No Love Lost

Two Stories of Suspense

The Patient at Peacocks Hall

Part One

Part Two

Safer than Love

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

A Note on the Author

‘I never did think her
eyes
were a patch on yours, Miss Ann. Take a good look. You can see them. They're as plain as anything. Now let me get you a hand mirror.'

Rhoda planted the folded newspaper with the photograph in it squarely in front of me, supporting it against my after-lunch coffee cup. She was forthright and innocently excited in every one of her two hundred pounds, and she tore open an old wound as surely as if, with her plump, well-meaning fingers, she had found the cicatrix and ripped it from my flesh.

It was so unexpected. I had had such a busy morning and was so full of other people's troubles that my own life was utterly forgotten. She took me completely off guard and got right through at a stroke, without my being aware.

‘No, thank you,' I said politely, hoping I had not turned white from the sudden frightening pain, for I knew her so well that my armour slips into place by reflex action, and I knew she would be watching me anxiously to see if my recovery was complete. (Rhoda is the kind of woman who digs up the mint outside her kitchen door two days after she has planted it, to find out if it has started to grow.) ‘I've seen my eyes this morning, bloodshot again. What do you think it is? Alcohol?'

She was nearly sidetracked. The buttons on her white overall strained as she took a breath and peered at me.

‘Nonsense, they're lovely, just like your poor mother's, only a different blue and not so round.'

‘How true,' I agreed. ‘Like her, I've got two of them.'

‘Now you're trying to be funny like your father. I never laughed when he wanted me to and I shan't at you. You have got nice eyes and you're getting quite good-looking altogether now you've finished working yourself to death at the hospital and settled down as half a country doctor. You've lost that puggy look you had. I was mentioning it to Mr Dawson when he came with the veg.'

‘That was interesting for him,' I murmured, remembering
that gaunt, asthmatic greengrocer. ‘I'm not half a doctor, by the way. I've been qualified for some years.'

‘Four and a half,' she said. ‘But you're an assistant to Dr Ludlow, poor old gentleman, aren't you? You don't do it all yourself.' Her kind unlovely face wore its most characteristic expression, part suspicion, part belligerence, and nearly all affection. ‘Aren't you going to read the bit about
her
? Or perhaps you don't want to?'

I ignored the emphasis. Rhoda did not mean it, or at least not much. She was sixteen when she came to work for my mother three weeks after I was born, and now that there is only myself of the family left, and I have my own little cottage at the far end of Dr Ludlow's estate, she has continued to work for me. She does it just as faithfully and a good deal more chattily than ever she did in that busy doctor's home in Southersham.

My father, who delighted in her and called her ‘Rhododendron'. used to say that she was the only woman in the world who knew everything about him and understood absolutely nothing, but I think he did her less than justice. She understands, a little, not quite enough.

It was very pleasant in my room – or it had been before she brought the newspaper. The cottage has only one downstairs room other than the kitchen and it is a big one. It is furnished with the nicest bits from home and is long and low, with french windows giving on to a small mossy yard, and it looks on to the broad tree-islanded meadow which marks the end of the built-up area on this side of the little town of Mapleford.

I love it, and I was happy and peaceful and content before she spoke. Now, since she was watching me, I had to read the paragraph about Francia Forde.

I did not linger over the photograph. Let me be honest and say at once that I have never really studied any of the reproductions of that lovely Botticelli face with its halo of pale hair. I never saw any of the four films she starred in and I never let myself envisage her as a real woman, lest I should fall into that most self-punishing sin of all and hate her till I burned myself to ash. I had no idea if she was tall or short, shrill or
husky, witty or a fool. As far as I was concerned, Francia Forde had never existed, nor John Linnett either.

Anyhow, that was my story and I was sticking to it, pretty well. I had my own way to make and I was enjoying it. At twenty-eight I was the chief assistant to an old man who had a practice twice too big for him. My experience was growing every hour. I liked my patients and their troubles were mine. I could still rejoice when they were born and feel a genuine pang when, despite my best efforts, they died. Love was now just another natural malady suffered or enjoyed by other people. I had experienced it, I knew about it, it was over.

At the moment my real passion was whooping-cough. The paragraph could hardly, therefore, be expected to hold much interest for me, and I was surprised to find how difficult it was to read. I have no intention of reproducing it. I couldn't if I tried. The words danced before me and their sense didn't seem worth discovering. But it was something about the ‘beautiful Francia Forde whom everyone had loved so much in
Shadow Lady
' having taken leave of the studios for a while to become the ‘Moonlight Girl' in an enormous press advertising campaign which Moonlight Soap and Beauty Products Ltd were about to launch on a breathless world – and there was a mention of television.

To me it simply meant that I was going to be reminded of her in every magazine or newspaper I opened, and that even the air would not be free of her. Movies I could and did avoid, but now she was going to be everywhere.

