Nurse Linnet's Release (3 page)

“I haven’t got a temperature,” he answered, almost impatiently. “And in any case you can wait to find out until we’ve got something settled. Supposing I don’t see you again tonight, and you don’t come on duty tomorrow night!”

“Why suppose anything of the kind?” she asked, and skilfully stopped his mouth with the thermometer.

Although his black brows frowned at her, and they gave him a curious, scowling look, while his mouth looked thwarted and told her that he had by no means an even—or even an easy—temper, she felt tempted to smile at him as she studied the result when she removed the thermometer.

“You’re quite right,” she told him, “you haven’t got a temperature. It’s still a little sub-normal.”

His fingers grasped her arm impatiently, and they were strong, firm fingers.

“Last night,” he said to her, without embarrassment, “I thought I was going to die, but I don’t honestly think I would have minded dying so much while I was holding your hand. And having made that discovery do you think I’m going to run the risk of never seeing you again?”

“Well?” she said, quietly, and felt as if the excitable pulse that was beating away at the base of her throat must be noticeable to him. For she knew that she, too, felt she must see him again.

“I’ve got to go home to Hertfordshire when I leave here—my mother’s place—but I’ll be back in Town in less than a fortnight. Will you dine with me the very first night I’m back?”

“I—” she began, hearing Cathie’s voice again—Cathie who was so much more worldly-wise than she was.

“Will you?” he insisted.

Although the sheet was without a wrinkle she started to smooth it again. This time he caught hold of her hand, and the pressure hurt her fingers. But as soon as he realized he was hurting her he let them go.

“I’ll telephone,” he said, as if that was as, good as settled, and lay back with a faint sigh against his pillows. Then he flicked open the fly-leaf of the book he had taken from her. His black brows bent again in a frown. “Diana Carey,” he exclaimed. “Good Heavens!”

CHAPTER IV

It was just over a fortnight later, and Linnet was walking in the Gardens where she often walked when she was free to do so. She had got up shortly before lunch and eaten at a little restaurant she occasionally patronized, and now she was taking advantage of the sunshine and the genial warmth of the afternoon.

There could be no disputing the fact that spring had firmly established itself. Wherever Linnet looked the trees were bursting into a flurry of young green leaves, flowers were dancing in the wind beneath the trees—particularly daffodils, which always made her think of Wordsworth and his, “When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils”—and little cottonwool clouds went scudding across the blue of the sky. On the Round Pond children were sailing boats, and a couple of proud swans with orange
-
coloured bills drifted with all the serenity in the world. Their air was so graceful, the patrician movement of their necks so arresting that Linnet paused to admire them and to wish that they would come a little closer to the edge of the pond. But they kept well out in the centre of the silvery sheet of water, disdaining tid-bits but revelling in admiration, and she thought this time of stately Spanish galleons loaded with spoils from Mexico which must have swept onwards in just such an imperious fashion.

Or was the word she wanted ‘quinquereme’?
“
Quinquereme of Nineveh
...”

“Good afternoon, Nurse,” said a voice beside her.

Linnet turned, putting up a hand to clutch at her little jewel-blue velvet cap as she did so, because a wind came whipping at it and threatened to deprive her of it at that very moment. She looked up into eyes as blue as her cap, but they were such a considerable distance above her that she had to put her head backwards at the same time, and the emotion which suddenly seized her in its grip was rather acute surprise—surprise because Dr. Shane Willoughby was so tall, and she, apparently, was not much more than a pigmy beside him; a slender pigmy in a grey tailored suit with the round white collar of a plain little blouse lying neatly beneath the laps of the jacket.

“Oh, g
o
od afternoon, Doctor,” she answered.

“So you are taking the air,” he said. There was a faintly quizzical expression on his face as he gazed down at her. “Oughtn’t you to sleep the clock round, more or less, when you’re on night duty?”

“If I did that I’d never get any air at all,” she pointed out reasonably.

