by Hilary Neal
“That’s all,” Mair echoed. “Easy when you know how. After that, I’ll have a cup myself. You want another, Mick?”
“Not for me, my love.” Out of the corner of her eye Fenella saw their hands meet and cling. “I’m going now. See you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, Mick. ‘Night.” Their hands fell apart and Fenella, filling the pot, turned round to wish Mick good night before Mair followed him along the hall to lock the front door after him.
When she came back, she said: “What was it all about? Or wouldn’t you know?”
“The—the accident, I imagine. But I don’t really know.”
“In that case I’ll go along and have a look at Gilda. Maybe she could hear them. You know, I think our David must have a very soft spot for her. And of course she is attractive, if you like that cool sort of beauty. But there, I musn’t gossip.”
“No.” Fenella’s cheeks were hot. “He’s known her for a long time. I don’t expect there’s anything more in it than that. It was a very brotherly kiss, after all. And all theatre people call everyone else ‘darling’, don’t they?” She was well aware that she was trying to convince not Mair but herself.
Stephen Ames lay watching the door when she went in. She smiled. “Here’s your tea, Steve. Sorry if I’ve been a long time.”
“You haven’t. You never are. I’m a nuisance.”
“Rubbish! What do you think I’m here for?”
He took the cup from her. “Not to fight my battles for me, at all events. Sorry about that. I can’t make Anderson understand.” He looked down at the spoon he was toying with. “Perhaps you don’t, either.”
“Understand what, Steve?” She could see he was not going to rest until he had talked, and she sat down in the chair by the bed. “Drink your tea. And swallow these tablets. And then tell me.”
After a minute or two he said: “Tell me, how bad is Gilda? Anderson won’t talk.”
She hesitated. David had said: “Ames isn’t to know anything about her,” hadn’t he? But surely he had meant: “Until I’ve talked to him myself.” And now he had. She took the empty cup from Steve and put it on the locker.
“She’s—improving.”
“But just what has it done to her?”
“It’s her leg, Steve, that’s worrying us most. She had a lot of bruises too, but that’s the main trouble. It was jammed in the door, you know.”
“Broken, you mean?”
“No, there’s no fracture. It’s the calf muscle. It was quite a job to patch up. I was in the theatre. Sir David made a wonderful job of it, but...”
“But. I see,” he said bitterly. “She’s finished as a dancer, is that it?”
“It’s a bit soon to say that.”
“But you’re saying it, aren’t you? I’m not such a fool as not to know that if there were any real hope you’d be sounding a darn sight more optimistic than that.” He rolled over away from her and put his hand over his face. “And I got off scot-free. It’s damnable. It wasn’t altogether my fault—whatever Anderson may think.”
“How did it happen, Steve? Or are you tired of explaining to the police and everyone?”
“Not too tired to tell you.” He reached out behind him to touch her bare forearm. “You’re sweet. Thanks for listening.” He turned or, to his back again, and closed his eyes. “She’d promised to marry me, an hour earlier. We’d had dinner in Birmingham and we’re hoping to make London by midnight. Coming through this place she said: ‘I’ve just thought—David Anderson lives here. Let’s go and see him.’ And I said: ‘So what? You’re engaged to me now’.” He looked up. “You see, she’d always talked about him a lot. She—she was fond of him, I suppose. Still is, maybe. And she kept on saying: ‘Let’s stop off and see him.’ ”
He was rolling the edge of the sheet between his fingers. Fenella waited, holding hard on to the sharp, cold edges of the bedstead. “And then—?”
“I said there wasn’t time. She had a show the next day, and she needed to get some sleep. And she suddenly lost her temper and caught hold of the wheel ... then I saw red. I’d been shaken when she’d accepted me, and I wasn’t feeling too secure about it—and then it seemed as though she thought Anderson was more important than either me or her work.” He laughed shortly. “Ironic, isn’t it? Her work always did get between us—and now it isn’t there any more the loss of it is dividing us ... So I knocked her hand off the wheel and put my foot down hard. And that was it.”
