by Jane Arbor
The man called Matthew retorted crisply: “Milady claimed to be speaking from experience. So was I. I’ve seen her breed in action—dragons, no less! Afraid of some of them myself. So I’m not particularly repentant, though I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.”
“But you wouldn’t accept conviction at the hands of a Botticelli angel in charge of a ward at the Easterbrook Trust?” The older man sounded amused.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind accepting it even from her—so long as she set about it by some other method than plunging unasked into my conversation and accusing me of knowing nothing of my own job!” was the cool reply.
After that there was increased movement behind the partition, and presently both men moved down the car towards the bar without having seen Ursula.
She began to drink her soup with fierce concentration. So he had made it a personal issue between them, had he? She felt her color rising. He had not only disagreed with her, but had been thinking her rude and uncouth for her intervention. His words rang in her brain—“her breed,” “a tongue like a whiplash,” “plunging in.” Fleetingly she wondered whether she was losing her sense of humor, for she could not recall having clashed so violently with a stranger before. But to that she assured herself that she could have laughed at the whole thing if he had only attempted to excuse or explain his attitude. Instead, he had said nothing when his friend had tried to make peace. He had just sat there with that enigmatic smile behind his eyes and had probably been thinking all the offensive things he had just said.
More than anything, she was chagrined to realize that he too had been speaking from experience. “My own job,” he had said. That meant that he must have some connection with medicine or hospitals. Well, she at least was thankful that she had not to work with him. She pitied those who had.
At Waterloo it was raining harder than ever. She was balancing her case upon a truck while she struggled to extract her raincoat when she felt a touch upon her arm. She looked up and exclaimed: “Why, Ned! How nice to see you!”
Ned Primrose stooped to drop upon her cheek the brotherly kiss which was his usual greeting. His round, goggle eyes were gleaming behind his spectacles. He explained modestly: “Well, it’s not an accident my being here. Coralie said you would be on this train.”
“So you came to meet me? That was sweet of you, Ned. Look, did you think to snaffle a taxi? You’ll come back to the flat for tea, won’t you?”
His face fell. “A taxi? Dear me, I quite forgot. You’ll get wet, won’t you?”
Dear, ineffectual Ned! He was always like that—moved by generous thoughtful impulses which he proceeded to carry out without a grain of practical sense.
She smiled at him. “Oh, well, never mind. We should have to queue now. We can go by Tube—”
Behind them a voice she had not expected to hear again said: “If you haven’t got a taxi, perhaps you would share mine and let me drop you both somewhere?”
She looked round, prepared to refuse, prepared even to resent his having managed to procure a taxi when Ned had not. But a glance at Ned showed her that for her sake he was anxious they should accept the offer, so she did so as gracefully as possible.
The man named Charles had disappeared, so apparently they were to share the taxi only with “Matthew.” Ned insisted on taking the occasional seat, leaving the other two to sit stiffly side by side on the main one.
Their conversation was that of polite strangers. Ned asked about the journey; the depressing change in the weather was discussed; after that there was silence.
Ursula reflected that, since he could not know that she had overheard his remarks about her in the dining car, the man at her side would certainly add “ungracious” to his other mental criticisms of her if she could think of nothing to say to show her appreciation of a gesture he certainly need not have made. Did she care what he thought of her? Oddly enough, she did. Of all the things she disliked most was to be misjudged—even by a stranger, as this man was.
But of what use to try to put herself right with him at this stage when, to judge by his stiff silence, he would not even meet her half-way?
When the flat was reached she thanked him again; he raised his hat, and when she and Ned had alighted, he leaned forward to give his own address to the driver.
She lingered a moment or two behind Ned, watching the taxi draw out of sight. An appropriate phrase presented itself in her mind—“the incident is now closed.” Well, so it was. Regarded dispassionately, it had never been anything more than an unimportant incident. And it was not at all likely that she would ever meet either man again.
Mrs. Craig was not at home, but Coralie was. She had been washing her hair, and came to greet them at the door of the lounge with her small head wrapped in an enormous turban of towelling.
