“And it’s the manager you find interesting?” Iris reached for a nut for herself and cracked it quickly. “Be careful, Hilary! I wasn’t as old as you are now and didn’t know as much about people as I know you do, when I—”
“That was something different,” Hilary interrupted quickly before Iris could delve back into the painful past and make herself unhappy again.
“Until now there’s been no one special. That’s it, isn’t it?” Iris teased. “I must meet this paragon of a manager! See if he’s good enough for my little sister! Someone has to look out for you, remember, and I’m the only one able to do just that! I’ll pop along to the store tomorrow. I want a new blouse, anyhow. Do you have a break at all, Hilary? I’d like to see the flat, if that’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Hilary was happy to assure her. “But I’m on duty all day. I can stop and make a coffee or a cup of tea in the little office if you call in. If it’s almost closing time for the store I’ll take you up to look around before we come home. How long can you stay this time?”
“I’d like to go back late Tuesday afternoon, if that’s okay with you,” Iris said. “I can get a train straight through. Two-forty-five, I think it leaves. We start classes again Wednesday morning.”
“Okay,” Hilary confirmed, adding with the spontaneity that always delighted Iris, “It’s grand to have you home, even for so short a time. We don’t really see much of one another these days, do we?”
“There’ll be ten days at Easter.” Iris ticked off dates on her fingers. “That’s just over six weeks’ time. And there’s summer holidays, too. What would you like to do this year?”
The topic of summer holidays occupied them until Iris yawned and announced that she was sleepy. It did not take many minutes to fall into the customary routine of being at home, and shortly after Iris had switched out the bedside light that stood on the small table between their twin beds, Hilary could hear the rise and fall of her sister’s breathing. Iris was sound asleep.
Hilary lay awake for some time. She liked Simon Vale, and she had fallen instantly a victim to the charm of the old lady, but her thoughts were far from either of them as she stared into the soft darkness.
Monica Dawson was a lovely personality. Hilary had admired her, both as a nurse and as a person, long before they had become such firm friends. Working with Monica on the ward Hilary had grown to love the older girl sincerely, and—her cheeks flushed warmly in the sheltering darkness—if Mark Dawson was anything like his sister, then she knew beyond all doubt she could love him, too.
He’s wonderful, she told herself. But I mustn’t even think of anything romantic. Not until I know Iris is going to be left all alone ... it’s not so bad while there’s two of us, but if she and Simon ... and they seemed to like one another on sight. She hasn’t even tried to avoid talking about him this time, like she’s done with everyone else she’s met since that man at university...
Her thoughts trailed off, a comforting mixture of daydreams and fantasy, and when she awoke in the morning it was with a feeling of well-being such as she had not possessed since she had been told she must undertake light duties for a whole year.
She went off to Vale’s early. Aida Everett was up earlier than usual, too. She had toyed with the idea of going to work early herself, since it was well known that Mark Dawson was always there at least a quarter of an hour before any of the staff, but on reflection she thought it might be as well to savor the knowledge of the previous evening and to make certain of telling him the story at the most opportune moment. That moment was very unlikely to be the minute he arrived at the store!
Hilary had no thought of anything but the pleasant weekend she had just enjoyed and the promise of the forthcoming longer holiday in a few weeks’ time, when Iris would be home again. She went up to the flat on her arrival at Vale’s and made sure everything was “shipshape and Bristol fashion” as her mother had been wont to say, before Iris arrived to look around. She was humming a little tune to herself as she changed into her uniform and went briskly down to open the first-aid center.
“Hello there! How did the visit go?” Mark was looking in through the door, his glance plainly registering the pleasure he found in looking at her, trim and pretty, standing in the reflected pool of pale sunlight that poured in through the window. “Mrs. Vale drag all your family tree up by the roots?” he joked.
“In the nicest possible way!” Hilary confirmed, her eyes shining and reflecting, although she did not realize it, the delight she always found nowadays in the sight of him. “She’s a darling, isn’t she?” she added impulsively. “I should think everyone who knows her would do anything she asked of them.”