“What did you hit?”
“A tree stump, just on the edge of the curb. It had cat’s eyes on it, they tell me, but of course I’d missed them in the moment when she grabbed the wheel to try and make me stop. And evidently we turned right over and went down the bank at the side of the road, from what the police say. I just remember the steering wheel crashing into my stomach, and Gilda screaming and holding the door handle. Poor kid. She must have been terrified.” He looked up at Fenella. “And now, I suppose, she doesn’t want to see me again?”
She shook her head. “She wanted to see you tonight.”
“She did?” His face lit up. “You wouldn’t spoof, would you?”
“She said she wished she could see you. ‘If only I could see Stephen,’ were her exact words.” Fenella straightened the sheet and dimmed the light down. “You’ll sleep now, won’t you?”
“When can I see her?”
“Soon, I hope.”
“Anderson thinks I ought to have stopped when she wanted me to. He doesn’t understand that it wasn’t him I was bothering about nearly as much as seeing that she got rested before the show. I know her work has to come before most things—I’ve never deluded myself about that. But he can’t see it. He thinks I was just jealous. He’ll never let me see her.”
Fenella opened the door. “He will,” she promised. “You’ll see.” Going back to the kitchen with the cup and saucer, she wondered what had possessed her, whether she had any right to reassure Steve. Would David object to his seeing Gilda? And if he did, did it mean that he ... She shivered.
Later, when she was taking pulses in the children’s ward, she put her hand into her pocket to find her watch, and brought out Bernard Parsley’s note. She read it again by the light of her torch, with a tight little smile. There was no doubt about it now—the night had been far from quiet. When she went into the office for the pulse book she turned up Steve’s admission slip, out of curiosity. His date of birth was given as October 4th. Born thirty-two years ago. That absolved him. So David was her unfortunate contact? Looking back, she saw that every meeting between them had been, in the end, disastrous—either of itself, or in its consequences.
When it was time for the midnight meal she sought out Mair in the female linen room, and asked her: “How much of Mr. Parsley’s talk do you really believe?”
Mair pushed her cap back and studied her shrewdly. “What has he been telling you? To beware the Ides of March, or something?”
“Something like that.”
“Take my tip—as I told you, we believe the good things and discount the bad ones. That way we don’t worry too much about him. But one thing I’ll grant him—he’s awfully good at summing people up. He’s got our David taped, for one.”
“Why, what does he say about him?”
“Oh.—all kinds of things. That he’s impetuous, but just. That he never forgets an injury, but that he’s quick to forgive people who really repent. And that he’s destined for great things. And so on.” She smiled reminiscently. “He’s also predicted that he won’t be a bachelor much longer, if that interests you. Not that I can see him marrying into the noble profession, though.”
“I don’t know why surgeons ever do. Nurses see the worst side of them, all the time.”
“It isn’t that. It’s because he sees the worst side of the nurses, too. And he isn’t very easy to please. I can’t imagine anyone so perfect as to come up to his idea of what a nurse ought to be—so of course he must have a pretty dim view of most women, too.” She pu
t the last hot water bottle cover straight on the shelf, and turned round, looking keenly at Fenella with her dark eyebrows lifted. “You won’t get too fond of him, will you? I can assure you, you’d be wasting your time.”
“I won’t,” Fenella promised lightly. “He regards me as less than the dust, at the moment. He was...”
“Let’s go and eat,” Mair said. They walked along the corridor. “The point is, you can’t compete with Gilda. No nurse could. She’s lovely.”
And then the front door bell rang.
Fenella went to unlock the door, and David stepped inside. Instead of walking past her he stood still in the hall and looked down at her. His face was strained and tired, and there were little lines about his grey eyes.
“I—left my notebook in Ward Two,” he said quietly. “Will you fetch it for me?”
He made no attempt to go himself, but stood there looking at her until she answered. “Very well, sir. I’ll go and get it,” she told him. Her pulse was racing, and she could feel that her cheeks were flushed, and she turned away and went quickly down to Ward 2 to hide herself from his penetrating gaze.
