Nurse in Waiting

by Jane Arbor

  Mrs. Carnehill intercepted her glance at the big clock on the mantel-shelf.

  “You’ll get used to this,” she said comfortably. “Over here we frequently don’t lunch till half-past two or three. Now Justin—Mr. McKiley, you know—he comes from the North and is half Scottish into the bargain—thinks it gastronomically criminal to eat after half-past one. I can’t agree with him, of course,” she added as if that settled the matter. She went on: “Shuan isn’t here today. She has gone to Naas market to sell some of her rabbits and bring back the horsemeat for the dogs. So I couldn’t really have met you myself off the 12.4 today, because she has got the car. It was indeed fortunate that it happened to be Wednesday and that Justin—”

  Her voice trailed off vaguely and Joanna ventured to ask:

  “Who is Shuan?”

  “Shuan? Oh, she is my ward. Her parents died when she was twelve, and she has lived with us ever since. She’s seventeen—no, eighteen—now. She makes her own pocket-money with her rabbits and her dog-breeding, and sometimes she has given riding lessons to visitors to Tulleen, if they want them. She helps me too. Between us, we have managed all the winter, but I have to be away a lot—to Dublin and sometimes over to England—and I couldn’t leave her entirely responsible for Roger. So that is why we needed you.”

  “You have to go to England on business?” asked Joanna politely.

  Her hostess looked a little surprised. “Oh—didn’t Colonel Kimstone tell you about me?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” smiled Joanna.

  Mrs. Carnehill threw back her head and laughed. “Then how you must have wondered whether I was to be trusted with the steak!” she gurgled. “Why, I’m ‘Luculla’! My job is food! You must have heard of me!”

  Joanna had. She had had her mouth made to water by articles on cookery, signed “Luculla,” in innumerable magazines in England. She told her companion so, and looked at her with fresh interest, though at the back of her mind hovered the question which had been troubling her for some time. Where was the wealth and luxury which she had expected to find at Carrieghmere? Those broken down walls, a household which apparently commanded the use of only one car, a hostess who was a journalist and whose ward gave riding lessons in order to make money—nothing of all this seemed to tie up with the valuable and antique appointments of the luncheon table, nor with those pearls about her employer’s throat, nor indeed with the fact of an agent who could afford to possess and use an expensive American car.

  Joanna knew that none of this was any business of hers, but though she tried to dismiss it from her mind and to accept what came, as an employee should, it made her all the more curious to meet the member of the household who was to be her special care—Roger Carnehill. She was glad, therefore, when at the end of the meal his mother said:

  “Now you would like to see Roger, I dare say?”

  “Yes, I should.” Joanna hesitated. “Would you like me to get into uniform first?”

  Mrs. Carnehill looked vague. “I don’t know. Do you have to?”

  “Well, there’s no rule about it,” smiled Joanna. “It is for you to say.”

  “Then I think not—for now. You look charming as you are. And I want Roger to like you—not to feel that he is being regimented. I think maybe that you’ll see why, when you’ve known him for a little while.”

  She led the way to another room on the ground floor, of which, Joanna’s swift professional glance told her, the furnishings were far too heavy for a sick room and that it was woefully overcrowded.

  The overcrowding was due partly to the presence of three large dogs, one of which, an Irish setter, lumbered off the foot of the bed as they entered.

  “Dogs Dogs!” protested Mrs. Carnehill half-heartedly as they surrounded Joanna and flung their forepaws almost to her shoulder. “Roger, call them off. Miss Merivale may not like dogs.”

  The young man in the bed lowered the book he had been reading.

  “Then maybe they won’t like her,” he said in a deep, attractive voice. “What then?”

  “But I do,” said Joanna with a smile. The expulsion of the creatures from her patient’s room would probably take time and a fair amount of tact, and today—when she hadn’t even the status which uniform would give her—was not a suitable occasion, she felt.

  She looked at her new patient with interest. And he looked at her.

