The Hasty Marriage

CHAPTER TWO

SHE saw him exactly two hours later, for he accompanied Mr Burnett on his bi-weekly round, towering head and shoulders over everyone else. He wished her good morning with cool affability, remarked that they seemed to be seeing a good deal of each other that morning and added, ‘The little dog is doing very nicely.’

‘Oh, good.’ Laura spoke warmly and then became a well-trained Sister again, leading the way to the first bed, very neat in her blue uniform with the quaint muslin cap perched on top of her neat head.

She handed Mr Burnett the first set of notes and advised him in her clear, pleasant voice: ‘Mr Arthur True, facial injuries, concussion and severe lacerations of the upper right arm—admitted at eleven o’clock last night.’

Mr Burnett rumbled and mumbled to himself as he always did, cleared his throat and said, ‘Ah, yes,’ and turned to his registrar. ‘You saw him, George? Anything out of the way?’

George White was earnest, painstaking and thoroughly reliable, both as a person and as a surgeon, and he was quite unexciting too. He gave his report with maddening slowness despite Mr Burnett’s obvious desire for him to get on with it, so that Laura, aware of her chief’s irritation, wasted no time in getting the patient ready for examination; no easy matter, for he was still semi-conscious and belligerent with it. But she coped with him quietly with a student nurse to help, and presently, when Mr Burnett had had a good look and muttered to Doctor van Meerum, his registrar and Laura, they moved on.

‘Mr Alfred Trim,’ Laura enlightened her audience, ‘double inguinal hernia, stitches out yesterday.’ She lifted the bedclothes and Mr Burnett stood studying his handiwork, apparently lost in admiration of it until he said finally: ‘Well, we’ll think about getting him home, Sister, shall we?’ and swept on his way.

The next bed’s occupant looked ill. ‘Penetrating wound of chest,’ stated Laura. ‘I took the drain out an hour ago…’ She added a few concise and rather bloodthirsty details and Mr Burnett frowned and said, ‘Is that so?—we’ll have a look.’ He invited Doctor van Meerum to have a look too and they poked and prodded gently and murmured together with George agreeing earnestly with everything they said until Mr Burnett announced, ‘We’ll have him in theatre, Sister—five o’clock this afternoon.’

His gaze swept those around him, gathering agreement.

Five o’clock was a wretched time to send a case to theatre; Laura exchanged a speaking glance with her right hand. She was due off duty at that hour herself, and now it would be a good deal later than that, for Pat wouldn’t be back from her afternoon until then and there would be a lengthy report to give. She checked a sigh and looking up, found Doctor van Meerum’s dark eyes on her. He looked so severe that she felt guilty although she had no reason to be, and this made her frown quite fiercely, and when he smiled faintly, just as though he had know exactly what she had been thinking, she frowned even harder.

A tiresome man, she told herself strongly, walking into her life and turning it topsy-turvy, and whoever had made that silly remark about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all needed his head examined. She had been jogging along, not quite content, it was true, but at least resigned, and now she felt as though she had been hit by a hurricane which was blowing her somewhere she didn’t want to go…

She swept past the next bed, empty for the moment, and raised an eyebrow at the hovering nurse to draw the curtains around the next one in line. Old Mr Tyler, who had had a laparotomy two days previously—Mr Burnett had found what he had expected and worse besides, and Mr Tyler wasn’t going to do. Laura looked at the tired old face with compassion and hoped, as she always did in like cases, that he would die in his sleep, and waited quietly while the surgeon chatted quietly with a convincing but quite false optimism. He drew Doctor van Meerum into the conversation too, and she listened to the big man saying just the right thing in his faultless English and liked him for it. She supposed she would have loved him whatever he was or did, but liking him was an extra bonus.

The next three patients were quickly dealt with; young men with appendices which had needed prompt removal and who, the moment they were fully conscious, set up a game of poker. Laura had obliged them with playing cards, extracted a promise from them not to gamble with anything more valuable than matches and propped them up in their chairs the moment they were pronounced fit to leave their beds. And here they sat for the greater part of their day, a little wan, but nicely diverted from worrying about their insides.

