Nurse for the Doctor

CHAPTER I

The room
was very quiet after Mrs. Duveen had taken her departure. Josie went round tidying, readjusting the green sun blinds so that the afternoon sun was prevented from falling across the bed and disturbing the patient. He appeared to be sleeping, or at any rate he was in a slumber that could have been largely due to exhaustion, judging by the weary lines in his face.

Mrs. Duveen had a habit of chattering about anything and everything just as it occurred to her, whether it was important or otherwise, and this afternoon she had stayed rather a long time. She had sat beside the bed in her
chic
suit of heavy oatmeal-colored silk that breathed exclusiveness in every line, and a little hat with the wisp of veiling—all Mrs. Duveen’s hats had a wisp of veiling through which her forget-me-not eyes, with the turquoise eye shadow on the restless eyelids, peered in a surprised fashion at the world about her—and held her son’s hand tightly with her tiny, beringed fingers.

Her perfume lingered in the room—a delicate, subtle perfume that suited Mrs. Duveen, and made Josie think of an extremely well-tended garden with a shady patch where lilies-of-the-valley flourished at the appropriate season. It rather overlaid the perfume of the roses that she had brought with her for the invalid, and which Josie had arranged beside the bed.

Stealing across to them now Josie made certain that they had enough water, and that they were displayed to the best advantage. They were creamily pink—like Mrs. Duveen’s complexion—and quite obviously hothouse; although at that season of the year roses were rioting in every cottage garden in the country, and Mrs. Duveen had a garden that would have accommodated several cottages.

“It’s not like you to fuss, Nurse,” a voice remarked quietly from the bed. “Or do you want something to do with your hands?”

Instantly Josie started and looked down at her patient, the color rising in a guilty tide to her clear skin, her brown eyes perturbed.

“Did I disturb you?” she asked. “Oh, Dr. Duveen, I’m terribly sorry if I did ...”

“No, of course you didn’t,” with a lazy, amused look in the darkly blue eyes that had set the heart of every nurse beating at rather more than the normal rate of speed when approaching the side of the bed Dr. Duveen had occupied since his admission to Chessington House six weeks ago. A ray of sunlight found its way determinedly between the green sun blinds and played over his head, and the strange burnished patch above his right eyebrow—strange because the rest of his hair had the darkness of a blackbird’s plumage—claimed Josie’s attention. She blinked at the brightness of that one rebellious wave. “Come and sit down,” he requested, indicating the chair drawn up close to the bed. “I’m accustomed to finding you sitting very restfully when I open my eyes, like a small but faithful replica of the original Patience on a Monument. Not flitting about like a butterfly.”

“Then I did disturb you.” Josie clasped her hands in her lap as she obeyed his request.

His eyes continued to watch her, and they were languid but not perverse.

“I’ve already told you you didn’t. As a matter of fact, I’m long past the stage where anyone should be detailed to watch me.

“I was merely tidying your room,” she explained not an entirely truthful explanation, for a pet patient, one of the nursing home’s own consultants, over whom Matron could not fuss enough, was not to be left unguarded, or his needs neglected, for even a quarter of an hour at a stretch, in spite of his bedside bell. At least those were Matron’s orders.

“After my mother’s invasion?” He glanced at the roses, and his mouth curved a little oddly. ‘They’re a bit artificial looking, aren’t they? But it would never occur to my mother to ask the gardener to cut her a nice big bunch of border flowers, which, after all, would brighten up this room just as well, don’t you think? Probably much better!”

“Your mother is a little bit exotic, like the roses.” Josie couldn’t resist making the observation.

“You think so?” He glanced at her carelessly. No one could accuse her of being exotic, although she was as neat as a new pin, and he was prepared to swear that not one fair, feathery curl on her young forehead was ever seriously out of place while she was wearing her primly-starched cap. She had a small, serene oval face that really did make him think of Patience on a Monument sometimes, because the eyes were so widely spaced, and their expression was nearly always tranquil so that they resembled the clear waters of a trout stream; a trout stream fringed with long and wavering grasses—her gilt-tipped eyelashes, sweeping up and down with every demure movement of her white eyelids. Her mouth was gentle, and faintly flower-like, and her little chin was smooth and rounded and indicative of a gentle sort of obstinacy—at times.

“My mother likes you,” he told her suddenly. “She said so this afternoon. In fact, she’s taken quite a fancy to you, Nurse Winter.”

“Oh!” Nurse Winter exclaimed, and her surprise was genuine. It had never occurred to her that Mrs. Duveen would even notice a second-year nurse who looked younger than her years.

“I’ve met and had to work with a variety of nurses in my time,” Michael Duveen confessed, looking round for his cigarette case that seemed to have vanished from the locker beside his bed. “Ah, there it is, Nurse!” he exclaimed, as she looked round also and their eyes fastened simultaneously on the fine platinum case, with a monogram engraved on its upper side, that was lying on a tray waiting to be carried out. “My mama again. She borrows a thing, and then just dumps it in the handiest spot.”

Josie watched as Dr. Duveen lighted the cigarette, his long, beautifully-shaped fingers making a somewhat slow job of it, although he had got to the stage when he declined to have his cigarette lighted for him any longer. When at last he lay back, the cigarette between his lips, and his dark head nestling amongst the pillows, Josie felt as if something inside her grew taut, and then trembled a little; trembled because, in addition to those eyes that reminded her of the sea on a stormy day, his mouth was the handsomest masculine mouth she had ever seen—or, she felt certain, was ever likely to see! And when he lay back like that, and the whiteness of the pillows closed round the crisp ends of his hair, and he sighed a little as if with exhaustion, it was almost too much for a young woman of twenty-two to take unmoved.