  For some reason she had misread her instructions about him. She had expected him to be a mere boy—not much over twenty, if that. But he looked nearer thirty—a man with a thin face, a stubbornly formed jawline and a petulant mouth. His eyes were as blue as his mother’s, but his hair was red—a mass of flaming “carrots.” He ran his hand rather wearily through it as he looked at Joanna.

  He saw a girl, tall, slim, with a clear, delicate skin which flushed in her cheeks to only the slightest colouring. Her straight nose had fine nostrils; her eyes were grey beneath level brows; her hair—a pale spun gold—was caught into a knot at the nape of her neck.

  Pure Anglo-Saxon—as cold and stiff-necked as they come—was Roger Carnehill’s mental comment. She looked now as if she had very little humanity. Put her into stiff cuffs and a starched apron and she wouldn’t have any!

  Then she smiled again—and his judgment checked. If she could really smile like that—with a kind of lighting up from within—maybe she had some possibilities after all. But he hoped they weren’t buried too deeply—it would bore him so to dig them out.

  With her smile Joanna said: “How do you do?” He liked her for that. No doubt the time would come when she would have the right to tweak at his pillows and ask brightly: “Well, how are we feeling today?”—which would irritate him to near despair. But at least today she had the good sense to behave towards him as if he were a newly introduced man and not a useless hulk.

  He returned a “How do you do” of his own. Then he turned to his mother. “You said Miss Merivale wasn’t coming till tomorrow,” he accused.

  “I know. I got muddled. But Justin was over to Tulleen with the eggs, and he brought her back.”

  “Oh, he did? Did he say when he was coming in to see me?”

  “I asked him to dinner tomorrow night—to meet Miss Merivale.”

  Roger Carnehill raised his eyebrows. “I thought he’d met her,” he commented ironically. “Anyway, send him in to see me afterwards, will you? Where’s Shuan?”

  “At Naas, darling. It’s market-day, you know.”

  Joanna stood silently by, using her trained observation to the full. In the sharply put questions she thought she detected the typical invalid’s effort to reach out beyond his bed, to keep a finger, as it were, upon the pulse of events over which he no longer had control.

  She realized that she knew less than she ought about the course of his illness. She would have to ask when she could see their Doctor Beltane, in order to get instructions. She knew only that a riding accident of nearly two years earlier had resulted in spinal trouble from which he ought by now to have recovered, but apparently hadn’t, even to the extent of convalescence. It looked, certainly, as if her own work towards his recovery might be of indefinite duration. Momentarily she believed she would not mind—even if it meant that she would be away from London—and from Dale—for far longer than she had expected.

  Mrs. Carnehill was saying: “Fancy! She didn’t know about my being ‘Luculla’!” She sounded as amused as she had been at luncheon, but Roger frowned slightly as he said to Joanna:

  “Didn’t you? Hadn’t Colonel Kimstone told you?”

  “No. I haven’t seen the Colonel since I nursed him, and that was some time ago. He didn’t mention Carrieghmere then,” she told him.

  “Then you didn’t know that Mother spends her time poking about the markets in the back streets of Dublin and writing about food for people who probably don’t know the difference between a consommé and a pig’s trotter?” His words might have been humorous if it were not for the bitter, sarcastic ring in his voice.

&n
bsp; Joanna was shocked. She had understood from Mrs. Carnehill at luncheon that she thoroughly enjoyed her work and that her ‘poking about the markets’ was incidental to the number of interesting food finds she made there. But it was clear that there was some conflict between mother and son on the subject, and Joanna was anxious not to be drawn into ‘taking sides.’ But she had begun to admire Mrs. Carnehill tremendously and she resented for her her son’s criticism.

  “It’s the people like that who most need to be told what the difference is—” she began with conviction, but her patient broke in with a sarcastic:

  “And I suppose they have to look to a Carnehill of Carrieghmere to tell them!”

  “If a ‘Carnehill of Carrieghmere’ is willing and knowledgeable enough to tell them—why not?” retorted Joanna.

