Seven Dials

by Claire Rayner

  ‘I’m not worried about the show,’ he said almost contemptuously. ‘It’s Letty. I’m looking to her to give me a decent part once this Benefit’s over - that’s the only reason I’m doing the job at all. And if I’m not there on the night it’s my guess she’ll get decidedly shirty. It’s not even as though I could ask her to let me go - unless maybe you did -’

  Charlie felt chilled for a moment and then shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t help, I don’t suppose,’ she said. ‘She might agree with your sister, anyway, and then -’ She stopped. ‘And it’s not the end of the world, for heaven’s sake, if you can’t take a bed next week. I’ll just put my application in again and we’ll see how we get on. It might delay things just a while, but you’ve waited so long already that another few weeks shouldn’t make all that much difference -’

  ‘Every bloody day makes a difference,’ he said violently and then looked at her, frowning. ‘What was that you said about not talking to Letty for me? That she might agree with Sophie? What do you mean?’

  ‘That was what I came to tell you,’ she said, uncomfortable again. ‘I - it was this afternoon. Sophie said she couldn’t give you any message from me and told me I shouldn’t do the operation on you.’

  ‘She said what?’ he began wrathfully. ‘She had the damned bloody cheek to say what?’

  She drew a deep sigh of relief. ‘Oh, Brin, I was so worried. I thought perhaps - I don’t know. I thought perhaps I’d got it wrong after all. That maybe I was doing the wrong thing in agreeing to your operation. I mean, I don’t believe that your looks are all that spoiled by that scar. In some ways -’ Again she swallowed and then went on hurriedly, almost too embarrassed to get the words out. ‘In some ways it adds to your attractiveness.’

  ‘Oh, Charlie, you are a dear girl, you know!’ He was laughing now, and again his arm was holding her closely. ‘You thought I’d do as my sister Sophie told me? Honestly, what do you take me for? She’s a silly fusspot, and always has been. Oh, she means kindly enough, I dare say, but all my life she’s gone on at me about what I ought to do and what I ought not to do. I pay her no attention at all and I’m just damned grateful you didn’t either. You didn’t, did you?’ He reached round with his other hand and took hold of her chin, pulling gently so that she had to look at him. ‘You didn’t pay any attention to her waffling on, did you? You’ll do my operation, no matter what she thinks?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s your decision and mine, not hers.’ And she smiled warmly, putting all the reassurance she could into her voice and her expression.

  There was a little silence and then he said suddenly, ‘For a doctor, you’re a good-looking girl, aren’t you, Charlie?’

  ‘”Thank you kindly, sir, she said”,’ Charlie said a little shakily and made no attempt to pull her head away from his restraining fingers. They were warm and agreeable on her skin and feeling the whisper of his breath on her face as he spoke, and smelling the hint of peppermint toothpaste in it was even more agreeable.

  ‘You’re a good pal to me, you know that?’ he said. ‘I’ve thought of you all this time as a really good pal. Never thought you were a bit like the other girls. But you are, aren’t you?’

  ‘In what way?’ She was still shaky of voice, but it didn’t matter.

  ‘You like to be kissed,’ he said and bent his head and kissed her very thoroughly and with a good deal of expertise, not that she, with her lack of it, realized that fact. His lips were soft and gentle at first and then became rather more urgent and she found her mouth opening under his in a way she could never have thought possible. She had been kissed before, on occasion, but no woman who has to do all the work necessary to get a medical training has much time for lovemaking, and Charlie, for all her twenty-eight years, was in many ways a very inexperienced person. Certainly she was no match for Brin, who had lost count of the girls who had shared caresses with him.

  Perhaps it was the heat of the evening, perhaps it was the emotion that had built up in her all that afternoon, perhaps it was merely as basic as the fact that he was wearing nothing but a towel and a skimpy one at that; whatever the cause, Charlie found herself responding to Brin in a way that amazed her. He too seemed startled at first by the eagerness with which she reacted to him and by the way her hands ran over his bare chest and back, but he made it very clear that he was glad of it.

