My Surgeon Neighbour

by Jane Arbor

  But Alice returned worriedly a few minutes later. “It must be that tree again, you know, the one that touched our wires and put us out once before. The line is completely dead; I can’t get the Exchange. Shall I run down to the corner-booth and ring from there?”

  “Yes, do. You’re dressed; I’m not,” said Sarah, staying herself to comfort and to do what little she could for Tony.

  The phone-booth was some two hundred yards away, and though it was to be expected that Alice would hurry, Sarah heard her return far sooner than she would have thought possible. Then there were voices below in the hall, a male one and Alice’s. And as Sarah looked out from Tony’s door, Oliver Mansbury’s stride was taking the stairs two at a time, while Alice hurried behind.

  Instinctively Sarah put a hand to her ruffled hair and wrapped her dressing-gown more tidily. Both gestures were the automatic reflex of a nurse at the approach of a surgeon, but the leap of her heart at sight him was all her own and too disturbingly familiar.

  She had time for the thought, What am I letting him mean to me? Then he was along the landing and in the room at a speed which spun her from his path, necessitating his hand on her shoulder to steady her,

  “I’m sorry,” he said perfunctorily. “Is this the boy? Good. Let me examine him, will you?”

  Over his shoulder as he bent to the bed Sarah looked her perplexity at Alice. But Alice only rounded her eyes and spread her hands by way of reply. And since Tony needed care and skill, needed them urgently, the ‘why’ and the ‘How’ of Oliver Mansbury’s arrival would have to wait.

  Presently he straightened.

  “Alice tells me your snap diagnosis was a grumbling appendix,” he told Sarah. “But my reading, I’m afraid, is that it’s an acute inflammation of the appendix with a risk of peritonitis, which means there’s no tune to lose. He glanced back at Tony. “He’s Dr. Carrage’s boy, isn’t he? I think Alice said he is here because his father is away? But where can he be reached?”

  Sarah bit her lip. “I—I don’t know,’ she said lamely.

  “You don’t know? But he must have left you his address?”

  Sarah shook her head. “He didn’t know himself where he might be from day to day, so he left a couple of addresses, Poste Restante, with his bank.”

  Oliver Mansbury’s gesture was impatient. “And that’s a lot of help in the middle of the night! What about his partners? He’s with Dr. Ackland, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. But I doubt if either Dr. Ackland or Dr. Berrider know more than the Bank. I suppose Dr. Carrage’s consent is needed if Tony must be operated on?” Sarah added.

  “In my view there’s no ‘if’ about it,” her questioner snapped. This is an emergency and we’re wasting time already. But yes, the father’s consent is a ‘must’, I’m afraid.”

  “Is it, however ‘emergency’ the case is?” urged Sarah. Couldn’t someone else—for instance, I suppose I’m sort of acting for Dr. Carrage while Tony is with me—give their consent instead? Or wouldn’t that be professionably acceptable?”

  At that a grave smile curved the surgeon’s mouth. “Well, you have something there,” he admitted. “Considering that, strictly speaking, there’s nothing ‘correct’ about my own intervention on the case, I think the point might be waived.” He turned again to the bed. “All right, son. We’ll soon have you on top of your form again,” he promised Tony gently. Then he was planning ahead, issuing orders, taking obedience and co-operation for granted.

  “I’ll take him next door, so if you’ll get him well wrapped up I’ll carry him over. I’ll get our theatre nurse out of bed, but you,” he addressed Sarah directly, “you’d care to come along too?”

  “Please, if I may.”

  “All right. Be over in a quarter of an hour. Just walk in and the theatre is on the right, through the baize door at the back of the hall.”

  When he had gone, carrying Tony in his arms, Sarah heard from Alice how he had come into the picture.

  It appeared that Alice, headlong in her hurry to get to the phone booth had dashed out into the road straight into the path of his car as he was slowing for the turn into the gateway of Greystones.

