Pain stabbed her foot and she answered perversely, “What shine there was.”
He shot another look, and when he stared back at the road his jaw was steel, the mouth narrow. He drove on in silence, the car beams picking out the road between the cork trees. The box jumped again on the back seat but he made no sign of having heard it. It was about eight o’clock, thought Linda. He was bent on getting home in time for dinner with Maxine.
By now, of course, Maxine would be getting irritable. She would have heard from Anna that Linda was out with Philip. It all seemed very remote from this car speeding through the darkness. Linda even recalled, vaguely, that she had hoped to mention the dilemma of Carmen to Artino to Philip Frensham. He was now about as approachable as a panther; and, in any case, it was difficult to realize the importance of anything which had nothing to do with Philip and her own physical pain.
The foot, she thought, looking down at it surreptitiously in the dimness, was swollen and bruised. The sandal strapping cut across her toes, and she spared a hollow moment to be glad she had not been wearing stockings; at least she was saved a ruined pair.
They came into a Montelisa which palely reflected the weekend mood of Valdez, and the car sailed up the hill to stop outside Philip’s house.
“Seeing that you’re dining with me,” he said tersely, “you may as well tidy up in my bathroom. There’s no time for either of us to change.”
In low tones she said, “I won’t have dinner with you, if you don’t mind. I’m rather tired.”
“You can leave early, but you have to eat.” His door was open and he had already flung out one leg.
She replied quickly. “I’m not hungry—truly. Please. I want to go home.”
He sat back, then swiftly snapped on the interior ear lights and studied her. She knew her expression was dispirited and that her nose shone, but she was not aware that pain had drawn in her mouth and painted shadows under her eyes.
“You did have some sort of shock,” he said sharply. “What was it?”
“I’m all right. Just let me go home,” she pleaded.
“What was it?” he repeated, almost savagely.
All the way from Valdez she had been determined to say nothing about her mishap on the square. It was bad enough annoying him; a small injury displayed in mitigation would verge on anticlimax. She had told herself that she had only to walk nonchalantly into her own cottage. After that, if she wished, she could collapse. She still felt it was the best way to handle the situation. So she swung open her door.
She was standing outside when he came round to her, but now he didn’t even look at her. He shoved open his own gate.
“Come along,” he said brusquely.
But the foot wouldn’t bend. She tried to make it do so, and stumbled. He caught her by the shoulders, gazed in consternation at the dead pallor of her face, and swept her up into his arms. Within two minutes she was half lying among the brilliant cushions on the leather sofa in his sitting-room, and he was bent, furious and astonished, over the foot. And standing at the head of the sofa, her eyes hard as stones as they moved over the honey-brown curls and ashen face, was Maxine.
Linda took a gulp from the whisky glass Philip held to her lips, and shuddered. She wanted them to leave her alone, to go into the next room and eat while she rested and perhaps slept. Hate stabbed at her from the green eyes, and an imprisoned fury from the grey. She couldn’t cope with either. She turned her face into the bright pillow to shut them out.
Despairingly, she felt him snip the shoe from her foot. She would a thousand times rather have borne the pain of easing it off than wreck the shoe, but it was no use telling him that. No use telling him, either, that she could look after a couple of bruised toes herself. Warm water washed gratefully over the wounds. Fingers gently explored the phalanges and metatarsals, found something which sent a rigid shiver up her spine.
In an odd voice he said, “I believe you’ve broken a bone in the second toe. I’m going to take you up the coast to Dr. Reeves.”
It was Maxine who replied. “Surely tomorrow morning will do, Philip? She’d far better go home and get to bed.”
“I know it may seem to you like cruelty,” he said, “but I don’t see it that way. It’s not so very late, and Reeves will look after her at once. He runs a nursing home and lives very near it. Leave this to me.”
Linda knew he had gone from the room, because finger nails dug like talons into her shoulder. She twisted, and opened weary eyes.
