by Jane Arbor
She parted her lips; he bent closer. She said: “I’m not—” and stopped as the outline of his face blurred and went out of focus when his mouth came down on hers in a kiss that was even more eloquent than that first broken phrase.
Her eyelids fluttered, dropped. Actually kissing her in the belief that she was Jessie was a worse mistake still—But as the darkness of unconsciousness gathered once more, somehow she could not care.
She did not come to again until she opened her eyes on a room that was not her own but was familiar enough. So were the muted sounds which came vaguely to her ears; so were the shadows cast by the shaded light above the end of the bed. She could even hazily identify herself with the girl in a winged cap who rose instantly from her bedside as she stirred.
She was back at St. Faith’s. She was on night duty. No, that was wrong. She was at St. Faith’s, but it was someone else who was on night duty, and it must be someone else again who was keeping up that ceaseless hammering inside her head. She wouldn’t be doing that herself, would she? It hurt too much. Besides, her right hand had become a numb, shapeless mass of dressings which couldn’t have wielded a hammer if it tried. And even if, in the morning, Matron demanded an explanation as to why a nurse who was supposed to be on night duty was in bed instead, for the moment it was simpler to drift back into the mists where everything was blurred and where it even seemed possible that it had been the right man who had kissed her, wanting to do it because he knew who she was and hadn’t mistaken her for anyone else at all...
That clouded unreality and bewilderment persisted beyond the confines of the night into a day where she knew that she was gently attended, that she was not often left alone, but that thought people consulted in low tones at her bedside they did not try to drag her from the torpor which was her refuge from pain.
When she woke naturally at last she learned that time had jumped about seventy-two hours since she had last taken an interest in its passing. But though her thudding headache had stopped, leaving behind a sharp clarity of mind which she had heard was often the rewarding aftermath of migraine, she still did not get answers to all the questions she wanted to ask.
She was soothed with: “Tomorrow,” and “Lie quietly,” and promised she might have visitors in a day or two if she were “good.” Hilary looked in every day, but it was nearly a week before anyone not on the staff of St. Faith’s was allowed to visit her, and then to her pleased surprise her first visitor was Judith Wake.
By that time she knew more details of the accident which had put her where she was. Apparently, before leaving for the day, the workmen had thought it safe to remove their “Danger. Blasting In Progress” notice from the outer gate, not foreseeing either the likelihood or the magnitude of a further collapse of masonry, due to the rising wind. Tessa’s own trouble had been severe concussion, many bruises and the badly abraded arm and hand which were still in bandages. Jessie had escaped more lightly with a deep cut or two and a wrenched shoulder caused by Tessa’s effort to throw her clear. But after one night she had been considered well enough to be sent for convalescence to her home in Ludlow. So she had not seen Tessa since the accident, though she and Dr. Pilley had sent their combined good wishes and flowers.
“That reminds me—” Tessa chuckled as she passed their humorous “Get Well” card for Judith to see. “Just before the wall came down, Nurse Cutlow had asked me if I’d seen Dr. Pilley. But though I hadn’t, as soon as I came round he was kneeling at my side, shovelling the debris barehanded and under the impression, of course, that it was Jessie he was digging free!”
Judith looked up from the card. “Dr. Pilley thought?
Why, Neil said! I mean, I heard you weren’t even conscious!”
“Conscious enough,” claimed Tessa laughing, “to hear myself being called by Jessie’s name and even being kissed in mistake for her! They’re engaged, you see, and I suppose it was understandable. He was expecting to meet Jessie in the courtyard and he knew nothing about my being there. Besides, we’d just agreed we aren’t unlike each other. Covered in brick dust, we could probably pass for twins.”
“But?” Judith broke off to query: “Have you taxed Dr. Pilley with this serious error in loyalty on his part?”
Tessa said: “No, but I’ve been trying to compose an answer to their card which would hint at it in some roundabout way. But I haven’t thought of anything suitable yet. In any case, he must know by now that he kissed the wrong girl.”
“Does he, I wonder?”
“But of course he must! He and Jessie are bound to have talked the whole thing over and over, the way people do. He knows, and he’ll have told Jessie. The joke is that, if I was believed to be unconscious at the time, they may not realise that I know too. That’s probably why they didn’t refer to it on their card. They’re saving it up against me, the wretches!”
“Couldn’t they doubt, perhaps, that you might not care for being kissed by mistake?” offered Judith with a smile.
“Oh, they couldn’t! Why, as a story against myself I can go on telling it for weeks!”
To that Judith queried on an oddly amused note: “Then you’ll tell it to Neil when he comes to see you?”
“When he? You mean, Dr. Callender might come with you if I’m here long enough for you to come again?”
Judith said drily: “I didn’t mean that. He wants to see you, I know. Wouldn’t you grant him an audience alone?”
Tessa flushed. “Of course. Only—Well surely you wouldn’t care for him to visit me alone?”
Judith, who had risen and was drawing on her gloves, sat down again. Tolerantly, as if humouring a child, she said: “I can’t think why. Good friends as Neil and I are, I’m still not his keeper, you know!”
