Heartbreak Surgeon (1960s Medical Romance Book 2)

by Sheila Burns

  Heartbreak Surgeon

  Sheila Burns

  Copyright © The Estate of Sheila Burns 2018

  This edition first published by Wyndham Books 2018

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 1963

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork: images © Irina Bg/Roman Sigaev (Shutterstock) and izuske (istockphoto)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Preview: Wyndham Books

  Chapter One

  Lorna slowed down the car a little and tried to think.

  The night was still very hot, and the cool wind which had come with sunset had abated. But the lanes were heady with the sweet scent of Maytime flowers, of green leaves and of budding summer.

  She was being something of a fool, she knew that. She wondered what her parents thought about her, the sudden visit home with ten days’ leave from hospital, ten days in which to make up her mind as to whether she would go on there to higher things, or make the clean break. Ambition said Go on; despair asked for the clean break. But she could not tell her parents how she felt at heart.

  Mr. and Mrs. Vane had been getting on when Lorna had been born twenty-four years ago. They had given up all hopes of fulfilling the dream of a happy nursery, and when the unexpected happened, they had looked upon it as being little short of the miracle of life. A daughter, and how much they had wanted one! Lorna Marianne, the sweetest baby ever born, so they said; the kindest most comforting props behind her, it was a shame to worry them so much. And she was worrying them on this visit, she could see it in her mother’s disturbed eyes ‒ even if she didn’t ask questions those eyes were sadly perturbed ‒ in her father’s way of reading the paper through silences, and pretending everything was just as it always was.

  It was nothing of the kind, of course. If she had had a grain of sense she would have told them already about the Heartbreak Surgeon, as they had called Michael Bland in the hospital, but the thought of putting a deep pain into words had hurt too much, and she knew that she could not do it. So she had left it, and now it was much too late to explain anything.

  They had been delighted when she had wanted to take up nursing. She remembered their enthusiasm when at school she had turned to Home Nursing and First Aid classes; then the request to leave early and go to the hospital where she could train from seventeen years old for two years, and so knock a year off the London training.

  ‘I wanted to be a nurse myself, you’ve got it from me,’ her mother said, ‘and Dad and I’ll do everything we can to help.’

  They had done everything.

  The food parcels they had sent her when they learnt how very happy-go-lucky were nurses’ rations; small postal orders, presents of this and that, and buoying-up letters at exam times. How welcome those had been! Old-fashioned, simple folk; her father had spent a lifetime in a bank, and had missed the managership by very much a hair’s breadth, and now was thankful for calm retirement.

  ‘I hate to say it, darling,’ he had told her, ‘but when we got those complaining girl clerks into the bank, I knew I had had it. It was not like the good old times. Not one bit like the good old times,’ and he had laughed.

  This morning she had had to confess that she was disturbed about her own future.

  ‘I rather want to chuck up hospital work,’ she had said, dropping it as the casual hint, to see how the land lay. The land didn’t lie; it rose.

  ‘Oh never, after all that training and hard work, and you’ve just got past the trying part, don’t give it up now,’ said her father incredulously. He left off doing the Times crossword to say it, and it took something to break him away from that.

  ‘Yes, I know, but hospital gets on your nerves.’

  ‘It’s absurd.’ Even her mother was laying down the law. ‘You’ll soon be Sister, you said so the other day.’

  She wanted to snap, ‘And who wants to be Sister? The moment you fling the belt aside and go into Sister’s rig the worst seems to happen.’ She said nothing.

  ‘Little things always go wrong in all careers,’ her mother said, ‘one meets the parting of the roads, and then one goes on to greater joy. Life works in phases, didn’t you know? Something else will turn up. It always does. You’ve got through the hard dull part and you’ve done so well, it would be madness to give it up now.’

  ‘After all that,’ her father chimed in.

  After all that, Lorna thought and the light blue eyes clouded. Not just the case of always being on the rocks, for the money simply would not go round, but that sickening dull hospital food. If she ever saw another shepherd’s pie, or a sago pudding, she would go raving mad! Not just the endless drive, the urgency, the on-edge feeling, which tired one out completely by the end of the day so that there was no time left for enjoying oneself, for happiness, for new friends, new places, and romances, but merely the fact that she wanted to end it.

  ‘It would be nice to get out of hospitals for a time,’ she said, ‘go as nurse-companion to someone who paid well and gave me good food. The chance to meet other people. To go about a little, perhaps travel. The Union Castle Line sails with a nurse on board. There are nurses at all the airports, and you meet the world that way. I want to escape routine.’

  It wasn’t wholly true. She wanted to escape the Heartbreak Surgeon, only they couldn’t know this.

