Nurse in the Sun

by Claire Rayner

  “Well?” Isabel said frostily, as she began to clear away the dressing tray and scrub the instruments. It was easier to talk to this woman while her hands were busy, when she didn’t have to look at her directly. “You want me on a personal matter? Personal to me or to you?”

  “Both,” Vanda Connaught said. “In a way,” and laughed softly and Isabel threw a startled glance at her. She had never heard Vanda Connaught sound so relaxed, so happy.

  “I don’t see how that could be,” she said. “We’ve hardly that much in common, have we?”

  Vanda Connaught laughed again, and moved across the surgery to perch herself on the operating table, watching Isabel’s deft fingers as she completed her tidying up operations. “You’d be surprised how much we have in common, Miss Nursie,” she said. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. Anyway - tell me. Is it true? That you and Sebastian have had a row?”

  “A row? I don’t have rows with people.”

  “Hey, pitchy putchy! Don’t we sound dignified! Too good to be true, aren’t you?”

  “Look, if you’ve come down here just to be disagreeable, Mrs. Connaught, I’m not in any mood for it, so will you just turn about and leave me in peace! Go on - away with you! I’m no’ going to be badgered by -”

  “Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you! Now, for heaven’s sake, take no notice of the way I talk - I’ve a sharp tongue but it doesn’t mean much - and talk to me, will you? I really want to know -”

  Isabel blinked, and felt the angry colour that had risen in her cheeks begin to subside as she stared at the other woman, puzzlement filling her.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that! I’m nothing like as nasty an individual as I might seem sometimes! I treated you rather badly, didn’t I? At first? I suppose you’ve a right to be a bit off. But look - I’m sorry! I was rude and nasty to you, and I admit it, and I’m sorry! Will you accept that?”

  Isabel moved then, and came to perch beside the other woman on the operating table. “I can hardly do otherwise, can I. But you’ll forgive me if I’m a shade suspicious! I mean, after all this time to suddenly - I can’t help wondering what it is you’re after -”

  “Canny - canny!” Vanda said, and grinned a little crookedly at her. “You remind me a bit of my - my late husband. He was of Scots extraction as they say -” she shrugged sharply. “Ancient history. Okay, call it an armed truce. But answer my question, will you? Have you and Sebastian had a r - er - disagreement?”

  Now it was Isabel’s turn to produce a crooked smile. “You could call it that, I suppose. Anyway, there’s no’ much point in denying that we’re not precisely on speaking terms, is there? He ignores me totally when he sees me, and I ignore him, and we don’t ever get together now.”

  “Please, what happened?” Vanda leaned forwards and touched Isabel’s hand, making her look up, and her face was filled with a most curious expression, half pleading, half avid. “I’ve a reason for asking.”

  “It’ll have to be a damned good reason to make me talk that easily about my private affairs!” Isabel said spiritedly. “I’m not one of your let’s-let-our-back-hair-down types, nor ever have been.”

  “Oh, damn you!” Vanda slid to her feet and began to prowl edgily about the surgery but there was no rancour in her voice. “Damn you for being so - so - oh, for God’s sake, girl! Can’t you tell why for yourself? As far as I’m concerned the sun shines out of that man’s ears, and always has. For years - more years than I care to remember, he’s protected me, looked after me, taken care of my pride as well as my financial needs, when he didn’t have to -”

  “What did you say?” Isabel said softly.

  “What? That he’s taken care of my pride, you mean?” Vanda said. “Oh, it’s a long tale. But years ago, he and my husband were partners. My husband treated him like - he did a lot of stupid things, shall we say. And Sebastian bought him out - and then when my stupid idiot of a husband went and killed himself, Sebastian took me on, pretended I was his partner -”

  “You know?” Isabel said, staring at her. “You know? You’ve always known?”

  “Oh, of course I have! Did he tell you about it? Ye Gods, you must have got under his skin. He’s never told a soul - if he had you can be bloody sure I’d know. He told you -” Her face suddenly hardened, losing the gentler softness that had seemed to be there for the past few minutes. “Then maybe there’s no point in my being here. If he told you that.”