“Quite right,” he agreed, and took her by the elbow and removed her from the paths of a couple of young gentlemen under ten years of age who were bearing an enormous model of a home-made sailing vessel enthusiastically down to the water’s edge. “You can believe me or not, but that’s the sort of thing I used to do half a century or so ago,” Dr. Shane Willoughby told her, watching the launching of the boat with interest.

Linnet looked up at him again with a dimple at the corner of her mouth.

“Are you quite sure it was as long ago as half a century?”

He grinned down at her, displaying white teeth.

“Well, perhaps not quite. A quarter of a century, shall we say?”

They watched until the home-made boat was well out in the middle of the pond, and even Linnet felt excitement rising within her when it looked as if the wind was the kind of freakish wind that was going to refuse to fill its sails, and after tacking drunkenly it was on the very verge of turning for home. But a sudden gust did all that was necessary, and away it went; the two boys started racing round the pond to receive it when its journey was completed, and her companion turned to Linnet.

“I don’t know how soon you want to get back, Nurse—?”

“Kintyre,” she supplied, as she had supplied the single word for Diana Carey.

“I don’t know how soon you have to be back, Nurse Kintyre, but there’s a little tea-shop not very far from here where they also provide the kind of cakes I like—and you probably do, too? Shall we make tracks for it, or will that be interfering with your intake of fresh air?”

She smiled up at him. Surprise had caused her to flush a little, and he was reminded of a drift of apple blossom stealing across a background of palest ivory.

“Thank you very much,” she accepted. “I think you mean Fuller’s, don’t you? And it’s right outside the gate on the other side of the road.”

“I see you know your way about, too,” he smiled back at her, flicked a pebble from their path with the end of the slender ebony cane he carried, and started to stride out briskly.

Within a short time they were seated facing one another at a little round table near a window that over-looked the busy High Street. But the roar of afternoon traffic seemed muted somehow, and the chink of teacups around them was very pleasant. Dr. Willoughby ordered tea—“and lots of cakes, please,” he added to the waitress, with the particular smile Linnet was beginning to associate with him, slow, pleasant, crinkling up his eyes a trifle at the corners, and relieving the natural gravity of his mouth by an unexpected and unlooked for touch of something very like sweetness.

Linnet removed her little hat, because being a Juliet cap it was feeling a little insecure on the back of her dark curls, and he glanced at her with approval.

“I think women are better without hats,” he remarked. “Even without caps.”

“But not nurses, surely?”

“I wasn’t really thinking about nurses,” he replied.

Again, for some reason, she felt that tiny flush sting her cheeks as his eyes studied her openly.

“I don’t normally stroll about the garden in the afternoon,” he told her, as if he felt it necessary to explain his apparent idleness. “But this afternoon’s sunshine tempted me, and I happened to have a little free time.” He paused. “You are still on night duty, Nurse?”

“Yes. And, as a matter of fact,” she admitted, truthfully, “I rather like it. It presents me with opportunities to do the things I like doing—” She felt faintly appalled as she realized that her admission that she liked having tea with him, or so it must sound, might strike him as a little odd, and hurried on—“Shopping, and so forth, when I feel like it, instead of having to cram it into a single half-day. And there are other advantages when the weather is fine.”

“Your walk this afternoon, for instance?” He offered her a cigarette, and then lighted it for her. “But what about your evenings?” he asked. “Don’t you like going out in the evenings?”

“I have my free evening,” she answered, “but I don’t particularly look forward to going out in the evenings. But perhaps that’s because I haven’t many friends in London.”

“You don’t live in London?”

“No. My home is in Kent, at a little place called Heatherbridge—actually it’s on the Kent-Sussex border.”

“I think I know it,” he told her. “And
is there any other county border in England as attractive as the Kent-Sussex one?”

Her small face suddenly glowed.

