by Sheila Burns
‘I’ll come,’ said Claire, and snatched up her bag. ‘I’ve got to go, Chris. This is one of those things about which one cannot delay. The old lady is dying,’ and she did not wait for argument. She saw his face like thunder, he was a man who betrayed his emotions and was never careful enough about this, maybe he could not help himself.
She was longer than she had expected, and when she returned to the cottage Mrs. Hopkins told her that Chris had gone back to the Woodman.
‘Ever such a nice gentleman,’ she said.
In a way it was to the good that he had gone, for it gave Claire time to think. She stood at the crossroads of her whole life, a moment of decision, and now she had got to make up her mind fairly quickly.
Chris was the man who could evoke the passionate emotion, the urge to love, maybe the Victorians would have called it just desire. In life together he would always make her apprehensive for him, for one could not be sure of him. There could be other Lucilles. She knew that she was worried as to her own reactions to the handsome husband who attracted others.
The shared career would of course be helpful. But would the hour come when she wearied of eternal case sheets? Maybe she would want to escape from the medical and surgical side of life, and for the nurse married to the doctor there is no escape.
She waited before she went up to change. She was still tiresomely aware of the hour of decision. She came down looking tired.
Mrs. Hopkins said, ‘It’s this sudden hot weather that upsets people. It comes too quick like, you know, and fair takes it out of you.’
‘I feel worried today.’
‘And that’s the hot weather, too. A good thunderstorm would clear the air and do the trick. What’s more I bet we gets one before long.’ Then she paused. Obviously she had formed her own conclusions and wanted the whole matter discussed. ‘Having a bit of bother, Sister? What a shame! Them men! If there was no men in the world there wouldn’t be one half the trouble, I always says.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘Right? Of course I’m right! Don’t trust them. Never trust anything in a pair of trousers,’ and as she moved to the door, ‘and that goes for them modern young misses in trousers, too, I wouldn’t trust one of them a yard.’
Later when Claire felt less tired, she rang up Sister Johnson who was at Kidley, to ask if she could take over the telephone for the evening for her. Sister Johnson was a brusque older woman, who had always said that she was a glutton for work, and fairly guzzled it up. All the same she showed no riotous gluttony tonight, for there was something on the television which she wanted to see. In the end she accepted coldly. But she made conditions. You could, Claire told herself, always reckon on the old-time nurse doing this. Claire must do the same for her next week, because she was acting in the amateur show in the town. The idea of Sister Johnson ever doing anything like acting surprised Claire, and what sort of a part could she possibly play?
She changed into a little white frock with a turquoise velvet belt to it, and was only half ready when she heard the sound of Chris’s car in the lane. Men! she thought, Mrs. Hopkins has got something there! At the same time the very purr of his car could provoke something within her, something which would not go silent on command. Love taught a girl how little she was mistress of her own emotions, and what misleading affairs they could be.
Then just as she fastened the turquoise sash, and Chris’s car stopped, she heard the sound of another one in the lane, also stopping, and voices. She had a peep and there was Mrs. Heath being driven by Vernon, with more flowers, more eggs, and another cake.
She rushed downstairs, for after the little contretemps she did not want Mrs. Heath to feel that she was backward in coming forward. She went out to her. Mrs. Heath was already talking to Chris.
Claire rushed to the rescue. ‘Mr. Long comes from my hospital,’ she said. ‘He is a friend of Sir Charles, and taking me along there to supper tonight.’
This should solve a difficult situation, and it had the merit of being entirely true. But Mrs. Heath had always been a doubting woman, and for a moment that showed in her face.
‘I just came along with a few flowers, and a cake,’ she said.
‘It is so good of you.’
‘Not at all. You help us here, so I help you.’
So far Claire could not have said that Mrs. Heath was a great help, but she let that pass. She could not ask her in; she gushed as best she could and watched them drive off again, then turned to Chris. He was laughing.
