No Time For Love (Bantam Series No. 40) (2 page)

Her mother had laughed.

“You belong to the sea,” she said. “That is why I called you Larina.”

“ ‘Girl of the Sea’,” Larina had exclaimed. “Perhaps I have an affinity with it, I am not sure. We have never been to the sea long enough for me to find out. Here I feel I belong to the mountains.”

“As long as it is not too boring for you, my dearest,” Mrs. Milton had murmured.

“I am never bored,” Larina had answered and it was the truth.

She put her hat on her head and fastening it securely with two long hat-pins she pushed back the screen and walked across the room to where Sir John was sitting at the desk.

He was writing on a piece of foolscap and she saw her name at the top of it.

“I have something to tell you,” he said, “which I am afraid you will find very distressing.”

“What is it?” Larina asked.

She felt as if her heart had stopped beating and that every nerve in her body was suddenly tense.

“You have not contracted the disease which killed your mother,” he said, “but you have in fact only three weeks to live!”

Going back to the little house in Eaton Terrace, Larina could not believe that she had actually heard Sir John say the words.

It seemed as if her mind had ceased to function and she told herself that what he had told her was impossible to believe as the truth.

As she journeyed part of the way in the horse-drawn omnibus, she found herself looking at the passengers and wondering what they would say if she told them that a sentence of death had just been passed upon her.

After Sir John had spoken she had stared at him with wide eyes, shocked to the point when her voice seemed strangled in her throat.

“I am sorry to have to tell you this,” Sir John said, “but I can assure you that I am absolutely certain of my facts. You have a heart complaint which is very rare, but it is in fact a disease I have been studying for many years.”

He cleared his throat and went on:

“Every Doctor who suspects it sends his patients to me for a final diagnosis, so I cannot suggest that you have a second opinion.”

“Is it
...
painful?” Larina managed to gasp.

“In most cases there is no pain whatsoever,” Sir John said reassuringly. “I will not burden you with the medical details, but what happens in fact is that your heart suddenly ceases to beat. It may happen when you are asleep, it may occur when you are walking, sitting, even dancing.”

“And
...
there is no
...
cure?” Larina asked in a shocked tone.

“None that is known at the moment to the medical profession,” Sir John replied. “What I can tell you, as an authority, is that it happens instantly, and when it is diagnosed the patient usually has exactly twenty-one days before the end comes.”

“Twenty-one days!” Larina echoed faintly.

As she walked through Sloane Square towards Eaton Terrace she felt that her footsteps echoed the number on the pavement. Twenty-one! Twenty-one! Twenty-one!

That meant, she told herself, that she would die on the 15th of April.

It was a time of year, she thought inconsequentially, she had always loved. The daffodils would be out, there would be blossoms on the trees, the chestnuts would be coming into bloom and the sunshine would be particularly welcome because one had missed it during the winter.

On the 16th of April she would no longer be here to enjoy it!

She took her key out of her hand-bag and opened the door of number 68 Eaton Terrace.

As she let herself into the narrow Hall, off which opened a small Dining-Room with a tiny Study behind it, she was conscious of the silence and the loneliness of the empty house.

If only her mother were in the Drawing-Room she could run to her to tell her what had happened!

Her mother would have put out her arms and held her close.

But there was no-one to help her now and taking off her hat, Larina walked slowly up the stairs.

Some detached part of her mind noted that the stair
-
carpet was very worn: it must have been given hard wear while they were away in Switzerland. Then almost sharply she told herself it was of no consequence.

In twenty-one days she would not be in the house to notice that the carpet was threadbare, that the curtains had faded in the Drawing-Room or the brass bedstead in her room had lost a knob.

Twenty-one days!

She went up another flight of stairs to her bed-room.

There were only two bed-rooms in the house, unless one counted a dark airless place in the basement which had been intended for a maid they could not afford.

Her mother had occupied the front room on the second floor and she had a small slip of a room behind it.

She went into it now and looked round her. All her possessions were here, all the small treasures she had accumulated since childhood.

There w
a
s even a Teddy Bear she had loved and taken to bed with her for many years, a doll which opened and shut its eyes, and in the book-case, beside the volumes she had acquired as she grew older, were the first books she had ever owned.

“Not much to show for a life-time!” Larina told herself.

Then as if the horror of what she had heard swept over her like a flood-tide, she moved to the window to stand looking out over the grey roofs and the back-yards of the houses behind them.

“What can I do? What can I do about it?” Larina asked herself.

Then almost as if the thought came like a life-line to a drowning man she remembered Elvin.

She wondered as she thought of him why he had not come into her thoughts from the very moment Sir John had pronounced the death sentence.

She supposed it must be because she had been shocked into a kind of numbness which had made it impossible for her to think of anything except the twenty-one days which were left to her.