“More or less, I suppose,” Mark grinned. “But then I don’t think she’d ask anyone to do the impossible, do you? ‘Morning, Mr. Simon,” he added as Simon’s bulk appeared behind him. “Just checking everything’s okay.”
“And it is, isn’t it, Hilary?” Simon asked, not noticing Mark’s start at the use of her first name. “How’s your sister?”
Mark drifted away, not certain just where this conversation was leading, but he looked back as he was surveying the newly erected stand of costume jewelry, and saw, to his annoyance, that Simon apparently had a great deal to say to Nurse Bell this morning!
And her sister’s an old-fashioned teacher, Mark thought, not even pausing to wonder how apt his casual description of Iris might be. I wonder ... is he just being polite? He can’t even know her! Then one of the salesmen approached him with a complaint about a suspected shoplifter, and the world of Vale’s reached out and took his thoughts securely into its possession for the remainder of the day.
Simon Vale was puzzled by his own emotions. He had never before been even remotely interested in a woman. Their minds, he had told himself, didn’t work like that of any man! Now all these fond beliefs had been shattered, shattered in one evening, and by the conversation of a slim, a too-slim girl, with an alert glance and an even more alert mind.
For the first time in his life he had found a woman who loved the things he loved himself, could discuss the same books, plays and films with ideas, which, if not always identical with his own, were sufficiently strong, sufficiently intelligent as to make their discussion both important and interesting.
For the first time, too, he had encountered someone who didn’t flutter her eyelashes in his face, waft her perfume under his nose to stimulate his senses, didn’t try any one of the thousand provocative tricks he had experienced in the past. Yet, she had captured his imagination, held his interest more than anyone else he had ever met apart from his own grandmother, whose quick and agile mind was always more than a match for his own or for that of anyone else in the world of business among which they both loved to move.
Because Laura Vale was the person he both admired and trusted more than anyone else, it was to her he had taken the first amazing revelations of the enormity of his own feelings.
“Isn’t life strange, Gran?” he had asked as they breakfasted together before he left for the store. “Just think, if I hadn’t taken Hilary home I might never have met Iris ... or not for ages, anyway. And she’s the one I should have met years ago. I know that now.”
“Life is strange,” Laura Vale had agreed. “But it all has a pattern, remember.”
“You think there’s a plan for every one of us, Gran, don’t you?” Simon asked, half-laughing at her, but there was only a gentle, half-reproving smile on the face of the old lady as she answered him.
“Not quite ‘a plan’ as you seem to think I mean, Simon,” she said quietly. “More that we each have a part to play in life, and that the direction of our respective parts is laid out for us individually, so that even when we don’t know why certain things happen, often, looking back, we can see they helped to make up a complete pattern of something we hadn’t even dreamed about.”
She was silent for so long that Simon might have been forgiven for thinking she had forgotten w
hat their conversation was about, but he knew her so well he realized that was impossible. He contented himself by lighting a cigarette and waiting quietly until she was ready to resume.
“You know my mother’s father, your great-grandfather Broadlay,” she began at length, “was a woollen manufacturer in Bradford up in Yorkshire, don’t you?” Simon nodded. His glance flew to the miniature of a bewhiskered, stern-looking man, flanked by another miniature picturing a sweet but somehow sad-looking young woman with her hair done in the style of more than a hundred years ago.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I scarcely remember any of the things you’ve told me about him, though, I’m sorry to say...”
