A Case of Heart Trouble (7 page)

“No hard feelings, Nurse?” he asked. “Because I lost my

temper yesterday? Of course you’ve looked after me splendidly. And I’m afraid I've been anything but an easy patient. The one thing I wish you is a really exemplary patient next time . . . and no mean advantages taken! ”

His eyes gleamed for an instant, she realized he was referring to the episode of the kiss, and she turned away.

“Goodbye, Doctor. I hope when you return from your cruise you will be absolutely fit.”

“There’s nothing much the matter with me now,” he admitted. He called out to her as she was about to ascend the stairs: “I’ll see you at Ardrath House!” She didn’t answer. When they came face to face in Ardrath House—if they ever came face to face, which was unlikely, as she was so junior—he would be the visiting consultant, and she would have no status at all. And if he condescended to notice her it would be simply and solely because she had once helped to while away long evenings at Loring Court, and played chess and backgammon with him.

She found it difficult to settle down in London again after her month at Loring Court. November was a very cold, grey month, for one thing, and December was even colder. There were lots of colds and influenza about, and she herself went down with influenza about a week before Christmas. She was feeling very shaky and completely unlike herself when she was allowed up for Boxing Day in the Nurses’ Home, only to take to her bed again the following day with a steadily mounting temperature.

She supposed that but for the powerful modern drugs that were used on her she would have had a very bad time indeed, quite unlikely to have escaped pneumonia, and her convalescence might have lasted indefinitely. As it was, she was sent home to recuperate for a fortnight in the middle of January, and by the time she returned to duty the excited word was going round the nursing home that Dr. Loring was back in Harley Street.

He must have grown tired of the Mediterranean, or else the weather hadn’t been up to standard there, for he had proceeded as far as the Bahamas in his search for sun and physical vigor. Or was it a kind of protracted second honeymoon? Dallas wondered, when she heard of the extent of his travels.

When she saw him again for the first time for three months she experienced something like a, shock because he looked so well. So brown that he must have spent countless hours doing nothing but courting the beneficial effects of the sun . . . and bathing in deliciously warm waters. He no longer walked with even a trace of

a limp, his eye was bright and alert, and he was as straight and elegant as he had ever been as he ascended the stairs with Matron.

Dallas had seen his car outside, and she was in a sense prepared for a sudden encounter. But she expected him merely to nod at her, and to pass on. She wasn’t prepared to have him stop— thereby making it necessary for Matron to stop, too—and ask her how she was.

“You’re hardly an advertisement for Ardrath House, Nurse,” he remarked, frowning. “The last time I saw you you were looking reasonably fit, but since then something’s happened to you. What?”

“Nurse Drew was one of the unfortunate ones who caught influenza just before Christmas,” Matron took it upon herself to explain. “We had quite an epidemic, and at one time it looked as if the entire nursing home was going down with it. However, nearly everyone made a fairly speedy recovery except poor Nurse here. She gave us quite a lot of trouble,” smiling forgivingly at ‘poor Nurse’, “and had to be sent home. As a matter of fact she has only just returned to duty.”

“I see,” Martin Loring exclaimed. But he went on frowning at Dallas. “And does that mean you’ve had a proper check-up since you returned? You look

to me as if you could do with a few weeks where I’ve just come from.”

Dallas coughed . . . she hadn’t yet conquered the nasty, irritating little cough that was a legacy from the bout of influenza.

“Oh, I’m very much better now,” she assured him, with a stiffness that made her voice sound stilted and slightly strained.

His eyebrows ascended a little, as if he could disagree with that statement. Matron was impatient to move on, but he had not yet finished with Nurse Drew.

“My aunt was asking about you the other day,” he remarked. “At the moment she’s in London, and she asked me to remember her to you if I saw you.” “That was very kind of Mrs. Loring,” she returned, just as stiffly. “Please thank her for the card she sent me at Christmas. It was most kind of her. I’m afraid I wasn’t well enough to return the compliment. Will you be so good as to explain to her?” “Of course,” he said.

