Green for Danger (6 page)

“I'm not in love with anyone,” he said steadily.

“You're in love with Frederica Linley. I suppose you want to marry her.…”

“You know I'm not in a position to marry anyone, Marion,” he said impatiently. Once, long ago, one of the lovely ladies had been importunate, and he had not then acquired his skill in evading desperate situations. He had not seen her for several years, but she formed a shield against similar assaults upon his liberty.

“But you don't love
me
any more?”

“Oh, Marion,” he said wearily, “do let's not go over this again. Men fall in love and fall out of love, and that's all there is to it.” You could not explain that you had never even fallen in love, that the worst you had done was to accept attentions flung at your defenceless heart. “I—I want to remember our little affair with affection and gratitude; let me do that, my dear. Don't spoil it all by trying to hold on to something that's gone, past recall.”

But she looked at him with blue eyes, stupid with pain and misery, defeating her own hopes by her uncontrollable need to put those hopes into words. “All the same, Gervase, I won't let you go; I'll tell everybody how you've treated me, I'll tell everybody how you're letting me down for that Linley girl, I'll
make
you stay with me.…”

He caught her by the wrist, staring down, grim and angry into her frightened face. “Don't you
dare
!” he said.

“I will, Gervase, I swear I will. I'll—I'll sue you for breach of promise.… I'll make it so that everyone thinks what a rotter you are.… All those women in Harley Street.…”

He flung her away from him in disgust and marched off out of the bunk and into the hall; she stayed for a moment, leaning against the wall, sick with realisation of her own behaviour; and then crept out after him; neither of them gave a backward glance towards the ward.

Frederica had retreated into the dark recess of the screens round the newcomer's bed; she came to the door and stood there, staring after them. “My God—supposing she does tell Barney!” Their unconsciously raised voices had reached her clearly through the thin partition. “Supposing she tells Barney—he'd never speak to me again; he'd never love me again! I should lose him, and all for a man like Gervase Eden.… Gervase would love me for a week or a month, and then just let me go. ‘I want to remember our little affair with affection and gratitude, Freddi; be a little darling, my pet, and let me go!' He has every woman in the place running after him, and he doesn't want any of them … any of the others. But he does want me! It was only because of Barney.… Oh, my God! Barney, why don't I just stick to you, when you're so decent and sweet and you love me so much more than I deserve … but the moment Gervase comes along—he doesn't say anything, he doesn't
do
anything, he never even touched me before to-night … but my heart turns over and my knees go to water … it's disgusting, really it is, it's nothing but sex, that's all! It's just my misfortune to look like a blinking machine and all the time be a raging furnace underneath. Oh, well!” she shrugged her little shoulders and smoothed down her apron and settled her starched white veil, “I suppose I'd better stop having inhibitions and look to my suffering patients.” The man in the corner bed said something as she went over to him, taking his hot hand in her cool and gentle one, she thought: “Anyway, thank goodness Esther and Woody don't know!”

6

Esther had just arrived back from the ward and was sitting in their quarters with Woods, discussing Frederica's infatuation. A benevolent providence had placed a small row of labourer's cottages at the main gates of the park, and here the V.A.D.s were accommodated, three or four to each little two-roomed house. The cottages were small and dark and inconvenient, but the plumbing was adequate and each had a tiny kitchen with a gas stove; to three girls unused to community life and especially to life among sixty women of greatly varying ages and drawn from every imaginable class, their cottage was a haven of privacy and relaxation and peace. Frederica, being on night duty, did Box and Cox with Esther in the room upstairs; Woods had a camp bed in the communal sitting-room.

The whole place rocked with the deafening roar of the guns, but the bombs seemed fewer and the flares were dying down. They sat very comfortably with their feet on the fender, drinking cups of cocoa, in defiance of all orders that nobody was to remain in their quarters after black-out, during a raid. Esther said thoughtfully: “What people can see in Gervase, I never could understand. I mean, he's nice and he's funny, but he's as ugly as anything, so thin and grey and, well, he must be at least forty.…”

“Thanks very much,” said Woods.

“Well, I don't mean that, darling, you
know
what I mean. He's not a glamour boy; and he never seems to try and make women like him.”

“Ah, but you're a lady icicle, Esther.”

“Well, I must be, because I seem to be the only female in the hospital who can see Gervase Eden without swooning at his feet. How did the great Act go to-night?”

Woods grinned. “Not bad at all. I caught up with Casanova as he came out of the concert, and I put on a terrific air of indifference and tried to look anxious to get away, and it was such a change for him, poor lamb, that he fell for it like a log.”

“Mind you don't fall yourself, Woody. That would be a laugh!”

“I should say it would,” agreed Woods, cackling with ribald mirth. “However, it would do no harm, Esther, and the effect would be the same. Frederica would see that some other female has only to whistle and off he goes like a shot.”

“She must know that anyhow; look at poor old Bates.”

“Ah, yes, but it's one thing for Gervase to sicken of Bates and turn his attentions to Freddi; and quite another for him to start running after fat old Woody, right in the first stages of his affair with Frederica!”

“Are you so sure it's an affair, darling?”

