Consulting Surgeon Read online

  Ursula heard Matthew addressing her. “You haven’t been yet to see my aunt again?” he asked.

  “No, and I’m afraid my next off-duty is booked up too. Ned—Professor Primrose, that is, who met me at Waterloo the day you gave me a lift—is coming to a convention and naturally wants to see something of us while he is here—”

  “ ‘Of us’?” The echo was a quotation of her own words. “Of you and Coralie, or of your stepmother too?”

  “Well, perhaps I meant ‘of me’.” Ursula was hating the flush that accompanied the admission. “We have been good friends ever since my father, who was also a scientist, died. They were colleagues, and afterwards Ned didn’t lose sight of us.”

  “Of course. I remember now. At Mrs. Grazebrook’s party Coralie mentioned that he was devoted to you. Naturally you have long-standing obligations and inclinations there, but I’d still be very grateful if you could find time to look Aunt Lucy up before long. She has spoken so often about wanting to see you again.”

  “I have written to her, and I shan’t fail to see her as soon as I can possibly manage it,” promised Ursula, meaning it.

  Meanwhile a kind of brittle friendship was being hatched between Coralie and Averil. On Averil’s side it was patronizing to the younger girl’s frank admiration; on Coralie’s, wary but fascinated. By the time the conversation again became general Coralie had accepted a carte blanche invitation to go to Shere Court whenever she pleased; she and Averil were meeting for coffee the next morning, and Mrs. Craig, smiling and nodding approval, was clearly pleased with the development.

  When Matthew and Averil had gone she patted Coralie’s hand indulgently. “Of course, I knew all along how right we were to come to a place like this,” she congratulated herself. “And, given the right opportunities, darling, you can be trusted to make the nicest friends. After all, anything might come of your being invited to Shere Court...” With which sentiment she appeared so content that no one could have had the heart to point out that the original introduction to Shere Court had been through Ursula, and not Coralie’s doing at all.

  Ursula, had obtained a late pass, so before returning to hospital she went with Coralie to see her room and to chat while she got ready for bed.

  In frilled nylon nightgown and mules, with her curly hair damp from her bath, Coralie looked almost pathetically young. And it was with a childish pout that she mourned! “He said he would ask us to dine when we met down here. But he didn’t.”

  “I dare say he will, if you mean Mr. Lingard. He is terribly busy, you know,” comforted Ursula.

  “Busy with his work—or with her?” demanded Coralie.

  “With his work, I meant.”

  “With his work you wanted to mean,” countered Coralie shrewdly. “Don’t pretend that you think it’s really fair for anyone to be as beautiful as Averil Damon, any more than I do. Why do some girls have everything?”

  “If I were ever tempted to think it unfair, I still shouldn’t be able to forget that she is a widow at twenty-seven,” returned Ursula dryly.

  “Yes, well—I’d forgotten that. I suppose nobody really gets all the luck there is,” returned Coralie, slightly abashed. “Was she terribly in love with her husband, do you suppose? Or haven’t you talked to her much?”

  Ursula stooped to tuck the sheets about Coralie. “Not much. I was with Mrs. Damon more.”

  “I dare say I shall find out. She’ll talk to me,” declared Coralie with precocious confidence.

  “Coralie—it’s none of your business!” Ursula’s voice was sharp.

  “But it’s interesting!”

  “All the same, you always ask too many questions. And you have no right to probe into Averil’s marriage if she doesn’t want to confide in you.”

  “But she will. People love to talk about themselves. I suppose she did love him passionately really, even if she doesn’t show it much. Anyway, with her looks, she is bound to get married again, so if we get really friendly with each other I shall hear all about that too.”

  There was a little pause. Then Coralie looked up, wide-eyed and apprehensive. “I say,” she breathed, “you don’t think, do you, that when Averil has recovered from losing her first husband, she will marry Mr. Lingard? I couldn’t bear that. But from what you’ve seen of them together, he is being only a kind of brother to her, isn’t he? I mean, there’s nothing of—of that sort between them, is there?”