  “It was after - after that - uh - disagreement we had, you and I. I think he was trying to explain a little of why -” Isabel said, embarrassment wrapping her in a hot blanket.

  “Huh! Yeah, well - I suppose. Anyway, I might as well tell you the rest, even if I’m past - so! The sun shines out of his ears. I -” she stopped her prowling and turned to stare at Isabel, and now her face looked naked, and so filled with appeal that for a moment Isabel felt her eyes prickle with tears.

  “I love him, you see. And I don’t know what to do about it. He’s kind to me, polite to me, protective - but I could be his bloody maiden aunt for all there is of anything else. And when I saw the way he looked at you, the very first day you got here, watched him fancying you, I wanted to - well, anyway, I was angry. Which is why I - But now - please tell me. What’s happening now? Is it all over? Or just a temporary thing? I suppose it is. If he told you such private things -”

  “It’s over,” Isabel said after a long pause. “It’s very much over. He’ll never speak to me again, nor I to him. That’s for certain. I can promise you that.”

  Vanda looked at her for a long time, her eyes searching her face, and then, very slowly, in a great wave.

  “Then - Thank you. Really, thank you. I’ve no pride left, you see. I’m past caring what you or anyone else thinks of me. I love him, and I’ll do anything I can to get him. One of these days, surely, one of these days -”

  Isabel stood up suddenly. “Come into the office,” she said crisply. “I’ve some of the makings of a cup of coffee -”

  Vanda laughed then. “I thought you weren’t one of the let-your-back-hair-down type?” she said jeeringly. “And here we go, hauling out the coffee cups!”

  “I’m not. I’m a nurse, though, and I know what to do when people have problems. But if you don’t want help - or the coffee - then you go and take a running jump at yourself!” Isabel said sharply.

  “Okay. Okay! Later on, I’ll take a running jump. Right now, I take my coffee black, no sugar.”

  She made the coffee with hot water drawn from the water sterilizer, and they sat in silence for a while sipping, and then Isabel said carefully “You want Garcia. You want to marry him, is that it?”

  “Yes,” Vanda said it badly, making no attempt to hide her feelings, and Isabel grinned at her.

  “If you’d shown your virtues as clearly as you showed your nastiness, right there at the beginning, we could have been friends, you know that, Vanda? I like honest people -”

  “So stop being so po-faced and stop lecturing me. Just tell me what it is you’ve dreamed up to solve my problem, in that clever nurse’s head of yours,” Vanda jeered, but she smiled as she said it.

  “He’s a - peculiar man,” Isabel said carefully. “Curious, I mean. He lives here in one of the most cosmopolitan towns in the world, he’s rich, he runs a highly successful business, yet he’s managed to pretend to himself that he’s still living back in the eighteenth century. It’s a most extraordinary thing -”

  “Hell, I know that! Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs!”

  “Well, if you know it, then you’re stupid to behave with him the way you do, without stopping to think about the way he thinks a woman ought to be!”

  “How do you mean? I can’t change the way I look, if that’s what you’re saying! If he’s got a fancy for carroty hair and green eyes, what do I do? Dye it? that’ll help a lot, I don’t think!”

  “Ah, no, woman! Where’s your sense!” Isabel snapped. “It’s got nothing to do with looks - or only margina
lly. It’s just that he wants a woman who behaves properly. His idea of properly. He thought I was one of his - one of those comme il faut types, who never do anything that isn’t precisely proper and feminine and all the rest of it. It’s all of a piece, of course. He saw in me what he wanted to see, never stopping to think that maybe I wasn’t one of the retiring well behaved sit-at-home types he really admires. Anyway - you’re not going to get far by getting drunk, nasty drunk at that, and making a great guy of yourself! So there you have it!”

  Vanda sat staring sombrely into her cup. “I only do it because I’m depressed, and frustrated and lonely -”

  “Hell, I know that. I know you aren’t an alcoholic - yet. Though you will be if you go on the way you’ve been. You’ll get nowhere with the great Garcia by being half smashed when you’re with him. You might get somewhere by being quiet and civilized and - and clever.”

  “How clever?”

  “You know his mother?”

  “I’ve met the old trout, once or twice. Yes.”

