My Surgeon Neighbour Page 6

  Sarah laughed. “I’ve found that with Trevor’s kind it often works wonders. They can’t bear to feel no one notices or minds their being as ‘awk’ard’ as they know how. It pricks their self-assurance somehow, I suppose,” she finished vaguely.

  He looked down at her and smiled. “Blood-letting for the swollen heads of the nursery, eh? You’re something of a pocket psychologist as well as a nurse, aren’t you Sarah Sanstead?”

  “When you mean to specialize in children’s nursing, you have to be both.” (‘Sarah Sanstead’ ... she liked that. There was friendliness to it.) As she spoke she was opening the front door to Dr. Carrage and Tony; she left the two men to exchange some cursory words while she took Tony back to Trevor and when she returned Oliver Mansbury had gone.

  Steven Carrage was in slacks and sports’ shirt and said this was his night off surgery duty; he wasn’t making a professional call, just bringing Tony to return Keith Tilling’s stamp album before Keith left for home on Saturday. But at Sarah’s invitation he came in and followed her into the small room behind the dayroom which she used as both her office and her private den.

  He accepted a glass of sherry and seemed glad to relax in her company. He described the rota system by which he and his two seniors got an evening to themselves once every ten days, “A stark necessity to enable one to unwind,” he commented, making Sarah glad she hadn’t taken the opportunity to ask his help with some medical forms with which she was having some difficulty. They discussed the news and watched the children from the window; then he glanced idly at the open bookshelf at his elbow and indicated the spine of one of the books with his forefinger.

  “ ‘McDougall on Psychology’ ”—don’t you find that rather heavy fare?” he queried.

  Sarah smiled. “Well, he’s hardly bedside reading, I admit. But I have read him, and if you have too, you must agree that he does give one some pointers as to what makes people—children particularly—tick?”

  “And you feel that in your job you need to know how children tick?”

  “I do indeed. It makes managing them so much easier,” Sarah broke off to laugh. “It’s odd that I should be taxed with dabbling in child-psychology twice in one evening. After something I had said, Mr. Mansbury teased me for airing my views on it too!”

  “And do I take it that as long as McDougall and Co. can furnish you with a set of rules, or pointers, didn’t you call them? you feel you can cut most of your charges down to size?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Good heavens, no. I get as floored and as baffled by children’s motives and reactions as anybody. I’d only claim that a pointer or two may help. But no one behaves exactly according to ‘the rules,’ because if they did they wouldn’t be people, they’d be computers.”

  “Exactly. But at least children’s motives haven’t usually had time to get as mixed or as warped as other folks’ have. After all, where would the psycho-analysis chaps be for a living if amateurs like you could untangle people’s twisted impulses just with the help of books or by sheer native wit? Or if anyone at all could hope to unravel their own?”

  Sarah said, “Now you’re putting me in my place! Of course ordinary amateurs like me can only grope around. For instance, my methods are so primitive that I treat children and baby animals in much the same way. When they’re intent on something horrid, I try to turn their interests on to something else. You’d be surprised how often it works!”

  “I’d be surprised and gratified if it were half as simple to reduce any given adult to his or her opposite number in the animal kingdom!” her companion retorted. “There just aren’t any rules to cover some people’s motives or reactions to pressure. I’ve seen the seemingly most sane and balanced and happy of people to go off the rails at a touch.” He paused as if undecided whether to say any more. Then: “I’m quoting a particular example. Care to hear it out?” he asked.

  Sarah, surprised by his switch from generalities, nodded.

  “Well, I knew a woman, not a patient, of course, who seemed to have everything, from a husband she loved and who loved her, to a child whom she adored. They understood each other and they did everything together. Not rich, but not poor and no worries. Until one day—suddenly, so far as the man knew, though it could hardly have been a sudden decision for her—she left him and her child, though still declaring on paper that she ‘loved’ them.

  “She didn’t go alone. Women—” his tone was bitter—“rarely do, do they? They believe in defence in depth.”

  “Oh Doctor Carrage, that’s not fair! When men leave home, they don’t usually go alone either!” Sarah protested.