  He looked at her, not replying, and Mrs. Carnehill, who recognized lowering signs which Joanna did not, put in briskly:

  “Come now, Roger. We’ve been over all this so often before. And I still say I like food; I like discovering odd ways of cooking it and, best of all, I like passing on my tips to other people—”

  She stopped, but not before Joanna had noticed the tightening of the sick man’s grip upon the coverlet. He said irritably:

  “But it’s all so absurd. It was all right when it was merely a hobby with you, but surely there should be plenty for you to attend to here, now that I’m no use? I ought to be able to look to you to be my link with what is going on, on the estate. But as it is, there seems to be a conspiracy lately to keep things back from me. I even have to force a report out of my own agent!”

  “Roger—please!” For the first time Mrs. Carnehill seemed distressed. “You know it isn’t like that at all. It’s simply that neither Justin nor I see the necessity for bothering you with trifles—”

  “Nor with anything else, it seems,” he returned gloomily, and Joanna felt that it was time she intervened. She turned to Mrs. Carnehill, saying quietly;

  “Oughtn’t Mr. Carnehill to rest now? Then, when I’ve changed into my uniform, perhaps you would show me where I prepare his tea. And might I ring up Dr. Beltane this evening?”

  “Yes, of course. We’ll go now, Roger. Try to sleep a little, won’t you?” Mrs. Carnehill moved to the head of the bed and laid a hand lightly upon his shoulder. He did not speak, but he looked up at her, and Joanna guessed that some unspoken word of communion had passed between them.

  More and more she was coming to admire the unexpected dignity of the older woman, so that she was completely unprepared for the sudden crumpling of her bright features as the sickroom door closed behind them.

  She leaned back against the oak and whispered with a kind of desperate tiredness:

  “It’s my fault. I’ve never learnt that any discussion of my work irritates him beyond measure. And this morning began well enough. It’ll be my fault entirely if by nightfall he has one of his black moods upon him—” She looked up at Joanna, a wry smile at her lips. “I told you that Roger wouldn’t be regimented. You’ll find that he won’t even accept the limitations of his illness; he’ll still indulge in the most absurd indignations and self-pity, not seeing at all that they only hold him back!”

  “It’s because he is ill that he can work himself into passions like that,” Joanna told her gently. “Haven’t you ever, even in a short illness, felt that no one loved you, no one at all seemed to see your point of view? And he has been ill for a very long time!”

  “But really he has had every care—mine, Shuan’s—everything we could do for him!”

  “And now he has got me!” commented Joanna dryly.

  The older woman looked at her, her face composed again. “Yes. Now he has you.” She hesitated. Then: “D’you know, I’m still not sure what I ought to call you? ‘Nurse’? ‘Miss Merivale’? What would you like?”

  Then Joanna did something which was against all the strict canons of nursing etiquette at the Marrone Nursing Home, and which would have struck horror in Matron’s professional breast.

  She said: “Call me Joanna—won’t you?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  By the time Joanna had changed, had organized a tea-tray for her patient and had learned how she could expect to get it for herself in future, it was nearer to what at the nursing home would be regarded as “settling down” time than an accepted hour for tea. No one, in fact, seemed to expect her to want to offer afternoon tea to her patient, any more than to want it herself.

  When at last she took it to his room Roger Carnehill made no reference to his earlier outburst.

  His eyes ran over her uniform as he said provocatively: “I suppose, now I’m taken over officially, so to speak, I become the patient in bed number so-and-so?”

  “Not,” said Joanna patiently, “unless you want it so. As you are my only patient I can give you individual attention!”

  He yawned elaborately. “I dare say that could be just as stultifying in the end. Meanwhile, what am I to call you when I don’t say ‘you’?”

  Joanna bent over the tea-things. “I expect you will usually call me Nurse,” she said.

  “Shall I? I don’t know. I never had one before. What does Mother call you?”

  “I asked her to call me Joanna,”

  “Joanna?” He repeated the name slowly as if weighing its quality. Then: “Why shouldn’t I do the same? Wouldn’t it make for mateyness all round?”

