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"It needn't have been like that." She forced herself to speak matter-of-factly. "After all, it wasn't like that for everyone - Sir Charles, for example." She bit her lip. "You both started out with what it takes. If anything, you had the edge over him in seniority."

"Chuck? Oh, no, it wasn't like that for him. The two guys with talents." The laugh didn't quite reach his eyes. "Only I buried mine in a tropical jungle, in that dreadful terrorist attack which came from nowhere. We had to set up a medical station to deal with the injured in the native village we were both visiting. Sometimes I think I needed my head examined - going back for him when he got it in the leg." His hand shook as he handed over his cup. "Time was when I could set up thirty blood drips in as many minutes. That's something none of your precious residents would ever believe now."

They were silent for a moment. It was a long time since they had taken down their guards with each other. Angela felt the stirrings of an old remembered intimacy, it threatened to stifle her again. She was determined to keep the door closed on the past.

"The truth of the matter, if you'd only face up to it, is that you used your talents to buy the easy option. It never occurred to you that one day you'd wake up to find the man who'd once been your junior officer promoted over your head." Her words sounded harsh, but her heart wasn't in them. She knew that Harry Dayborough's scars were as real and as crippling as Sir Charles Hope-Moncrieff's stiffened leg.

"Oh, no, it didn't happen like that for Chuck." He went on as though she hadn't spoken. "The years haven't done to him what they've done to me - six major publications, the professorial chair, teaching wards, government commissions, a knighthood - and if anything, he's even more ambitious than ever."

"Rumour has it that he wants a vice-chancellorship; eventually even a baronetcy."

"Being Chuck, he'll probably get them. Everything always goes according to plan - his plan. Catch him being held at arm's length for ten years by a woman." He looked at her with a bitterness that had nothing to do with the matter in hand.

"It's one thing he doesn't seem to want," she said at length.

She had no intention of being drawn into that emotional vortex again.

"It's just not been in his blueprint to date. 'All in good time' he once told me when we were still on chaffing terms."

"It's to be hoped she's still free when he finds her."

"Being Chuck, she will be. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth." He set the one in his saucer grating tensely on her ears. "Even the wretched ward maids worship the ground he walks on. He apologised yesterday - actually apologised - when he had to walk over their newly scrubbed floor."

"Perhaps they'd think a bit more of you too, if you occasionally showed that you knew they were human, instead of treating them like parts of the furniture."

"Trust you to turn it against me." He aimed the ball of silver paper at her waste paper basket. "It's a pity he doesn't remember that his medical staff's human too. I suppose you've heard the latest. He won't operate the hospital's night roster. I was left to find out from Brown's registrar last night that he wasn't to be called for our wards in the future."

"There's nothing so unusual about that. You can't really blame him for wanting to run things here as they do in St. Kentigern's. Their residents always take their own night calls and bring in one of the seniors from their own unit."

" 'One of the seniors' - that's the phrase." He thumped his fist on the table. "It's time he realised that this isn't St. Kentigern's. For a start they've got six medical units so they only 'receive' once a week. And you can hardly get into their wards for seniors. There are so many registrars, senior housemen, and dispensary physicians, they practically have to queue up to put a stethoscope on a patient's heart. Here, you might as well be in the wilds of Africa - two seniors for each unit and only two medical units for the whole hospital. As it is we have to 'receive' on alternate days - and do all our own outpatients into the bargain.

"Your precious Sir Charles has another think coming if he supposes that I'm going to stand by every other night. There's nothing wrong with the system we've been operating for years, with one senior on call for both units at a time. That way we're each on duty every fourth night. Old Brown and the Super are quite satisfied with the scheme. I don't see why your high and mighty Sir Charles should start chucking his weight about at this late stage in the day."

"At least things will be a bit easier once you get the establishment for two new senior house posts. You've got Sir Charles to thank for pushing that through the Regional Hospital Board."

