My Surgeon Neighbour

by Jane Arbor

  “But only, surely if she got in touch with you again? Did she?” asked Sarah.

  “She didn’t, and the next bit reads like something you’d hardly credit in a book. By the merest chance a very dear mutual friend who was holidaying in Belgium was lunching on a cafe terrace in Ostend when she was pretty certain she saw Nora having coffee at a table inside. She was alone, and Mary Crosbie, our friend, kept her in view until she left and then followed her. At first by bus and then quite a distance on foot, which taxed Mary a lot as she suffers from spine curvature and can’t walk fast. She was a good way behind Nora when Nora went into one of three tall apartment houses, and when Mary did catch up she was faced by three lots of name-plates yards long and no one of Nora’s surname—though of course she hardly expected that—amongst them.

  “That put Mary on a spot. She has hardly a word of French and the only concierge she was able to find hadn’t any English and couldn’t or wouldn’t understand Mary’s mimed description of Nora. What was more, Mary was on a coach-tour due to leave Ostend in a couple of hours, so she did the only thing possible to her. She noted in her diary the name of the street and the block-numbers, meaning to get in touch with me, and then lost her diary when her handbag was stolen from her later.”

  “Oh no!” breathed Sarah.

  “That, and a good deal more, is what I said too,” replied Steven. “However, Mary was able to give me a vague description of the district and it was the first clue I had ever had as to Nora’s whereabouts. So on the little I had I parked Tony with you and went over. My French is passable and it wasn’t too difficult to locate the place and I went through those three blocks with a fine comb, knocking on every door, even though I didn’t even know whether Nora lived there or had just called in and left again after Mary had gone.

  “It took time, explaining myself to them all and having to go back when I got no answer, which happened often. But then, in the third house, the photograph of Nora I was showing touched ore, or so nearly as to sicken me. The concierge said she had had a single one-room flatlet there, that did my heart good, but had left only a couple of days earlier.”

  “Without a forwarding address?”

  “Without,” Steven confirmed, “a forwarding address. In fact, she hadn’t had one when she went away. She had left on good terms with the concierge and only because she had to find somewhere cheaper. Anyway, she had promised to phone or call in with her new address when she had one, so a good fat pourboire to the women took care of that, as far as I was concerned. I was to sit pretty until Nora rang; upon which the concierge would ring me. But as you know Tony’s affair brought me back a day or two later, by which time Nora hadn’t made any sign, nor hadn’t since until today.”

  “But now she has? You know where she is?”

  “Yes. She phoned me herself, person-to-person early this evening.” Steven expelled a long, long breath. “Sarah, you don’t know what it did to me to hear her voice again—catchy, eager, young, just the same as ever. She hadn’t kept her promise because she hadn’t been able to stick the first place she had found and had moved twice since. But when she did go back, the concierge had gone beyond my instructions by describing me and passing on my address. And—Nora did the rest.”

  “And she hadn’t—? She wasn’t—?” Sarah stopped, embarrassed.

  He understood. “No. They had parted a long time ago, and since she had had a job in an import-export office, translating English letters and doing copy-typing. Of course there are volumes of things we couldn’t say and great yawning gaps to be filled in. It could even be that we’ll find adjusting difficult. But the good thing is, Sarah, that she wants to come back as much as I need her, and that’s with everything I’ve got!”

  There was no need for Sarah to find words to tell him how glad she was for him. Her shining eyes said it for her as she asked, “Does Tony know yet? That when you come back from this trip, she will be with you?”

  Steven shook his head. “I haven’t told him yet, though I wanted to.”

  “Then why not?”

  “Because,” he smiled, “I had an idea that you’d like the job. Would you?”

  “You know I would! You mean I may tell him while you’re away?”

  “That was the rough idea.”

  They talked on for a while, then Steven looked at his watch with sharp surprise. “Ten-thirty! I must go. I’ve oceans of things to do before morning,” he exclaimed, cutting across Sarah’s dismayed echo of, “Half-past ten! Then where on earth is Martha?”

