Prisoner of Love

by Jean S. MacLeod

  CHAPTER TWO

  The following afternoon Laura found herself in Harley Street. She had time off from the hospital and had come to do some shopping—alone, because everybody else seemed to be on duty—and quite unconsciously she had turned aside from the busy thoroughfares into Wigmore Street.

  She walked rapidly, scarcely giving a glance to the shining brass plates that adorned almost every doorway, some of them bearing more than one professional name. But long before she came to the end of the quiet street with its air of greatness she turned back, half ashamed of the impulse that brought her there.

  Why should I want to know about his life apart from the hospital? she asked herself, half angrily, yet she knew that it wasn’t idle curiosity that had taken her there. It was not even the desire for further knowledge of the man himself, but the strange, blind sort of fascination this small, sequestered area of London’s West End held for her. There was an aura about it that gripped her imagination and held her in thrall. It seemed as if even the pavements were hallowed by the tread of brilliant men. Names to be conjured leaped out at her, names from the past and names that adorned the present. Men who had been honored and knighted for their brilliance and their services to humanity. Men like Julius Behar...

  She hurried away. Suppose he had seen her there she thought with a burning sense of confusion.

  It was, of course, a remote possibility, and for the next two weeks she did not see him at all. He used another theater when he was operating, and she tidied up after a series of minor surgical jobs with a peculiar sense of loss.

  Then almost dramatically, they were face to face.

  “The head nurse wants you in number three,” Molly Bryant told her one morning, half an hour before a series of tonsillectomies was due to begin. “You’re to drop everything and fly! I gather there’s something of an emergency along there and you’ve been asked for. Rather you than me!” she added thankfully, wheeling a meal trolley away in the direction of Agnes Ward. “I’m not cut out for surgery.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea who’s operating in number three?” Mary Roath asked somewhat testily when Laura passed on the information of her transfer. “We’re going to be up to the eyes in it here, too, but I suppose that doesn’t matter if it’s Julius Behar that’s waiting along the corridor!”

  Normally a genial sort of person, Sister Roath hated her arrangements to be upset at the last minute like this, but the head nurse had to be obeyed after all.

  Laura’s heart was beating hard and fast as she hurried along the corridor to the second group of operating rooms and a deep color rose into her cheeks as she saw Julius Behar standing in the anteroom, waiting to scrub up.

  Bending over the taps, with an attendant nurse on either side, he seemed to fill up all the room, yet he was not abnormally tall. He turned as she went in, holding up his hands for his gloves, and before the mask was clipped across his mouth she saw his profile for a moment silhouetted against the harsh northern light from the window behind him. The high cheekbones and long narrow jaw were sharply outlined and the arch of the nose looked more prominent than ever.

  “Ah, here you are at last, Sister!” The head nurse said. “I shall have to ask you to help us out, I’m afraid. Nurse Hanford has had a slight accident and we are very short staffed.”

  The head nurse probably went on to explain about Maud Hanford’s accident, Laura realized later, but she did not hear, or what she heard seemed to have little significance. All that mattered was that she would be able to watch Julius Behar at work again, that she would be contributing to his eventual success.

  The list was long and proved complicated. They worked steadily until six o’clock, with only a half-hour break. By that time even Julius Behar was beginning to look tired. Yet Laura knew he could have gone on working twice as long if the situation had demanded it, and her mounting regard for him increased. She knew that she had fallen completely under his peculiar domination as they worked, although she did not imagine for one moment that he even noticed her. She was no more than a unit, a necessary factor to help him complete the job at hand, a trained person who should not make any mistake.

  He washed and changed in the anteroom as usual, walking off afterwards with the head nurse in tow, and Laura found herself helping to clear up in the theater with a strange feeling of anticlimax. He had been casually polite, apologizing for keeping them so late, and that, after all, was the logical sequence of events. The personal touch was missing. It was only by chance that they had come together for a brief moment after that other operation, because the operation itself was unusual, perhaps. She had no right to expect it to happen again. In the interval he had forgotten her.

  When the lights in the operating room had been switched off she took her leave and hurried to the main door. It was raining, and she hesitated a moment, buttoning her cloak securely under her chin as she prepared to dash across the glistening quadrangle toward the gates. Close against the boundary wall a line of cars was parked. They were deep in shadow, but suddenly a pair of headlights were switched on, catching her fully in their powerful beam. She could not see beyond them because they blinded her, but somehow she knew that the man behind the wheel was Julius Behar.

  “Come on!” he commanded. “Run for it. You’re going to get wet standing there!”

  She ran then, splashing through puddles and all but slipping on the treacherously wet stone slabs.

  “I knew it was raining,” she confessed as she got in beside him, “but I had no idea it was anything like this! Thank you,” she added gratefully as she closed the door.

  “I owe you this, in a way,” he said. “I kept you late.”

