Prisoner of Love

by Jean S. MacLeod

  When she finally consulted her watch it was well after six o’clock.

  “Heavens! I must fly!” she exclaimed, gathering her parcels together off the floor. “We have people coming in to dinner at eight—”

  There was a sudden small, reserved silence and Anne shifted uneasily.

  “I’m sorry, Laura, if we’ve kept you,” she said.

  “I’ve kept myself!” Laura smiled. “I’ve never known time go quite so quickly. I’ll phone you next week Anne, but now I must dash off and find a taxi.”

  “I’ve got my car here,” James Calder offered tentatively. “Could I give you a lift? It’s on my way, as a matter of fact.”

  Laura was glad of the suggestion. She climbed into the brightly-painted sports car parked at the side of the bar, her parcels packed in behind her, and they drove off with much hand-waving and goodbyes.

  “They’re a nice crowd,” James Calder said. “Full of laughter and fun. I think we sometimes need that kind of distraction to keep us on an even keel, especially when we’re doing hospital work.”

  They didn’t have far to go, and when he drew up just short of Julius’s door, Laura turned to proffer her thanks.

  “It was very kind of you to run me back,” she said. “Will you come in for a drink?”

  He looked slightly embarrassed.

  “Not when you are expecting friends,” he said. “Perhaps some other time.”

  As she got out of the car Laura had an uncomfortable feeling of being watched, but when she looked up at the windows there was no sign of anyone looking out. There never was in that discreet thoroughfare, she . reflected. All was decorous calm.

  Holmes opened the door to her, and she thought, suddenly, that Julius had never offered her a key of her own.

  He was standing in the doorway of the drawing room when she crossed the hall, a shadowy figure within the shadows.

  “Can you come in here a moment, Laura?” he asked.

  Holmes took her parcels and she shed her expensive fur wrap on one of the high-backed chairs flanking the hall table. They were never, never as much as a fraction of an inch out of place, she thought irrelevantly. Nothing was ever out of place. Nothing that Holmes controlled.

  Julius had gone into the room ahead of her and was standing at the fireplace with his back to the door. When he turned she saw the cold anger in his face.

  “I won’t have you coming home with junior registrars!” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Shopping.” Laura’s voice was not quite steady, her own anger very near the surface. “I was offered a lift when I realized how late it was. That’s why I came back with Doctor Calder.”

  He poured her a sherry from the decanter on the low table between them, his eyes hard and watchful as the golden liquid ran into the glass.

  “Doctor Calder and, no doubt, the rest of your companions on this afternoon’s little jaunt, are very junior members of the hospital staff,” he reminded her in a tone as biting and incisive as the instruments he used so skilfully in the operating room. “They, if not you, seem to be aware of the inadvisability of such clandestine meetings, since they had the sense to pull up just short of my doorstep.”

  “There was nothing ‘clandestine’ about our meeting,” Laura flashed angrily. “We met by accident.”

  “While you were out with Miss Davis and Miss Meakin,” he suggested frigidly.

  “You married a nurse!” Laura reminded him. “You seem to have forgotten that, Julius.”

  He came around the end of the table.

  “You little fool!” he said between his teeth. “I can make you more than that! I can give you all you want in life, but I won’t have you running with the gang. I thought I made that quite clear to you some time ago?”

  “Not quite clear enough,” Laura said wearily. “Or perhaps I wasn’t clever enough to understand.”

  “Now that you do understand,” he said, smiling, “I’m sure that you will come to accept my point of view without question.”

  She did not answer him, and two days later, when she phoned Anne Meakin, she was met with a slight rebuff.

  “I called you yesterday,” Anne informed her, “but your husband said you were ‘otherwise engaged’. He also said you would be rather busy for the next few weeks, mostly with social commitments at the hospital. I’m sorry, Laura,” she added in a slightly bewildered tone. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  Laura had put the call through from her bedroom, and suddenly she realized that they were cut off. The line had gone dead, and she hurried downstairs to find Holmes at the small private switchboard.

  “I thought you were finished, madam,” he said, his curious eyes completely expressionless as they looked into hers. “I’m very sorry if I cut you off. Do you want me to get you the number again?”

  “No,” Laura said, suppressing her anger, “it doesn’t matter. We had—nothing more to say.”

  After that, small and unpleasant scenes seemed to develop between her and Julius with amazing regularity. There was the day when Holmes was off duty and the impeccable Miss Gleason had failed to report back after lunch. Laura had opened the door to a patient and shown him into the waiting room adjacent to Julius’s consulting room, but half an hour had passed without Julius putting in an appearance. She knew that he was due back from a luncheon engagement by three o’clock, and he had never kept a patient waiting before. The man seemed restless, pacing up and down the carpet as he waited, till finally she opened the door on an impulse to speak to him.

  “I’m sorry you have been kept so long,” she apologized. “My husband expected to be back before three. Something must have delayed him.”

  “Traffic, no doubt.” He stopped his pacing to smile at her. “You must think me very impatient,” he said, “but I’m due to leave for the Continent at five o’clock and I wondered, if an examination is necessary, whether I could do it or not. I can quite easily cancel my trip, of course,” he added.

