Nurse Greve

by Jane Arbor

  “Couldn’t I be allowed to decide whether you and I are in competition over Rex Girling?” asked Tessa.

  “How could you—if he continued to be successful in his deception of you? No, it is much better that we should know where we stand. In fencing—do you fence?—we should now be duelling to the order—‘Buttons off your foils’—and this is a relief. Not, perhaps, that I should have to care too much about taking him from you. On your own admission he shares your interest with other men. And you have not always been honest with him, have you?”

  “Did he suggest that I hadn’t?”

  Camille looked shocked. “Oh, no. But he was hurt. For instance, he was surprised when I told him Maman had said that you seemed to be on quite intimate terms with your friend Dr. Callender in your own apartment. And what about the night when that old man tried to commit suicide?”

  “Captain Furse did not try to commit suicide! It was a pure accident!” It was only after she had sprung to her old friend’s defence that Tessa realised with a sense of cold shock that if Camille knew of the happenings of that night she must have seen or heard from Rex since he had left Northtrenton to go on leave.

  Camille shrugged again. “Oh, well—you still threw over Rex’ plans for taking you to a dance he had been looking forward to. As a doctor himself, he didn’t want to question your decision to stay, and of course it only happened that it was Dr. Callender whom you had called in. But Rex said—”

  “Please, Camille—I’d rather you didn’t report what he said!” Bewildered, too humiliated to defend herself, Tessa gathered her things with trembling hands and pushed back her chair. But even as she turned away she was aware of the impish triumph in Camille’s eyes.

  At the door of the restaurant she was recalled by a polite inquiry for the cash check for her coffee.

  “Oh, I’m sorry—” As she thrust the check and money beneath the grille the girl cashier looked at her compassionately. “Excuse my asking, Madam—but you are awfully white. Are you feeling quite well?”

  At the kindly, unexpected question a flood of colour beat up from Tessa’s throat. She began: “Yes, I—” But her lip quivered and, afraid that she might be betrayed by the sudden welling of tears, she hurried away.

  Hounded by her thoughts, she could not bear to wait for a lift and ran blindly down the stairs, pausing only when she reached a telephone booth at the last flight.

  She must ring up Rex. She had not collected anything she meant to say to him, but to hear anything at all from his own lips was better than to listen to Camille’s smooth insolence echoing endlessly in her head. While she waited for the Banbury number to come through she wondered why she had not crushed Camille’s assurance about the attraction she had for Rex by telling her that, however the acquaintance had continued, it had begun at least in Rex’s cold self-interest. But though the story would have stung Camille’s vanity, it was too ugly a one to tell of Rex. Tessa knew she had not used it because of a long-standing loyalty to Rex which would die hard. Even harder and later than love. But why, in relation to him, she should be separating one from the other in her mind, she did not know. Where love existed, wasn’t loyalty implicit without question? Where love existed?

  “You are through to your Banbury number. Press Button A,” the operator’s voice interposed, and Tessa in her confusion said: “Hello. Is that you Rex? Tessa speaking—” before she realised that at the other end the call was not being answered by him but by his mother.

  Mrs. Girling, whom Tessa had met at one or two of St. Faith’s big occasions, was a widow who centred all her affection upon her son, and Tessa had sometimes wondered whether she had discouraged him from thinking of marriage. But when Tessa began again and explained who she was, Mrs. Girling recalled her well and was cordial enough.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” she said, “but Rex went off into the blue this very morning. He and his friend from Cambridge are each driving their own car, but where they were heading for they didn’t say. But Rex should have told you they were off today. Or didn’t he expect you would ring up?”

  Tessa said: “He didn’t expect me to, and he did write that he was leaving for a tour. It was just that I thought I might catch him before he left.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. But there it is. However—if he calls up tonight, is there any message you would like me to give him?”