  “That didn’t matter,” she assured him, and he drove off in the ensuing silence.

  It was a rather embarrassed silence because she felt suddenly shy in his company. Sitting within inches of him in the warmth and intimacy of a luxurious car, she could feel all the old intoxication returning, the dangerous, heady sense of belonging on the same plane as this man, of being part although a very minor part, of the world she knew was his whole life. How little she knew of him really, she mused. And how much she wanted to know!

  “Don’t go out of your way, Doctor Behar,” she said when they had crossed the river. “I can quite easily get a bus from here.”

  He said, with the finality that defeated all argument, “I am in no particular hurry. I can quite easily put you down on your front doorstep.” He turned to glance at her. “Where to?”

  “Chiswick. Arlton Gardens. But it’s so very far out of your way.”

  “I have nothing else to do.” Once more he glanced at her. “Unless you would allow me to take you to dinner somewhere?" he suggested. “I could almost say that I owed you that, too!”

  Laura bit her lip. There was nothing—nothing in the world—she would have liked better than to accept his invitation, but quite apart from still being in her uniform, there was Lance’s supper and the homework she had promised him to help with.

  “I should have loved to come,” she confessed, “but I have chores to do. My brother is still at school and I look after him. He’s almost fourteen, but I don’t like the thought of children being left alone all evening.”

  He did not press the point, driving westward through the early theater traffic with a sureness and precision that seemed to characterize his approach to most things. When she thought of the dinner they might have shared she wondered if they would have spoken about his work, if she might have come to know something of his background and the driving force that had lifted him at thirty-four far ahead of his fellows on the perilous ladder of success.

  “Your parents are dead?” Julius Behar asked the question as if he hardly needed an answer. “There’s just you and your brother?”

  “Yes.” Laura sat a little way forward in her seat, her small, sensitive face illuminated by the passing headlamps of other cars. It was a piquant face, pale now in the artificial light, with a vague hint of sadness abou
t the mouth, which the man at the wheel had been swift to see. “My people were killed in an accident nearly two years ago. It was a terrible shock, especially to my brother. He was so young—”

  “Twelve? Yes,” he agreed, as if he were remembering his own youth. “Too young for tragedy. And you,” he added, “you were just at the beginning of your career.”

  “It was a career I could go on with,” she answered. “I took night duty for a time and had someone from next door in to sleep with Lance, and then I sublet part of the apartment, which solved more than one problem for me.” She paused, smiling. “But I must be boring you with all this family history,” she said. “Life has just gone on fairly uneventfully ever since.”

  “Surely not entirely uneventfully at St. Clement’s?” His smile, in the dimness of the less brilliantly lit side street into which they had turned, was slightly cynical. “One could hardly complete one’s training there without at least the usual romance,” he suggested.

  Quick color stained her cheeks, although she knew that he could not see. “I don’t think I’ve had time,” she said, “even for romance.”

  Not a love affair, she thought honestly. Not anything deep and passionate and lasting. It was true that she had scarcely had time for love. It hadn’t come in search of her as determinedly as all that!

  “Which might be a mistake,” Julius Behar suggested unexpectedly. “Where do we go from here?”

  “To the right,” she directed. “Then first left and right again.”

  They were nearing her destination and she had spent the time talking about herself, whether by accident or by Julius Behar’s design it was impossible to say. She supposed if he didn’t want to talk about himself, if he had no intention of allowing a comparative stranger to probe into his personal background, it had been easy enough to let her chatter. He probably thought her too loquacious. She glanced at him, wondering what he was thinking.

  The handsome, clear-cut profile had engraved itself on her mind now, so she had no need to look at him. When he pulled the car up to the curb before number ninety-five Arlton Gardens she got out immediately.

  “It was most kind of you to bring me home,” she said.

  He gave her a brief smile.

  “What about that dinner?” he asked almost abruptly. “I shall be having some friends in on Thursday—Dermot and Mary Strang. Can I persuade you to join us?”

  Laura’s heart lurched forward excitedly as she attempted to thank him once again.

  “I’d like to come,” she confessed. “It’s very kind of you.”

  She supposed she was repeating herself foolishly, but her thoughts were chaotic, with a confusion about them that matched her quickened heartbeats.

  “Harley Street,” he said as he let in his clutch. “You know the number.”

  She didn’t, but she could so easily find out. Any directory of Who’s Who would list his name and qualifications. Yes, it would be easy. Easy and exciting beyond anything she had ever dreamed about!

  CHAPTER THREE

  The taxi crawled along Harley Street. There was very little traffic, but the driver was checking the numbers above the massive doorways.

  Laura, sitting forward in her seat as she neared her destination, was aware of her rapidly increasing pulse. She had been looking forward to this moment all day, but now that it was here she felt curiously shy and inadequate, almost wishing that she had not come.