  “I felt an awful fool,” reported Alice. “I sort of froze like a rabbit in the headlights until he looked out and said what did I think I was doing, and then when he recognized me, asked what I was really doing.”

  “And?” prompted Sarah.

  “So I told him, and then he was backing his car down to our gate and dashing in almost ahead of me.” Alice paused, then added, “You know, he’s supposed to be a wonderful surgeon; I’m sure Tony couldn’t be in better hands.”

  As Sarah dressed again in uniform her instinct and faith told her so too. But in any emergency operation there was always an element of risk and tension and her responsibility for Tony made her especially nervous at the ordeal before her. But once she gained the familiar, clinical atmosphere of the operating theatre she relaxed and under the calm, efficient direction of the theatre sister became merely a brain, a hand and an eye serving the consummate skill of Oliver Mansbury’s surgery upon Tony.

  Less than an hour later the thing was done and Tony had been put to bed under the eye of the night nurse on duty. Tiredly the three in the theatre got out of their gowns and masks and sat for a while over coffee brought to the ante-room by a maid. Then Oliver rose and told Sarah, “Come, I’ll see you home. I’ll ring you in the morning with a report on the boy, and as soon as you have it, you’d better have that Bank of his get in touch with Carrage.”

  Sarah promised she would. On the way over to Monckton he answered an unspoken question in her mind by telling her that Mrs. Beacon was away from home for a few days, which was the sum total of their conversation until they reached her own door where she began to put her gratitude to him into words which he cut short.

  “What did you expect?” he asked. “That I’d find you in trouble and pass by on the other side?”

  “You might merely have advised me to call an ambulance and get Tony into hospital.”

  “And risked the dangerous delay involved in laying on all that?”

  Her eyes widened in the darkness. “There was ... that much danger in his condition?” she breathed.

  ‘“As it proved, there wasn’t. But at that stage I wasn’t to know it for certain.” He broke off to stoop above her, peering down into her face. For she had begun to shake uncontrollably and her eyes were wide now in an effort to blink back sudden tears.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked sharply.

  “Nothing ... Just relief, I think.”

  He said, “You should take critical cases better than that. But I suppose you’ve made a deeply personal issue of this one?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I—” But before she could explain how fond she was of Tony, apart from her responsibility for him, Oliver Mansbury cut in,

  “I understand,” he said briefly. “But you can take it from me the boy will be all right. His father need find nothing wrong with your stewardship.” Then his finger and thumb went to her jaw, tilting her face upwards, enabling him to touch his handkerchief to each of her damp cheeks.

  “What a pity one can’t comfort adult tears as one would a child’s, by kissing them away,” he said cryptically. And then belied his own words by putting his lips lightly to her brow before he strode away into the darkness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEN he rang up in the morning to report on Tony’s condition Sarah was grateful for the barrier of the telephone which enabled her manner to be as crisply impersonal as his.

  He had to be elsewhere, operating all day, he told her. But she could visit Tony when she liked, and he could rely on her to contact the boy’s father as soon as possible, couldn’t he, he wanted to know.

  To which Sarah said, “Of course,” and “Yes,” and “No,” and “Thank you,” in all the right places, the whole exchange a matter-of-fact sanity to set against the foolish dreams she had indulged since his meaningless kiss overnight
.

  For with her inner response to it she had had her answer to her own question, What does he mean to me? Then she had known; known why she craved his good opinion; understood his challenge to her spirit; known why her heart ached with jealousy of Jurice Grey. She loved the man with a love which owed nothing to the kindliness or pity or habit against which he had warned her, but still had come too late for the wrong man.

  The realization shook her to her core, her one grain of comfort the knowledge that not by word or gesture had she betrayed herself to him. At least her dreary little secret was her own and that, she resolved with a defiant pride, was how it must stay until she too learned to forget the pain of it now.

  When she went to see Tony he was still drowsy from the effects of the anaesthetic and she doubted if she had made him understand when she promised him ‘Daddy’ would be coming back very soon. Meanwhile, though the Bank had kept its own counsel as to Steven Carrage’s whereabouts, she had been given its guarded assurance that she could probably look for his return within a couple of days.