  Ursula shook her head. “I’ve told you—I know they are good friends and nothing more than that. Certainly neither Averil nor Mr. Lingard has confided in me.”

  “Oh, all right. I only asked. You needn’t be stuffy about it,” sulked Coralie, snuggling down and turning her face into the pillow. And to the kiss which Ursula dropped upon the top of her head her only response was a muffled: “ ’Night.”

  “Stuffy.” The slang word was meaningless, yet it rankled. For Coralie, without knowing it, had accused a reluctance of Ursula’s which went deeper than she knew.

  As Ursula listened to Ned giving a lecture on popular science which held his audience—mainly schoolboys in their teens—completely entranced, she thought how strange it was that, vague and absentminded to a degree, he should be able to give so clear and simple a picture of his own subject. She found herself waiting, fully as breathlessly as her open-mouthed neighbors, for the fascinating results of the experiments he was doing as illustration, and at the end of the two-hour lecture she could have wished it were just beginning.

  “That was grand, Ned,” she told him when they met afterwards for tea.

  He beamed his appreciation of her praise. “I’m so glad you liked it. I think I got their interest, don’t you?”

  “You certainly did, to judge by the comments round me—‘super’ and ‘wizard’ and ‘tops’! You had me enthralled too.”

  “Yes, well, you are different. With lads of that age you have to dig around a bit to find out what will hold them. But with you I’m safer. I don’t have to whip up your interest, because you have the knack of making me feel that it never stops. You understand so well, Ursula.”

  Ought she to feel guilty that Ned should believe she grasped more of his work than indeed she did? Before she could decide how to disillusion him he went on, showing by his next words that it was not only of his work that he had been speaking.

  He said: “You’ve known me so long and you understand so much about me by now that lately I’ve wondered whether—whether you would consider marrying me?”

  “Oh, Ned—” Ursula stopped short upon the realization that here was the moment of danger between them, the moment she had believed past after their last meeting in London. She had not guarded against a repetition of it.

  Ned went on: “I know I’m much older than you, but you are so sensible and well, sort of balanced that I often think of you almost as if you were a man friend and not a girl at all. We could go on more or less as we are now, Ursula, dear, because you know I’m not much of a chap for sentiment and such things. But I don’t believe we’ve had a serious argument in our lives. And you know you’ve always said I ought to have someone to look after me!”

  How difficult it was to hurt him. Yet for his sake as well as hers it must be done. For even Ned’s own words proved that marriage would spell disaster. Ned, bless him, believed he paid her a high compliment when he compared her to a man friend. And that, her woman’s instinct warned, was no basis for the infinitely delicate balance of marriage. Ned was “not much of a chap for sentiment” either. But was not sentiment—that tenderness expressed in word and touch and thought—the very warp of the fabric of marriage?

  Further, it was indeed true that they scarcely ever disagreed. For Ned was so blanketed with the placid abstraction of his work that it was almost impossible to quarrel with him. Though reasoned thought had no time in which to warn her, instinct did, and she answered gently: “No, Ned. Please try to understand that it wouldn’t do,” hoping that he would not ask her why.

  He scratched moodily
on the tablecloth. “I was afraid you’d say that. But don’t you agree that we’ve got a lot in common?”

  “So much so, Ned, that we oughtn’t to endanger it by marrying, only to find that we weren’t suited as well in—in that way.”

  “You are telling me that I don’t suit you ‘in that way’?” he asked humbly.

  “I think,” she said slowly, searching for words that would express a conviction, “that if it had been so for either of us, we should have found it out long ago. We should have known at once, or it would have come suddenly, as a sort of revelation—”

  She broke off so sharply that Ned looked at her in questioning alarm. But her face betrayed nothing. Not for Ned’s eyes nor for anyone’s was that revealing, blinding flash of knowledge which had checked her whole train of thought. Later, she knew, her heart must face its meaning, its whole implication to her life. But not now. ‘Now,’ she prayed, ‘let Ned not guess—any more than I did myself a moment or so ago—that I am refusing him for any other reason than that I don’t love him—that for both of us it wouldn’t do.’

