Doctor's Assistant

by Celine Conway

  He smiled, took the work-box from her hands and placed it on the dressing-table. “I’m not going to fight with you, Laurette. I repeat that if you should find yourself in a spot, be it financial or otherwise, I’ll put you right. And don’t ask me why I’d do it, because even to me the reason’s obscure. Maybe I like the combination of grey-blue eyes with sunshot brown hair.” His voice lowered and the mocking note went out of it. “It’s my guess that you’ve been half in love with Ben Vaughan and it will take you quite a while to recover. But first love is notoriously the most devastating. I advise that you acknowledge your first affair is over and be thankful it was only Ben.”

  “I can keep going without your advice, Charles.”

  “Very well”—laconically.

  He turned to the door, held it back for her to pass him. But as she did so, with her head down, he stretched a detaining hand. His fingers turned her chin and he bent to press a brief hard kiss upon her mouth.

  “That’s goodbye,” he said. “Last time I kissed you it was as a proxy for your father. This time let’s say it’s for Ben. Who knows, one of these days I may take a kiss that’s all mine!”

  She cast him a swift, blurred glance, the red lips parted as if there were something urgent she had to say. But the next moment she shook her head like a sad, defeated child, and preceded him from the room.

  The following half-hour had for Laurette the chaotic clarity of a fevered dream. Charles brought the big car to the front drive and had the boys load it with his vast assortment of gear. Spare cans of petrol were stacked in the luggage carrier, for there would be few filling stations on his route through the primitive hilly country which stretched north from the Wild Coast and into southern Basutoland. He stowed away a flask of coffee and some sandwiches, filled his cigarette case and made sure that he had matches. Abstractedly he tapped the pocket which held his revolver. He was ready to depart.

  He shook hands with John Delaney. “Goodbye, Captain. I’ll get busy right away on the printing of the book. Don’t be too anxious to trot around.” And to his uncle: “Look after yourself, old chap. Keep the polo club on its toes.”

  Laurette he left till last. He didn’t offer a hand, and his smile held patronage and satire, and perhaps a suggestion of steel. “So long, my sweet. Life isn’t so very serious, you know. It’s always changing.”

  The car slid away. At the curve in the drive Charles looked back and waved a hand; then he was gone.

  The late sun slanted across the casuarinas, gilded the palms. A breeze stirred and rustled drily about the house.

  “It’s going to be cooler,” said Mr. Kelsey, scanning the heavens. “I rather think we’re in for more rough weather.” Laurette hoped it would be so. She badly needed to battle with something that would not turn and laugh in her face.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RESOLUTELY, the next day, Laurette aired the bungalow and arranged meals with Bwazi. Her father was to be brought over in Mr. Kelsey’s old but luxurious limousine, and it seemed but natural to give a small home-coming tea-party. Several friends of her father’s had promised to welcome him, and she thought one or two of them might be persuaded to remain to a cold supper.

  She baked cakes and put them away in tins, took out a lace tablecloth and fancy napkins. She moved and worked in a pained sort of daze, knowing that time alone could heal the ache of loss. It was no use pitying herself, or thinking that if only all had been well with Ben she would have had less time to dwell upon her own girlish troubles. She had to handle the situation as it stood, face the reality that Charles was gone and that she herself might have left Port Quentin before he came that way again.

  In her father’s workroom she paused to inspect his desk. His manuscript, the brief, acidly-humorous poems and snappy prose paragraphs interspersed with sketches and cartoons, was tidily secured into a cover ready for final preparation. During the past months it had been the Captain’s labor of love and, glancing through the pages, Laurette thought how wonderful it must be to create, to make something which held part of the essence of oneself indelibly and for ever. Yet she could not feel within herself a creative urge. Too ordinary, she sighed inwardly. Ambition in most women is curbed by the hope that they will marry and have children. She was just one of the majority.

