by Jane Arbor
Across the table their hands were nearly touching and Rex began to play idly with her fingertips as he asked: “This girl Camille, what is she like?”
“She has never been to England, so far as I know, and I’ve never met her.”
“No snapshots exchanged?”
“We were never intimate enough. But Godmother did send my mother a photograph, I remember. Camille would have been in her early teens then, and my memory is that she was tiny, with a head of close, dark curls and a piquant little face.”
“More French than English?”
“Oh yes, and more doll-like than flesh-and-blood. Sort of helpless and appealing.”
“Unlike you, who were probably a bouncing Girl Guide at the time?” he teased.
“Unlike me in every way, I think.”
“Then she may appeal like mad, for all I shall care,” he returned with the touch of gallantry that came so easily to him. And he turned Tessa’s hand over in order to put his lips lightly to her palm just as a floor waiter was conducting two people past their table.
Glancing up, Tessa snatched away her hand, causing Rex to look at her in surprise. “What’s the matter? Didn’t the chaste salute please?”
“Yes, of course. I loved it. Only it was a trifle—public, that’s all.”
“Public? Nonsense. No one saw.” But as his eyes followed hers to a neighbouring table where by now Neil Callender and Judith Wake were installed, he frowned. Snapping open his cigarette case irritably he muttered: “Oh, no! Not again! Isn’t this city big enough to hold us as well as that woman medico and her squire without our falling over each other every time I want to make love to you?”
“Perhaps they would say you shouldn’t choose the city’s best-known restaurant for the exercise,” Tessa pointed out.
“As if anywhere less would be good enough for you,” he riposted. “But why the agitation? We’ve as much right here as they have, and the Wake woman doesn’t know either of us from Adam.”
“She knows me. She practises in The Chase.”
“Does she, by jove? You hadn’t said anything about it. Well, you might tell her sometime that I don’t admire the manners of her boy friend. Come to that, through your knowing her, I could find out easily enough who he is.”
“You needn’t trouble,” said Tessa quietly. “I know who he is.”
“You mean—you could tell me?”
“Yes.” Tessa took a deep breath and told him.
She spent the remainder of her off-duty hours lazily and indoors, glad that she need not go out into the raw uninviting day which she awoke to next morning. But towards nightfall the cold intensified, and by the next dawn a wind sweeping straight from the North Pole had turned yesterday’s wet city streets to so many acres of sheet ice.
From the window of her flat Tessa watched the early morning workers and the schoolchildren slipping, skating and clinging to each other in a struggle for their “ice-legs” which the children took hilariously, the grown-ups less so. “And I,” thought Tessa ruefully, scanning the black glass of the roadway, “have got to drive a car on that!”
At the garage the man who always serviced the car warned her to drive carefully and, as she backed out, added a caution to keep the radiator warmly covered if she had to leave the car waiting in the streets. “This wind—and you’ll find yourself frozen to a standstill, Nurse,” he said.
Thanking him, she told him that her morning’s visits should entail very little delay at each. And so it proved—until her last before lunch, an ante-natal check-up of a woman who was to have her baby at home, which should have been a matter of mere routine.
But when she arrived she found that the young mother was already in labour and that there was likely to be nothing “routine” at all about the next few hours.
“I shall call Dr. Callender, but I think he may decide your wile must be moved to hospital,” she warned the distracted father-to-be, glad that she could give him the task of looking out such necessities as the mother would need there. There was so little to be done for fathers on these occasions, she had learned to her cost. But to keep them well occupied was generally a sovereign rule!
In answer to her telephone call Neil Callender came, made his examination and lost no time in sending for the ambulance. He waited until it came, saw his patient into it and then left before Tessa, saying that he had to keep an appointment in the city centre for an important meeting on Civil Defence.
But when Tessa emerged into the street she found him taking his bag and papers from the car, preparatory to abandoning it.
In answer to her inquiry he nodded towards the uncovered radiator. “Serves me right. Stone-cold engine—even a cracked cylinder if the Fates really have it in tor me. But I haven’t time to investigate. Where is the nearest garage, do you know?”
Tessa thought. “Farebrothers’, I believe. If you must hire, I could drive you there. I haven’t any more calls before two o’clock. Or—” she hesitated—”I could drive you into the city, if you would accept the lift.”
“You would? You’d drive further than you need in these conditions from choice?” He looked from her to the street’s vista of unrelenting ice and she wondered if the same thought was passing through their minds. But before he could say that he considered her as foolhardy as she felt herself to be she said quickly: “Not from choice. But you said it was urgent, and I could save you at least the time it would take you to fix up a hire from Farebrothers’, though we could call and tell them to collect your car.” Perhaps, she thought, as she felt his calculating glance momentarily upon her, he is debating whether, from what he thinks he knows of my driving, the time saved would be too dearly bought! But he said crisply: “Good idea. Thank you. May we go?”
In the car she was glad that he did not attempt any “backseat driving” and left her to negotiate the difficult journey without any well-meant advice. Taking some papers from his brief-case, he appeared to be absorbed in them until at one point he looked up to ask: “Would this be regarded as a legitimate use for your duty car, Nurse? I don’t want to get you into any trouble.