‘The awful part is that I do believe that she means so well,’ Claire said.
‘Don’t fox yourself with that one! She’s suspicious of us, Mrs. Nosy Parker, in the original manner. I don’t think that she means well, she is bursting to find out what is going on, and that is all there is to it.’
Claire got into his car, and they drove away together. She had the impression that all this was wildly unsettling. She wished she could get her mind out of this sense of disturbance which was so maddening; she wished she could become unmoved, not laid open to his attractions, but sensible again.
Sir Charles and Mavis were waiting for them in the garden. He looked more ashy in the face than he had done before, recently this strange colour had privately worried Claire, she did not like the look of it. They sat down to cocktails, in the very pleasant atmosphere. Mavis was exalted by the sight of Chris, for a new man about the place intrigued her. The syringa smelt sweetly, it had the weddingy perfume which lingered about the garden and changed the atmosphere. I’ve got to make up my mind, Claire kept telling herself.
‘I’m in luck tonight,’ Mavis said, ‘for I have got somebody coming in to help me with the washing-up.’
‘That must be a joy.’
‘Indeed, yes. Washing up is always my undoing, perhaps because it is the recurring chore,’ and she turned to Chris. ‘You’ll never believe this, but Mrs. Brown who is helping out, has a daughter who is a beauty. A real beauty, I mean. She is competing for the Miss Great Britain contest next month, and we all hope that she will get it.’
Chris was immediately interested. ‘Tell me when she gets here and I’ll have a look,’ he said and laughed. It was the schoolboy laugh again, the laugh which is enchanted with life.
It was Sir Charles who spoke. ‘I never think that these competitions are too good for girls. We all have to grow older, and time is merciless. Then we are disappointed with what youth promised. When I was a lad we had May queens, and it went to their heads badly enough, but now, with thousand pound prizes, they go dizzy.’
‘I’m all for beauty queens!’ Chris said.
Mavis laughed with him. ‘She’ll be calling for her mother in a little car that she won at one of these competitions. I’d be careful, for I’d have said she knows where she is going.’
Sir Charles changed the conversation and Claire felt that under it all it had worried him. He had read in The Times that Terence was exhibiting in a gallery in London, and that a preview had given the critics the highest satisfaction. There had been quite a lot said about the miraculous beauty of his picture of sunset over a lake, which was said to be a masterpiece.
‘I wish I could see it,’ said Claire. Suddenly she felt a supreme hunger to see Terence’s pictures, a longing which was almost unquenchable.
‘You could run up for half a day. The trains from here are very good,’ Sir Charles said.
‘But I’m so new here that I don’t like taking time off. Somebody is bound to want me.’
‘Sister Johnson …’
‘Sister Johnson did not seem too enthusiastic about watching out for me tonight!’ Claire ventured.
‘Oh but the Sisters share and share alike, that is part of the job,’ said Sir Charles, and somehow she knew that he felt that this would settle it.
They went into the house for supper, returning into the garden for coffee. There was a bewilderingly beautiful sunset of salmon streaked across the west, and the first chinks of sly stars here and there in the sk
y. Claire had to admit that this part of the world had something she had never come so close to before, the illuminating beauty of the garden of England.
She saw the girl in the car coming round to the back of the house to take home the woman who had helped with the washing up. Perhaps she had been waiting for this moment, and was angry with her own suspicions. Chris saw it. She did not have to look to realise this, for she was fully aware of it as something he too had been waiting for.
Yet he did nothing.
She leant forward to him. ‘Aren’t you going to have a look at the beauty queen? Wouldn’t it be a pity to miss her?’
‘I’m not that interested.’
She wondered if that were true. Did she walk on a quicksand, or had he changed and was she being cruel about it? The others talked on, but she had gone quiet, aware that life has a certain madness of its own, it is the past-master in uncertainty, it is never true. The car went off again, and some minutes after, she saw it returning with the girl herself alone in it. Possibly she had returned for something that her mother had left behind her. Sir Charles saw it.