  “No thank you, Mrs. Girling. No message.” Tessa rang off, feeling half cheated, half relieved that the ultimate cruel finalities had not to be faced—yet. She saw too that it had been a mistake to telephone. Nor could she write the things she had to say to Rex. Their parting must be at the point where in the past he had best used his charm with her—face to face. For she realised with merciless clarity that if, there, she could see him stripped of all that her wishful imagination had made of him, one day she would be free of him ...

  Besides, she owed it to him to seek the truth from him, not to condemn him through Camille’s reporting. Or was that to clutch at a straw of hope that he had not lied and manoeuvred quite ruthlessly between herself and Camille? To that her instinct had its own swift answer. She knew he had lied. She had been blind because she had wanted to be so, and for her and Rex there was no possible future and already no past that was not soured and shrivelled by the very memories which should have kept it sweet.

  On her way back to The Chase she was haunted by catch-phrases of consolation—“As good fish in the sea” ... “Time heals everything” ... Had they been compiled by cynics, or were they really the experiences of those who had won through to the far side or rejected affection, of defeated pride? For herself she felt that only the feverish filling of every minute would help her to stop the gap that parting from Rex would leave in her life and thoughts. That was why, when she remembered the expedition to Stratford planned for the evening, she rejected her first impulse to excuse herself from it. For one thing, Hilary would press for reasons she was reluctant to give, and to go would occupy some of the hours before the final break with Rex was possible. Tomorrow again there would be the blessed anodyne of work, but tonight she did not want to be alone.

  At Shakespeare’s birthplace that evening the warm spring dusk was made gay with the flags which had flown for the morning’s civic procession, and on the lawns beside which the Memorial Theatre stood sheer to the river, strangers and friends alike were joining in the patterned weaving of the old dances, Mage On A Cree and Gathering Peas cods, which Shakespeare himself would have known.

  As always, the crowds in the theatre foyer had a happy air of belonging there, and once in the auditorium with the lights dimmed and the curtain up, Tessa knew the blessed relief of becoming briefly part of the happenings, colour and even imagined scents of a make-belief world instead of her own.

  When the curtain swept down for the first interval she chose to remain where she was when Hilary and others of their party went out to the foyer. But Hilary returned almost at once to her seat. Glancing at Tessa curiously she asked with characteristic abruptness: “Did you know that Rex Girling was to be here tonight?”

  “Rex?” Too much taken aback to hide her surprise, Tessa went on lamely: “But he can’t be. He has gone touring by car.”

  “That,” said Hilary, “is what I thought you’d told me. But he is here. In full evening kit and with a party from Usherwood, I gather, because I spotted Sir Bartram as well as they came in a group into the stalls foyer. And if a doll-like vision with black eyes and all in bouffant white is your godmamma’s ‘baby Camille,’ she is there too.”

  “Did Rex see you?” asked Tessa faintly.

  “He couldn’t very well help it. I said ‘Hey’ and nailed him and told him you were in the circle.”

  “What—what did he say?”

  “Let’s face it—he looked so sheepish that I couldn’t resist suggesting he should come back with me to see you. But he said he’d rather make it the next interval, so I promised I’d send you out. All I hope, though,” added Hilary trenchantly, “is that you
won’t let him get away with having lied to you about his plans.”

  “I—I may have made a mistake. And after all, on a tour from Banbury he could have decided to take in Stratford tonight—”

  “And managed to get a stall for the Birthday performance and to snake into Sir Bartram’s party, both at no notice at all?” scoffed Hilary. “Tessa, when are you going to see through that young man? And if that’s too much to hope for, when are you going to stop defending him through sheer force of habit?”

  Tessa drew a deep breath. “I am stopping,” she said.

  Hilary stared. “You? You mean, you and Rex Girling are—through?”

  “Yes. (“Through.” Strange, thought Tessa, that her generation needed only a single expressive word to put a full stop to hopes and dreams.)

  Hilary protested: “But Rex didn’t say anything about it! Look, I just don’t understand!”

  “He doesn’t know. It’s something that has happened since he went on leave. Something I learned about only this morning, in fact. I’ll tell you about it when it’s—really all over.”

