Silent Song
Lucilla Andrews
Copyright © The Estate of Lucilla Andrews 2019
This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1972
www.lucillaandrews.com
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork images © Boris Ryaposov / Jo Ann Snover (Shutterstock)
izusek (istockphoto.com)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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Also by Lucilla Andrews
from Wyndham Books
The Print Petticoat
The Secret Armour
The Quiet Wards
The First Year
A Hospital Summer
My Friend the Professor
Nurse Errant
Flowers from the Doctor
The Young Doctors Downstairs
The New Sister Theatre
The Light in the Ward
A House for Sister Mary
Hospital Circles
Highland Interlude
The Healing Time
Edinburgh Excursion
Ring O’ Roses
One Night in London (The Jason Trilogy Book 1)
A Weekend in the Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2)
In an Edinburgh Drawing Room (The Jason Trilogy Book 3)
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
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Chapter One
There was no sun that day and the tall, grey terraced houses on the other side of the crescent seemed a charcoal etching to which an eccentric artist had added the coloured Christmas trees. In every front window I looked at, a lighted tree glittered in the twilight of an Edinburgh mid-winter noon.
Smiling, I turned from the Grants’ spare-room window. ‘But for the long spiel you once gave Dave and me on the Scottish non-celebration of Christmas, I, for one, should now cry hurrah for Tiny Tim!’
Elspeth smiled uncertainly at Dave’s name and as she had spent five years in England took refuge in the weather. ‘Chilly without the sun. I hope you’ll not find us too cold. Such a pity when yesterday was perfect.’
‘While the deep, warm, south reeled under a blizzard. From the plane, the snowline ended clearly just south of Birmingham. In the pilot’s “Cool it, folks, I don’t want to die either” bit, he said weren’t we lucky the blizzard changed its mind and headed back to France to let Scotland enjoy a snow-free Hogmanay. An Englishman in the next row gloomily suggested God was a Scotsman and the tartan-draped Australian beside me choked with joy on his fancy wallop.’
Elspeth was a quietly pretty brunette with a good skin and misleading air of great gravity. ‘Did he recover?’
‘After I’d banged him on the back. Then he insisted on another bottle of fancy wallop for the little lady.’
‘You drank a whole bottle of champagne?’
‘I had two glasses. He got through the rest to give him strength to fly on to Aberdeen. I’ve promised to look him up next time I’m in Melbourne.’
‘Did you tell him you live in London?’ I shook my head. ‘Very wise. With twelve million inhabitants one can’t be too careful. But weren’t you lucky to get on any plane?’
‘That was the blizzard. When I rang the airline after you yesterday the guy said normally I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of a return ticket, having left it so late. Luckily for me, some people took the met. reports as gospel and cancelled.’
‘You’d have had the same difficulty with a train seat ‒ though you might’ve got up in the guard’s van. Hamish’s brother came up like that last year. Took us three hours to thaw him out. I’m glad,’ she said, ‘you were spared that.’
‘Frankly, dear, so am I, and not only as I enjoyed the fancy wallop. It’s good to be here.’
‘Good to have you.’ She hesitated. ‘Four years is a long time, Anne.’
‘In some ways. In others ‒ could be yesterday. You know?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘oh yes.’
We had been friends since our set started in St Martha’s Preliminary Training School nine years ago and in our fourth year when I met Dave Dorland. Dave’s unhidden anti to Elspeth and her then steady, Hamish Grant, would probably have wrecked our friendship permanently, had things worked out as expected. They were not my only friends Dave had disliked, but at the time this had irritated rather than worried me as I had been too emotionally involved for clarity of vision. When I later saw that problem for what it was, it had ceased to matter.
Dave and I had married first and, since neither of us had living parents, very quietly. Only my brother and Dave’s one first cousin came to our wedding. ‘Crazy,’ said Dave, ‘to waste the lolly when what we really want is this car.’ That I had agreed absolutely was something else I couldn’t forget.
We took the new car on our honeymoon in Spain. In the last week Dave had wanted an English paper and none was obtainable in the off-beat fishing village we had chosen for an overnight stop. ‘You go down to breakfast,’ he said. ‘I’m not hungry yet and feel like a drive. I’ll nip back to that town we came through seven miles off and didn’t fancy last night. See you, darling.’
He didn’t. He took a corner too fast, hit a tree and was killed outright.
His cousin wrote: ‘One would have expected a doctor to remember to do up his safety-belt.’
To my eternal gratitude, no-one else said that.
I went back to Martha’s and there I had stayed. A few months after my return, Elspeth and Hamish left to marry and work in their home city. ‘You know how much we’d like to have you at our wedding,’ they wrote, ‘but we do understand Edinburgh is a long way from London.’
