Healing in the Hills

by Ruth Clemence

  HEALING IN THE HILLS

  Ruth Clemence

  It was in the Lake District that Ismay sought escape from the pain of one romantic experience—only to find another.

  But this time the situation was the other way round. With Peter, the love had been on his side. With Lewis, it seemed his interest in her was only as a nurse who could be useful to him. Her rival was his work...

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ismay Carroll sat in a high, straight-backed chair by the dining-room window. She had been there for well over an hour, completely motionless, her thoughts churning endlessly but to little purpose. At the back of her mind she knew she should arouse herself, tidy her bedroom or at least start preparing vegetables for lunch to give her mother a hand, but she felt unable to make the effort. It took real will power to drag herself out of bed these days, wash, dress and try to preserve at least an appearance of normality.

  She turned her head and looked out into the garden. It was the last week in May and all the trees were clothed in fresh green leaves, not yet dusty from the summer winds, and in the borders the last of the forget-me-nots and tulips were still flowering bravely. But for all the interest in Ismay’s eyes it might have been midwinter, the trees bare and the flower beds desolate. She continued to stare out blindly for a moment or two and then glanced down at the hands lying idly in her lap.

  They hardly seemed to belong to her. As a rule she never sat down without a piece of mending or some embroidery work in her busy fingers, and often she would contrive to read at the same time. Slowly Ismay raised her right hand and traced with her forefinger the faint line still visible on the third finger of her left hand where, for two years, Peter’s ring had rested.

  She had taken the ring off the day after the funeral, put it in its little white box and pushed it to the back of her handkerchief drawer. One day perhaps she might be able to wear it again without bitter memories or feelings of guilt assailing her.

  Ismay knew she ought to get up and find something to do, anything in fact that would keep hands and mind occupied. She had seen patients get into this particular form of depression, but never in her wildest dreams had she thought it could happen to herself. She would have to pull herself together somehow otherwise disaster lay ahead. A job would be the answer, but what sort of job? She did not want to return to the big London hospital where she had done her nursing training and worked so happily until Peter returned from America and swept her ruthlessly into plans for an immediate wedding. It was barely three weeks since the big farewell party had been held in the nurses’ home and she could not go back yet to face the sympathetic glances of her hospital friends, not even Sandie’s.

  She and Sandie Grey had done their training together and climbed the ladder slowly side by side in St. Ninian’s after they passed their finals. It had been Sandie too who had been the one who put the first doubts in Ismay’s mind about Peter’s reliability as a prospective husband.

  Ismay shook her head as if by doing so she could clear it of recollections of past unhappy conversations. Even worse than the sympathy she would meet were she to return to London were the daily encounters here in Cambridge with Peter’s mother, the pitying looks she saw on the faces of neighbours and close family friends. The answer would be to get right away from familiar surroundings, but where? And doing what kind of job? Nursing was her only skill.

  Just at that moment Ismay heard the back door open and the sound of footsteps in the kitchen. It would undoubtedly be her mother returning from the supermarket. Hastily Ismay straightened in the chair and tried to look as if she had just that second sat down, but she knew her mother was not deceived. The hatchway between dining-room and kitchen was open and through it Ismay glimpsed her mother’s face wearing the anxious expression it assumed all too frequently these days.

  Not only had Peter’s death rocked Ismay’s own private world, but indirectly it was causing unhappiness to everyone who came into daily contact with her. Mrs. Carroll’s normally smooth forehead had recently acquired a continual furrow of concern, Ismay realized, and whenever she thought her daughter was sitting moping she had a look of helpless despair. It would be unfair to stay here and continue to distress her parents by letting them see her confused state of mind. At your time of life, Ismay told herself sternly, you should be capable of concealing your feelings a little better.

  As she was taking herself to task, Mrs. Carroll’s voice floated through from the next room. ‘Had your elevenses yet, darling?’ she asked,, although she must have guessed the answer to this question before the words were spoken.