  She had dressed most carefully wearing the one evening gown she possessed, brushing her hair until it shone with all the highlights of burnished copper and finally discarding the thought of any jewelry. The low-cut emerald gown and her hair were color enough, she had decided, and she had searched London for the plain satin shoes, which were such a perfect match for the brilliant green of her dress. Her coat was black and rather shabby, but she had pressed it carefully the evening before, and in any case, it would be discarded in the hall.

  The taxi came to a standstill before a lighted doorway and her excitement rose again.

  “This is it,” the taxi driver announced jovially. “These one-way streets are a proper trial!”

  Laura glanced at the number, nodding as she paid the fare.

  “Yes. Thank you very much.”

  The taxi pulled away and she was left standing on the deserted pavement, looking at the house. Although there was a light streaming out from above the door the rooms on either side of it were so heavily curtained that they presented a dark face to the outside world. The door itself, immaculate as all the other doors in that well-known neighborhood, with its discreet black paintwork and plain, brilliantly polished brass plate, gave little indication of what lay behind it.

  It opened, however, before she could ring the bell, and it seemed to Laura that it was only held ajar sufficiently to allow her to go in. It was immediately closed behind her and the butler took her coat.

  “Good evening, miss,” he said. “Will you come this way? The doctor is waiting for you.”

  The hall was square and lofty, with a vast circular stairway rising at its far end and rich Persian rugs carpeting the tessellated floor.

  Before Laura had time to cross it a door opened and Julius Behar came toward her. He looked different, she thought at once, and strangely formal in his evening clothes, but he was smiling.

  “I might have known you would be punctual,” he greeted her, taking her by the arm to lead her into a brilliantly lit room on their left. “You have always struck me as being the soul of integrity, Laura.”

  He had used her Christian name quite naturally, and if he had been deliberately trying to put her at her ease because he had detected her nervousness, there was no outward sign of it.

  The room they entered was empty, and as he poured their drinks, she wondered if she had, indeed, been too punctual, if it would have been better to have timed her arrival for a little later, when the other guests were assembled.

  “I’ve an apology to offer," he said. “For the Strangs. They’ve been unavoidably delayed in Paris.”

  “Oh,” Laura said, Tm sorry. I was looking forward to meeting them.”

  She wondered if he had substituted another couple for Dermot and Mary Strang, whom she had worked with at the hospital, and then, suddenly, she knew that he had not. They would be dining alone.

  A strange, quick surge of excitement rushed from her heart and climbed into her throat, and she became aware of tension and the smile in Julius Behar’s eyes that was half watchful, half mocking as he raised his glass.

  “To our future acquaintance, Laura!” he said.

  She raised her own glass and its golden contents seemed suddenly full of liquid fire. The lights from the heavy chandelier above their heads struck a million points of diamond brightness from the exquisitely cut crystal to reflect them back into her eyes, dazzling her for a moment as she looked into those other eyes across the hearth; then she told herself the idea was ridiculous, utterly fanciful and painfully absurd!

  It was no use being dazzled by people to the point of remaining dumb in their presence if you wanted to interest them. She did not know why Julius Behar had asked her to dine with him, but he could not have any ulterior motive. He had nothing to gain from her friendship. On the contrary, it was he who had the most to give.

  Looking about her as she finished her drink, she acknowledged the tremendous stimulation that just being here afforded her. The whole place enshrined the man’s success. The thick carpet covering the floor was a genuine Aubusson; the few pictures adorning the walls were originals, lit softly and discreetly from above. There was nothing ostentatious, nothing jarring. The man and his home had achieved a peak of perfection. Laura put down her glass on a side table and looked across at her host. “I’m very curious,” she said, forcing her nervousness aside. “I want to hear all about you.”

  He gave her a straight, amused look from under his dark brows, and his lips curved slowly in a smile.

  “Rather a tall order, isn’t it?” he suggested, stooping to ref
ill her glass. “Where do you want me to begin?”

  “At the beginning, I think,” she suggested, wondering if he resented the intrusion but unable to contain her curiosity. “From when you first decided to take up medicine as a career.”

  “That would be too boring,” he said, holding up his glass to the light so that, suddenly, she saw the true color of his eyes for the first time. They were a curious mixture of gray and green, an indefinable color that might vary with their owner’s varying moods, and she realized how mistaken she had been when she had thought them hazel. There was no true light in them. They were eyes that would smoulder suddenly or glint dangerously in anger, changing from green to the color of slate as the thoughts behind them varied. “I knew about my career, I think, right from the beginning,” he went on. “I had made up my mind and I was quite determined to succeed. It helps,” he added, looking at her directly, “if one knows what one wants.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Laura’s voice was vaguely constrained, yet this was what she had wanted to hear. “Have you always lived in England?”

  He nodded.

  “My family came here from Germany two generations ago. My grandfather was an analytical chemist and he settled in London with his wife and two sons. They both married Englishwomen. My father was the younger of the two.”

  “And a doctor?”