The New Sister Theatre

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Much better, thanks. Mrs Easton ‒ the lady ‒ has had an operation and hopes to be back here very soon.’

  The guards beamed when this was handed on, then launched into a long discussion that clearly concerned me, but was conducted at such a rate that I was not even able to catch the odd word I might have understood.

  When we drove on, Mr MacDonald asked about my uncle, the famous English doctor. ‘He couldn’t make the trip this time?’

  ‘No. He’s working. He’s not really my uncle. He’s ‒’ I hesitated, trying to find the right word.

  ‘Kind of guardian?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said truthfully, ‘you could call him that.’

  He nodded as if he approved of this. ‘Seems there are a lot of doctors in your family, Señorita. Or going to be. Those guys were saying the young English doctor you are going to marry lives out here. Is he staying near the house of this Señora Alvaro you are going to visit with?’

  ‘Fairly near,’ was the only comment I felt I could make.

  He nodded again. I asked if he knew the Alvaros’ village well? He said it was some years since he had taken a fare that way, but he remembered enough and knew Miguel. ‘He comes into my garage to stock up with spare parts when he brings a fare into Gibraltar.’

  He ran three cars, had two of his sons working for him. He was a pleasant and very chatty man. By the time we were a few miles from La Linea I had heard about his Gibraltarian wife, four children, Spanish mother, Scottish father, and maternal grandfather from Ronda who had, he said, been the best wine- and tobacco-smuggler in the business. ‘It was too bad the old man wasn’t around in New York City in the old bootlegging days. I’m telling you, Señorita, he certainly knew all the angles.’

  It was a bright, dry afternoon, far removed from the freezing slush I had left behind. The traffic was as sparse as previously. We met the occasional car, a few scooters, an ox-cart, several much-laden donkeys. It was siesta time, and the little white villages had a timeless air. There were old men snoozing against walls; barefooted children playing a type of hop-scotch in the still light dust; and every now and then an old woman all in black came slowly out of a house with an earthenware jug on her head, looking as if she had stepped out of some biblical print.

  In the valley before the mountains the same women were working in the same fields. The young man with the ox-plough was missing. My mind went back to the thought I had had while I watched him, and then the tension and bitter, black despair of that other drive. So much still remained unchanged, yet because I felt as if I had come alive again, anxiety had become a challenge.

  The sickening twists of the mountain road were exciting instead of terrifying. I kept my eyes open and saw the yellow plain below rolling wide and open as the sea when we reached the crest. I glanced back. Far away to the south-west the sun was shining on the roofs of a large town on a hill. The tiles glistened and sparkled. It could have been Bunyan’s Celestial City. Then the road curved, and it was gone. I was glad I had not missed it this time.

  I concentrated on the view, intentionally, in the rare intervals when Mr MacDonald was silent. I dared not let myself wonder whether I was doing the right thing or not. Joe had gone to so much trouble to avoid me. Was it fair to invade his privacy? Was it fair not to? I remembered my instinctive hesitation when Frances made her suggestion. She was convinced I was doing right, and so was Lady Stanger. Sir Robert had given me every assistance, but no opinion. He and I knew Joe far better than the others.

  I had thought along those lines all my waking hours last night. I refused to let myself think on them now. My job had taught me to control my thoughts as well as myself. That was necessary in the wards, doubly so in the theatre. And not only in the theatre, I thought, not only in the theatre.

  Once down on the plain I realized it was cattle-country. The yellow land was speckled with tiny dust clouds hovering over ambling herds. A little later, we drove by about fifty head of cattle under the leisurely guidance of two young men on small, tough-looking horses.

  My driver jerked a thumb. ‘Cowboys, Señorita. They don’t look much like John Wayne, eh? But that’s what they are.’

  ‘Are there many farms round here?’

  ‘I guess not what you’d call farms. That herd’ll most likely belong to all the folks in one village. Some’ll own a few beasts, some just one, some’ll share a beast with the neighbours. The men from the village will take it in turns to do the droving.’