  ‘If you leave before you are a Sister, you’ll be very silly,’ said her mother. ‘Be a wise girl, Lorna dear. Don’t be stubborn because that is so foolish. It is better to stay on a wee bit longer and take no risks.’

  Lorna wanted to scream, ‘The risk of meeting him again is too much,’ but she said nothing. Her parents did not know that she simply couldn’t go back.

  She looked again at the personal column of the newspaper before her, knowing that this offered escape. The quiet house in Cornwall, and the sick woman (not incapacitated) who needed someone to be there with her. The use of a car offered, a proper suite, and perhaps one of the best addresses in Cornwall. It tempted her very much. She played with the idea, realising that as yet she knew nothing about it. The woman advertising might want someone much older than twenty-four. She might object to Lorna’s prettiness, for it is not every woman who likes prettiness in a younger one
. There could be a difficult husband, and the sick woman might be jealous, or have some flirtatious son. Anyway she might not get the job, but she was in the mood that wanted it.

  ‘You see, darling, we know you very well and you will only regret this,’ her mother said.

  What she did know was that she had met Michael Bland and now could not bear to return to the hospital. A year ago he had come there and at first she had had the good sense not even to like him. Tall and handsome, a rich man, he had the brains which made surgery easier to him than to most. In the theatre she had admired him enormously. He dared to take risks. Those sinuous slender fingers never trembled for a second, but were precise. He rapped out orders between his teeth, orders which Sister obeyed implicitly. Patients adored him. Nurses complained that he never spoke, he was one of those silent surgeons. Even at that moment at the table when the patient’s heart stopped, and she had for a single second felt her own heart miss a beat.

  But not Michael Bland!

  He was the autocrat commanding. He had made the slit with the deftness of one completely controlled, and not for a moment flustered. She had watched him fascinated. He took the reins of life or death into his hands and drove them hard. When the patient breathed again, he showed no sign of emotion, or of tenseness. She thought that she saw the faint shimmer of sweat on his brow just under the rim of that pudding-basin cap which he wore, then was not sure that she had not imagined it.

  Has he no emotional side? she had asked herself.

  ‘That man is dangerous,’ Nurse Fletcher had told her afterwards. ‘Staff Nurse Vincent told me he behaves in his own life just as he does in the theatre. Remorselessly.’

  ‘He’ll never get the chance to do that with us!’ she had answered gaily.

  ‘Personally I don’t believe he ever even sees us.’

  ‘Certainly he gives no sign of it.’

  But he did notice them. She found that out later. There had come the afternoon when everything changed. Quite suddenly, and not of her own seeking. She had always know that romances between surgeons and the nurses could so easily lead to complications. She had steered clear of the usual love affair ever since she had started training. If an occasional student crowding round a bed, had let his attention wander from the famous specialist droning and giving details, so that he had glanced at the nurse with the auburn hair and the light eyes, she had pretended not to see him.

  No love affairs of that kind for me! she told herself. That sort of thing is so unwise. It leads to misery. I’ll cut it out.

  She hadn’t catered for the day off; a hot summer’s day when the michaelmas daisies were along the herbaceous border at Hampton Court Palace, and she went down there for she had all the time in the world, and somehow she had thought that a garden would be unutterably lovely. Emotional reaction. Time to relax and enjoy herself. She was sitting on the lawn in the shade of a giant acacia; she had kicked off her shoes and her toes were curling. She wore the little silky frock of high summer, no hat, and she did not look one bit like a nurse. Anyway, nobody’ll see me, she thought.

  Who would have expected Michael Bland to come through the shrubbery, also with no hat, and carrying his coat? The surprise was immense, because she had never thought to see him like that. A man with a silk shirt, no tie. His dark hair ruffled, his eyes amused. A man who had done exactly what she had done, had wanted to escape the insistent demands of routine, of sick folk, of suspense, and of the hospital itself, and had come here because he wanted the lovely things. A garden. Flowers. Serenity. Time to relax. Time to be himself.

  ‘Hello, hello!’ he said.

  This man is dangerous, her heart told her, but the trouble was that a girl realises that much too late. He had sat down on the grass beside her, hugging his knees. He had said, ‘Isn’t this exactly what one wants after St. Botolph’s? How good that we have found each other! Now we can have tea together.’

  She wouldn’t have believed that he even knew her name, then she found that he did. It was absurd to let the whole thing go to her head and make her on edge, bewildered, and a little horrified at heart. She must accept it as a chance meeting, something that had happened, meant nothing, and then had gone. Deep down inside herself Lorna knew that this was none of these things ‒ leastways not to her ‒ knew that already the affair which had only just started had gone too far, and that she was a silly idiot ever to have permitted it.

