Hospital in the Highlands (11 page)

“Perhaps I did Fay a great wrong by coming between her and Robert when they were on a musical plane together,” she thought. “The way we—I—allowed us to be did sweep us along, rather, at the expense of everything and everybody else.”

But that was being in love, she knew; and if she had had the right to fall in love nobody would have disturbed them in the small, secure, sparsely populated wonderful Eden where all lovers dwell for a while, having mutually resigned the rest of the world for the core of perfection they hold within their grasp.

“I was stealing,” Flo concluded with an ache of wonderment at the simplicity of it all, “and now justice has caught up with me. I have simply given up what I never had any right to in the first place. No matter how much of a nuisance Fay may have been
I
was the only real villain of the piece. I do hope Robert isn’t really hurt, that he never actually cared!”

But could she sincerely wish this when her own heart was in little splinters from the impact of his wounding words? If tomorrow he told her of a new love, and flaunted his jewel, would she not wish she was dead or blind—unable to see the triumph denied her?

Of course she would, and she was well aware of it!

In the morning Meg was already at the breakfast table when Flo appeared, looking like a sleep walker, early though the hour was.

“You’re not going out without something to eat,” Meg said firmly. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Oh—” Flo felt at a loss. “I was going to have some coffee and toast. I usually do.”

Meg squinted at her.

“This isn’t a usual day though, is it? Not for either of us.”

“Oh,” Flo said again, nervously, “so Fay told you about Keith being at the hospital?”

“Yes.” Meg sat down firmly behind the coffee pot.

“I think I would rather have known all along,” Meg said challengingly at length. “I think I would have liked to see him. Fay says he was very keen to come out here and you wouldn’t let him.”

“No.” Flo ate mechanically. “I may have been mistaken, of course, but I thought only of you. Not in the least of him, or what he wanted.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you,” Meg admitted somewhat cynically. “I’m inclined to believe you.”

Flo merely shrugged as though to imply it didn’t really matter whether she was believed or not.

“Actually I’m amazed to discover I’ve survived the news so well,” Meg went on, energetically battering her own breakfast egg. “I hardly lost any sleep over it as a matter of fact.”

“Good!” Flo forced herself to say
.

“Naturally I’m curious to see Keith again. I’m certainly not allowing his presence at the hospital to deter me from accepting the job Matron has offered me.”

“Good again,” Flo decided.

“I’m looking forward to it as a matter of fact. You—you don’t think Keith wants me back, do you?”

“How can I answer that?” Flo demanded wearily. “I hope you don’t take him back. He isn’t worth it.”

“How do you know that? Tell me—has Keith ever—ever—?”

“Ever what?” asked Flo, suddenly uncaring.

“It doesn’t matter. Here’s the toast now. I may come and see Miss MacDonald today.”

“Do. I’ll be glad to show you around.”

“I think I’ll ask Keith to do that,” and Meg was actually smiling to herself as she stirred her second cup of coffee.

Whatever adjustments Meg had to make, Flo was busy making her own. Robert Strathallan was still Consultant Surgeon at The Glen and she was required to attend to him, as unobtrusively efficient as before. He did not make it too difficult for her, and even cracked little jokes across the patient on occasions in Tier direction, as though drawing her into a pleasant public relationship in place of the old private one. This was better than open resentment and rebuke, but she might have known that such a splendid character, with centuries of the breeding of chieftains behind him, would not be so small-minded as to allow wounded pride to heal only as far as permanent ill will towards his offender.

The weeks passed through the long drawn out late spring of the Highlands into early summer; cool, golden-bright days when it never seemed to be really dark at all and on a clear evening the Northern Lights could be seen flaming beyond the head of the loch. The town was now a throng with visitors, mostly enthusiastic regulars who either yachted or golfed. The hotels were packed and Fay was enjoying her work, especially as she had made several friends among the hotel guests and there was no dearth of pleasurable occupation.

Meg was seeing Keith again, Flo knew, and there was nothing she could do about it. Meg wasn’t a child and she seemed settled and fairly well content these days. Pixie was never any trouble, and in her loneliness of heart Flo turned more and more to the youngest sister, trying to enter into her youthful enthusiasms and imaginative games. Sometimes, however, even Pixie would catch her unawares, unprepared, on the raw edge of her emotions.

“You got a letter from Jim, didn’t you?” the youngster asked one Saturday as they cut flowers for the
house together.

“Yes—yes, I did,” Flo said cautiously.

“Any message for me?”

“No. Why should there be?”

“Well, Jim usually says ‘love to the cherub,’ or ‘a big kiss for Pixie' or something big brotherly. Just lately he either hasn’t been minding me or you aren’t passing on his greetings.”