  Hilary had a compassionate hand over hers. “Tess dear, I’m sorry. But thankful for your sake, even if you do think that hard of me. And what a hideous meddler I am! Of course you don’t want to see Rex tonight. What on earth am I to do about that?”

  But Tessa had come upon a sudden resolution. Rex must be faced, and the sooner the better. This morning she had lacked this opportunity and had been torn between frustration and relief at her enforced respite. Now let them say what must be said between them and have done—

  She heard herself telling Hilary: “Do nothing about it. I’ll see him when he comes.” And Hilary nodded, accepting that.

  When the curtain rang down for the next interval and she slipped from her seat she heard Hilary discouraging anyone from joining her by saying that she was going to meet a friend. So she threaded her way alone across the circle foyer and went to stand in a window embrasure from where she could see the curve of the staircase up which Rex would have to come.

  There was a constant coming and going—of people on their way to the flood-lighted roof balcony, of others going down to stroll on the lawns and the lower terraces overlooking the river. On this floor the general movement was towards the circle bar; from her vantage point Tessa saw Lady Catterick with a couple of guests, but Rex was not with them and, not caring to be seen, she quickly turned her back.

  She had her window to herself and its embrasure afforded her a little island of privacy and silence against the noisy background of tapping footsteps, eager talk and the incessant clink of glasses in the bar. Waiting for Rex to come, she watched the moon rise over the water meadows beyond the town bridge; presently she became so absorbed in its gradual tracery of a shining path across the water that, suddenly aware of someone at her side, her swift breathing of Rex’s name was unguardedly full of the old eager warmth which after tonight would never spark between them again.

  But it was not Rex. It was Neil Callender who said: “I thought I’d recognised you in the foyer on the way in. I’ve driven over to join a party from Usherwood at Sir Bartram’s invitation. I’d rather expected you’d be of it. Are you alone here?”

  “No—I’m with some nurses from St. Faith’s. We are occupying most of a row in the circle up here,” Tessa told him.

  “But you were waiting for Dr. Girling? Does he know that?”

  “Yes. We were to meet here during the interval.” As Tessa spoke she glanced from the window to the terrace below, where, within the arc of the huge flood-lamps trained on the building’s facade, the groups and casual strollers were as recognisable as in a relentless daylight, and as surely as if he had pointed them out to her, she knew that the figures of Rex and Camille crossing towards the friendlier darkness of the lawns had not gone unseen by the man at her side.

  She knew also that he had glanced down at her, but when she did not meet his eyes he murmured something to himself on a long exhalation of breath. It sounded like: “The eternal patient tenacity of women!” and, stung by the implication that, knowing Rex might be with Camille, she had put in a possessive claim to his attention, she said sharply:

  “I didn’t know until the first interval that Mr. Girling was to be here tonight. He has been on leave, and as we were likely to be out of touch until he goes back to duty, I rather badly wanted to see him now.”

  “Would you care then for me to go to him to remind him you are waiting?”

  “Oh, no, please don’t.”

  “You didn’t know, I gather, that he was to be the Cattericks’ guest this evening?”

  “No. And as what I had to say to him was—important, I mustn’t miss.”

  “ ‘Must not’?” A lifting of Neil Callender’s tawny brows queried the strength of the phrase, and Tessa wondered what would have been his reaction if she had said “dared not”—which would have been nearer the truth. But he went on: “And when you found he was here—presumably as escort to Miss Lejour—was what you had to say to him important enough for you to have to invite that particular snub?” His nod towards the dark lawns was eloquent.

  Tessa’s fingers tightened on the rail of the wrought-iron work guarding the window. “Important enough to me,” she said.

  “I see.” He allowed the ensuing pause to lengthen, and she knew that conversation forbade the further question which, on a sudden wild impulse, she longed to answer.

  She wanted Neil Callender to know that everything was over between herself and Rex! What was more, she wanted him to know it so badly that she was willing to risk his thinking she was playing for his sympathy by volunteering it.

