Nurse in Waiting (14 page)

And Shuan, staring, did not understand the quiet, almost triumphant confidence with which Joanna turned towards the door of Roger’s room. She had not Joanna’s knowledge that she was going forward to help Roger, racked with present pain, but already freed from the death, the nothingness, of the paralysis he had known.

For the rest of that night, when Dr. Beltane arrived at last to administer sedatives and to share her confident hopes, and throughout the next day Joanna had no thought nor time for anything other than her work with her patient.

It was not until the late evening that she realized with a shock that Dale was expecting her to go again to Dublin on the following day. Before they had parted at the Greville they had arranged that she should telephone him to tell him when to expect her. Now, of course, she could not go. That was quite definite. As she went to the telephone she wondered how Dale would take the news.

When she contacted him she s
a
id quickly: “Dale, I’m dreadfully sorry, but I can’t see you tomorrow. When I got back late last night
—”

“ ‘Late’?” queried Dale’s voice. “You weren’t particularly late in leaving here.”

“No, but we ran out of petrol on the way
—”

“Oh, come, Joanna, isn’t that rather thin?” He sounded cold, suspicious.

Joanna was stung to indignation. “It happens to be the truth,” she said shortly. “Anyway, when I did get here I found that Mr. Carnehill’s paralysis had begun to give way to pain—we hope it means that the feeling in his back is beginning to return. It’s a sort of crisis and, of course, I can’t leave him now.”

There was a pause. Then Dale asked: “Are those his doctor’s orders?”

“That I’m not to leave him? No. But obviously it’s my duty not to.”

“Obviously—so far as it goes. But—you don’t particularly want to come to Dublin, do you?”

“Dale—what do you mean? Are you suggesting that I’m using Mr. Carnehill’s illness as an excuse, or even that I’m lying about it?”

“No. I believe in it all right, just as I believe you are justified in deciding that you oughtn’t to leave him. But I also believe that you are glad not to have to come.
Aren’t you
?”

Joanna rubbed a finger wearily above her brows. In an effort at jocularity she said: “You’re being awfully difficult, aren’t you? You’ve never been like this before!”

“Neither have you!” came his swift retort. “Joanna, do realize that I’ve known you for long enough to know that a strangeness has come over you—that for some reason, though I can only guess at it
—
you’ve grown away from me, even in this short time.”

Joanna caught her breath. She had not credited Dale with the perception that would tell him what she herself had realized—that they had indeed grown apart. Suddenly she wanted to deny it—to
cling to that pleasant, undemanding relationship with him, which, before she came to Eire, had been an insep
a
rable part of her life.

“That absurd,” she said, not knowing that it was beyond the power of her sincerity to put real conviction into her voice. “Do we have to argue about it? I’m very tired, and I think you’re more than inclined to magnify something you’ve imagined—”

“I haven’t imagined it. I’ve told you—I don’t know what it is that I’m having to compete against, but there is something, that I’m convinced. Joanna—will you do your best to get to Dublin tomorrow?”

“I can’t. Dale! That’s final. You know how I’m placed. Don’t—don’t make an issue of this!”

“I
am
making an issue of it. I must. If you won’t come, then I shall come out to you, either tomorrow or the next day. I’d stay over in Eire on purpose, though I’m due back the day after tomorrow. If I come, you will see me, Joanna?”

“Yes. Yes—come if you must.” Joanna felt tired, dispirited, and almost frightened as she laid down the receiver.

Mrs. Carnehill, back prematurely from Belfast, smiled kindly, if a trifle tiredly, when Joanna asked if it would be convenient for Dale to come out to Carrieghmere on the following day and for her to have an hour or two in which to be with him.

“Of course. Why not?” she said. “He’s your sweetheart in England, maybe? Wasn’t Roger telling me something about him? Isn’t he designing something more frightful than the hydrogen-bomb?”

“No. Only looking for microbes!” Joanna assured her a little shakily. “And—and he’s just a friend, that’s all.”

“Well, ask him by all means, my dear. He’ll stay for a meal, of course?”

“I don’t know. He may be glad to,” Joanna told her gratefully, though she felt instinctively that in his present mood Dale would not be willing to accept the hospitality of Carrieghmere for longer than was necessary.

When she rang him up to come over he said quietly: “Thank you. I’m glad you’ve been able to arrange it because I think it is time we said certain things to each other. And face to face is the only way in which they should be said.”

As she waited for him in the long drawing-room which bore an air of remembering past gaieties in the midst of present disuse, Joanna found herself shivering not so much from cold as from apprehension. She did not sit down but wandered restlessly round the room, staring unseeingly at the furniture, the pictures on the walls. Everything spoke of a wealth which must once have seemed assured—the brocade of the chairs was faded, but had been rich; the pictures were mostly portraits in oils, and Joanna had been told that one of them, of an elderly lady, was a Romney and one of a girl in a blue-lined cloak was by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

When Dale came, shown in by a frankly curious Roseen, there was nothing in his manner or his greeting to dispel her misgivings.

In the kitchen Roseen was giving Cook her own version of the situation. “Sure, it’s the tragic way he has with’m!” she said with relish. “He’s come, be certain of it, to tell her that he loves Another. Then
he’ll ask her to Forgive All
—”

After one glance around him. Dale exclaimed, “Heavens! Do we have to talk here?”

She said quickly: “No—we could go out into the park. I’ll get my coat.”

In an awkward silence they went side by side across the deserted parkland, stooping beneath the deep boughs of the trees, now breaking reluctantly into bud. When they were at last out of sight of the house Dale stopped abruptly and said:

“Joanna, walking together or even being together at all today is only incidental to more important things—the things we have to say to each other.
Perhaps we’d better get them said
—”

She turned to face him, thrusting her hands deeply into the pockets of her travelling coat and being
glad of the support o
f
a gnarled bole as she looked frankly at him for almost the first time that day.