“You know most of them,” Laura Vale dismissed her own memories with a small wave of the hand. “One thing he said to me when I was a very small girl captured my imagination, however. I’ve forgotten the occasion,” she smiled reminiscently as she continued, “but I do remember what he said. ‘Think of life as a piece of cloth, woven by a Master, love,’ he said. ‘There’s warp and there’s weft ... and the two together make a pattern, and only the one who’s designed it knows how many threads are needed crosswise, and how many lengthwise, because He’s the only one who knows which way the pattern’s intended to turn out! Pull a wrong thread, weave one a wrong way, and there’s no pattern such as was planned by the Master. There’ll be a pattern of sorts, that’s sure enough, but it’s better by far to weave steadily along the lines life’s laid out for you ... you’ll find it’ll work out to the right pattern in the long run, even though some of it may seem a little boring along the way.’ I’ve followed that rule of his,” Laura went on simply. “It’s not fashionable now, but there’s never a day goes by that I don’t ask for guidance in my daily life and try my best to keep the Ten Commandments. Apart from these two rules I accept what comes and try to do my best to cope with it, whatever it may be, pleasant or otherwise. It usually works out all right,” she ended, but by no means complacently.
“I’d never have thought you a fatalist, Gran,” he said, rising and preparing to leave for work. “Somehow...”
“I’m not, not if you mean I’ve had no share in the shaping of my own life!” Laura maintained stoutly. “We all have a share in our own lives, for good or ill. I’m merely maintaining that though life is strange at times, most of what we make of it depends on how we react to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, whether we chose them deliberately or not. For all you know to the contrary, Nurse Bell, Hilary, might have had to become ill just so that she could come here ... so that, indirectly, she could lead you to her sister.”
“Which means the girls she nursed so devotedly also had a thread in my pattern,” Simon said a little belligerently. “I’m not in the least sure I like that.”
“You can’t have a piece of cloth woven from only one thread, Simon. I’d cultivate Hilary, if I were you. It was obvious before you told me about your visit that those sisters are devoted to one another! Let Hilary be certain you’re the sensible, reliable, adoring chap you seem to be, bless your heart, and—” her eyes twinkled at the grandson she adored, “—I’ll gamble that’ll go a very long way with the lady you hope to impress.”
Now, chatting to Hilary at the door of the first-aid center, Simon was dutifully following his grandmother’s advice. Always she had seemed to know the right approach to things or to people he found either baffling or disconcerting. This, anyway, he told himself, appeared to be the right thing to do in the circumstances, since Hilary was by no means loath to chat about Iris just as long as he was prepared to stay. By the time he had turned away and Mark had gone about his business in another part of the store, he had committed to his excellent memory the date of Iris’s birthday, her favorite foods, drinks, flowers and ideas of entertainment, secretly delighted to discover they were so much akin to his own. He was extremely happy, and Mark, seeing him go, noting the happy smile on his face and the light in his eyes, wondered sourly just what Simon had been saying to Hilary to leave him looking so cheerful!
“Something wrong, Mr. Dawson?” Aida had glided up to him before he was aware of her approach, and instinctively he straightened up and made himself alert, the complete businesslike manager he was.
“Not really,” he said quietly. “Just a few worries in the general run of things. Everything ready for the afternoon parade?”
“More or less.” Aida, who was usually so fussy about the pre-Easter displays of Vale fashions, dismissed the parade as being unimportant, something that was so unusual Mark wondered if she, too, had problems. When he said as much she gave the high, artificial laugh he hated and moved slightly away.
“If I have,” she simpered, “I’ll keep them to myself, I think. I have no intention of joining the line-up of people who want to ask Nurse Bell’s advice, whether in office hours or out of them.”
“Excuse me, Miss Everett.” Aida frowned in annoyance as a junior came up with an inquiry about the stock of floral headdresses for bridesmaids’ outfits, and Mark took the opportunity to slip away, but the words lingered in his mind, just as Aida had intended, and all day they recurred to him with a maddening frequency.
It did not help any when Iris came to the store as she had promised and bought her blouse. Simon had seen her at the counter, and when she walked over to the first-aid center he lost no time in following. Iris, as was to be expected, stayed chatting with Hilary between the visits of people who required her help. Simon seemed to find sufficient excuse to return time and again to the first-aid center, so that it seemed to Mark that his boss had spent most of the day with the new nurse and her sister.
At the end of the day, when the store was closed and Hilary locked up for the night, she took Iris up to see the flat, Mark, as always, accompanying them. Aware now who the stranger was, and that Hilary would not be staying in the flat that night, he was about to offer to drive her home, when Simon had joined them again and made his offer first.