  “All right. But—this woman couldn’t even explain why she went, except that she was drawn to something in the other man which she didn’t think she ‘loved’ but which she couldn’t resist. Anyway, whichever it was, its call was strong enough to take her and keep her away, so that her husband couldn’t get at what she and their child hadn’t been able to give her. What ‘rules’ could cover a situation like that, I’d like to know? Because she wasn’t just wanton. I never knew anyone who meant so well, so desperately well, as she did.”

  Sarah listened with dismay. Either she was hearing the betrayal of a confidence, or else this was his own, his wife’s story. With difficulty she kept her tone casual as she asked, “And has she never come back?”

  “Not to date, and she saw to it later that she lost touch. So it remains a heap of loose ends. Her husband may never know now where he failed her. Or whether the inability to ‘love’ him lay in her; or whether she was equipped to love both him and the other fellow, and of course modern thought would have us believe that that’s not only possible but even admirable.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’d hate to think it was.” Feeling herself on surer ground, for this was the faith she had tried to express to Oliver Mansbury, that love was a clear-cut thing, scintillating like the facets of a jewel for one beloved being only, she added, “I’m afraid I’ll always want to think that one loves, or one doesn’t. You can’t subdivide that kind of love, not once you’re adult enough to know what love means.”

  “Then on that reasoning, you’d be inclined to say this woman wasn’t fully adult, hadn’t really grown up?”

  “Without knowing her, yes, I think so,” said Sarah.

  “With the chance that one day she might?”

  Sarah’s small gesture was despairing. “Oh, I don’t know. Some people never do, do they?”

  There was a pause. Then. “No,” Steven Carrage agreed curtly before he stretched out a hand to pick up a near-by copy of The New Yorker which friends in America sent regularly to Sarah.

  “How do you find American humor compares with ours?” he asked, telling her as surely as she had guessed that he had given a secret of his own into her keeping, that for the moment he had deliberately closed a door upon it.

  He stayed for some time after that, indeed, until she told him it was Alice Cosford’s evening off duty and that she must see the older children to bed. Then he left, taking Tony with him, neither he nor Sarah aware that both his arrival and departure had been witnessed with some interest from next door.

  At the window of Mrs. Beacon’s sitting-room Jurice Grey stood looking out at the twilight brought down too early by gathering rain clouds.

  “And whom,” she asked suddenly of her hostess, seated behind her, “do you suppose our charming neighbour at Monckton has been entertaining for most of the evening? It’s a man, for I caught a glimpse of him going in as I came downstairs ages ago, and he’s only just leaving now.”

  Mrs. Beacon crossed over to the window. “Oh, that’s her doctor. He’s in one of the town partnerships and he acts as M.O. to her Home. But I suppose he’d have been visiting her personally tonight. For that sprain Oliver insisted on attending the other night.”

  “Well, well! All that time for a professional visit?” Jurice mocked, her voice cool and high. “Or could it be it was a social call and that Romance with a capital ‘R’ is bu
rgeoning under our very eyes?”

  Though she had hardly expected him, Trevor Boothe did condescend to join Sarah’s charges at play about as frequently as Tony Carrage did. She supposed he had decided that the indignity of consorting with ‘babies’ was cancelled out by the power afforded by his superior size and bluster. For he had the makings of a bully; he was not above lying in his own defence and Sarah knew she would have given him very short shrift if it were not for that sense of challenge; of feeling herself on trial to Oliver Mansbury in her ability to manage his nephew.

  Tony, on the other hand, was popular with everyone. Intelligent far beyond his years, he was also ingenuous and childlike and the magpie’s hoard of assorted facts and figures which his active brain carried could always be relied upon to clinch any playground argument which arose. “Well, ask Tony then—!” and “It must be, Tony says so,” and “But Tony read about it in a book!” were daily choruses which proclaimed the esteem he commanded. And little Jean Cosford’s authority was different again. For she ruled by sheer gentleness and a genius for pouring oil on troubled waters; when arguments arose Tony was the court of appeal, but it was Jean who produced the olive-branch when tempers reached flashpoint. Sarah called them both her ‘fixed stars,’ relying on them to make newcomers feel at home in an ever-changing group. But they, like the others, were apt to fall victim to Trevor’s petty malice, as happened one wet evening when Jean was discovered in tears because she had no crayons.