“Our District superintendent allows us to use it for occasional private journeys at our discretion,” she told him. “Until now, I hadn’t availed myself of the privilege.”
“So I’m your first ‘discretion’? Do you know, I find that so respectable as to be almost dull?”
She slid a glance at him along the line of her shoulder, saw that the frank blue eyes were laughing, and felt that her cheeks had stained with colour as she turned her attention again to the road. The remark had seemed to have a provocative intention, but when she found no adequate reply to it he did not follow it up and returned to his papers.
They did not speak again until they were nearly at their destination in the heart of the city. Here the ice was fast turning to slush under the heavy traffic, which slowed their progress to a walking pace but made conversation less of a dire risk to life and limb.
Neil Callender asked: “I suppose you haven’t had time yet to volunteer or be roped in for Civil Defence?”
“Not yet, but I’d like to join up. At St. Faith’s, where I trained, we had regular exercises—casualty reception and so on. But of course I’m not attached there any more.” She had mentioned to Judith Wake that she had been a St. Faith’s Nurse, but evidently the news had not been of sufficient interest to be passed on, for he queried in surprise: “So you’re no stranger to Northtrenton? And I suppose you count most of your friends among the staff at St. Faith’s?”
“Yes, I still know heaps of people there. My best friend is now a Ward Sister and—” But she broke off upon the impulse to mention Rex. Instead she said: “Will you accept me as a volunteer for the local Civil Defence if you are organising it, Dr. Callender?”
“I hope to be able to. At this meeting today we are quartering the city into areas, with a receiving hospital serving so many. But you’ll be hearing about the Exercises in due course. How would you like to serve?”<
br />
“How? Why, as a nurse, surely?” she said, surprised that he should ask.
She had drawn up at the Civil Defence Headquarters and he was fully turned to her as he reached for his brief-case from the back seat. He said: “I was only wondering whether you might find ambulance driving of more interest. You could still double up some first-aid with that.”
“But?”
“I meant,” he explained carefully, “that driving of the quality you’ve shown in today’s conditions isn’t easily come by and shouldn’t be wasted. Think it over, won’t you?”
Her utter surprise at the compliment emerged as a ridiculous little crow of laughter. She stared at him in confusion as he went on: “All right. You regard that as a complete face-about on my part, don’t you? But—” his eyes held hers as inexorably as on that first occasion—”you hadn’t been driving that other car, had you?”
“How did you know?” She bit her lip, but the words were out and her defences down.
“Because your performance this morning has made nonsense of your ever having been capable of that criminal piece of parking on Arden Ridge. Also because, afterwards, I remembered noticing that, though you were in the driving seat, your gloves, your bag, even your handkerchief were still in the cubby-hole opposite the other one. I was able to argue that they were there because you were, or certainly had been, the passenger, not the driver.”
Tremulous with some emotion that was neither irritation nor amusement Tessa said inadequately: “You—you should have been a detective instead of a doctor.”
He shrugged and appeared to consider the point. But as he made to alight he said: “No, I make a better doctor on the whole. For instance, my long shot about your belongings went home. But detection must examine motive too, and I confess myself baffled as to why you didn’t think you owed me the truth—then or when we met again that night. So I’d probably better not try to explore motives which seem good to you but which I mightn’t understand. Thank you again for the lift. Drive back as carefully, won’t you?” The car door slammed and Tessa found herself alone.
CHAPTER THREE
Shortly after the announcement of Sir Bartram Catterick’s coming marriage appeared in the newspapers Tessa received a silver-engraved invitation to the wedding in Paris which naturally she could not accept. Alter that her only information filtered through in gossip from St. Faith’s—the medical and nursing staffs were to make a subscription list for the great man’s wedding present; the honeymoon was to be spent on the Italian Riviera; Usherwood was being completely “done over” for the reception of the new Lady Catterick; and finally (to a shudder of excitement the famous surgeon was expected to return to duty on a certain day.
Hilary rang Tessa to announce this, and hard upon that call Rex rang with a casual inquiry as to whether she had heard anything directly from Usherwood yet. Tessa had not, but by the next post she had a formal At Home card (“Cocktails. Bridge. Dancing”) and almost immediately there was another telephone call—from Lady Catterick herself.
“Darling Tessa!”—the light voice carried a faint accent—”Lovely to be in touch with you again, though what a bad girl not to come to my wedding without saying why! I’d even have sent Bartram to fetch you if you had only said the word!”
“But Godmother, I did explain that I had just begun in my new job and couldn’t ask for leave so soon,” protested Tessa. (The conjured picture of Sir Bartram Catterick being despatched to escort a mere District nurse to Paris was almost too much for her gravity).
“Did you, dear? I couldn’t have noticed. So much to see to, you know. Wedding presents pouring in. Endless fittings tor my clothes. And my little Camille was being the tiniest bit difficult about my re-marrying at all.”
“Oh, dear, is she unhappy about it?” asked Tessa in sympathy.