  In fact he arrived the following morning. He looked tired and drawn; far more so than a night flight from Ostend would explain, thought Sarah, noticing the air label on his travelling bag. But she asked no questions and his for her were all of Tony.

  They went together to see Tony. This time Oliver Mansbury was there and so was Mrs. Beacon, starched, professional and cool. Reluctantly Sarah acknowledged the efficient qualities which had made the older woman so successful a Matron of her exclusive establishment. But she doubted whether the chasm of prejudice between them would ever be bridged while they remained neighbors.

  There was no doubt of Dr. Carrage’s gratitude to Oliver Mansbury and he elected to leave Tony where he was until he was convalescent.

  “Then,” he told Sarah, “I’d like him to come back to you for a while, if you’d have him.” To which she agreed eagerly, expecting him to add that he would be going again on his interrupted errand. But he did not, whether or no he had completed it before Tony’s crisis had recalled him, she was evidently not to learn. Steven Carrage had brought down his iron curtain of reserve once again.

  She had not to call him in professionally to any of her small patients for some weeks, and though, when he visited Tony next door, he usually called in to report on the boy, he never stayed long. So that she was to be completely nonplussed by Dick Finder’s kindly warning when he made it.

  He had invited himself to Monckton one evening, ostensibly to discuss plans of which he made a mystery over the telephone but which were to emerge as ideas for Sarah’s future to which he had evidently given a good deal of thought.

  “Look,” he urged her, “if you’re really set on this career of yours, why don’t you go in for it in a really big way, not piecemeal fashion as you’re doing now, with your very highest sights trained on, say, a couple more beds or so by this time next year? You’re never going to make money or grow any kind of reputation for your Home like that, you know.”

  Sarah shook her head. “ ‘Big ways’ aren’t for me. I like the idea of growing up and out slowly from small roots.”

  Dick chewed a thumb thoughtfully. “That’s all very well. But I’m afraid you may have to grow faster or find yourself up against the kind of competition that won’t let you grow at all. Listen you know, don’t you, that in the next few years, ten at the most, the population of Fareborough is to be doubled under a Government ‘overspill’ scheme?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, of course we estate-agent chaps are going to do pretty well out of it, and it occurred to me that there’s no reason why you, Sarah, shouldn’t get in on the ground floor too. Forewarned, forearmed, and all that.”

  “ ‘On the ground floor’? How do you mean?”

  “Well, by beginning to plan now; expanding now; turning the whole thing into something bigger, so that you are ready for the increased business when it comes, as it is bound to with cohorts, no less, of people with young families flowing into the place as fast as there are houses to take them.”

  Sarah protested, “But Dick, I can’t! I haven’t the experience for one thing; I couldn’t pay the increased staff for another, and I haven’t a clue as to the business side of a venture as big as you have in mind.”

  “Pooh! For any sound scheme—and I’d see that this was one—you can always get financial backing, and I’d fix all the business end of it for you. You’d probably take a partner, and I doubt if you’d be wise to try to expand here. You’d need to move—”

  At that, at the risk of offending him, Sarah laughed aloud. Would Dick never learn, she wondered, that the tiny growth of her own creation was far too precious to be merged and lost in a soulless expansion for profit and prestige only? She said, “Forgive me, Dick. I wasn’t laughing at you, only at the picture of me, trying to run before I’ve learned to walk! No,” she laid a hand on his, “it’s too big a scheme altogether. Maybe in time I’ll grow big, but I just don’t want to launch big, and least of all do I mean to leave Monckton until it threatens to burst at the seams. Do you see?”

  “I suppose so. I also see that, as usual, you don’t mean to let Finder Son run your life for you!” he grinned at her ruefully. “However, You Have Been Warned,” He paused, then added diffidently, “And that’s another thing, Sarah dear. D’you mind?”