  “Well, that’s where he’s vulnerable. Right there. If you want him, and you’re prepared to get him on any terms - use his mother. If she told him to marry you, with his daft eighteenth century ideas I really believe he would. He mightn’t love you at first, mightn’t ever love you. But he feels responsible for you and that’s a fair beginning. Feels guilty about you too. Show him you can change and be meek and proper, tell him the change was made by him, and who can say what’ll happen? It’s up to you to decide whether or not those are the terms you want him on, but if you do -” she shrugged. “Then it’s his mother you want to work on. Not him. And keep away from the bottle, for heaven’s sake!”

  Vanda was staring at her, her eyes a little narrowed and very bright. And then she smiled again, that slow smile that made her face look so much younger.

  “I think you’re right - I really think you’re right. I’ll visit her. Take my knitting and sit and talk to her, do the dutiful would-be-daughter-in-law bit - ” she laughed, a sharp bark of laughter, and stood up and stretched her catlike languorous stretch, and smiled down at Isabel. “Thank you, Nursie! I’ll say this for you - you’re no dog in the manger, are you? You’re right. We should have been friends.”

  “Bit late now,” Isabel said shortly, and then held out her hand, impulsively. “Good luck, Vanda, I think it’ll work - and any way it’s worth trying, and it’ll give you plenty to think about - ”

  After a moment, Vanda shook hands with her, and then said curiously, “What about you though? Are you at all - upset by this disagreement, whatever it was? I still don’t know, do I?”

  “Nor will you, not from me,” Isabel said, and then shrugged. “Me? I’m not upset. Not in any basic way, certainly.”

  “Someone else? The Yank?”

  “Yank? Oh, Biff - oh no! He - he was a very good friend. That’s all.”

  “You’ve been piling up the past tenses, haven’t you? Both your fellas, out in the cold?”

  “Vanda, I have work to do, d’you mind? I’d like to get on with it - ”

  “Ah, stuff!” Vanda said, and shoved at her a little roughly, so that she had to sit down again. “Now it’s my turn. You sat there and told me what to do, a flibberty bit like you, half my age, God damn you, and now it’s my turn. So, what’s your problem, Nursie?”

  Isabel sat there, looking at the other woman’s face with its lines of years of living etched on it and felt it rise in her, a great wave of loneliness, a desperate need to talk to someone, to pour it all out in words, and almost surprised to hear her own voice she said, “Someone at home. In London. I came here to get over him, and I can’t. It’s pretty bloody, one way and another.”

  Vanda nodded. “I imagine I know how you feel,” she said dryly. “So why do you have to get over him? Did he chuck you?”

  Isabel shrugged. “For the stupidest reasons. Said he wasn’t good enough for me, on account he wasn’t the marrying type - and that was what I wanted. So he put an end to it.”

  “Not an excuse? Not a quick way out because he fancied someone else ?” Vanda said baldly and Isabel winced slightly. “Yes, I know, I’m crude and coarse. But I know the way the world wags. So, was he alibi-ing out, or was it for real - I mean were you nagging him to marry you?”

  “I was not!” Isabel said indignantly. “Indeed, I was not. I never mentioned the word, never asked him to - told him I loved him and that was all that mattered - and as for wanting out - he loves me too. Misses me like hell. I know that - ” and her hand moved, touched the pocket of her uniform, where Jay’s letter sat, as it always did. She had told herself she carried it on her in case one of the inquisitive chamber maids took to peering among the things in her room, but she knew that was an alibi of her own, knew that it was just that she couldn’t bear not to keep it with her.

  Vanda’s eyes followed the gesture, and she said quickly, “You’ve had a letter from him since you got here? Then I guess maybe he does - show me.”

  “I will not!” Isabel said hotly. “Don’t be so damned inquisitive!”

  “Oh, stuff. Don’t be so damned full of yourself! You had the pleasure of telling me what to do, and now it’s my turn. So show me, you daft wee thing!”

  Almost against her will Isabel smiled at her imitation of her accent, and then, with an almost luxuriant sense of relief she took the letter from her pocket, and handed it over. And then sat, staring at her fingers interlocked on her lap as Vanda read it, listened to her breathing and the rustle of the paper as she turned the pages.