“Oh, it wasn’t that she had anything against Bartram, you understand. In fact, the young minx knows how to twist him round her little finger—right round! No, it was simply that she hated the thought of having to live in England. She has what you call here a ‘thing’ against Englishmen. She says they are boring and stuffy, and I must say that if Bartram’s contemporaries at our wedding were samples, they weren’t prepossessing. I had forgotten how much less charming than French men-of-the-world they could be.”
Tessa murmured: “But Camille should have lots of opportunity at Usherwood to choose her friends among Englishmen of her own age.”
“Of course she will, dear, in time. But that brings me to why I rang you. About this housewarming At Home of ours—I haven’t had time to look round myself, and all my badgering of Bartram to produce some young men only results in his saying he doesn’t number young people in his circle of friends and at our age what can I possibly want them for! So at my wits’ end I thought of you dear. Tessa, I said to myself, must surely know some nice young men who could fill in until my baby has made her own set. And you do, don’t you? After all, you must have had so much more freedom than Camille, who has always been very carefully chaperoned.”
“Well—” began Tessa, wondering how much she was going to like a girl who had opposed her mother’s marriage for the sake of her own prejudices and who, however heavily chaperoned, had still learned the art of twisting men round—right round!—her capricious finger. What was more, except for Rex, who wanted an invitation to Usherwood, she was reluctant to introduce there other young people if Camille was likely to discard them as soon as she had chosen her own circle.
“Yes, dear?” Lady Catterick was prompting gently.
“Well, I should like to bring one man with me, Godmother. His name is Rex Girling and Sir Bartram would know him slightly, as he is on St. Faith’s staff. I should like you and Camille to meet him. He is—rather a special friend of mine.”
The implication of that appeared to escape Lady Catterick. Murmuring: “Only one? Well, that’s something I suppose,” and adding that she could hardly wait to meet Tessa, she rang off.
Usherwood was a square-built, gracious house standing in its own grounds on the outskirts of Englemere, a village some eight miles from the centre of Northtrenton. The main frontage of the house faced terraced gardens shelving down to its own lake, the waters of which, on the night of Lady Catterick’s party, danced and shimmered coldly in the reflected light from its many windows and from the standard lanterns flanking the broad curve of its entrance steps.
It was, in fact, a house of great outward beauty, but its interior, Tessa thought, lacked the character of a home. That was perhaps natural, as Sir Bartram had been a widower for many years and had no children. But Tessa wondered whether it was due more to a scheme of furnishing which—ultra-modern, colour-blended and aligned to a point of near-perfection—had been executed to an impersonal design which seemed to brook no sentimental preferences or attachments at all. At least in the rooms which had been thrown open to the guests there was nothing out of period; no chair or table had the look of being someone’s favourite, well-used piece. Lady Catterick’s new broom of contemporary decoration had swept very clean indeed.
It was an effect which Rex, for one, greatly admired, and, to Tessa’s surprise, on being introduced to his hostess, he was able to suggest the probable name of its creator.
She was delighted. “Dear boy! How clever of you to know that it was the work of ‘Chez Philippe’! Of course it is, and what’s more, Philippe himself is here tonight. You must meet him. Yes, I insist. Now where? Ah yes, I see him over there with Camille, and you haven’t met her either yet, have you? So if you will come and gratify Philippe by telling him that at least one of my guests has recognised the signature to his work, you may choose for yourself what you say to Camille!”
As, with a hand lightly on his arm, she was about to draw him away, she appeared to recall that they would be leaving Tessa alone. “Tessa dear, now whom for you?” she murmured. “But of course—Bartram! Wait here, won’t you, and I’ll bring him straight over and you and he can talk hospital shop to your hearts’ co
ntent!”
They moved off. Over his shoulder Rex mouthed a signal to Tessa that he would be coming back. But across the room he seemed to melt into the crowd of people round Camille Lejour, and when she looked for him shortly afterwards she could not see him at all.
She herself had already met Camille. On her arrival among the earlier guests Lady Catterick had deputed her daughter to show her to the room set apart for cloaks, and while Tessa had taken off her wrap the two girls had taken stock of each other.
Camille was still so like the snapshot of some eight or ten years ago that Tessa felt she could have described her to Rex with much more conviction. Camille was small-boned—petite in every way; her hair was still a curly cap about her head and her dark eyes seemed to be wide with an appeal to the world to deal gently with her.
The only thing which the camera had not caught was her smile, which was a tiny, secret thing, warming only to herself. As it played about her rosebud mouth without lighting her eyes, Tessa had the uncomfortable feeling that she would never know whether Camille was laughing with her or privately at her expense.
Camille spoke English with little more accent than Lady Catterick. She told Tessa that she had had English governesses, and since her father had died she and her mother had spoken English and French almost equally between themselves.
“Do you think you are going to like England?” Tessa had asked.
In the mirror before which she was seated she saw the little smile come and go. “That depends,” said Camille carefully.
“What on?”
Camille stretched slim creamy arms upward and outward, then clasped her fingers at the nape of her neck. “Oh—mostly—the sort of men I attract. Of course, though, I’ve never liked Englishmen much,” she added, as if warning Tessa against supposing otherwise at her peril.
Tessa pushed a chestnut wave into place and took out her powder compact. “So Godmother said,” she commented drily. “Isn’t it rather a sweeping statement, though?”
