Nurse in Waiting

by Jane Arbor

  “What do you mean?” Joanna spoke sharply.

  “Well, only ‘tis the strange thing that he wouldn’t be enabled t’ switch on to his reserve supply an’ be off again as merry as a bird—”

  “You mean—that he should have had petrol all the while?”

  “In his reserve tank, surely. Don’t them big American cars always have them?” An’ don’t I know that his own has one itself?”

  Joanna said casually: “I expect he tried that.” But mentally she exclaimed: “Well—! A single, unfinished phrase which expressed much of her bewildered questionings of Justin McKiley’s motives in having seemingly engineered that delay upon the journey. Much, indeed, of a newly born fear of him.

  Earlier she had not understood him. Now, she believed reluctantly, she must look upon him as an enemy.

  At Carrieghmere at last, Roseen uttered a single “Good night” to them both and scuttled away in the direction of the kitchen regions. Joanna alighted and was asking Michael if he could go straight back to Justin’s car with petrol when the house door flew open abruptly and Shuan, a wildly dishevelled figure, was silhouetted against the light behind her.

  She almost hurled herself at Joanna as she half sobbed: “Oh, thank goodness you’ve come. Thank goodness you’ve come! Roger has been in terrible pain for an hour or more. I haven’t been able to get Beltie and I haven’t known what to do. Thank goodness you’ve come at last!”

  Joanna’s heart, which had seemed to turn over sickenly, quieted and steadied. Even the shock of realization that she had unwittingly left the girl to deal with the utterly unlooked-for onset of crisis was submerged beneath the urgent necessity to check her rising hysteria, to act for the best swiftly, at once.

  Over her shoulder she spoke sharply to Michael. “Don’t go to Mr. McKiley yet. We may need you. Wait with the car.” Then she took Shuan firmly by the arm in a grasp beneath which the girl flinched.

  In the hall Joanna said with the sternness for which hysteria must call: “Now tell me—what has happened? And be quick!”

  “He—he was quiet until after I gave him his supper and sat with him. Then suddenly he shouted with pain. He sort of grimaced at me, and after that he couldn’t talk for it. I tried to get Beltie and I couldn’t. I tried to get Mums, but at the hotel in Belfast they didn’t know where she was likely to be. I sent Cook down to the Dower House, and René has gone to Tullen to get Beltie—his phone was out of order or something. But nothing I’ve been able to do for Roger has helped him—”

  “Where is the pain?” Joanna was taking off her hat, her gloves.

  “I don’t know. Yes I do—it’s in his back—where he’s never had it before—!”

  And Shuan, staring, did not understand the quiet, almost triumphant confidence with which Joanna turned towards the door of Roger’s room. She had not Joanna’s knowledge that she was going forward to help Roger, racked with present pain, but already freed from the death, the nothingness, of the paralysis he had known.

  For the rest of that night, when Dr. Beltane arrived at last to administer sedatives and to share her confident hopes, and throughout the next day Joanna had no thought nor time for anything other than her work with her patient.

  It was not until the late evening that she realized with a shock that Dale was expecting her to go again to Dublin on the following day. Before they had parted at the Greville they had arranged that she should telephone him to tell him when to expect her. Now, of course, she could not go. That was quite definite. As she went to the telephone she wondered how Dale would take the news.

  When she contacted him she said quickly: “Dale, I’m dreadfully sorry, but I can’t see you tomorrow. When I got back late last night—”

  “ ‘Late’?” queried Dale’s voice. “You weren’t particularly late in leaving here.”

  “No, but we ran out of petrol on the way—”

  “Oh, come, Joanna, isn’t that rather thin?” He sounded cold, suspicious.

  Joanna was stung to indignation. “It happens to be the truth,” she said shortly. “Anyway, when I did get here I found that Mr. Carnehill’s paralysis had begun to give way to pain—we hope it means that the feeling in his back is beginning to return. It’s a sort of crisis and, of course, I can’t leave him now.”

