No Love Lost (6 page)

‘Ah,' said Rhoda, taking a beaker from the dresser with the idea of pouring us a hot drink to take to bed, ‘you are like your father when you talk like that. I can hear him this minute. My word, he'd be wild!'

‘The extraordinary thing is that she should come
here
,' I went on, ignoring the reference to Father, although it had its comforting side.

She paused, jug in hand, and turned a pink face to me.

‘Coincidences do happen. That's life. I've seen it a hundred times. Some people call it fate and some people call it religion, but whatever it is there's no denying it happens.'

I always find Rhoda rather difficult to bear when she gets on this theme. It is one of her favourites and there is no stopping her. I took up my beaker and edged for the door.

‘You can run,' she said warningly, ‘you can run, but it'll catch you. This is a coincidence, and it's more of a one than you know. You get some sleep.'

In my ignorance I felt this remark of hers was the only one that contained any reason at all, and I went off to bed feeling that at least there was some solace there.

Despite my worries, I felt the slow anaesthesia of sleep creeping over me the moment I pulled up the blankets. Just before I slipped away into unconsciousness I remembered two things. The first was that I had not asked Rhoda what news the letter from our old home had brought her, and the second that in my preoccupation with the patient I had not tackled Gastineau about the scrap of blue paper I thought I had seen on his desk. Even in my drowsing state this last seemed a formidable proposition, and I sailed away into oblivion without making up my mind how to to tackle it.

The next day began quite normally for a Sunday. That is, I was up very late and only partially by mistake. I fear I leave the worst of my paperwork – and there is no end to it in these days – to Sunday morning, and I settled down to a mountain of hospital reports on patients I had sent there, about a quarter to eleven. I had not forgotten Francia Forde by any means, but I was trying to get her out of my mind. It was not just Francia. She brought back too many unbearable memories altogether. I was still stunned by the knowledge that she had got so close to me.

The only unusual element that morning was provided by Rhoda. Once or twice I wondered if she was ill. She bustled about as if she was thinking of spring cleaning, and for ten minutes we had a wrangle because she objected to my clothes. I was very comfortable in slacks and a twin set, and her remarks
on my ‘slovenliness' and my ‘nice new red wool upstairs' completely bewildered me. In the end I got the better of her by insisting on taking her temperature. It was normal but her pulse was slightly quick, and I recommended a sedative. She left me alone after that but I heard her go out to the back gate several times, which was puzzling, for no one goes calling in Mapleford on a Sunday.

The sound of the car pulling up in the road outside filled me with sudden apprehension that Gastineau had come for me again. He seemed to have no idea that a doctor might have any hours. Also I guessed that his patient, if not in any danger, might well be feeling pretty sick by this time.

I got up and tiptoed across the room to peer out of the small window overlooking my minute front garden, so that I should get fair warning.

I pulled the curtain back half an inch and the next moment stood petrified, every nerve in my face tingling as if I had pressed it to a network of live wires.

John Linnett was standing at the small iron gate.

For a long time I simply did not believe it. I watched him hesitate, glance nervously at the cottage, and then fumble with the latch through his heavy driving glove.

He looked much older, and there was a touch of apprehension in his expression which I had never seen there before. It may sound absurd to say so, but I knew it really was John because of the changes in him.

The car he had come in, a low roadster covered with dust, stood in the lane behind him, empty, so he was alone. Of course. The sudden explanation of his sudden arrival broke over me like a wave. He had come to find me because Francia was at Peacocks, and I was supposed to be attending her. My scattered wits came together with a jerk. I felt my expression setting and becoming hard and brittle and very bright. If I had had any sense at all, I suppose, I should have expected him to appear on the scene sooner or later.

I threw open the window at once. ‘Hallo, John.'

‘Ann.' He came stamping over the garden, his coat skirts flying and his hands oustretched. I saw how thin he was, suddenly,
and how the bones of his face stood out. ‘My dear girl, thank God you're all right.'