  “I hope it won’t be,” Laura said, looking out of the window. “Delays are unavoidable sometimes, but my husband generally allows for them when he is making an appointment. There’s no way of getting in touch with him, I’m afraid.”

  “You mustn’t worry about it,” he assured her. “My health is much more important than my trip to Paris!”

  He was a pleasant person and they chatted on. He had just come back from Scotland, and the fact that he had visited the Western Isles made Laura’s heart lurch nostalgically.

  “I was there during the summer,” she explained, “and we hope to go back for Christmas.”

  “Indeed? It’s a wonderful country, and, thank heaven, it hasn’t been fully exploited by the holiday crowds yet!”

  Neither of them had noticed the door opening and it was several minutes before Laura looked around to find Julius standing there. His face was cold and set.

  “Thank you, Laura,” he said in a voice of ice. “I shall be able to take over from here.”

  Passing him, she closed the door behind her, feeling humiliated and disgraced. She had only been trying to help him and he had dismissed her in cold fury.

  The heavy front door closed behind his patient half an hour later and he joined her in the dining room, where she was arranging the table flowers. “Allow me to look after my patients in my own way, Laura,” he said in a voice of frigid politeness. “You were guilty just now of a complete breach of etiquette. What you did was most unprofessional,” he flashed in sudden uncontrollable anger.

  “I’m sorry, Julius,” she apologized abjectly. “But you were late—”

  “Don’t question me!” he interrupted savagely. “It seems you find it impossible to leave an attractive man alone for five minutes, even in my waiting room.”

  “That isn’t true!” she cried, utterly aghast at the suggestion. “You ought to know it isn’t. You ought to know!”

  He turned away without looking at her, and she was left to stare after him, hardly believing he could have made su
ch a vicious statement even in angry condemnation of her “breach of etiquette," as he put it. Then suddenly, she felt sorry for Julius.

  Looking at him standing there, ravaged by his own thoughts and ugly suspicions, she had seen the flaw in him at last. He was viciously and uncontrollably jealous.

  She supposed she had come to the truth gradually, but it was only now that she had admitted it, and there was nothing she could do, nothing she could think of, to combat it.

  During the next few weeks she was provided with ample proof that she was right. When they entertained he was constantly watchful of her, and when they were being entertained she found it necessary to guard her every word and look. Even the most ordinary gestures of friendship or liking were instantly suspect, and the final humiliation came one evening during a theater party when he refused to go on to a nightclub for supper because he considered that she had been paying undue attention to their bachelor host.

  What am I to do, she thought, enduring his possessive kisses when they had returned to Harley Street. What can I possibly do to convince him how wrong he is?

  “When you get up,” Julius said the following morning, “I want you to pack. We’re going to Dunraven.”

  “But—there’s Lance,” she protested. “He’ll be breaking up in a week, and he expected us all to travel to Scotland together.”

  “He’s quite old enough to travel by himself,” Julius said frigidly. “We can’t regulate our lives to suit Lance. You mollycoddle the boy!”

  They traveled back to Scotland the following day, after Laura had explained to Lance as best she could in a letter why they were going on ahead. Julius’s patients, she wrote, had to be attended to, and that meant Blair.

  Coldly Julius told her of his plans.

  “I mean to stay at Dunraven, at least till the spring,” he said when they were driving swiftly westward at the end of their journey. “I have resigned my appointment at the hospital, but I shall still keep my Harley Street connection, and of course continue to take private patients up here.”

  “Will there be enough?” Laura asked. “And will you be able to get the nursing staff?”

  “I don’t think I shall need to worry unduly about a nursing staff,” he decided. “These people are hardly invalids, and one reliable S.R.N. in residence should be enough. I myself will be there in a supervisory capacity.”

  “I wish you would let me help,” Laura offered once again. “I could do relief duty, Julius—”

  “No,” he said, firmly and decisively. “Don’t ask again, Laura. I have made up my mind about that.”

  Dunraven had come into view far beneath them as they sped along the coast, and to Laura it looked suddenly cold and unfriendly standing out there at the end of the causeway, its high wall isolating it like—a prison.

  She thrust the word from her, but she knew that it would persist in her mind so long as Julius continued to view her every action with mistrust and suspicion. In the end, she thought, this ungovernable jealousy of his will spoil his whole life. It could, she knew, even ruin his brilliant career.

  Morag came to the open door and she waved to her, feeling a first suggestion of warmth as the Highlandwoman took her hand and looked smilingly into her eyes.

  “What news, Morag?” she asked. “I thought we would find the whole glen covered in snow!”

  “Not yet,” Morag answered. “We’ve had a mild winter up till now, but, then, we never do have the worst of our weather up here much before the end of January. The faoilteach we call it—those angry days we are sure of getting before the spring comes again. There’s snow, though,” she added, “on the top of Suilven. An old man with a white cap on his head he is!”

  Looking at the mountain Laura remembered Blair and his half-laughing promise to Lance before they had gone away. Had he been climbing much, she wondered, and was he really fit now? All but cured?