  There was a pause. Then Dale asked: “Are those his doctor’s orders?”

  “That I’m not to leave him? No. But obviously it’s my duty not to.”

  “Obviously—so far as it goes. But—you don’t particularly want to come to Dublin, do you?”

  “Dale—what do you mean? Are you suggesting that I’m using Mr. Carnehill’s illness as an excuse, or even that I’m lying about it?”

  “No. I believe in it all right, just as I believe you are justified in deciding that you oughtn’t to leave him. But I also believe that you are glad not to have to come. Aren’t you?”

  Joanna rubbed a finger wearily above her brows. In an effort at jocularity she said: “You’re being awfully difficult, aren’t you? You’ve never been like this before!”

  “Neither have you!” came his swift retort. “Joanna, do realize that I’ve known you for long enough to know that a strangeness has come over you—that for some reason, though I can only guess at it—you’ve grown away from me, even in this short time.”

  Joanna caught her breath. She had not credited Dale with the perception that would tell him what she herself had realized—that they had indeed grown apart. Suddenly she wanted to deny it—to cling to that pleasant, undemanding relationship with him, which, before she came to Eire, had been an inseparable part of her life.

  “That absurd,” she said, not knowing that it was beyond the power of her sincerity to put real conviction into her voice. “Do we have to argue about it? I’m very tired, and I think you’re more than inclined to magnify something you’ve imagined—”

  “I haven’t imagined it. I’ve told you—I don’t know what it is that I’m having to compete against, but there is something, that I’m convinced. Joanna—will you do your best to get to Dublin tomorrow?”

  “I can’t. Dale! That’s final. You know how I’m placed. Don’t—don’t make an issue of this!”

  “I am making an issue of it. I must. If you won’t come, then I shall come out to you, either tomorrow or the next day. I’d stay over in Eire on purpose, though I’m due back the day after tomorrow. If I come, you will see me, Joanna?”

  “Yes. Yes—come if you must.” Joanna felt tired, dispirited, and almost frightened as she laid down the receiver.

  Mrs. Carnehill, back prematurely from Belfast, smiled kindly, if a trifle tiredly, when Joanna asked if it would be convenient for Dale to come out to Carrieghmere on the following day and for her to have an hour or two in which to be with him.

  “Of course. Why not?” she said. “He’s your sweetheart in England, maybe? Wasn’t Roger telling me something about him? Isn’t he designing something more frightful than the hydrogen-bomb?”

  “No. Only looking for microbes!” Joanna assured her a little shakily. “And—and he’s just a friend, that’s all.”

  “Well, ask him by all means, my dear. He’ll stay for a meal, of course?”

  “I don’t know. He may be glad to,” Joanna told her gratefully, though she felt instinctively that in his present mood Dale would not be willing to accept the hospitality of Carrieghmere for longer than was necessary.

  When she rang him up to come over he said quietly: “Thank you. I’m glad you’ve been able to arrange it because I think it is time we said certain things to each other. And face to face is the only way in which they should be said.”

  As she waited for him in the long drawing-room which bore an air of remembering past gaieties in the midst of present disuse, Joanna found herself shivering not so much from cold as from apprehension. She did not sit down but wandered restlessly round the room, staring unseeingly at the furniture, the pictures on the walls. Everything spoke of a wealth which must once have seemed assured�
�the brocade of the chairs was faded, but had been rich; the pictures were mostly portraits in oils, and Joanna had been told that one of them, of an elderly lady, was a Romney and one of a girl in a blue-lined cloak was by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

  When Dale came, shown in by a frankly curious Roseen, there was nothing in his manner or his greeting to dispel her misgivings.

  In the kitchen Roseen was giving Cook her own version of the situation. “Sure, it’s the tragic way he has with’m!” she said with relish. “He’s come, be certain of it, to tell her that he loves Another. Then he’ll ask her to Forgive All—”

  After one glance around him. Dale exclaimed, “Heavens! Do we have to talk here?”