  Ismay got up and walked through the door leading into the kitchen. ‘Not yet. You put the shopping away, Mummy. I’ll get the coffee ready,’ she offered, and slowly bent down to the cupboard under the sink and took out a milk pan.

  All Ismay’s movements were slow these days, Mrs. Carroll noticed, and sighed inwardly. As she put the groceries into the pantry, she surreptitiously watched her daughter going about the preparations for making the morning cup of coffee, and nothing she saw allayed her constant anxieties. She and her husband had been so happy when Peter and Ismay had finally named the wedding day after a long courtship followed by a two-year engagement. Peter’s tragic death three days before the wedding had grieved her almost as much as if it had been her own son, Robin.

  She had found it almost impossible to believe Ismay when she had rung up on that wet dark evening and told her that on the way back from the cottage they were modernizing Peter, getting out to change a flat tyre, had been knocked down and killed by a drunken motorist, driving far too fast on a slippery surface. Dr. Carroll had fortunately been at home and he had driven at once to the hospital, but there was nothing he could do except bring a dry-eyed and shocked Ismay home, give her a strong sleeping draught and put her straight to bed.

  ‘Want a biscuit with your coffee?’ Ismay asked suddenly, and Mrs. Carroll was brought abruptly back to the present.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a cigarette, though. Come on, let’s carry it through,’ and picking up the tray which Ismay had prepared she walked out of the room.

  Ismay followed her slowly. This was another new characteristic of her mother. Mrs. Carroll had previously been only a social smoker, having a cigarette occasionally at parties more to hide a trace of shyness than because she enjoyed it. Since Peter’s death her mother had begun to smoke far more frequently, and this in itself gave an indication of how worried she was underneath the placid exterior which she managed to present to her family.

  As they went into the dining-room the telephone rang. Calling to her mother, ‘I’ll answer it,’ Ismay walked through to the hall and picked up the receiver. To her surprise a voice asked her to hold on and then she heard the voice of her old matron at St. Ninian’s coming over the line.

  After the preliminaries had been said Miss Fellows quickly came to the purpose of her phone call. ‘I thought by this time you’d be feeling like getting back to work. Oh, not here,’ she went on before Ismay could speak. ‘I could understand your not wanting to return here, but I’ve had an inquiry this morning from an old friend of mine. She’s desperately trying to find someone to look after her two teenage granddaughters. One of them has had rather a complicated operation to a knee and she’s had to be sent home from her boarding school. The younger girl won’t stay there without her. She’s hard of hearing, in fact, practically deaf, and I don’t think she can cope without the older sister’s help. Anyway, Clare has refused to stay at school without Anne, and consequently, as it’s nearing the end of the term, the family have given in and the girls are expected home tomorrow morning. The older one will need a bit of experienced nursing, of course, but there’s another reason why I thoug
ht of you. You know the sign language, I believe.’

  Ismay gave a surprised laugh. ‘Fancy you remembering that, Matron! It’s ages since I was on Men’s Medical and we had that dear old deaf patient in the corner bed. He taught me. I was six months on the ward and he was in for most of that time with a broken femur.’

  ‘Yes, I remember the case.’ Miss Fellows was well known for her prodigious memory. ‘You were the only one on the ward who could get through to him, Sister said.’

  ‘It was easier to learn deaf language than to keep writing notes to him,’ Ismay explained. ‘It didn’t take me long to pick it up.’

  ‘If you decide to take up this post,’ Miss Fellows went on, ‘it will prove very useful, because apparently Clare can be difficult at times—not an unusual characteristic of the very deaf. Being only twelve, she hasn’t learnt to compensate yet. Well, you’ve got all day to think it over. Lewis Kynoch, my friend’s son, and incidentally an old boy of St. Ninian’s himself, has arranged to give you a ring some time after six, when I hope you will have had time to think the matter over. If you do accept he’ll arrange all the other details with you personally.’ There was a pause before Miss Fellows went on, ‘Take my advice and accept. The only snag is that the Kynochs live right up on the Westmorland/Cumberland border, in the heart of the country. Would that be a drawback?’