She wanted to rush to him and relight the cigarette because it wasn’t drawing properly, and plump up those pillows because they might not be as comfortable as she could make them. She wanted to smooth the sheet beneath his hand although it didn’t want smoothing, gently lift that rebellious wave off his forehead, and then touch the thin, hollow cheek that, six weeks ago, had been coated with bronze after a holiday in the south of France; a holiday that had ended disastrously for him.

But because he was just a part of her job, and she mustn’t fuss—certainly under no circumstances could she touch his cheek, unless it was by accident when she was helping him mop up shaving cream!—she sat very still, and waited until he got back to the subject he had been about to discuss with her.

“Where was I? Oh, discussing the various types of nurses I’ve known...” He looked at her obliquely under his thick black eyelashes. “But only one like you, Nurse Winter! Perhaps you don’t realize it, but you really are unique! You look as if a puff of wind would blow you away, and yet you can lift a six-foot slab of helplessness like myself with consummate ease, and apparently not even feel the strain! You don’t say with a bright, determined smile on your face, ‘You’re much better this morning’—or ‘this evening’, as the case might be—when you take my temperature, and I know very well it’s shot up a degree for no apparent reason! You simply look unshakably calm, although distinctly human at the same time, and when you do smile—and actually it’s rather rare—it’s the sort of smile a drowning man might cling on to, if I’m not getting my metaphors or similes too mixed up.” Humor glinted in his eyes as they gazed up at her. “Also, painfully young though you are, you don’t fidget with scissors, your cuffs, the bib of your apron, or your feet. If there’s one thing I detest in my nurse (or any woman, if it comes to that) it’s a tendency to fidget.”

Josie looked at him with her brown eyes rather wide, but otherwise quite unrevealing.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, and wanted to add, “for this unexpected tribute.”

He grinned, his white teeth flashing attractively. “Well, now perhaps I’d better get down to what I want to say. Old Arbuthnot, as you know, is turning me out of here in about a week, but he predicts a long spell of convalescence ahead of me. Of course it’s due to him that I shall never have much more than a limp when getting around—and even that he anticipates will grow less in time—but in the meantime I’ve got to be good and go on thinking of myself as an invalid.” He grinned. “I simply loathe being an invalid—I’m not the patient type, and I wasn’t born to hang around and do nothing. Or, rather sit about and let people fuss over me.”

Suddenly he closed his eyes and turned his face away from her. The black lashes lay like black half circles on his colorless cheeks, while the hollows below his cheek bones showed up painfully, as if he were gritting his teeth. She wondered whether he was recalling all that had gone before his accident: that appalling crash at eighty miles an hour on a road leading into London, which should have killed him outright, and the woman whom everyone said was the cause of it; the woman with whom he had holidayed in France, to whom he was reported to be engaged—or just about to become engaged—but who had never once put in an appearance while he had lain in the nursing home.

He opened his eyes, jerked round his head, and looked full at Josie. For a second or so she felt as if the dark blueness of his eyes was the intense dark blueness of a strip of velvet, and that it was wrapping her about. She could feel the glowing color of it, the warmth, the subtle appeal of it as it pleaded with her.

“Look here, Nurse Winter, Arbuthnot says I’ve got to have a nurse to keep an eye on me for the next few weeks, and I absolutely refuse to have one of your regimented, stern-sense-of-duty types who won’t, allow me to call my soul my own! I refuse to be bullied, sent to bed at a certain hour, watched-over, cosseted and cajoled—as an occasional alternative to the bullying—by someone who will derive an unwholesome satisfaction from having me at her mercy, in spite of the angelic qualities she may otherwise possess. For all nurses are angels up to a point—they have so much to put up with, and they do it gladly and wonderfully. But when you have to live with such a paragon day after day...” He looked at her almost whimsically. “My mother and I are both agreed that we’ve got to make a few stipulations, and one of the stipulations we’d like to make is that if I’ve got to have a nurse I have you.”

“Me?” Josie was aware that the single word was ungrammatical, but it simply shot out before she could prevent it. Her eyes didn’t merely widen this time, they grew positively enormous with—at first—complete amazement, and then the dawning realization of what he had inferred. He didn’t want a paragon to live with him and his mother for the next few weeks, but he did want someone who would sink into the background, and be more or less overlooked, save when her services were actually required.

Someone young, and rather colorless, and unassertive—but with a sufficient knowledge of nursing to be of use. Someone whom Matron would vouch for, even if she were as surprised as Josie was herself.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, a quizzical note in his voice with the faint Irish inflection. “Do you feel that I’ve attacked your status as a nurse?—all the many excellent reasons why you will one day wear a Sister’s belt? But it will have to be a very slim belt,” he continued with his eye on the ridiculously slender waist. “Almost I feel tempted to suggest that there isn’t such a thing as a Sister’s belt slim enough to encircle that microscopic waist.”

He was laughing at her, she knew—quite kindly, but in the hopes of overcoming any faint antagonism she might feel bemuse of his inference that she
was
quite unlike the rest of her undeniably competent sisterhood. She was the straw a drowning man clutched at, not because of her smile but because of that ability of hers, which he suspected, of becoming part of the furniture when it was desirable she should do so, and whom his lovely vivacious mother could bear to have around her because she would never get in the way. Because she was a negative personality, with negative coloring, she would never intrude.