They greeted Mr Burnett in a cheerful chorus, assured him that they had never felt better, that Sister was an angel, and that they couldn’t wait for the pleasure of having her remove their stitches. All of which remarks Laura took with motherly good nature, merely begging them to refrain from tiring themselves out before steering her party forward to the neighbouring bed. Its occupant, Mr Blake, was thin and middle-aged, and although his operation had been a minor one, a continuous string of complaints passed his lips all day and far into the night.

Mr Burnett, his entourage ranged behind him, stood by the bed and listened with an impassive face to details of uneatable porridge for breakfast, the callous behaviour of the house doctors and nurses, and Sister’s cruelty in insisting that he should actually get up and walk to the bathroom. He shot her a look of great dislike as he spoke and Mr Burnett said quite sharply that since he was making such excellent progress he would do better to convalesce at home, where he would doubtless find nothing to grumble about. ‘Though I doubt if you will find a better nurse or kinder person than Sister Standish,’ he concluded severely.

He stalked away, muttering to himself, and Laura hastened to soothe him by pointing out the excellent progress the next patient was making.

‘I don’t know how you put up with it, Laura,’ said Mr Burnett, half an hour later, when they were all squashed into her office drinking their coffee. ‘For heaven’s sake get married, girl, before you lose your wits. That Blake—I’ll have him home tomorrow; he’s fit enough, and besides taking up a bed he must be driving you all mad.’

‘Well, that would be nice,’ conceded Laura mildly, ‘for he does wear one down, you know. But they’re not all like that, you know, sir.’

He passed his cup for more coffee and snorted: ‘If I wasn’t a married man and old enough to be your father, I’d marry you myself just to get you out of this ward,’ he assured her, and they all laughed, because Laura was considered to be one of the Sisters in the hospital whom no one could ever imagine leaving. Young but settled, the principal nursing officer had once described her, and Laura, who had heard of it through the hospital grapevine, had considered that it amounted to an insult.

They all got up to go presently, and Doctor van Meerum, who had said very little anyway, merely murmured vague thanks in her general direction as he went through the door. She went and sat at her desk again when they had gone, doing absolutely nothing until Pat came to remind her that she had expressed a wish to inspect the previous day’s operation cases.

She managed to forget the Dutch doctor more or less during the next few days; she had plenty of friends, she was popular in a quiet way and there was no reason for her to be lonely. And yet she was, and the loneliness was made worse when Joyce telephoned at the weekend and told her gleefully that Reilof van Meerum was spending it with them. ‘We’re going out to dinner,’ she bubbled over the wire. ‘I shall wear that blue dress—and on Sunday we’re going out for the day in that super car of his. Laura, do you think he’s rich?’

‘I really don’t know. Did he say anything about a dog?’

‘Yes—rather a bind, really; he has to bring the creature with him, he says, because it’s broken its legs. Still, I daresay we can dump it on someone.’

Laura didn’t answer. Somehow the doctor hadn’t struck her as being a man to opt out of something he had undertaken to do, and he had promised her… She said mistakenly, ‘It’s only a very little dog.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Joyce after a tiny pause, and Laura, sighing for her unguarded tongue, told her, ‘It was knocked down by a car just as we reached the hospital—we took it into Cas…’

‘Have you seen Reilof?’

‘He did a round earlier in the week with Mr Burnett. I didn’t talk to him at all—or rather, he didn’t talk to me.’

She knew exactly what her young sister was thinking; that no man, no young, attractive man at any rate, would bother very much about a young woman who was looking thirty in the face. Thirty, to Joyce, was the absolute end.

Laura went home again at the end of the following week without having seen the doctor again, although she had found a note on her desk one morning to tell her that he had gone back to Holland, and that he had the little dog, now in excellent health albeit hating his plasters, with him. He was hers, RvM. She put the note away carefully and told herself once again to forget him.