  Some way on he slowed again as we passed some black bulls grazing on scrappy scrub in a well-wired paddock. ‘Take a look at those, Señorita. Fighting bulls! And mighty fine ones at that! You been to the bullfight? You ought to get to see one. They are the greatest!’

  After that he talked bullfights and matadors for miles. The land grew hilly again, we were nearing my journey’s end, and I began to feel so peculiar I wondered whether to take another of Sir Robert’s pills. I did not because they made me so muzzy. I was not at all sure what lay ahead, and I needed a clear brain for dealing with it.

  On the flight out I had been tempted to drive straight to the Eastons’ house, to get my first, and inevitably tricky, meeting with Joe over as soon as possible. On reflection, I decided against that. Señora Alvaro had been extraordinarily kind in inviting a total stranger as a week-end guest, and she might be offended if I delayed introducing myself. As she had spent five years in a convent in Sussex, I guessed ‒ or, rather, hoped ‒ she would not be unduly shocked if I later asked to hire Miguel’s taxi and drive over to the Eastons during the evening. If she was it would be just too bad. I had come all this way to see Joe, and I was going to see him even if it sparked off an international incident.

  At the last village my driver said he must ask the way to the doctor’s house. There was a little crowd of men standing outside Luis’s wine-shop. One of the men answered my driver’s query with a polite explanation that took around ten minutes.

  Mr MacDonald turned over his shoulder. ‘We go on through, take a left turn.’ He waved at the tavern. ‘Seems they’ve been making a fiesta in there all week. The boss has a new piano, and there’s some Englishman staying here who plays it real good.’

  I sat on the edge of the back seat. ‘That why they are waiting?’

  There was another long explanation. My driver translated briefly: ‘Seems they are just taking the air. This guy ‒ the piano-player ‒ seems he’s gone to Madrid.’

  ‘Madrid? Oh, no!’ Both men stared at me. I took a grip and asked the driver to inquire if the English piano-player was the man staying with the English artist. ‘Or if he doesn’t know that, could you ask if he walks with a stick?’

  I was already hideously sure of the answer even before the Spaniard illustrated his reply by leaning on an imaginary stick and limping round in a little circle. He used the name Luis several times.

  Mr MacDonald was very upset. ‘But maybe this guy has it wrong. You wait here. I’ll go talk to this Luis.’

  I was far too disappointed to be embarrassed by the appraising glances and comments of the men who had now grouped themselves round the car. They moved aside to let my driver return with Luis, then closed in on us again.

  Luis, looking now more a tragic than a weary poet, spread his hands helplessly directly he saw me. ‘Aie, aie, aie! La señorita inglesa! Aie, la pobrecita Señorita!’

  My driver said, ‘He says the Englishman didn’t know you were coming.’

  ‘No. I ‒ I wanted to surprise him.’

  The expressions on the faces of the men around now reminded me of Sir Robert’s last evening. They listened to the exchange of remarks between my driver and Luis, then all began talking at once.

  Again the driver translated: ‘Seems your gentleman had this cable telling him he must get back home early next week. He came in last evening to say as he guessed he’d like to take a look at Madrid as it was his last week-end and he didn’t know when he’d get back to Spain. Miguel took him down to Malaga airport first thing this morning.
’

  I had never burst into tears in public in my life. To my horror that happened. I was very ashamed, until I saw my behaviour had clearly met with the full approval of my whole audience.

  Luis bellowed something. A few seconds later a youth in a white apron appeared with a glass of wine for me. The wine pulled me together. I asked if anyone knew where Joe was staying in Madrid and if he was coming back or going straight on from there to London.

  No one knew his address. Luis told me via MacDonald that he had suggested several places where Joe might care to stay, but he had not made up his mind on any particular one when he said good-bye. He was not expected back.

