New Doctor at Northmoor Page 8

  What did he mean about being too old a campaigner? That suggested he was always giving presents to girls. Well, hadn’t she come to the conclusion already that he was every girl’s pin-up boy in this hospital, and he hadn’t been here five minutes? You had only to listen in to the conversation of passing nurses to learn that much, Gwenny reminded herself sourly. And if it was like it here in such a short time, what could it have been like at the other hospital?

  She couldn’t stop thinking about it, and when Priscilla looked in later that day, Gwenny asked her outright:

  ‘Where did you get that diary you gave me?’

  ‘You ill-bred brat,’ Priscilla observed, without rancour. ‘You’ll be asking next what it cost.’

  ‘Oh, no, I won’t, because that doesn’t concern you since you didn’t buy it,’ Gwenny flashed. ‘And there was a note in it, from the person to whoever it was he was giving it to.’

  That really did shake Priscilla. ‘You’re making it up,’ she said hotly. ‘Where is this note, if it’s true?’

  ‘I threw it away,’ Gwenny said, ‘because I thought he’d written it to you with the diary, but he told me it hadn’t been given to you. So where did you get it?’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ Priscilla asked softly, her eyes very bright and eager.

  Just out of sheer cussedness, and also to test how much her sister knew about the whole thing, Gwenny said, ‘One of the housemen. It doesn’t matter which one, and anyway, I’m not sure I’ve got his name right.’

  Gwenny had never seen Priscilla so put out. ‘If I could only be sure you weren’t having me on,’ she muttered. ‘What did the note say?’

  ‘Just something soppy about the diary having been intended to preserve precious memories.’

  ‘How was it I never saw this note?’ Priscilla fumed.

  ‘I suppose it was because it was folded lengthwise to make a sort of bookmark,’ Gwenny offered, watching her sister.

  Priscilla swallowed, and decided to make a clean breast of it. ‘Well, if you must know, that diary went the rounds. One of the nurses in my set had it and she didn’t want it and was going to throw it away and it hadn’t been used, so I told her she’d better give it to me—I might find a use for it. As I didn’t, it occurred to me that you might like to scribble in it, lying here with time on your hands.’

  ‘Who gave it to your nurse friend?’ Gwenny persisted.

  ‘Blessed if I know, but if you ask me, there’s something fishy about it if one of the housemen in this hospital wrote a note about a diary given to someone in my old hospital.’

  ‘Wait a bit,’ Gwenny said, thinking. ‘It didn’t mention the diary—it just said “this token”. It could be anything, I suppose. It might have been picked up off the floor, dropped by someone else, I suppose, while I was asleep, and someone might just have put it in my diary thinking I’d dropped it.’

  Priscilla was relieved. ‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘Still, I wish you’d kept that note. I would have liked to see it.’

  She went soon after that. Gwenny was very much relieved when her sister did go. She wanted to think.

  Now where did she stand, about that note? Mark Bayfield had finally behaved as though it had been sent with the diary, and that meant it had been sent to someone in his old hospital, but not to Priscilla. Gwenny was so ridiculously glad about that, she could have wept. Still, he had said pretty definitely, hadn’t he, that it hadn’t been to her sister? She wondered who it had been sent to. She had hated telling those half-lies to Priscilla, but it had been necessary. If she admitted that the R.M.O.’s handwriting had been on that note, Priscilla would have been most difficult to live with.

  Now the gift of the diary settled into its proper perspective, and Gwenny, with sister-like affection and tolerance, felt she understood the gift better. Things which no one else wanted, but which would do to amuse Gwenny—well, that she could understand, but if Priscilla had started to buy new things to give to Gwenny, the time would come when Gwenny would begin to be suspicious. At the very least, she could only think that in such circumstances, her prognosis was very shaky indeed.

  She retrieved the diary and stood it up. It had been sent to a Miss X whom Gwenny didn’t know, and Miss X hadn’t wanted the gift from the R.M.O. and it had wandered through several hands until it had come into Gwenny’s own. Well, that was all right. Now she could settle back into her old pretending games, and make believe that he had sent it to her. How would she feel about receiving that note from him?

  Much to her surprise she found herself thinking that it wouldn’t do, such a note. It was really too impersonal. She would want him to write something like, Darling Gwenny, and then she would want him to say that the diary was just a little thing he had picked up and he would come with something quite gorgeous for her at a later date. She lay shaking with excitement and anticipation. Perhaps such a note would threaten, ever so gently, of course, that he would come to collect payment for such a gift. Five kisses for a little diary, a dozen kisses for a larger gift, two dozen kisses (the best) for a super gift. She fell asleep on that pleasant note and dreamed about him, but in the dream Miss X, with a frozen hand and a face as blank and unfeatured as the back of a spoon,, was fighting with Priscilla for Mark Bayfield’s favours, but he was giving all his attention to sticking his wretched hypo needle in someone, and that someone was Gwenny. He was saying he didn’t want to be bothered by silly women while he had a super ill patient with a mystery disease to claim his attention.