  For an instant blue eyes looked challengingly into grey. Joanna knew that he was trying to bait her into a show of sharp professionalism and knew also that to a certain extent she was gratifying him when she replied briskly:

  “If it made for co-operation, it would be quite a good idea. If it didn’t—”

  “If it didn’t, it would merely be familiar of me! Is that it—Joanna?”

  Joanna had to laugh as she handed him his teacup. “Call me what you like—or whatever comes first to your mind,” she said easily. “Meanwhile, won’t you tell me about your day? What time you usually wake, what your routine has been?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh—d’you mean you’re not going to reorganize it according to some starchy cut-and-dried methods of your own?”

  “I can’t promise,” returned Joanna placidly, realizing that the ‘baiting’ process was being tried again. “I may like to suggest some alterations when I’ve spoken to Dr. Beltane. But begin at the beginning—what time do you wake?”

  “Oh—about seven, I suppose. If I’ve been sleeping, that is. If I haven’t, and Shuan comes too early with the tea, she knows she’ll get slung out on her ear, because I may have just dropped off.”

  “So Shuan—I’m afraid I don’t know her other name—brings your morning tea?”

  “Ferrall. Shuan Ferrall,” he prompted laconically. “She hauls the dogs in, and some extra saucers, and we all sit round having a cosy conversazione.”

  “The dogs? All of them?” queried Joanna with a glance at the three humped bodies beside the bed.

  “Not,” returned her patient gravely, “not all seventeen. Only these three. They always come.”

  “I see,” said Joanna just as gravely. “And after that, I suppose they spend their day here? Or do they ever feel the need to step outside for a breath of air?”

  He laughed. “All right. You win that round! You don’t approve of their being here, do you? I saw you look down your nose at them when you came in with Mother. Well—you’ll have to fight Shuan about that. They’re her animals; she believes I adore having ‘em around, and I wouldn’t disillusion her for the world—”

  He broke off as swift footsteps sounded in the hall outside, and the door opened with a clatter of its handle.

  Joanna looked up to see a girl—Shuan Ferrall, no doubt—standing upon the threshold.

  She wore jodhpurs, a clumsily darned fawn jumper and a short jacket shrugged across her shoulders. She was hatless, and her black hair, dishevelled by the wind, made a tangle of curls in her neck. Her cheeks were flushed to a high color, and Joanna,
looking at her, realized that greenish-blue eyes deeply set beneath dark curling lashes could indeed appear to have been ‘smudged in’ by a careless hand.

  For a second Shuan stood there. Then in one convulsive movement she flung herself across the room, bent over Roger Carnehill and kissed him upon the lips.

  “Darling!” she exclaimed. “What do you think—?”

  Unceremoniously he set the tips of his fingers at the roots of her hair where it sprang upward from her brow, and held her back from him.

  “I don’t,” he said. “Your volatility would disturb anybody’s thought-processes. If it’s affectation or nerves, or both—check it. It grows on you. Speak nicely to Miss Merivale now.”

  She flicked him lightly upon the cheek.

  “Beast,” she commented briefly.

  Her violent embrace of Roger had dislodged her jacket. It had fallen at the feet of Joanna, who now handed it to her with a smile.

  She smiled back a little uncertainly.

  “Oh—you are Roger’s nurse!” she said. “I ought to have known, but I didn’t expect you until tomorrow. None of us did, did we, Roger?” As she turned to appeal to him her eyes lighted upon the tea-tray.

  “Why, you’ve got tea!” she accused. “Whatever for? Didn’t you eat your lunch?” She looked curiously from him to Joanna and back again, and Roger said with a glance of his own towards Joanna:

  “Apparently it’s an old English custom. Over there, four o’clock tea is something of a rite, I understand!”

  “But it isn’t four o’clock! It’s nearer six!”

  “That,” Roger pointed out—and Joanna had an uncomfortable feeling that he was talking ‘at’ her, rather than ‘to’ Shuan—“is not the fault of our charming new English broom! We didn’t lunch until two-forty-five or so.”