Nurse Lang (5 page)

“We could have avoided it, I think,” she said unhappily.

“Not short of being downright unsportsmanlike!” Philip put in. “These people are quick to notice that sort of thing and take it as an unnecessary slight. Besides,” he added with a laugh, “look at the experience you would have missed!”

Moira wondered if Philip had ever seen the Floral Dance and knew how it ended. He seemed preoccupied with the idea of Grant having danced it with her and more than once he shot a querulous glance in her direction that seemed laden with suspicion. Once again she was conscious of that strong sense of possessiveness about Philip’s attitude, of an unspoken warning passing between them.

Anger flared in her for a moment, but it was swiftly overcome by pity. Philip, in his present unenviable state, could be excused almost anything.

CHAPTER
FIVE

TWO DAYS OUT from England the first icy winds struck them, reminding them that it was still February in the northern hemisphere, and long afterwards Moira was to remember that first chill which was like a warning of all that was to come.

They were met in the Channel by mountainous seas sweeping in from the Atlantic and she was kept busy in consequence. A crop of minor accidents kept her in the surgery or the sick-bay for most of the day and she was prevented from visiting Philip as much as he would have liked. Now that she had promised to go to Mellyn with them he felt that he had the exclusive right to her services even before the ship docked and he was quite often resentful when she went to have a word with him in her few off-duty hours.

It was inevitable that she should meet Grant on these occasions, but he had little to say. As England drew nearer he seemed to retire more and more behind that correct, professional mask of his which she found both irksome and bewildering, and their conversation became limited to polite generalities about the weather and the state of Philip’s health.

On the last day of the voyage there was a great deal of packing to be done and people kept to their cabins more.

It was after nine o’clock before she closed her last case and labelled it, too late to join the passengers at the concert, but not too late to stroll along the deck which she loved before turning in for the night, and she was putting on her coat when someone tapped on her cabin door. The old excitement throbbed in her pulses when she opened it to confront Grant standing in the alleyway and she knew that he must see the tell-tale color mounting in her cheeks as she waited for him to speak.

“I wondered about that last turn round the deck,” he said noticing the coat. “I was counting on it, as a matter of fact. I couldn’t quite imagine you spending your last evening at a ship’s concert!”

He stood aside to let her precede him along the narrow passage and she caught up a fine woollen scarf to tie over her hair before she closed the door.

“Will you be travelling to Mellyn by road?” she asked.

“Yes.” He paused, holding the glass door to the deck open for her to pass through. “That’s what I wanted to see you about. You can, of course, come straight to Mellyn with us?”

“If that is what you wish.”

“You said that you hadn’t fixed anything up after you landed,” he reminded her, “and there will be plenty of room in the car. I’m having it sent down to meet us at Southampton. It will save Philip two changes and the journey by train.”

“I’ll be ready when you are,” she promised.

He paused to light his pipe, shielding the match with his hands, and the tiny flame leapt upwards to illumine his eyes and the lean, determined line of his jaw.

“I don’t know whether I've thanked you adequately for all this or not,” he confessed. “For looking after Philip when you had so many other things to do.”

“You’ve tried,” she said, not quite sure whether she could trust her voice. “That day on Grand Canary, for instance—”

He looked at her keenly.

“You misrepresent me,” he said. “That was hardly by way of saying ‘thank you,’ but no matter. It is well behind us now.”

“I’d like to see my sister, if that could be arranged,” she told him in a restrained undertone, forcing their conversation back to the conventional. “She’ll be taking my place in the sick-bay next trip, but I’m not quite sure yet whether she intends to meet the ship at Southampton or not. There should be a letter waiting for me, though.”

“And if there is no letter?” he suggested after a pause in which he had drawn hard on his pipe. “If your sister decides that she wants more time ashore?”

Without the slightest hesitation she gave him her answer.

“I have made you a promise.”

“Well, that’s fair enough,” he said lightly. “Philip is setting great store by your faithfulness, as a matter of fact.”

There had been a suggestion of dryness in his tone, a certain cynicism which bewildered her so that she turned away towards the rail to look out across the grey water.

“You’re going to miss all this,” he said, coming to stand behind her in the darkness, “and I’m afraid Mellyn has very little compensation to offer.”

“Philip told me that it was a lovely old house,” she said.

“Mellyn’s all right,” he agreed with something like pride in his voice. “It’s the people who live in it who might prove—difficult.” When she did not answer that, he went on briefly: “The house itself is well worth seeing and the hospital will interest you professionally. We’ve done a lot to it in the last few years, made improvements and built a new outpatients’ department and a physiotherapy wing.”

Moira was immediately interested. Apart from the fact that after-care had been her chief interest during her student days, something in his strong voice had suggested that it might be his deepest interest, too. He did not pursue the subject, however, saying rather dryly instead:

“But you will come upon these things gradually, providing you survive the first few weeks.”

