Nurse Linnet's Release (2 page)

Linnet felt shocked when the information was passed on to her that his temperature was about as high as it could be and still leave a margin for safety.

Night Sister signed to her to take her place beside the bed, and when, she withdrew and the door closed silently Linnet knew that she was getting on to the telephone.

The man in the bed was tossing and muttering a little incoherently—but considering his temperature the incoherence was not as marked as it might have been.

“What time is it, Nurse?”

He looked at her with a queer, glittering little smile in his dark eyes.

Linnet told him, her cool fingers once more encircling his wrist. The touch of his skin felt like a hot biscuit, and she wondered why it didn’t actually scorch her.

“One o’clock,” he muttered. “A good many hours yet before dawn! And dawn is the time when—when these things decide themselves, isn’t it, Nurse?”

Linnet smiled at him as if she were humouring a child with a somewhat perverted sense of humour.

“Dawn isn’t going to decide anything for you, Major Monteith,” she answered him coolly. “You’ve got to make your own decisions, and just because you’ve got a bit of a temperature there’s no reason to panic. You’re used to malaria, aren’t you?”

“I’ve had it often before,” he admitted. “But this is one occasion when I could have dispensed with it.”

“Because you’re on leave?”

“Because I’m staying in a hotel, and o
n
e should never be taken ill in a hotel. It’s the unforgivable crime.”

“Nevertheless, a good many people are taken ill in hotels.”

“In places like the Granchester?” His black eyebrows arched, and she felt that it was a mocking arch, and a habitual mannerism of his. “If anything happens to you they smuggle you out the back way and hope that nobody sees you go!”

“You’re morbid,” she said, but she was still smiling.

His eyes remained almost avidly glued to her face.

“You’re pretty,” he told her, “and it’s nothing to do with that fetching uniform
...
” And then he started to toss again restlessly, and watching him closely she could almost see the dryness of his skin. “How much longer can this go on? And how much higher can a mere temperature climb?” he wanted to know, with a tight, mirthless smile on his cracked lips.

“We’ll get it down,” she assured him, softly, and having released his wrist she was surprised to feel his fingers fumbling for hers. Quite unashamedly he clutched at them and hung on. “I like the feel of your hand,” he said. “It’s small and cool and it smells nice—a mixture of lavender soap and antiseptics.”

It seemed hours later that the door opened and Sister Carpenter returned, ushering in Dr. Shane Willoughby. At least, Linnet guessed instantly that it was Dr. Shane Willoughby, and she stood up at once and made room for him beside the bed. He did not glance at her or say a word to her, but he grinned amiably at the patient.

“Well, well!” he greeted him. “So you’re determined to make another night of it, are you?”

Afterwards, when it was all over, for the first time in her experience, Linnet felt as if the night had drained her of something vital. At five o’clock, when da
w
n was just beginning to break, she stood in the kitchen and made coffee for the doctor, Sister Carpenter and herself, and she felt as if all her limbs were trembling.

She told herself angrily that that was because she was out of condition, and more than once Sister Carpenter’s keen looks had told her so, too, as the night wore on. Sister Carpenter had no use for any sign of weakness in any of her vital helpers, although Linnet never missed a cue, was never slow to obey a behest even when it was unspoken and merely inferred by a look, and never fumbled or betrayed any awkwardness. She had the feeling that if Night Sister had been the matron at Aston House she would have told her niece to stay at home in Kent for some time, at least, and take long walks in the open air and get herself thoroughly built up again before reporting for duty as a nurse.

But fortunately for Linnet, who would have been appalled by such an edict, Night Sister was not her aunt, and she knew that it was not merely the strain of the past few hours that was causing her to feel how unusually exhausting the night had been. It was something to do with the patient in Room 23, and his clinging, burning fingers before the doctor arrived.

And now that he was out of danger, although the doctor had not yet taken his
departure, the relief she experienced was in some
queer way almost personal. She was, after all, only a second-year nurse, and experience never does away entirely with the hollow feeling of loss and dreadful inevitability which clamps down like a garment when a patient fails to respond to every known treatment. Linnet knew that if the vital spark that animated the body of Guy Monteith had decided to slip its moorings with the dawn light and steal away and leave an empty husk behind, as he himself had been so very much afraid it was going to do, then, added to the sensations of loss and inevitability she would be feeling this morning, as she mechanically did such an every-day thing as make a pot of coffee, would be something un-nameable and even more acute; something much more like personal failure and personal grief.