  “Martha? Why, where is she supposed to be?” Sarah related Martha’s errand, but made little of her lateness in order not to keep Steven. On the way out to his car she asked him,

  “And the future, Steven? When you do come back, will you be staying on here in Fareborough?”

  But he told her no. His plans were necessarily fluid, but his present idea was that he would not bring Nora to Fareborough at all. She would stay with friends in London and at first he would only take Tony to visit her while he sought a suitable medical partnership elsewhere where the three of them could make a fresh start. Meanwhile, other than Sarah, he would take only his present partners into his confidence and he knew he could trust Sarah to keep it too, he said.

  “Of course you can,” she assured him. And then, on impulse as he was about to open the door of his car, she laid a hand on his arm. “But I wonder if you know how badly I’m going to miss you, and Tony too?” she said.

  He put his own hand over hers and gripped it hard. “If it’s as much as we shall miss you, I do know,” he said. And then, “Bless you, Sarah, for everything,” he added and planted a hearty kiss upon her cheek as lights suddenly and revealingly raked the gateway and drive and Oliver Mansbury’s car swept in and halted to allow his passenger to get out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OLIVER alighted too and handed to Martha a covered basket which she cradled lovingly in her arms as she turned to Sarah.

  “I’m ever so sorry, Miss Sarah! That I’m so late back, I mean. Who’d have thought I could be so silly, thinking the buses from Chevicote would run the same on Sundays as on weekdays? I waited and waited, not knowing there would be no nine o’clock and thinking it was just late, you see. And I could have been waiting till now or walking, as I’d set out to do, carrying pussy, if Mr. Mansbury hadn’t come along in his car and seen me and given me a lift. Wasn’t that kind of him?”

  Covered in confusion, Sarah agreed, “It was indeed.” She did not know whether Oliver had seen Steven’s kiss. But his glance at the other man’s sports jacket and corduroys had not escaped her and she felt sure he had read the worst in the fact that Steven was carrying no professional bag. Meanwhile, after nodding to the surgeon, Steven had got into his seat and was ready to go, and a moment later, with a, “Think nothing of it. I was glad to be able to help,” Oliver was at the wheel again and following the smaller car out.

  Indoors Sarah had to hear the story in fuller detail and to admire the newcomer, a ball of orange fur with a tiny protuberance for a tail and ears so transparent that the veins shone through, rose-pink. Martha planned to call him Sunny, she told Sarah before she took him down to the kitchen to meet Moses, leaving Sarah to the kaleidoscope of her thoughts about the events of the evening to her chagrin that it had ended as it had.

  For this was the kind of thing Dick had warned her to avoid at all costs, the perfectly innocent situation which could be misread. It irked her badly that she was in no position to pass it off or to joke about it, for she did not know Oliver Mansbury well enough for either. Ironically, she only loved the man for what she knew of his kindness, his sense of justice, his controlled virility! They were on no terms which would allow her to explain away to him the fact that she had had Steven at the house for no professional purpose on a Sunday evening when she had known Martha would be out and, as no doubt Martha’s gossip on her way home had informed him, when Alice was still away on holiday.

  How much of Jurice Grey’s malice had he
heard? She wondered. How much would he have read into tonight’s scene? Enough perhaps to explain his rather curt dismissal of Martha’s thanks and her own. But enough for him to think it his professional duty to act on? Oh please, please not, prayed Sarah in an agony for Steven’s reputation as much as for her own.

  Tied by her promise to Steven, she told nothing of his story to anyone but Tony, whom she knew she could make the staunch guardian of the secret as long as it was ‘Daddy’s’. As for Tony himself, Sarah only wished his mother could have heard the confident faith of his, “Of course I always knew Mummy wouldn’t stay away from Daddy and me any longer than she had to. I told Daddy so when he was sad about her having to be away so long.” To Sarah that spelled all the trust she prayed she might inspire in her own children if she ever had any, and again, as often before, she thought how much she would give to have a son just like Tony.

