My Surgeon Neighbour (12 page)

On the doorstep stood Steven Carrage and Tony, the latter carrying the minute suitcase of his possessions with which he had left a week or two earlier. As usual he was calm and philosophic behind his owl-like spectacles, but Steven’s tone was agitated as he said,

“Sarah, I realize this may be an awful imposition, but
could
you take my young man in again for a few days more?”

“Of course. Come in. I always keep one spare bed for an emergency,” she told him.

“But it’s so late
—
”

“Late for his bedtime, I agree.” Sarah ruffled Tony’s hair. “Has he had his supper?”

“Oh yes. In fact, he was in bed. I had to get
him
up to bring him to you, because I need to be away again at first light.” Steven paused. “Look, if we could get him to bed, might I have a word or two with you afterwards?” he added.

Sarah left him with sherry while she went to see Tony into bed in his old room. As she did so, she recalled Dick’s warning again, and she could have wished either Alice or Martha were in the house too. But if this wasn’t a legitimate errand of Steven’s, what was? And in any case, Martha should be home very soon.

Steven was doing a quarterdeck march across her den and he stubbed out a cigarette as she rejoined him. When she sat he did so too, but uneasily and forward, his fists clenched between his knees.

She waited, sensing that his tomorrow’s errand was in some way a sequel to his earlier one, and after a brief silence he confirmed this. He said, “You shouldn’t think I don’t realize I owe you an explanation of these alarums and excursions. I do, so here goes. “You’ll remember that, the last time I was away, I came back at short notice when Tony was taken ill? Well, that meant I had to abandon what I went away to do. But now, tonight, I’ve learned that I have hopes of finishing the job. Do you remember too that I told you about a certain marriage which broke up?”

“Yes, I remember. It was yours, wasn’t it, Steven?” asked Sarah quietly.

He nodded. “Perhaps I meant you to guess that. Perhaps I knew, even so early in our friendship, that I could talk to you; that you might say the one word that would give me a clue, give me hope. And you did. In fact, you said two. You stated your own code
—
that love, real love, can’t be subdivided; it’s whole for one person or it isn’t love at all, and that anyone who didn’t know that wasn’t fully adult. Which Nora
—
my wife
—
wasn’t, in more ways than that. For instance, she had a wilful child’s temper and not a clue about money or making-do, so that if life or experience did jerk her into growing-up, I felt there was a gleam of hope she might realize too which of us, me or her lover, mattered most to her. And if she did, that might be the beginning of the end of the nightmare she had put me through.”

“But only, surely if she got in touch with you again? Did she?” asked Sarah.

“
She
didn’t, and the next bit reads like something you’d hardly credit in a book. By the merest chance a very dear mutual friend who was holidaying in Belgium was lunching on a cafe terrace in Ostend when she was pretty certain she saw Nora having coffee at a table inside. She was alone, and Mary Crosbie, our friend, kept her in view until she left and then followed her. At first by bus and then quite a distance on foot, which taxed Mary a lot as she suffers from spine curvature and can’t walk fast. She was a good way behind Nora when Nora went into one of three tall apartment houses, and when Mary did catch up she was faced by three lots of name-plates yards long and no one of Nora’s surname—though of course she hardly expected that
—
amongst them.

“That put Mary on a spot. She has hardly a word of French and the only
concierge
she was able to find hadn’t any English and couldn’t or wouldn’t understand Mary’s mimed description of Nora. What was more, Mary was on a coach-tour due to leave Ostend in a couple of hours, so she did the only
thing
possible to her. She noted in her diary the name of the street and the block-numbers, meaning to get in touch with me, and then lost her diary when her handbag was stolen from her later.”

“Oh
no
!”
breathed Sarah.

“That, and a good deal more, is what I said too,” replied Steven. “However, Mary was able to give me a vague description of the district and it was the first clue I had ever had as to Nora’s whereabouts. So on the little I had I parked Tony with you and went over. My French is passable and it wasn’t too difficult to locate the place and I went through those three blocks with a fine comb, knocking on every door, even though I didn’t even know whether Nora lived there or had just called in and left again after Mary had gone.