  She said quickly: “No—we could go out into the park. I’ll get my coat.”

  In an awkward silence they went side by side across the deserted parkland, stooping beneath the deep boughs of the trees, now breaking reluctantly into bud. When they were at last out of sight of the house Dale stopped abruptly and said:

  “Joanna, walking together or even being together at all today is only incidental to more important things—the things we have to say to each other. Perhaps we’d better get them said—”

  She turned to face him, thrusting her hands deeply into the pockets of her travelling coat and being glad of the support of a gnarled bole as she looked frankly at him for almost the first time that day.

  “Perhaps we had,” she agreed quietly.

  Dale took a deep breath. “Well, since it is you who have changed, perhaps you’d better begin.”

  “I haven’t changed.” Strictly, that was true. She knew now that in her heart she had always wanted something which did not exist, had never existed, between herself and him. But how could she make him understand that?

  He made a weary gesture. “Don’t deny it, Joanna. You’ve been different since you came over here. It—it fairly breathed through your letters. And even the day before yesterday you didn’t want to come to Dublin to see me.”

  “Yes I did—”

  “Only, I think, because you hoped that seeing me might help you to recapture something which you knew you had lost. What was it, Joanna? Haven’t I the right to know?”

  She said nothing, feeling surprised for the second time at his insight into what had been happening to her. She felt that he was the good friend he had always been. If only, if only that could be enough!

  He repeated: “Haven’t I?”

  “Yes, Dale. If there is anything ... I don’t know—’

  “There is something. Go on.”

  “Well—I think that being apart from you this time has taught me something about—about us. We’re very good friends, we’ve always enjoyed doing things together, but there isn’t enough between us on which to—to store our hopes, our futures.”

  “What do you mean—not ‘enough’? We’ve known each other for years!”

  She lifted her eyes to his. “Yes. Perhaps that’s the pity of it! In some ways we’ve come to know each other well. In others we’re still complete strangers!”

  Dale said slowly: “This hasn’t come about just through your coming over here. You believe you have fallen ‘in love’ with another man. You think he has more to give you than I have—”

  “No!” she denied sharply. “No—not that!”

  “What else am I to believe? Do you think that, since meeting him, I can’t realize just why your letters, full of everything else about this benighted place made practically no reference to that man McKiley—?”

  “It has nothing to do with McKiley. You must believe that!”

  “How can I? You were happy enough when you left England, happy enough to take me as you found me. And I haven’t been a mere cad, monopolizing your time for nothing. You’ve known all along what I’ve hoped for us—for our future!”

  “Perhaps I’ve guessed. But you’ve never told me. Dale,” she reminded him gently.

  He stared. “Why should I have had to? You must have known!”

  “I think—a woman needs telling.”

  Dale said nothing. If he had held out his arms to her then, drawn her into them, she would have known that to the question in her heart there might be an answer in his. But he made no movement towards her as he muttered:

  “All that romantic stuff! I never dreamt you had any time for it.”

  Joanna stifled a sigh. The ecstasy, the implicit understanding, the self-forged chain that love could be was, to Dale, “all that romantic stuff”.

  She answered him gently: “Nor have I—except from the man who, one day, I might expect would ask me to be his wife—”

  ale caught upon that. “So you did know? You knew all along that was what I planned for us? If you did, why must I make love to you, ask you in so many words—as I’m doing now?”

  “You’re asking me to marry you?”

  “If that’s what you want, yes. It’s what I came today to do, anyway.”

  “Did you?” Joanna caught at an ill-defined hope.

  “Yes. I’d realized from your manner in Dublin and on the phone that you believed I’d failed you somewhere. So I said to myself, ‘All right. If it’s marriage that she wants, she shall have it—” His voice held an ugly note, but he broke off at her protesting cry: “Don’t, Dale! You know it wasn’t that—!”

  “Then what was it? Why else did you see fit to use against me that man McKiley’s attentions to you?”