  Ned was saying: “I only know that I like being with you and talking to you more than anyone else. Isn’t that enough?”

  How could she make him understand that it was not? She said: “You know I like being with you too. We are friends, and I value that. I don’t want to lose it. So is there any reason why we shouldn’t go on as before—that is, if you want to, Ned?”

  He stared at her in surprise. “Why shouldn’t I want to?”

  “I don’t know,” she smiled gratefully. “Except that, for some men, asking a girl to marry them and being refused would mean the end of everything pleasant that had gone before.”

  “For me it doesn’t.” Ned touched her hand as it lay upon the table. “We’re still friends—aren’t we?”

  After that there remained only a guilty counting of the minutes to their parting. Coralie had gone up to Shere Court and Ned was to join herself and Mrs. Craig at the hotel for dinner. He would be going to his own hotel to change first, which meant that Ursula, already in a simple cocktail dress beneath her coat, would have time to herself before returning to the Grand.

  Time. Precious time and outward silence in which she might hope to still the clamor in her heart. She bade au revoir to Ned with catching breath, then made her way towards the sea front, meaning to walk out beyond the half mile of promenade to where the cliffs dropped sheer down to the shingle and where the only way was by a winding path above tide-level.

  It had been raining for an hour or two, she noted by the sticky treachery of the streets. But that was all to the good. It was fine again now, but the rain had chilled the air, and there would be few people about where she was going. She had to be alone...

  Strangely, when, stumbling along the cliff path at last, she allowed herself to think, it was to Denis to whom her thoughts first turned.

  How often had she told herself that with Denis she had buried the need and even the ability to love, outliving both the heady delight of knowing that she did love him and, later, the devastating despair that losing him had brought?

  Why then, in that moment of self-questioning that she owed to Ned, had she experienced that insisting thrust of knowledge which would not be denied? The knowledge that, deny it as she would, she had not done with love, had outlived none of it, knew it now for the ecstasy and passion that it was.

  Nor was it a nostalgia for Denis; not even a wishful extension of her genuine feeling for Ned. It was love of a man—Matthew Lingard—for whom she was no more than a type he disliked, a mere colleague in his work, the unwilling butt of his irony.

  So much that had been shrouded before was clear now. Her moment of envy of Averil Damon held in the circle of his embrace; her shrinking from allowing him to believe that Ned was more than a friend; that ecstatic lift to her whole spirit upon hearing the “bless you” that marked no more than his gratitude, but into which love longed to read a world of hidden meaning.

  Upon such little things love hungered or went richly fed; between two people who would love they were the first blind offerings to each other. But when one loved—and the other did not—ah, they were bitter fare indeed.

  She found a sheltered recess in the cliff face and stood leaning back there as she stared out to sea. Deep in her coat pockets her fingers were tightly clenched, the nails pressing painfully into her palms as she fought for the control and balance which presently must take her, outwardly calm, on her way back to the hotel to meet her stepmother and Ned, and ultimately back to hospital where no one must guess what this day’s work had done to her.

  Tomorrow, at the latest, she would have to face Matthew himself. ‘Even that,’ she thought with a bitter curve to her lips, ‘might be easier if he actively disliked me, in every way, or if his ironic titling at me were mere uncouth rudeness which I could combat. But it’s more subtle than that. Already he grudges me no appreciation of my work where he feels able to give it; and in that I know I serve him well. But it is our work’s very closeness of interest that makes his personal indifference to me the more marked. And indifference, I have read somewhere, is the very death of the heart. How cruelly true that is!’

  She must go back, she decided wearily at last. Mrs. Craig would be waiting and Ned would soon be due.

  But when she reached the hotel Ned had not arrived, and though they waited for a long time he still did not come. At last Mrs. Craig, who did not care for Ned. remarked rather waspishly that, though she had never supposed Ned’s absentmindedness was anything but an excuse to forget his manners, she could have hoped that this evening he would try to be punctual. Upon which Ursula went to telephone his hotel, only to learn that he had left there at least half an hour earlier.