“Take it as said, always, darling,” Flo assured her.

“Well, things aren’t the same as they were between you and Jim, so why pretend?”

Flo turned slowly, her cheeks as scarlet as the rose she had just cut from the bush by which she was stooping.

“What are you saying, Pixie? Who told you such lies?”

“Nobody told me,” the other said sulkily, “but I’ve got eyes in my head. You’re not in love with Jim any more. You like Mr. Strathallan better.”

“I—I—” Flo hardly knew how to express herself, or exactly how much Pixie was simply stabbing in the dark and hitting the truth only by accident—“I hope you haven’t said such things to anyone else? What has come over you?”

“There’s nothing come over me! I’m the only unchanging thing around this family. You I thought I
could
depend on: you were as—as safe as the Rock of Gibraltar until a couple of months ago, and then you began to look sort of queer and shut me out, and when I saw the same things had happened to yon Strathallan I knew the
worst
had befell!” Dramatically Pixie
rose and pointed a finger at the other. “Not only my word for it, either,” she continued, "because young Hamish took me into his confidence, swore me to secrecy and told me that his brother was daft over you. His very words.”

“And you told Hamish he was wrong because I was already engaged to be married, didn’t you?” Flo asked interestedly.

“No, I didna. I said ‘Guid luck to him!’ And I meant it. I like the Strathallan.”

Flo hugged her swiftly, fiercely, tears trembling on her lashes, the rose-petals crushed and bruised by such heedlessness.

“You may have been right, darling, at one time, but we know it was an impossible situation, don’t we? After all, Jim does exist and I gave my word to him. Robert Strathallan knows about Jim and it’s all over.”

“Ay. But does Jim know about Robert?”

“Not yet. He’s coming home. I’ll tell him then.”

“If he releases you it’ll be all right, won’t it?”

“I told you, Pixie, it’s all over, whatever there was, between Robert Strathallan and myself.”

Pixie’s jaw dropped.

“You can’t seriously face being a
spinster
all your life?”

“Can’t I? There are worse fates, I should think.”

Obviously Pixie couldn’t agree.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jim’s letter in reply to her distress signal had been calm to the point of casualness:

“I have gathered,” he wrote, “that you want to see me about something. Why didn’t you out with it and say so? I don’t associate you, my sweet, straightforward Flo, with disjointed phrases and hysteria. Can it be that we will both see changes in one another which 'time’s passing alone has not wrought? I am due for
two weeks’ leave—have wangled it into three and am flying home for an untangling. Mother has not been too well (you
should
know this) and I am making her my excuse.”

So now she had to wait and ponder on what was to be.

She hadn’t known Mrs. Darvie was unwell, and her conscience troubled her on this score, for their correspondence had become cursory to the point of neglect. With Jim so far away she should have visited his widowed mother more often, every month or so, even though it meant a journey of a hundred miles, for Jim was a Lowland Scot who hailed from the Clyde and thought of his countryfolk in the far north as foreigners and pagans.

Sometimes a thrill of remembered excitement ran through her veins when she thought of Jim’s coming, but she had only to read his letter again to feel immediately damped, for somehow the letter’s phrasing put her in the wrong from start to finish, without hearing the worst of the business, and there was certainly nothing which could be termed exciting about it.

“I seem to have lost all my self-assurance lately,” Flo fretted. “I’m actually afraid of telling Jim: I’m sure he would never put a foot wrong or look at another girl while he was engaged to me. In fact Jim’s rather a prig, though I only see it now when it’s too late.”

For Flo it seemed a sad summer. Several of her friends among the long-term patients died, including Annie Lindsay, and it was no use Matron saying that it didn’t do to get fond of anyone in their profession. Of course one grew fond of certain people, because somehow they sensed their need of you, and need ripened easily into affection. You could not graciously refuse affection. It would be like refusing a flower from a child. Young Dennis finally graduated from the Physiotherapy Department of the Hospital on an artificial leg of which he was extremely proud, and went home for a spell before taking up his career as a cub reporter on a Scottish daily, and for a while Flo missed him so much she could scarcely bear to look at his bed, which was now taken over by a naughty old man with a bladder weakness who pinched every nurse who came near him and made the most embarrassing requests for attention right in the middle of morning rounds.

“Anybody would think that Irish gossoon was your own kin, Sister,” Robert Strathallan said one day, hearing her catch her breath and sigh as the boy’s name was discovered chipped in the paintwork above the corner bed. “I didn’t see him much, but I believe you and he were buddies?”

“Yes. Yes, sir, we were. I liked Dennis.”

“I also hear you turned football fan for him?”

“For one day I did. Yes, sir.”