Rhoda had stamped off with the plates, so I did not have to watch my face. I put the folded paper down and sat looking across the table at the rock flowers and the meadows beyond.

The past is a terrifying thing. One finds one cheats so. John was four years older than I. We were the children of friends. Our fathers were doctors in the same town, and from our babyhood they had set their hearts first on our taking up medicine and then on our marrying. At that moment I could have sworn that it had all been a silly mistake of the old people's and that we never could have loved each other, and yet in the next instant I was remembering the night I first noticed John had
grown so breathtakingly good-looking. It was the night before he was off to war as a fully fledged major in the RAMC and I was still in my first year at hospital. We had walked in the Linnetts' walled garden, and the ilex trees had whispered above us and the sweet earth had breathed on us with a new tenderness.

Without wanting to in the least, as I sat there with Francia Forde's smile flashing up at me from the page, I remembered the feel of his fingers on my shoulder and the hard, unexpectedly importunate touch of his mouth on mine. I could understand still and even recapture all the crazy magic of that moment when we realized that the one really important thing in all the world was that we were ourselves and no one else, and that together we were complete and invincible.

All that was quite vivid. I could remember the plans we made and how none of them seemed at all grandiose or impossible. Even the children's clinic, which was to grow into a hospital and a research station, was more real to me than – say – the puzzled misery of the last time he came home on leave just after V.E. Day.

By that time terrible things had happened. Old Dr and Mrs Linnett were both gone. They had stepped into a crowded train after a flying visit to London, only to be taken out in the screaming darkness in the midst of a raid two stations down the line. They were both dead, killed by machine-gun bullets, the surprised expression still on their kind old faces. My own father, too, was fuming in a bed in his own hospital as the cruelty of his last illness slowly consumed him.

I don't think John and I quarrelled on that last leave. We knew each other too well. We were still friends, still in love. We made plans for our wedding, which was to take place as soon as I had finished at St James's. But there was a change in him. He had become nervy and preoccupied, as if the strain of war had begun to tell. At least, I think I put it down to the war. Women were just beginning to suspect that the experience might have had some sort of strange effect upon their menfolk about that time.

I know his looks had become remarkable. He had always
been considered handsome in Southersham, but now there was something outstanding about him. He had his father's dark red hair and wide-shouldered height, his good head and wide smile, and he had Mrs Linnett's short straight nose, thick creamy skin, and the narrow dancing eyes that were more attractive in a man even than in her. There was no doubt about it. Old friends, let alone strangers, looked hard at him twice and, if they happened to be young and female, were inclined to blush for no good reason at all. To do him justice – and it was terribly hard for me to do him justice at that distance – he had not seemed to be aware of any change.

I could remember all that, but later, that long lonely period in the winter of '45 when I had no letters, the time which semed to go on for years – as I sat thinking that afternoon it had no reality for me. I had forgotten it. The psycho people have a theory that one only remembers the things one desires to, secretly. I cannot believe that, for every line of the Southersham
Observer's
bombshell that spring was as clear to me as if I had had the fuzzy small-town print before me, and if there was ever anything I should want to forget it must have been that. The owner and editor of that paper was my father's only local enemy. Daddy always said he had a ‘corseted soul'. and certainly the way he presented that extract from the film company's publicity sheet was typical of him. He conveyed he did not approve of it but he got every word of it in.

Miss Phillimore sent the paper to me in London and I got it on a day that was pure poetry, green and gold, and blue skies. No one but she could have written, This may surprise you dear,' in that spidery 1890 hand. The editor had quoted a few paragraphs written in the out-of-this-world style some of those writers achieve. I could recite them still, though I had only read them once.

FAIRYLIKE FRANCIA FORDE
CAPTURES GLAMOUR HERO FROM ARMY

Medicine Relinquishes Its Handsomest Man. Runaway Wedding Ere Film Goes on Floor. Francia Forde, Bullion's new and scintillating starlet, who is to portray the daughter (Yetta) in the new Dolores
Duse epic
Chains
, has married John Linnett, Director Waldo's latest discovery. Linnett, who has been granted indefinite leave from the army to play opposite his bride, will take the part of Yetta's tempestuous lover.

The Southersham
Observer
finished the piece with a reference to ‘an engagement notice printed in these columns not long ago', and a snappy hark-back to the tragedy of Dr and Mrs Linnett's death in the raid.

I remembered that all right. Although I was heart-free and cured and wedded to whooping-cough, I remembered every paralysing word of it. Incredibly enough, that was all there was to remember. That was all I ever heard. I had no letter, no message, not even gossip through friends. It was as though John had died. He had turned his back on his home, his ideals, and everything he had ever lived for. It was so unlike him that for months I could not believe it.