“It took time, explaining myself to them all and having to go back when I got no answer, which happened often. But then, in the third house, the photograph of Nora I was showing touched ore, or so nearly as to sicken me. The
concierge
said she had had a single one-room flatlet there, that did my heart good, but had left only a couple of days earlier.”

“Without a forwarding address?”

“Without,” Steven confirmed, “a forwarding address. In fact, she hadn’t had one when she went away. She had left on good terms with the
concierge
and only because she had to find somewhere cheaper. Anyway, she had promised to phone or call in with her new address when she had one, so a good fat
pourboire
to the women took care of that, as far as I was concerned. I was to sit pretty until Nora rang; upon which the
concierge
would ring me. But as you know Tony’s affair brought me back a day or two later, by which time Nora hadn’t made any sign, nor hadn’t since until today.”

“But now she has? You know where she is?”

“Yes. She phoned me herself, person-to-person early this evening.” Steven expelled a long, long breath. “Sarah, you don’t know what it did to me to hear her voice again—catchy, eager,
young,
just the same as ever. She hadn’t kept her promise because she hadn’t been able to stick the first place she had found and had moved twice since. But when she did go back, the
concierge
had gone beyond my instructions by describing me and passing on my address. And—Nora did the rest.”

“And she hadn’t—? She wasn’t—?” Sarah stopped, embarrassed.

He understood. “No. They had parted a long time ago, and since she had had a job in an import-export office, translating English letters and doing copy-typing. Of course there are volumes of things we couldn’t say and great yawning gaps to be filled in. It could even be that we’ll find adjusting difficult. But the good thing is, Sarah, that she wants to come back as much as I need her, and that’s with everything I’ve got!”

There was no need for Sarah to find words to tell him how glad she was for him. Her shining eyes said it for her as she asked, “Does Tony know yet? That
when you come back from this trip, she will be with
you?”

Steven shook his head. “I haven’t told
him
yet, though I wanted to.”

“Then why not?”

“Because,” he smiled, “I had an idea that you’d like the job. Would you?”

“You know I would! You mean I may tell him while you’re away?”

“That was the rough idea.”

They talked on for a while, then Steven looked at his watch with sharp surprise. “Ten-thirty! I must go. I’ve oceans of things to do before morning,” he exclaimed, cutting across Sarah’s dismayed echo of, “Half-past
ten!
Then where on earth is Martha?”

“Martha? Why, where is she supposed to be?” Sarah related Martha’s errand, but made little of her lateness in order not to keep Steven. On the way out to his car she asked him,

“And the future, Steven? When you do come back, will you be staying on here in Fareborough?”

But he told her no. His plans were necessarily fluid, but his present idea was that he would not bring Nora to Fareborough at all. She would stay with friends in London and at first he would only take Tony to visit her while he sought a suitable medical partnership elsewhere where the three of them could make a fresh start. Meanwhile, other than Sarah, he would take only his present partners into his confidence and he knew he could trust Sarah to keep it too, he said.

“Of course you can,” she assured him. And then, on impulse as he was about to open the door of his car, she laid a hand on his arm. “But I wonder if you know how badly I’m going to miss you, and Tony too?” she said.

He put his own hand over hers and gripped it hard. “If it’s as much as we shall miss you, I do know,” he said. And then, “Bless you, Sarah, for everything,” he added and planted a hearty kiss upon her cheek as lights suddenly and revealingly raked the gateway and drive and Oliver Mansbury’s car swept in and halted to allow his passenger to get out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

OLIVER alighted too and handed to Martha a covered basket which she cradled lovingly in her arms as she turned to Sarah.

“I’m ever so sorry, Miss Sarah! That I’m so late back, I mean. Who’d have thought I could be so silly, thinking the buses from Chevicote would run the same on Sundays as on weekdays? I waited and waited, not knowing there would be no nine o’clock and thinking it was just late, you see. And I could have been waiting till now or walking, as I’d set out to do, carrying pussy, if Mr. Mansbury hadn’t come along in his car and seen me and given me a lift.
Wasn’t
that kind of him?”