Over the years we exchanged Christmas cards, telegrams when their twin sons were born, occasional letters. In the last year our letters had become more frequent, more
concerned with abstracts than personalities, more like our pre-Dave conversations. On this year’s Christmas card Elspeth added, ‘Any time you feel like a change of scene, any time, just pick up a phone.’
I had done that yesterday morning after Sister Cardiac rang my flat to ask me to switch week-ends with her.
‘My dear,’ she said last night in Coronary Care, ‘how nice I need no longer feel guilty. But if I miss my sister-in-law’s wedding next Saturday, the family feud’ll carry through to our grandchildren. Yes ‒ she’s the difficult one ‒ and why she’s suddenly decided to marry puzzles me only less than why this misguided man has decided to marry her. She’ll lead him a miserable life, but, of course, some people are never happy unless they’re miserable. Did you say Elspeth Lindsay that was? Didn’t she marry that nice red-haired lad in obstetrics? Is he still in the same line?’
‘Yes. Now a Senior Obstetrical Registrar. He’s got Fellowship and the D.R.C.O.G. and is hoping the next step up’ll be as consultant somewhere.’
‘I hope he gets it. A very nice lad. Sister Mary thought highly of him.’ Her eyes followed the rise and fall of the pin-points of light tracing an electrocardiograph on our only live corridor monitor screen last evening. ‘Come as soon as you can, they said? Very Scottish. An amazingly kind and hospitable people, the Scots. Sometimes,’ she mused, ‘I wonder if they’re too kind for their own good. Can be such a disadvantage, since kindness implies seeing the other person’s point of view. Or am I confusing it with imagination?’
She had a long, pale, medieval face Holbein would have enjoyed painting, had nursed on and off for thirty years and in the off periods married, borne and raised four sons.
‘Don’t they go together?’ I glanced at her Tudor profile then gave the graph more attention than it actually needed. ‘That heart’s picking up very nicely.’
‘Very. We’ll send the good lady out to have her second, and undoubtedly she’ll have it as she won’t alter her lifestyle whatever she may say now. Pity. Clever woman but no imagination.’ She looked through the glass door of the intensive care cubicle to the sleeping owner of the recorded heart-beat. ‘No kindness in that face, either. Do they go together, Anne? Not invariably, surely. I’ve known some exceedingly kind, utterly unimaginative people and the reverse. Naturally, when one meets the rare individual with both qualities, one’s met someone worth knowing.’
And remembering, I thought, then wished I hadn’t.
Elspeth had left the twins with her parents before meeting my plane at Turnhouse and, as Hamish was coming back for lunch and only had an hour, she had to get on with the cooking. ‘Join me for a wee drink soon as you’re unpacked.’ She paused in the doorway. ‘I do like your new short hair-do and this new willowy elegance. Still make all your own clothes?’
‘Most. All this extra off-duty is doing my wardrobe a power of good.’
‘How’s being Salmonized working in Martha’s?’
‘Pretty well in Coronary Care as we’ve no student nurses and don’t have to stretch the trained staff over the gaps when they’re off free or on some project. That’s being quite a problem in the general wards. Patients, as Miss Evans says, have the unfortunate knack of being ill twenty-four hours a day. The students’ forty-hour week leaves quite a few gaps.’
‘Hamish has the same problem. Miss Evans still Martha’s Chief Nursing Officer?’
‘Yes, and just the same only she no longer wears a uniform. Otherwise, nothing much has changed since you left. The sisters can now wear trendy white overalls and American caps if they want to, or the old blue dresses and lace frills. To a woman they’ve opted for the old.’
‘So much more attractive. I must get on.’ But she lingered. ‘Anne ‒ er ‒ is there …?’
‘No, dear.’
She looked perturbed. ‘It’s still Dave? Surely, by now, you should start thinking of marrying again? Or is it just that you’ve yet to meet another man you’d wish to marry?’
As I liked her I managed not to wince. For some reason young British women get asked at least one and generally all three of those questions within weeks of being widowed, which could explain why they continued to hurt. If I liked the questioner I tried to answer honestly, and sometimes was believed. With the other sort I just turned dumb and left them to think what they wished since experience had taught me that was what they would do whatever I said.
‘I suppose the last comes into it. I loved Dave a lot, but as it was all over so fast there are times when I wonder if he really existed, or was another of my dream figures. I was a great one for living in a fantasy world in training.’
‘I remember. Not any longer?’
I shook my head. ‘I came belatedly out of the mental teens only after he died. I’ve so changed, I don’t think he’d love me now. He loathed independent women.’
‘Lib-type now, Anne?’
