Hospital in the Highlands

CHAPTER ONE

When
Flo received the summons to Matron’s office she knew exactly what it meant, and wished that she could have pretended not to understand the message, quit her duties without more ado, cast her responsibilities aside along with her uniform and make her escape from hospital before Matron had time to realize her request had been flouted.

HOSPITAL IN THE HIGHLANDS

An emergency was admitted just as she was signing off for Night Sister to take over, an emergency needing immediate surgery, and she was the only member of the staff, apart from Matron, who had enjoyed first-class surgical experience.

She had not been christened Florence Nightingale Lamont for nothing, however. When her godmother had promised to remember the child in her will and provided her name, which was Nightingale, Adrian Lamont had promptly decided on “Florence” for good measure.

“It’s too good an opportunity to miss,” he had told his protesting, yet adoring, wife, “and what’s wrong with Flo as a name, anyway?” He had peeped into the cot. “She looks like a Flo,” he decided. “There’s nothing spectacular about this child.”

There never had been anything spectacular about Flo Lamont; her hair was pleasantly brown with gold lights in it; her eyes were soft and brown also. Sometimes they were likened to a spaniel’s eyes, but she didn’t mind the comparison in the least, having been acquainted with quite a number of gentle-eyed spaniels in her time.

Most of the hospital staff and all the patients thought Sister Lamont adorable and very pretty. She had qualities of serenity and graciousness denied her more spectacularly beautiful sisters—of whom the hospital knew nothing—and her slight figure was trim and neat in the dark, becoming uniform of her calling.

Occasionally she was aware of being two people,
as now, when Flo Lamont fought a losing battle with Flo Nightingale. Miss Lamont had planned to go to the station to meet her sisters, to shepherd them to their new home in the pine woods of Glen Lochallan. She had explained how residence in the quiet Scottish Highlands would be economic, cost of living being what it was; as opposed to the cultural and tonal background offered by purse-proud Edinburgh, with its dearth of housing, and sky-high rents. Only Flo could convince her sisters they had done the right thing. Once they saw Glen Lochallan, they would be all for catching the next train back to Edinburgh, she was sure. They had to be gently broken in to new things, new ideas; most particularly to the realization that they were practically beggars, and therefore could no longer expect to be choosers.

Sister Nightingale Lamont—like the voice of conscience—reminded her that Matron had said in her pleasant, lowland Scots voice, “I’ll be glad to let you out if I can see my way, Sister: take it as granted unless I send for you.”

And now—only fifteen minutes before she had planned to go off duty—the summons.

Flo straightened her cap and went resolutely down the long, antiseptic corridors to Matron’s office.

“You wanted to see me, Matron?”

“I did that, Sister. I’m glad I caught you. Is it important that you meet your family?”

Flo would have liked to say it was not only important but vital, she felt sure her superior had summoned her with good reason. “It’s for you to say whether I go or stay, Matron. My sisters will probably take a taxi. I didn’t exactly promise to meet them. I said it depended
...
”

“Yes,” Matron smiled, “in our job things always ‘depend’, don’t they, Sister? We have to put family and friends aside
...
forget they exist, at times.”

“I can never forget
my
family!” Flo pondered ruefully. “If I put them aside for one moment I’d be doubly reminded the next.”

“I’m due at a staff meeting in half an hour,” Matron went on, “and I’ve just received a telegram saying that a new locum medical registrar is on his way to us. He'll want to be shown around, so I wondered if you could do that?”

“Certainly” said Flo, dutifully. “What is his name?”

“The telegram doesn’t say,” Matron said, frowning. “As Doctor Stewart was stricken with appendicitis, I suppose we’re lucky to get anybody at such short notice.”

“Absolutely,” Flo agreed. “Anyway, I suppose he will announce himself when he comes. I’ll stay near the front office.”

“Do that,” Matron nodded briskly. “I hope he’s a nice
young
man,” she added thoughtfully.

“Why, Matron?” asked Flo, smiling. Molly MacDonald was almost sixty and a confirmed feminist.