"Talking of senior housemen, what about this new bit of Moncrieff's?" Harry Dayborough scorned the use of the double-barrelled name. "It's not like him to have a woman. They tell me she's got her eye on one of these new posts after she gets her name on the register. Next thing we know he'll be promoting women - over our heads."

"You make me sick! He's never been anything but generous to you, though heaven knows why - still under a mistaken sense of obligation, I suppose."

"And you can stop making soothing noises, woman. After all, he's just promoted some Cambridge slicker over everyone else's head at St. Kentigern's. Three months ago you'd have said that couldn't happen either."

"Sometimes I fear for your sanity." She shook her head. "You're developing a positive persecution complex." She began collecting the cups. "But I'll tell you one thing, Harry. You want to watch it. I don't know what's got into you lately - but whatever it is, it's getting worse. All sweetness and light in front of Sir Charles - then taking it out of everyone else the moment his back is turned. One of these days you'll go too far. No wonder he's had to take a woman. He can't get anyone else to work with you. Since he got these wards you've been quite impossible to live with."

"That, of course, is something you would know all about." His voice was thick with sarcasm.

In spite of herself, Angela found she was colouring, but there was no perceptible change in her tone as she said, "You're just the same as you've always been - like a little boy. Deep down you're hurt and you want to smash everything near to you. I can't think why it always has to be me."

"Angela, you're a bitch. If you'd loved me you would have married me."

"If you'd loved me -" She bit her lip. No, he never could have changed. "You didn't need a wife. What you wanted was a whipping boy."

"God, how I hate clever women! Always thinking they can change a guy." He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in irritation.

"Not me, Harry. I've seen too many women make that mistake."

He tried to catch her hand, but she drew it away. "Give it a miss, Harry. I'm not getting embroiled in all that again."

"Can you avoid it?"

She recognised the once irresistible pleading in his voice. "It's the easiest thing in the world," she said crisply. "You learn to steer clear of the emotional moments."

"Whoever would have guessed that under that soft exterior there beats a heart that's as hard as gold? I wonder you never got where you meant to go."

"I think you know the answer to that one."

"Your outstanding abilities were no doubt instantly recognised - and made you equally instantly disliked. 'Watch out for old Bish'," he mimicked the youngsters. " 'Thinks she teaches residents and pros all they'll ever need to know.'"

She looked at him unblinking. "That's so typical of you. You have a compulsive need to make a doormat of someone, then openly despise them for letting you get away with it."

"Quite the little analyst today, aren't you?"

She rose and unconsciously straightened herself, patting the waistband and smoothing down the crisply laundered apron.

"That's right. Hold up your head so the wrinkles don't show at the neck. Not bad for forty, eh?" he taunted. "You won't be able to keep them at bay much longer."

"It's no use, Harry. There's nothing there to hurt any more." Only this morning she had seen the tell-tale venules on her cheeks. She adjusted the broderie anglaise cap by habit, without so much as glancing in the wall mirror.

"Not a grey hair in sight." He cocked an eyebrow at her. "I expect you have it touched up nowadays."

She wondered what kept her imprisoned here listening to this. "It's all over, Harry. You're flogging a dead horse." She touched the bell on her desk - the one that would bring the probationer nurse.

He saw the movement and rose. At the door he turned back to retrieve his stethoscope. "Don't fool yourself, Angela." He made it sound like a threat. "You and I will never be through."

*

She sat for a moment after he'd gone and stared at the place where he'd been. It still astonished her that after all those years of emotional bondage at last she had managed to break free. "All dead and empty inside now," she thought. All that anguish and pain. It was almost as though it had happened to some other woman. She sighed. People were right when they said you could get over anything in time. Somehow that seemed like the greatest betrayal of all.

She found herself wondering about his violent swings of mood. Some day soon someone was going to be made to pay for Harry Dayborough's imagined slights. She'd said that she couldn't be hurt by him again, but she had a strange premonition that whoever else suffered, Angela Bishop would not go unscathed.

