by Jane Arbor
Tessa whispered: “I don’t think I shall be betrayed into that. I’ve already accepted that it is—finished.” But at the thought that she had nothing to put in Rex’s place and that the man at her side uncannily knew it, her control suddenly snapped and to hide the childish crumpling of her face she dropped it into her hands.
“My dear!” An iron grip on her upper arm forced her to turn towards him. He waited until, ashamed of her weakness; she looked up. Then, in a tone rough-edged and bracing as winter frost, he said: “I counted that you didn’t want sympathy of the conventional sort, and I guessed you’d despise my pity. There remained only facts which experience has warned me of and which I believed you’d have the courage to face. So don’t say No., Tessa Greve. Don’t dare to tell me you can’t!”
Tessa thought, he is slapping the face of an hysteria patient, healing a wound with salt. But grateful that he should care enough to want to fortify her, she wondered how she could convince him that if she wept in the future it would not be for Rex but for all that she had squandered in loving him for so long.
She said: “Thank you for warning me. Tonight I still don’t know whether I’m more humiliated than angry or more jealous than either.”
Now both her arms were pinned into immobility by Neil Callender’s strong hands. He ordered sharply: “Forget jealousy. It’s a soul-destroyer, and while you allow yourself the luxury of it you’ll never be free. Try hard work. Try the courage that’s lent by outraged pride instead.” He paused, then bent to touch her brow with the lightest possible pressure of his lips. “That’s for courage—” he said.
He released her and she sprang back from him, disturbed beyond measure by the kiss, however little it had meant to him. As she stared at him, one hand at her burning cheek, he added: “If you cared less for Girling, I might have suggested that you should try falling in love again,” and then turned her about with a hand at her elbow without waiting for her reply.
When he left her at the auditorium doors she lingered to watch him stride away down the empty gallery, noticing idly as she did so that a flurry of white skirts had taken the curves of the staircase just ahead of him. Then she stepped into the dimness of the circle, letting the door swing to behind her.
The curtain had already gone up and on the stage the voice of the young actress playing Jessica was lifted to the lines—:
“In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne’er a true one—”
But, poignantly apt to her own case as the words were, they stabbed the less because Neil Callender had cared that she had been hurt. Had cared enough to kiss her “for courage,” without guessing how, in doing so, he had troubled her heart...
CHAPTER SIX
At the end of the performance Rex was waiting for her in the main foyer. She had thought he might be, and when he said: “Sorry I couldn’t make it in the interval. Sir Bartram had cornered me—” the lie mattered less than any yet.
She replied coolly: “I was sorry too. I had something to say to you—as I daresay you may know already from Camille.”
“Yes, well—I’m free now, and if you can fob off the gaggle you came with, I’ll drive you home.” But his jauntiness was forced, telling Tessa that anything he had not heard from Camille he had already guessed for himself. Without giving him time to explain why he was not on his planned motoring tour, she accepted his offer, and went to tell Hilary and the others not to wait for her.
In the car silence lay between them like a sword until they were many miles on their way. Then Rex began defensively: “About all this—I really am on a tour, you know. But there was this invitation from the Cattericks, so the chap I’m with hogged on as far as Shrewsbury and I’m to join him there. Anyway, how was I to know that you’d be here tonight?”
Wondering detachedly why she had ever been gratified by his eagerness to placate her, Tessa cut in: “It doesn’t matter, Rex. It doesn’t affect the main issue between us at all. And I think you know what that is as well as I do.”
“I do and I don’t,” he conceded sullenly. “Camille was full of virtue about ‘owing it to you to be frank,’ and she didn’t like it frightfully when I told her she could have left the whole thing to me.”
“On the principle of ‘What the eye doesn’t see,’ I suppose?” asked Tessa, adding ironically: “You know, that poses the question of how much you would have judged I ought to hear. Also how long I might have waited for you to be as frank as Camille?”
“Oh—I should have chosen my time. And at least I shouldn’t have been as brutal about it as I suspect she was.”
“I think she only told me the truth. What would you have told me?”
She knew by the way his hands shifted restlessly on the steering wheel that her brittle detachment had disconcerted him. Not looking at her, he muttered: “I suppose—that the Camille affair had got a bit out of hand, and then I should have offered you the chance to give me the push if you wanted to.”
Tessa, guessing that he had taken considerable savour from playing off Camille and herself against each other, wondered if he really believed he would have willingly brought as much truth to her. But before she could reply he went on more confidently: “After all, mostly I told you when I was seeing Camille. You did introduce us, you know. I realise I asked you to. But I told you why. And can you deny that on your side you’ve been a good deal less honest than that with me?”
With not quite her earlier coolness Tessa said: “Camille didn’t stint her items of news—either way. She said that you hadn’t cared for my asking Dr. Callender to tea. Nor for my staying to nurse Captain Furse when he was attending the case.”