  His kisses became even more urgent and his hands as widely ranging as hers and then suddenly they were no longer on the sofa, but on the floor and her dress was crumpled round her waist as her legs curled up along his back. She had no memory of kicking off her shoes, no recollection of shedding her underclothes, but for all that she had and was as free and comfortable in her movements as he was, now that his towel lay in a discarded heap beside them.

  If she had thought about it all, she would have expected that this, her first experience of sex, would be a frightening one, painful even, but in spite of the fact that she had had so little experience of men, had never even enjoyed much of the sort of petting that so many of the girls she had known had talked about on long cocoa-drinking evenings at school and later at university, she found herself so eager and responsive that there was no pain at all, and no doubts. She wanted him, wanted to swallow him whole, almost, and there was nothing he could do to her and with her that she didn’t welcome, and want even more than he did.

  And when after what seemed to be only a few moments she found the new and marvellously sweet sensations that filled her whole body rising to an almost unbelievable level she shouted her excitement aloud and clung to his back so tightly, her head thrown back and her mouth pulled wide with tension, that the result was incredible. It was as though she were both floating and yet swooping, as though she were being buffeted by waves of softness that made her face flame with heat, and sent sweat running between her breasts, and even then it wasn’t over. He went on thrusting at her as strongly as he had from the start, his own eyes tightly closed, seeming oblivious of her, and then it all seemed to start again inside her own body; the waves of feeling, the lifting excitement and at last the swooping satisfaction, which seemed this time to go on and on and on.

  But at last it ended and she was lying there as breathless as he was, his weight slumped on top of her and her eyes staring up at the ceiling in amazement. Was this really happening? Or was it some embarrassingly explicit erotic dream from which she would emerge to discover herself in her narrow bed in the medical staff quarters at East Grinstead?

  She closed her eyes, tightening them till sparks of red and orange light shot through the blackness behind her lids and hurt her, and then opened them again; and there it all was; the ceiling with its faint cracks made into maplike shapes by the shadows thrown by the lamplight, the outlined black of the window, and the floor hard beneath her. She, Charlotte Lucas, had behaved in a way that was totally out of character, totally appalling, totally dreadful, and she had never felt more contented in all her life.

  20

  The next few days seemed dreamlike to Charlie. She walked through her last few days of work at East Grinstead and seemed to the other staff and to her patients there to be the same as she always was, quiet, but aware of and genuinely interested in them and their doings, but all the time she knew she was only giving half of herself, if that, to what she was doing.

  Even at the surprise goodbye party they threw for her in Ward Three, with the men sitting up in bed in their bandages and plasters, some with the battered faces of recent surgery, some with the dependent lumps of misshapen tissue which were half completed pedicle grafts, but all with friendly and affectionate expressions in their eyes, she stood there seeming to listen demurely to Archie McIndoe’s flattering speech about her abilities, but without really hearing anything. Because all she was doing was thinking about Brin, running over and over again in her mind that incredible half hour in his flat and reliving her delight in it.

  And it was the same when she left the Queen Victoria Hospital and went bac
k to Nellie’s as a new registrar on the surgical side. She walked through her work in a state of abstraction, coping well, operating on her patients, supervising dressings and checking charts, doing all that was necessary, yet not really there. Brin’s face and Brin’s voice and Brin’s smell and touch and presence seemed to accompany her everywhere.

  Brin himself, somewhat to her surprise, seemed to be able to be exactly as he had always been; friendly, charming but not at all loverlike. Since she had herself told him that was the way he ought to behave, she should not have felt any chagrin because he did; but all the same, there was some regret in her that he had found it so easy to be obedient.