Everything about Coralie was petite. Unlike her mother, who was tall and still youthfully regal, Coralie had tiny, exquisitely proportioned hands and feet, and Ursula had always envied her the ability to wear “small debutante” clothes. Her hair curled closely and boyishly, and her features seemed to have been modelled in miniature, giving her an appealing, doll-like expression of which she was not unaware. She was nineteen now, and when Ursula’s father had married Nicola Sefton, her mother, the two adolescent girls had at first been wary and diffident with each other. But that phase had passed, and now they were friendly enough, though sometimes Ursula thought that they still did not know each other very well.
“Hello, Bear,” said Coralie, offering her cheek for Ursula’s kiss. “So Ned managed to remember to meet you?” (Coralie had once learned in Latin class that “ursula” meant “a little bear,” and had adopted “Bear” as a nickname for her stepsister forthwith.)
“Yes, and he is staying to tea,” Ursula told her. “M-m-m—It’s nice to be free and at home for just on three weeks!”
“Mummy is out at bridge. My hair is still wet, but I suppose I’d better get tea for you.” Coralie touched the turban gingerly and looked towards the door as if she expected a fully laden tea-trolley to roll itself in.
Ursula laughed. “Don’t worry. As soon as I have had a wash I’ll do it.”
“Oh, I can’t let you—”
Ursula patted her shoulder reassuringly. “You concentrate on getting your hair dry. With that erection up you are so top-heavy that you look liable to crash-land at any moment. What is it all in aid of, anyway?”
“Cocktails. Tonight. You are invited too.”
“I am? How could I be?”
“You are, because I told Mrs. Grazebrook you would be home, and she said of course you must go too. You will, won’t you?”
“To Mrs. Grazebrook’s? Yes, I’d like to. I shan’t know anyone, but Mrs. Grazebrook is good about that. She seems to have a memory like a card-index, and she never leaves people standing about without introducing them.”
“No, she doesn’t. Although it could be quite exciting the other way, I always think.”
“The other way?”
“Well, being allowed to see if anyone comes to introduce himself because he thinks you look attractively lonely or something,” said Coralie rather wistfully.
“How does one look attractively lonely?” queried Ursula. “I look merely wallflower.” But somehow she felt that Coralie had already tried the experiment and had found it entirely successful.
She took Ned to the kitchen to help with getting the tea, though, once there, she found it quicker to do most of it herself—there was an old story that Ned, asked to set a tray, had been found pencilling out the solution to a quadratic equation on the traycloth. But she was glad of his company and they had quite a lot to talk about.
Ned said suddenly: “That’s a pity about your cocktail party. I’d meant to ask you to come with me to Much Ado.”
“Oh, Ned, I’m so sorry. And I’d love to see it. But, of course, Coralie couldn’t have known. Will you take us another night instead? You hadn’t got the tickets, had you?”
“Not yet.” The ve
ry unlikelihood of Ned’s looking as far ahead as that had its advantages, after all! “But I wasn’t taking Coralie this time—just you.”
“Oh!” Ursula paused, then added belatedly: “That would be nice.”
“Yes, I thought so,” beamed Ned.
“You’d better write it in your diary or you’ll forget,” she teased.
“I—shan’t forget,” said Ned seriously.
After tea, when he had gone and Coralie had removed the turban to reveal a mass of clustered curls like those of a Greek boy, she went to manicure her nails in Ursula’s room while Ursula finished her unpacking and began to dress for the party.
Coralie said idly: “You must be glad to be out of that awful barrack for a while. Why you go on working there when you needn’t, I can’t imagine.”
“But I do need to. I happen to love nursing and, after all, one must live!” replied Ursula with a smile.
“Yes, well—if you really like it, I suppose that’s different, though I can’t think how you can. And when I said you needn’t I meant that you don’t have to refuse to take an allowance from Mummy. She considers it misplaced pride on your part. She said so.”