  Gwenny woke up sobbing, sure that that was all he regarded her as: his mystery disease, and not as a; woman at all. Sister was by her bed and she was saying to someone that the R.M.O. must be fetched, but the dis-; embodied voice said from a long distance that he had, gone off duty and had been seen to drive out of the Residents’ Car Park an hour ago.

  Sir Giles was still on hospital premises, however, and he came at the double and looked severely at Gwenny.

  ‘What’s all this, then? Been upsetting yourself again? It’s my belief that this is nothing more or less than simple hysteria.’

  Sister was shocked and said so. In her prim way she had many stand-up battles with Sir Giles, and rumour had it that under his lofty manner he privately enjoyed, doing battle with her.

  Gwenny decided they weren’t going to do battle over her bed. ‘I want Dr. Bayfield,’ she heard herself say. ‘He says I’ve got a special disease. He wouldn’t like the suggestion of hysteria to be put around.’

  She was shocked at herself for saying that, but it appeared to amuse Sir Giles very much. ‘H’m, so under hat meek exterior, poor Kinglake’s brat has a bit of spirit! No wonder my nephew...’ and he murmured something under his breath which made a fleeting smile come to Sister’s lips.

  Cosgrove was fetched to sit by Gwenny and watch her, md honorary and ward sister went out, talking, it seemed to Gwenny, about the advisability of telephoning around to try to find Mark Bayfield.

  A little later on, Sister came back and gave her an injection, which put her to sleep, and when she awoke t was dark, and Mark Bayfield was standing by her bed.

  There was a curious intimacy about her room, with inly the light from the passage outside, filtering through he frosted glass in her door. She savoured being alone with him, until she realized that they weren’t alone and hat Cosgrove was busy at the table in the far comer. Mark Bayfield murmured, ‘What seems to be the trouble?’

  Gwenny was very cross about that approach. ‘That’s low my father speaks to bothersome patients who he mows haven’t got much the matter with them,’ she protested.

  ‘Well, let’s put it this way—what made them fetch ne back from Bittleby?’

  ‘Did they? I’m sorry about that. Sir Giles Faraday came to see me and said it was nothing but hysteria. Anyway, I didn’t ask to see you. I just had a nightmare and called out.’

  ‘Did you tell Sir Giles that?’

  ‘No, he didn’t ask me. Nor he didn’t give me the chance to say. H
e’s quite horrid! He just talks all the time and looks at the poor patient as if it was something nasty that the cat had brought in!’

  He made a sound like smothered laughter. ‘Not to worry. He talks to all his patients like that, even the rich old ladies. Most honoraries do, you know.’

  ‘Will you, when you’re an honorary?’ she asked him.

  He seemed to take his time over considering that, but at last, he said, ‘I expect so,’ just as if she were a child. She joined ranks with her family in hating him.

  And yet she had to admit that he gave her a lot of attention. She knew that it was his shadowy figure standing by her bedside often when she came up from the dark depths, her head swimming, wondering where she was and how long she had been under. His figure was like no one else’s; it was tall and powerfully built, and there was a special something about the set of his shoulders that she recognized, silhouetted against the light from the corridor, and she recognized the shape of his head, too.

  ‘She heard some nurses gossiping about the amount of attention he gave his mystery patient, only that day. Mystery patient, mystery illness, it was all one to Gwenny; they were referring to her, and she didn’t like it and didn’t understand it.

  She didn’t know their voices. They were doing some job or other in the room next to hers. When she had been in the hospital longer she learned to recognize the sounds of each job and to know that those bumps, squeaks and sloppings of water meant that a bed was being disinfected and prepared for a new patient. At the time all she was concerned with was what they were saying. A disconcerting conversation that settled in her head and she stored against him for future reference.

  ‘Is our new little patient all that important, do you suppose?’ one asked. She had a lightweight voice and a clipped way of enunciating. The other had a sleepy voice, deeper, and said,

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d like to. Can’t tell, as we don’t know him well enough, if he goes mad over every new patient like this.’

  ‘He couldn’t, could he? Or do you mean in the singles?’

  Gwenny’s room was a single, and she already knew that it was by way of being special, but she hadn’t found the reason.

  ‘No. Foster says he’s got a special interest in her.’ The sleepy voice finished in a chuckle full of meaning.

  ‘What, one of the Bayfield family getting interested in a little patient, a G.P.’s daughter at that? Don’t be daft!’

  ‘Well, you must admit he haunts that room.’

  ‘I heard that it’s because there’s been trouble with her family. Rumour has it that he’s upset every one of them ‘

  Someone interrupted them at that, and Gwenny was very sorry. She would have liked to hear the opinion of the other girl on that remark.

  She put it to her mother, the next time she came. She knew her mother was coming up. She saw her mother by training her field-glasses on the main gate. She saw her mother looking annoyed when she had to wait for an ambulance going through, and then she saw her mother’s brilliant smile flash out, and looked around to see who it was her mother was apparently so pleased to see. It turned out to be Priscilla, smartly going out in mufti. Mother and daughter stopped for a brief exchange of words, then Priscilla ran. That would be for the half—hourly bus, Gwenny decided. She watched her mother progress. These glasses were a joy, because it was quite a long walk from the gates, and fun to watch one’s visitors every step of the way, except when they were lost to view behind the jutting wall of the Casualty Block.

