Kissing Kin (9 page)

Camilla felt that what Jenny was saying was somehow all wrong, but she was not yet of an age herself to make any patronizing remarks about wait-and-see or time-will-tell. She considered Jenny’s attitude an awful waste, because Jenny was so pretty and understanding, and some man would be done out of a delightful wife if she held to her determination not to love anyone. But it was Jenny’s life, after all, and she had a right to run it any way she chose. Her unhysterical viewpoint on her own future, which was in no way martyred resignation or bitterness, but merely a deliberate choice of what she was sure she wanted from now on, left Camilla feeling childish and muddled and insecure. Camilla had no idea so far what she wanted, or expected, from her life. Without Calvert at her side she was rudderless and lost. She had never faced the necessity, at Richmond, of making decisions without him, or encountering any situation where he could not tell her what to do. It was time, she decided humbly in Jenny’s stimulating presence, that she grew up and began to think for herself.

They finished the cocoa and biscuits and went upstairs to bed, swinging linked hands like old friends, and found Jenny’s
overnight
things laid out in Camilla’s room. Jenny asked if she would rather be alone, to which Camilla gave an emphatic negative, and they undressed together with easy chatter about what was going on in London these days, and how Virginia’s accident had happened, and the amusing or exasperating things which could happen to a VAD And soon after the light was out Camilla slept, and to her own surprise never woke until the morning sunlight was streaming into the room.

Because Camilla had never visited the Hall as Phoebe had before the war began, when the young Earl had just married a coal heiress and the great house was gay with parties for the hunting, and Winifred’s famous balls, its altered aspect was no shock to her when she arrived there the next morning with Archie and Jenny. Nowadays its wintry park and gardens were full of wheel-chairs and blue-clad men on crutches and canes, and the red-caped forms of their attendant nurses, all making the most of a mild sunny day.

Camilla had by now acquired a professional interest in the equipment and management of hospitals other than the one in St. James’s Square, and was eager to see what Winifred had made of this one. They said Goodbye to Archie, who
departed
on his mysterious assignment—said by him to be very dull—in Gloucester, and Jenny led Camilla through the mansion as a distinguished visitor, introducing her to
Winifred
and some of the Sisters, stopping to chat with patients who eyed the attractive young American with respectful admiration. They paid a special visit to the wounded Canadians, none of whom happened to have been in Calvert’s outfit, but who were interested to hear that she had a brother who belonged to a machine-gun.

Most of the ground-floor rooms and those on the floor above had been turned into wards, and the morning-room, which was next to the garden-room with its commodious sinks and drains once used for the care and arrangement of cut flowers and household plants, had been converted into the
operating-room
. The equipment here was so ample and so exceedingly up-to-date that it was a surgeon’s joy, and the great Sir Quentin Ffolliott himself had come down from London more than once to perform his remarkable operations. The baroque dining-room nearby, with its elaborate plasterwork and coved ceiling and long windows facing east, was now the surgical ward, and shapeless muslin bags covered the nude statues which postured in the deep shell niches around the walls. The white drawing-room, its Gainsboroughs and Hoppners and crystal
chandeliers all swathed in muslin, was the medical ward, and the blue drawing-room, which was smaller, housed the eye and head cases. The Gobelins had all been removed from the tapestry-room on the garden front, and Winifred used it as an office for conducting the business of the hospital and the
interviews
, often tragic, with relatives and friends of the patients. The gunroom, more or less intact in its comfortable leather furniture and oak-panelled walls, had with the addition of more chairs and a piano and a gramophone become the
recreation-room
. The billiard room, minus its table and appurtenances, but retaining its deep cushioned window-seats, contained the beds of the more active convalescent patients who could get about somewhat on their own and who took their meals at a big table in what had been the servants’ hall. The spacious ballroom, which was always hard to heat, had the wheel-chair people. The family bedrooms had been stripped of their personal belongings and turned into small wards for special cases and for occasional officers sent down from the London house to convalesce in private.

