Nurse in Waiting (2 page)

Cook clutched the handle of Joanna’s suitcase in a brawny fist. “This way, will ye?” she demanded, and marched ahead of Joanna up the broad oak staircase.

It was with pleased surprise that the girl saw the bedroom which had been allotted to her. It was not too large, the two broad windows would face south, she thought, and there was a pleasant pale green carpet on the floor, a colouring which was taken up by the curtains and the cushions in an easy chair by the fireplace. About it there was none of the rather austere chill of such of the ground floor as she had seen. It looked as if it had been furnished by someone with modern, ‘young’ tastes. Somehow Joanna could not see Mrs. Carnehill as having planned it, and wondered who had.

Downstairs, in the dining-room, she was to be surprised again. The room itself was big, not too warm and its furnishings were heavy and near-Victorian. But the appointments of the table—the silver, the glass, the linen—were exquisite. The steak which had been cooked in such an unorthodox fashion lay in a silver chafing-dish, and the sight told Joanna’s young, healthy appetite that waiting for it had been worth it.

Mrs. Carnehill intercepted her glance at the big clock on the mantel-shelf.

“You’ll get used to this,” she said comfortably. “Over here we frequently don’t lunch till half-past two or three. Now Justin—Mr.
Mc
Kiley, you know—he comes from the North and is half Scottish into the bargain—thinks it gastronomically criminal to eat after half-past one. I can’t agree with him, of course,” she added as if that settled the matter. She went on: “Shuan isn’t here today. She has gone to Naas market to sell some of her rabbits and bring back the horsemeat for the dogs. So I couldn’t
really
have met you myself off the 12.4 today, because she has got the car. It was indeed fortunate that it happened to be Wednesday and that Justin
—”

Her voice trailed off vaguely and Joanna ventured to ask:

“Who is Shuan?”

“Shuan? Oh, she is my ward. Her parents died when she was twelve, and she has lived with us ever since. She’s seventeen—no, eighteen—now. She makes her own pocket-money with her rabbits and her dog-breeding, and sometimes she has given riding lessons to visitors to Tulleen, if they want them. She helps me too. Between us, we have managed all the winter, but I have to be away a lot—to Dublin and sometimes over to England—and I couldn’t leave her entirely responsible for Roger. So that is why we needed you.”

“You have to go to England on business?” asked Joanna politely.

Her hostess looked a little surprised. “Oh—didn’t Colonel Kimstone tell you about me?”

“No, I don’t think so,” smiled Joanna.

Mrs. Carnehill threw back her head and laughed. “Then
how
you must have wondered whether I was to be trusted with the steak!” she gurgled. “Why, I’m ‘Luculla’! My
job
is food! You
must
have heard of me!”

Joanna had. She had had her mouth made to water by articles on cookery, signed “Luculla,” in innumerable magazines in England. She told her companion so, and looked at her with fresh interest, though at the back of her mind hovered the question which had been troubling her for some time. Where
was
the wealth and luxury which she had expected to find at Carrieghmere? Those broken down walls, a household which apparently commanded the use of only one car, a hostess who was a journalist and whose ward gave riding lessons in order to make money—nothing of all this seemed to tie up with the valuable and antique appointments of the luncheon table, nor with those pearls about her employer’s throat, nor indeed with the fact of an agent who could afford to possess and use an expensive American car.

Joanna knew that none of this was any business of he
r
s, but though she tried to dismiss it from her mind and to accept what came, as an employee should, it made her all the more curious to meet the member of the household who was to be her special care—Roger Carnehill. She was glad, therefore, when at the end of the meal his mother said:

“Now you would like to see Roger, I dare say?”

“Yes, I should.” Joanna hesitated. “Would you like me to get into uniform first?”

Mrs. Carnehill looked vague. “I don’t know. Do you have to?”

“Well, there’s no rule about it,” smiled Joanna. “It is for you to say.”