‘Why is she coming back again?’ he asked, and went to her, Chris with him. They parted as they came to the house, Claire could not think why, and Chris went round to the back. Sir Charles returned. He had had a dizzy turn again, he said, and Mavis poured him out some liqueur brandy.
‘You should be more careful about hurrying, Uncle. You know that you are always getting these attacks.’
‘It’s nothing. Just let me sit quietly and don’t worry me.’
Claire saw the difficulty. She went to him. ‘Where are the tablets?’ she asked him in a low voice, half hoping that Mavis would not hear.
‘I left them in the house. No fool like an old fool! They’re on the bureau.’
‘I’ll get them for you.’
‘There’s no hurry. It’s going off.’
So he had angina, had had it for years probably, but had never admitted it. For some time she had been suspicious of something of the kind, but one did not mention it, of course. None questioned the medical side of a great surgeon’s life. She took the short cut through the kitchen, and saw that the door was open. As she reached the step she heard a girl’s rather coquettish little giggle, then a man speaking. His voice was quick, quite low, and she knew that it was Chris.
She had come so fast that somehow or other she could not pull up in time, yet knew that she was going into trouble. The light-hearted flirtatious voice of his, it was the same as he had used that day with Lucille, that never-to-be-forgotten day. For a second she would have stayed herself, then she knew that perhaps it would be better for everyone concerned to walk right into this scene, straight into it, and finish it once and for all. To bring the skeleton out of the cupboard, and lay the ghost for ever. They sprang apart as she entered.
‘I came for Sir Charles’s tablets,’ she said.
There was a single moment of grim silence, and both of them stared at her unwelcomingly; she had come at just the wrong moment, the atmosphere disclosed it. Then the girl said something about going, and picked up an oversmart handbag from the dresser. She was a beautiful girl, almost too lovely, and plainly knew it, which is always destroying. She was the girl with the hope of becoming Miss Great Britain, and the chance of Miss World lying ahead of her, a girl who would never throw herself away on Chris, but liked a flirtation when it offered itself. Claire turned to him. Men hide their feelings worse than girls do, even a big doctor, whose job had made him adept at wise concealment of an emotion, but this emotion was too much part of him, and Claire knew that everything had changed.
They stood there, as the girl went out to her car, prinking a little, and then started it up. The sound moved away into the distance, then very softly Claire looked at him.
‘It’s no good, Chris.’
He made a desperate effort to save the situation. ‘It was nothing ‒ nothing at all, you’ve made a mistake.’
‘I haven’t, you know. It can’t go on, this has happened twice now, I could never bear a third time.’
He was terribly sorry, she knew, angry with her, too, for he thought her to be unreasonable, perhaps jealous, and in truth she was neither of these things. It almost horrified her that she was not jealous. She cut short his argument.
‘It isn’t a case of whether you meant it or not. It is just that I could never bear it again. People are born with different natures, Chris, and you are like this. I’m not, and it would hurt me too much.’
‘I’ll ‒ I’ll stop it. I could if I tried. It has never been necessary to try yet, but I’ll do it for you, because I do love you. Please be sensible.’
He came closer to her, and she knew that she was not in the mood that could be talked round. This sort of man never turns over the new leaf, because the old one is too attractive. She turned sharply away. She was precise in her actions and in her words, training had taught her this, and perhaps that training was the greatest help there was.
‘No, Chris. It has got to end, and now. I can’t go on with it, you must realise it.’
She went past him into the sitting-room with the iron mangers against the wall, and she picked up the little box of tablets from Sir Charles’s desk. She would never have thought that suddenly she could be so cool, almost chilly.
She went back with the tablets, surprised that Chris did not follow her. She gave them to Sir Charles, and later helped him back into the house, where Chris was reading a book. If Sir Charles noticed it and suspected that something was wrong, he did not say a word.
‘Better now?’ Claire asked Sir Charles.