When Tessa flinched with surprise at her choice of phrase she added ruefully: “Oh, dear, now what have I said? You hadn’t any idea, surely, that he and I were more than friends?”
“I—” Tessa’s lips parted drily. Moistening them, she plunged again: “I’d thought you were going to marry, yes. Perhaps I jumped to conclusions too soon, but—”
“My dear child! What possible evidence did you imagine you had for that?”
Judith sounded baffled but not annoyed. Encouraged, Tessa said: “Forgive me, but I thought it was so. Dr. Callender had—”
“Neil for short,” interposed Judith.
“Well Neil had once said of you that he cared for you differently from the way he cared for any other woman. Another time he said that knowing you was a valuable experience he wanted me to share. At the time I was rather proud that he should. And then ... together you seem to have achieved a sort ... of peace in each other’s company that’s good to watch even from outside. Other people believed the same thing. Nurse Hatfield, for one. And if that sounds as if we’d discussed your private affairs, I think it’s because people like to believe they know happiness may be building up nearby.”
Judith advised crisply: “Don’t worry about that. I’d rather be talked about than dead. And perhaps all this is Neil’s fault, for saying things in a two-edged way that you didn’t understand. But, for instance, he never said he loved me, did he?”
“No, not that.” Tessa’s whisper barely shaped the words.
“No, well—Take ‘differently.’ You hadn’t thought, I suppose, that his feeling for me—and mine for him—could be quite different from love as it’s understood between a man and a woman? There are other ways of caring, you know!”
Tessa nodded. “But, having seen you together, wasn’t it natural to think that ‘differently’ did mean that he had set you above and apart from other women?”
“That was your own romantic projection into something that wasn’t said and doesn’t exist,” smiled Judith. “No, what Neil meant was that we have achieved a friendship that’s without any emotional trespass on either side. There never has been any; there never could be. Brothers and sisters accept each other in exactly the same way. In this case—elder sister, younger brother. I’m eight
years older than Neil. I’m forty-three.”
Tessa looked wonderingly at the smooth serenity of Judith’s face beneath the lifted wings of dark hair. She puzzled aloud: “But I thought you and he had trained for medicine together?”
“Roughly, yes. But I came to it late. I’d done other things before I realized that medicine and nothing else was my vocation. And after Peter, my husband, was killed, I had a desperate need to come back to it for all that it could do for me, as well as for what I could do for other people through it.” Judith paused before adding: “It was then, more than at any time, that having Neil for a friend helped. Looking back, I think I couldn’t have gone on or even taken a single step for myself without him.”
Tessa murmured: “Friendship like that must be very valuable—and quite rare.”
“As valuable on both sides, I hope, as Neil claimed to you. And rare? Yes, that too. But you see, for us there were the conditions which made it possible for a platonic friendship, first of all to exist at all, and then to last.”
“Conditions? What sort?” queried Tessa.
“That both of us loved elsewhere. Not being heartwhole, neither of us ever craved to offer or to take more than a passionless friendship could stand.”
That left a question which Tessa dared not ask. Instead, stating, not asking, she said: “You were in love with Peter, your husband.”
“Yes, all the time. And for Neil there was a girl. I knew her, though not well. She turned to him on the rebound, as it’s called, from a disastrous affair with a worthless creature who let her down badly. Neil loved her deeply and waited with an almost divine patience and forbearance for her to forget the other man. And then, almost on the eve of marrying Neil, she went back, although by then her lover was involved with yet another girl.” Judith shook her head as at a distasteful memory. “It was horrible and cheap, yet Neil cared so much for her that anything like ‘I told you so’ or ‘She was never worth it’ would have been insults that he wouldn’t have taken even from Peter or me. We could only watch him suffer—and stand by.”
Taken so far into Judith’s confidence, Tessa ventured: “Is Dr.—I mean, Neil—still in love with her?”
Judith rose again. “My dear, this was years ago. Neil has had all his native sanity and the work that he loves on his side since then.” As she made a business of massaging her gloves to each finger she added thoughtfully, “No, he has long grown out and away from her. But he still carries her mark like an ugly knot spoiling a lovely grain of wood.”
“Her mark?” echoed Tessa.
“Yes. Since, he has believed that a jilted girl will always be looking over her shoulder at ‘might-have-beens.’ He said once that any man who was fool enough to want her to take him as second best would always have to fear that she might destroy her own future and his by clutching at any straw of hope that she’d merely misread the signs and that she had never really been jilted at all. From there, Neil said, you’d hardly see her for dust on her way back.”
That was confirmed for Tessa by a memory of her own. Of Neil’s voice urging, “After the showdown, the lonely, treacherous hours when you can almost believe you threw something valuable away—times when you’d trade your very integrity to get it back.” So he had thought, then, that she might be as weak as that!
Aloud she said to Judith: “That’s too cruel a generalisation.”
“So I told him. But that’s what I mean by a knot that’s unworthy of him and quite out of character. Because no man could be as good a doctor as Neil and a cynic at the same time.”
“And yet he lets himself believe this?”