  The crowd offered sympathy and suggestions. Mr MacDonald discussed the matter in detail with Luis. They talked and talked and talked. And I sat and wanted to kick myself for being such a blind, senseless fool, not only now, but all these last months. If I had not let my fixation about his loving Frances cloud and distort my intelligence, I would have long realized he had had to shed his white coat at Barny’s, but not his whole character. Certainly illness brought out the worst as well as the best in people, but more than that, it turned people into caricatures of themselves. The brave became braver; the weak weaker.

  Joe was a quiet man. Quiet, not weak. In many ways he was very like Robert Stanger. Neither man was given to acting on a crazy impulse like Mark, but both preferred action to the reverse. That was why they were surgeons, not physicians. If only I had had the sense to remember that I would have realized that once he had that recall, and knew what hell the strain of the next few days would have to be, the last thing he would have done would have been to sit out the dragging hours on the Eastons’ patio, or in Luis’s tavern, accepting the inevitable with a resigned and increasingly gloomy shrug. He had never been able to stand around helplessly in the face of defeat ‒ and a lot of people were alive at that moment who would have been dead but for that. Throughout his S.S.O. time, when a situation turned tougher, his mood always matched it. ‘God knows we can’t make matters worse,’ I remembered him saying hundreds of times, ‘and crying woe, woe, won’t help, so we may as well go ahead along a new line. It may even turn out to be the answer.’

  Eventually Mr MacDonald finished his conversation. ‘Life is shorter than death, Señorita. I guess maybe we should go on, eh?’

  Ever since that talk with Frances last evening all my energy had been concentrated on getting to Joe. I had not even worked out what to say to him when we met. I just wanted to be with him, and to achieve that I had been prepared to regard walking out on the Stangers, the money I was spending, and my being a self-invited guest in a strange household in a strange country, as minor details. It was only when we reached the doctor’s house that I fully appreciated that last point. It would have been difficult with Joe. Without him it was going to be grim.

  The house was built along the same lines as the Eastons’, but even from the outside had a much more formal air. Señora Alvaro, a plump, youngish lady in elegant black, came out to welcome me. I expected a very civil but very formal reception.

  ‘Miss Lindsay, how nice of you to visit us! Such a long way to come! What a pity you did not let Mr de Winter know of your visit, but, of course, you wished to surprise him! We are all so disappointed for you.’

  Later I learned she had heard the news through Luis. He had sent one of his younger brothers up on a scooter while my driver was still thrashing out my problems with the crowd outside his tavern. One of the Señora's three maids was Luis’s second cousin; the scooter-riding brother was her novio, and only too happy to deliver any messages at any time to her house.

  The doctor was out. The household, with the exception of an aged gardener, was exclusively feminine. The Señora in nearly perfect English introduced me to her two elderly aunts who shared her home, five fascinating little daughters, and a middle-aged lady whom I took to be the housekeeper by her bustling air, but later discovered was a distant cousin of the doctor’s who had moved in with them when she lost her husband several years back.

  ‘Poor Antonia,’ said the Señora calmly, ‘she is very trying because she will never rest. She had no children, which is very sad. But she is one of the family, so, naturally’ ‒ her hands fluttered constantly as she talked ‒ ‘we could not leave her to live alone.’

  She was a charming hostess, friendly, even gay when we were alone with the other females. The atmosphere was very much more formal during the brief periods when her husband was present, and at meals.

  After only a few hours in time I felt as if I had stepped back at least half a century. The step was by no means wholly unpleasant. I found it rather restful, for a limited period, to live like a Victorian woman in England. The Señora was another great talker. She never stopped unless her husband was there. She told me about her early life in Madrid, of her parents’ modern ways that had resulted in her having part of her education in England. She had enjoyed her schooldays, apart from the weather. ‘It rains every day! And if the rain stops for ten minutes all you English people say, “Isn’t it a nice day!” ’

  In Spain, she said, men and women still inhabited separate worlds. Her world was her home. There, as I observed, she was supreme. It was that, plus her insight into English life that she had gained as a girl, that explained my presence. ‘I remember my English school friends were constantly travelling by themselves ‒ you have so much freedom! I have always liked the English, and was very happy to be able to entertain you in my own house.’