They all left the flat together, Mark inwardly fuming. Even with Hilary’s sister present, he thought, she couldn’t help but be flattered by the attention of the owner of the store himself!
Iris wasn’t saying very much. She had been too hurt, some years ago, to trust any new emotion that smacked even lightly of love. Iris had managed to get over her disastrous love affair, and now she no longer regretted her escape—she was glad it had all amounted to nothing. Yet how would she know when it was “the real thing,” and how could she be certain of not making a second mistake?
The trio reached number four, and naturally, Simon was invited in to share the simple meal Iris had prepared.
Simon telephoned home and told his grandmother where he was and stayed on until late that evening. It was amazing how much there was to discuss with this wonderful sister of Hilary’s! Aida, to the exasperation of Miss Thornhill, wouldn’t leave the window. She could not see very clearly from where she stood, but she could see the gray Bentley down the road, and with a satisfied smile she made a careful note in her diary of the time the car was driven away.
“Something interesting?” Brenda asked, but Aida smiled mysteriously. This was something she would share with no one but Mark Dawson, and only with him ... because he had to know, if her own plan was to succeed.
“Not really.” She turned away from the window, satisfied. “Just checking something,” and with that Brenda had to content herself, at least for the time being.
CHAPTER SIX
Even in her own remote section of the store Hilary was aware of the stirring sense of spring. There were Easter eggs on the confectionery counter. Little yellow artificial chickens peered at her from behind biscuit tins and looked up in perky surprise from the midst of the boxes of chocolates. There was a constant stream of people waiting to have special greetings iced on the surface of the chocolate egg of their choice.
In Millinery, cardboard bunnies flirted cotton-wool tails among some of the most lovely hats she had ever seen. The haberdashery section seemed to be rampant
with artificial daffodils; but the most wonderful display of them all was in Gowns.
There were fashion parades three afternoons each week. One was solely for Easter weddings, with off-the-peg gowns to suit every type of bride and attendant. There was one afternoon devoted to the teenager and the young twenties group, and the third catered mainly for the mother of the bride and her companions. All in all it was a hectic time, and the floral section reported an unusually large number of orders booked for the coming weeks.
Even the normal grocery department appeared to have gone haywire. Carruthers, puffing importantly, breezed into the first-aid center one afternoon remarking glumly, “When I was a boy we were contented with a little egg, boiled in water with onion skins to color it, an’ a day trip to the country if we were lucky.
“Seem to be making a proper feast and holiday out o’ everything in these days, they do,” he commented. “Any excuse to gad about a bit, and never mind where the money’s coming from to pay for it all, nor the effort, neither! Down in Travel they’re booking folks across the Channel as fast as they can go ... an’ for what, might I ask?” he grumbled. “They’d be a lot better off at home, takin’ their kids to some nearby country place to roll their eggs down a hill and have a good run in the fresh air, then home to an early night!”
“That’s just the point, I think, Mr. Carruthers.” Hilary checked his prescribed amount of insulin before continuing, “People like to get away, to where they’re fairly certain of some sunshine, even if it does cost money. It’s a long time since Christmas, you know, and a number of people don’t have much of a break—”
“There’s something I want to ask you, nurse, if you can tell me an’ if you don’t mind,” he interrupted. “I’ve been a single man all my days,” he began, and to Hilary’s secret amusement the burly porter’s weatherbeaten cheeks flushed an unbecoming red. “You remember last winter when I was off work with flu? No,” he corrected himself before she could speak, “it was early on ... you’d not come to work here, then. Anyway I was off work for a spell, and Kitty Andrews, a young woman who lives next door to me with her old parents, looked after me. We, well, it was good to have someone take a thought for my comfort now and then,” he went on half-apologetically. “The truth of the matter, nurse, is that I must have lost my head or something. I’ve asked her to marry me ... Easter Saturday, and she’s said she will.”
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