  It had been Jean’s own idea that past guests of Sarah’s should be kept in touch by means of home-made greeting cards after they had left. So Sarah had willingly supplied materials, paints, crayons and cartridge paper; pocket-money pence were pooled to buy stamps, and every week a batch of lovingly executed designs of steam trains, surrealist sunflowers and backward tilting houses with smoking chimneys went on their way, carrying the goodwill of Monckton to its late patients.

  But tonight Sarah found Jean dolefully “shading-in’ a fine saddleback pig in pencil and heard that he could not be executed in color because Trevor had confiscated and hidden Jean’s quota of crayons.

  Sarah quickly produced others, then tackled Trevor. He shrugged, pouted and attempted to stare her out. “I haven’t touched her crayons,” he bluffed to a shocked chorus of “Oh Trevor!” from the other children.

  Sarah laid hold on her patience. “Look, Trevor,” she said, “If Jean says you took them, I believe her. Now, did you or not?”

  He hesitated. Then, “No,” he lied.

  Sarah appealed, “Well, Jean—?”

  “Oh he did, Nurse Sanstead, he did really. Bobby and Pam saw him!” the child exclaimed.

  “So what if I did? I only did it for a joke, silly,” Trevor sulked, both the senseless lie and the unpleasantness it made typical of the disturbing element he was in an otherwise happy little community.

  More than once she had considered telling him she would rather he did not come over to Monckton again. But the repercussions of this latest brush with him took her unawares, stiffening her resolve to improve his social behaviour at all costs before she had done with him. The occasion was the following evening as she was off for an hours’ tennis at the Club and met Mrs. Beacon face to face at her gate.

  A nod and a murmured word usually sufficed as greeting between them. But tonight the older woman paused to say, “Oh Miss Sanstead, this makes an opportunity for me. Last evening Trevor came home rather distressed, saying you had accused him of lying to you over some small matter between you. Is that so?”

  Sarah nodded. “Yes, I accused him certainly. But as I had proof he was lying, what had he to be distressed about?”

  “About the injustice of it, I suppose. He was distinctively upset.”

  “ ‘Injustice’? But he hadn’t a leg to stand on!” Sarah returned hotly. “With two other children looking on, he had filched and hidden some crayons belonging to Jean Cosford and then had the face to lie about it to me. But it was only a triviality, magnified into nastiness by the fact of his lie, not his first by any means, I may say, when he has found himself cornered.” She bit her lip over her choice of an unfortunate word, but Mrs. Beacon was swift to pounce on it.”

  “ ‘Cornered’?” she echoed. “Surely, Miss Sanstead, your experience with children, sick or well, hasn’t taught you to ‘corner’ them, to set them at bay from you when they’re at fault?”

  “Of course it hasn’t. Anyway, in this instance Trevor cornered himself with a stupid lie that hadn’t a hope of standing up. But he didn’t let it worry him that I could see. And although, as I say, he does he and play mean tricks, I try to treat every incident separately and I’m hoping that before long he may see the silliness of calling attention to himself by trying to be clever-clever at his playmates’ expense,” Sarah retorted.

  Mrs. Beacon’s cold eye gleamed. “From which, I gather, you’d be as glad as not if he didn’t join your charges again for play?” she asked.

  Sarah hesitated. To agree would be the easy way out, but because it smelled too much of defeat she said, “If I thought he would never learn to fit in with the others, I’d ask him myself not to come again. But I don’t want to do that. I think I’m beginning to take his measure now and I’d like a bit of time to prove something about him.”

  “To prove what?”

  “That he’s as difficult as he is because he only knows the tough, bully’s way of asserting himself. If he could pipe down a bit and expect less of the limelight, I’m sure he could enjoy the other children’s company and help me with them as much as little Jean and Tony Carrage do.”