  “I’m not responsible for Justin McKiley’s ideas on gallantry!” she rejected scornfully. “And the very last thing I want is a proposal of marriage dragged from you at—at the pistol-point of something you believe I’m demanding!” Her voice softened as she laid a hand upon his coat-sleeve. “Dale, I want no more today than I’ve always wanted—though it’s only lately that I’ve seen it clearly enough to express it. Even now I mayn’t be able to ... But I want—as well as externals and gossip and ‘shop’—I want tenderness and all the things I think I’m groping for when I speak about ‘love’. I want to know that we depend upon each other utterly for the real things.

  I want to know that, without the man I say I ‘love’, I am nothing. And I want to know that I am needed—as every woman must. Before I marry I’ve got to know all this. And between us. Dale—I’m sure of none of it!”

  He said suddenly: “Is that my fault?”

  “It isn’t a question of ‘fault’. Dale! We’re good friends. I hope we always may be—”

  “And ‘Thank God we found out before it was too late’, I suppose?” His tone held bitterness, and he paused before he said: “Well—will you marry me, Joanna—or won’t you?”

  “The answer is ‘No,’ Dale. It must be. One day you’ll be grateful to me—when you’ve found the ‘real thing’ yourself.”

  He looked at her shrewdly. He was thinking: “And you, though you would deny it, believe you have found the ‘real thing’ already!”

  But all he said was: “So this, Joanna, is—good-bye?” He held out his hand.

  She took it, and through stiff lips said: “Yes. It’s better so.” Even then Dale might have appealed to some hunger in her—some desire to serve, to be needed, to be loved. But he only dropped her hand and turned away.

  She watched him go, knowing that in refusing him she had cheated him of nothing. If, through the mere habit of each other, they had drifted ultimately into marriage they would have driven almost immediately upon rocks. Already, she knew guiltily, she had sometimes been bored with him. No doubt he had sometimes felt the same about her. He had known jealously certainly. But it had been the jealousy of pride, not of hurt love.

  Yes, they had finished, she and Dale ... As she had told him, it was better so. But as she watched his familiar back disappearing beyond the farthest trees she had the sensation of being confronted by a door—a door that was inexorably closing upon that part of her life where Dale had once been, if not part of its meaning, at least part of the importance of every day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gradually as the r
eluctant Irish spring advanced, Roger Carnehill began to find strength where there had been complete atrophy and peace where he had known pain. But neither Dr. Beltane nor his Dublin surgeon would allow him to ‘rest on the laurels’, so to speak, of this partial recovery.

  “You’ve got to work for it, young man!” Dr. Beltane adjured him. “Exercises—and more exercises—and no shirking possible, because Nurse Merivale’ll be superintending every minute of ‘em!”

  So every morning Roger, bored but reasonably submissive, stretched and flexed his stiffened legs and made archways of the spine that was beginning to respond again to his will.

  “Kindergarten stuff!” he would grumble to the quiet tone of Joanna’s: “One—two—relax!” And she would smile at him, but would insist upon the steady rhythm being kept up.

  At last he said: “Look here, can’t you abandon this metronome business? I’ve got the idea now—in fact I dream ‘One—two—relax’ o’ nights. Why shouldn’t we talk instead, and you can pull me up if I start slacking?”

  Joanna agreed, knowing that if he became too bored he would not try. But after a little desultory conversation as he worked he said suddenly: “This is too silly too. How can I talk while I’m going up and down like the coils of a sea-serpent? You talk to me. Tell me things—”

  “What sort of things?” smiled Joanna.

  “Oh—things. Anything, so long as I don’t have to say ‘Really?’ at the top of an arch or ‘Is that so?’ at the bottom! Tell me—tell me about when you were a little girl!”

  The naiveté of this request took Joanna by complete surprise. Of what possible interest could her childhood be to him? But the memory of it, happy though money-restricted, was vividly with her, and she found it easy to talk about it to him. It became a kind of saga which ran on from day to day, to which Roger listened intently, even correcting details of it here and there.