Elvin would have understood exactly what she was feeling; Elvin in his inimitable manner would have made everything seem different.

They had talked of death the very first time they had met.

It had been a day when Mrs. Milton had been very ill and Larina had known by the expression on Dr. Heinrich’s face that he was worried.

“There is nothing you can do,” he said to Larina. “Go and sit in the garden, I will call you if she needs you.”

Larina had known if she was called it would not be a case of her mother needing her, but because Dr. Heinrich thought she was dying.

She had turned and gone blindly out into the garden of the Sanatorium.

For the first time she did not see the brilliance of the flowers or the beauty of the snow-capped mountains which had never failed to make her heart leap whenever she looked at them.

She moved out of sight of the buildings to a place among the pine-trees where there was a seat that had been specially put there for patients who could not walk far.

It was very quiet. There was only the sound of the cascade pouring down the side of the mountain into the valley below and the buzz of the bees as they sucked the nectar from the mountain-plants that grew among the rocks.

It was then, because she thought no-one could see her, that Larina had put her hands over her face and begun to cry.

She must have cried for a long time before she heard a movement beside her, and a man’s voice said gently:

“Are you crying for your mother?”

Larina with tears still running down her cheeks had turned to see who was there.

A man seated himself beside her and she saw that it was Elvin Farren, an American she had not spoken to before because he slept in a hut by himself in the gardens of the Sanatorium and never came to the Dining-Room for meals.

“Mama is not dead,” Larina said quickly as if in answer to a question he had not put into words, “but I know that Dr. Heinrich thinks she may be dying!”

She drew her handkerchief from her belt as she spoke and wiped the tears from her eyes almost fiercely. She was ashamed of having given way so completely.

“You must go on hoping that she will recover,” Elvin Farren said.

Larina did not speak for a moment, then she answered: “I am frightened, but then I suppose everyone is frightened of death.”

“Perhaps for other people,” Elvin Farren replied, “but not for one’s self.”

Larina looked at him and knew that he was very ill. He was extremely thin: there was something almost transparent about his skin and the tell-tale patches of bright colour on his cheek-bones were all too obvious.

“You are not afraid?” she asked.

He smiled at her and it seemed to transform his face. “No.”

“Why not?”

He looked away from her towards the panorama of mountains where the sun shining on the snows remaining after the winter was almost blinding.

After a moment he said:

“Do you want the true answer to your question, or the conventional one?”

“I want the true answer,” Larina replied. “I am afraid of death because it must be so lonely.”

She was thinking of herself as she added:

“Not only for those who die, but also for those who are left behind.”

“For those who die,” Elvin Farren said, “it is an adventure, a release of the mind, and that in itself is something exciting to look forward to!”

He glanced at her to see if she was following him. Then he went on:

“Have you never thought what an encumbrance one’s body is? If it were not hampering us, keeping our feet on the ground, so to speak, we could fly wherever we wished to go! To other parts of the earth, to the moon or, more especially, to the Fourth Dimension.”

“I think ... I understand what you are
...
saying to me,” Larina said hesitatingly.

Her grey eyes were wide in her oval face.

This was not the sort of conversation she had ever had with anyone before.

“And as for being alone while we are on earth,” Elvin Farren said, “why that is actually impossible!”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because you are a part of everything that is living,” he replied. “Look at these flowers.”

He pointed as he spoke to a little bunch of blue gentians on the rocks in front of them.

“They are alive,” he said, “as much alive as you and I are. They are living, and what is more, they feel even as we feel.”

“How do you know that?” Larina asked.

“I have a friend who has been working on the reactions of plant-life for some years,” he replied. “He believes, and I believe with him, that a plant has feelings because it contains, as we do
...
the cosmic force which we call life.”

“Explain
...
explain it to me,” Larina begged.

She was fascinated by what this stranger was telling her, and she turned towards him feeling in some inexplicable manner that she must get closer to him.

“The Buddhists never pick flowers,” Elvin began. “They believe by touching one and loving it they share its life and it becomes a part of themselves.”

He smiled as he said:

“In my country, the American Indians when they are in need of energy will go into a wood such as this. With their arms extended they will place their backs to a pine-tree and they replenish themselves with its power.”

“I can understand that,” Larina said, “and I am sure it is true. I have often thought when I have been walking alone in
the woods that the trees were pulsatingly alive and that there was a kind of vibration coming from them.”

“So when there is life all around you, how could you ever be alone?”

It had been easy to understand what he was saying to her when they were sitting in the pine-woods and looking at the flowers, Larina thought. But in the confines of her little bedroom in Eaton Terrace she felt that she needed help desperately.

If only she could talk to Elvin, she wished, as they had talked together so often after that first meeting.

Mrs. Milton’s health had improved and Dr. Heinrich said she was out of danger for the moment. Larina had gone to find Elvin on the balcony of his isolated chalet because she wanted to share her joy with someone.