  ‘No!’ Ismay replied promptly. ‘I’m fond of plenty of exercise and fresh air, in fact anything to do with country life, and although I’ve visited the Lake District once, I never got the chance to explore much.’

  ‘Then this is a superb opportunity to get to know it better,’ Miss Fellows went on. ‘I don’t suppose your duties will be exceptionally arduous. In fact, as Anne improves in health I daresay you’ll be expected to see she gets out as much as possible, so it will give you an excuse to make expeditions in the district. Anyway, give it a thought during the day. You’ve got several hours to think it over carefully and probably you’ll want to talk it over with your parents, but when Dodo Kynoch phoned it occurred to me that it was the very thing for you at the moment.’

  Ismay thanked her, and slowly put down the telephone gazing at the instrument for several minutes before she went in to join her mother and tell her who had been on the telephone. Mrs. Carroll listened attentively and without comment as Ismay explained about the job. ‘It’s a long way to go,’ she remarked when Ismay finally finished, ‘but I don’t know that it wouldn’t be the very thing for you.’ She looked directly across into her daughter’s eyes. ‘Father and I were talking it over together last night in bed. We agreed you ought to get right away from. Cambridge and from all associations with Peter, and we didn’t think you’d want to go back to St. Ninian’s right away.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Ismay’s voice was emphatic. ‘It would be absolutely awful. Oh, everyone would be terribly kind and sympathetic. I think that would hurt almost as much as if they pretended nothing had happened and I’d simply been away on leave. I’ll talk to Daddy at lunch-time about this. It sounds almost as if it’s a job tailor-made for me. If I like the sound of this man who’ll be ringing tonight I think I’ll accept. It’s only a temporary job, after all. I expect the girl will be on her feet again in a few weeks, and I always did get on well with youngsters. I thoroughly enjoyed my period in the children’s ward at St. Ninian’s and was sorry when I got moved up to theatre. The younger sister sounds as if she might be a bit of a problem, but I expect there are ways and means to overcome that. And it’s handy that I happen to know the deaf language, isn’t it?’

  Mrs. Carroll agreed, and when Dr. Carroll came in at one-thirty for a quick lunch before going out to do his afternoon calls he too thought that the post sounded a very suitable one, at least as a temporary measure. ‘You’ll know more when you’ve spoken to Miss Fellows’ friend this evening,’ he said as he glanced at his watch and picked up his bag to make a hurried departure. ‘I don’t suppose I shall be back before he telephones, but if you don’t like the sound of him, stall until you can talk to me. Get his telephone number and say you’ll call back.’

  Ismay went for a walk after lunch along the small suburban road where they lived and out by the footpath across the fields. Her father was senior partner in a large group practice right in town, so the family had never experienced the difficulty of ‘living over the shop’. Peter’s parents had moved in next door twenty years ago and Ismay could not recall a time when she had not been able to peep over the fence and feast her eyes on ‘the boy next door’.

  Mr. McNeil was an accountant and had come from London to live in Cambridge. Peter, their only child, had always been a studious boy and it was no surprise when he got a place in the best grammar school in the district and followed it up with an open scholarship to Cambridge. From then on he had gone from strength to strength, and had finished after getting his degree and three years as a research student by spending twelve months in the United States on an exchange scholarship.

  For Ismay there had never been anybody else but Peter. From the moment his family had moved in she had been his devoted slave, but it was not until his last year at university that he suddenly noticed that the troublesome little hanger-on next door had turned into a real beauty. Almost overnight the ponytail and the puppy fat disappeared, and in their place was a slim, attractive girl with grey eyes which looked as if they had been smudged in with a sooty finger, a heritage from her father’s Irish ancestry.

  Peter had begun to call in on all sorts of feeble pretexts and Dr. and Mrs. Carroll had been vastly entertained by this sudden change in his behaviour. Where once he had made excuses not to see Ismay, now he was hard pressed to find a suitable reason for dropping in so often. For her own part Ismay had been thrilled by his sudden interest and had accepted without hesitation the invitation to partner him at his last May Ball.

