Nurse in the Sun

by Claire Rayner

  And at twelve thirty she was free, with no more work to interpose between herself and it, and she stood in the middle of her gleaming quiet clinic, with just the distant sound of clattering glasses from the pre-lunch drinks on the terraces and the hiss of steam from the sterilizer, and turned the envelope between her fingers. For a long moment she stood there, feeling extraordinarily tense, almost as though she were on a stage and waiting for the moment when the curtain would rise to reveal a vast audience waiting for her; and then with a jerky movement she thrust her thumb under the flap and ripped it open.

  And at that moment the door opened, and Fred was standing there, his tanned face serious under his sunbleached thatch of hair, glowering at her, his mouth set in the mulish lines he could so easily produce.

  “Isabel!” he said loudly, and his voice seemed to jar on her as it never had, for she was filled now with a desperate urgency, a need to pull the folded sheets from the envelope and smooth them out and devour with her eyes the sprawling words. “Do you know what rottenunclestinkyjack has done now? Do you know what? And her, she says it too, an’ all, and - ”

  “Look, Fred. Please - not now - I’m rather busy and -”

  He frowned. “No you’re not,” he said flatly. “The waitin’ room’s empty an’ there’s no one in here. An’! - ”

  “I tell you I am!” she snapped, feeling every atom of her body stretched and twanging like a guitar string. “I’m - I have things to think about. Not now, Fred, please. Later - come down after lunch. Then. Not now - ” and her fingers twitched on the envelope with irritation.

  The child stared at her for a long moment, and then he let his lower lip thrust forwards as he looked at her, and the effect was to make him seem preternaturally wise, filled with a sharp knowingness. “You’re not busy,” he said again, and it came very flatly at her. “You’re tellin’ me to go away an’ play an’ stop bothering you, that’s what you’re really saying.”

  “All right! That’s what I’m really saying!” she said, and her own voice was loud and irritable, and she knew it. “I’ve - I’ve things on my mind right now, Fred. Please, come back after lunch.”

  “It’s important,” he said, still not moving and now her temper almost overcame her and she moved forwards briskly, and putting her hand on his shoulder turned him crisply about and held the door wide open for him.

  “Nothing’s so important that it can’t wait till after lunch,” she said firmly. “Now, get away with you, and I’ll talk to you about it then, whatever it is.”

  He went without any further demur, looking over his shoulder at her just once as he went through the door. Then, his very blue eyes hooded as he looked down, and he went stumping purposefully across the waiting room and away, and she closed the door with a sharp snap and went back to the table in the middle of the clinic room to lean on it and try to stop her trembling. For now she was trembling, and she knew the control she had been holding so iron-strong all morning had broken, and it was reaction triggered by her irritation with the child that had broken it.

  “I shouldn’t have been so snappy,” she thought briefly, as with shaking fingers she pulled the letter from the envelope, and unfolded it. “I’ll have to apologize and try to explain why after lunch - ”

  But at the first sight of the words on the page, her concern about Fred was washed quite away; she forgot him immediately. “Bel-beloved” she read.

  Bel-beloved. A very special name he had used for her on the very first time they had made love. They had been on a picnic by the river, near Richmond, and he’d brought a half bottle of wine and chicken pies, and they had eaten and drunk and talked a little shyly, for they had known each other only a very short time, after all, and then, there in the long summery softness of the grass he had quite suddenly leaned forwards and taken hold of her very roughly and urgently and kissed her till she was breathless, had pulled her down beside him into the hidden-away circle of waving grass stems, and had kissed her more, had caressed her ever more urgently until she felt she was no longer herself, no longer Isabel, the cool, the sensible, the sometimes dour Isabel, but part of him, the other half of herself found in him, and she had responded with an urgency of her own that startled her even as she knew it was right and good and real. And later, much later, they had lain side by side, breathless and almost stunned with surprise at themselves, staring up at the cloudiness of an English June sky, and he had murmured, “Isabel - my Bel - Bel - beloved.”

  And so it had been ever after. Whenever they were alone together, whenever they melted into each other as they had that afternoon by the river, he had said it. Bel-beloved.

  And now she stood in a room filled with glittering chrome and glass, in the alien sunshine of a foreign country hundreds upon hundreds of miles away from him, and it was as though he were there beside her and she could smell the special rich smell that was him, ether and anaesthetic and tobacco and clean human skin, the essential maleness of him, and she felt her muscles shake with a need for him. Just at the sight of two words written in scrawled black ink.