“Then I think not—for now. You look charming as you are. And I want Roger to like you—not to feel that he is being regimented. I think maybe that you’ll see why, when you’ve known him for a little while.”

She led the way to another room on the ground floor, of which, Joanna’s swift professional glance told her, the furnishings were far too heavy for a sick room and that it was woefully overcrowded.

The overcrowding was due partly to the presence of three large dogs, one of which, an Irish setter, lumbered off the foot of the bed as they entered.

“Dogs Dogs!” protested Mrs. Carnehill half-heartedly as they surrounded Joanna and flung their forepaws almost to her shoulder. “Roger, call them off. Miss Merivale may
n
ot like dogs.”

The young man in the bed lowered the book he had been reading.

“Then maybe they won’t like her,” he said in a deep, attractive voice. “What then?”

“But I do,” said Joanna with a smile. The expulsion of the creatures from her patient’s room would probably take time and a fair amount of tact, and today—
w
hen she hadn’t even the status which uniform would give her—was not a suitable occasion, she felt.

She looked at her new patient with interest. And he looked at her.

For some reason she had misread her instructions about him. She had expected him to be a mere boy—
n
ot much over twenty, if that. But he looked nearer thirty—a man with a thin face, a stubbornly formed jawline and a petulant mouth. His eyes were as blue as his mother’s, but his hair was red—a mass of flaming “carrots.” He ran his hand rather wearily through it as he looked at Joanna.

He saw a girl, tall, slim, with a clear, delicate skin which flushed in her cheeks to only the slightest colouring. Her straight nose had fine nostrils; her eyes were grey beneath level brows; her hair—a pale spun gold—was caught into a knot at the nape of her neck.

Pure Anglo-Saxon—as cold and stiff-necked as they come—was Roger Carnehill’s mental comment. She looked now as if she had very little humanity. Put her into stiff cuffs and a starched apron and she
wouldn’t
have any!

Then she smiled again—and his judgment checked. If she could really smile like that—with a kind of lighting up from within—maybe she had some possibilities after all. But he hoped they weren’t buried too deeply—it would bore him so to dig them out.

With her smile Joanna said: “How do you do?” He liked her for that. No doubt the time would come when she would have the right to tweak at his pillows and ask brightly: “Well, how are we feeling today?”—which would irritate him to near despair. But at least today she had the good sense to behave towards him as if he were a newly introduced man and not a useless hulk.

He returned a “How do you do” of his own. Then he turned to his mother. “You said Miss Merivale wasn’t coming till tomorrow,” he accused.

“I know. I got muddled. But Justin was over to Tulleen with the eggs, and he brought her back.”

“Oh, he did? Did he say when he was coming in to see me?”

“I asked him to dinner tomorrow night—to meet Miss Merivale.”

Roger Carnehill raised his eyebrows. “I thought he’d met her,” he commented ironically. “Anyway, send him in to see me afterwards, will you? Where’s Shuan?”

“At Naas, darling. It’s market-day, you know.”

Joanna stood silently by, using her trained observation to the full. In the sharply put questions she thought she detected the typical invalid’s effort to reach out beyond his bed, to keep a finger, as it were, upon the pulse of events over which he no longer had control.

She realized that she knew less than she ought about the course of his illness. She would have to ask when she could see their Doctor Beltane, in order to get instructions. She knew only that a riding accident of nearly two years earlier had resulted in spinal trouble from which he ought by now to have recovered, but apparently hadn’t, even to the extent of convalescence. It looked, certainly, as if her own work towards his recovery might be of indefinite duration. Momentarily she believed she would not mind—even if it meant that she would be away from London—and from Dale—for far longer than she had expected.

Mrs. Carnehill was saying: “Fancy! She didn’t know about my being ‘Luculla’!” She sounded as amused as she had been at luncheon, but Roger frowned slightly as he said to Joanna:

“Didn’t you? Hadn’t Colonel Kimstone told you?”