Moira had the distinct impression that he had taken the law into his own hands by inviting her to Mellyn immediately, that he was determined to present the stern custodian of his home with a
fait accompli
rather than face the hazard of endless argument.

More and more she found herself wondering about Serena Melmore, about her power at Mellyn, and more and more she began to dread her meeting with Grant’s cousin. By the time they docked she had almost made up her mind to ask Grant if she might follow on in a day or two, but very soon she realized how foolish that was. If she was being employed to nurse Philip it was now that Grant really needed her, not when the first difficulty of returning home on a stretcher was safely past.

Philip was to prove far more difficult than either of them had expected. The morning found him morose and disinclined to talk, sunk in a mood of depression from which it was impossible to drag him even with Grant’s expert help.

“It’s no use,” he said when he saw the English coast line emerging out of the mist. “I’m not going to like this, and I’m not going to pretend that I do!”

Moira stood silently beside him knowing so well how he must feel at that moment when home was almost in sight. Pretence was impossible when a strong emotion held you by the throat and your heart recoiled from the bludgeonings of fate.

"Tomorrow,” she tried to console him, “it will be different. This will all be over and you will be back at Mellyn.”

“But with a difference!” he reminded her bitterly. “Do you think I’m looking forward to the idea of going back home crippled—not able to walk or ride or hold a gun? Do you think I’m looking forward to going back to a house full of memories?”

That was Kerry again, Kerry’s memory haunting Philip, too! His face grew dark as his thoughts slid into the past and there was no kindness in his eyes when Grant came for him.

“We’re not going ashore till the other passengers are safely off,” Grant said in a brief, matter-of-fact way. “You’ll have to clear your patients, Moira, and I expect you’ll want to make sure that your sister isn’t on the quay.”

“I’ll want to say good-bye, too,” Moira said, trying to smile. “Everyone has been so kind to me, and Doctor Paston may have a letter from Jill which will let me know what she intends to do.”

She went in search of Greg, finding him at last in the purser’s office helping Terry Baldock to sort the incoming mail.

“Sorry we’re losing you, Moira,” Terry remarked, glancing up from his desk. “I’ve just had word from Jill, and she’s sailing with us in a week’s time.”

Greg was distant to Moira.

“I hope you’re doing the right thing,” he said, “going off with these people. You don’t really know them, and I’ve heard quite a lot about the older brother from Eva Chiltern. All her sympathies appear to be with the invalid brother.”

“Isn’t that only natural?” Moira returned crisply. “Philip will have everyone’s sympathy, I’m sure. He was young and ardent and full of vigor when he left England and now he is coming back reduced to hopeless inactivity, lying on his back all day with no very definite prospect that things will ever come right for him again.”

“It’s not just that,” he said almost roughly. “It’s the whole unconventional set-up I don’t like.”

Moira gave him an impish grin, determined that she was not going to discuss Grant with him, or even Philip.

“Don’t let that worry you, Greg,” she advised. “Mellyn Priory is well guarded by a most conventional chaperone—or so I’ve heard.”

“Well, the future’s on your own head!” he declared with studied indifference. “You can’t say that you haven’t been warned.”

Warned against what, precisely? Moira felt her heartbeats quicken as she walked away along the deck, and then, down on the quay, as the ship drew in, she saw a familiar figure and Grant Melmore and Mellyn and everything else was immediately forgotten as she greeted her sister.

Jill came on deck with the air of someone coming home after a long journey. She was as lovely as ever. Perhaps a little too thin after her recent operation, but there was color in her cheeks and the light of anticipation in her blue eyes as they scanned the decks for a face she knew. Yes, Jill was delighted to be back in her old job again and could hardly wait till she rejoined the
Tavistock
on her next voyage.

“Oh, so that’s it!” she remarked. “Well, just so long as we’re all happy about the future everything’s fine! I don’t suppose your brother will want to meet people just now,” she added with amazing understanding for someone so much wrapped up in her own affairs. “Anyway, not garrulous people like me!” She turned back to Moira. “I’ll see you when the boat docks again, I expect,” she added gaily.

“Hadn’t you better take your sister’s address?” Grant suggested. “She’ll want to know exactly when the boat gets in on your return trip, I dare say.”

When she finally met Gregory Paston there was no doubt about the doctor’s attraction for her.

“Greg!” she cried. “It’s wonderful to see you again! I’ve been simply longing for this moment, so don’t tell me that you’ve fallen for my sister while I’ve been away!”

“Moira is difficult to fall for.”

Greg’s cool, insolent voice drifted across the deck to where Grant Melmore was standing at the rail watching the first disembarkations, but he did not turn to be introduced to Jill. Moira was quite sure that he must have heard Greg’s careless rejoinder, and perhaps he was glad that he had succeeded in employing someone “safe.”

