by Jane Arbor
Tessa’s head jerked up. “Camille has gone to the Races?” she echoed.
“Yes, dear. By car. Somewhere beginning with ‘C’. Chepstow, would it have been?”
“Cheltenham, I think.” Tessa hoped that no inflection in her voice had betrayed her mind’s plunge towards fear before it steadied to remind her that it was possibly the merest coincidence that Rex also had gone to Cheltenham Races today.
Lady Catterick accepted the correction graciously. “Cheltenham, of course. Camille, bad girl, rushed off this morning without telling me a thing. It was Challis, our chauffeur, who mentioned to me that when he was filling up with petrol at the village garage a young man who stopped there in a car told the garage man that he was in a hurry, because he was late for his appointment to take Miss Lejour to Cheltenham Races. And from Challis’s description I was able to recognise that charming Rex Girling. So kind of you, dear, to have brought him over to Usherwood for Camille! I told you to scold him, but I hope you weren’t too hard on him for that rather naughty escapade of theirs which left you stranded?”
Wondering that such matter-of-fact words could so threaten her personal world, Tessa heard herself say: “No. When he explained how it had happened, I understood.” She was thinking that, with suspicion turned so swiftly to fact, hope and fear need not nag alternately. Even the numbness round her heart was not pain—yet. And she was aware, for the moment, only of the over-riding mortification that Neil Callender should again have witnessed her chagrin at Rex’s hands. For she was enormously aware that he had already sensed her need to know she had Rex’s loyalty. And knowing that she had not hidden from him the shock which Lady Catterick’s story had been, she felt again a desperate lack of a barrier between his pity and her pride.
Almost immediately he rose to go, saying that he would not wait for Judith Wake any longer, as she must have been delayed on a case. Tessa went to see him out, and at the door of the room he asked: “If you weren’t doing anything more interesting, would you dine tonight?”
At once her sore spirit was on the defensive, trying to gauge the impulse which had prompted the invitation. And they were in the tiny hall, out of Lady Catterick’s hearing, when he went on: “I am taking Judith to a cabaret show at Rigli’s, and I thought if you’d care to join us, I’d rustle up another man and we’d make a party of it.”
Tessa was relieved. A foursome was different from the tête-à-tête she had believed he might be offering her; with him and Judith Wake and, for her own partner, a stranger who was unlikely even to know Rex, she could be at ease. Already beginning to dread an empty evening with her thoughts, she accepted, and the arrangements for the other three to pick her up later were made.
In the living-room Lady Catterick, about to leave, was adjusting her furs.
“There, dear!” she triumphed at sight of Tessa. “Didn’t I tell you that giant of a man was more interested in you than you tried to pretend? ‘Of no interest to you.’ And ‘just a doctor you work with’ indeed! And what do I find? That he calls in for tea at your fiat; that you meant to play golf together if it hadn’t rained “
Tessa protested: “You’ve got it all wrong, Godmother. I wasn’t expecting him to tea, and it wasn’t me he was planning to play golf with.”
“Not, dear? Oh, of course you were speaking of some other woman. But he was asking you to dine with him, and don’t deny it, for I heard him. And you needn’t tell whether you accepted or not. I don’t want to pry. But—just the merest sly puss of a god-daughter, eh?”
As Lady Catterick’s exquisitely gloved forefinger chucked Tessa coyly beneath the chin in farewell it seemed easier to let her go than to try to explain that the “giant of a man” was in love with someone else, and that in inviting Tessa herself to dinner he had had no other motive than to be kind.
Waking next morning, Tessa at first remembered only that she had enjoyed the previous evening beyond her expectations.
The dinner had been a good one; the cabaret excellent. She had found the other man of the party—a robustly hearty friend of Judith Wake’s—very easy to talk to, and he had a nice turn of flattery which had not to be taken too seriously. Neil Callender in dinner clothes was an impressive figure, and Judith, in classic simple black and without the horn-rimmed glasses which normally hid her fine eyes, had had a distinction of her own. She was open and friendly towards Tessa, and getting to know her better confirmed Tessa’s envy of the relationship between her and Neil Callender.