Easier said than done, as it turned out, for when she did get home he was Joyce’s main topic of conversation; they had had a super weekend and he was coming again just as soon as he could manage it. ‘I’ve got him hooked,’ declared Joyce happily. ‘He’s a bit old, but he’s very distinguished, isn’t he? and Uncle Wim says he’s carved himself an excellent career—he’s got a big practice somewhere near Hilversum. I imagine that the people who live round there are mostly well-off.’ She added dreamily, ‘I expect he’s rich.’ She smiled beguilingly at Laura. ‘Look, be a darling—I don’t dare to ask Uncle Wim any more questions, but you could, he dotes on you, and I do want to know.’

Laura shook her head; her godfather might dote on her, but he was the last person in the world to gossip about anyone. ‘Why do you want to know so badly?’ she asked.

Joyce grinned wickedly. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a doctor’s wife, as long as he was very successful and had masses of money and I wouldn’t have to do the housework or answer the door, like Doctor Wall’s wife does in the village.’

Laura kept her voice matter-of-fact; Joyce fell in and out of love every few weeks, maybe her feeling for Doctor van Meerum was genuine, but on the other hand someone else might come along. ‘Chance is a fine thing,’ she remarked lightly, and wished with all her heart that she might have that chance.

‘Like to bet on it?’ Joyce looked like a charming kitten who’d got at the cream. ‘I’ve bowled him over, you know; he’s thirty-eight and he had a wife years ago, only she died, and now he’s met me and discovered what he’s been missing.’

Laura had been sitting in the window, perched on the open window sill, but she got up now, shivering a little; it was still a little chilly in the April sun, but that wasn’t why she shivered. ‘I must go and get tea,’ she said. ‘Are Father and Uncle Wim still playing chess?’

Joyce shrugged and yawned. ‘How should I know? Why don’t you go and see for yourself?’

In a way it was a relief to be back at work again, although Laura loved being at home, but on the ward there was little time to bother with her own affairs. It was take-in week and the empty beds were filling fast, so that there was more than enough to do. She went her calm, sensible way, checking drips, seeing that the cases went on time to theatre and when they returned, were dealt with with all the skill available; and all the while being disturbed times out of number by housemen, George at his slowest, the Path Lab people, the lady social worker, and Mr Burnett, never at his sunniest during take-in week.

Moreover when she did escape to her office to catch up on her paper work, it was to be interrupted again by nurses wanting their days off changed, evenings when they had mornings, mornings when they had afternoons free…she did her best to accommodate them, for she could remember her own student days and the agonising uncertainty of days off not fitting in with one’s own private life. Staff was going to have a long weekend, which meant that Laura would be on call for a good deal of that period, something which she didn’t mind about, for to go home and listen to Joyce eulogising about Reilof van Meerum was more than she could bear. It would be better, she reflected, when he had either gone for good or he and Joyce…she tried not to think any more about that, but Joyce could be ruthless when she wanted something or someone.

It was a pity that her father had told her that she need not look for another job, she could stay home and do the housekeeping; he engaged a daily housekeeper at the same time, for as he was at pains to tell Laura, Joyce wouldn’t be strong enough to cope with running the house on her own. And that meant that she would idle away her days, cooking up schemes with which to ensnare the doctor yet more deeply.

Laura went home the following weekend, and although her father had told her on the telephone that either he or Joyce would bring the car in to Chelmsford to meet her train, there was no one waiting, for her when she arrived. She waited for a little while and then telephoned home. Mrs Whittaker, the new housekeeper, answered. She sounded a dear soul but a little deaf and not at her best with the instrument, for she wasted a good deal of time saying ‘Hullo’, until Laura, getting in a word edgeways at last, asked for her father or Joyce. She had to repeat her question and when Mrs Whittaker finally grasped what she was saying, it was disappointing to be told that there was no one home.

Well, it had happened before. Laura left a message to say that she would get old Mr Bates to fetch her in his taxi from the village, and rang off. It took her a little while to get hold of him, and then she had had to wait half an hour for him to reach her, and she was tired and peevish by the time she opened the house door and went inside.