  “ ‘Mind’?” she echoed, puzzled. “Mind what?” “This. Briefly and brutally, Sarah, there’s Talk, did you know?”

  His tone made his meaning clear and she blanched. “Talk—about me?”

  He nodded. “About you and Steven Carrage, not to mince matters. I hear it’s being said that he is here oftener and sometimes later and longer than, professionally speaking, he need be.”

  “But, he’s my M.O.! How dare people judge how often I need to call him? Or how late at night? Or how long he chooses to stay? Or whether or not I invite him socially as well? How dare they?” Sarah fumed.

  “Exactly. How dare they? But they do. And whether or not there’s anything in it, you shouldn’t forget two things, Sarah. One, that they’re not to know which are professional calls and which aren’t, and Two, that, marriage-wise, Steven Carrage has an unrevealed past. And the latter gives them all the excuse they need to say a lot of things they would never bother to, if he were known to be a bachelor. Then it would be a case of ‘All the world loves a lover.’ But as it is,” Dick’s slight shrug was meaningful.

  Sarah quoted slowly “ ‘ Whether or not there’s anything in it’. D’you mean you think there is?”

  “If you say not, then No,” he assured her loyally. “Only, have you perhaps been a bit indiscreet, Sarah love? Honestly, now?”

  “Not even that. How could I be, here?”

  “But you have been on dates with him?”

  “One. He took me to dinner at the Fontenoy the night he asked me to take Tony while he had to be away.”

  “And you’ve had him here at night?”

  “Often lately, after he has been to see Tony. And once before, for perhaps a couple of hours, when he seemed to need to talk. About”—for the first time Sarah put her own shrewd guess into words, “about his wife, Tony’s mother, and how much he had loved her, if you must know.”

  Dick’s brows went up. “Then you know how he’s placed—divorced I mean, or what?”

  “No. He didn’t confide that much then and he has never mentioned the subject since.”

  “Not? Could that be because he’s put the whole thing into his past and is seeing the future in terms of—you?”

  “Of course not. There’s never been anything. He is wholly wrapped up in his work and in Tony!”

  “And you, Sarah? You’re not seeing him in those terms either?”

  “No, I tell you, no! Dick, who is talking?” she urged. “Tell me?”

  Dick said, “Not to worry. No one who matters really, and they won’t for long, if you don’t give them anything to feed on, which I’m sure you won’t. And the real malice I may have m
anaged to scotch for you, I don’t know.”

  “The real malice?”

  “M’m, the deliberate stuff. Source—Miss Grey from next door. You’ve made yourself an enemy there, Sarah. Any idea how?”

  “No. What has she said about me?”

  “Well, it appears she owns a seaside bungalow at Python Bay and she came to ask if I could let it for her. When I had taken her details I made a bit of conversation; asked her how she liked Farebourogh; mentioned you, and opened floodgates of sneering abuse of you for my pains!”

  “What?”

  “Oh, all about your ‘senseless’ obstruction of Mrs. Beacon and Oliver Mansbury and your shameless enticement of Alice Cosford, and then that she hoped you realized the extent to which you were cooking your own goose by the way you were ‘carrying on’ with Steven Carrage. She allowed that you seemed to take a very ‘mixed’ lot of children, but presumably most of them had fairly respectable parents who wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing. I said, ‘What sort of thing?’ and let her say her piece about Carrage’s late visits, and then I warned her she was perilously near to slander and politely suggested she might care to find another agent to handle her business.”

  “Oh Dick, you turned her down for me?”

  “What did you expect I’d do? But I’m afraid I slipped up once. In telling her to be very sure of her facts, I told her that I happened to drive the same model and color of car as Carrage does, and that if she were going by the number of times it stood outside your place, it was probably me there, not him. But she chose to twist that by saying did I really think that made it any better, that scarcely an evening passed when you weren’t entertaining one man or another, not to mention that you seemed extremely fortunate in organizing crises to entice her fiancé over to your place.”