  When her mother came out from behind that wall, Gwenny saw that she had a young man stepping out briskly beside her. Laurence, by all that was wonderful! Laurence, coming to visit Gwenny? Then she discounted that, and promptly recalled her father admitting that Dick and Tilda Sansom were in the hospital. Laurence would be visiting them, of course. But what was he doing at home, anyway? Could it be possible that he, too, had been transferred to this hospital?

  Gwenny’s mother was painfully brief about the Sansoms. She didn’t like them, Gwenny remembered.

  ‘They are a careless couple,’ Mrs. Kinglake said, and then got round to the real reason for her lack of warmth towards the Sansom brother and sister. ‘Dick is a very selfish young man. He has that Land-Rover all to himself, yet he won’t ever give any of my old ladies a ride in it—and almost everyone else in the district does. At least they help in some way or other. Everyone ought to help in the way he or she can, and as to that lazy sister of his—all the time in the world on her hands, and will she do any secretarial work for my committees? No, not a line will she write. Not five minutes of her time will she give. All she wants to do is to sit on the back of a horse. And now look where it’s got her. It’s almost like a judgment!’

  ‘Oh, Mummy!’ Gwenny protested.

  ‘And your brother Laurence is silly over her. I can’t think why. Not the type of girl for Laurence, I would have thought.’

  Gwenny thought of Tilda Sansom; tall and angular, eager and fresh-air-loving, her slaty grey eyes dancing with good health, her sensitive hands wonderful on the reins. What if she never did bother to look well-groomed and frail? Not every girl could be like that. Tilda was strong and energetic, and when she wasn’t riding she was taking long country walks, or helping her menfolk on the farm. She wasn’t lazy, whatever else she was, but how Tilda did loathe Mrs. Kinglake’s committees! The old tabbies with their claws unsheathed, Tilda had been heard to say.

  ‘And that Dick—don’t let me hear anyone say he’s trying to get friendly with you, Gwenny.’

  Gwenny turned surprised eyes to her mother. ‘Is it likely?’ she asked blankly.

  ‘I wouldn’t say it was unlikely,’ her mother retorted. ‘Laurence tells me that Dick has asked him if you’re courting yet. When young men ask other young men that question, it usually means they’re thinking on those lines. I don’t want that to happen, Gwenny.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mummy. Dick and I just happen to be good friends.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be friends with him at all,’ Mrs. Kinglake said firmly. ‘He associates with girls I wouldn’t invite home to tea. Oh, well, never mind, I’ll take that up with you later. There’s something else I want to discuss with you. First of all, how are you feeling?’

  Gwenny’s lips twitched. She played with the idea of telling her mother of how weak she sometimes felt, and of how many pains she got in her joints, and how swimmy her head was sometimes, and of how many injections she had and what a large part of her life she managed to sleep away, and of how the R.M.O. stood guard over her sometimes ... but she said none of those things. Her mother didn’t want to hear all that.

  So Gwenny said what she knew her mother would want to hear: ‘Not too bad, Mummy. I expect I shall be home soon.’

  Her mother didn’t like that idea at all. ‘Gwenny, you can’t come home yet. Who would look after you?’

  ‘That’s a thought,’ Gwenny said soberly. ‘Oh, well not to worry. How’s Laurence?’

  Her mother looked sharply at her, wondering what had prompted that question. Gwenny seldom asked after Laurence, and today her mother was curiously put out over it.

  ‘He’s ... at home,’ she admitted unwillingly. Laurence had said he didn’t want Gwenny to know he was visiting the hospital. That meant, she supposed, that he was going to give all his time to that Tilda Sansom and not spare even five minutes to look in on his sister. ‘He sent his love, dear. And that reminds me—that tiresome old Mrs. Yeedon also sent a message to send you her love, which brings me to the main point of my visit. You go to that horrible little cottage far too much, Gwenny. Have you told the doctors here how much you visit that old woman?’

  Gwenny set her mouth tightly. Not for worlds was she going to tell her mother of that visit to the old woman’s cottage, when the R.M.O. had stood talking to Mrs. Yeedon, and had apparently got on well with her, nor was she going to disclose that Mrs. Yeedon liked Mark Bayfield either. But it bothered Gwenny that she should feel like this. She ought to be
able to say, frankly and openly, that Mark Bayfield knew about it, and then her mother would take the obvious step of remarking tartly that anyone like Mark Bayfield would just naturally approve of that horrid old woman, because Gwenny’s mother disliked Mrs. Yeedon almost as much as she disliked Mark Bayfield.

  Gwenny said, ‘I don’t know what they know about the friends I make, but I don’t suppose they want to know. They just want to cure me of this bug I’ve got.’

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ her mother said triumphantly. ‘It’s because of that that I wish them to know, because I really do feel that you caught your bug in one of those dirty places.’

  ‘They aren’t dirty,’ Gwenny said indignantly.

  ‘Your father feels the same,’ her mother went on. ‘There have been cases of fever in the village, but your father can’t arouse any interest among the local authorities because Church Terrace is belonging to St Matthew’s, and you know what Mr. Walker is like.’