Nurse for the Doctor (2 page)

In fact, she was the perfect answer to Dr. Arbuthnot’s insistence that a nurse, for a few weeks, was absolutely essential.

When Josie left the room she did so with the knowledge that the job of looking after Dr. Michael Duveen in his own home for a few weeks—and possibly also during a short trip abroad to complete his convalescence—would make her an object of bitter envy amongst half the members of the staff at Chessington House. Half the girls she knew so well, who looked upon Dr. Duveen as a kind of answer to every maiden’s prayer—although not many maidens received an answer quite like him—would try to work out amongst themselves what it was
she
possessed, and they apparently didn’t, that had caused her to be selected for such a plum of an interlude.

But instead of feeling delighted Josie felt like a child who had been promised a birthday treat and had it cancelled at the last moment. She had enjoyed looking after Dr. Duveen while she had had no real idea of his opinion of her; but now that she knew what that opinion was she wondered whether even he supposed she could possibly feel flattered.

There was nothing quite so unflattering as being more or less told how easily one could be overlooked.

CHAPTER II

But it was
universally accepted, when the news broke, that she had cause for rejoicing. She would be away from clockwork routine, from long hours devoted to strenuous duty, and from any form of discipline save that imposed upon her by her own conscience.

A busy London nursing home, run for the well-to-do who liked thick carpets that were brutally unkind to tired feet and ankles, was the sort of place where one could never get away from discipline. Or if one thought to escape it for a short while there was always the crisp tongue of the duty-sister to bring one back to realities.

But in Michael Duveen’s home there would be only Mrs. Duveen, and Dr. Duveen himself. Rumour had it that it was the sort of home a lot of people dreamed about but few could have maintained, even had some fortunate chance dropped it into their lap. But Mrs. Duveen was one of the three celebrated O’Hara sisters whose father had left them an equal-sized fortune apiece, and only an irresistible drawing towards medicine had caused Michael to devote himself to it. He need never have done anything at all to support himself, or even to provide himself with the trimmings of life. Only a faint touch of arrogance in his manner at times—or was it a kind of natural hauteur?—occasionally brought people up with a jerk to the realization that he was not exactly one of them.

As Rachel Richardson, Josie’s closest friend at Chessington House, had observed when he had been brought in shortly after his accident: “Looks, charm, money—everything. And he has to go and get himself smashed up like this. And all because of a woman.”

“How do you know it was a woman?” Josie had asked, with the curiosity they had all betrayed at the time.

Rachel had lifted her shoulders, and looked as if she was voicing something particularly profound.

“When a man drives a car at eighty miles an hour on a road he knows to be dangerous, after a holiday that should have increased his mental alertness, then something is wrong—and it could only be a woman. At least, it could with a man like Dr. Duveen, who, if it was a matter of life or death, would have had the sense not to drive dangerously. He might have driven fast, but not
dangerously.
Only a love affair that had taken the wrong turning could cause him to do that.”

Josie had wondered whether this apparent shrewdness was based on gossip or knowledge that Rachel didn’t wish to disclose, because, after all, Dr. Duveen was a Chessington House consultant. She had decided that possibly it was a little of both.

On the morning that they left the nursing home, as Josie saw the most interesting patient the slightly grim old-fashioned walls had sheltered for some time standing leaning on a stick in the wide hall, saying goodbye to Matron, she thought that if there was anything at all in Rachel’s frustrated love affair story it was extremely hard on Michael Duveen.

He was wearing a beautifully-cut lounge suit, but it fitted him loosely, and he looked taller than she remembered when he came visiting patients. He also looked gaunt, and haggard, and in spite of his manly good looks, a little pathetic. There was nothing at all left of his Riviera tan, and his eyes looked almost painfully blue in the extreme colorlessness of his face.

His mother was insisting that he hold on to her arm, but Josie felt certain he leant on her scarcely at all. She hesitated to offer her own arm because this was a moment Mrs. Duveen had looked forward to for weeks, and not one to be shared with an outsider. There was no doubt about it, the mother’s face was very fond as she looked up at her only son—and, indeed, her only child and realized that he had been given back to her, when he might so easily not have returned at all.

“Make sure that the chauffeur has the car door open, Nurse,” Matron said to her briskly, just before they gravitated to the top of the nursing home steps. “And see that there are plenty of rugs and hot water bottles. It’s warm for a September day, but Dr. Duveen will probably find it cold driving.”