He had left the notebook on Gilda’s bed table. When she brought it he took it without looking at it, and thrust it in his jacket pocket. “Thank you:” He began to inspect his finger nails. “I’m afraid I was rather abrupt, earlier on,” he said. “I hope you will forgive me. I was—rather worried.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, sir.” She backed away from him uncomfortably. “Please—it was nothing. I ought not to have interrupted you, I know, but...”
“Of course you ought!” His voice was rough. “You must always do what you think is right, without fear or favor. Always. Do you hear? You must never be afraid of anyone. And particularly not of me. Do you understand? Never.”
She looked up at him dumbly, and found his eyes only an inch or two away from her own, burning down at her with a new intensity.
His voice softened. “I’ve frightened you, haven’t I? I’m so very sorry. It’s the last thing...” His dark lashes came down over his eyes. “What more can I say?” He turned then and unlocked the door for himself, almost as clumsily as if he could not see the key properly.
He was at the bottom of the steps before she had collected herself enough to reply. And then it was too late. Locking the door again, she peered out into the darkness, and across at the lights of his house behind the trees opposite.
“Good night, David,” she whispered.
CHAPTER IV
WHEN Fenella fetched Bernard Parsley’s breakfast tray away he looked at her over the top of his glasses. “Quiet night?” he asked. “Have you been wearing those velvet gloves?”
“Velvet gloves?”
He nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes, my dear. You need them when it comes to dealing with headstrong people. They can unsheath their claws—but you musn’t. Not if you’re a young woman, at all events.”
“I’m afraid I had to unsheath mine a little, last night.” She opened the door, resting the tray on her hip. “And now I’m supposed to regret it, am I?” She ,wondered how much he had heard of her exchange with David outside Ward 4.
Mr. Parsley twinkled at her, and unfolded the first newspaper of the day. “And don’t you, my dear?”
“I’m...” She stopped, and smiled thoughtfully. “That would be telling. Anything else I can get you before I go off duty?” She waited for a moment. “No? Then I’ll see you tonight.” For once she was glad to turn her back on his shrewd, kindly face. Mr. Parsley, she felt, was altogether too observant.
She stacked the tray on Nurse Dennis’s trolley in the corridor, and went for a last look at Stephen Ames. He lifted a greeting hand. “You’re going off now? Have you seen Gilda?”
“She’s sleeping, Steve. She’s had a better night.”
“I’m sorry I was a nuisance to you last night.” He took the edge of her apron in his fingers and gave it an apologetic little tug. “Thanks for being nice. I hope Anderson won’t make trouble for you—for turfing him out of here.”
“I didn’t ‘turf him out’, Steve. I just wanted to speak to him, that was all. Forget it—it’s a new day. Maybe you’ll be able to go along in a wheelchair and see Gilda.”
He nodded, and sighed, and thrust his thin, nervous fingers into his red hair. “Maybe. But maybe not ... I say, are you going out this morning?”
“I can. D’you want something from the shops?”
“I’d like it if you could get some flowers—for her. Could you? Or would it be a pest? There’s two pounds in my locker drawer, if you can find it. Under the hankies.”
“Of course.” She found the money, and put it in her pocket. “What does she like? Roses?”
“Mm. Red ones, if you can get any. Those long pointed buds, you know. What are they—Étoile something?”
“Étoile de Hollande, you mean? They’re lovely. I’ll do my best—there’s a good little florist’s just down the road from here.”
“Thanks a lot. And would you ask whoever takes them to her to call in here for a note to go with them?”
“I will. I’ll bring them in myself, to make sure you get them. I expect I can slip in when Sister Cunningham isn’t looking—and she wouldn’t really mind, anyway, so long as she wasn’t forced to see me breaking the rules.”