Dallas knew what was expected of her, and she turned and disappeared along the nearest corridor as if she was a piece of thistledown and a little breeze had blown her away. Dr. Loring followed Matron’s straight back along the opposite corridor with a definite cleft between his dark brows.

It was during her off-duty break the following afternoon that she ran into him again. She had been shopping in Oxford Street, and was walking back to Ardrath House through some of the quieter byways when his car came sneaking round a corner and pulled up within a few feet of her. His door was held open, and he looked out at her smilingly.

“Hello, Nurse. Your last day at Loring Court you were loaded with parcels, I remember. Get in, and I’ll give you a lift.

But Dallas declined the offer hurriedly.

“No, thank you, Doctor. I really came out for exercise, and I enjoy the walk.”

“In this weather?” He looked at the dismal sky, and the thinly falling rain. “Well, it won’t do you any good, I can assure you of that. It won’t do that cough of yours any good, and it’ll fill you with rheumatism. Get into the car.”

He leant across to hold open the other door, but she chose to be obstinate.

“It’s really very good of you, Doctor, but I honestly prefer to walk. I’ve one or two things I want to do before I report back on duty, and—” He glanced at the wet front of her coat She wasn’t even wearing a raincoat.

“Get in,” he said tersely, and because she couldn’t very well do anything else she got in. But she was suddenly seething with resentment, and the fact that she had been forced to do something she was entirely opposed to doing brought a bright flush to her face. Her green eyes sparkled like stars on a frosty night, and she bit her lower lip hard.

He smiled sideways at her, with compressed lips. “At least you won’t be soaked through by the time you get back to Ardrath

House,” he remarked. “I wasn’t going straight back to Ardrath House,” she told him, untruthfully. “As a matter of fact—” “Yes?”

“I was going to have some tea somewhere.” “Good,” he exclaimed, as if that was entirely satisfactory; “Then you can come back with me and have some tea with us. This happens to be an unusually free afternoon for me, and I’d like you to meet my—” “Oh, no, no! ” she exclaimed, quite determined now that she was not going to be coerced. She had no doubts at all that he was going to say, “and I’d like you to meet my wife,” and although she had already met her the very last thing she felt she could endure in her present slightly bedraggled condition was to be ushered into a comfortable drawing room in Harley Street and pressed to take tea

with Maureen Loring, wearing something that she had probably bought in Paris on the way home from the Bahamas, and looking lovelier than ever now that she was reconciled with her husband.

For the first time the doctor seemed slightly taken aback.

“My dear girl,” he said, a somewhat odd note in his voice, “I’m sure I don’t want to trespass on your free time, but it occurred to me you might like to renew association with my aunt, for one thing. I believe you two got on very well. And she’s returning to Loring tomorrow.”

“Tell her I hope she’ll have a very comfortable journey,” Dallas said huskily.

“And you won’t spend half an hour with her? Twenty minutes, if that’s too long?”

“No, I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. I haven’t really got the time ... I mean, I’m due back on duty at five o’clock, and—it was only an idea about having tea somewhere. . . .” She was beginning to sound agitated. “If you’d be so good as to drop me at the nearest point to Ardrath House . . . I mean, I don’t want you to make any detours for my sake. If—if it won’t take you out way . . . ? “It won’t,” he returned briefly, and started up the car. During the short drive to Ardrath House they neither of them said anything at all, and Dallas was so conscious of the silence that her fingers twined and untwined themselves about the string of her parcels that were clutched in her lap. It was the first time she had travelled in the low-slung Jaguar that the doctor drove himself, and but for the fact that she was so anxious to get out of it she might have enjoyed the superbly comfortable drive through the wet streets of London, with the lights beginning to stream out from the shop windows and dancing brightly in the puddles. She might have admired his meticulous driving, and marvelled how he came to be involved in an accident, but she was waiting almost breathlessly for the moment when she could say:

“Set me down here, please! ” and he need not go right up to the front of the nursing home, where they would be under observation from all sorts of odd pairs of eyes. And afterwards she would have to endure the surprised looks, the frankly envious looks —for the fact that she had been chosen to nurse Dr. Loring had hardly made her popular with the more senior members of the nursing staff. And she was in no mood to be twitted, with archly upraised brows, and gleaming hostile eyes.