  It was that need which made her reply: “They happened to be important things because on my side I meant them to be—final ones which couldn’t be left unsaid.”

  “Final?” His hands drove deep into the pockets of his dinner jacket and on an oddly savage note he asked: “D’you expect me to comment on that? If so, what would you like me to say?”

  “I—just wanted you to know,” said Tessa lamely, not wanting to define even to herself why she did.

  At that his hand rested briefly on hers. He said more gently: “I’m sorry if I’m proving a poor confidant. But I’m afraid I was remembering—and distrusting—the way you spoke Girling’s name when I came upon you just now and you mistook me for him. The note in your voice then, I thought, hadn’t held any finalities that I recognised.”

  Tessa flushed. “It was only this morning that I learned the last thing which told me quite certainly that we—he and I—couldn’t go on, and I don’t think it’s possible to switch off caring for someone as you’d snap out a light.”

  “No. Tell me then, if it’ll help—”

  Suddenly, however, she was shy. She thought, I mustn’t whine—and saw with humiliating clarity that she had little enough to whine about.

  For the stark truth was that Rex had cheated her of nothing because he had promised nothing, and he had probably regarded even the petty deceits which sickened her as no more than the small change of a relationship without past or future, and so of no account.

  She was surprised, almost shocked, that already she could stand objectively outside three years of feeling for Rex without being racked by, How am I going to bear this? And remembering that in the telephone booth her mind had separated loving from a desire to be fair to him, now she knew why. It was because for longer than she wanted to admit, their affair had become as meaningless a record as a dead account in a ledger, and Camille’s revelations this morning had done no more than score it finally through.

  The interval bell was sounding to recall the audience to their seats, but though the wide gallery gradually emptied her companion continued to watch her questioningly until she said: “The details don’t matter. But just now, when I think you were deploring the sort of tenacity which hangs on beyond all dignity and common sense, I wanted to tell you that everyone has to reach their own point of—letting go.”

  “And
you’ve only just reached yours? Forgive me, but haven’t you deliberately turned your back on the decision? Why, even I have seen you slighted, lied to, made use of—”

  “Please!” Tessa bit her lip. “Don’t you see that looking back on it is bad enough, without having to remember that you—I mean, that it had witnesses all along the way?”

  “I couldn’t help being there on certain of the occasions,” he reminded her.

  “How you must have despised me!”

  “On the contrary, I had reluctantly to admire a quality that seems to be common to women in love.”

  “What quality?”

  “A forbearance which, in its non-acceptance of defeat, comes close to the sublime. Men don’t have it in anything like the same degree. As idealists, we judge more harshly than women who, as realists, expect less and so find it natural to forgive and be kind.”

  Tessa said slowly: “You were more right when you said my fault lay in not wanting to know I was being deceived—or why. There were signs I ought to have read, I know. But Rex could always explain them away, and when you are very sure of your own feelings, you don’t expect to have to probe every motive or action of the person you love.”

  “And you love Girling.”

  “I did love him—yes.” Though Tessa had felt compelled to answer the dispassionate statement as if it had been a question.

  But Neil Callender shook his head at her use of the past tense. “I’d like to believe, for your sake, that you’d already written ‘finis’ across the whole wretched business—and then torn out the page. But somehow”—he regarded her in grave appraisal—”I’d judge that the sort of love you’d give wouldn’t, as you said yourself, snap out just like that—even at the instance of damaged pride. I’d like to think it’s going to be easy for you to say, ‘I loved him. He let me down badly. So now I don’t.’ But it isn’t, you know—at all.”

  “I don’t hope that forgetting all he has meant in my life will be easy,” Tessa murmured.

  “No, and one keys oneself to one’s big scene—of accusation or renunciation or whatever it may be—not admitting that the concert-pitch of the most justifiable wrath doesn’t last to sustain one for ever. After the showdown—the lonely, treacherous hours. Ever; damnable times when you can almost persuade yourself you threw something valuable away, times when you’d trade your very integrity to get it back on any terms.”