Doctor's Love

by Jane Arbor

  DOCTOR’S LOVE

  Jane Arbor

  “A woman driver, of course!” had been Dr. Richard Guyse’s impatient inward comment as he braked and swerved to avoid a collision with the open car door of the unknown but attractive young girl. He wondered briefly who she was and then promptly forgot her.

  That was a trick of mind training on which Doctor Guyse prided himself. He could always switch his concentration to the important details of his busy doctor’s life—yesterday’s operation, today’s X-ray, tomorrow’s problematical new case—to the exclusion of everything else.

  Doctor Guyse did not know it then, but his meeting with Lysbet Marlowe was the beginning of a strange disturbance in his powers of concentration.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a quality of heat this afternoon which gave to the road surface a black snake-like sheen, and set a haze quivering at the brow of every slope.

  The girl at the wheel of the open Jaguar glanced momentarily at her watch, and the increased pressure of her foot upon the accelerator drew instant response from the car. As it climbed the long last hill before the sudden drop down into Fallsbridge, Lysbet Marlowe leaned back in her seat and savored the glow of the sun’s warmth upon her body with all the natural, sensuous delight of a young animal.

  Her thoughts were running disconnectedly, without concentration.

  “Lovely, lovely sun! ... ’Fraid I’m going to be awfully late at the Club—the others won’t have waited for me to go into the pool. But I hadn’t the heart to stop Aunt Alicia when, at lunch, she began comparing this summer with the good ones she remembers when she was a girl ... There was 1933 wasn’t there?—that was the year when Aunt Alicia was twenty-one and when she married Uncle Everard ... Those dreadful photographs of their wedding in the local paper! That makes Aunt Alicia nearly fifty now, and she’s better looking today, bless her, than she ever had a chance to be in those peculiar clothes and that awful way she did her hair...”

  “I wonder—” thought Lysbet idly as the car took the steepening gradient with a confident purr—“I wonder whether everybody believes that the summers were better when they were young? When I’m old I suppose I shall be telling people about the lovely weather this year—how I drove over to the County Club to swim, and how I used to drive back in the evening when the trees were making long bars of shadow across the road and the sun was setting behind the rookery when I got back to Falcons ... And then I shall delve even further back in my memories, telling about how, when I was a little girl in South Africa before Daddy died and I was sent to England, the sun seemed to shine all the time. But perhaps it did—in South Africa—and it was that which made England so grim by contrast, until gradually I stopped being homesick for South Africa and Falcons became ‘home’ instead...”

  Her sensitive lips lifted amusedly at the trend of her thoughts. “By the time you get to that point of the story, young Lysbet,” she told herself, “you’ll have bored everybody within hearing, and you’ll have to tell the rest of it to yourself!... Thank goodness, there’s the top of Enshaw Hill at last. Now, Jag my dear, we shan’t be long.”

  Once over the crest of the hill the car lept forward as if it were a live thing anxious to do her bidding, and she was able to catch only a glimpse of the lovely old town of Fallsbridge nestling at the foot of the downs of which Enshaw Hill was a spur, before it was hidden from view by the curve of the steeply dropping road.

  Then in a few minutes she had reached the level of the valley, threading her way through the grey, mellow streets towards the point where the River Fall made a wide sweep in its course to encircle on three sides the site of the Country Club for which she was bound this afternoon.

  Three minutes or so, Lysbet calculated, should find her in her bathing-suit, and then there’d be that first delicious plunge into the cool depths of the pool. And not before it was time, either. The others would think she was lost.

  Upon her arrival at the Club she was in such a hurry that she had barely stopped the car before she flung the door wide, jumped out and then turned to grope upon the back seat for her swimming things.

  She did not hear the rasp of brakes being applied to another car which had followed her round the sweep of the drive and which now drew up abruptly beside her own. Nor did she hear the sharp exclamation of annoyance uttered by the man who was driving as, by a piece of extremely skilful manoeuvring, he managed to avoid a collision with the open door. Nor, being intent upon collecting her belongings as quickly as possible, did she realize that he had remained in his seat watching her as she turned about, kicked-to the car door with the heel of her sandal and hurried towards the Club buildings without giving him a backward glance.