“You’re doing very nicely with Dr. Loring, aren’t you, Nurse? Yesterday he stopped to talk to you, today he gives you a lift ... !”

So when she saw the lamp-post on the corner, and the door in

the side turning with the words Tradesmen’s Entrance painted on it in white letters, she spoke sharply and a little feverishly:

“This will do, Doctor. I always slip in here, anyway.”

But he drove right up to the front of the building, and set her down before the square portico. With crimson cheeks she scrambled out and thanked him.

“Not at all,” he said dryly, as her thanks seemed a little excessive, having done the same for anyone. Now get inside out of the rain. Good afternoon, Nurse.”

And he drove away before she had time to say another word, leaving her feeling foolish and a little ungracious on the pavement.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

SHE saw him constantly in the next few weeks, but he didn't stop to speak to her, or single her out for any special attention. She was glad of this, because it prevented her being singled out by her fellow nurses for surprised looks and double-edged comments. The fact that she had been selected—over the heads of the more experienced and far more suitable—to nurse him on her own for a whole month at Loring Court had not gone down well with the other members of the nursing staff at Ardrath House. They had received her coolly when she returned, and even Matron, she was sure, had been rather more than surprised because he had picked on her.

But, now that she was back, and sunk in obscurity once more, those who had once been friendly were friendly again. Life was very much as it had been before Dr. Loring had had his collision with a taxi, and little Nurse Drew was reasonably popular. She was relegated to her rightful position, made pots of tea and coffee for the visiting doctors and surgeons and carried them into Matron's private office without being noticed by anyone—the fact that she was so pale these days seemed to have detracted from her looks, for one thing—fetched and carried for whoever wanted her to fetch and carry, and spent a lot of time in the sluice-room.

During her off-duty periods she took advantage of London's pale sunshine—whenever there was pale sunshine—and walked in the park and the quiet squares surrounding the nursing home, without getting any more color in her cheeks. She tired easily, and she still had the remains of a cough, but she couldn't have said she felt ill. Just a little wistful, sometimes, when she dreamed of a world where there were no endless miles of corridors to traverse in rubber-soled shoes, no demanding patients paying very large weekly sums to have their bells answered immediately, and to be lifted, reassured, listened to, when she had a dozen other tasks to perform.

And, above all, no demanding Day Sister, who would never forgive a lapse, watching her critically all the time, and perhaps reporting on her to Matron.

But she loved nursing, and was quite sure that when the spring came—the real spring, not just a few deceptive fine days—she would begin to feel much more like herself, and have a new zest for her job. So she went about ticking the days off on the calendar, delighted when February dragged to an end, thrilled by the squally arrival of March.

And it was on a wild day in March, when Matron’s room was filled, nevertheless, with great bowls of daffodils and vases of other spring flowers, that she was sent for by Matron, and the summons drove every scrap of color out of her face because she was sure that, at last, there was to be some complaint about her work.

But Matron greeted her smilingly, and waved her affably to a chair. She seemed to understand the slightly petrified air of the youthful Nurse Drew, and explained at once that the reason she had been sent for was a very pleasant one ... a remarkable piece of good fortune for Nurse Drew, who was receiving preferential treatment for the second time in a matter of months.

“Doctor Loring came to me this morning and explained that he had a problem,” she said. “His daughter, Stephanie, is recovering from some childish complaint that she caught at school, and because she appears to be in rather a run-down condition she’s being sent home for a while. As you know, Yorkshire is quite healthy country, and it’s hoped that the pure moorland air will do her a lot of good. Unfortunately, Dr. Loring’s aunt is rather elderly to have a delicate child thrust on her to take charge of, and since someone must take charge of her he has thought of you. Are you prepared, Nurse, to leave London almost immediately for Loring Court?”

Dallas was so utterly taken aback that she could say nothing immediately. And then the only thing she could think of to say was: “But—what about Dr. Loring’s wife? Surely she—? The child’s own mother . . . !”