  She said she seldom had guests staying in the house unless they were relatives. She never went out unless escorted by her husband, one of the aunts, or ‘poor Antonia’. I gathered Joe was the first unrelated male guest her husband had entertained at home. ‘But Mr de Winter is English.’ She shrugged expressively. ‘My husband is a good man. He knew it would give me pleasure to meet your fiancé. Such a charming man! So sad he has been ill. Was it an accident? My husband did not tell me, and I never like to disturb him with questions. He prefers his work to remain outside his home.’

  I said Joe had had a spinal complaint without giving any details.

  ‘He will be better soon, and then you will be married. I think’ ‒ she considered me ‒ ‘you will be very happy. Mr de Winter has the face of a good man.’

  I said, ‘Yes, he is. Thank you, Señora. I hope we will be very happy.’

  She could not have been more hospitable, yet every hour seemed endless. That night in bed I remembered my anxiety in London last night and how much better it would have been if the snow had closed all the airports. And then I thought about Joe in Madrid, and how difficult if not impossible, it was going to be to see him before he had that operation. I had to be back in Barny’s on Monday night, as I was due on duty Tuesday morning. Sir Robert had told me the spring-cleaning was over and my theatre working again. Tuesday morning would be the gynae list, Tuesday afternoon Sir Robert’s teaching list ‒ and he said it was going to be a long one. I would not be free until late that evening, and having been away would probably find myself on call for the night. If I went across to Martha’s in my free period on Wednesday, if he had arrived ‒ and I did not know what time he was expected ‒ he would almost certainly have asked for no visitors again, and they would not let me see him. In any good hospital only a husband, wife, parents, or children were allowed to batter down that particular request ‒ and they would have to struggle. Even an official fiancée only had rights if the patient named her as next-of-kin.

  Next morning the Señora returned from Mass looking perturbed. Her husband had been called to a case several miles away and Luis’s young brother had arrived on his scooter while she was at church with a message from her parents-in-law.

  They lived near a village twenty miles off. Her father-in-law had had what sounded to me like a minor stroke in the night, and his wife was anxious her son should see him. ‘We must go to her,’ she added anxiously, ‘as she will need the comfort of her family. I have already sent a message to my husband and order
ed Miguel’s car. It distresses me to have to ask this ‒ but will you excuse us if we leave you alone for a few hours?’

  ‘Of course! I’m so sorry about your father-in-law. Naturally you must go.’

  It took me a long time to persuade her I did not consider this an affront, but eventually she was reassured. Miguel arrived not in his car, as it would not have been big enough, but in a minibus he had borrowed from an uncle. The Señora, the two aunts, poor Antonia, the five little girls, and one maid to look after them all seated themselves in orderly rows in the minibus. Rosaria and Pepita, the two maids left behind, watched with me until the bus drove off in the direction away from the village, then sighed sadly and retired to the house, talking quietly together.

  I stayed until the dust died down in the road, and thought of the many old patients I had nursed. I had forgotten nearly all their names, but could remember so many old faces. And so many of them had been so alone. ‘You can’t blame the young folk, dear,’ they had said. ‘They’ve got their own lives to lead. It’s not that they don’t want the bother ‒ they just haven’t got the time.’

  Was it only that? I thought of the way the Señora accepted the old aunts, poor Antonia, her mother-in-law’s need for the comfort of the family, not as so many demanding responsibilities, but as natural a part of her life as were her children.

  I went back into the house to a solitary lunch, feeling disturbed and rather ashamed. Pepita hovered helpfully. Then I remembered how much domestic help the Señora had, how much room in her house, and consequently how much time at her disposal. Perhaps all those old patients were right. The fundamental problem involved was not irresponsibility or selfishness; it was that price tag on female emancipation, lack of time.