“Tell him you refuse to go!” commanded Maxine in a whisper. “There’s nothing wrong with your foot that time won’t heal.”
“You’ll have to deal with him,” said Linda dully. “I can’t.”
“Well, stop shamming and get up on your feet! Don’t flatter yourself you look pretty and helpless. You’re a sight!”
As if Linda cared how she looked! As if she wouldn’t give anything to be in her own bed! She pushed up into a sitting position, stretched her leg and rested the heel gingerly on the floor. Her hair fell about her forehead and she raked it back with a shaking hand. Maxine withdrew herself, fastidiously. She was regal in stiff yellow silk and a pearl collaret; her mouth had thinned into a red line and her nostrils flared whitely.
“You’ll get nowhere by working for his sympathy,” she said very quietly, each word a splinter of ice. “He’s not a boy, to be taken in by a show of stoicism and innocence. How did you get him to take you out with him this afternoon?”
Linda could not grapple with the insult implicit in the words. “Is it important?” she said. “I did go and I did have a slight accident, but there’s no reason at all why it should spoil your dinner engagement.”
“Then go home—now!” I’ll manage Philip!”
“Do I walk barefoot?”
Maxine’s teeth snapped. “You’re being awkward, aren’t you! You think you’re getting back at me for the way I treated your miserable brother. Very well, we’ll see who wins in the long run.”
The vindictiveness in her tone petered out towards the end, because footsteps were audible, crossing the diningroom. When Philip came into the room she was smiling, and her hand actually hovered above Linda’s head, as if she had been stroking back the hair.
He was carrying a pad of lint and one of his own socks. “Just for protection,” he said, as he bent to press on the one and slide the other over it. “Does the toe give you gyp, Linda?”
“It’s not too bad. I think it can easily wait for attention till tomorrow.”
“Don’t be an idiot. Reeves’s house isn’t more than four miles away. He’s a good chap.”
“Don’t you think,” asked Maxine with studious calmness, “that we should get in touch with Sebastian and let him decide? After all, he has more rights where Linda’s concerned than either you or I.”
Philip pause, almost imperceptibly, and then straightened. “I don’t see what rights have to do with it. The foot needs medical attention and I’m going to see that it gets it. My servant will give you dinner, Maxine. You may as well have it while it’s fresh, and I should be back in an hour. But don’t wait here if you’d rather not.”
What with the burning ache of the foot and revulsion from Maxine, Linda was now beyond making any comment. When Philip drew her carefully up she let him take her weight, and to Maxine’s shallow enquiry as to how she felt she returned no answer at all. She was carried along, powerless, by a Philip who was very gentle but oddly more aloof than he had been earlier, on the way back from Valdez.
In the car, once they were moving swiftly, she understood the meaning of his withdrawal.
“The stiff upper lip can be overdone,” he said, without much expression. “You intended keeping quiet about the accident, didn’t you?”
“I don’t think, it’s serious,” she replied stubbornly.
“How did it come about?”
“I was thrust rather too close to a donkey cart and the wheel went over my foot.”
His face tightened; s
o did his long brown fingers as he drove, but he did not look her way. “I expect you felt very noble, keeping it to yourself. You probably gained a sort of perverted satisfaction from letting me shout at you and tip you into the car.”
She looked out at the dark shapes of the trees. “Would you have had me weep all over you?”
He took a moment or two before answering this. “You wouldn’t have acted so unnaturally with anyone else. I wonder why you did it with me?” But he didn’t sound as though he wondered; he gave the impression of knowing only too well in his own mind and being both contemptuous and angry about it.
Linda found herself saying, “I can’t help it if you make me feel inadequate. When I’m with you I do my best to rise to your set of standard and if I don’t quite reach it I try camouflage.” A heat rising in her throat, she added, “Expecting a woman to be natural in your exalted company is asking a little too much. You see, some of us...”
“Be quiet!” he interrupted curtly.