  Laurette was not excessively introspective, but unhappiness seemed to exaggerate the importance of her thoughts. However, she determinedly put away the manuscript and firmly closed the workroom door, as if by snicking the lock she had also shut off the pointlessness of conjecture. Soon afterwards she closed the house door with the same precision and walked against the strong wind to the Kelsey residence.

  Poor Mr. Kelsey was obviously unable to throw off his testiness. Laurette tried hard to dislodge it, but the old man’s consciousness that not only was his nephew gone from his home but the Delaneys also were preparing to remove themselves from it, apparently was rather hard to bear. His stringy figure strode up and down the garden, his very blue eyes glared from under his white bushy brows at the servants and nothing in or outside the house was quite as he wanted it.

  When Laurette reached the drive that afternoon Mr. Kelsey was attacking the garden boy. He had detected groups of insects round the lush crimson blossoms of the pomegranate trees, and though he always described the fruit as a ball of sweet pips fit only for the monkeys which periodically raided the garden, he still could not bear that it should be marred through the boy’s negligence.

  Laurette smiled at him and slipped a hand into the crook of his arm. “You’ll wear yourself out. Come indoors out of the wind.”

  He allowed himself to be led, and when they reached the lounge he gave a half-exasperated, half-humorous shrug. “I’m tired, Laurette—not physically; there’s a remedy for that. I’m tired of being old and alone, of running a big house for no good reason. I’m not begging for your sympathy, or even for your company—I’m sure you’re ready to offer both. It’s just that I have to voice it sometimes— this futility of going through life on one’s own.”

  “You’ll get over it,” she said comfortingly. “I know how you feel.”

  “Do you?” He cocked a glance at her, sudden add piercingly bright. “You’re too young to understand completely, but ...” He broke off and demanded pointblank, “Were you growing fond of Charles?”

  Laurette’s heart moved queerly, and she had to pause a moment. “He could be nice,” she hedged, “and at those times one could like him.”

  “But you found it equally easy to hate him? That’s interesting. If he’d stayed much longer you might have lost your heart to him.”

  She managed an easy little laugh.. “Charles has a clever technique which protects both him and his victims. He never allows one to forget one’s drawbacks—in my case, youth and inexperience. If he should ever meet a woman who hasn’t a single fault, he’ll marry her.”

  Mr. Kelsey lay back in his chair and crossed his immaculate white-trousered legs. “You’re so devastating. Do you know what he once said to me about you?” he twinkled. “ ‘The child hasn’t yet gauged her own strength,’ he said, ‘but when she does realize it she’ll pack the hell of a punch.’ He didn’t mean those bony little fists of yours, Laurette.”

  She made a complication of placing the cigarette box nearer to him. “No? What do you suppose he did mean?” she asked casually.

  “To continue in Charles’ vernacular, he meant that one of these days you’ll floor some poor beggar and glory in it.”

  Displeased, she said, “Why should he think that?”

  The old man twisted a long fat cigarette between his fingers and shook his head. “You’re more likely to be aware of the answer to that one than I am. You and he were alone together quite a bit.” He let out a large sigh, put down the cigarette and got out his pipe. “Charles has often gone off and left me before, but this time it’s less bearable because something was beginning to humanize him and I started to get ideas. I wonder if he met someone in England?”

  She
answered a trifle hurriedly. “A woman? He’d have stayed there longer than three weeks if he had.”

  He nodded agreement. “You’re right there; of course he would. Oh, well. We shan’t know unless he chooses to tell us. Go and find your father, Laurette, and we’ll play cards.”

  It was much later, after dinner that evening, that Laurette was reminded of her conversation with Mr. Kelsey. As the meal ended and he pulled out her chair, he also gave her wrist a pat.

  “Will you do something for me? Being called away a day early, Charles left a job or two undone. One of them was the clearing of the writing table in his room. The drawer is full of bills and receipts and letters collected all over the place during his leave. They have to be looked through and destroyed.”

  “How looked through?”

  “Make sure that nothing official from Maseru has been left among them. He’s so methodical and thorough that it’s bound to be all rubbish, but I promised him I’d have it done.”