“Och, not for myself!” she laughed. “It’s just that I’m a wee bit tired of old fogeys around me. Don’t
you
like a young man about the hospital, Sister?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Flo admitted.

“Of course you’re engaged,” Matron shrugged, “and your young man’s gallivanting somewhere on the other side of the world, isn’t he?”

“Hardly gallivanting,” sighed Flo, thinking of Jim in Malaya, running a tin-mine practically single-handed, “but he is a long way from home.”

“If I had a young man far away,” Matron said solemnly, “I’d go to him and marry him before anything could go wrong.”

“Go wrong?” echoed Flo blankly. “Jim will be home in another year and then we’ll get married, I expect, so I shouldn’t think he’s considering being unfaithful to me.” She smiled so that the sun seemed to come out all over her countenance. “Anyway, he isn’t the unfaithful type.”

“Of course not.” Matron’s smile was now one of dismissal. “Well, carry on.”

Writing up her reports in the front office, however, Flo found her attention wandering to the view over the loch and the famous gold course beyond. Glen Lochallan was a tourist's and sportsman’s paradise in season, but now, in spring, there were no boats sailing on the dark, brooding waters, neither was there a national tournament taking place on the golf course. The Glen merely decked itself in all its arboreal beauty and waited quietly and peacefully for something to happen.

Flo signed the last report and sighed over the stack of temperature charts. In their recent conversation Matron had aroused all her latent longing for Jim. He had been in Malaya for well over a year, and though she wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone else, his memory had faded somewhat. She knew she loved him and missed him, but she could no longer recollect what kissing him was like, for instance: she tried to remember the feel of Jim's arms, almost roughly—about her on the quayside as he was about to sail, but it was no use. Her memories were without emotion, and Jim himself did nothing to stimulate them when he wrote his regular weekly letters. He, too, was a Scot, and his native dourness prevented his pen from conveying anything that could be termed “mush.” He could wait, and Flo could wait, for “all that sort of thing.” Words were sorry substitutes for acts of purest delight.

As the tall young man with the bushy fair hair came through the main door and paused in the Outpatients’ Hall, he saw the trim figure bent over the desk and then looked again, emitting a long, low whistle.

Flo looked up from her work, sensing an alien presence. “He
is
young,” she decided, glad for Matron’s sake, and opened the office door in welcome.

“I’m Sister Lamont,” she greeted, holding out her hand. “You must be Doctor—er—” she froze where she stood, feeling suddenly faint. “Oh, no!” she gasped sharply.

“Oh, yes, my dear old thing,” said Keith Bexley, pushing past her into the office, and closing the door on them both. “It’s me, and very much in the flesh. Fancy finding
you
again, Flo! How are Meg, Fluff and the kid? I suppose plenty of water has passed under the bridge since we last met, and that they’re all married, eh? I’ll bet you’re an auntie or something by now. Come on, sweet. Give me the news!”

Flo decided that she was still standing on her own two feet and that only a minute—instead of eternity—had sped away.

“None of us is married,” she said more calmly. “It’s only three years since we met, after all. Meg never”— she swallowed—“got over you. I doubt if she’ll ever marry.”

“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Doctor Bexley, savoring this news. “I didn’t mean to blight the poor girl’s life, or anything like that.” He shrugged. “I just happened to fall hard for
you
, told Meg there was someone else and broke our engagement. That was fair enough, surely?”

“You don't have to justify yourself all over again, Keith,” she said coldly. “It was too bad for Meg that she happened to be in love with somebody as unstable as you.”

“Hey, steady!” said the Englishman.

“Well, you
are
unstable, Keith. You said you loved me. I never encouraged you, and I suppose there have been a dozen since then.”

“You’re wrong,” he smiled, and the old warmth spread over his countenance. “It was the real thing, for you, Flo. Honestly, I’m quite prepared to carry on where we left off. There!”

Her eyes glinted with danger.

“Carry on what was never started?” she questioned him. “I’d die rather than take my own sister’s lover.”

His brows darkened again. “I’m a doctor, you know, and I merit your respect while you’re in that uniform, my girl. I was only kidding, my proud beauty. But you’re hard to get once too often, and you’ll find yourself high and dry on the shelf eventually.”