It was the most unlikely and most unexpected approach, and it floored me as nothing else would have done. He took my hands through the window and looked anxiously into my face.

‘What's happened? What's the matter? I came at once, of course.'

The whole thing was beyond me. My new hard cheerfulness cracked completely. I was only aware that he was there, trying to get into the house, and, apparently, through the window.

Rhoda opened the front door. I heard her say something to him and the next moment he was in the room, filling it. The nervous energy which I remembered in him so well had become intensified. His narrow eyes were eager and still terribly anxious.

‘You look all right,' he said with relief. ‘You haven't altered at all. In fact you're better. Lost your puppy fat. What is it, Ann? What's happened? I got the telegram early this morning and I've been driving ever since.'

There was a passage of stupefied silence from me, and a movement from Rhoda lurking in the doorway.

‘I sent it.' Her tone was flat and her face expressionless, save for a faint gleam of belligerence in her eye. ‘I put your name, Miss Ann, because I thought that Mr John might not remember mine. As soon as you came in last night and said you weren't satisfied I knew it was my duty.'

The barefaced wickedness of it took my breath away, but the thing that foxed me utterly was how she'd known where to send. She answered that one as if I'd asked the question.

‘I got a letter yesterday from my neice in Southersham. I was going to tell you about it but you were too busy to listen. She told me that she'd heard down there that Mr John was attached to the hospital at Grundesberg in Northamptonshire, so last night, when you'd gone to bed, I got on the telephone and sent a telegram to him there.'

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. She gave me a defiant stare and opened the door.

‘I've got the lunch to see to,' she said as if I was thinking of disputing it. ‘I'm doing something special because I expected Mr John. You still care for pancakes, I expect, sir?'

‘I do,' he said without thinking and returned to me. His expression was not only anxious now, but somehow frightened. ‘I thought
you
sent,' he said. ‘I thought
you
wanted me for something. The telegram just said, “I think you had better come at once, Ann Fowler.” and gave the address.'

It was his dismay that got me. The utter disappointment came out so clearly that if I had been only half as sensitive where he was concerned it would have reached me. I found I knew him as if he had never been away.

‘If you've driven from Grundesberg this morning you must be exhausted.' I said hastily. ‘Sit down and I'll get you a drink. We'll thrash this out in a minute.'

He laughed and it was a laugh I had known from childhood.

‘I haven't even shaved. The thing got me out of bed at dawn. What's the mystery? What aren't you satisfied about?'

I had my back to him, since I was fixing a highball on the sideboard.

‘Rhoda got scared by something I said last night,' I began with a casualness which was not convincing even to me. ‘I was called out to a new patient and she turned out to be … Francia Forde.'

‘Oh.' His disinterest was startling. ‘Is she down here? I thought I read somewhere that she was setting up as an advertising model.'

I swung round to look at him blankly and he took the glass from my hand.

‘I've not seen her in four years,' he said slowly. ‘I shouldn't get involved in any of her machinations if I were you, Ann. She's a dangerous piece of work.'

I don't drink whisky as a rule, but I had poured a highball for myself and now, in sheer absent-mindedness, I swallowed it almost whole, nearly choking myself. I had tears in my eyes and was gasping for breath and I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘John, what happend to you?'

He met my eyes steadily but he was ashamed, even frightened, and desperately miserable.

‘God knows, Ann.'

That was all, but I knew about it suddenly, or I knew a very great deal.

Rhoda came in to set lunch at that juncture. She was very busy being the model housekeeper, keeping her eyes downcast and wearing the wooden expression of one who has withdrawn completely from any awkward situation she may have precipitated.

Because I wanted to talk to him so badly and found it so easy I asked John about Grundesberg.

‘Understaffed and overcrowded. The usual story in that kind of district,' he said easily. ‘Just the place to catch up on one's general work. I've been there nearly eighteen months, ever since I was demobbed.'

‘But I thought …' I began before I could stop myself, ‘I mean I thought you came out in 45.'

