Consulting Surgeon (10 page)

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 afterwards 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.”

“He—he’s not attending Ned—the patient?”

“Heavens, no. Mr. Bayert was the surgeon on call. Your Ned is his patient. It’ll be Bayert who’ll operate, if that is necessary.”

“Mr. Lingard isn’t still on the ward?”

“Wasna when I left. Bayert had gone too. You won’t have to see either of them. Bayert said he might look back after he’d had his dinner. No reason, though, why Lingard should.”

But when Ursula had donned a uniform which seemed especially recalcitrant against her haste and clumsy fingers, and had hurried on to Miller ward, she found that behind Ned’s screens Matthew Lingard was there before her.

Across Ned’s unconscious body they faced each other, question and answer in their challenging eyes.

Matthew said quietly: “So it does link up. I thought I recognized him, and the name found on him was confirmation. I’d remembered that too. How did you hear about it? They said you weren’t in hospital when I enquired.”

“I’ve been off duty, and I only just got back. Sister Arnock told me, though she didn’t know I knew him. I—I was with him until two or three hours ago, and we were to have dined together, but he didn’t turn up.”

Matthew looked at her sharply. “Of course. While he was conscious he was worrying about a girl, about an engagement...”

“That would have been, his engagement to dine with my stepmother and me at the Grand.”

“Would it?” Matthew shot her a curious glance, then paused. He went on: “I’m afraid you must face it that he is in rather bad shape. I dare say Sister Arnock may have told you that Mr. Bayert considers him too shocked for full examination tonight? He has had a quarter-grain of morphia, though, and the morning may show improvement. Has he relatives who should be told, do you know?”

“No close relatives. He lives in rooms in London.”

Matthew went on musingly: “He walked straight into the car as if he were sleep-walking. No driver on earth could have avoided him. At a walking pace he might have risked no more than being piled up on the bonnet. At speed, he hadn’t a chance.”

“No one should have been speeding, with the roads in the treacherous condition they were tonight,” broke in Ursula, passionate with anxiety for Ned.

“No one was—beyond reason. And the dawdling car can frequently be even more of a danger than the fast one,” he assured her dryly. “Besides, I told you—he was crossing the street as if he were in a dream. I’d had my eye upon him for some time—”

“Then if you were watching him, how was it that you couldn’t avoid him—?”

“
What
did you say?” His eyes were accusing her and there was an edge of anger to his voice.

She looked up to read in his face the baselessness of her own accusation and wondered in panic how even her agitation had led her to make it. She stammered: “I didn’t know. I...”

"Where did you get hold of such a ridiculous idea? Surely Sister Arnock didn’t give you to believe it?”

“No. No.” At all costs Arnock, and even her gossiping probationers, must be cleared of suspicion. “It was only that you
brought Ned into Casualty and accompanied him up here. I—I suppose I was so worried that I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Your own words misled me into thinking that you—you...”

“That I was responsible? Well, for pity’s sake, what did you
expect me to do when I saw the whole thing happen before my eyes, and only a few yards in front of my own car? The other driver wasn’t to blame. I told the police so. And when I recognized the Professor, would you have expected me
not
to make myself responsible for getting him up here without even waiting for the ambulance, which could have spelt fatal delay? Don’t you credit me with common humanity?”

“I—I’m dreadfully sorry.” The words were no more than a broken murmur, and she swayed with weariness as she uttered them.

He did not answer her for a moment. Then with brusque solicitude he said: “Perhaps it was understandable. You are over-tired and a good deal shocked by this. I think I would suggest that you should go now. There’s nothing useful you can do here. The Professor probably won’t come round tonight, and Mr. Bayert is looking in on him later.”