Covered in confusion, Sarah agreed, “It was indeed.” She did not know whether Oliver had seen Steven’s kiss. But his glance at the other man’s sports jacket and corduroys had not escaped her and she felt sure he had read the worst in the fact that Steven was carrying no professional bag. Meanwhile, after nodding to the surgeon, Steven had got into his seat and was ready to go, and a moment later, with a, “Think nothing of it. I was glad to be able to help,” Oliver was at the wheel again and following the smaller car out.

Indoors Sarah had to hear the story in fuller detail and to admire the newcomer, a ball of orange fur with a tiny protuberance for a tail and ears so transparent that the veins shone through, rose-pink. Martha planned to call him Sunny, she told Sarah before she took
him
down to the kitchen to meet Moses, leaving Sarah to the kaleidoscope of her thoughts about the events of the evening to her
chagrin
that it had ended as it had.

For this was the kind of thing Dick had warned her to avoid at all costs, the perfectly innocent situation which could be misread. It irked her badly that she was in no position to pass it off or to joke about it, for she did not know Oliver Mansbury well enough for either. Ironically, she only
loved
the man for what she knew of his kindness, his sense of justice, his controlled virility! They were on no terms which would allow her to explain away to him the fact that she had had Steven at the house for no professional purpose on a Sunday evening when she had known Martha would be out and, as no doubt Martha’s gossip on he
r
way home had informed
him,
when Alice was still away on holiday.

How much of Jurice Grey’s malice had he heard? She wondered. How much would he have read into tonight’s scene? Enough perhaps to explain his rather curt dismissal of Martha’s thanks and her own. But enough for him to
think
it his professional duty to act on?
Oh please, please not,
prayed Sarah in an agony for Steven’s reputation as much as for her own.

Tied by her promise to Steven, she told nothing of his story to anyone but Tony, whom she knew she could make the staunch guardian of the secret as long as it was ‘Daddy’s’. As for Tony himself, Sarah only wished his mother could have heard the confident faith of his, “Of course I always knew Mummy wouldn’t stay away from Daddy and me any longer than she had to. I told Daddy so when he was sad about her having to be away so long.” To Sarah that spelled all the trust she prayed she might inspire in her own children if she ever had any, and again, as often before, she thought how much she would give to have a son just like Tony.

Steven came back happy from Ostend and Tony duly returned to the flat. But during the month of the dissolving of Steven’s Fareborough partnership and connections, they spent their weekends in London with Tony’s mother and Sarah saw very little of them. Meanwhile there were no further developments in the feud between Monckton and Greystones until the eruption of a serio-comic clash which at first did not involve Sarah at all.

She was to hear of it from Martha. Martha, indignant, outraged, on the defensive, exploded one morning, “That Pigott! That
gardener
they have next door,
you
know, Miss Sarah? Well, what do you think he’s saying now? That—but of course you’ll have heard that lot of cats that have been caterwauling around and going on nohow at night lately?”

Sarah had and said so. It was a recent midnight nuisance in their hitherto quiet district. But knowing both the more mature Moses and the kitten Sunny had alibis in Martha’s ste
rn
marshalling of them to bed every night, she queried, “Surely Mr. Piggott hasn’t suggested your cats are amongst them?”

Martha fumed, “That’s just what he has done! Won’t credit that you
can
get cats in at night if you take the trouble and, well,
provide
for them, if you’ll pardon the expression, Miss Sarah. Says it stands to sense that Moses anyway is there, yelling his head off with the rest and worse than that too.”

“Worse?” echoed Sarah amusedly.

Worse, by his way of thinking. Oh no, he doesn’t care so much about the noise that keeps our children awake and must do the same for the Greystones patients, I should have thought. It’s his precious garden-borders that
he’s
worried about. Says these cats, whoever they are, and
I
know they’re the lot from the housing-estate below, are careering about and playing merry Harry with his bedding-out, and if he can only catch them at it, he’ll
do
them, and no two ways about it!”