  “Bel-beloved. I think I was wrong. Not wrong to tell you there was no future for you with me, not wrong to send you away for your own sake, for that still holds - I know it does. I’ll never be to you what you want and deserve - a virtuous and faithful husband, a father to the children you’d like to have. That still holds. But I was wrong to myself. I should have gone on being the selfish bastard I always have been, and stopped myself from thinking about you. I should have let you go on as we were, and enjoyed being with you as long as you were willing to stay on my selfish terms. I don’t know why I’m writing this letter, not really. But I miss you quite horribly. I’d be a liar to pretend I haven’t spent some time with other girls - I have. People you know. And do you know something? I chose them because you know them. Right now I’m sitting here in my room feeling like hell, and Bar Haydon has just gone storming out in a rage because I tried to make love to her but forgot myself and called her by your name. And she is not going to be a substitute for you, she said, and I’m twenty kinds of a bloody fool if I don’t go out there to that damned hotel and marry you out of hand - oh, hell, I don’t suppose I’ll ever post this stupid screed, not unless I get smashed first. The silly thing is I was going to write you a quite friendly cool sort of letter, the sort you would have approved of in your distant scornful days, do you remember how you were then? I got as far as phoning Fiona for your address, and did no more. And now I sit here missing you like hell and writing a lot of maudlin nonsense instead of the cheerful bit. Oh, hell, Bel-beloved, I wish I’d been more of a bastard and kept you here. But even though I miss you so, I still don’t know what it is I miss. You - or your loving. I just know I want you here. Jay.”

  Very slowly she folded the pages, and put them back in the envelope, and then put the envelope in her pocket, and stood there for a long time, her hands folded on her uniform front, her head bent so that her eyes were fixed on the terrazzo of the floor. But she wasn’t seeing the floor. She could see only Jay’s face, see him sitting there in his bed sitting room in the doctors’ quarters at the Royal, sitting at the cluttered desk with his head bent over his hand flying over the paper. She could see too, for one fleeting moment, Barbara Haydon, one of the girls she had trained with and who had become Out Patient Sister when Isabel herself had been appointed to the operating theatres; tall slender Barbara with her cheeky grin and her relaxed and easy way. Some said too easy, for there was no doubt that Bar went from one doctor to another in the Royal, seeming to fall out of love as simply and uncomplicatedly as she fell into it, shrugging away the end of each affair with a gaiety that Isabel had sickly envied in the harsh days when she was fighting so hard with Jay to make him change his mind -

  And now, Jay had changed his mind. Or had he? She thought of Barbara in his arms as she herself had once been, and closed her eyes sharply, trying to eliminate the image. What had the letter said after all? Not that he loved her, not that he saw her, as she once
had seen him, as an ineradicable part of his future, the missing part of himself. That had been how Isabel had felt, what she had needed to tell him. And in telling him had terrified him away, for so he had told her with a desperate honesty. That he wanted her and needed her and yearned for her was undoubted; that she had always known. But in a physical way, only a physical way, he had cried helplessly at her. “For all I know that’s all there is! All there’ll ever be! You’re the most exciting and devastating and marvellous woman I’ve ever made love with, but what you’re wanting back from me is what you’re feeling, and it’s more than just physical, isn’t it?” And she had said yes, it was more than just physical, for so it was. She loved him wholly and helplessly and all the time; and whether they made love or not didn’t really matter sometimes -

  And now what was he saying in this letter, which was so typical of him, so impulsive, so urgent, and - she had, painfully, to admit it - so honest? Not once had he said in the letter that he loved her, for now he used the word more circumspectly than he once had; she could recognize that. He wanted her, missed her, ached for her perhaps. But that was all.

  “He doesn’t know what love is,” she thought bleakly. Any more, perhaps, than she did herself. What was it, after all? An aching need for another person’s physical presence, a sense of the rightness and goodness that came when they were making love? Perhaps that was all there was to it, and Jay was expressing his bewilderment in telling her that was all he had to give her. Maybe she was expressing an impossible dream in saying to him that that was all she wanted from him as long as she could go on giving him the love she felt, which seemed to her to be so much bigger, so much more important than his. But he had rejected that, seeing it as a cheating situation. To take more than he could give was not his way. And yet he missed her. She took that thought out of the morass and held it to her, close and warm. He missed her.

  She stood there for a long time, her hands still clasped with deceptive tranquillity on her uniform front but her thoughts went round and round busily, mouselike and hectic. Knowing that the hard won peace of the past three weeks was false, that her belief that she had “got over” Jay was a totally erroneous one, should she stay any longer? Was there any point in it? Or was this only a temporary set-back, born of the shock of getting a letter from him? Would she regain her equilibrium by tomorrow or perhaps the day after that? -

  The phone shrilled sharply and she jumped, feeling her pulse thump sickeningly and for a moment had to let it ring on while she regained her composure.

  And when she did pick it up it was almost as though it had all happened before; a stream of excited Spanish, which she tried desperately to comprehend, and then a clatter as another voice took over; Sebastian saying crisply, “Fourth floor. At once. An emergency.”

  She reached for her emergency bag mechanically and ran, obscurely grateful for this episode, whatever it was, and feeling slightly guilty for that. She wished no illness or disaster on anyone, but having to deal with such an event would at lest prevent her from mulling over and over again her own affairs.

  “It’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good -” she whispered aloud to the wall of the lift as it bore her upwards, and then giggled almost hysterically and took a deep breath to compose herself for whatever would be likely to be waiting for her. And almost automatically her mind began to check over the possibles; haemorrhage? stroke? heart attack? accident? -

  The door hissed open, and Jaime Mendoza was there on the corridor waiting for her, his face white and pinched, and she felt a twinge of very real fear as she looked at him, for she had never seen him look so anxious.