But the chauffeur already had the door of the magnificent cream-colored car wide open, and he was looking eagerly—like a dog that has been longing for a sight of its master—up at the tall figure on the top of the steps. His training kept him standing like a statue beside the door, and it was Josie who tucked the rugs round the patient when he was lying back exhaustedly against the superbly sprung seat.

“Please sit in front, Nurse Winter,” Mrs. Duveen requested, “and I’ll keep my son company here in the back of the car.”

She took his hand and held it, as if he was a child, and Josie understood how she was feeling; but she also understood that the process of keeping her relegated to the background had begun. Unless she discovered a keener power of asserting herself than she had ever suspected, she might just as well have been left behind at Chessington House where a little group of nurses remained standing on the steps and watching their departure until there was no longer anything to see.

It was, as Matron had remarked, a warm September day—a beautifully warm and mellow day of departing summer. Josie felt the soft air coming in at the windows, and as she sat back and let it fan her cheeks her pulses began to stir a little in a pleasurable kind of way. She was a country girl, brought up in a tiny Yorkshire village, and she had never really taken kindly to London, although nursing was the only career she would ever have chosen for herself. Sometimes she wished that her parents still lived in that tiny village tucked away on the edge of the moors—fold after fold of glowing purple in the autumn—instead of moving in closer to London, where she could see them sometimes at week-ends.

The big cream car ate up the miles swiftly, and yet so smoothly that there was absolutely no sensation of discomfort, or even of noticeable movement. The suburbs were reached and left behind before Josie properly realized it.

Then the green fields came at them, and the leafy lanes where the berries were already turning to scarlet and the blackberries were swelling and taking on a pansy-purple shade. The Duveen home was deep in the heart of Hertfordshire, and to get to it they ran through peaceful villages where the inn signs winked in the sunshine, and the village greens were like a display of emerald velvet. Ducks quacked on village ponds, and mellow roofs stood out against the pale September sky. Woods crowded down to the edge of the narrow byways, where they were swallowed up by a rich and fertile wilderness that was already splashed with the colors of autumn.

Josie could hear her patient and his mother talking quietly in the back of the car, and once Mrs. Duveen suggested that they should stop for lunch at an hotel and give him a chance to rest, but her son rejected this suggestion.

“I’ve rested more than I ever expected to rest in the whole of my lifetime during the past six weeks,” he said, “and I’m feeling perfectly fresh. Let’s wait for lunch until we get to King’s Folly, and not disappoint Mrs. Benedict. Unless she’s altered greatly since I saw her last she’s prepared something special for today.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, darling, I know she has,” his mother admitted. “One of her special cheese
soufflés
,
and a duck that
should
melt in the mouth. And for dinner tonight there’s some salmon that certainly wasn’t caught in a local river.”

“Good old Benedict!” Michael remarked complacently, and the complacence told Josie that it was no more than he expected that a member of his household should endeavour to excel herself as a means of celebrating his return home. He was accustomed to people exerting themselves in order to please him, and such a thing as his return home after an accident could provide no more legitimate excuse.

He asked after various other people who apparently formed part of his daily background when he was in the country, and was assured that they were all eagerly awaiting his return. All the inmates of King’s Folly, and others who lived near it, had been looking forward to today almost as keenly as Mrs. Duveen herself had done.

“Of course I can’t tell you how
terribly much
I’ve been longing for today,” the lovely, tiny Irishwoman who looked too fragile to have borne a son—particularly one who was now six feet—confided in a rather pathetic voice, and Michael patted her hand and looked down at her affectionately.

But when Josie ventured to turn her head and look back at him he was lying with his black head resting against the pale beige upholstery, looking very white and obviously at the end of his tether.

“Bed, I think,” Josie said firmly, as they turned in between a pair of wrought-iron gates, and swept up a beautifully tended drive, “as soon as we’ve got you out of the car. You look as if you’ve had quite enough, Dr. Duveen.”

“What!” His blue eyes tried to mock her, although he was too languid to move his head. “And disappoint poor Benedict! ... Haven’t you heard us discussing the duck she’s prepared? And she’s bound to want to serve it in state in the dining room, with the portraits of my ancestors looking down on us.”

“Never mind about your ancestors,” Josie heard herself reply, in an amazingly firm voice. “They can wait to welcome you back, but your bed must not be allowed to wait.”

“But, surely this is all rather ridiculous and unnecessary?” Mrs. Duveen protested, when she had scrambled out on to the drive with the assistance of the chauffeur, whose name was Fordyce, and Josie was leading her son away into the house. “A glass of sherry in the library, where there’s bound to be a fire ... And perhaps a little rest before lunch is served. But I really don’t think Michael needs to be put to bed at once...”