She introduced Jill to him later.

“I think Moira’s been madly lucky,” Jill informed him. “Coming straight out of a berth like this into an easy job in the country!”

“I wouldn’t say that your sister’s job was going to be exactly easy,” he answered. “It certainly won’t hold any of the variety of a shipboard appointment, for one thing.”

“Oh, Moira isn’t the glamorous type,” Jill assured him airily. “She’s content to serve.”

“Which is as it should be,” he reminded her somewhat dryly.

“I should really feel worried about afterwards,” Jill ran on. “About what she will do when your brother gets over his accident, but I suppose something else will turn up.”

“If it will put your mind at rest and make your voyage—more pleasant,” he said briefly, “I think I can promise you to take care of that.”

Jill gave Moira a roguish look, backed by a certain amount of uncertainty.

That would be almost two months ahead, Moira thought. No knowing where she might be by then, but there would be no harm in giving Jill the address to write to her from Cape Town.

Grant wrote it on a card, Mellyn Priory, Mellyn, Sussex. He had scribbled it above his consulting-room address in Wimpole Street, and Moira caught a glimpse of letters after his name which surprised her, and obviously impressed Jill.

Her sister took the card, murmured “Gosh!” beneath her stood staring after Grant as he walked away.

“You wouldn’t think it, would you?” she remarked when she had recovered from her surprise. “He looks far too much of an Adonis to have a lot of grey matter into the bargain. Come to think of it, though,” she added, “he has got something of the remote ‘consultant’ air about him and when he looks at you he’s positively analytical; I had almost forgotten that sort of thing, but it’s unmistakable, isn’t it?”

“It’s preoccupation, I suppose,” Moira said as Terry Baldock came up to greet her sister. “I’m sorry you’re not going to see Philip,” she added. “I think you’d like him. He’s—quite different to Grant.”

Jill was to meet Philip for a brief moment in that busy day, however, as meteors might pass in their courses through the heavens, swiftly, airily and without recognition, yet in that split second a seed was sown which was to bear fruit for them both. Jill stood beside the gangway as the stretcher was carried ashore, looking like some rare piece of Dresden china in her sky-blue coat and winged felt cap with tendrils of fair hair blowing across her cheek, and he turned his head to look at her aggressively. There was bitter resentment in that look, resentment of her youth and its glorious promise, and before she could smile at him he had turned his head away.

Moira had been witness to that pathetic gesture and she felt her heart contract in pity as she walked beside the stretcher with her hand lying lightly on Philip’s arm. He made no acknowledgement of her presence, and she wondered if he resented her, too, but at least she could help in a professional way.

A long, shining black limousine was parked at the foot of the gangway and Grant made his way purposefully towards it.

“We’re going to have difficulty here,” he said under his breath as Moira came round beside him. “Philip just wouldn’t hear of going home by ambulance.”

A chauffeur in a dark green uniform stepped forward, saluting them respectfully, and Grant acknowledged him with a brief nod.

“Is everything set, Holmes?” he asked. “How about the roads? I wondered if they might be dangerous with all this frost about.”

“If we go carefully, sir, there’s no need to worry.” The man’s eyes were upon Philip, full of compassion for his unfortunate plight. “This is a bad business, especially for someone like Master Philip,” he added.

“I would rather it had happened to me,” he said grimly.

He stood back beside Moira as the stewards made Philip comfortable in the back of the car, a difficult business in the limited space, but at last the final rug was adjusted and Grant turned towards her.

“Will you travel with him?” he asked. “I’ll sit in front and give Holmes a spell at the wheel if necessary.”

Moira cast one swift look back towards the
Tavistock
as they drove away, seeing it lying at the quayside, its white hull etched against the grey sky, a ship of memories which she might never see again. The only reason she might have for coming back to Southampton would be to meet Jill, and her eyes clung to the slim young figure in the blue coat still standing at the head of the gangway as if Jill might preserve some of her memories for her.

They drove swiftly through the green countryside as the sun broke through the grey canopy of clouds to shine down on the rolling pasture-land all about them and she realized why so many people longed to come home to England in the spring. The land was green beyond believing, fresh and radiant as a young bride when seen after the parched yellow fields of tropic isles, and the golden-trumpeted early daffodils in cottage gardens were as fair as any tropic flower and twice as fresh to look at as they bent before a stiff breeze.

“At Mellyn there are fields of daffodils,” Philip said reminiscently. “They used to be my father’s special pride.”

She knew then that some part of him wanted to go back, that the pull of home was proving stronger than any bitterness or disillusionment, and she was infinitely glad for Grant’s sake as well as for Philip’s own. Philip would find something to live for at Mellyn. She had never known the miracle of homecoming to fail.