“Ru
inin
g his flower-beds? But I thought midnight cats usually sat on walls and roofs, and howled and fought it out there?”

“So they mostly do. Don’t mean anything by it half the time. Just their way. Bang up a window and pour out a jug of water and they’re off, double-quick. It’s only if they think they’re cornered that they’ll helter
-
skelter amongst growing plants, and then only from fear, poor
thin
gs. But this—this
Pigott
,”
Martha’s tone made anathema of the name, “he will have it that there won’t be a flower left in his borders and that it’s bound to be Moses, if not Sunny, doing the damage along with the rest.”

“But we can prove that you always get them in at night before you go to bed yourself,” objected Sarah.

“Only if I got him round here to see them. Which isn’t to say, if he doesn’t want it to, that they’re in every night of their lives,” Martha pointed out with logic. Her lip suddenly quivered. “Miss Sarah, you don’t really think he’d try to do either of them a mischief, do you?”

Sarah shook her head. “He wouldn’t dare. He must know that cats are specially
privileged
, that they are beyond the law of trespass or damage. I can understand he is annoyed about his flower-beds of course. But if the damage is done at night, everyone here can back you up that neither Moses nor Sunny can possibly be blamed. Don’t worry, Martha. Now that Mr. Pigott has had his say, I should doubt if any more will be heard about it.”

Nor was it until a certain Saturday morning. From the staircase window Sarah saw Trevor Boothe leave Greystones by a side door and come over to join the Monckton children in the garden. Lately, she thought in passing, there were hopes for him in a social way. The children themselves made short work of his bragging and ganged-up against him when he tried to bully. But he still chose to join them when there was no compulsion on him to do so, and certainly recently he had caused no tro
ub
le from which he needed to
see
his way out.

But alas for her complacency! She had barely reached the dayroom when a small company burst in on her there: Alice, white-faced and indignant; little Jean Cosford, one hand in her mother’s, the other fist knuckling her tearful eyes; and Trevor, sullen and shu
fflin
g, an unwilling third.

Sarah looked in dismay from one to the other. “Why, what’s the matter, Nurse?” she asked, using the title by which the children knew Alice on duty.

Alice compressed her lips. “Trouble,” she said curtly. “But Jean had better tell you what she has told me, I think. Jean—?”

However, Jean, thus invited, could do no better than to dissolve into sobs, from which presently emerged a choked, “I didn’t do it, I
didn’t
!
Really
not, Sister Sanst’d!”

Sarah went to kneel before her. “Didn’t do what, Jean? Tell me?”

“What—what Trevor says. What he’s told
them.
But I didn’t, and he knows I didn’t. Not once. Not
ever
!”

Sarah stood and turned to Trevor. “Well, Trevor? What’s all this you have been saying about Jean? Suppose
you
tell me?”

But Trevor merely thrust out sulky lips and it was Alice who explained, “It seems the big greenhouse at Greystones was found with the door open this morning, and heaps of damage done to the prize flowers Mr. Pigott was entering for the Flower Show next week. It must have been those night-prowling cats. At least, I suppose so. But what Trevor says he has told them
—
Mr. Mansbury and Mr. Pigott and Mrs. Beacon—is that it was Jean who went into the greenhouse yesterday evening and must have left the door open behind her.”

Sarah’s jaw dropped.
“
Jean
?
What nonsense! Why, she has never set foot in the Greystones grounds since you both left there, has she?”

But the answer to that was a slow reluctant nod on the child’s part. “I was there, Sister Sans’d. Yesterday. With Trevor. Like he says.”

“Oh, Jean! You went over there without asking Mummy if you might? Or asking me?” Sarah accused gently.

Another nod. A gulp. “Well, it was Sunny, you see.”

“You mean Martha’s new kit?”