  It had been a wonderful evening, one that she had never forgotten. To start with the weather had been perfect, and she had found what she considered to be just the right dress. It still hung in a corner of her wardrobe because Ismay had never had the heart to throw it away. Wishing to look more sophisticated than her eighteen years and nearer to Peter’s age of twenty-one, Ismay had chosen black velvet, a perfectly plain fitted style with bare shoulders and a simple round neck. With her beautiful long dark hair in a coronet in which two small pink rosebuds had been cunningly inserted she had looked dazzlingly young and beautiful, and the glow in Peter’s eyes as he came to collect her had dispelled all the doubts that perhaps the dress was too sophisticated after all.

  Ismay remembered that ball so well. She had been about to take her ‘A’ levels and leave Cambridge to start training as a nurse at one of the big London hospitals. Everything had been arranged, and suddenly here she was at last an object of interest to her childhood idol. When it came time for her to leave for St. Ninian’s it had been quite a wrench, but Peter had come up to London as often as he could, and she had returned home whenever she had a week-end off.

  It had been a happy time with both the young people working hard, Ismay for her S.R.N. and Peter for his thesis. Looking back now, Ismay decided as she turned for home, it seemed as if it had happened to somebody else, not herself. A dreamlike quality hung about those years, and as she turned up the garden path it seemed to her as if everything in that happy life before Peter had left to spend his year in America had happened to two different people.

  Supper was almost ready and Ismay and her mother were awaiting the return of Dr. Carroll from his evening surgery when the telephone rang. Mrs. Carroll looked up from the pullover she was knitting and remarked, ‘That will be for you, I expect!’

  Hesitantly, Ismay went to the phone. She let it give a couple more rings before lifting the receiver and putting it to her ear, gave their number. A deep, well-modulated masculine voice immediately asked, ‘Is that Miss Carroll?’

  ‘Speaking,’ Ismay replied.

  ‘Good. This is Lewis Kynoch here. I understand Miss Fellows has been in touch with
you. Have you had time to think the proposition over?’ the voice at the other end of the telephone asked.

  Ismay hesitated again. Then she said slowly, ‘Miss Fellows did telephone, but she only gave me the briefest idea of what would be required of me. I’m not sure...’ She got no further.

  ‘I must say you don’t sound over-enthusiastic.’ It was quietly said, but for some reason Ismay felt her temper begin to rise. It was the first time she had felt any violent emotion for some time and she was surprised at the hot flush of anger which she could feel stealing into her face.

  ‘Telephones can be very deceptive,’ she replied rather tartly. ‘I don’t see how you can possibly gauge my enthusiasm or lack of it in just a few words. As a matter of fact I think it might be just the kind of thing I’m looking for.’ Immediately the words left her lips there was a second’s absolute silence from the other end of the telephone, and indeed Ismay herself was startled as the words popped out. Why had she reacted as she had, and was this job really a desirable situation considering her present state of mind? During the day she had felt completely apathetic about the whole idea and even determined to turn it down, and to her own astonishment instead she had accepted. But at any rate it was an offer of escape and she must do something soon, otherwise she would lapse into a state of complete melancholia, and that, she told herself firmly, would do neither herself nor her family any good.

  ‘You do understand you’ll be looking after two girls, in fact,’ Lewis Kynoch suddenly remarked in her ear. ‘It’s the older of the two, Anne, who has been ill, but her younger sister refuses to stay at boarding school without her. Clare has been extremely deaf from birth, and as it’s only a few weeks until the end of the summer term, we don’t think it would do her any harm to miss a bit of schooling and come back here with Anne. We’ve been having some remarkably good weather, so if it continues we want them both to get out as much as possible. We’re due for a good summer, heaven knows. And by the way,’ he went on, ‘I hope you have no objection to country life, because we’re miles from anywhere. Oh, there are a couple of shops half a mile away, but to some people it would hardly rank as civilization.’