Their manner towards each other was matter-of-fact, casual, even no more than fraternal. But Tessa felt that it must hide a basic understanding which they did not need to express in words. Meanwhile it shut no one out and the party had kept its foursome character throughout the evening. It was a tonic which Tessa’s mood had badly needed, and she was proud of the near-gaiety she had achieved in spite of everything.
But that had been last night, and this morning there was likely to be only a continuation of the disappointment she had had to return to at the evening’s end. Before leaving she had asked the telephone exchange to switch any calls for her to the porter’s box. But his greeting to her of: “No message, Nurse!” had closed the loophole of hope that Rex might have lost no time in clearing the whole tangled web away.
This morning’s clearer thought indicated that if his deception had been planned he would make no move at all. For Camille had “rushed off” somewhere to their rendezvous, and he could not have known that his passing encounter with the chauffeur would have been reported to Lady Catterick. Everything, Tessa realised bleakly, pointed to the meeting having been clandestine, and everything was against the likelihood that Rex would volunteer explanations which he could not know she was expecting from him.
There, however, she was wrong. When the click of her letter-box told that there was a letter for her, Rex’s writing was on the envelope which lay there.
She tore it open eagerly, her eyes snatching in relief at the words “Camille” and “Cheltenham” here and there before she read it through.
Its candour was completely disarming to her fears. Surmising that she might be sick of the sound of the telephone, Rex had thought she would like a love-letter “for a change,” so after returning from Cheltenham (wishing all day that she had been with him) he had hastened to catch the last post.
Oh, and about Cheltenham, darling—he went on—you can’t mind, can you, that I took Camille Lejour? Overnight., the chap from St. Faith’s I was going with calmly announced his girl friend was to be alongside, so, not caring about the role of gooseberry all day and knowing that by then you were all tied up with Lady Catterick, I asked Camille. She’d told me that she adored racing, and though I warned her Cheltenham was no Longchamps or Auteuil, the kid was agog at being asked.
Of course I missed you sadly, but I knew you wouldn’t grudge her the day out. No dog in the manger, my Tessa. Anything but. In fact—and in the closing lines there were some foolish extravagances which Tessa found very sweet and the answer to all her doubts.
Before she went on duty she replied generously, gladly, and faced the day with a lighter heart than overnight she had thought possible. Probably she would not see Rex again until they went together to the Rugger Dance. And immediately after it he had some leave due to him which he was to spend at his home. But, reassured once more, she need not waste her substance in counting the hours until they met again. For, as long as she was happy about him, each day would consume itself in busyness, she knew. And in work that she enjoyed increasingly she was discovering a core of quiet satisfaction which was almost as rewarding as the heady ecstasy of loving Rex.
Nurse Hatfield had prophesied: “People will have accepted you as soon as you are ‘Nurse’ to everyone, whether you are on duty or off, in uniform or out of it.” And, early days though it was, Tessa had already been made to feel that she “belonged” to The Chase, with as many friends as she had patients among the children and the young mothers and the old people who knew and greeted her even before he
r quick memory could fit their own correct names to them.
She had one friend who was not a patient, in an elderly man named Furse who lived alone in a flat on the door below her own. He was retired from the Merchant Navy and was known vaguely as “the Captain” among neighbours with whom, however, he did not mix at all. His original link with Tessa had been through his canary which on fine mornings would carol its heart out at his open window. She had stopped on the pavement below to chirrup back to it, and the two of them had been raptly engaged in this pursuit when the canary’s owner came along. His gratification at Tessa’s admiration of his pet had lighted up his fine but austere face; they had exchanged introductions, and Tessa had found herself accepting an invitation to meet Melba the canary at closer range.