“Yes. She didn’t know where he was after tea, an’ I hunted for him for her, an’ I was worried too,
’
cos he’s very small, an’ I thought if he didn’t come home for his supper, he might
die
if he’d wandered off and didn’t know his way back. And then when Trevor was going home after play, he said p’raps Sunny had gone over the wall into next door, and why didn’t I go back with him an’ look. So I did, an’ he helped me for a bit an’ then he said, ‘Let’s look in the big greenhouse.’ ”

“I didn’t. You said that,” put in Trevor.

“Oh Trevor, you know I didn’t.
You
did.
I
said, ‘No, we mustn’t. When I lived here with Mummy Mr. Pigott never let me or any children go in alone, so we really mustn’t.’ So Trevor looked through the door an’ he said he couldn’t see Sunny there.”

“You mean, neither of you did go in?” put in Sarah.

“Not then. I didn’t and Trevor didn’t while I was with him. But when he came round this morning he said the greenhouse door had been left open all night and lots of Mr. Pigott’s flowers were all smashed down.”

Sarah put a gentle finger beneath the child’s chin. “But you really hadn’t been in? We want the truth, Jean.”

“No, I’ve
told
you and I’ve told Mummy. But Trevor told them over there that I did and they believe him!”

“Well, tell me, did Sunny come home after all?”

“Yes. He was in Martha’s kitchen when I got back, and I was so glad I didn’t think anything more about it. I didn’t even tell Mummy I’d been next door with Trevor.”

Sarah turned to the boy. “Well, it looks as if it rests with you,” she said quietly. “After Jean came home, did
you
go into the greenhouse and leave the door open behind you?”

H
is stare was defiant. “No.”

“Then don’t you see that if neither of you went in, it could have been someone else who left the door open after you and Jean had just looked through it? Why did you say it was Jean?”

“Because it
was.
She said, ‘Let’s go in,’ and she went and
—
I came away.”

“Oh
Trevor
!”
Jean appealed to Sarah, “That’s what he told Mr. Mansbury, he says. An’ it isn’t, it
isn’t
true!”

Sarah looked from one to the other and then in despair at Alice. She knew whom she wanted to believe; experience told her whom she
could
believe. But equally earnestly did she want to think that Trevor was not lying this time. For if he were it meant that she had made no progress with him at all. She drew Alice aside.

“Look,” she whispered. “Will you send Jean away and we’ll give Trevor another chance alone? After all, if we can make him see that he’s not to blame if a third person was really the culprit, he may realize the utter senselessness of his implicating Jean.”

But Trevor stuck defiantly to his story and there was no choice but to let him go too.

Alice said wretchedly, “What
is
the truth, do you suppose, Sister?
I
know Jean wouldn’t
li
e to me for anything in the world, which is more than we could say of Trevor. But if they’ve chosen to believe his story, who is going to convince them of anything different?”

“
We
are, if only we can find some way to discredit it,” replied Sarah stoutly. “Meanwhile, I suppose we shouldn’t forget the really injured party, Mr. Pigott, and I’ve been thinking that, whether or not it was the children’s fault, we ought to sympathize provisionally, just in case.”

“You mean, you think there’s just a chance it
was
Jean and that I ought to go over and eat humble pie on her behalf?”

Sarah shook her head. “No. I’ll go myself. I’m in charge here and they’ll expect me to make some gesture. I’d rather do it voluntarily than be put on the defensive by any of them. I’m terribly sorry for Mr. Pigott and I want to say so .But don’t worry, Alice, I’m not wearing any blame or letting Jean shoulder it unless they can produce someone other than Trevor who saw her open that door and leave it open.”

A quarter of an hour later she had faced Oliver Mansbury across the desk in his own sanctum. As once before, she had asked for Mrs. Beacon, but he had been crossing the hall as she was shown in and he had asked her errand.