  “You - you are so stupid!” Vanda said at length, but her voice sounded warm and friendly. “There’s not a girl in the world who wouldn’t give her eyeteeth to get a letter like that from a man she loves, and what do you do? Sit here moping instead of rushing home to him. Stupid, absolutely solid ivory from ear to ear!”

  Isabel looked up at her, her face creased a little. “Stupid? But he says-”

  “He says he loves you. The man’s near demented for want of you - what more do you want? Sure, he’s fighting tooth and nail not to have to admit it, not fully, but that’s not so unusual. Men often do - but love you? Of course he does, and probably always will. Take my tip, ducky. Write him a letter, tell him you’re coming home, and when you get there, you put your arms round him, and tell him you love him, and tell him he loves you - even though he knows it - and tell him that whether he likes it or not, you two are going to be married. He’ll fight and he’ll argue - damn it, you may even have to take him to buy you the ring! but he’ll go along with you, and he’ll be there on the day you set, I promise you. And then, once you’re married, you’ll see - he’ll turn into the most satisfactory of suburban husbands ever, all wrapped up in mortgages and school bills and the rates. You’ll see - ”

  “I - ah, you’re crazy - how can you - ”

  “How can I be so sure? How can you be so sure that you gave me the right advice? Do you think what you suggested will work for me?”

  “Yes - yes, I do - ”

  “Then this is what’s right for you. I’m as certain as you are. So do as you’re told at once, will you? Go write the letter, book the next plane home, and he’ll be there on the ground waiting for you. You’ll see.”

  She moved away then, across the surgery to the door, and stopped for a moment and looked back over her shoulder. “Tell you what, nursie. Bring him here for your honeymoon. Here, to the Cadiz. By then, I’ll be running the place with my - with Sebastian. It’ll work for me, it’s got to - and it’ll work for you. So - ” and now she grinned that crooked grin again. “Hasta la vista!”

  EPILOGUE

  The plane banked steeply, so that the wing rose high on one side to cut the sky with a sharp silvery line, and the fear that had thickened her throat when they took off but which had momentarily settled came bubbling up again. She turned her head to look out of the window beside her but that was worse, for there below her - so very far below! - was a lurching patchwork of brownish green fields, the cluste
r of glass-gleaming black and red roofed buildings that was Palma airport, the crawling ants of cars on the grey ribbons of road and this time she closed her eyes, and let her hands convulsively grip the buckle of her safety belt.

  “Been on ’oliday then?” a voice said in her ear. “You’ve got a real lovely tan there, so it’s a proper silly question, ’n it? I ’ave too. Smashin’ place, Majorca, I reckon, don’t you?”

  She turned her head, and looked at him. A tall young man with a wide smile, rather long hair over an open-necked shirt, very white teeth in a sunbrowned face. He looked friendly, kind and relaxed, and she stared at him consideringly for a long moment before she opened her mouth to speak.

  “No entiendo el inglés,” she said loudly and clearly. “Soy española - ” and the young man looked puzzled for a moment, and then nonplussed and then rather bored, and he nodded at her in a vague way before turning his head to look at the girl sitting on the other side of the gangway.

  She leaned back in her seat, and unbuckled her safety belt, and relaxed. Just a couple of hours, and then Gatwick - and the road to London and the Royal -

  She closed her eyes, happily snuggling back against the upholstery of the seat, and imagined it, how it would be, Jason standing there on the other side of the customs barrier, his hands in his trouser pockets, watching for her, and the way his eyebrows would go up and his mouth would crease into its familiar grin when he saw her and then his arms about her.

  She grinned to herself, and let her mind slide away to Vanda, wondering how it was with her. They had met that morning as Isabel’s luggage was being carried out of the Cadiz, under the fussy direction of Jaime Mendoza, and Isabel had laughed aloud at the sight of her, for she was wearing a very simple linen dress and a wide brimmed straw hat, and a bare minimum of makeup on her face.

  “You’re going to Valldemosa!” Isabel had said, and Vanda had smiled at her, her eyebrows raised quizzically, and said “Where else? I have a lunch date with an old lady - and what’s with you? It worked?”