The hall was cool and dim, but the sitting room had a great many windows, allowing the spring sunshine to pour into the room. There was no one there, though; she went through the house then, and found the kitchen empty too, with a note on the table ‘Soup in saucepan’, presumably meant for her. She went upstairs to her room next, unpacked her overnight bag, got into a rather elderly tweed skirt and a thin sweater and went downstairs again.

It was almost one o’clock by now and there was no sign of lunch or anyone to eat it; possibly her father and godfather had gone off on some expedition of their own and forgotten all about her arrival, but Joyce knew that she was coming. Laura hunted round the sitting room once more, looking for a note, and found none. She wandered into the kitchen, served herself some of the soup and sat down on the kitchen table, supping it from a bowl while she decided what she should do with her afternoon, for it looked as though she would have nothing but her own company for the next few hours.

But in this she was wrong; she had finished her soup and was sitting doing absolutely nothing, her head full of Reilof van Meerum, when the front door opened and she heard Joyce’s voice, high and gay. She heard her father’s voice too and then his rumbling laugh, and a moment later the kitchen door opened and her sister and the Dutch doctor came in.

Laura didn’t get up, indeed she was too surprised to do so—Joyce hadn’t mentioned that he would be there and just for a moment she could think of nothing at all to say. It was Joyce who spoke.

‘Laura—oh, darling, I quite forgot that you were coming home.’ She bit her lip and went on quickly: ‘Daddy and Uncle Wim wanted to go to some fusty old bookshop and Reilof turned up—wasn’t it lucky?—and took them in the car, and then we went for a drive—we’ve just had lunch at the Wise Man…’ Her eyes fell on the empty bowl and she gave a charming little laugh. ‘Oh, poor you—I told Mrs Whittaker not to bother because you’d probably not come…’

The man beside her gave her a thoughtful glance and Laura saw it and said at once: ‘My fault, I usually telephone, don’t I—I changed my mind at the last minute and got Bates to fetch me from the station.’ She smiled at her sister. ‘I wasn’t hungry, anyway.’ She turned the smile on the doctor. ‘Hullo—how’s the little dog?’

He answered her gravely: ‘He’s fine. I had to leave him at home, of course, but my housekeeper is his slave and will take good care of him.’ He paused for a moment. ‘If I had known that you were coming home this weekend I would have given you a lift.’

Very civil, thought Laura, even though he was dying to get Joyce to himself; he could hardly keep his eyes off her, and indeed her sister looked delightful in a new suit and those frightfully expensive shoes she had wheedled out of her father. ‘And my new Gucci scarf,’ thought Laura indignantly, suddenly aware that her own clothes did nothing to enhance her appearance.

She got down from the table then, saying in a bright voice: ‘I’m going along to see Father and Uncle Wim—what happened to Mrs Whittaker?’

Joyce’s blue eyes were like a child’s, wide and innocent. ‘I told her to take the rest of the day off. Laura darling, I do feel awful…’ and Laura thought without anger: ‘If she weren’t my sister, I would believe her, too.’

‘You see,’ Joyce went on, ‘Daddy and Uncle Wim are going to Doctor Wall’s for dinner—his wife will be at the WI meeting and Reilof is taking me to that gorgeous place at Great Waltham…’

‘And we shall be delighted if you would join us,’ the doctor interrupted her gently.

He was kind, thought Laura; he might have dozens of faults, but lack of kindness wasn’t one of them. ‘That’s sweet of you,’ she replied hastily, allowing her voice to show just sufficient regret, ‘but actually I’ve reams of things to do and I was looking forward to an evening on my own.’ For good measure she added, ‘We’ve had a pretty hectic time on the ward.’

‘Poor old Laura,’ Joyce spoke with facile sympathy, ‘but if that’s what you want to do…’

Laura considered for one wild moment telling Joyce what she really wanted to do, and then looking up she found the doctor’s dark, questioning gaze upon her, so that she hastily rearranged her features into a vague smile and said enthusiastically, ‘Oh, rather. There’s nothing like a quiet evening, you know.’ She prolonged the smile until she reached the door, said ‘’bye’ to no one in particular and left them together.