Rex shrugged. “Not only that. I’ve got eyes and wits of my own. What about your anxiety to keep Callender and me apart by not telling me who he was, long after you knew yourself? And on the night you did tell me, I didn’t miss that you hadn’t wanted him to see me kiss your hand. But if you want Camille’s evidence as well, what about the scene in the circle foyer this very evening? When I didn’t show up you didn’t waste much time in getting hold of him instead, did you?”
“... A doll-like vision all in bouffant white—” Hilary’s description of the other girl was Tessa’s clue to the fact that it must have been Camille who had slipped down the stairs in front of Neil Callender. Very quietly she said: “And I suppose Camille made a piece of star reporting out of having seen Dr. Callender and me together?”
“She wasn’t intentionally spying. But after we came—”
Rex corrected himself hastily—”I mean, just before the end of the interval she remembered dropping her handkerchief in the circle bar during the first interval, so she ran up to find it. And as you and Callender were the only people left in the foyer before she came down again, she’d have been pretty blind if she hadn’t seen you. Besides, seeing you ‘in his arms and obviously enjoying being kissed isn’t exactly something she could have made up!”
“She could have misread what she did see. I wasn’t in his arms and I wasn’t in any mood to enjoy being kissed.”
“But if you were being kissed at all, doesn’t that rather level up the scores?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if, as you’ve wanted me to believe, there’s an understanding between Callender and his woman-doctor friend, is your cutting in on that so very different from anything you’re holding against Camille and me? I mean—if you regard the one as a shabby deal, what about the other?”
White-lipped, Tessa said: “I’m not putting a label on the’ one. And ‘the other’ doesn’t exist, since I did nothing tonight that I’d be ashamed for Judith Wake to know.”
“All right. Camille was wrong. You were being kissed, but quite innocently as far as you were concerned? But what about Callender? I suppose, with nothing clinched between him and his Judith, he is free to sow a wild oat or two here and there. And what more fertile ground
than a girl whose young man has failed to turn up and on whom he can practise his best sympathetic approach without its having to mean too much?”
“Rex, how dare you!”
“Because,” he flashed back, “Callender has always managed, I’ve noticed, to be conspicuously among those present whenever it has looked as if I’d let you down. The perfect knight-errant, in fact. And if a girl actually asks to be flattered by pity, it only needs a good bedside manner to put it across!”
“That’s unforgivable!”
“Is it? But you and he weren’t merely bandying small talk, were you? You don’t deny he kissed you, and if you want to know, I saw the whole thing coming, soon after you’d told me who he was.”
“What ‘whole thing’?” asked Tessa coldly.
“Well, that you were ready to fall for him even then. And if the idea didn’t exactly push me towards Camille, at least it helped!”
Could he possibly have deceived himself into believing that? Tessa’s new detachment enabled her to see that he had, and, angry and hurt as she was, she saw the futility of continuing to fight him with weapons which his self-interested reasoning could always turn against her.
She said wearily: “All this recrimination is getting us nowhere, Rex. Don’t let’s go on, in case we both say things that aren’t true and that we shall regret when we’re feeling less bitter. I’d like it to finish, thinking that you believed in—well, in us—right up to the point where something cracked and the ‘us’ we used to be didn’t exist any more.”
Suddenly shamefaced, he muttered: “If you like. No pack-drill. But don’t you want to know about Camille?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“Well—” he hesitated—“it began, as you know, with my wanting to get next to Sir Bartram through her. But somewhere since then I’ve rather lost the clue to that, and I’ve got fascinated by the kid for her own sake, so that already I’m more than halfway to being in love with her.”
Tessa put in quietly: “I think I can be glad, Rex. I’d rather it were that way.”
“I don’t know why you should care. But thank you for not telling her that it was ever any other way. You didn’t, did you?”
“No, it didn’t seem fair.”
“Tessa, that was big of you, and more than I deserved!” Guessing that his rancour would have been equally extravagant if she had betrayed his motives to Camille, Tessa said: “You could deserve it by going the whole way towards loving her and then not expecting her to—to hope and wait indefinitely.”
“You mean—ask her to marry me?” he queried slowly, as if she had offered him an entirely alien idea.
“Yes. But only, Rex, if you’re sure you love her enough. Not because she offers a way of ‘getting next to’ any advantages for you!”
“I might at that.” He drove in silence for some time, then flashed her a look which for her, now, was no more than a smile on the face of the wrong man. He said: “You’re a generous soul, Tessa. If it’s any help, I’m sorry about Callender—”
“Sorry about him?”
“Yes. Tough, I mean, if you did want him and he’s not for you. Forget, won’t you, what I said just now?”
“I’ll—try.”
“Good girl.” He smiled again and she saw that he had already written off any guilt at having hurt her for the last time when he went on: “As you say, you and I were quite something until we cracked. And while it lasted it was fun. Say you found it so too!”
She echoed obediently: “Yes, Rex. While it lasted it was—fun.”
Fun while it had lasted! So much for spent emotions and not a single coin left. But after she parted with Rex that night nothing stayed to rankle so much as “If a girl actually asks to be flattered by pity, it only needs a good bedside manner to put it across.” For that cheapened and debased something she had wanted to be of lasting value and with which she might have filled her empty hands.
