as though nothing had changed in the least, and played with the ends of my hair.

  I tried to tell him. “Don’t you see—if you did know about it, it alters everything. You weren’t ready to put me before the house and the practice after all. And you told me—”

  “Isn’t all this rather childish?” He had stopped smiling. "Suppose Alan did tell me—not that I remember it—it makes no difference. Whatever I gave up or didn’t give up, Lanna, I still want to marry you.”

  It was no use. There was a cold breeze blowing across the garden that chilled my heart as well I stood up. “You told me a lie. I can’t take that.”

  “Darling, be your age! I made a mistake, perhaps. I certainly hadn’t taken it in that—”

  I couldn’t listen to any more. I left him sitting there, looking after me as I ran into the house and up to my room. When I had stopped crying I tidied the bed again, washed my face and saw clearly for the first time that I had worked things out all wrong. It was not a question of choosing between Alan and Simon at all. It was a question of choosing between a life of my own, and a life devoted to one of them. The third choice had stood there all along, and I hadn’t even recognized it. Work was the answer—and work as far as possible from Retby and everyone in it. I had been right in the beginning—anyone could do my job there.

  But before I put a call through to Allanby I waited to see Alan again.

  I caught him alone after supper, moodily walking around the yard. I fell into step with him. “I think I know now what to do,” I began. “But first I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes?” he went on walking without looking at me.

  “Did you tell Simon Mrs. Tarsh had left me the house? Did you, Alan? I have to know.”

  He broke step for a moment, and then went on again still looking down at the gravel. “Yes, I told him. Was that wrong?”

  I stopped where I was. “No, it wasn’t wrong. I just wanted to be sure.”

  “Why?” He looked up at last. “What difference does it make?”

  “It changes everything.” I swallowed. “It’s canceled the only real reason I had for thinking that Simon really cared about me.” And then, because his eyes were lit up briefly with a flash of live interest, I ran forward and took him by the hands. “Alan, I’ve been such an utter fool—”

  I didn’t know, until then, that Alan could be savage. He hurt my wrists as he pulled his hands free and threw mine down to my sides again. He was very white; “Don’t!” he told me sharply. “Don’t touch me, Lanna. It’s over; it’s finished; it’s done with. Let it go.” And then he turned away quickly and hurried back toward the house, stumbling a little as he took the short cut across the rockery bank.

  I was positive then. The only constructive thing I could do, after the muddle I’d made, was to go back to Allanby and begin my life again where I had broken it off months before. There was no longer any question about that. Without me, Simon and Alan would settle down again and somehow sort out things for themselves. There was no longer any place for me.

  Ward Six looked quite stunning. It was the first ward to be decorated in the new colors the management committee had pressed for. It was hardly recognizable as the shabby old place I had loved so much. There was green and daffodil everywhere instead of the old liver and cream. And every bed had a bright yellow and gray spread. I smiled wryly at my new staff nurse. “I had a car with this color scheme once,” I told her. “My favorites.” And then, although it was no business of hers, and very likely of no conceivable interest, I added, “I must be mad not to buy another. I could afford it now.”

  She nodded. “You miss it once you’ve had one, I suppose.”

  Our first intake of patients came during the afternoon, and I was glad to get back to work in earnest, preparing two of them for the operating room, making out new reports on report, and filling in telephone inquiry lists again. Even the papers were daffodil colored, too, instead of the old buff ones. They ought to have cheered me up, but somehow they didn’t quite succeed. I was not yet properly back in harness.

  By Friday evening we were packed, and the morning list left us with so many post-operative cases that I was still on duty when Nurse Hemming came on. I stayed to give her a hand until after nine o’clock. Then, in the dimmed light, the ward began to feel familiar to me again. I stood looking down the row of beds before I went and said, “You’re lucky, Nurse. I often wish I were back on nights.”

  “Do you, Sister?” She raised her eyebrows. “But why?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something about a ward at night that’s quite unlike anything else. It’s an unforgettable atmosphere. I don’t think you’ve lived until you’ve done at least three spells of nights. The days belong to everybody, but the nights belong to senior night nurses, I think.”

  She grimaced. “I’ll be glad to go on days again. This is my second shift on nights since the spring. I’ll be staffing for you next, I suppose,” she added.

  “I hope so. You want to, Nurse?”

  “Yes, I’d like to. Sister, please go off duty! You shouldn’t have stayed. Everything’s under control now.”

  I had stopped being a help; I was an intruder. I remembered how I had hated it myself, on night duty, when officious ward Sisters had insisted on staying on, invading our night peace with their daytime authority. The night nurses had their own world, and I had no right in it. “Of course,” I agreed. “I’m going now. I know you can manage beautifully. It was just that it would have been rather a rush if I hadn’t waited till that colostomy came to. Good night, Nurse.”

  She opened the swing door for me. “Good night, Sister. And thank you.”

  I was the last of the day staff to go down. All the wards were quiet as I slipped down the stairs. But there was, as usual, a light in Sister Gregory’s office when I passed it. I would go in and chat to her, I promised myself, after I had had supper.