The house was very quiet when everyone had gone out that evening; her father had pressed her to go with them to the doctor’s, but if she had done so the three old friends would have felt bound to exert themselves to entertain her, whereas she knew well enough that they wanted nothing better than to mull over the latest medical matters. So she repeated her intention of staying at home, saw the two elder gentlemen out of the front door and a few minutes later did the same for her sister and Doctor van Meerum. Joyce looked radiant and the doctor looked like a man who had just won the pools. She went back indoors, shutting the door firmly behind her, and wandered into the kitchen to get herself some supper. Scrambled eggs, rather watery because she cried all over them.

But no one would have known that a few hours later; she sat, composed and restful, in the sitting room, her newly washed hair hanging in a shining mousy cloud down her back, the coffee tray and sandwiches set ready, the local paper on her lap. The older gentlemen got back first, as was to be expected; they had drunk most of the coffee and made great inroads upon the sandwiches before they were joined by Joyce and Reilof van Meerum. Joyce glowed, looking quite breathtakingly lovely—enough to turn any man’s head, and it was obvious that that was what had happened to the doctor—he wasn’t a man to show his feelings, but some feelings couldn’t be concealed. Laura went away to get more coffee and when she returned he took the tray from her, asked her kindly if she had enjoyed her evening, and expressed the hope that she would be free to join them on the following day.

Laura, aware of Joyce’s anxious wordless appeal to say no, said with genuine regret and a complete absence of truth that she had promised to go back early as she was spending the afternoon with friends. The doctor’s polite regret sounded genuine enough but hardly heartfelt, and later, when they had parted for the night, she wasn’t surprised when Joyce came to her room.

‘Thank heaven I caught your eye,’ she observed. ‘Heavens, suppose you’d said yes!’ She smiled sunnily. ‘He was only being polite, you know. We’re going out for the day—to Cambridge—he was there, simply ages ago.’ She settled herself on the end of the bed. ‘Laura, isn’t it super—I’m sure he’s going to ask me to marry him.’

Laura was plaiting her hair at the dressing table and didn’t turn round; although she had been expecting Joyce to tell her just that, now that she heard the actual words she didn’t want to believe them. She finished the plait with fingers which trembled and said carefully: ‘Is he? However do you know?’

Joyce laughed, ‘Silly—of course I do,’ and she added with unconscious cruelty: ‘But you wouldn’t know…’

Laura smiled ruefully. ‘No, I wouldn’t. And are you going to say yes?’

‘Of course—lord, Laura, I’d be a fool if I didn’t—he’s very good-looking and he adores me and I’m sure he’s got plenty of money although he hasn’t exactly said so—but he’s got that marvellous car and his clothes are right.’

Laura stared unseeingly at her reflection in the looking-glass. Her face, she was thankful to see, looked just the same, although inside she was shaking with indignation and rage and a hopeless grief. ‘Do you love him?’ she asked.

Joyce got off the bed and strolled to the door. ‘Darling, I’m prepared to love anyone who can give me all the pretty things I want.’ She paused before she closed the door behind her. ‘I suppose he turns me on, if that’ll satisfy you.’

Laura got up early the next morning. She had slept badly and the urge to get out of the house before anyone else got downstairs was strong. She got into slacks and a blouse and went, quiet as a mouse, downstairs. Breakfast was already laid in the dining room, but she went straight to the kitchen, made tea, cut a slice of bread and butter to go with it and fetched a jacket from behind the kitchen door. It was a splendid morning as only an early May morning can be and she went through the village and then turned off down the narrow lane which was the back way to the neighbouring village. It had high banks on either side of it and the birds were already there, singing. There were catkins and lambs-tails too, and the hedges were thick with bread and cheese, green and fresh, and tucked away here and there were clumps of primroses and patches of violets.