  Steven came back happy from Ostend and Tony duly returned to the flat. But during the month of the dissolving of Steven’s Fareborough partnership and connections, they spent their weekends in London with Tony’s mother and Sarah saw very little of them. Meanwhile there were no further developments in the feud between Monckton and Greystones until the eruption of a serio-comic clash which at first did not involve Sarah at all.

  She was to hear of it from Martha. Martha, indignant, outraged, on the defensive, exploded one morning, “That Pigott! That gardener they have next door, you know, Miss Sarah? Well, what do you think he’s saying now? That—but of course you’ll have heard that lot of cats that have been caterwauling around and going on nohow at night lately?”

  Sarah had and said so. It was a recent midnight nuisance in their hitherto quiet district. But knowing both the more mature Moses and the kitten Sunny had alibis in Martha’s stern marshalling of them to bed every night, she queried, “Surely Mr. Piggott hasn’t suggested your cats are amongst them?”

  Martha fumed, “That’s just what he has done! Won’t credit that you can get cats in at night if you take the trouble and, well, provide for them, if you’ll pardon the expression, Miss Sarah. Says it stands to sense that Moses anyway is there, yelling his head off with the rest and worse than that too.”

  “Worse?” echoed Sarah amusedly.

  Worse, by his way of thinking. Oh no, he doesn’t care so much about the noise that keeps our children awake and must do the same for the Greystones patients, I should have thought. It’s his precious garden-borders that he’s worried about. Says these cats, whoever they are, and I know they’re the lot from the housing-estate below, are careering about and playing merry Harry with his bedding-out, and if he can only catch them at it, he’ll do them, and no two ways about it!”

  “Ruining his flower-beds? But I thought midnight cats usually sat on walls and roofs, and howled and fought it out there?”

  “So they mostly do. Don’t mean anything by it half the time. Just their way. Bang up a window and pour out a jug of water and they’re off, double-quick. It’s only if they think they’re cornered that they’ll helter-skelter amongst growing plants, and then only from fear, poor things. But this—this Pigott,” Martha’s tone made anathema of the name, “he will have it that there won’t be a flower left in his borders and that it’s bound to be Moses, if not Sunny, doing the damage along with the rest.”

  “But we can prove that you always get them in at night before you go to bed yourself,” objected Sarah.

  “Only if I got him round here to see them. Which isn’t to say, if he doesn’t want it to, that they’re in every night of their lives,” Martha pointed out with logic. Her lip suddenly quivered. “Miss Sarah, you don’t really think he’d try to do either of them a mischief, do you?”

  Sarah shook her head. “He wouldn’t dare. He must know that cats are specially privileged, that they are beyond the law of trespass or damage. I can understand he is annoyed about his flower-beds of course. But if the damage is done at night, everyone here can back you up that neither Moses nor Sunny can possibly be blamed. Don’t worry, Martha. Now that Mr. Pigott has had his say, I should doubt if any more will be heard about it.”

  Nor was it until a certain Saturday morning. From the staircase window Sarah saw Trevor Boothe leave Greystones by a side door and come over to join the Monckton children in the garden. Lately, she thought in passing, there were hopes for him in a social way. The children themselves made short work of his bragging and ganged-up against him when he tried to bully. But he still chose to join them when there was no compulsion on him to do so, and certainly recently he had caused no trouble from which he needed to see his way out.

  But alas for her complacency! She had barely reached the dayroom when a small company burst in on her there: Alice, white-faced and indignant; little Jean Cosford, one hand in her mother’s, the other fist knuckling her tearful eyes; and Trevor, sullen and shuffling, an unwilling third.

  Sarah looked in dismay from one to the other. “Why, what’s the matter, Nurse?” she asked, using the title by which the children knew Alice on duty.

  Alice compressed her lips. “Trouble,” she said curtly. “But Jean had better tell you what she has told me, I think. Jean—?”