If she could have moved further away from him she would have done so. Her heart was pounding uncomfortably, and unaccountably she wanted to quarrel with him, quarrel bitterly and with finality. And seeing that no man had ever affected her in such a fashion before, Linda also felt she was being unfairly used.
An occasional light shone now through the trees to the left. On Philip’s side the sea washed among the rocks, not very far below the road, and soon they were running alongside a beach and the houses were much closer together. This hamlet, a kind of afterthought to Montelisa, was known as Monteliseta. It was here that the English colony, and the more literary and artistic of the Spaniards, had their being. Philip nodded at a long, well-lighted building.
“The nursing home,” he said briefly, and a minute later the car swerved round the drive of the next house and pulled up at the foot of a flight of shallow steps.
Even in her stress, Linda had to admit that it was all accomplished with consummate urbanity and ease. Philip went with her into the surgery, and he was even present when she was taken into the X-ray room of the nursing home. He made teasing remarks and occasionally gave her a smile, but something about him quenched even the beginnings of enchantment. There came a moment, when he pressed her shoulder and murmured good night, that she looked up at him from her bed, and knew. Knew that she would never be free, peaceful and heartwhole again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE sun was high when she awakened and bees were droning around the neat border of flowers just beyond the french window. Linda absorbed the small sounds, breathed the scent of heliotrope and eventually took in the antiseptic whiteness of the small room. Her memory stirred and cautiously she moved first her ankle under the bedclothes, then her toes in their dressing. Sore, decidedly sore, but the one in plaster seemed to have no feeling at all. Still, one didn’t have to remain in bed with a sore foot.
Her watch, on the narrow white bedside locker, said a quarter to ten. Whatever it was that Dr. Reeves had made her swallow at something after midnight had certainly done its job. She felt as if she had been asleep for ever.
She pulled herself up in the bed and swung out her legs. White cotton pyjamas, on the large side and fashioned to last rather than for appearance. The left foot so grotesque that she would have to wear espadrilles and her other foot very small and pale in comparison. On the whole, she thought, staring out at the exceedingly trim grounds, she felt very well. Particularly, she liked the pleasant, blank sensation in her mind.
She had been sitting that way for about five minutes when the doctor came in. Because Hugh Reeves was that kind of man, she smiled at him and decided against hurriedly sliding back between the sheets.
He was a spare man, and not yet forty, but his eyes had a tired, jaded look, which he himself ascribed to the fact of his having championed too many lost causes. He had doctored British troops in Egypt and India, had fought disease in infested swamp country and even founded a leper colony. Only when his own health had cracked up had he settled among the fashionable, but, he had been heard to allude to himself as the nearest thing to a failure. Not bitterly, because that was not his nature, but philosophically and with a nod of warning to his listener.
This morning, in his spruce light suit with a gardenia in the lapel, he had the demeanor of the successful practitioner, but there was a companionable air about him which reminded Linda of the night before, when he had chatted away to Philip about all kinds of things while rigging her up for X-ray.
“Hallo,” he said. “Taking flight?”
“Not exactly; I haven’t my clothes. You let me sleep awfully late.”
“It won’t hurt you, once in a while. Any pain with the foot?”
“Only when I move it.”
He drew up the hard white enamelled chair and sat down. He wasn’t exactly smiling as he regarded her, but a crinkle appeared at the corner of each brown eye. They were nice eyes, she decided; kind and thoughtful. And the touch of grey at the temples suited him.
“The nurse will bring you some breakfast and your clothes, presently. As a matter of fact, Philip said you weren’t to be let out of bed before lunch.”
She grimaced. “He hands out orders as if any place in which he sets foot automatically comes under his command. Do you know him very well?”
“Oh, yes. When I was in Egypt a few years ago he was working there, too. We’ve met, at intervals, ever since.” His glance at her was shrewd and faintly amused. “He’s not very tolerant of young women, is he? Though I thought he curbed his exasperation with you very well last night, and I was glad to have him on hand to carry you about. My staff is small and the night nurse was busy.”