‘Not a card-carrying fully-paid-up member, and nothing’d have me burning my bra as I’ve no intention of hitting the menopause with bosoms round my waist. Otherwise ‒ yes. I never thought once I wanted, or needed, liberating, but as I never thought at all, that’s not so odd. Having had liberation thrust upon me, slowly I’ve discovered how much one enjoys freedom once one stops equating it with loneliness. I enjoy it a lot, now. I enjoy my job, my super new flat just across from the main gates, my nice quiet life ‒ and the way I can hop on a plane to Edinburgh if I feel like spending my own lolly, without scenes or having to feel guilty.’
‘You sound,’ she said doubtfully, ‘as serene as you look.’
I smiled. ‘And that’s bad?’
‘You know I didn’t mean that!’
‘Sure! Nor did it happen overnight. Took years, but thank God now it has and I’m in no hurry to risk it.’ She was silent. ‘Hell, Elspeth, I know and am delighted you and Hamish are making such a good thing of marriage, but not all our set are. So many marriages have fallen apart I’ve lost count. You two are different, but you are both very undemanding people.’
‘If anything, I’d have said you were too undemanding. Hamish used to say that was why you always attracted ultra-demanding and possessive men. Or do you mind my telling you?’
‘No,’ I lied, as there were still some facts I preferred to leave unfaced.
There was a faint silence. Then, ‘I’ll bring you a drink to help you unpack. Whisky, gin, or sherry?’
She brought me a sherry then disappeared to cook. I took the drink to the window, stared unseeingly at the houses opposite and wished I knew how to avoid the verbal apologia I seemed to feel bound to make on reunions like this. Why feel I had to defend myself because at twenty-seven I hadn’t hitched on to another man? Conditioned feminine reflex? Or had I simply invented the need as an excuse to suffer the emotional mangling my defence invariably caused me, because I felt I should suffer for not going with Dave that morning. He had never bothered to do up his belt unless I reminded him. ‘You were the wife but not the free will of an intelligent, educated man,’ once said the only person to whom I had ever admitted this. A man I met in Spain called George Farler.
After breakfast I had wandered out on to the patio of the little hotel to wait for Dave, and then down to the beach. Not a proper beach as I then understood the word. No sand, no pebbles, no deck-chairs, no children, no sunbathers. Just jagged, black, salt-encrusted rocks edging an improbably blue sea and the only other occupant an artist propped against one rock and working on a canvas on a portable easel. He looked about Dave’s age, but a little taller and thinner and I guessed he was English as much from the way he and I ignored each other as from the little I could see of his fair hair and face under his battered straw hat. I hadn’t bothered with a hat or dark glasses, my long hair had still been damp from our pre-breakfast swim and I had on an old-fashioned orange mini shift. I had found a rock, sat and watched the sea and thought how wonderful it was to love and be loved and forgot I wasn’t alone. Then I heard the urgent shouts from behind me.
I had looked round incurious
ly. No premonition, no apprehension. The balding, fat, hotel proprietor, his equally fat but younger wife, panted towards me. Behind them were three men in uniform with grave, dark-jowelled faces. I didn’t see the Englishman move, but suddenly he was there too and asking questions in fluent Spanish. I saw his very blue eyes darken with compassion and knew with a nightmarish certainty what had happened as he took off his hat. He said, ‘Come back to the hotel, Mrs Dorland. I’ll explain.’
The señora made us tea. Terrible tea. ‘I’m sorry,’ said George Farler. ‘I thought you’d prefer it to coffee.’
Whether he lived in Spain, was a professional or amateur artist, why he was in the hotel and the only other British tourist in that village at the time, either he hadn’t told me or I couldn’t remember. I had still to check to be sure how long it had all taken, or the name of the nearest British Vice-Consul. He had been very kind when he eventually arrived, but I couldn’t now recall his face or colouring. All I properly recalled of George Farler was his name, some of the things he said, some of his mannerisms, and the way he had always been there when I needed him. All else aside, having previously left the language to Dave’s Spanish A-Level as I spoke only English and sixth-form French, I had needed George Farler badly.
On my last day he came with me in the one village taxi to the nearest airport. The drive took two hours over dusty, bumpy roads lined with eucalyptus trees. I hoped I had thanked him. I did remember his hand had felt as cold as mine when we said goodbye, the smell of steaming tarmac, and his brief formality, ‘Adios, Mrs Dorland.’ I had a feeling that earlier he’d called me Anne. I couldn’t have said that on oath.
I last saw him from the plane window, standing at the barrier with the straw hat over his eyes and flattened right hand upraised in the old Roman salute. Later, much later, I wrote to thank him. The letter came back from the hotel Return to sender. I had torn it up unopened, and thankfully I had neither heard nor wished to hear from him again. That wasn’t from lack of gratitude. But I had learnt first-hand that of the many good deeds done a total stranger by a certain Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, one of the kindest was the way after paying the two pence and promising the innkeeper to settle arrears later, next morning he pushed on to his own unknown destination.
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