  And when all he said was a curt “Come - this way” and led a hurried way along the corridor towards a knot of people her tension grew. For Jaime to be as uncommunicative as this must surely mean something very dreadful had happened.

  The knot of people were guests and staff, all craning their necks in an attempt to stare into one of the rooms, and they fell back, hissing a little in their excitement, as Jaime brusquely shoved them aside and made way for Isabel to follow him.

  On the far side of the room, beside the open balcony door, stood the greyhaired man with the cigar - as ever - clenched between his teeth. “Rottenunclestinkyjack”, she thought at once and fear began to build up more and more in her throat. Beside him stood a chambermaid, her face buried in her apron as she rocked her shoulders and howled noisily and Mr. Rendell was muttering something at her in obvious impatience, while on her other side the hotel housekeeper also talked steadily in an attempt to stop the woman’s howling.

  On the bed sat Daniel’s mother, her face almost green in its pallor, sitting with her shoulders, hunched and her hands twisted in her lap, and on each side of her sat an older woman, both of whom Isabel recognized as hotel guests. They too were talking and murmuring, apparently attempting to get some sort of response from the girl who sat there with her face half hidden by her sheet of pale hair, but she ignored them completely, simply staring into the middle distance.

  Certainly the room seemed to be full of people, and for a moment Isabel was bewildered, looking about her for the patient, whoever the patient was, though she thought she knew, but then Jaime moved forwards and she followed him. He moved past Mr. Rendell, out of the door and on to the balcony, and here there were more people, one of the white jacketed hotel maintenance staff, a couple of waiters, and at the very edge of the balcony, leaning sideways over the railing, and apparently talking, was Sebastian.

  The men moved apart as she came out on to the small paved area, and she felt the midday breeze warm on her face, and put her bag down on the paving stones, feeling the chill of certainty creeping from her belly across her shoulders and into her arms.

  “Where is he?” she said and she knew her voice sounded hoarse and tense. “Fred-Daniel - where is he?”

  Sebastian turned his head and looked at her, and there was an expression on his face that was compounded of tension and annoyance and oddly - boredom, and then he looked down again, and opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind, and straightened himself and stood upright, dusting his hands with a characteristic fastidiousness.

  “He is down there,” he said shortly. “And will not move. If anyone makes a move for him, he says he will jump. He will talk to no one, he says, we are all to go away. But when I asked him if he would talk to you he did not refuse. So - ” and he stood back, and she nodded shakily and stepped forwards to look over the balcony.

  Below her the remaining floors’ balconies and the hotel terraces dropped away to the water of the Bay, with the same foreshortening effect she could see from high up on her own floor, though from here it was of course less pronounced. She could see the great expanse of glass that was the restaurant roof, with waiters and guests clustered in groups and staring upwards, waving and gesticulating, and she bit her lip, for the roof looked so very large, so very fragile, and was so very much in a direct line from the balcony where she stood.

  And then she shifted her gaze, to look immediately below her. She was aware of the corresponding balcony of the floor beneath, with a woman in a swimsuit standing on it and staring upwards, but she paid no attention to her, for between that lower balcony and the one on which she was herself was the narrow ledge that ran right round the building, between each set of balconies. And on it, his back to the wall and his feet planted carefully apart stood Daniel.

  He was standing very firmly, she thought at first, with his shoulders hard against the wall, and his arms spread wide, the palms of his hands flattened against the wall, too. But then she saw the whiteness of his face, the pinched look round his mouth, and the faint trembling of his shoulders and she thought “He’s scared - and he’s tired. He can’t stand there much longer- ” and she turned her head and said softly to Sebastian “How long?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. The woman was looking after him - the chambermaid - she is hysterical, I can get no sense from her, perhaps half an hour - ”

 
“Ye Gods - half an hour!” She leaned over the edge of the balcony then, and speaking very softly and almost conversationally she said “You are rotten, Fred. You promised to tell me when you were going mountaineering. And you didn’t.”

  His head moved slowly, and then he looked up, and his eyes blazed blue in his face, so white was it under its veneer of golden tan, and he looked at her for a long moment.

  “You tol’ me to go away,” he said flatly, and level though his voice was she could hear the panic behind it.

  “You’re right, Fred, I did. I’ll explain about that in a minute. Thing now is, to get you up - or down. Got that string round your middle?”

  “No. Didn’t need it - wasn’t takin’ anyone else with me.”

  She felt the hurt anger in his voice and it made her wince. “All right, no string. So, someone’ll have to come down with some - a rope - ”

  “No!” He spoke sharply, his voice coming loud and clear and he jerked his head up to stare at her with such malevolence in his face that again she recoiled. “Don’t want to. I’ll do it on my own. Or I’ll fly, that’s what - ” and he stared down again, and even from her high vantage point, she could see the lower lip thrust forwards, and felt cold panic rising in her.

  There was more to this than just a child getting into a difficult scrape and needing to be extricated; not precisely the all too common adult situation of “do-what-I-want-or-I’ll-jump” but something perilously like it. A disturbed and unhappy child, not sure of anything secure in his privileged yet deprived world, playing with a fantasy of freedom and adult powerfulness -