“I’m very grateful for all you did.”
“It wasn’t much. The break is clean and will heal fairly quickly. As soon as the bruised tissues of the rest of your foot will allow it, you’ll be able to walk normally, though it may be a couple of months before you can wear fancy shoes. Philip said you were planning to go home in two or three weeks.”
That rather delightful blankness began to recede. “I may go even sooner,” she said, a little offhandedly.
He stood up. “When you decide you must let me know. I’ll give you a letter for your doctor.” He paused. “I was a friend of your aunt’s, you know; her doctor, too. You resemble her, a little.”
“Several people have said that, but no one seems able to tell me very much about her. I wish I understood just how she felt about ... several things.”
He looked at his watch “I have to finish my round, but we’ll find time for a chat later. When you’ve eaten and done the best you can with a bath, go out and sit on the veranda. I’ll come there when I’m through.” He gave her a friendly smile and went out.
To avoid having to bother with the ache which was beginning to form about her heart, Linda straightway took half an hour in the bathroom and about fifteen minutes over dressing. Someone had put the white nylon through water and given it a touch up with a cool iron, and the same considerate person, probably, had placed toilet articles on the bedside locker. Linda made a mental note not to omit her thanks, and eventually emerged from the room feeling clean, and presentable, if not quite joyful.
She sat in one of the long chairs in the veranda, her feet bare to the warm breeze. She was glad the other french doors were closed and precluded conversation, but it wasn’t easy to settle with a magazine, either. A tyrannical, obsessive emotion to which she dared not give a name seemed to drive out all ordinary feeling. It was with a sense of gratitude that she welcomed Dr. Reeves, when he came and sat in one of the ordinary basket chairs at her side.
She dropped the magazine to the floor, and because her nerves were not too steady she spoke first. “This is a beautiful spot for a nursing home. I haven’t been this way before.”
“I like it, too. Actually, to build a nursing home and run it under an Englishman was rather a venture, but it’s turning out well. I co-operate with a Spanish doctor in Montelisa and take his urgent patients on hospital t
erms, and I have several patients of my own among the grape and olive growers inland. We seldom have an empty bed.” He offered her cigarettes, and when she had shaken her head, lit one himself. “Your aunt helped me to get established, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know,” she said quickly, interested. “How did she help?”
“Not financially. I don’t think she ever had a great deal of ready cash. But she had plenty of influence and a zest for seeing awkward things turn out right. My setting up here was something of a challenge and she told me herself that she intended to test me before using her influence for my benefit.” He laughed a little. “She sent me an old man with a chronic stiff leg and guaranteed to pay his bills if I cured him. We had a ticklish time here persuading the chap to have knee surgery, and he made things as difficult as he could for us by refusing to bend the knee even after it was cured. But we got through.”
“Good for you.” She smiled at him, liking him even more. “I know what you mean about my aunt’s zest for seeing awkward things turn out right. She’s placed me in a horrid spot.”
“Really? I can’t imagine her doing that. She was fond of you.”
Linda conjectured for a moment, and decided that Hugh Reeves was her doctor; therefore she could tell him anything. So she asked, “Do you know Sebastian de Meriaga?”
“Of course,” he said easily. “He practically lived with your aunt during the last fortnight of her life, when I was attending her daily.”
“Did you know that Aunt Natalie intended us to marry?”
He blew out smoke. “Yes, I believe I did. I had no notion who you were, of course, but I do remember wondering how your aunt proposed to achieve it. She always had a plan for everything.”
“She had a plan all right,” said Linda ruefully. “May I tell you about it?”
He listened all the way through without offering comment beyond a raised brow or a quick smile of understanding. She left out nothing, not even Carmen Artino’s seemingly hopeless love for the young Spaniard. She was determined to do what she could for Carmen.
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