  She had gone back to East Grinstead that night, taking the bus to Victoria to catch the last train, and he had hugged her warmly and kissed her soundly as they had waited at her bus stop, and told her with real admiration in his voice that she was a spitfire underneath all that surface quietness of hers, and she had laughed, feeling oddly as though she weren’t really herself at all, but an actress studying a part. She had told him that it was always dangerous to make assumptions about people on the basis of mere appearance and then had said, a little awkwardly, ‘Look, Brin - if I’m to go on being your doctor, this - I mean this can’t happen again.’

  She had looked up at him then and managed a small smile. ‘Damn it,’ she had added softly.

  ‘Why not? Didn’t you enjoy it?’

  ‘You know damn well I did. You don’t have to ask. No - it’s just that doctors aren’t supposed to have - they aren’t supposed to be as close to their patients as we were tonight.’ She chuckled softly in the darkness. ‘It’s usually men doctors and women patients they worry about, the powers-that-be, but it’s frowned upon this way round too, I imagine. We really oughtn’t to see each other again except strictly as doctor and patient till after your operation is over and done with -’

  She had expected him to argue about that and had been quite prepared to make some sort of plan to meet him quietly, knowing there would be no real problems about their relationship. Neither she nor he would ever talk about it, of course, so there was no real risk. And anyway, as a woman doctor she wouldn’t be seen by even the most censorious of her colleagues as taking advantage of the special doctor-patient relationship. Such an idea would be impossible to them, she knew, for they could never imagine a woman taking the initiative in any entanglement, so it would be reasonably safe to go on from their starting-point.

  But he had nodded in instant understanding. ‘I hadn’t thought of that - damn it, just my luck! Now I’ve really got to know you properly we’ve got to pretend we’re the same as everyone else, all stuffy and drear. Never mind, my darling old Charlie. We can wait - let’s get this damned operation over and done with and then we’ll see where we go from there! Let me know if you can hang on to admit me to Nellie’s till after the show, will you, as soon as you can? If you can’t, then I’ll have to go and try my wiles on the Dame. One way or another, I’ve got to have this damned scar dealt with as soon as possible. Goodnight, ducks - see you soon -’, he had added as the big red bus came grinding to a halt beside them and then he had handed her up onto the platform and stood on the kerb waving to her as the bus took her on its trundling way.

  She had stood there swaying as she held on to the strap over her head, peering out into the darkness at his diminishing figure and then had sat down, feeling deflated and suddenly very tired. He was right of course to accept so willingly the need to return to an arm’s-length relationship, but all the same, it would have been nicer if - and then she had shaken herself and bought her ticket from the yawning conductor and settled down to make the long journey back to her lonely bed in West Sussex, thinking of Brin all the way.

  And so it had been ever since; she thinking of him and he being very busy with his work and offering her no more than the shortest of cheerful and friendly but undoubtedly impersonal conversations on the telephone when she called him. She spent a good deal of time in the admissions office at Nellie’s poring over the waiting lists and arguing with the clerk as she tried to get a new date for his operation, and when she managed to arrange for a bed to be available just ten days after the Benefit night, she was jubilant. Just another week to go to the show, and then the operation and he’d be over that, she estimated, within a couple of weeks and then, then they could be themselves again. And her eyes had actually misted with tears of happiness as she had contemplated a future in which episodes like the one they had shared on the floor of his sitting-room would be a nightly experience.

  There had been a moment when she had suddenly stopped being quite so starry-eyed and found herself thinking of any possible outcome to their love making. It had all happened so suddenly and been so spontaneous that she hadn’t given any thought to that possibility, and now she tried to work out from her diary just how risky that night had been. Could she possibly, she asked herself, leafing through its pages crowded with details of patients and dressings and letters she had to write to other doctors, could she have been at a vulnerable stage of her cycle? But the relevant information wasn’t there; she had not bothered to enter it, and after all why should she? Women who were not making love need not concern themselves with such matters, and until that night she had been one of the unconcerned.