“Mama didn’t want me to go to Sheremouth in the first place. But when she didn’t actually forbid, it, as she could have done, I told her that if she would let me go I would never expect her to help me with money. And I never have.”
Coralie spread the fingers of one hand in order to examine her manicure. “It sounds a bit involved and unnecessary—as if you had been fiercely keeping a bargain with yourself rather than with Mummy.” She paused, then added thoughtfully: “Bear—why don’t you marry Ned?”
“Marry Ned?” Ursula’s hairbrush, sweeping deeply into her shining waves, was suddenly arrested as she turned to face her stepsister. “Marry Ned? Coralie, what do you mean?”
Coralie was on the defensive at once. “You needn’t look so startled. He is awfully fond of you—”
“No more than of you. And he is old—he was Daddy’s friend!”
“He is only about forty, and I always thought he was more of a protégé of your father’s—anyway, much younger. There’s nothing so very odd in the idea.”
“But there is. Even if he is only forty, I’m only twenty-four. He hasn’t a thought beyond his science, and I’m not looking for a husband. As an idea it’s more than odd—it’s ludicrous.”
“It’s not.” Coralie sounded sulky. “He is in love with you—so far as he could remember to be in love with anyone. Anyway, Mummy says all that doglike devotion of his isn’t healthy, if it doesn’t mean anything. And even if he is staid and stuffy—” She broke off. Perhaps, even to Bear, she could not quite say that!
But Ursula had taken her unspoken meaning. Quietly, trying to see the humor of it, she said. “You’re implying that I’m staid and stuffy too?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“But you were going to say it.” Ursula turned back to the dressing-table and took up her hairbrush again. “Sorry, Coralie, but even if I agreed that Ned was dull and that I matched him in it, it still wouldn’t seem to me to add up to a good reason for our marrying. I should forget it, if I were you.”
When Coralie had returned to her own room Ursula sat staring at her reflection in the mirror and pressing the bristles of the brush hard into the palm of her hand.
She wanted passionately to deny Coralie’s criticism. Was it possible that to Coralie’s nineteen-year-old eyes she appeared so “set” that there seemed no difference either in age or in outlook between herself and Ned? And could Coralie really believe that Ned had ever thought of her in any other way than as his younger sister?
A sudden disturbing thought prompted—could Coralie believe it because Ned himself had allowed her to? Little things began to take on significance. He had never before gone to the trouble to meet her at Waterloo. His kiss had meant nothing, though she supposed that that man “Matthew” would have been a witness of it. But there had been Ned’s stolid: “I wasn’t taking Coralie—just you.” Her own surprise, not acute enough at the time, seemed now to have been justified.
She stood up abruptly, pushing away the intrusive thoughts. She could not love Ned and she did not want him to love her. She did not want to lose Ned as a friend. But perhaps it was already too late for that. For her stepmother had already laid a distasteful finger upon their happy relationship, calling it “unhealthy”. And now Coralie, if not Ned himself, had done the rest. Why, oh, why must people spoil things so?
Mrs. Craig had returned from her bridge party before the girls were ready to leave. But though she had been invited she did not accompany them, saying she was going straight to bed.
“Oh, Mummy, not one of your headaches again?” cried Coralie.
Mrs. Craig pressed graceful fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. “I’m afraid so. This one promises to be a demon.”
“You haven’t mentioned them in your letters. Do you have them often?” asked Ursula in concern.
“Increasingly, lately. I must see someone about them if they go on.”
“You certainly must. Wouldn’t you like me to stay with you instead of going out?”
“No, no. Go along with Coralie. It is quite enough to expect Mrs. Grazebrook to excuse one of us, let alone two. How are you looking, by the way?” She shaded her eyes with one hand and subjected Ursula to a critical appraisal. “Isn’t that suit a bit severe?”
Ursula glanced down at her suit of fine black barathea with which she wore a narrowly pleated nylon blouse. “Is it? I thought anything was permissible for cocktails.”