  “Very well. Personally I’d say you’d be better to concentrate on your own convalescents than to be trying out amateur ‘psycho’ theories on completely healthy ones like Trevor. And if you don’t succeed in breaking his spirit, which it sounds as if you want to, please remember that you refused to let us relieve you of the trouble of him, won’t you?” Mrs. Beacon warned.

  “I certainly will.” As Sarah set a foot on her bicycle pedal her tone was even. But her hands were a’tremble on the handlebars as she rode away. The nerve of the woman! ‘Amateur psycho theories’ indeed...! Sarah’s blood chilled as she recalled Oliver Mansbury’s comment on the same lines, ‘Something of a pocket psychologist, aren’t you Sarah Sanstead.’? She had laughed and glowed a little at the time. But hadn’t his teasing been as kindly meant as she had taken it? Had he been ridiculing her too?

  At the time she had sprained her ankle a minor fear had been that she might not be fit before she was due to partner Dick Finder in the forthcoming Open Tournament at the tennis club of which he was also a member. But as the day approached it was Dick who was forced to demur that he might not be able to play after all.

  “Father is ill,” he told her over the telephone. “Only a fainting fit, we supposed. But he’s to have a few days’ rest in bed on doctor’s orders. And if he’s not about again by Saturday, tournament day, I shall have to deputise for him at a big auction over at Sellinby.”

  “Oh, Dick!” Sarah could not conceal her disappointment.

  “I know,” he agreed. “It’s tough luck. We might have done quite well in harness. All right. Tennis harness; joke over,” he added. “But I think for safety’s sake you’d better see if you can rustle up someone to partner you in my place.”

  Though she suspected that would not be too easy, she said, “I’ll try. Anyway, not to worry. I’m awfully sorry to hear about Mr. Finder. In case there’s anything I could do for either of you, could I come round to see him tonight? I’m on duty, but Martha will be here, and I could slip down for a little while after the babes are in bed.”

  “Yes, do that, there’s a dear. And do something about another partner for yourself,” Dick urged.

  But without telling him so, she resolved to let it ride. She should wait for him and if he couldn’t play, that would be just too bad.

  But when she cycled down to his house that evening, her first sight of Dick, opening the door to her himsel
f, told her that there was no chance of his partnering her and she understood why. Though not needing to ask, she said, “Oh Dick, your father? He’s—?”

  For a moment he stared at her, as if questioning her right to intrude upon him. Then he nodded and drew her into the hall, retaining his grip on both her hands.

  “Sarah, I can’t believe it! He seemed all right, even better after I had phoned you. So I went to the office as usual, leaving him with Mrs. Bennet, our housekeeper, you know. But I’d hardly arrived before there was a phone call to come back. He had collapsed again, it was a second stroke apparently, and he died a couple of hours ago.”

  “Oh no! Dick, dear Dick, what a terrible shock for you!” Since his mother’s early death he and his father had been very close and as Sarah murmured her sympathy she thought how vulnerable he was to his loss. Suddenly he was unsure, the mere shadow of his bright, confident self, more likeable somehow when he needed help than when he was intent on giving it.

  She stayed longer than she had meant to. But when she left he was more in control and she hoped she had been able to do something for him. The matter of Saturday’s tournament was naturally far from their thoughts and it was not until the next day that Olive Cosford reminded her of it.

  “I suppose there’s no hope that Mr. Finder can play with you now?” she asked.

  “No. It’s out for us both, I’m afraid. Dick couldn’t of course; in any case, he’ll still have to take his father’s place at the Sellinby auction, and it’s too late for me to get another partner. But I’ll go along and watch if it’s a nice day. I hear there are some real tennis ‘lions’ coming for it, among them, Dan Rossiter who’s played at Wimbleton. Dick seemed to think that he and I had a hope, though of course against that kind of opposition we didn’t stand a chance.”

  Alice knit her brows. “Rossiter? Rossiter? That rings a bell. Last night Martha—she does love to pass on news, doesn’t she?—was full of a young man Miss Grey next door has been about with all the week. His name is Rossiter, according to Martha. Though how would she know, do you suppose?”