“You should be on the psychiatric side, you know, Sister. Maybe you missed your vocation, eh?”

Was this a sneer?

She flushed before saying quietly, “In nursing one has to be on the psychiatric side part of the time, if other things have failed, sir. But it didn’t take much psychiatry to understand young Dennis. One needed plenty of patience with him. That’s all.” They passed on to the next bed, and Robert Strathallan glanced at the patient’s notes.

“You have got patience, Sister, haven’t you? I’ll grant you that.”

Once again she didn’t know how to reply, so kept silent. “I’m not a patient man,” he told her with an odd, twisted smile. “If I can’t have action I bust. Now, what have we here?”

Flo felt upset for the next hour without really knowing why. It was as though Robert Strathallan had taken his probe and stirred depths in her she didn’t know existed. What had he been trying to say? That all was over? Well, of course it was over. That was understood.

She was in her small office across from Matron’s in the main hall of the hospital when a beautif
ul
red-haired female appeared and glancing through the glass panel tapped and said, “Excuse me, but is Mr. Strathallan available yet? He told me to collect him at four and it’s after that now.”

In a confused moment of jealousy and shock, Flo observed the stranger's flawless creamy complexion, which so happily mates with red hair and green eyes; noted the modulated tones of the exquisitely educated Scottish voice and saw the careless elegance of good clothes casually worn.

“I shall inform him you are here, Miss—Miss—er?”

“Tell him Jenny’s playing hell,” the other said cheerfully, snapping open her powder compact and creating a feminine fragrance in all the antiseptic smells around.

Flo lifted up the house telephone and gave the message in her own disciplined context. No sooner was it received than Robert Strathallan appeared on the double and was obviously not sorry to see Jenny or afraid of the hell that threatened. Just for a moment his eyes met Flo’s and then he bore his companion away, as though anxious to make his escape.

“He was telling me about
her
,”
Flo decided, wonderingly. “He wanted me to know he had found someone else, that he had to have ‘action,’ in other words.”

She shook her head but her thoughts refused to clear.

“He didn’t have to tell me anything about her,” she pondered numbly. “He always has been quite free, and she—she seems to be nice.”

But while Robert remained free she would always have hoped, that one day some miracle would happen to bring them together again. Now she prayed that she might be spared the agony of being asked to dance at his wedding—to someone else.

She knew she wasn’t as patient and tolerant as all that.

Jim’s letter announcing his imminent arrival in Glen Lochallan was written on thick, gray deckle-edged paper, which made it appear strange to her eyes, for she had grown accustomed to the crackle of thin, air mailed sheets.

There is something of thrift in most Scots, but now Flo found this trait rather irritating.

Why couldn
’
t Jim have cabled her when he was leaving Malaya and telephoned as soon as he arrived?

Surely the occasion merited the expense.

Flo had to free herself from the hospital for two or three days, and Matron was less than pleased when she heard the formal request for leave of absence from her Sister in Charge.

“Now, Sister, you’re breaking our
golden rule, aren’t you? You know very well we can only consider bereavements or severe illness for special
l
eave. I released you for a fortnight when your father passed away, and before that there was a long weekend for something or other. Is it—er—important, Sister?”

Flo hadn’t wanted to tell about Jim, for she knew Matron would be ringing wedding bells for her.

“My—my
fiancé
has flown home on compassionate leave to see his mother, who is unwell, Matron. Naturally he hasn’t much time and—and he’s travelling to Glen Lochallan overnight.”

Miss MacDonald’s countenance relaxed.

“Naturally you won’t want to come in to work,” she said promptly. “I suppose I’ll have to give in and knock the time off your annual holiday, which you’re taking in October. Will three days be sufficient?”

“I think so, thank you, Matron. It isn’t as though Jim has come to stay,” Flo insisted, so that her colleague would nurse no mistaken ideas. “We just want to have a good, long, uninterrupted chat.”

“Stop talking now and then, and behave naturally for your ages,” Matron advised sternly. “You grow too old for such things far too quickly, Sister.
I
know. Go along now. You’re excused duty until Monday.”

Flo went and took off her stiff cuffs almost gladly. Matron really was a dear at times. So understanding. She would probably do an extra round herself each day rather than overload the rest of the staff with the S.I.C.’s various duties.

Flo was waiting on the station at half-past six next morning, looking neat as a pin in a simple gray suit, her hair shining and knotted low on her nape as Jim liked it. She knew he would approve her clothes; he liked women to be tailored; but for the life of her she couldn’t put the old expression back in her eyes. Once, it seemed to her, her eyes had glowed continually: now they were simply two brown orbs; they looked tired, and it was not only owing to lack of sleep, as she well knew.