  However, Jean, thus invited, could do no better than to dissolve into sobs, from which presently emerged a choked, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t! Really not, Sister Sanst’d!”

  Sarah went to kneel before her. “Didn’t do what, Jean? Tell me?”

  “What—what Trevor says. What he’s told them. But I didn’t, and he knows I didn’t. Not once. Not ever!”

  Sarah stood and turned to Trevor. “Well, Trevor? What’s all this you have been saying about Jean? Suppose you tell me?”

  But Trevor merely thrust out sulky lips and it was Alice who explained, “It seems the big greenhouse at Greystones was found with the door open this morning, and heaps of damage done to the prize flowers Mr. Pigott was entering for the Flower Show next week. It must have been those night-prowling cats. At least, I suppose so. But what Trevor says he has told them—Mr. Mansbury and Mr. Pigott and Mrs. Beacon—is that it was Jean who went into the greenhouse yesterday evening and must have left the door open behind her.”

  Sarah’s jaw dropped. “Jean? What nonsense! Why, she has never set foot in the Greystones grounds since you both left there, has she?”

  But the answer to that was a slow reluctant nod on the child’s part. “I was there, Sister Sans’d. Yesterday. With Trevor. Like he says.”

  “Oh, Jean! You went over there without asking Mummy if you might? Or asking me?” Sarah accused gently.

  Another nod. A gulp. “Well, it was Sunny, you see.”

  “You mean Martha’s new kit?”

  “Yes. She didn’t know where he was after tea, an’ I hunted for him for her, an’ I was worried too, ’cos he’s very small, an’ I thought if he didn’t come home for his supper, he might die if he’d wandered off and didn’t know his way back. And then when Trevor was going home after play, he said p’raps Sunny had gone over the wall into next door, and why didn’t I go back with him an’ look. So I did, an’ he helped me for a bit an’ then he said, ‘Let’s look in the big greenhouse.’ ”

  “I didn’t. You said that,” put in Trevor.

  “Oh Trevor, you know I didn’t. You did. I said, ‘No, we mustn’t. When I lived here with Mummy Mr. Pigott never let me or any children go in alone, so we really mustn’t.’ So Trevor looked through the door an’ he said he couldn’t see Sunny there.”

  “You mean, neither of you did go in?” put in Sarah.

  “Not then. I didn’t and Trevor didn’t while I was with him. But when he came round this morning he said the greenhouse door had been left open all night and lots of Mr. Pigott’s flowers were all smashed down.”

  Sarah put a gentle finger beneath the child’s chin. “But you really hadn’t been in? We want the truth, Jean.”

  “No, I’ve told you and I’ve told Mummy. But Trevor told them over there that I did and they believe him!”

&nbs
p; “Well, tell me, did Sunny come home after all?”

  “Yes. He was in Martha’s kitchen when I got back, and I was so glad I didn’t think anything more about it. I didn’t even tell Mummy I’d been next door with Trevor.”

  Sarah turned to the boy. “Well, it looks as if it rests with you,” she said quietly. “After Jean came home, did you go into the greenhouse and leave the door open behind you?”

  His stare was defiant. “No.”

  “Then don’t you see that if neither of you went in, it could have been someone else who left the door open after you and Jean had just looked through it? Why did you say it was Jean?”

  “Because it was. She said, ‘Let’s go in,’ and she went and—I came away.”

  “Oh Trevor!” Jean appealed to Sarah, “That’s what he told Mr. Mansbury, he says. An’ it isn’t, it isn’t true!”

  Sarah looked from one to the other and then in despair at Alice. She knew whom she wanted to believe; experience told her whom she could believe. But equally earnestly did she want to think that Trevor was not lying this time. For if he were it meant that she had made no progress with him at all. She drew Alice aside.

  “Look,” she whispered. “Will you send Jean away and we’ll give Trevor another chance alone? After all, if we can make him see that he’s not to blame if a third person was really the culprit, he may realize the utter senselessness of his implicating Jean.”