  For a little while she had worried, trying her hardest to remember the necessary dates, and then had relaxed. She was almost certain that she had been within safe limits, especially as her body had always behaved erratically in such matters, sometimes refusing to function altogether for a while when she overworked and became too thin; all she could do was wait and see, she told herself, and firmly put the thought to the back of her mind. It was exceedingly unlikely, her doctor’s mind lectured her woman’s mind, that she had any cause for concern. Every doctor who had ever worked in gynaecological wards knew how difficult it was for many women living in active marriages to start families; a single experience like hers, the doctor said firmly, was unlikely to give rise to alarm. And the woman who was Charlie listened and believed, needing to have that to hold on to. And perhaps hoping, somewhere so deeply inside her that the idea was not accessible to her conscious mind, that there had been a risk, after all -

  The hospital was now buzzing with talk of the Benefit that was to happen at last on the next Saturday night. The posters had gone up and glittering name after glittering name adorned it. There was to be ballet and opera, musical comedy and jazz, sketches and songs and dances and everything the most jaded of theatrical appetites could desire. The writer and the choreographer and the director of the show were of the highest calibre, and altogether, the staff told each other, it was going to be the hit of the year.

  The only pity was that none of the nursing staff could possibly afford to go, because the tickets were to cost an astronomical amount, from ten shillings in the gallery up to the heady box-seat charge of fifteen pounds each. It was clear this Benefit Night was designed to solve Nellie’s financial problems once and for all from the pockets of the extremely wealthy, and the nurses watched enviously as the more senior and therefore richer doctors bought themselves their tickets from the special booth that had been set up in the lobby, right under the Founder’s statue.

  A poster had been painted to hang across the front of the building and it announced the Benefit to the public at large and also begged for donations to help Nellie’s reach its target of twenty-five thousand pounds, and many were the shabby individuals who came scuttling through the doors to drop their threepenny pieces and sometimes lavish sixpences into the collecting boxes. But they didn’t consider for a moment the possibility of seeing the show, for too few of the people of Seven Dials could afford threepence, let alone the price of a seat at the Stoll Theatre.

  Two days before the show was to happen, Charlie was in the Casualty Department standing in for a junior houseman who had developed a raging toothache and taken himself off to the Eastman Dental Clinic in Gray’s Inn Road. She had nothing else to do and though she had h
ad a long day in the theatres, the prospect of an evening spent in Casualty seemed to be more agreeable than one spent sitting alone in the common room. She ached to talk to Brin, but that was impossible. They must be at a crescendo of busyness, she told herself, at this stage of rehearsals, and he wouldn’t welcome hearing from her. He knew she had a bed for him next Wednesday fortnight and that once he was admitted they would have time to talk contentedly; so she told herself firmly that it wouldn’t be sensible to make a nuisance of herself now, and settled down to read the Lancet at the Casualty Officer’s little desk, hoping there wouldn’t be too much to do.

  The big clock ticking ponderously in the big terrazzo-floored waiting-hall and the occasional clatter of a nurse’s heels as she went busily about the small dressing-clinic that was going on in the far corner was all the sound there was, for the department was unusually quiet tonight, and Charlie yawned and looked at her watch. Another half hour and the night people would be on duty and she could go to bed herself and tomorrow she could look forward to a short but interesting theatre list of minor surgical procedures, all of which demanded some concern for the cosmetic result; she was feeling more relaxed than she had for some time. Not since Brin -

  The big double doors swung open and a woman in an expensive satin coat which was streaked with blood came hurrying in. A man beside her in full evening dress was holding her round the shoulders with great solicitude as she held a large and very bloody handkerchief to her face.

  ‘Quickly, quickly!’ he shouted as he came bustling into the big waiting-room. ‘We need a doctor at once - oh, please, be quick!’

  Charlie came out of the small office at the same time as a nurse went hurrying across to lead the woman into one of the patients’ cubicles amid much fussing from the very agitated man and saw her settled on the examination couch. She was a young woman, certainly a good deal younger than her companion, and her eyes above her bloodstained handkerchief were wide and frightened within their frame of heavily mascara’d lashes.