“Oh, it is. But with all the severity of that hideous uniform, I should think you would welcome the chance to ‘froth’ a little.”
Ursula laughed. “I don’t froth very easily. Probably I was born tailor-made.”
“Nonsense. You have allowed yourself to become typed, that’s all. And it is a great mistake. You should allow your choice of clothes to veer with your mood. Coralie—you will explain to Inez Grazebrook, won’t you?”
At their hostess’s house Ursula found, as she had expected, that she knew very few people. Coralie was quickly whisked from her side, and she was alone until an elderly man who had known her father came to speak to her. He brought her some sherry and they talked until they too were absorbed in a group of his acquaintances. This in its turn broke up, as is the way at parties, and then Ursula momentarily alone again, saw her hostess bearing down upon her.
Mrs. Grazebrook, large, florid and good-natured, took her by both hands in greeting. “Ah, there you are, my dear. When Coralie promised to bring you I planned a special surprise for you—a man you should meet, if you don’t know him already. You know how I adore fitting suitable people together...!” She paused to scan her guests. “So tiresome though. A few minutes ago I had him safely, but now he has escaped again. Ah, there he is—”
She dived into the crowds and took firmly by the arm a man whose back was turned. Then in gay triumph she bore him like a prize to Ursula’s side.
There was a moment’s silence—a moment of flashed recognition between Ursula and Matthew Lingard. Then Mrs. Grazebrook said: “Ursula, dear, I want you to meet Mr. Lingard, the orthopaedic surgeon. He has been in Egypt for nearly two years and he is on vacation now. But when that is over he is to be chief surgical consultant at that Sheremouth hospital of yours.” She looked up at Matthew. “That’s right, isn’t it? And Ursula—Miss Craig—is a ward sister there, so that makes you colleagues, doesn’t it, and with enough in common to get you nicely acquainted? I may add that I have been to a great deal of trouble to bring you two together, so, once my back is turned, let either of you say, ‘Dear me, what a coincidence!’ if you dare!”
She need not have worried. Momentarily at least she had left both her guests with nothing to say.
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS Matthew who spoke first. He took Ursula’s empty wine glass from her, twirling its stem between his fingers as he said: “With all d
ue respect to our hostess’s diligence, it is something of a coincidence, is it not? You must tell me if you find it unbearably unwelcome!”
For Ursula the situation was infinitely more difficult, more galling. He had known that she was a sister at the Easterbrook Trust, for she had told his friend so in the train. Yet, for some purpose of his own, he had deliberately concealed his own coming connection with the hospital, and that roused in her a resentment which even good manners could scarcely conceal. Her eyes met his squarely, but she was shamed by a little catch in her voice as she parried: “No more unwelcome, I suspect, than you do yourself!”
He laughed. “Be sure your sins will find you out,” he quoted. “I plead guilty to all that you are thinking, and fate—abetted by Mrs. Grazebrook—made sure that I was not to escape. Perhaps, even, I am wrong in thinking you might find our meeting unwelcome, and you are actually looking forward to continuing a diatribe which you began so ably?”
She frowned, looking down at her hands. “You know that I’m not,” she said in a low voice, hating the mockery in his own. “You know that I said what I did in the belief that neither you nor your friend knew anything of the conditions you were criticizing. A single word from you would have put me right about that. But you didn’t give it. In fact,” she added with spirit, remembering the warning of a glance which had flashed between the two men, “I think you even signalled to your friend that he was to say nothing. That—that wasn’t quite fair.”
“You think not?” He still spoke lightly, and she realized that he wore an armour of raillery which even an appeal to his sense of fair play could not penetrate. “You think not? But supposing I were to tell you that I said nothing—yes, and even warned Charles!—in order to save you from losing face?”
“I find it hard to believe that—”
“But I assure you it was so. At that moment you were so angry and so utterly right—in your own opinion!—that to have challenged you then and there would have been no less than cruelty. Later—aided by time and by a sense of proportion which I argued you must possess somewhere—you might take it better, I judged.”