  “A woman driver—of course!” had been Dr. Richard Guyse’s impatient inward comment as he braked and swerved. That had been a sort of general male tolerance, but it was his own male curiosity which prompted him to wait until Lysbet should turn round and apologize, and it was his male pride that was piqued when she did nothing of the sort.

  “Apparently they don’t teach ’em manners nowadays, any more than they teach ’em the elementary rules of road-sense!” he grumbled to himself as he heaved his length out of his car and followed Lysbet towards the swimming pool, his bathing-trunks swinging from his hand.

  He wondered briefly who she was and then, as he went to the men’s changing-rooms, promptly forgot her.

  That was a trick of mind training on which he prided himself. He believed that he could always switch his concentration back to the watertight compartments of thought, speculation and decision which made up the pattern of his work. Yesterday’s operation, today’s X-ray photographs, tomorrow’s problematical new case—he could always, he told himself, turn his whole mind upon them to the exclusion of everything else.

  This afternoon, as he changed, his mind was back in brief speculation upon the problem which he had been set this morning in the radiographer’s room at the Fallsbridge Cottage Hospital. The radiographer had had ready for his examination the X-rays of that diseased femur ... Now he and the surgeon who would operate had to decide whether Jones, whose femur it was, could stand an operation at his age...

  That was Dr. Guyse keeping his mind on his work. But it was a tall young man in his early thirties, with a broad, intelligent brow, straw-fair hair and a creasing of sun-wrinkles around straight grey eyes who presently stepped from his cubicle, intent upon a swim and a brief sunbathe, having turned a key firmly, if only temporarily, upon every other consideration whatsoever.

  He had only lately taken the practice which included a medical appointment at the Hospital, and, so far, knew very few other members of the Club. He thought idly as he stood at the pool’s edge, shading his eyes with his hand: “If Caroline is here I’ll go and keep her company. Though she’ll probably have that spoilt infant of hers along with her—”

  He scanned the kaleidoscopically gay groups of color scattered about the sloping lawns, in search of Caroline Ware, the young widow of an Army doctor friend of his, who shared a furnished house in Fallsbridge with some friends and she was the only person Richard Guyse had known when he first came to the town a few months earlier. As he surveyed, one after another, the groups of people gathered about the large orange-and-black sun-umbrellas on the lawns, he noticed that few of the scantily clad bodies were actually seeking their shade. Everyone was intent upon ‘doing’ their skins to a richly roasted tint. Probably only Caroline, if she were here, would be caring for her delicate magnolia-bloom complexion by putting a sun-umbrella to its legitimate use...

  Suddenly he noticed that he was standing close to a cheerful group of young people of whom the centre of attraction at the moment was the girl who had driven the Jaguar into the Club drive in front of him, and who had deserved to be
involved in at least an awkward accident, even if she had escaped injury herself.

  She was laughing and talking animatedly, though Richard doubted whether anyone was listening to her through the general uproar of noise and emphatic ‘My dears!’ with which her friends’ conversation was peppered.

  He stood by quietly, looking at her again with interest.

  This time his eyes took in the full message of her beauty. For Lysbet was beautiful with a simple unconscious loveliness that would well prove a challenge to the heart of any man.

  She had exchanged the blue and white cotton frock in which Richard had first seen her for a white bathing-suit which emphasized the golden-brown tan of her limbs. She was tall, with a height that was of the length of her legs rather than of her body; she had not yet put on her helmet and her hair was a live blue-blackness with every separate strand seeming to imprison facets of sunlight within it. She wore it swept to one side of her brow, where it fell to shoulder length in a perfectly groomed curve. Her eyes were wide-set and of a deep-water blue that might be green. Watching her, Richard felt that they probably lightened to green or deepened to blue, like jewels, according to the reflection of her mood.