Which was absurd, because she knew nothing at all about Guy Monteith, apart from the fact that he had been taken ill in one of London’s best-known hotels, that his eyes were strangely dark and his smile strangely twisted, that he had clung to her hand, and that Cathie Blake had decided he was a “hard liver”.

The little Pro who was on duty came in with a request from Sister to make tea instead of coffee for Dr. Shane Willoughby, and Linnet mechanically switched to making tea. She was preparing a tray with a small individual teapot and some biscuits on a flowered plate to carry along to Sister’s office when there came a light tap at the door and the doctor himself entered.

The light was growing fast outside the tall window, and there was a rosy, flushed look in the air, heralding the rising of the sun and another fine spring day. From the garden on to which the window looked a blackbird suddenly lifted up its voice, piping vigorously in a thicket of lilac, and the sound cut through the silence of the kitchen like a deliberate challenge to a world that was coming awake.

Dr. Shane Willoughby, just a trifle jaded, looked closely at Linnet as she poured him his tea. He took a seat on the edge of the well-scrubbed table.

“I was going to bring it along to Sister’s office,” she informed him, in her rather shy voice.

“There was no need to do that.” He stirred the tea almost absent-mindedly as he continued to gaze at her. “I don’t think I’ve met you before tonight, have I, Nurse?”

“No, Doctor.” His eyes were so blue that they were a little confusing—a kind of searchlight blueness, or an
u
nder-water blueness, that had the effect of making them difficult to meet, particularly as their gaze was undeviatingly direct. His face was thin and set in taut lines, and it was a young-old face—young because the eyes were so clear and alert, old because the mouth was so serious. In the spreading light his brown, crisp hair had a touch of greyness at the temples, and it was an early greyness, for he was probably somewhere in his middle thirties. The spare, athletic lines of his figure emphasized the youthful side of him.

“I’m afraid it’s been one of those nights,” he said, smiling slightly.

“Yes, Doctor.”

“A repeat performance of last night, but you weren’t here then.” He helped himself to more sugar, and then flickered a glance at her coffee cup. “I don’t know how you people can consume so much coffee—to me it’s rather a revolting beverage, particularly when taken black. I’ve the old-womanish habit of enjoying tea.”

“I think most women—young or old—enjoy tea.”

“Then why don’t you throw that away and have some of this? It’s
Noir comme le diable, Chaud comme
l
’enfer
—but that refers to coffee as well, doesn’t it?” He stood up rather abruptly and walked to the window. “Major Monteith should do very well now, I think. I should imagine you’ll find him quite an easy patient. He’s had a bad fright.”

“Yes,” Linnet agreed soberly, “I think he has.”

“There were moments during the night when I was very definitely not at all happy about him...” He stared down into the green tangle of the garden, where the blackbird was now blithely hopping about on the lawn and looking for worms for his breakfast, while a golden bar of sunlight cut the square lawn in two. “That temperature of his looked like defeating us at one time.”

“Yes,” Linnet found herself breathing barely audibly.

Dr. Shane Willoughby turned and glanced at her again. She looked, he thought, too pale for night duty.

“Apparently his attacks of malaria have been getting worse for some time now, but he’s never done much about them. He’s on leave for several months, so I’ll keep my eye on him for a bit. Then there’s Mrs. Carey.”

Sister Carpenter quietly pushed open the door and stood smiling at him in the tight-lipped fashion she permitted herself. The tighter the lips the higher the esteem in which the Medical or Surgical Authority was held by her, or so it was generally agreed. And this morning her lips seemed very tight.

“I’ll be looking in again this afternoon to see Mrs. Carey, Sister,” he told her. “I’ve had some tests made, and I should have the results some time today; and in any case I shall want to have another look at that fellow Monteith.”

“Very good, Doctor,” Sister Carpenter seemed almost to purr. She accompanied him out into the corridor, and although he didn’t glance again at Linnet she watched him go before carrying his cup and saucer to the sink. As she looked down into the cup, still with a little tea at the bottom of it, she completed his quotation silently:

“
Pur comme un ange, Doux comme
l’
amour
.”

CHAPTER III

That night when Linnet went on duty she found that the prospects of a comparatively undisturbed night were reasonably high. No one to whom she need attend was critically ill, or threatening a sudden crisis, and the two most recent admissions seemed both to have settled down very well indeed.

Diana Carey looked like a contented cat who had stolen the cream when Linnet went in to her room to bid her good evening. She was sitting up in a lace bed-jacket and a chiffon nightdress both the colour of the inside of a shell, and her golden hair was arranged in a beautiful cloud about her shoulders. Tonight her eyes glistening as if with satisfaction, looked golden as cairngorm in the light of the bedside lamp, and even her face looked le
s
s pinched. She also looked absurdly young, Linnet thought, to be a widow—young even for a wife.