“You think so, too, Doctor?” There was enthusiasm in her soft voice. “I’ve lived there all my life, apart from the two years spent doing my training, and I honestly think there’s nowhere else like it in the world. But, then, of course, I haven’t seen very much of the world,” she admitted.

“And you’re not very old to have seen much of the world, are you?” he suggested with his faint smile. “I’d say you were about eighteen when you began your training, and therefore you can only be about twenty now.”

“Quite right.” The dimple appeared at the corner of her mouth as she peeped at him. “In another four months I shall have my twenty-first birthday.”

“And be given the key of the door?” His blue eyes looked amused. “But where did you do your training?” And then, before she could answer him: “Was it St. Faith’s?”

“Why, yes.” She looked at him for a moment, astonished. “How did you guess?”

“It isn’t exactly guess work, because I’m certain I’ve seen you somewhere before I met you the other night at Aston House, and I think it was very probably St. Faith’s.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and for an instant longer her eyes were held by his across the table, and she felt that ridiculous colour, over which she had so little control, rising up in her cheeks. For it was unusual for a man of his eminence in the medical profession to remember a first or second-year nurse after he had glimpsed her, but not spoken to her, on only one occasion. And it could only have been one occasion, since she did not remember ever seeing him at St. Faith’s.

“Why did you give up after only two years?” he asked. “And how do you come to be at Aston House?”

She explained about the unreasonable behaviour of her own health, and the set-back in the winter, and then about her connection with the matron of Aston House, and for several seconds afterwards he looked thoughtful. Then he surprised her a little by changing the subject completely.

“What do you think of Mrs. Carey?” he asked.

“Mrs.—?”

“Your patient in No. 29? Is she making much progress, do you think?”

“Oh, yes—definitely.” She was quite decided about this, because Diana Carey was suddenly responding quite amazingly to treatment. “Her nerves are much calmer, and even her voice is stronger. And I’m certain she feels that you’re doing her a tremendous amount of good, and that’s helped to restore her confidence.”

“Good!” he exclaimed, absent-mindedly crushing out his half
-
smoked cigarette and lighting another. “She’s had a bad time, Nurse Kintyre, and I’d be particularly glad if you’d do all that you can for her in the way of keeping her morale well raised now that we’ve got it out of the morass. I’m even going to ask you specially to go out of your way to do all that you can for her, and to be as understanding and sympathetic towards her case as possible, even if you feel sometimes that she may be just a little bit unreasonable and exacting in her demands upon you. Will you do that for me, Nurse?”

“Why—of course!” she answered, but she felt suddenly just a little bit deflated. Had he, having caught sight of her in the park, asked her out to tea merely to enlist her sympathy i
n
the case of Mrs. Diana Carey, and for no other even slightly more flattering reason, she asked herself? And remembering the loveliness of Diana, her own undisguised delight when the doctor’s visits were due, the books beside her bed, and her godfather, Sir Paul Loring—who was senior Consultant Physician at St. Faith’s—and his close association with Adrian Shane Willoughby, she became certain that that was the reason. And her feeling of deflation increased ridiculously.

“Thank you,” he smiled.

“Not at all,” she replied, rather primly. “If you wish me to be particularly attentive to one of your cases, Doctor, naturally I’ll do all I can.”

When Linnet got back to Aston House Cathie was in the Staff sitting-room, and as it was her afternoon off and she was enjoying a late cup of tea after an afternoon devoted to somewhat hectic shopping, she had kicked off her high-heeled shoes and was curled up on one of the chesterfields.

“Hello, darling,” she greeted Linnet, whose free afternoon and evening it also was. “I’ve had such a mad sort of afternoon, trying to fit in a hair-do and hunt for some material at the same time. What do you think of that?” and she tossed a parcel across to the other girl.

Linnet opened the parcel and exclaimed with delight at the lovely length of sea-green brocade, and another of net, that came to light.

“Oh, Cathie, how absolutely beautiful!” she enthused. “And with your hair—! But what are you going to have it made up into?”