  Eating alone in the half-lit dining room I had time to take stock. I had my ward; I was all set for a permanent career in hospital—if I wanted it. But did I? I thought of the alternatives. There was only one that would have meant a thing to me and that was out. Right out. I didn’t even know where Alan was.

  I was still sitting there, over a cup of cold coffee, when Sister Gregory came in to put out the lights for the night.

  “You’re late!” she said. “I thought I was the only one left over here. What have you been up to?”

  “I was late on the ward,” I explained. “We had a mighty long list this morning—it seemed to go
on all day.”

  “So you had to stay on?”

  I nodded. “You can’t ask the nurses to stay—it’s hardly fair. They have a long day as it is. We do have breakfast an hour later, after all.”

  “I suppose there’s something in that. Well, if that coffee’s cold you may as well come down ad have a fresh cup in the office. I’ve not had my nightcap yet.”

  “Finished your lists?”

  “Nearly. Coming down?”

  She flicked the lights out, and we went down in the elevator, and along to her office. I stood at the window looking out at the parking lot, remembering how I had stood there and watched Simon’s car nosing into the corner more than a month before. And then I leaned nearer the glass and caught my breath. Exactly as it had happened before, headlights were whitening the cliff of the Admin, block; a car was turning in, moving slowly over to the empty corner by the dispensary windows. In the light of the outside lamp I saw it quite clearly. It was the Metropolitan.

  As I went off duty the following evening I decided to attend the monthly College of Nursing meeting. Walking back to the residence the quick way, through the ward block, instead of taking the long path through the garden, I cannoned head on into Alan coming out of the gynae ward.

  In his long white registrar’s coat, I hardly knew him. We stood there by the elevator, staring at one another blankly. And then I managed to say, “Alan! What are you doing here?”

  His face lost its stiffness and dissolved in a quick smile. “Giving myself a refresher course before I do my diploma.” He stepped a yard nearer. “I want to take the R.C.O.G. diploma—I told you.”

  I didn’t remember. In fact I was almost sure he had never told me anything of the kind. But it didn’t matter. I wanted an excuse to laugh hysterically, but I said, “I suppose you wanted to do something about the Mrs. Bridgers of this world?”

  He nodded soberly. “Partly.”

  “Only partly?”

  He breathed in. “I wanted to be near you,” he said simply. “Does that worry you?”

  “Worry me!” It was very odd. I had wanted to laugh, but something seemed to have gone wrong with my reflexes because there were tears trickling down my left cheek. “No, it won’t worry me.”

  He looked over his shoulder at a group of nurses coming along the bottom corridor and pushed me quickly into the old elevator. Then he reached over my head and pressed the top button. “The roof,” he explained. “No traffic up there.”

  Neither of us spoke until we were out on the flat roof, five stories up, leaning on the stone balustrade and looking down over the sparkling lights of the hospital and the streets. Away down below us I could just make out the garden and the bench by the flower banks. It looked infinitely small and unimportant. And Alan, big and dark against the purple sky, dominated the whole world, including me.

  Very carefully, not touching me, he said, “We’d better know where we stand, Lanna.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t have spoken without stammering.

  He turned toward me, and I could feel his warm breath on my face. “It’s true, isn’t it, that you and Simon are all washed up? I understand Marion Green’s wearing her ring again ... But that isn’t the point. What matters is how you feel about him. Tell me.”

  I looked down at the little world of the ghostly garden and then up at the limitless sky. And halfway between, real and near, stood Alan. “I think he was the ghost of an old dream,” I confessed. “A nostalgic excitement that I couldn’t resist. I thought he was still a real person, but I know now that he isn’t.”

  Wanting the security of reality, I put my hand under his big one on the cool balustrade; he gripped it tightly. Then he lifted it and looked down at my bare fingers and bent his head to kiss them one by one. “I love you,” he said. “But I had to leave you free. You had to be happy, Lanna.”

  I looked at his dark head bent over my hand and touched his hair awkwardly. “I don’t want to be free,” I told him. “I know now. I’m sure.” He lifted his head to look at my face, which I hid from him. “When Simon sent the car,” I went on, “I thought it was all closing in on me again. Like Fate. And I—”

  “Not the car.” He shook his head. “I bought it from him, Lanna. Partly because mine has had it; partly because it had been yours. It’s ours now.”

  “Ours?” A warm current flowed from the hand he was still holding and surged up into my face.

  “If you’ll have me.” Still holding my fingers, he reached into his pocket with his other hand; my opal ring shone green and gold in the moonlight. I let him slide it onto my finger, and then I went into his arms. It was like coming up from dark water into the air and sunlight. In his first kiss, everything that had been topsy-turvy miraculously righted itself. In his second there was reassurance.

  While he was kissing me I thought for the last time of the house at Retby, of the big white room that could have been mine. I knew then, safe against Alan’s thudding heart, that houses and rooms and practices and gardens were just the trimmings. The only place I really needed was the space between his strong arms. Under his long, slow, searching kisses I was roused so deeply that the quick flash of heady excitement I had always found with Simon seemed a very little thing, a tiny tinsel star compared with a great blaze of white light. I opened my eyes at last and looked up into the purple and silver night. I forgave Midge for everything; and hoped somehow, she understood.