  Again he found himself wondering who she was. He’d ask Caroline. She knew most things about people in Fallsbridge. Sometimes he’d thought there was an air of slightly sheathed malice in the way she reported bits of gossip, but that was amusing, even rather piquant, as long as it was news which didn’t touch you nor anyone you cared about very nearly. Meanwhile, where was Caroline?

  It was at that moment that Caroline herself hailed him from behind. He turned quickly and hurried over the lawn to her.

  As he had expected, she was exposing her well-shaped legs to the sun, but she was protecting the petal tints of her very fair complexion with a carefully tilted sunshade. She was wearing a candy striped play-suit, and a bathing-suit lay near her on the grass. Richard noticed with amusement that the suit wasn’t wet. Caroline didn’t really care for swimming, but she liked looking the part...

  Her hair was as fair as Richard’s own, but the curls which clustered tightly about her head were of a natural babyish fluffiness, where his was coarse and straight. She had a characteristic gesture of running her fingers lightly through her curls and of saying plaintively: “I suppose it’s because I look so childish really, that people seem to want to take care of me of shield me or something.”

  And indeed, when Richard had sometimes wondered why Adrian Ware, grave, serious-minded and earnest, had married so apparently empty-headed a creature as Caroline, he had always come to the same conclusion—that her looks and her manner did create an appeal to a man’s protective instinct. Some men fell for that sort of thing pretty easily. He himself thank goodness, was fairly impervious to it.

  He greeted her and stretched himself in the grass beside her as he asked idly:

  “Where’s your offspring?”

  “Ian? Oh, he started school at the beginning of this term. Hadn’t I told you?”

  “School? But he’s only a baby!” protested Richard.

  “He’s over five, and it’s only a nursery class. Besides, he was beginning to get completely out of hand,” complained Caroline.

  Richard pulled at a grass and sucked it reflectively. “I’ll say he was getting out of hand,” he remarked, remembering a tantrum or two of young Ian’s of which he had been a witness.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Caroline with a defensive pout to her full red mouth, “Ian can be awfully sweet!”

  “ ‘And a child’s best friend is his mother’!” quoted Richard mockingly. He shook his head at her. “No, Caroline, you’re not much of a parent, if I may say so. School will do that young man a world of good. I just hadn’t realized he could possibly be old enough. How long is it since Adrian?”

  “ ’58,” answered Caroline briefly, her eyes clouding slightly, making Richard experience a momentary pang for having teased her. But from her next remark it seemed that the memory of Adrian was less to her than a present worry.

  She began to pluck nervously at the short burnt grass beside her as she frowned and said: “I—I wanted to talk to you, Richard. I’m nearly at my wits’ end for money!”

  He stared at her. “I’m sorry, Caroline! Is there anything I can do? D’you mean you’re actually short of money? A loan?”

  She brushed aside the idea of borrowing money from him. “No—it’s simply that I can’t go on as I am doing. There’s Ian’s schooling, and now Mabel wants two guineas a week more for my share of the house. Says everything is so expensive and she could easily get another three guineas if I weren’t occupying it!” She raised liquid blue eyes to Richard’s own. “I’ve been thinking—I shall have to get myself a job.”

  Richard considered this. “Well, what can you do?” he asked practically at last.

  Caroline spread helpless hands in a gesture of appeal. “I don’t know. What do you think I could do?”

  “What were you doing when you met Adrian? I’ve forgotten.”

  “I was just beginning a course of dispensing. Adrian whipped me away from that, and then we had Ian, and I haven’t done anything since.”

  “Dispensing? You mean—you didn’t qualify?”

  She shook her head.

  “H’m.” Richard sat up and stared thoughtfully before him. Caroline’s mention of dispensing had given him an idea—but it was one which he wanted to examine before saying anything to her. It was an idea on which he wasn’t particularly keen, but it was possible that there were some things which he ought to do for Adrian’s sake...

  “Well, do you know anything about it?” he asked after a pause.

  “Not much, I’m afraid. But I’ve still got my text books!” said Caroline brightly.

  “Better forget ’em,” advised Richard, adding dryly: “A little learning—and all that! But can you type? What’s your handwriting like?”