The energetic Countess of Enstone and the Earl’s sister Clare were pigging it cheerfully in former parlourmaids’ bedrooms on an upper floor, appearing punctually in their starched nursing dresses to pull their weight and a bit more with the rest of the staff. One tremendous concession the Hall made to its hardworking VAD’s, most of whom before the war had not known what it was to dress themselves without a lady’s maid—each of them had her own cubbyhole of a bedroom, however bleak and ill-heated, to herself. Jenny and others of her age and kind, tormented by personal grief or anxiety, sometimes found this cherished privacy about all that stood between them and the breaking-point during the difficult settling-in period each one of them had to go through—
learning
to do without mere bodily comfort, to say nothing of recreation or companionship—learning to focus on each day as it came, without expending useless energy on remembering yesterday’s tragedy or dreading tomorrow’s possible bad
news—learning not to see behind their closed eyelids in the dark the hideous, quivering wounds they had handled, nor hear again the sounds wrenched from brave men by agony. It required a whole new nervous system, these girls had learned, to become a successful VAD And no matter how
strong-minded
you had proved yourself about not turning away from the kill in the hunting-field, nor how useful you had been the time your mother had bronchitis, nor how brave you had been about your own broken collar-bone, the things you saw in the surgical ward left you hanging on to the edge of the sluice in the garden-room, sick and shaking and ashamed.

After all the introductions and the chat, and even a brief glimpse of the great Sir Quentin himself, who was down for the day and with whom Jenny was obviously a favourite, one name was still missing. Camilla knew that Fabrice worked here as a VAD, but hesitated to ask for her lest Jenny should think it was plain low-down curiosity—which in a way it was. Just then Winifred said blandly, without moving her lips, “Ah, here is our little angel of mercy, she’s a sort of cousin of yours, isn’t she?” and gave Camilla a sidelong, malicious glance.

A girl was coming towards them down the surgical ward, to which they had returned after the tour of inspection. She was small and very slight and rather pink and white in the face, Camilla thought, with too much curly dark hair showing round the edge of her white coif. She was pushing a trolley full of cups of broth which she was dispensing with a great deal of graceful bending over beds and patting of pillows and laughing backward looks which brought answering grins and some informal retorts from the men as she passed.

“Always scattering cheer, wherever she goes,” said
Winifred
,
sotto
voce
, at Camilla’s ear. “I’m sure I don’t know what we’d
do
without her, she does perk us up so, the
self-sacrificing
darling!”

“Well, they do seem to like it,” Camilla remarked, watching.

“They do, God bless them, I’m telling you they
do!
”
Winifred agreed promptly. “Don’t think for one minute I’m complaining. Just a little ray of sunshine, that’s what it is!”

“Wini-fred,” drawled Jenny with a rueful smile, and Winifred turned on her heel.

“Go and introduce them, I’m busy,” she said, and walked away.

As they approached the trolley in the centre aisle, Fabrice left it and came forward, both her hands held out—frail, curving hands with tapering wrists lost in the bulky starched cuffs.

“You must be my new cousin from America,” she said before either of them could speak, and the words were lightly touched with a French accent. “How nice it is to meet one more of my charrrming family. My dar-ling, it is
trrrragique
about your poor brother, but we must always hope for the best until we know to the contrary!” And she kissed Camilla prettily on both cheeks with the sort of tenderness due to a chief mourner.

Camilla, who had to stoop to receive the caress, found herself withdrawing from it as soon as common courtesy permitted, heard herself saying rather brusquely, “We hope Bracken can arrange to get him to England soon.”

“Ah, yes, that makes them well when nothing else can.” Soft brown eyes rayed with black lashes looked up at her sympathetically, small warm fingers pressed clinging comfort on hers. “The sight of a familiar face, like a sister’s—it brings them back from the door of death sometimes! Send him to us here, and we will pamper him and get him well for you.”

Camilla, who felt perfectly capable of pampering Calvert in London herself if she had the chance, thanked her politely and said the broth would be getting cold.

“And then
I
shall hear!” cried Fabrice archly, and sent a dazzling, inclusive smile down the row of beds on their left. “Sick men are such tyrants! They would as soon run your feet off as not!” She caught up a cup of broth in fingers that made
the thick white china seem almost too heavy to hold, and carried it to the man in the nearest bed, who watched its approach greedily. “This is the one we call Grison, don’t ask me why!”

Camilla, who saw that the man had grey hair, smiled
perfunctorily
, and Jenny standing beside her said in an expressionless tone, “Well, I think that’s about everything. I must go and change now. Will you stay to lunch, or do you think you ought to be getting back?”

Camilla said she thought Virginia might be needing her, and Jenny accompanied her to where the bicycles lived in an empty stable, and saw her off down the lane to Farthingale. Pedalling thoughtfully along the frosty ruts, Camilla argued with herself that everything Fabrice had said was entirely in order and if it had been said by anyone else would have given no offence whatever—and heard herself resolving inwardly that if Calvert could heal as well in St. James’s Square she would keep him there for more reasons than one, commission or no commission. Not that he would be likely to be taken in by Fabrice. He would dislike her at first sight, and that, too, would be bad for him.

Bracken’s letter arrived within the week, written from a big base hospital near Boulogne.