  “Don’t you think he’d mind my poking about his things?”

  Mr. Kelsey laughed and snapped his fingers impatiently.

  “Can you imagine Charles having intimate correspondence? Or leaving it around, if he had? Go ahead, child; your sight is better than mine. The houseboy will burn the stuff in his brazier.”

  She left them to their coffee and liqueur and went along to the large turquoise and navy room at the end of the corridor. It was an impersonal room and would have been chilling in its austerity but for the great window which overlooked a border of bright yellow lilies and a dense hedge of scarlet-splashed hibiscus. Tonight, though, the window was a blackness faintly starred towards the top, and the two shades of blue of the curtains and bed cover had a hard and merciless quality.

  Laurette opened the drawer of a kidney-shaped writing table, scooped out the conglomeration of papers and seated herself before them. Right at the top, the folded white sheet peeping from a pink envelope, lay the telegram which had called Charles back to Basutoland. She put it aside and systematically waded through the receipted accounts and formal notes of which the rest of the pile consisted. He seemed to have spent an energetic three weeks in England, replenishing his clothing and book stocks and attending numerous small parties. Letters had thereafter been addressed to him in Madrid, Nice, Rome and Tunis, and finally care of the liner which had brought him to the Cape.

  She saw him moving about foreign, exotic cities, knocking into people he knew, enjoying a few hours with them and passing on, untouched, impenetrable. Just as he had passed on from Port Quentin. True to her earlier decision she did not allow her mind the foolish pleasure of imagining herself in those alien places with him. Even if, by some miracle, she had been on the spot, he would have seen to it that she was not abruptly thrust into sophistication; one must protect the feminine young, she thought wryly.

  Sheaf by sheaf, she pressed the papers into the white-painted waste-basket till only the telegram remained on the table. That, too, could join the others, for by now he was in Mohpeng, probably expansively smoking a cigar and reflecting with satisfaction that his house and district hadn’t changed.

  Almost abstractedly she drew the telegram from its sheath and read it; read it through again with a sense of bewilderment and shock. With the urgency of panic she looked at the head of the form and saw that it had been sent from Cape Town, not from Maseru, and for the third time she scanned the blithe wording.

  “Surprise for you, Charles. I arrive in Maseru by air on Saturday morning and hope you will pick me up there and carry me with you to Mohpeng. Longing to see you again. Maris.”

  Maris. Nervelessly, Laurette dropped the wire and sat forward, with most of her weight upon the writing table. For a void moment her eyes were closed, her sinews slack, and then her fingers pulled into her palms and a quivering breath came from her throat. Maris could be a surname; an uncommon one, it was true, but ... but it could be. Men signed their surnames to telegrams, though she had hollowly to admit that they worded them more economically, and they didn’t end off with an extravagant, “Longing to see you”.

  No, Maris was a woman—the woman for whom Charles had accelerated his departure from Port Quentin. Presently she would get used to the knowledge and from then on it would lose its strangeness. At the moment it speared too deeply; she couldn’t bear to probe into it.

  Mechanically, she picked up the waste-basket, snapped off the lights and went to the back of the house. The kitchen was clean, disinfectant-smelling and deserted. The boys must have gone to their huts.

  She made her way along the back path, right-angled towards the servants’ quarters and came upon the boys grouped about the indispensable brazier. Their negroid features were shiny and dark in the red glow, their teeth and the whites of their eyes curiously prominent. One of them burned the papers while Laurette looked on. Their women, sitting a few feet away with their backs to the largest hut, kept eerily silent.

  At any other time Laurette would have stored up this scene; so typical of Africa. Tonight she scarcely took it in. Her whole being seemed bruised and incapable of adjusting itself to what she had just learned.

  The basket was returned to Charles’ room, Laurette said good night to her father and Mr. Kelsey and crept to the refuge of her own bedroom. But long after the house was hushed for the night she lay wide awake, fruitlessly pondering about Charles Heron and the woman called Maris.