  For an hour they talked of absurd things: his childhood, and how he had lost his mother but had a devoted father. He had been spoilt as she had been, also an only child. His father was rich, one could not say that of Dad, she admitted, and he had a big ancestral home standing in a deer park. Not far from London; he’d take her there one day. She knew of course that he made the remark only pour passer le temps, and it meant nothing. She was not such a little fool as to suppose otherwise for a single moment. He talked a little nostalgically, as though home had meant a great deal to him, as though he were no longer sitting on the daisied grass of Hampton Court lawns, with the yew trees before him, but back there again. And liking it.

  She got the impression that within him was an innate tenderness, a deep and abiding love of possessions, of his father too. They did not bother about tea. It looked hot and crowded, and they felt they were better sitting here in the cool of the acacia tree.

  I mustn’t fall in love with him, she kept telling herself. It is coincidence that he came here. We met, we talk, we pass on somewhere else.

  He offered to take her back in his car which was in the park behind the tennis court where red Henry played when he was a youth, and later watched sourly when he was too fat to play himself.

  ‘No,’ she said, for now she had reached the moment when she knew that it was madness to continue. ‘I have an aunt in Kingston, I am going in to see her on the way home.’

  She had no aunt in Kingston, but that did not matter, for now there must be some excuse, some dead ordinary excuse that he would not suspect.

  ‘All right,’ and he had gone.

  All the way back she told herself that the thing was to forget that this had happened. Memory is such a cheat, such a ready teaser, and already she knew half ashamedly that she was in love.

  When Michael Bland met her on duty four days later, he passed her by in the ward as if she were a woman he had never seen before (and most certainly had never talked to) on a daisied afternoon in one of the world’s loveliest gardens.

  The same thing happened in the corridor the next morning. He had been called in to visit the thrombosis case, it was his speciality. Once Lorna had heard the doctors talking about his amazing ability in these cases, and the fact was that he had saved the case given up as lost in Fitzalan-Grey ward.

  ‘That young man Bland will go a long way; he is hall-marked for specialist’s work,’ she heard one of them say.

  ‘He’s got a room in Wimpole Street already. Pretty good for his years, I must say.’

  And then, half grudgingly from the first speaker, ‘He deserves it. I admit he takes risks, but they are wise risks, and I admire his courage. His name may be one of the great ones, and before he is much older.’

  Then they had gone on, their voices had trailed to nothingness, and Lorna, with a beating heart and a flushed face, knew that she was proud of Michael, and the praise that he had earned. One of the best men for thrombosis. From what she had already seen of his work, she could agree with that.

  Called into the theatre a few days later to take the place of a nurse who had fainted, she watched Michael operating, and he unaware of her presence. Once, for a single second, those black eyes of his looked across the whiteness of the gauze mask. It’s you, said the eyes.

  Before this Lorna had always felt that a girl who could not curb a love affair before it got too big for her, was silly. She knew better now. At the staff dance he danced with her, with others as well, of course, but he asked her out to lunch that week, and that time she could not think of a suitable excuse. So she went to the lunch. It was n
othing very formidable, or impressive. Perhaps purposely he took her to a usual restaurant, and gave her an ordinary meal.

  Then came the very hot night when she had wandered out for a breather from the nurses’ home (which was notoriously stuffy, and became unbearable in heat waves), and Michael stopped his car.

  ‘Come and see the Serpentine?’ he said, ‘it’s nice there on a hot night.’

  Once, in the last war, somebody wrote a song about nightingales singing in Berkeley Square and angels dining at the Ritz. To her the Serpentine had the lure that night of the Nile to Cleopatra! A mirage. This thing has got to stop, she thought, but the thing was running away with her. One day he’ll fall in love with someone and marry her, it is just one of those things that have to happen, she thought, and knew that although she dared not put it into words, she was remembering that she could be the someone.

  They began meeting on occasions. He teased her. On duty he was still the dragon; the big surgeon who walked through the wards with his head high, or into the theatre breathing fire. The great surgeon whose skilful fingers saved. There were moments when she gasped at the things he dared do!

  Then, only a fortnight ago, there had been the visit.

  ‘I promised to take you down to see my home,’ he said meeting her in the courtyard as she was crossing to the nurses’ home. He had remembered. It was absurd that it should mean so much to her that he had remembered! ‘I’m going down this Saturday, and you have a day off, come and have lunch with my father? He adores my friends. Do come?’

  He made it sound almost casual, although all the time she knew that it could never be casual to her. He wanted to take her home, and that visit meant so much. She had always felt ‒ perhaps foolishly ‒ that when a man takes a girl home, a door opens on the future. She tried to silence the delirium of joy that rose within her and the high hopes that came and went. A door on the future, she was entering into a new phase and in this new phase lay everything of which a woman dreams.