Nurse Greve

by Jane Arbor

  She said evenly: “Thank you, Doctor. Perhaps my training for it was longer and more thorough.”

  “Forgive me, but that jumps to the eyes. Even so, there’s got to be aptitude and instinct as well as training, fortunately for the future of the race.” From his easy posture, leaning against the edge of the table, he levered himself forward in order to touch the baby’s head. “Starting in on his after-dinner nap, isn’t he?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’ll put him down.” She rose, but paused to cradle the baby against her shoulder for a minute or two before carrying him back to his cot. As she stood there she was wondering where the ranking soreness of the afternoon’s incident had gone.

  Since she had her instructions she expected that the doctor would have already left when she returned to the kitchen after looking in on the other children in bed. But though he had shrugged his coat across his shoulders and had his hat in his hand, he was still there. On his way to the door he said: “You’ll be waiting until the man Frere comes back. So ask him, will you, to ring me at Dr. Wake’s surgery first thing in the morning?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Good-night, then—” But as if a thought had suddenly struck him, he turned. “Incidentally, how was it that Dr. Wake, who was driving me this afternoon, didn’t mention knowing you? That is, if she recognised you in passing under some difficulty?”

  “Dr. Wake wouldn’t have known me. I’m new on this district.”

  “How new?”

  “Very new. I—I’ve just qualified as a Queen’s Nurse. This is my first case.”

  “Really?” His tawny brows went up. “A pity that I’m not established enough myself to do the honours and hang out the welcome flag. But this happens to be my own first week of partnership with Dr. Wake, though we are old friends. Time was when we sat under the same Dean of Faculty and walked the same hospitals.” He looked at his watch. “I think you should have about an hour to wait for Frere. How far are your digs, by the way?”

  “The Council has given me a flat in Clive Mansions, overlooking Broad Avenue. About a quarter of an hour’s walk from here.”

  “But you aren’t walking? You and the other nurse surely are provided with some form of transport for use on duty?”

  “Yes. A—car.”

  If she expected some wry or amused reaction to the word, she was to be disappointed. Frowning, her companion snapped: “A car—quite so. Then why aren’t you using it?”

  “Because I judged it would be quicker to walk.”

  “At night and in a strange area?”

  “But I knew it was only a short distance. Before I took over I made it my job to learn something about the layout of my district, Doctor.”

  “All right. But that apart, I suppose it didn’t occur to you that after this call I might have had others I wanted to send you on to?”

  “Well, have you?” Tessa flashed, stung to unprofessional retort by his peremptory tone.

  He said coolly: “In fact, no. I only mention it so that you should take the possibility into account in future.”

  “In other words, you are ‘mentioning’ it to the inexperience I’ve admitted to?”

  “If you like. You should be grateful to me. After all, you will be working for other colleagues of mine, and they mayn’t all be tolerant of avoidable delays. Tonight, as it happened, there were none, and a word to the wise should be enough.” Once more he made for the door but turned again. “I’m going on to some other calls myself, so I’ll time them to look back for a word with Frere afterwards. It’ll be late by then and I’ll give you a lift back. So wait, please, until I come.”

  He left Tessa feeling that it was the last thing she wanted to do. For though her chagrin arose from having laid herself open to the criticism by telling him she was a novice, she resented his having traded on the information so promptly and devastatingly.

  If course she should have foreseen the importance of using the car wherever possible. But the briefest of practical experience would have taught her that; she resented learning it at the hands of a man who believed he already had one score of ineptitude chalked against her and now had another.

  Somewhere in the situation, she was vaguely aware, there was an irony which other people might find amusing. At their first encounter she had been deemed unfit to be in charge of a car; at their second she was trounced for failing to use the one at her disposal! Yes, very funny indeed. Odd, that the humour of it had completely escaped them both—

  And then suddenly, with the impact of a long-awaited sun, it was funny. In the silence of the little flat her laughter burst spontaneously, dispersing her chagrin and even her resentment of the “royal command” air of his offer to driver her home.

  Glancing at the sedative prescription to be made up for Mrs. Frere in the morning, she saw that the signature—just legible—was “Neil Callender.” Neil ... It suited him, for no one as ruggedly built as he was should support any but a plain one syllabled name. To pass the waiting time she amused herself by fitting other labels to his looks and to her judgment of his character. But the brevity of “Neil” stood by him best. It was a sturdy sort of name ... friendly. For some reasons it began to be important that in time she should count Neil Callender among her friends.

  After a night’s sleep which to her healthy needs had seemed all too short, Tessa woke to a first day of work with which she would have to cope unaided until Nurse Hatfield came back to duty in the evening.

  Overnight on the short drive back from the Freres’, few words had passed between her and her companion. There had only been time, in fact, for him to ask for directions to Clive Mansions and to volunteer the information that as Dr. Wake made her home with her mother in one of the city’s older suburbs, he was taking over from her the hitherto empty flat above her surgery in The Chase. Then they had arrived and, setting Tessa down with a brief Goodnight, he had driven away.

  This morning, as soon as she was dressed, Rex—ready always with the smaller pleasing attentions, bless him—rang to say that he simply couldn’t wait to hear her voice until they next met and how was she facing the prospect before her?