“No. I haven’t seen the Colonel since I nursed him, and that was some time ago. He didn’t mention Carrieghmere then,” she told him.

“Then you didn’t know that Mother spends her time poking about the markets in the back streets of Dublin and writing about food for people who probably don’t know the difference between a consomm
é
and a pig’s trotter?” His words might have been humorous if it were not for the bitter, sarcastic ring in his voice.

Joanna was shocked. She had understood from Mrs. Carnehill at luncheon that she thoroughly enjoyed her work and that her ‘poking about the markets’ was incidental to the number of interesting food finds she made there. But it was clear that there was some conflict between mother and son on the subject, and Joanna was anxious not to be drawn into ‘taking sides.’ But she had begun to admire Mrs. Carnehill tremendously and she resented for her her son’s criticism.

“It’s the people like that who most need to be told what the difference is
—”
she began with conviction, but her patient broke in with a sarcastic:

“And I suppose they have to look to a Carnehill of Carrieghmere to tell them!”

“If a ‘Carnehill of Carrieghmere’ is willing and knowledgeable enough to tell them—why not?” retorted Joanna.

He looked at her, not replying, and Mrs. Carnehill, who recognized lowering signs which Joanna did not, put in briskly:

“Come now, Roger. We’ve been over all this so often before. And I still say I like food; I like discovering odd ways of cooking it and, best of all, I
like passing on my tips to other people
—”

She stopped, but not before Joanna had noticed the tightening of the sick man’s grip upon the coverlet. He said irritably:

“But it’s all so absurd. It was all right when it was merely a hobby with you, but surely there should be plenty for you to attend to here, now that I’m no use? I ought to be able to look to you to be my link with what is going on, on the estate. But as it is, there seems to be a conspiracy lately to keep things back from me. I even have to force a report out of my own agent!”

“Roger—
please
!”
For the first time Mrs. Carnehill seemed distressed. “You know it isn’t like that at all.
It’s simply that neither Justin nor I see the necessity for bothering you with trifles
—”

“Nor with anything else, it seems,” he returned gloomily, and Joanna felt that it was time she intervened. She turned to Mrs. Carnehill, saying quietly;

“Oughtn’t Mr. Carnehill to rest now? Then, when I’ve changed into my uniform, perhaps you would show me where I prepare his tea. And might I ring up Dr. Beltane this evening?”

“Yes, of course. We’ll go now, Roger. Try to sleep a little, won’t you?” Mrs. Carnehill moved to the head of the bed and laid a hand lightly upon his shoulder. He did not speak, but he looked up at her, and Joanna guessed that some unspoken word of communion had passed between them.

More and more she was coming to admire the unexpected dignity of the older woman, so that she was completely unprepared for the sudden crumpling of her bright features as the sickroom door closed behind them.

She leaned back against the oak and whispered with a kind of desperate tiredness:

“It’s my fault. I’ve never learnt that any discussion of my work irritates him beyond measure. And this morning began well enough. It’ll be my fault entirely if by nightfall he has one of his black moods upon
hi
m—”
She looked up at Joanna, a wry smile at
her lips. “I told you that Roger wouldn’t be regimented. You’ll find that he won’t even accept the limitations of his illness; he’ll still indulge in the most absurd indignations and self-pity, not seeing at all that they only hold him back!”

“It’s
because
he is ill that he can work himself into passions like that,” Joanna told her gently. “Haven’t you ever, even in a short illness, felt that no one loved you, no one at all seemed to see your point of view? And he has been ill for a very long time!”

“But really he has had every care—mine, Shuan’s—everything we could do for him!”

“And now he has got me!” commented Joanna dryly.

The older woman looked at her, her face composed again. “Yes. Now he has you.” She hesitated. Then: “D’you know, I’m still not sure what I ought to call you? ‘Nurse’? ‘Miss Merivale’? What would you like?”