Josie ignored the rising note in her voice, and was glad when the housekeeper made her appearance in a black dress, with a bunch of keys actually jingling at her waist, and promptly took hold of her master’s other arm and helped him towards the magnificent carved staircase. They took the stairs very, very slowly. Fortunately the treads were very shallow, and the staircase bent like an uncurling fan as they made their way upwards, so that the ascent was not as exhausting as it might otherwise have been for the invalid. He said nothing, neither protesting nor approving the decision to whisk him straight away upstairs, until his room was reached, and he stood leaning very heavily on Josie while his eyes—glowing suddenly as if a vivid blue flame had come to life behind them—went roving in all directions.

It was a pleasant and, Josie thought, welcoming room that he had chosen for himself a long time ago. There was a huge four-poster bed with brocade curtains, standing in the middle of a sea of burgundy-colored carpet that looked rich and warm and lush, and the walls were panelled with the kind of wood one came upon only in unspoilt gems of houses such as this.

“It’s good to be back!” the man said simply, and then he looked down at Josie and smiled at her twistedly. “And it’ll be good to be between those sheets,” he admitted. “You know your stuff, Nurse Winter.”

Between them she and the housekeeper got him into bed, and although he protested that he was very well able to manage himself, his protests were ignored by both of them. The housekeeper fussed over him and called him “Master Michael”, as if he were a schoolboy sent home from the sanatorium at school after developing something catching. He called her Bennie and told her that unless he had a double helping of the cheese
soufflé
he wouldn’t forgive her this high-handedness. She promised him a tray that would delight his heart, and over his recumbent body eyed the slender uniformed figure of the unusually young-looking nurse with unconcealed approval. She hadn’t expected anyone so young, or anyone who already gave the impression that she would be anything but difficult to work with, and she was greatly relieved.

But outside the door she confessed: “He gave me quite a turn when I saw him, but his color came back once we got him into bed. I’ll see about his lunch, and perhaps a glass of sherry as well.” She hesitated. “Mrs. Duveen will be disappointed because she was looking forward to a kind of celebration lunch, but you’ll have to be firm with her, Nurse. She’s not really used to sickness.”

“No, I’d already gathered that,” Josie admitted.

“After all, you’re the nurse—he’s in your charge. She’ll try and persuade him to do too much at first, and you’ll have to prevent it.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Josie answered, but as she went downstairs to confront Mrs. Duveen in the library she wasn’t quite as confident as she sounded.

Mrs. Duveen had poured herself a drink and was lying back in a deep leather chair by the fireplace. The fireplace was huge and baronial and, logs blazed away cheerfully on the stone hearth. Mrs. Duveen absurdly small but dainty feet in hand-made snake-skin shoes with slightly perilous heels were extended towards the warmth, and the powder-blue suit she was wearing made her eyes look powder-blue also, while her silvery-pale, exquisitely coiffured hair had been treated to a light blue rinse that emphasized the prevailing color scheme.

“Sit down, Nurse,” she said, in rather a thin, petulant voice, “and help yourself to a drink if you’d like one.” She obviously made an effort to appear pleasant and forget the annoyance she was feeling. “Is Michael comfortable?”

“Quite comfortable, Mrs. Duveen. After a rest this afternoon he’ll probably be quite bright this evening.”

“Then he’ll be able to come downstairs to dinner?”

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

The wealthy Irish widow crushed out the end of the cigarette she was smoking in an ash tray at her elbow, and then selected another from an expensive shagreen case. She didn’t offer the case to Josie.

“How soon do you think he’ll start getting back to normal?”

“You mean how soon will he be fit?”

“Fit enough to travel—to get away from here.” She pretended she didn’t hear the sound of the luncheon gong that was booming through the house, and looked as if her main desire then was to settle down and extract information. But Josie’s half unconscious glance of admiration about the splendidly proportioned room had been caught and held by a photograph on the enormous roll-topped desk in the window, and for a few seconds the appreciation it aroused was plainly pictured on her face. She was certain that never in her life had she gazed at anyone as lovely as the girl in the beaten silver frame—a girl with a smile so warm and enticing that it could not have left unaffected her bitterest enemy, and eyes put in, as the Irish themselves phrase it, with a “sooty” finger.

Mrs. Duveen followed the direction of her glance, and her lips tightened. She recognized the effect the photograph was having, and remarked dryly: “That is a studio portrait of the young woman my son hoped he was going to marry.”