“Perhaps we had
,”
she agreed quietly.

Dale took a deep breath. “Well, since it is you who have changed, perhaps you’d better begin.”

“I haven’t changed.” Strictly, that was true. She knew now that in her heart she had always wanted something which did not exist, had never existed, between herself and him. But how could she make him understand that?

He made a weary gesture. “Don’t deny it, Joanna. You’ve been different since you came over here. It—it fairly breathed through your letters. And even the day before yesterday you didn’t want to come to Dublin to see me.”

“Yes I did
—”

“Only, I think, because you hoped that seeing me might help you to recapture something which you knew you had lost. What was it, Joanna? Haven’t I the right to know?”

She said nothing, feeling surprised for the second time at his insight into what had been happening to her. She felt that he was the good friend he had always been. If only, if only that could be enough
!

He repeated:
“
Haven’t
I?”

“Yes, Dale. If there is anything ... I don’t know—’

“There is something. Go on.”

“Well—I think that being apart from you this time
has
taught me something about—about us. We’re very good friends, we’ve always enjoyed doing things together, but there isn’t enough between us on which to—to store our hopes, our futures.”

“What do you mean—not ‘enough’? We’ve known each other for years!”

She lifted her eyes to his. “Yes. Perhaps that’s the pity of it! In some ways we’ve come to know each other well. In others we’re still complete strangers!”

Dale said slowly: “This hasn’t come about just through your coming over here. You believe you have fallen ‘in love’ with another man. You think
he has more to give you than I hav
e—”

“
No
!”
she denied sharply. “No—not that!”

“What else am I to believe? Do you think that, since meeting him, I can’t realize just why your letters, full of everything else about this benighted place made practically no reference to that man McKiley
—
?”

“It has nothing to do with McKiley. You must believe that!”

“How can I? You were happy enough when you left England, happy enough to take me as you found me. And I haven’t been a mere cad, monopolizing your time for nothing. You’ve known all along what I’ve hoped for us—for our future!”

“Perhaps I’ve guessed. But you’ve never told me. Dale,” she reminded him gently.

He stared. “Why should I have had to? You
must
have known!”

“I think—a woman
needs
telling.”

Dale said nothing. If he had held out his arms to her then, drawn her into them, she would have known that to the question in her heart there might be an answer in his. But he made no movement towards her as he muttered:

“All that romantic stuff! I never dreamt you had any time for it.”

Joanna stifled a sigh. The ecstasy, the implicit understanding, the self-forged chain that love could be was, to Dale, “all that romantic stuff”.

She answered him gently: “Nor have I—except from the man who, one day, I might expect would ask me to be his wif
e—”

ale caught upon that. “So you did know? You knew all along that was what I planned for us? If you did, why must I make love to you, ask you in so many words—as
I’m doing now
?”

“You’re asking me to marry you?”

“If that’s what you want, yes. It’s what I came today to do, anyway.”

“Did you?”
Joanna
caught at an ill-defined hope.

“Yes. I’d realized from your manner in Dublin and on the phone that you believed I’d failed you somewhere. So I said to myself, ‘All right. If it’s marriage
t
hat she wants, she shall have it
—”
His voice held an ugly note, but he broke off at her protesting cry: “Don’t, Dale! You know it wasn’t that
—
!”

“Then what was it? Why else did you see fit to use against me that man McKiley’s attentions to you?”

“I’m not responsible for Justin McKiley’s ideas on gallantry!” she rejected scornfully. “And the very last thing I want is a proposal of marriage dragged from you at—at the pistol-point of something you believe I’m demanding!” Her voice softened as she laid a hand upon his coat-sleeve. “Dale, I want no more today than I’ve always wanted—though it’s only lately that I’ve seen it clearly enough to express it. Even now I mayn’t be able to
...
But I want
—
as well as externals and gossip and ‘shop’—I want tenderness and all the things I think I’m groping for when I speak about ‘love’. I want to know that we depend upon each other utterly for the
real
things.

I want to know that, without the man I say I ‘love’,
I am nothing. And I want to know that I am needed
—
as every woman must. Before I marry I’ve
got
to know all this. And between us. Dale—I’m sure of none of it!”

He said suddenly: “Is that my fault?”

“It isn’t a question of ‘fault’. Dale! We’re good friends. I hope we always may be
—”

“And ‘Thank God we found out before it was too late’, I suppose?” His tone held bitterness, and he paused before he said: “Well—will you marry me, Joanna—or won’t you?”

“The answer is ‘No,’ Dale. It must be. One day you’ll be grateful to me—when you’ve found the ‘real thing’ yourself.”

He looked at her shrewdly. He was thinking: “And you, though you would deny it, believe you have found the ‘real thing’ already!”

But all he said was: “So this, Joanna, is—good-bye?” He held out his hand.

She took it, and through stiff lips said: “Yes. It’s better so.” Even then Dale might have appealed to some hunger in her—some desire to serve, to be needed, to be
loved.
But he only dropped her hand and turned away.

She watched him go, knowing that in refusing him she had cheated him of nothing. If, through the mere habit of each other, they had drifted ultimately into marriage they would have driven almost immediately upon rocks. Already, she knew guiltily, she had sometimes been bored with him. No doubt he had sometimes felt the same about her. He had known jealously certainly. But it had been the jealousy of pride, not of hurt love.

Yes, they had finished, she and Dale
...
As she had told him, it was better so. But as she watched his familiar back disappearing beyond the farthest trees she had the sensation of being confronted by a door—a door that was inexorably closing upon that part of her life where Dale had once been, if not part of its meaning, at least part of the importance of every day.