She unlocked the poisons cupboard and began to check the contents against the afternoon nurse's report. When the probationer came into the room she couldn't remember why she had rung the bell.

The
bus which had brought her from Glasgow disappeared slowly over the hill towards the coast. Lesley put down her suitcases, straightened her back for a moment, and took a deep sniff of Renfrewshire air. Fenham General Hospital sprawled in the hollow of moorland before her.

Built as an emergency medical centre in wartime, it was like a great many other peripheral hospitals in Scotland. The original prefabricated buildings still formed its core. New concrete and brick extensions had been added over the years till now it was a hotch-potch of the old and the new. Away on the hillside the afternoon sunshine cast a peach-like glow on the slate-grey stone of the new nurses' home. Down by the west gate, Casualty and Outpatients' Departments seemed strangely deserted till she remembered that it was the end of Glasgow Fair. Beyond that gate were the moors that she loved so well. To outsiders they looked bleak and uninviting - as austere as the Covenanters who had once sought their shelter. High in the late July sky a lark sang.

She picked up her suitcases and began to make for the driveway marked "Medical Staff Quarters". A wide expanse of courtyard as windswept as the moor itself lay between her and the wards in which she would serve. On the north side of the site she could see the dispensaries, the path lab and the administrative wing with its fine new bungalows for the Senior Nursing Officer and the Medical Superintendent. Gardeners were busy rolling the ground in front of them. At the old nurses' home contractors were unloading heavy equipment while an ambulance stood incongruously in its doorway. Two uniformed drivers were stacking cases, and girls in white coats were struggling with lampshades and laden coathangers, laughing and giggling as they tried to squash the ambulance doors shut. Some sort of removal was apparently in progress.

Already the atmosphere was claiming her. After the long month's holiday it was good to be in hospital again. In spite of earlier misgivings she found her spirits begin to rise. No matter what he'd said to the contrary she was going to make these six months count. She'd set her heart on his senior house job. By the time she was through there'd be no more talk about not having another woman doctor! She began to stride out with a new spring in her step. The future stretched like the moors before her. "Beyond each hilltop others rise, like ladder rungs to loftier skies." She laughed at the old quotation. Nevertheless, imagination ran on - next year the London Membership and the year after that perhaps even an M.D. If she worked hard enough and showed herself willing perhaps he would finally let her work on a project of her own in his now famous diabetic clinic.

She became aware of a frantic honking in the driveway behind her.

"Hiya, Duchess. Day-dreaming as usual?"

"Jim! I thought you weren't due for another two days." Her eyes took in the battered red sports coupe. "Where on earth did you dig up this contraption?"

"Do you mind? You're speaking of the woman I love." Dr. James Graham vaulted lightly from his aged MG and threw open its passenger door with a flourish. "Allow me." The tall freckle-faced giant proceeded to toss her cases into the back.

"In the name of fortune, Jim, is it a residency you're here to run or a photographic agency?" She laughed as her briefcase wobbled precariously on top of tripod, enlarger, developing trays. Fishing rods, camera bag, golf clubs and a shotgun spilled over each other in the general muddle on the back seats of the old car. All final trace of gravity left her. It was never any use being too much in earnest when Jim was around. He was very good for her; stopped her taking herself too seriously, he said. Both twenty-three-year-old redheads, they were frequently mistaken for twins. Lesley knew that their fellow students thought the relationship was something else, but she preferred not to think about that. It was something they had never discussed. Emotional complications were one thing neither of them could afford at this particular stage in their careers. At times, though, she had found herself thinking - and more frequently recently - that Jim was all the "family" she really had, except for Aunt Margaret, of course, at Fairlie.

"How were the Pyrenees?" She settled in beside him and they began to talk animatedly about the things they'd been doing since graduation day.

"Hallo, gorgeous." Jim screeched his car to a halt outside the medical staff block and was addressing the middle-aged woman who had opened the revolving swing door at their approach. "And how is my favourite pin-up today?" He was out of the car and whirling her into a waltz before she could even protest.