She had told him and had expressed her regrets for the catastrophe. And then, though her instinct told her that Trevor so enjoyed even unfavorable limelight that it wasn’t the best way to handle him, she had found herself agreeing to his uncle’s suggestion that both children should be arraigned and questioned until one of their stories ‘cracked’ under pressure. His hand on the phone, he had asked her permission to ring Alice to bring them over and to sit in at the ‘tribunal’ too. Then he had gone in search of the
gardener
, saying they must have the story of the open door at first hand. And now they were all there: Jean and Alice; Trevor; Oliver himself; Mr. Pigott; Mrs. Beacon, and the crowning irrelevance in Sarah’s eyes, Jurice Grey. What had
she
to do with it anyway? thought Sarah sourly.

“It’s all wrong. It’s all
wrong
!
They’re making a—a spectacle of it,” was her inward protest. But already
Oliver was questioning Jean and she was repeating her story in a thin, halting little voice. Then it was Trevor’s turn and, as Sarah had feared, he was blustering, enjoying himself immensely.

“And you still say it was Jean who went into the greenhouse alone?” asked Oliver?”

“Oh yes. She said she was going in, and I went away. ‘Cos we’re not allowed to go in by ourselves,” Trevor added with a virtuous glance at Mr. Pigott.

Oliver looked a little hopelessly at Sarah. “That’s been his version all along. So where do we go from here? The same denials, the same contradictions from each of them. And the fact still remaining that the place was found open this morning and the damage done!”

Sarah longed to say, “Well, what did you expect? A dramatic confession from one of them? Or a last minute intervention from Mr. Pigott saying he made a mistake and the door was shut after all?”

But all she said was, “Perhaps you haven’t made all the enquiries you might have done. Has the gardener been asked whether the house could have been left open by anyone else?”

“Oh yes. We’ve already ascertained that!”

Sarah said quietly, “Well, may I ask him again now?” (If they wanted a court-of-law they should have it!)

But when she put her question, Mr. Pigott said firmly that when the afternoon watering had been done at four o’clock, “no one at all would have call to go in to the hothouse after that.”

“No ‘call’ perhaps,” persisted Sarah. “But isn’t it just possible that someone did?”

“And who should want to?” Mr. Pigott countered.

Nonplussed, Sarah said, “I don’t know. But I was thinking
—
”
her
glance
at Mrs. Beacon held a
question
—
“mightn’t one of your walking patients have seen no harm in stepping inside and then have been careless about closing the door when leaving?”

Mrs. Beacon bridled. “At the moment I
have
only two convalescent patients. When they go out in the gardens a nurse is always with them, and you surely don’t suppose we haven’t questioned everyone on the house and garden staff?” she enquired icily.

To that there seemed to be no answer and there was a small silence until Oliver began, “Well, it rather looks like deadlock,” only to be interrupted by Jurice Grey’s voice.

“None of my business of course,” she drawled, “and to date nobody has questioned
me.
But if you’re interested, I happen to have had a ringside seat on the whole silly business, and I saw this child,” she indicated Jean, “open the greenhouse door and go in, though whether or not she left it open when she came out, I didn’t wait to see.”

No one spoke. In a swift glance at the others Sarah saw their different expressions in a series of vignettes. Jean’s, flushed an ugly red to the roots of her hair; Alice Cosford’s, white, indignant disbelieving; Mrs. Beacon’s, calm and self-satisfied; Mrs. Pigott’s open-mouthed; and Oliver’s, staring straight into Jurice’s eyes.

“Why on earth have you waited until now to say this?” he demanded.

Jurice shrugged.
“
Dear
Oliver!” she purred. “Because you were enjoying yourself so, of course! Doing your Perry Mason act, cross-examination, hostile witnesses, the convenient adjournment when you’re floored, the lot. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, I really wouldn’t!”

But as Oliver’s brows drew together in a frown and Alice’s eyes blazed, suddenly Sarah
kn
ew the truth as, mentally and visually she was elsewhere, namely on the staircase of Monckton, looking out across the Greystones gardens towards the greenhouse in question, fully visible from that vantage-point. In recollection she picked out the framework of the doorway, the door itself, the roof-lights, the condensation-shrouded interior, and felt a kind of exultation. This had ceased to be an arraignment of the children.
Now
it was an affair of unsheathed swords between herself and Jurice Grey.