“He claimed to, the last time we talked of it, though that was some time ago. He tried, I remember, to dismiss my arguments by saying ‘I don’t deceive myself into thinking that history doesn’t repeat itself, Judith dear.’ But I only laughed and told him he had still a great deal to learn about women and even about love. Because,” added Judith, ready to go, “it probably takes a woman to know that history is nothing if it’s not about people. And people have never been known to repeat themselves exactly yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
So Neil Callender and Judith were not in love! Looking back, Tessa saw that every sign that they were could point equally to the friendship without passion which Judith had described. And Neil, Judith said, had long “grown out of and away from” that other girl who had betrayed him in the end. That meant—Tessa tested the hope as guardedly as she would have ventured on a quicksand—that he was free to love again if he would let himself believe that he was no “second best” but chosen, loved for his courage, for his spirit, for all that made him the man he was
Both her hands sped to her flaming cheeks as she saw where the thought had led her—to admit at last to a hope, forbidden while she believed he would marry Judith Wake, but now free for honesty to face, if not to build on.
How long since Rex Girling had first appeared as a mere handsome cut-out against the tremendous importance to her of Neil Callender? Was it that night when she had defied both their wills and had not even known when Rex had slammed out of her old friend’s flat without her? Or even earlier still—within the first minutes, the first hour!—when Rex’s guilty silence had handed her over to Neil’s caustic blame? Oh, she knew now why Rex’s defection to Camille had seared her pride but not her heart! For though loyalty to Rex remained, even then her heart had been given into Neil’s keeping.
For a while there was relief and wonder merely in knowing that every contact with him which she valued had not, after all, been disloyalties to Judith of which she must be ashamed. But that was not enough for long. Presently she was craving to read into each tiny memory a meaning it could never hold while that enduring core of bitterness prevented Neil from loving again.
Soberly she had to tell herself that for him nothing in the situation had changed. He was not in love with Judith Wake, but that didn’t add up, did it, to his loving Tessa Greve just because she had faced at last the fact that she was in love with him? All the same, immediately ahead there was a promise of which no misgivings could cheat her. He was coming to see her. He had told Judith so. And on this side of a meeting he had deliberately sought, if only out of kindness, wasn’t it excusable for love to dream a few dreams...?
He did not come until the day before she was due to leave hospital. Sister, who ushered him in, appeared to be under the impression that he was making a semi-professional visit and gave him Tessa’s case history in some detail. Neil co-operated with a question or two, and when Sister had left them together he commented drily: “A busman’s holiday for me. Obviously, in Sister’s view, that’s all you are! My mistake, of course. I should have brought you flowers. I didn’t because Judith said you are going out tomorrow and I thought you might like to be welcomed by some at your Hat instead. By the way, too, I’ve checked on the time you leave and I’ve asked Nurse Hatfield to see you safely in. She’s willing to move in with you for a night or two as well if you’d care to have her.”
“Oh, no, she needn’t. I’m perfectly all right,” protested Tessa. “But how kind of you to think of it—of the flowers, I mean, and foreseeing that I mightn’t care to be alone!”
Neil shrugged. “A fellow-feeling merely. There’s a particular bleakness about returning to a place that’s been empty for a time even of only oneself. In any case, don’t you think you should take a few day’s holiday?”
“I don’t think so. Actually I’m tired of being idle and longing to get back to work. Besides, Nurse Hatfield says the district is getting very busy again.”
He nodded and frowned. “Yes, and though I go tomorrow, Judith still hasn’t anyone to take my place in the practice “
For Tessa the world seemed to tilt ... “You’re—going away?” she faltered. “Leaving the practice? Leaving The Chase?”
He glanced at her as if puzzled by the plunging dismay she had not been able to hide. Then he laughed—a little pleased laugh which in turn puzzled her. He said: “You make
me sound as indispensable as we’re all assured we’re not! But no—I only meant that I’m off to attend a medical Congress in Holland for a month and that all our efforts haven’t tracked down a locum to help Judith yet. However, that’s our headache—” He broke off to indicate the book she had put aside when he arrived. “What are you reading there?”
As Tessa showed him and they talked of the book and its author she had the curious impression that for some reason he had shared her embarrassment over her foolish mistake, even that his change of subject had been a sheering back, as from a cliff edge which dropped unexpectedly away. The thought that he could even have read her secret in her tone, in the betraying flood of colour from her throat, did not help at all.
He went on to ask how she had spent her convalescent time, what visitors she had had.
“Far more than I expected,” she told him. “Even people from Civil Defence whom I hardly knew.”
“From your own district too, I daresay?”
“Yes, several from there.”
“And from Usherwood?”
“Sir Bartram was called into consultation over me the first night, and while I still wasn’t allowed to see anyone Lady Catterick called with hothouse grapes and flowers. I wrote to thank her, but she hasn’t been again.”
“Nor anyone else from there?”
“No one else,” she told him, her voice steady and her eyes meeting his.
In the little pause which followed she wondered why she had counted so much upon a meeting which she might have known must be frittered away, minute by precious minute as far as she was concerned, in just such sick-room Smalltalk. And as she told herself yet again that for Neil Callender nothing had changed since they last met, she saw that he was looking at his watch, was preparing to go.
Before he rose, however, he took something from an inner pocket; handed it across to her.