‘Yes, of course. It is nothing very much, just a warning perhaps, no more, and I do treat it carefully.’
‘You might perhaps be a shade more careful?’ she suggested.
‘I’ll try,’ and he smiled.
She made an excuse to go home. The Hammond baby was already late, and if she was likely to be called out in the night, it was wiser to get what sleep she could now. He agreed. He agreed so readily that she suspected that he had noticed something.
At home she was just getting into bed, when the telephone rang, and instinctively she knew that the message was not about the Hammond baby. It was Chris on the other end. He had changed from guarded self-reproach to indignation that she could be so abrupt with him. There was nothing in it, as she knew, and it was absurd that she should be so angry.
Quietly she said, ‘It’s no good, Chris. I’ve made up my mind, and it’s “no”.’
‘But I was doing nothing ‒ nothing at all ‒ just a little flirtatious conversation, not even a kiss.’ Then, when she did not deny it or agree with it, revealing nothing of what she had seen, he said, ‘I shall go back to London first thing in the morning. I can’t stay here to have you behaving like this to me.’
She was quite surprised to hear herself say perfectly calmly, ‘I don’t suppose your heart will be broken by it.’
He let fly then, reproaching her for what he called her ‘quaint prudery’, and in the end she quietly hung up; one could not go on listening to that sort of thing, and tonight had given her a new strength. She had finally made up her mind, and although part of it was a great shock, she was thankful that she had at last taken a definite decision, and knew that she would not go back on it.
When the time came she was surprised that she could sleep, but she did. At dawn she was called out to the Hammond baby, somehow she had had an idea that this might happen, and was actually glad when it did happen, and gloried in the fact that there was a job to be done. After this she would for the time being put men out of her life.
Chris did not approach her, and during the day she heard that he had been recalled to a case in London and had gone. It was two mornings later when Sir Charles walked into the cottage with some fruit for her from his garden. Fat dark crimson strawberries, and could anything make a girl happier? These country folk were so good, they gave so liberally of their own, and she had to admit that here in the co
untry she had come to like people more than she had ever done before.
As Sir Charles sat there smoking, she told him what had happened; she had to do that. She had ended the affair with Chris, perhaps because she had not the courage to face a flirtatious husband and knew he could never cure it, and felt that this hurt even more when the husband was a doctor. He listened quietly, one could not tell what he really felt, but she was convinced that this was what he had always wanted her to do.
Then he spoke of something else.
He was, he said, contemplating taking Mavis away on a cruise, somewhere where she wanted to go. He thought that a complete change might give her a chance to pull up. The Mediterranean was where they would go, to the islands dotted along those coasts, the hot days and the warm nights. Somehow Claire knew that his niece was an infinite worry to him.
‘It would have been so much better if she had married,’ Claire said.
‘Yes, I know, but she never will. Men don’t want a wife like Mavis, and although it would have helped her, I doubt if her husband would have been too happy. I think a cruise is the answer; maybe I need a rest, too.’ He smiled very kindly, excusing himself. ‘I have been overdoing it a little lately.’ He had indeed! He never refused a case when the young wife said that she wanted him so much. He ought to retire soon, sit back, and treat that tired heart gently, giving it a chance.
‘You take that cruise,’ she suggested. ‘It would be so horrid if you got ill, for you’re too kind to others who are ill. What about petting yourself up for a change?’
‘I never get the chance when I’m working. I get so wrapped up in my job, you know what it is. On a cruise maybe I could rest, most people don’t have babies on cruises!’
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘I shan’t see too much of Mavis. She is the sort of person who runs gymkhanas, gets on to committees, is busy over the ship’s concert and all that sort of thing. Yes, it will do me good, and thank you for being worried about me.’
‘And always put the tablets in your waistcoat pocket,’ she suggested.
‘I know. That was very naughty of me the other night, and after I had kept it dark for so long, too. Keep my secret for me,’ he said.