Since then she had always been welcome in the neat flat which was cared for meticulously but whose hospitality was offered, she believed, to no one but herself. That, she guessed, was Captain Furse’s tragedy—that a praiseworthy independence of spirit had turned in his old age to a deliberately sought isolation. He would sometimes talk of the past to Tessa, but there were gaps in his story, and she sensed that if they had been filled in they might tell of family troubles which he preferred to forget. He spoke of no relatives; no one of his own came to see him, and, so far as Tessa knew, he visited nowhere. All of which made his later news the more surprising when it came.
As one of his odd prides was his good taste in clothes she would play to it by displaying for his approval anything which she knew he had not seen her wear before. And when, on the morning of the day of the dance at St. Faith’s she took out the dress of palest green and white chiffon which she planned to wear, she decided to run down to show it to the old man.
At his door she waited for him to open to her, holding the dress against herself and spreading the fall of its wide skirt into a one-sided fan with her other hand.
She began gaily: “There! Am I going to look nice, do you think?” only to break off at sight of the sharp change in him. Though he did not look ill, the lips above his neat goatee were unsteady and his gaze was absent, as if he were looking beyond her to some scene she could not share. However, as she hesitated, not wanting to pry, he indicated the froth of chiffon over her arm and managed a smile.
“That’ll be the party frock, Nurse? Of course—come in and show it off. You mustn’t mind me. I—I’ve had some unexpected news.”
“I’ll come another time, Captain Furse. Tonight, when I’m wearing it, perhaps?”
He smiled again. “Then too, I hope! But come in now, all the same. My news was a shock, but it’s not private and I’d like to tell you about it if I may.”
In his living-room the sheets of an airmail letter were spread upon the table and one of several snapshots had fluttered to the floor. Captain Furse stooped to retrieve it and handed it to Tessa. “That’s my news,” he said simply. “A daughter whom I haven’t seen since she was a baby. And she is landing in England tomorrow!”
The snapshot was of a bright-faced woman in her thirties or so, and glancing from it to those on the table, Tessa saw they were of a bronzed man in shirt and shorts and two baby children playing by a swimming-pool. It looked, she thought, as if, in re-discovering a daughter, Captain Furse was acquiring a ready-made family as well!
She said gently: “I’m so glad for you. I expect you’ve guessed that I’ve wondered sometimes that you should seem to be so alone. Tell me about your daughter, won’t you? Would this be her husband? And these her babies?”
“Yes, Margery writes that they have a farm in British Columbia and they want me to join them out there when she goes back.” As if suspicious of a criticism Tessa had not voiced, Captain Furse added: “You’re thinking, maybe, that it’s a belated invitation? Yes, well—the reason is an old story and no fault of the girl’s. Imagine it—grown up, married and with two children without my knowing anything about it! It’s been such a surprise that just now—don’t think hardly of me for it—I found myself questioning whether I was more shocked than I was glad. Unnatural of me, you might say—”
Tessa laid a hand on his arm. “I shouldn’t dream of saying or thinking it. Of course you’d be shocked and apprehensive after all these years. But you’ll consider going back with your daughter, won’t you?”
“I don’t know. I’m a solitary old man and set in my ways. But I’ll welcome my girl. As—as I’d have welcomed her mother at any hour of day or night if she had come back.” With trembling hands he gathered the strewn sheets of the letter, creasing and re-creasing them nervously as he went on: “But she never wanted to come back. We hadn’t married for the same reasons, you see. I’d wanted—her. She just wanted a child. But she wasn’t frank about it early enough, and when she had had Margery she wasn’t woman enough to stand by her bargain. She didn’t want a husband particularly, but she couldn’t, as your generation says, ‘take’ the loneliness of being a sailor’s wife. She was a Sydney girl and she went back to her people. I never saw her again. When her home broke up she took a housekeeper’s job, and after that I had no address for her. And now Margery turns up, not from Australia at all!”
Tessa asked: “Is your wife still alive?”