  “Well, Nurse Hatfield has bequeathed me a daunting list of appointments. But all the same ‘the condemned man is about to eat a hearty breakfast’,” she quoted gaily.

  “On top of the world, in fact?”

  “On top of my world—until I fall off!”

  “Attagirl.” They laughed and Rex rang off before she had time to recount the sequel to the previous afternoon’s clash. But she was hardly sorry. Sooner or later Rex would have to know that chance was about to throw her into close professional contact with Neil Callender as well as with Dr. Wake. But this morning she had not wanted her high, eager spirits damped by his probable reaction to hearing that she had already met again the man with whom he had threatened to pick a fresh quarrel. It would only revive his truculence and she had dreaded arguing that, if only for her sake, he could not possibly make further trouble now. It was not the first time she had soft-pedalled on news which would irritate Rex, and though she did it for the sake of peace she always despised the diplomacy of it a little.

  With variations, that day’s programme—visits to patients to give injections, blanket baths, eye-drops; attendance at a school; a post-natal clinic and then more visits—became the regular pattern of all the days which followed. Nurse Hatfield came back on duty, and during that first week, whenever they attended a patient together she would regale Tessa beforehand with a thumbnail sketch of the case, of its progress and of the idiosyncrasies of the doctor attending it. Her attitude to her work was a bluff, hearty optimism and a conviction that, once under her supervision, no patient would dare to defy her by growing worse instead of better. Her habit was to refer to them all by their ailments rather than by their names, and Tessa wondered how the more sensitive of them would relish being to Nurse Hatfield “that convalescent appendix” or “my little Pott’s fracture over the road.”

  Tessa first met
Judith Wake on a schools duty—or Eyes and Ears as Nurse Hatfield called it—and afterwards Nurse Hatfield inquired how she had liked the woman doctor.

  “Very much,” said Tessa, knowing that she had. She had found Dr. Wake a tall dark-haired woman of, she judged, about thirty-five, with calm eyes, an attractively modulated voice and strong capable hands. Tessa noticed that she wore a wedding ring and wondered whether she had learnt her firm, gentle wisdom with pert or apprehensive children through having some of her own.

  To her relief, Tessa found that she had been forestalled in the apology she had planned to make. During a pause between one batch of children and another Dr. Wake had said smiling: “By the way, Nurse, Neil—I mean Dr. Callender—has told me that you and he came together on your first case only a few hours after he had mentioned rather forcibly what he thought of you on Arden Ridge. I laughed and laughed!”

  “I’m glad you were able to,” Tessa assured her. “It was—”

  “No more than a good test for my driving skill, and I flatter myself I came out of the situation rather well, which was good for my vanity. No, it was Neil”—this time she let the Christian name pass—“who decided he must tick off ‘the darned idiot responsible.’ And before I could stop him, he’d leaped off to do it.”

  “Perhaps,’ Tessa had murmured, “Dr. Callender has a prejudice against women drivers.”

  “Good heavens, no. Anyway, I’d have laughed him out of such nonsense long since, if he had. And that day, when he came back and said it had been a man and a girl in the car, I had to remind him that ‘all the world loves a lover’ and that you must have thought it unchivalrous of him to forget it.”

  “Oh dear, what did he say to that?”

  “He said—No, I don’t remember. But here come Standard Three en bloc. Now what did I do with their cards?” Tessa was left in no doubt that Judith Wake had thought it wise to hold back Neil Callender’s final caustic comment on the incident, and the impression she gained that he and the woman doctor were even closer friends than he had claimed was confirmed by Nurse Hatfield’s filling-in of details.

  “No, Dr. Wake hasn’t any children, and her first marriage is already behind her, poor girl.” (Rita Hatfield, incidentally, was only two years older than Tessa’s own twenty-three!) “Her husband was killed in Korea, and she only came back into practice after his death. She was overworking herself terribly and everyone was glad when she took a partner. Now, as she and Dr. Callender seem to have known each other for ages and are on first-name terms, perhaps they’ll link up in another way. Get married, I mean.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “Could be,” said Nurse Hatfield, helping herself to another crumpet at Tessa’s tea-table. “He isn’t married, and she’s one of the few women around here tall enough not to be dwarfed by him at the altar,” she added, as if those arranged by yardstick were among the more successful marriages of her experience.

  So Tessa’s first eight days of duty passed and on the morning of her off-duty period she had a complete surprise—by letter.

  She was meeting Hilary Pugh for tea at a cafe in the city centre and she was to dine with Rex at one of the bigger restaurants in the evening. When she went to meet Hilary she tucked the letter into her bag and produced it with a flourish as they lit after-tea-cigarettes.

  “Read that,” she said. “I’ll explain afterwards.”

  Hilary read through the sheets of expensive notepaper and finally passed them back. “It’s going to take some explaining, at that, young Tessa,” was her comment. “Who is this—what is her name—Frances Lejour? Oh, I know she’s going to marry our great Sir Bartram Catterick as his second wife, because she says so, and that’s staggering news enough. But she signs herself your godmother! How come? And how long have you known in secret that you are as good as related by proxy to the Senior Consultant of St. Faith’s?”