“I am engaged to be married,” Flo felt bound to state.

“Oh, you are. Does he work here?”

“No. He’s not a doctor and he’s in Malaya.”

“Shake hands and be friends, at least,” urged Keith Bexley. “If
we’re to work together we can’t carry daggers in our teeth, can we? Anyway”—he shuffled his feet—“I’ve said I’m sorry about old Meg. Could I meet her somewhere and buy her one for auld lang syne?”

“No. That wouldn’t be wise,” Flo demurred. “She would cry, or something. Better leave things as they are. Do you expect to be here long?”

“No.” He smiled. “I
do
prefer the brighter lights, but locum work makes a change, even in a one-eyed hole like this. I suppose Meg is in Edinburgh still?”

“No—er—not now,” Flo said hesitantly. “Father died at Christmas and we’re sort of scattered...”

“I’m very sorry. He was a lively soul, your father.”

“Yes. Well—I’m supposed to show you around, Doctor Bexley. Shall we go?”

He bowed mockingly, noting her trim figure and realizing she had unwittingly displayed her Achilles’ heel to him. He had only to insist on reacquainting himself with his old sweetheart, Meg Lamont, whom he had jilted three years ago, and who was still, apparently, keen on him, to make dainty Miss Nightingale’s life absolute hell.

CHAPTER TWO

T
he express train thundered along and the scenery bordering the track became increasingly, loomingly majestic.

“We’ll no’ be long, now,” decided a young, female voice, vaporing the window against which it spoke.

“
Not
be long.
Not,
Pixie,” snapped Margaret Lamont impatiently. “I won’t have you acquiring these dreadful dialects. I shan’t be sorry to leave this compartment, I can tell you. I hate trains. Why is Fay standing in the corridor? Can’t she sit down and still look out of the window?”

“I think it’s because there’s a nice-looking young officer talking to her,” Pixie said cheerfully. “I know I’d rather talk to him than to”—she looked at her eldest sister uncertainly—“me for instance.”

“Fay’s always got men around her,” Meg complained. “She picks them up far too easily. I don’t know what young people are coming to.”

“Anyway, he seems tae be getting oot,” Pixie announced, her English slipping once again. She looked across at the other with a sudden frown. “Meg, do you remember Jean Mackay?”

“Which Jean Mackay?” snapped the elder sister. “Scotland’s full of Jean Mackays.”

“Ay,” nodded Pixie, “but there was only one in my class at school. Well,
my
Jean Mackay thought
you
were
my mother
.”

Meg forgot her irritation and looked aghast.

“Not seriously?” she asked.

“Ay, she was serious enough. It’s the way you act, Meg, like an old hen. When I told her you were about thirty she wouldna believe it.”

“I’m only twenty-seven, you little horror!” Meg protested. “You’re just trying to be unkind.”

“Och, I’m no’!” Pixie protested.

“And stop talking like a child from a Glasgow slum.”

Fay Lamont, angelically lovely with her long blonde hair falling on her shoulders, re-entered the compartment as gracefully sinuous as a cat.

“What’s up?” she demanded, looking into her handbag mirror and pouting.

“Nothing at all,” came Meg’s martyred voice. “You enjoy your journey and don’t bother about us.”

“Enjoy
this
journey?” Fay questioned, her brows lowering. “It’s the end of the world for
me.
No concerts, no decent tuition on the violin, no money for clothes ... and as if that isn’t bad enough I’m expected to go to work and earn my keep.”

“Flo works,” Pixie said mildly.

“She has always been the odd one,” Fay snapped. “Father never expected us to work. Flo just wasn’t happy not working. Anyhow, she always had her godmother Nightingale to rely on. How were we to know Dad would leave us penniless?”

“Life’s been very hard on me,” Meg mourned.

“Oh, shut up!” Fay said in exasperation. “Your Great Sorrow is slowly driving us all nuts, Meg. Forget it and let’s face this new tribulation practically.”

“What new tribulation?” asked Pixie, her eyes round.

“Living at Glen-whateveritis.”