During the weeks which followed Tessa’s telephone rang only for professional reasons, because Nurse Hatfield was asking to borrow anything from a clinical thermometer to a clean apron, or because Hilary had theatre tickets, needed Tessa’s company on a shopping expedition or—when their off-duty hours did not fit in—because she claimed that she had just “thought a chin-wag would be nice.”
Tessa was grateful that, over Rex, nothing in Hilary’s attitude implied “I told you so.” She simply did not mention him again, and if, for a time, she did not suggest that Tessa should go to any staff functions at St. Faith’s, Tessa realised that this was because Rex was likely to partner Camille at them, and she was grateful to Hilary for this too. They went about together more than they had done since their first student year, and when their Whitsuntide leave was to coincide Hilary was quick to propose that, though she would be free before Tessa, they should spend it in London at her married sister’s house. She would go up on the Thursday; Tessa could follow on the Saturday. Tessa, who had found that her defences built up best through busy days of work, had been dreading the enforced idleness of the brief holiday and she accepted very willingly indeed.
Meanwhile she had not been invited again to Usherwood—a fact which spared her making excuses for not going. Though her ability to grudge Rex to Camille had died with her love for him, she did not care about meeting Camille again just yet. And evidently Camille, equally reluctant, had managed to convey to Lady Catterick’s vague brain that the idea of their becoming “the greatest of friends” had no interest for either of them.
The tacit break left Tessa with no knowledge of how Rex’s courtship was going, and though she was glad that she could sincerely hope he was serious about Camille, she was equally glad to promise herself that, with Hilary’s cooperation and by avoiding future invitations to Usherwood, she need meet him seldom, if ever, again. There were many things which time would have to forgive Rex; and not the least of them was that his insinuations had put her in an utterly false position with the man who had kissed her “for courage” and who had been briefly kind—but who, Rex had said, had been moved to both gestures because she had appeared to invite them, because she had angled for a sympathy which it had cost Neil Callender little to give!
It was not true, and even Rex must have known that it was not. But it made the thought of facing the other man difficult enough, and long after she had regained her poise she remembered with chagrin their first professional encounter after the night at the Memorial Theatre.
She had not expected him to make any reference to it, and he had not done so. He had greeted her as cordially as usual and had gone straight on to instruct her on the case he had called her to. It was a factory injury, and the patient’s arm was to be dressed and bandaged with one of the modern tubular bandages which had come into use just before Tessa had left St. Faith’s.
Two people must apply it, and while Neil Callender held the frame Tessa was to draw the bandage into position. Ordinarily she was adept at the task, but the bandage had drawn short and twisted, necessitating its being applied afresh.
Dr. Callender made no comment, only indicating that at the second attempt she should hold the frame for him. But in taking it from him she dropped it on to a floor which was only too obviously non-sterile. She caught his glance searchingly upon her as she handed him another, and afterwards when he was packing his bag he had said: “It’s not like you to be so on edge, Nurse. What about taking a few days off?”
She had said: “I’m not due for leave yet.”
“What of it? In the circumstances you could apply for some. Or would you care for me to have a word with your District superintendent?”
“Please don’t, Dr. Callender. Nurse Hatfield is ‘off’ this week.”
“As you please, though I’d have said a few days’ inconvenience for all of us would be preferable to a breakdown for you. However, look in on our patient at his home tonight, will you, and give me a ring at the surgery?” And though his parting nod had been kindly and impersonal he had left Tessa mortified beyond wo
rds.
Then, just before Whitsuntide, he surprised her by ringing her up.
“Neil Callender here. Do you remember that you promised you’d join up with Civil Defence?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ve always meant to.”
“Well, we’ve got the area organised now, and there’s to be a first Exercise next Tuesday. Can you be there?”
“Why, yes—” But she had hastily to correct that to:
“Oh, dear, next Tuesday’s not possible. I shall be in London until that night.”
He said surprisingly: “Good. I’m glad you’re getting away. C.D. can wait. When do you go up and how?”
“On Saturday, by train,” she told him.
“Saturday? Then I wonder if you’d care to forego the train and travel up by car? With Judith Wake, in fact. She has to go up on that day and she hates driving long distances alone. If your times would fit, would you go with her?”
Tessa agreed: “Yes, of course, if she would have me.”
“Then I’ll fix it, and she shall ring you. Better still—she is having a meal at my flat the night before, so if you would join us you could arrange things for yourselves. Would about seven suit you? Good. I’ll expect you then.” And he rang off.
He had in fact taken as her acceptance the somewhat confused murmur which Tessa had intended as a preliminary to an excuse for not going. Certainly Judith Wake had welcomed her unreservedly to their foursome dinner party, but Tessa could not imagine that she would be glad to find that a third person had been invited to Friday’s tête-à-tête meal.
When, however, Tessa rang the doorbell of the flat over the surgery, Judith opened the door and seemed genuinely pleased to see her.