  More waiting ensued, until the point at which they could not put off dining any longer. And when the time came for Ursula to return to hospital, Ned had neither come nor sent a message.

  ‘If it were anyone other than Ned I should be worried,’ she thought as she waited for the bus which would take her up the Downs road. But with Ned it was fully possible that he had bethought himself of a problem which must be worked out forthwith, and had taken himself to some small cafe to drink pot after pot of strong tea while he struggled with it. And if that were so, he could have completely forgotten his appointment for the evening.

  The common room, where she went for a cup of cocoa before going to bed was deserted until Sister Arnock, a fierce little Scot and the sister-in-charge of Miller, the “brother” ward to Christian Shere—being, that is, the men’s surgical ward, while Christian Shere was for women—bounced in to join her.

  “Och, what a game this nursing is that keeps you at it when any other Christian job’d be done. And they talk of union rights!” exclaimed Sister Arnock, snatching eagerly at the cup Ursula passed to her, and stretching her legs inelegantly before her.

  “But you haven’t just come off the ward, surely? ‘Night’ should have been on hours ago!”

  “Have I not? You’re telling me. Why, my wee bairn, don’t you try accepting a serious accident case from Casualty, at the very moment that you’re due ‘off’? Just to make it easier, add the fact that one consultant came in with it, and another—the one on call—followed directly afterwards. Mix well with the chance that tonight night staff was short-handed—no sister, only a ‘staff and a pro.—and then see what you would find to say to the request that you should stay on to see the poor fellow fixed and as comfortable as you could make him. Not that he has more than a slender chance, I’d say!” concluded Sister Arnock dramatically.

  “Poor Arnock. Things do happen, don’t they?” sympathized Ursula. “But, of course, you had to stay. What was the case? And why two consultants? Who were they?”

  “Middle-aged chap in spectacles. At least, he’d had ‘em. Now he’s got only half the frames. Suspected compound fracture of the femur, compression and shock. Been run over. Actually, I wasn’t on duty when he was brought in; I came back just afterwar
ds and in time to get from the chatter of my more imbecile pro. the juicy fact that our revered Matthew Lingard, who came in with him, had done the running over. But I wouldn’t know about that, and you know what these pros. are. But I couldna exactly ask our Matthew about it, could I? It looked a bit odd, certainly, that if he hadna anything to do with it he should have brought the fellow in...”

  But to the later flow of Sister Arnock’s news Ursula was not listening, even though the impact of Matthew’s name had made her flinch. “A middle-aged chap in spectacles.” Ned wore glasses, and had not kept his appointment for dinner. Hope prayed that it was not Ned, even while intuition told that it was.

  Through white lips she asked: “What—what was the patient’s name, Arnock?”

  “Help. Oh—Primrose. Edward Primrose. He was still carrying his identity card—fancy! Why, Craig, what’s the matter? What have I said? Do you know him? A friend of yours? Ah, my dear—!”

  “Yes. Yes, he is a friend of mine. We were to dine together, but he didn’t turn up, though I never suspected anything like this—Arnock, can I see him, do you think?”

  “Surely, though he is part unconscious, part wandering. Compression does that, you know. Mostly they forget anything that went before they were hit, but I remember now that he was talking about a girl and about an engagement. Would that have been you. Craig? Look, I’ll give you permission to see him. Tell the night-staff nurse. But you’ll change first, won’t you? You know Matron’s feelings about our being on the ward in civvies, even if we’re off duty. Cut along now. And—I do hope he’ll be all right.”

  “Thanks, Arnock.” For all her haste to see Ned, there was a question Ursula had to ask. She said: “Just one thing—what is this about Mr. Lingard’s having been responsible for the accident? How true is that?”

  “I’ve told you—I wouldn’t know. Probably just pro.’s talk. But he did come in with him, which I didn’t understand.”