  “I’m nothing of the sort,” laughed Tessa. “Sir Bartram never knew me from any other meek apron he met on his rounds of the wards, and Madame Lejour isn’t any relation to me. She has never been a particular attentive godmother either. I haven’t seen her for years, though at long intervals I have written a duty letter or two. The fact that she is going to marry Sir Bartram was as much of a surprise as the letter itself, which came only this morning—forwarded from St. Faith’s. That would have been the latest address she knew for me, you see.”

  “Clear as mud,” nodded Hilary. “But—Lejour? Is she French?”

  “No, English. She and my mother were school friends, and they married at much the same time. Father was a country padre, as you know, but Godmother made a brilliant match with an eminent Frenchman named Lejour. Their daughter—’my baby Camille’ whom she speaks of—must be a little younger than I am, but Godmother has been a very rich widow for some years until, as she says, she became engaged to Sir Bartram after meeting him recently at a reception in Paris.”

  “Yes, he went off there with a flourish of trumpets to an international conference of surgeons a few weeks ago,” confirmed Hilary. “And now?”

  “Well, as you see”—Tessa’s fingers smoothed a page of the letter—”Godmother says she remembered that I was, or had been, at St. Faiths and so I ‘simply must’ go over to visit her at Usherwood, Sir Bartram’s place out at Englemere, as soon as they are installed there after the wedding. But you read all that.”

  “You’ll go, of course?”

  “Yes. I must go. That is, if she hasn’t forgotten she invited me when I turn up! She was always very vague, Mother said, and she used to pat my head as if she wasn’t quite sure whether I was there or not. But Usherwood, Hilary! I’m not likely to be able to keep up, either in dress or free time or return invitations, with its scale of entertaining, so I should think the suggestion that Camille Lejour and I should become ‘the greatest friends’ is bound to fall through.”

  “Wait and see,” counselled Hilary. “She may be quite a honey, though she shouldn’t let her Mama call her ‘my baby Camille’ at twenty-two or so. And if you did get to like her and went to Usherwood often, think what a boost it would give you with the rest of us common folk at St. Faith’s—hobnobbing with the great Sir Bartram actually in his own home!”

  “You mean,” laughed Tessa, “that I should mount several steps in the social scale and in all your eyes?”

  “Steps? A whole ladder, no less!’ And they both laughed at a joke which seemed to savour of the ridiculous then, but which, for Tessa, did so no more when she met Rex that evening and gave him the same news as she had given Hilary earlier.

  Rex leaned across to her, his handsome face eager. “But darling, that’s marvelous! As soon as these two—the mother and the daughter—are installed with the Old Man at Usherwood, you’ll go out there as often as you can, won’t you?”

  “Supposing I’m not invited more than once?” suggested Tessa lightly.

  His shrug was impatient. “Of course you will be—if you make yourself agreeable enough.”

  Tessa’s brows drew together. “Enough? That sounds as if you were urging me to be agreeable for some ulterior motive.”

  “Well, with such a chance offered you, you’d be a fool if you didn’t cultivate it for all you’re worth.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because—” Rex paused, then enunciated each point slowly as if to a stupid child—”Because Usherwood is one of the places in the whole country for—well, anyone—to be seen at; because Sir Bartram is—who he is; because, if you care about this, your connection there could mean a good deal to me.”

  Tessa’s heart plunged. His “—well, anyone—” could have been derogatory without intent. But he seemed to want to make clear that, whether or not she found herself at ease in the promised new acquaintance, he was already planning to use it for his own ends, seeing her as the short cut to Sir Bartram’s favour which he had claimed to need.

  Surely he couldn’t be more serious than she and Hilary had been? But a glance at his face told her that
he was.

  Still struggling not to believe it, she said slowly: “I should hate to think you’d like me to curry favour at Usherwood for anything I might get out of it.”

  “I didn’t mean for yourself, honey. Once they know you as I do—”his eyes narrowed tenderly—“it would be funny if they weren’t your debtors, not you theirs. But as I told you, to the Old Man I’m just one of a crowd of nondescript surgical staff and likely to remain so, unless you could play a card or two in my favour.”

  “It sounds so—so designing.”

  “But you don’t have to be blatant about it! I don’t propose you should thrust me under Sir Bartram’s nose, jelled ‘Rising Young Surgeon, Seeking Advancement.’ But there are bound to be parties and things like that, and I daresay even the second Lady Catterick wouldn’t mind a surplus, unattached man at them. Just give me a break by introducing me, as casually as you like. You can leave the rest to me.”

  Put like that, it seemed very little he was asking, though she could have wished he had waited for an outcome which would have fallen naturally into place in time. She said: “But of course I’ll take you along at the very first opportunity, and I shall probably babble enthusiastically about you before that, if I get a sympathetic audience. How shall I describe you when I do?”

  Rex’s answering stare was absent. “How? Why, as a friend of yours on the staff at St. Faiths, that’s all.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” (Not as “my fiancé.” From his description of himself as “unattached” she should have known he would not welcome that. But her test question which had invited his indifferent reply had sprung from so great a need to know where she stood in his thoughts.)