He invited her to sit down and she realised that from his balcony there was an even more marvellous view of the valley beneath them and the mountains in the distance.

While at first she had been afraid of imposing herself on him, she had soon learnt that he enjoyed seeing her, and whenever she was not with her mother she found her way to his balcony and they would sit talking in the crisp clear air.

Nearly always they spoke of the mystical things that Elvin believed existed in other dimensions.

“This is a material world,” he said. “It is merely a shadow of the next which is non-material and very much more advanced mentally and spiritually.”

“But suppose someone like myself is not clever enough to understand it?” Larina asked.

“Then you will have to stay here,” he replied, “and go on learning and developing until you can.”

He had so much to tell her that Larina had begun to count the hours to when she could be with him.

Yet sometimes when he was too ill to walk even as far as his balcony, she would have to wait impatiently until he was better and she could see him again.

She had known without his having to tell her that he had not long to live.

“I am almost looking forward to dying,” he
sa
id. “There is so much I want to know, so much I want to find out.”

Larina gave a little cry of protest.

“Do not talk like that,” she begged.

“Why not?” he enquired.

“Because if you go away I shall have no-one to explain such things to me; and when I come to die I shall be afraid
...
very afraid!”

“I have told you there is no reason.”

“That is because you are so sure, so certain of what you will find after you are dead,” Larina said. “I am not sure, I only want to believe what you tell me, and while I do believe it while I am with you, when you are not there I lose faith.”

He had smiled at her as if she were a child.

“When the time comes for you to die,” he said, “which will not be for many, many years, call me and I will come to you.”

Larina had looked at him wide-eyed.

“You mean
...
?” she began.

“Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, if you want me, if you call for me, I will hear you.”

He put his hand over hers.

“We will make a pact, Larina. When I am dying I will call for you, and when you die, you will call for me.”

“There is no reason why I should not die before you,” Larina replied. “I might fall down a mountain or have a train accident.”

“And if that happens,” Elvin said gravely, “send for me and I will come to you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise!” he answered. “Just as you must come to me.” His fingers tightened for a moment on hers.

“I know of no-one I would rather be with when my spirit takes wings.”

There was something in the way he said the words which told Larina it was in fact not only the highest compliment he could pay her, but also, in his own way, an expression of love.

She was very inexperienced where men were concerned, having known so few in her life; but she was woman enough to realise that Elvin’s thin face lit up when she appeared and there was a look in his eyes that was unmistakable.

If he had not been so emaciated with the disease which often made him start coughing so convulsively that each spasm left him breathless and exhausted, he would, Larina thought, have been very handsome.

But the disease was eating his life away and she knew even though he was only twenty-five years of age, there was no hope of his survival.

Sometimes when she thought about Elvin in the darkness of the night she wondered whether, if they had met before he fell ill, they would have fallen in love with each other.

She loved him as he was, but as if he were a brother.

She wanted to be with him, she loved talking to him; but because of the way he was suffering she could not think of him as an attractive man, a man to whom she could give her heart.

Nevertheless when one day Elvin told her he was going back to America, she had felt an almost incalculable sense of loss.

“But why? Why?” she asked.

“I want to see my mother,” he said. “She is ill, and as I am the youngest member of the family I perhaps mean more to her than my brothers.”

“How many brothers have you?” Larina asked.

“Three,” he replied. “They are all very clever, very busy with their careers and their families. We have also a sister who is married. I am my mother’s baby, and I know at this moment she needs me and therefore I must go to her.”

“Will the journey not be too much for you?” Larina asked.

“Does it matter if it is?” he answered again with one of his beguiling smiles.

“It matters to me!” Larina cried. “Oh, Elvin, I shall miss you so much! It will be horrible here without you!”

She paused and then added:

“I could bear it before you came, although sometimes I was the only healthy person in the whole place. But now that I have been with you I cannot imagine how I will fill the days without seeing you, without talking to you. It will be unutterably lonely.”

“I have told you that you are never alone,” Elvin replied. “When you sit in the garden or on the seat in the pine-woods where we first met, imagine I am there, because in fact I shall be. I shall be thinking of you, and all of me that matters will come to you from America or whatever part of this world or the next I may be in at that particular moment.”

“Do you really believe you can get in touch with people by thought?” Larina asked.

“I am completely and utterly convinced of it,” Elvin replied. “Thought is stronger than anything else. Thought moves quicker and far more efficiently than anything man can devise, and thought can bring us anything we want—if we want it enough.”

“I will think of you,” Larina promised.

“Believe that I am near you,” Elvin told her, “and I will be!”

Nevertheless once he had gone and the chalet where they had sat together was empty, it was not the same.

Obediently Larina had sat in the garden thinking of him, or had walked, sometimes twice a day, to the seat near the pine-trees.