  She had not long to wait for her answer. Blair came to Dunraven the following day.

  “Thought I’d better report,” he explained as Julius shook his hand rather stiffly. “It’s about Northern Bird,” he added. “I’m not altogether happy about that mooring of hers. She took a terrible pounding in a gale we had about a fortnight ago. She would be better down here in the lee of the island if you mean to keep her in the water all winter.”

  Laura came into the room at that moment and he looked up and met her eyes.

  “Blair!” she exclaimed, her own eyes shining, “you look wonderfully well! Julius’s cure has worked!”

  “I’m hoping so,” he said, taking her outstretched hand. “But what have you been doing with yourself? Slimming?”

  She looked away from his gently probing gaze.

  “I think one rushes about in London more than one realizes," she said. “I didn’t know I had become so thin.”

  “I didn’t say that! I suggested that you had lost a little weight.”

  “When you have finished discussing the effects of these weeks of separation,” Julius put in sarcastically, “perhaps we can come around to the future. I don’t intend to keep you much longer at the lodge, Cameron,” he added. “I feel that the cure may have worked. I shall have to decide, of course, after I have seen Nurse Scyler’s report.”

  “Of course,” Blair agreed. “She has been a most reliable watchdog, by the way. Nothing escapes her eagle eye!”

  “She is a person I can trust,” Julius said. “I have known her for some time.”

  “So I understand,” Blair laughed. “I've never seen such a high pedestal, Julius. The woman worships your very name!”

  “I think she realizes that I demand perfection.” Julius got up and crossed to the window overlooking the narrow strip of water between the island and the shore. “We’ve got time to go and look at Northern Bird, I think,” he decided. “I suppose she should have been laid up for the winter, but I thought we might have used her again in September, and then the whole thing escaped my memory. I had other and more important things to think about,” he added as he led the way to the door.

  The following morning Blair, with the help of Callum and one of the other patients from the lodge, brought Northern Bird into the small natural basin behind the island. It was a precarious journey and a great deal of skill was needed in handling her in the shallower water, but Blair revelled in the adventure.

  Julius, watching the whole procedure from his study window, said that it would be a great pity if Blair should suffer a relapse at this stage.

  “You can’t mean that he could become desperately ill again?” Laura exclaimed unguardedly. “It would be terribly unfair. He has so much to live for!”

  Her husband turned to look at her with a small, questioning smile in his eyes.

  “Has he told you what he hopes for in the future, then?” he asked. “I sometimes wonder if he feels it impossible to confide in me.”

  “I don’t think he’s been looking at the future very closely,” Laura answered uncertainly. “After all, he wasn’t too sure about it, was he? About there being any future at all.”

  “No,” Julius mused, turning back to the window, “that’s true.”

  When Lance joined them at the end of a week Laura felt far more settled and content. She set about her preparations for Christmas and the New Year with a fresh awareness of happiness she did not try to explain to herself, and each day found Blair Cameron working with equal happiness under her kitchen window.

  He had decided to overhaul the yacht, which was safely up on stilts with Lance chipping away at its barnacles that had gathered below the waterline. Callum was busy mixing paint and varnish in the boathouse under the causeway.

  It takes so little for happiness, Laura thought. So little!

  Two days before Christmas Julius made the suggestion that they should climb Suilven.

  “Won’t it be dangerous at this time of year?” Laura asked.

  “There’s no snow to speak of,” Blair said. “We could even take you along with us, if you feel like coming!”


  Julius looked up.

  “Why not?” he asked unexpectedly. “It isn’t a difficult climb.”

  “You’re all out of your mind!” was what Morag said when Laura told her what they proposed to do. “People come up here and they think they know about our Scottish mountains, but they don’t! They’re treacherous and bleak, snow or no snow, and I’m surprised at a man like Doctor Cameron not putting a stop to such nonsense.”

  “But, Morag,” Laura objected, “Doctor Cameron has climbed all over the world.”

  “I’m not worrying about that,” Morag returned. “He should know better when he’s up here.”

  Both Julius and Blair laughed Morag’s warning aside, and Lance declared that it would “make” Christmas for him even to get halfway to the summit. What a lot he would have to tell his schoolfellows!

  They set out early in the morning in heavy boots and windbreakers, Julius carrying a length of stout rope around his waist and Blair suitably armed with a small ice-axe in case it might be needed on the higher slopes.

  It was a wonderful morning, and when they parked the car at the foot of Suilven the sun was almost hot on their backs. Laura could not believe that it was December, yet she knew that in a day—within an hour, even—the whole face of the countryside could be changed.

  Almost as if he had read her thoughts, Blair said:

  “Don’t worry. Neither Julius nor I would have brought you if we hadn’t been sure about the weather.” He held her gaze for a moment. “It’s a wonderful experience, Laura—climbing a mountain in the sun!”

  Laura turned to find Julius looking at them, but this time there was no anger in his eyes. He looked curiously withdrawn, aloof almost, as if the present held no great interest for him, yet she knew that he was an enthusiastic climber, a mountaineer of no mean ability.