“Well, Freddi goes round looking like a love-sick hen all the time he's about; and love may be blind, but if it gets any worse, Barney's bound to see it. Barney wouldn't take a thing like this lightly, you know, Esther. It would break his heart, but he'd just write Freddi off for ever: he loves her too much and too sort of
deeply
, for her to try playing fast and loose with him. It's as much for Barney's sake as Frederica's that I want to put an end to it if I can.”

“I hope this won't get you into a mess though, Woody,” said Esther, still not satisfied.

Woods sat staring into the fire, a shawl clutched round her bosom, her exquisite legs stretched out towards the blaze; the lines of laughter ironed, for a moment, out of her face. She said slowly: “My dear, I'm past getting into messes. I've led a bit of a comic life, Esther, one way and another, getting in and out of messes and not doing any harm to anyone, that I could see; except perhaps to myself; and even then I don't know—I don't think I'd have it any other way if I could do it all over again. Freddi's different. She's so young and she's so pretty and attractive; she must settle down with Barney, Esther, and run his house and have lots of lovely babies and be a little Madam … the charm about Freddi is that she's so cool and sure and—well, sort of pleased with herself; isn't she? Not in a nasty way, I don't mean, but just rather funny and sweet. If she went and got herself a past, she'd lose all that; she'd lose her faith in herself, and, you know, I don't believe she'd marry Barney. She wouldn't be able to deceive him, and yet she wouldn't be able to confess her weakness by telling him. I don't know. I may be all wrong; I'm rotten about knowing people's characters … but anyway, if I can prevent her from going off the rocks with this Don Juan of hers, by fair means or foul, I will. I don't think there's the earthliest chance of my getting hurt in the process, but if I do, well, I've been hurt before and I can take it again.” She belched vigorously and patted her chest. “My Godfathers! That stew!”

“Well, I hope it works, Woody, and I hope you ever get any thanks from Frederica, if it does!”

“I don't want any thanks,” said Woods calmly; and Esther, looking at her, sitting there bundled up in shawls, fat and jolly and rather common, with her made-up face and shining, shrewd, dark eyes, said to her lovingly: “No, darling, you never do.”

CHAPTER III

1

I
t was always a miracle, after a heavy raid, to look out in the morning and see one's world still intact about one. Esther walked across the grounds with Woody, wrapped in her short red-lined cape against the cold, dawn air. “I believe there's a new crater in the field over there … that must have been the one that fell at about ten. I could have sworn it was nearer.”

“Stick of three,” said Woody comfortably, in the familiar jargon of life under the blitz. “Look, there's another one, up in the woods—you can see where it's broken the branches of the trees. Good thing it wasn't a bit more to the left or the third would have given the Sisters' Mess a conk. That would have shaken them up!”

“Never run, except for a land mine!” said Esther, mimicking Matron.

The fractured tib. and fib. was agreeably surprised to see her, on the ward. “Hallo, I haven't met you before!”

“I've met
you
,” she said, smiling, not pausing in her assault upon his person with a large wet flannel. “I saw you last night being wheeled across from the theatre, but you weren't taking much notice at the time.”

I can't have been,” he said grinning.

He was a young man, a slim, blond, smiling young man with bright blue eyes and something pleasant and clean and reliable about him. Esther was profoundly bored with dependable young men, but she recognised in him something a little different from the ordinary run. She said kindly: “How are you feeling to-day?”

“Oh, I'm not too bad for seven o'clock in the morning. They say I've fractured my tibia and fibula or something. What does that mean?”

“It means that you've broken the two bones running down the front of your leg; they generally get sort of—overlapping, you know, and you have to have them pulled apart so that the bones can meet and have a chance to unite again. I expect you'll be strung up like this to an extension frame for a little while—several weeks; but it won't hurt, not very much; and then they'll fix you up in a plaster and you'll be able to hop about, and when it comes off it'll just be a matter of getting the leg strong again and you'll never know the difference. It'll take a long time and it isn't exactly heaven, but that's the worst there is to know.”

He looked at her intently. “Are you just telling me this?”

“No,” said Esther. “I don't ‘just tell' people things. Give me your other hand.”

“Are you going to hold it for me?” he asked, laughing.

“Only as long as it takes to wash it; and don't try to flirt with me—I don't like it.” She pulled down his pyjama sleeve with a jerk and picked up the basin and towels.

“I'm sorry,” he said, surprised and rather hurt.

“That's all right.” She looked at the remains of his clothing folded away in the locker, at the shoes beneath it, which, though cut and scratched by debris, were of the rich, chestnut colour that only comes of polishing beautiful leather. “Are you a civilian?”

“No, I'm a simple Able Bodied in the Navy. I happened to be home on leave and I was helping out with my old job.”

She did not inquire as to what his job had been, but the word ‘home' caught her attention. “Do you live in Heronsford?”

“Just outside. I—well, you know the big brewery out at Godli-stone?”

“Good gracious—don't tell me you're a brewer?” she said, laughing.

“I'm afraid I am; does that astonish you?”

“Well, no, not exactly; but you don't—well, you don't
seem
like a brewer, that's all.”