“Oh, Nurse Kintyre,” she greeted her, “I’m feeling so much happier because Dr. Willoughby is going to start treating me at last! He thinks he’s on to the beastly bug that’s been causing all the trouble, and if all goes well I’ll be a hundred per cent fit before long! And what do you think,” waving a hand to indicate the pile of books beside the bed, “he brought me these! Wasn’t it sweet of him?”

“It was,” Linnet agreed, glancing at the books. There were a couple of new novels and what looked like a biography, and a volume of verse. Linnet looked at the volume of verse more carefully and saw that it was Masefield, her own favourite.

“Do sit down,” Diana begged her prettily—she could be very charming, with a delightful childish peremptoriness, when she chose, and felt like it. Linnet realized. “I must have someone to talk to for a little while, and you’re not hectically busy, are you? That poor man in No. 23 isn’t likely to die tonight, is he?”

Linnet looked shocked.

“I—I hope not!” she exclaimed, and took a seat on the edge of the locker.

“I’ve been hearing about him today,” Mrs. Carey explained, stretching herself under the silk eiderdown like a luxurious kitten. “And, what’s more, I think I know him—or I know of him! A man called Monteith—Guy Monteith.”

“That’s right,” Linnet answered.

Diana frowned for a moment and pursed her lips. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

“Of course, it
might
not be the same man.”

“No,” Linnet agreed, and wondered why the patient in the bed was studying her almost speculatively. “Although it’s not a name one would be likely to meet every day,” she added.

“No.” This time it was the widow who agreed, and for some reason she did not look too pleased. But she did not ask for Guy Monteith to be described to her. Instead she said, picking up one of the books she had already read, and which she had brought in with her, and handing it over to the nurse: “Perhaps you’d like to borrow this, Nurse—if you care for contemporary essays. I think those are rather good.”

Linnet fetched her a glass of hot milk and saw her settled for the night, and then went along to Guy Monteith’s room. For some reason she had a curious, hesitant feeling as she paused with her hand on the door handle—as if she had been wanting to do this all day, and the fact that she had not been able to do so until now had
given her a queer, tensed,
strung up
, almost anxious feeling.

But as soon as she was inside the room she knew that the feeling was ridiculous, and all her professional calm returned.

His voice reached her from the bed.

“So there you are, Nurse! I’ve been wondering how much longer I’d got to wait for you to put in an appearance. I wasn’t even sure that I would see you tonight, but you do work to a kind of rota, don’t you?”

Linnet admitted that they did. She moved to the bed and automatically began to plump up and turn his pillows for him. He was lying very comfortably up against them, and he did not look as if he wished to be dislodged. He was wearing heavy silk pyjamas of deep cerulean blue, and was looking much, much better than on the previous evening. There was no angry flush under his skin that she realized now was deeply tanned, and he was not even looking as wan as she had expected. Apart from a tendency to natural gauntness, emphasized by an obstinate jaw and slightly high cheekbones, he could have been in almost a normal state of health. His sleek dark hair was beautifully brushed, and she noticed for the first time what extraordinarily luxuriant eyelashes he had—almost feminine eyelashes. But there was nothing else feminine about him.

He might have been just a little younger than Shane Willoughby, but it was difficult to judge until she saw him out of bed.

“What’s this?” he asked, reaching for the book that was tucked under her arm.

Linnet answered at once:

“You can borrow it if you like. It has just been loaned to me.”

But instead of opening the book he looked deliberately up at her. She received the impression that he was actually deriving some sort of satisfaction from his study of her, and having always regarded her own reflection in the mirror as a near escape from definite plainness she would have been amazed if she had known what he was thinking. Cathie Blake’s description of her eyes as having “a shadowy purple look” was not lost on him, and neither was the sheer delicacy of her camellia-like pallor. And the dark feathers of fringe formed by her soft hair lying on her wide, white brow under the stiff
little starched cap intrigued him. He wanted to put out a finger and touch them.

“In a few days I shall be turned out of here,” he said, as if he had been rehearsing this speech all day, “and unless I do something about it now I might not see you again.”

Linnet looked down at him, and although she heard the warning voice of Cathie crying, “Wolf, wolf!” her expression was almost gentle. For there was urgency in his voice, and there was urgency in his look.

“Do you have to see me again?” she asked, as she smoothed his top sheet.

“Of course.”

He said it as if he was surprised that she asked.

She produced a thermometer.

“Let’s see what your temperature’s doing tonight.”