‘No,' he said coolly. ‘I got some extended leave then and set about making a goddam fool of myself in a pretty big way, but after that I sneaked back into the army and went to the Far East.'

‘Hence the – silence,' I murmured.

He said nothing at all. He did not even look at me. Rhoda saved us by a remarkable entrance, the silver soup tureen which we never use held high.

That meal was a revelation to me. I knew she had her secret store cupboard stocked against Christmas (or another war, perhaps) but I had no idea that it could produce anything like that. She waited on us, too, putting on a remarkable act which was part Maitre of the Ritz and part Nanny at the party.

John began to enjoy himself. I had seen it happen to him so often in our childhood. The prickles drew in and the silences grew fewer. He began to laugh and to tease us both indiscriminately. No one mentioned the telegram, I think we forgot it deliberately. This was a dispensation, a time of sanctuary, something that might never come again.

After the meal we sat by the fire while the shadows grew long
outside. There was so much to tell about the present that there was no need to speak of anything else, and we were chattering, and eating some filberts which Rhoda produced, as contentedly as if we were back in my schoolroom at Southersham.

I spoiled it. We were talking of his life in Grundesberg and he was giving me a highly comic if horrific description of the lodgings he shared with the other house surgeon when I said suddenly and without any excuse at all:

‘Are you still married to that woman, John?'

It was like breaking a gaily coloured bubble. The light went out in our little make-believe Sunday afternoon of a world.

‘Yes,' he said, and added flatly, ‘I suppose so.'

I said nothing more, and after a long time he began to talk. At first I hardly heard what he was saying because I had made the panic-stricken discovery that his being here made the kind of difference to my life that colour makes to a landscape. It made sense. I had never before dared let myself believe that that could happen.

‘If I stop telling you I shall stop making excuses for myself,' he was saying, ‘and there aren't any. When I realized exactly what I had done, I decided that I was mental and I went right away. I meant to stay away, and I did …' He turned on me with sudden anger. ‘Damn you, Ann. I was all right until I got that telegram.'

‘So was I.' It slipped out before I could stop it.

I could hear the words breaking like a little crystal dish on stone.

He lunged clumsily out of his chair and caught me as I sat, pushing his rough cheek into my neck and holding my shoulder blades with heavy, well-remembered hands. There was no helping it, no stopping it. I put my hands into his hair and held him close while my heart healed.

Percy Ludlow had to tap at the french windows twice before we heard him at all. The room was fairly dark, but he is not exactly blind and he was pink and apologetic when at last I got over there to admit him.

He had walked across the meadow with a packet of the endless papers which dogged our existence, and at first he was disposed
to thrust them at me and depart, but I forced him to come in and be introduced.

‘This is Dr Ludlow, John,' I said. ‘I told you, I'm his assistant. And this is Dr Linnett, Dr Ludlow. We were brought up together in Southersham.'

Percy gave me one of his sidelong glances.

‘I formed the impression that you were old friends,' he said primly. ‘I can't think why I haven't heard of you before, young man. She's a very close young woman, Dr Fowler, almost secretive.'

I thought that at any moment he was going to inquire how long ‘this' had been going on, but I got him into a comfortable chair and was on the point of seeing about some tea when Rhoda came in without ceremony.

‘You didn't hear the phone, did you?' she said. ‘It's the gentleman from Peacocks, and that you must go down to see her. He said he'd come for you if he didn't hear.'

‘Eh, what's that? Is that the foreigner?' Percy startled Rhoda, who had not seen him.

‘Mr Gastineau.' I glanced sharply at John to see if he would recognize the name, but clearly it meant nothing to him. He was standing in front of the fire with his chin up and the most obvious and reckless expression of delight in his eyes.

Percy grunted. ‘A woman down there now?' he inquired.

‘I understand it's a Madame Maurice,' I explained cautiously. ‘He brought her from London yesterday and fetched me up late to look at her. My impression was that she was mainly tipsy.'