After Chichester the road began to climb and they were on the high reaches of the South Downs, with mile after mile of undulating country stretching ahead of them and still the tang of salt coming in from the sea. It was new country to Moira, who had been bred in the north, a part of England she had only seen before from the window of a railway carriage, and she leaned eagerly forward so that she should not miss anything on the way. Once or twice Grant turned from the front seat and spoke through the glass partition to them, but for the most part he seemed content to let Philip answer her questions. Short of tiring her patient, Moira would not let Philip slip back into his former mood of depression and bitter self-pity, and when they came to Mellyn she thought that there was resignation in the look he gave her.

“This is it,” he said. “You can just see the Priory over there amongst those trees, but we have to go through the town first.”

Mellyn was a typical small country town, with one long main street broadening out to form a market place and the town hall in the centre.

At the end of the High Street the chauffeur turned the car to the left and they drove into open country again, over a level crossing and on between giant beeches in a green twilight of bursting leaves. Spring had come early that year and the earth seemed rich and full of promise. Moira watched the sunlight slanting between the smooth boles of the trees as they turned in between high, gilded gates and swept up a broad driveway to the house itself.

The Priory was old and arched and grey, with high mullioned windows flanking the door and steps worn by the feet of time. Set like a jewel in green parkland, and surrounded by trees, it had a look of peace and seclusion which surely could not be disrupted even by the people living there, and she saw Grant look about him with a new expression in his grey eyes.

Whatever he felt, whatever he was, this was his home and it meant much to him. Coming back to it was truly the end of a journey.

He got out and Moira felt surprise that the door was not opened to them immediately. A strong impression of being observed assailed her, of someone watching them from a hidden vantage-point somewhere in the house, and then Grant turned to her and said simply:

“Welcome to Mellyn, Moira. I hope that you can be happy here.”

The door behind them opened and a maid ushered them into the hall. It was a high, raftered place of carved panelling and deep shadows where long windows let in the sunlight in dusty golden shafts to fall on the centuries-old paving and on the dim, old furniture set around the walls, and their footsteps rang hollowly against the stone as they crossed the floor.

Beyond them in the shadows of the deep staircase well, a door opened and a tall woman in a grey dress stood silhouetted against the light from an inner room.

“Serena,” Grant said, leading Moira forward, “this is Miss Lang. She has come home with us to nurse Philip.”

“I got your telegram.”

The thin, uncompromising voice struck chilly on Moira’s ears and she looked at Serena Melmore appealingly.

“I hope we can do something for him,” she said.

Serena’s eyes met hers for the first time. They were a pale yellowish-brown with dark flecks in them and they seemed to pierce straight through her, searching for something. Otherwise, Serena was a handsome woman. She had the Melmore features, the high, arched nose which tended to give the men of the family an autocratic look, and the firm, shapely mouth and determined chin. She had well-shaped hands and feet and a slim, upright figure which gave her dignity, and she knew how to wear her clothes. Moira thought that she would be about thirty years of age, probably a little older, but it was difficult to tell exactly with people like Serena.

“Philip will get all the attention he needs at the hospital,” she said. “We are very well used to these situations at Mellyn.”

And you could have managed very well without my help, Moira mused. Well, that was for Grant to decide. He was, after all, the man in authority.

The reflection did little to reassure her in the light of Serena’s obvious resentment, however. It was plain that the older woman had made up her mind to dislike her from the beginning, treating her presence at the Priory as an intrusion, a slight, maybe, on her own ability to cope with the situation. Yet, Serena's animosity did not seem to end at personal pride. Behind the pale eyes there was a watchfulness bedded deeply in suspicion, and Moira was glad when Grant said into the lengthening silence:

“I think we should get Philip settled into his room right away. The journey will have tired him and he’s had enough excitement for one day.”

Serena turned immediately, walking towards the stairs.

“Everything is ready,” she said. “I have a meal waiting, but if you think Philip should have his on a tray in his room I’ll get it ready while Holmes helps you carry him up.”

She had excluded Moira with a few brief, well-chosen words, rejecting her usefulness where Philip was concerned from the first. Grant had made his plans, unexpectedly and without consulting her, and she was leaving him in no doubt about how she felt. Authority had been taken out of her hands, and she resented it quite openly.

Feeling helpless and inadequate in the circumstances, Moira stood aside while Grant went out to the car again to speak to his brother. Serena remained behind in the hall with her back to her, as if she had forgotten her presence there altogether, and when Philip was carried in she stepped briskly to her cousin’s side.

She made no comment on his accident, looking down at him and smiling briefly as she welcomed him home.

“Grant will take you up to your room,” she said. “I have everything ready for you.”

For the second time she had repeated that efficient little formula, and there could be no doubt that it was calculated to exclude all other forms of help.