After her own meal she hurried to change, and was back with a sheaf of dark red roses by ten o’clock. She slipped in at the side entrance and worked her way through a queue of outpatients in the waiting room. There was nobody in the main corridor except Kate, the ward maid, polishing the floor with her heavy bumper, and she went quickly across to Ward 4.
As soon as she opened the door she realized her mistake in not coming through the car park.
David, standing by the bed, talking easily for once with his hands in his pockets and one foot resting on the rung of the bedside chair, looked round casually as she halted in the doorway. He stopped in mid-sentence, and his face froze. Then his look ran from her face to the roses, and back again. “Once again, Nurse, I am engaged with Mr. Ames,” he said tonelessly.
“I’m sorry.” She began to back out again.
“Come in, please, Nurse Scott. If you have brought Mr. Ames some flowers, you’d better leave them, hadn’t you?”
She felt her cheeks redden. “But they’re only...” And then she saw Stephen gesturing a “scrub it”, moving his hand from side to side, and frowning. She went forward and laid the roses on the bed table. “There you are, Mr. Ames.”
“Thanks a lot. That was kind of you.”
Without looking at David again she turned and hurried out, and went back through the waiting room and down the road again to the shops, anxious only to put as much distance as possible between herself and David until her discomfiture had receded.
It was too early to order coffee in one of the cafes, and there was no other shopping she wanted to do. She would rather have been in bed, but she felt that just for a little while she wanted to get as far away from the hospital as possible, despite her aching feet. She had walked right through the little town, and was a mile outside it on the Birmingham side when the grey saloon nosed alongside and drew up a few yards ahead.
As she came level with it David leaned over and opened the nearside door. “You’d better get in, hadn’t you?”
“But you’re going to Birmingham.” She hesitated, playing with the door handle. “I must go back.”
“Then I’ll drive you back. Get in.” He moved back to his own seat behind the wheel. A staff nurse does not argue with a senior surgeon—and her training won.
Sitting beside him as he turned the car round at the next intersection, she glanced cautiously at his profile. Was he angry? It was impossible to tell. His face was almost without expression and his grey eyes were narrowed, watching the traffic, as the car shuttled' its way through the crowded, narrow High Street.
When they reached the hospital, he evidently had no intention of slowing down. He drove straight pa
st, and took the left-hand turning, by the signpost reading: “To the Common.”
“Where are you taking me?”
He shrugged. “Where would you like to go? It seems to me you need fresh air, without the labor of walking to get it. You must have been on your feet most of the night.”
“I’m due back—I have to go to bed.”
“Not until noon, I believe. Surely you can spare half an hour of your time? Or has Ames a monopoly? That young man seems to be getting thoroughly spoiled.”
She flushed. “That’s not fair, sir.”
“I told you before—I’m ‘sir’ in hospital, not outside. Of course it’s fair! You go rushing out to buy flowers for him. You come back in the wards when you’re supposed to be off duty—and in mufti at that...” He looked down briefly at her buttercup yellow cardigan and green pleated skirt, and a muscle tightened in his jaw, above the small scar. “But when I suggest a short drive for the good of your health, you talk about racing back to bed.” He crossed one hand over the other and pulled the wheel hard over to swing the car off the road and on to the springing grass of the Common. There he stopped, and switched off the engine. “Shall we get out? Or are you still in a hurry?”
He came round and opened the door, and she got out, avoiding his eyes.
“The Common looks lovely. So—unspoilt.” Her voice sounded inane and breathless in her own ears.
“Yes. But by August it will be a morass of waste paper, orange peel, broken bottles—all the disgusting debris of modern civilisation. And most of it will have been brought out from Birmingham by people with plenty of energy for carrying bulging carrier bags, and full beer bottles, but none at all for taking away their empties.” He swept a hand round towards the purple carpet of ling, fitting the ground between the gorse bushes. “Man’s inhumanity to man is bad enough—but his inhumanity to this kind of thing is something that sickens me.” He looked at her quickly. “Will that skirt be ruined if we sit down? Or shall I get a rug?” He half turned towards the car.