  “Yes. I can type. And I write neatly—Richard do you mean you know of something for me?” In the bright eyes which she turned upon him there was nothing but an innocent hope. In her voice there was nothing at all to indicate that she had spoken to Richard this afternoon with set purpose—the purpose of bringing him to the point of the very suggestion which, a moment or two later, he made.

  He said slowly: “Well, perhaps I could make use of you, Caroline. I must say I’d have preferred you as a dispenser, but you could still act as my secretary and receptionist and general hold-all. What do you think of the idea?”

  Caroline paused just long enough to indicate that she was absorbing it as something entirely new to her. Then she said rapturously: “Richard! That would be marvelous!” Richard looked at her, wondered if he had gone suddenly mad and then told himself quickly that it was for Adrian’s sake. But had he taken on too much, even for Adrian’s sake? Of what use could she be to him? He would have to begin training her at the very beginning!

  He said warningly: “Not so marvellous! You’d have to keep surgery hours, morning and evening, and any other times when I wanted you. What about Ian?”

  “School. And he’d be safely in bed for evening surgery,” Caroline reminded him. “Please, Richard, say I may try it! What—what would you pay me?”

  “I don’t know, but the current rate for the job. Would that help?”

  “Richard, of course! That’s dear of you! When may I start?”

  “Nine o’clock, Monday,” he said briefly. “And from then on, Caroline, it’ll have to be ‘Mrs. Ware’ and ‘Dr. Guyse’. You’ll understand that, of course.”

  She dimpled at him, bowed her golden head in mock meekness. “Of course—Doctor Guyse!”

  They both laughed. Richard rolled over then and propping his face in his hands found himself looking up the slope of the lawn towards the high diving-boards at the pool’s deep end. Standing in the shadow of their framework he recognized the figure of ‘the Jaguar girl’ as he had begun to think of her, and he remembered his resolution to ask Caroline who she
was. She was pulling on her helmet now, and Caroline found her easily identifiable when Richard pointed her out.

  “My dear, that’s Lysbet Marlowe. Haven’t you met her yet? Nor her aunt, Mrs. Tempest?”

  “Not,” said Richard a little sarcastically, “unless they’ve been unidentified casualties at, say, the Cottage Hospital, which doesn’t seem likely.”

  Caroline’s laugh tinkled, bell-like. “It isn’t likely. If anything happened to either of them, they wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere but in the most expensive room of the Fallborough Nursing Home. A couple of day-nurses and the same to match at night would be the least that would satisfy their money!”

  “Rich, eh?”

  “Auntie is. I never heard that Lysbet had anything of her own. But she never seems to want for much, all the same,” was Caroline’s slightly bitter comment. “They live out at Falcons—it’s about six miles out on the Brackenbury road. You must know the place. It’s on the right, up about half-a-mile of drive. Oh, definitely you’ll have to cultivate them, Richard—I mean—Doctor Guyse!”

  Richard ignored this pleasantry as well as the implication that he must ‘cultivate’. “Nice house?” he queried.

  Ever so slightly Caroline hesitated. “Very nice, I think,” she said shortly without, however, concealing from Richard’s trained sense that she did not know Lysbet Marlowe, nor Lysbet’s aunt, well enough to have been invited to Falcons.

  “Hasn’t the girl any parents?” asked Richard.

  “No. I think her mother and father died out in South Africa. Anyway, she has lived with Mrs. Tempest, who is a widow, ever since she was a little girl—certainly all the time they’ve lived at Falcons.” Caroline treated Richard to an arch glance of inquiry. “Whence your interest, may one ask?”

  Her companion shrugged. “Merely self-protective and with a view to keeping my car on the road more or less intact. That young woman oughn’t to be let loose with a car herself, until she’s learnt to use her driving-mirror with a grain of intelligence. This afternoon, it was only by the grace of God and the skilful driving of a chap named Guyse that she didn’t get the door of her car swept off—not to mention her own rather well-found legs, as she hopped out in something of a hurry.”