“No. She had told Margery that she wouldn’t know where to begin to look for me, and the girl says she felt that she must respect her reluctance until she could offer me a home herself. After my wife’s death Margery traced me, as her mother could have done, through official channels. And tomorrow she arrives in England, coming, she says, to take me ‘home’.” Master of himself once more, the old man looked up at Tessa with a quizzical smile. “What am I going to say to that, Nurse—eh?”
“Ultimately—that you’ll go ‘home,’ I think,” smiled Tessa.
“Maybe. Maybe,” he nodded, and as he went to the window to try to coax Melba to break into song, Tessa believed that already his initial dismay was changing to happy expectation. And later, remembering that she had witnessed that veering of his mood, she was to be glad of the conviction it would bring.
She had to hurry off to duty, so they parted on her promise that she would run down to parade in her dance frock for him just before Rex called for her. She would not need to knock, Captain Furse said, as he sometimes “dropped off” while listening to the radio, and as he had no letter-box, it was his habit to leave his door ajar until after the newsboy had Hung his evening paper inside.
Tessa was glad to promise, as she was anxious to see how he would have weathered a day which could not but be filled by sunrise, if not by alternating fear and hope. But in fact she saw him again when she was returning from her morning’s work. He was coming out of the chemist’s on the Parade, and they exchanged a wave before Tessa drove on to the garage to put up the car.
That evening she changed in good time into the chiffon dress, pinning on Rex’s flowers as a fastening for its filmy green stole before going down for Captain Furse’s inspection.
As he had promised, his door was ajar, and after a perfunctory knock she stepped inside. But the living-room was dark and the radio silent, and though she stood puzzled and irresolute for a moment she decided that, as he would hardly have gone out, leaving his outer door open, he must have gone early to bed without waiting for her. She turned to tiptoe away, then halted, her whole instinct warned by a sound which had reached her from the half-open bedroom door.
Her blood chilled as she recalled how often at St. Faith’s she had heard that sound in the Casualty Ward or at postoperative bedsides. It was either the heavy stertorous breathing of the drunk, or it was a sign of the battle against coma of the dragged...
The drugged? Oh, surely not! Without realizing she had covered the short distance Tessa was already at the bedroom door, switching on the light. Captain Furse lay—no, was slumped, rather—on the made bed, arms outflung, his drawn, tortured breathing almost thunderous in the little room. And momentarily Tessa stared down at him, aghast, incredulous and stonily unable to act.
Then her training asserted it
self. She felt for his pulse, lifted an eyelid to note the pinpointed contraction of the pupil, then looked about her for some sign, some cause. There was nothing. If Captain Furse had done this thing deliberately he had laid his plans well.
But she could not believe it—would not! She must make a positive stand of her faith that when she had left him that morning he had been happy, newly confident, alert. If she could not carry that conviction to others the sordid consequences would only be beginning with the strident arrival of an ambulance; with police questions; with the buzz of gossip which would be open scandal by the time the old man’s daughter came But she was back in her own flat, dialing Neil Callender’s number, before she had prepared her old friend’s defence.
She said, “Nurse Greve speaking. Could you come urgently to Flat 17, Clive Mansions? It’s for Captain Furse, and I don’t know his own doctor, if he has one.”
Neil Callender’s voice answered: “I happen to be. I prescribed for him recently. What’s wrong?”
“He is unconscious in his rooms. I believe he may be drugged—an overdose of a narcotic, perhaps—”
“Were you called in to him?”
“No. He lives alone, you know, and I look in on him sometimes. I went down this evening and I found him—like that.”
“What has he taken? He has had no barbiturates nor any form of narcotic from me.”
“There’s nothing to be seen. But I didn’t stop to make a search. He—”
At that Neil Callender cut her short. “All right. I’ll be there inside five minutes. I’ll meet you there.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
As she replaced the receiver Rex was at the door. “Darling, you look marvellous! Like a bronze lily on a pale green stem. Come here—” His arms were held wide.