  When one is deflated, the morning light has a cynical, prying brilliance. Laurette got up and looked into her mirror, and though the reflection was no different from yesterday’s, she knew herself older and somewhat disillusioned. For one thing, however, she was grateful; she might by some means have learned of the existence of Maris while Charles was still here—heaven be thanked that she hadn’t. This kind of hurt was easier to live down when no one else had an inkling of it.

  Fortunately, the day was a fairly busy one, and she was seldom alone. She, her father and their trunks of clothes were transported to the bungalow, where several men and two or three women had gathered in good time to chant a greeting. Tea had to be served and, later, cocktails poured. Mr. Kelsey and Mr. Markham stayed to supper and left together at ten-thirty.

  John Delaney hopped happily about the house on crutches. “It’s poky, there’s a decided bulge in the dining room wall and the kitchen floor is sinking—but it’s ours, Laurette! If my book brings in a few pounds we’ll have the repairs done professionally.”

  “The place will last for years as it is,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure about that floor, we only patched it up.” He threw the crutches aside and nudged into the divan. “You look sleepy, my dear. Go to bed. I have to catch up on my thinking.”

  “Sure you won’t need any help to get to bed?”

  “Quite sure. I shall probably need more help when my, leg’s free than I do now. But it’s astonishing what one can become accustomed to.”

  She bent and kissed his forehead. “Good night, then.”

  “Laurette.”

  She turned back from the doorway. “Yes?”

  He gave her a long, direct look. “You haven’t told your brother about this accident of mine, have you?”

  “Peter?” she echoed. “You know I never write to him except to put a postscript to one of your letters. What made you ask?”

  “A feeling I had. He’s missed a mail and I wondered if he’d written to you instead.”

  “Perhaps he’s working inland. We’ll hear soon.”

  “I expect so. He’s forgetful sometimes, but at heart he’s the best boy in the world. Sleep well, Laurette.”

  In spite of the roar of the wind about the hillocks and through the “Gates”, she did sleep better that night. The small-pink-and-white bedroom gathered her in, and left outside the past month in which she had occupied a much grander apartment. In the half-comatose condition which precedes unconsciousness Laurette nearly believed that nothing beyond the bungalow had reality.

  A day or two later she began
work on her father’s manuscript. There was not a great deal of typing to do but considerable care had to be taken with the setting out. They both intended that it should be sent forth in style.

  Towards the end of the week Ben came again. Still unsmiling and withdrawn he put a few questions to the Captain, barely nodded to Laurette and went away again.

  “He’s still torn two ways,” said John Delaney. “There’s a rumor that the practice is on the market.”

  It was curious how he who never left the bungalow and its garden, knew so much more about the current gossip than Laurette. This particular point of interest roused her to Ben’s defence.

  “His cousin will have put it about. She’s one of those women who go in for accomplished facts, but it won’t get her far with Ben. I wish she’d leave him alone.”

  Unexpectedly, her father agreed. “He may have a thread of weakness, but he’s not so spineless that he’d take kindly to being dominated by a woman. I’d like to see him come out on top.”

  There was not much one could say about Ben. He had wounded Laurette, but his own wounds were deeper. His reticence and the steel guard erected by Alix Brooke were insuperable. Laurette went slowly back to her task.

  For a couple of weeks after Charles’ departure it seemed that her life had entered one of those phases which mercifully occur seldom in a lifetime. She was becalmed and without hope. The weather stormed and eventually smiled forth again in all its blue, green and gold splendor. The visitors to the house were many and gay, but they made no impact the small plantation yielded many branches of fine bananas which fetched a fair price, yet she could not rejoice.

  Then a letter came from Nigeria and Laurette was shaken out of her personal torpor.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE letter arrived on the day that Ben cracked the plaster from John Delaney’s leg and fitted the limb with a smart and shiny support. Laurette had helped, and smiled with Ben at her father’s exuberant admiration of the new pink casing to his calf and ankle. The atmosphere in the tiny veranda had an element of relief, and when finally Ben had prepared to go, Laurette had met his eyes frankly.