“Why, an evening-frock, of course, darling,” Cathie replied, reaching over to switch off the wireless that was blaring into their ears and otherwise to an empty room. “I’ve discovered someone who is really clever at copying any style you like to show her, in
Vogue
or anywhere else—even a model in a West End shop window!—and she’s going to provide me with a creation worthy of Dior for St. Faith’s dance on the 27th. And, by the way, I hope you haven’t forgotten it?”

Linnet, whose own feet were feeling a little tired after her exercise of the afternoon, sank into a chair near to her and looked a little surprised.

“But neither you nor I belong to St. Faith’s any longer,” she pointed out. Cathie had, as a matter of fact, lasted longer than she had, and it had never been quite clear to Linnet why she had thrown in the sponge, as it were, when there seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason for it. And in spite of her somewhat self-centred outlook on life, Cathie was a good nurse. Moreover, she enjoyed nursing.

“No, pet, I’m quite well aware of that, but Roger Sherringham wants you to be his girl friend for the evening”—Roger was a Houseman at St. Faith’s, and Linnet could recall that he was fair and pleasant, and a little addicted to overdone flatteries— “and I’m going with Pat Murphey. We’re going to make up a nice little foursome, and if you think you can get out of it you can’t, darling, because
everything’s arranged
!”
She lay back and smiled blatantly, wriggling her toes in their cobwebby nylon hose. “You remember Pat, of course?”

“Yes, I remember Pat.”

Linnet did remember him. He was smooth, and dark, with sleepy Irish eyes, and a sleepier Irish brogue, and belonged to the Pathology Department at St. Faith’s. “But I didn’t know you’d kept up with him.”

“I didn’t keep up with him, but I met him the other day, and as a matter of fact we’ve been to the flicks twice in the last fortnight. I don’t believe a word he says, but he amuses me.” She smiled as if she meant what she said, her huge, greenish-hazel eyes a little dreamy nevertheless as they concentrated on the pelmet above the wide window.

“And it was Pat’s idea about the foursome?”

“Well, yes—he thought it a good idea, and so did I. And so, apparently, did Roger Sherringham.”

“I hardly know him.”

“Nevertheless, darling, he remembers you in quite a tender fashion, and he’s a nice enough lad. And I didn’t want you left out,” looking across at her with real affection.

Linnet recognized the affection and smiled back gratefully.

“But I honestly wouldn’t have minded being left out—and for one thing I
may
not be able to get my duty changed—and I haven’t the faintest idea what I can wear.”

“You’ve got that leaf-green thing that makes you look like a dryad. You can wear that.”

“Yes,” Linnet admitted, slowly, “I could.” The leaf-green had been bought for rather a special party at home, and it certainly was very attractive. “But it’s more a cocktail dress than an evening-dress, and I expect I’ll have to launch out if I’m really going with you to the dance.”

“With Roger, darling,” smiling under sweeping eyelashes. “You’ll be under his protection! And I think on the whole you’d better launch out as it’s a St. Faith’s dance.”

And in her heart Linnet agreed with her that St. Faith’s, when it went all festive, was worthy of a new dress.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing this afternoon?” Cathie asked, with a return of her slightly languid manner. She started to gather together her parcels, preparatory to carrying them up to her room.

“Walking in the Gardens,” Linnet told her.

Cathie smiled at her as if she found her a little amusing, and also a little pathetic.

“How dull!” she exclaimed. “But I’ve no doubt you enjoyed it. And I’ve no doubt you walked alone!”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” Linnet confessed, “I didn’t, not all the time. And somebody asked me to have tea with them.”

“Oh!” Cathie’s eyebrows flew upwards. “Who?”

“Oh, just—someone!” Linnet replied, and smiled at her provokingly. And she declined to reveal the fact that she had had tea with Dr. Shane Willoughby, which would have been a tid-bit of information Cathie would have appreciated. And perhaps for that very reason Linnet kept the tid-bit to herself.