Seven Dials (3 page)

Not that they were all stuffy, she had to admit, and remembered, as she so often did, Cousin Mary, who had been so meek and demure an old lady on the surface and yet so wickedly funny and acerbic of tongue when she felt herself to be in safe company, and her lips curved. Dear Cousin Mary; what would she have advised her to do about Brin? Wouldn’t she have had some sharp little insight to offer her, have found some stiletto of a comment that would have punctured the bubble of absurd excitement Charlie felt whenever she thought of him? I’m sure she would have done, she thought, and sighed again. Losing Cousin Mary had been more of a blow than she had realized, and even now, almost three years after Mary’s death, she could still feel the pain of it.

Her mind slid backwards, memory pushing in. Mary, she thought again. How funny it had been, that first meeting. She had been a rather gawky twenty-one-year-old using most of her meagre inheritance on a recuperative visit to England, prickly and aggressive in all her dealings with everyone she met, finding that was the only way she could cover her deep grief over the loss of her parents within a few months of each other. Father, dying in a stupid argument in a saloon down by the docks at Sparrow Point, and Ma just not bothering to go on living without him; they’d been a racketty pair, always in debt, always in trouble, but they had loved each other wholeheartedly and had doted on Charlotte, their only child, and she had been missing them dreadfully, as well as feeling furious with them for daring to die and leave her as they had. So, she had gone to England on an impulse mainly, and then, out of curiosity (for wasn’t she Charlotte’s only living relative on her father’s side?) had gone to see Mary Laurence.

But it had not been only that; she had also wanted to hit out
at someone, anyone, for her sense of loss, and to visit a British cousin and be rude to her had seemed something worth doing, absurd notion though that was, and she had gone marching behind the butler into Mary’s handsome drawing-room in her house at Lancaster Gate and said loudly, ‘I don’t know why the hell I’m wasting my time coming here, but I’m your Uncle Fenton’s granddaughter’, and had stood and scowled at the rotund but neat figure sitting so upright in her chair beside the fire.

And Mary had looked at her benignly over her glasses and then laughed aloud and said, ‘Heavens, of course you are! You look
exactly
like my Mamma in a temper and she always told me that she was the image of her wicked brother.
Do
tell me - are you as bad a person as your grandfather was? I do hope so, because I’m fearfully bored, and I’d relish a bit of wickedness to speed the days by - ’

And Charlotte had tried to go on scowling and not been able to and they had both laughed and got on famously from then on; and now, standing leaning over the first-floor balustrade at Nellie’s in 1946 she looked back at the seven years that had followed that first meeting and sighed yet again. It had all seemed so right somehow; to stay in England and live with her elderly cousin because she wanted to, and not only because she had been trapped here by the outbreak of war, to do her medical training at Nellie’s rather than at Johns Hopkins at home in Baltimore, which had been her first plan – it had all seemed so sensible and it had indeed all worked beautifully. Until the Blitz and Mary’s heart attack during one particularly noisy raid.

That had been a dreadful night, dreadful, and though it had left her comfortably provided for, for Mary had willed her a handsome fortune as well as the big Lancaster Gate house, it was a lonely life for a girl. She had her work, of course, and was good at it; to be a surgical registrar at the great Queen Eleanor’s Hospital at the age of only twenty-eight, and a woman to boot, and to have so excellent an income, was splendid, but she often found herself counting her blessings, and asking herself what more a girl could want. And that was a bleak way to be.

But what more
could
a girl want? she thought again and then, without realizing she had done so, murmured aloud,
‘Just Brin’, and a passing nurse said politely, ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Lucas?’ and Charlie felt her face redden furiously.

‘Oh, nothing, nurse,’ she said quickly. ‘Nothing at all. I was just thinking aloud.’ And the girl went rustling away, leaving Charlie standing chewing her lip and staring at the door of the big committee-room.

To hang about for Dr Lackland or to give up for today? That was the question. And if she gave up, what would she tell Brin? There he was sitting on the edge of his bed in Spruce Ward, no doubt, watching the door for her, waiting desperately with that look of eagerness on his face that always had the effect of making her belly tighten, because she’d promised him she’d talk to Dr Lackland, and - ‘Damn,’ she said aloud, and then more loudly, ‘Damn and
blast
!’

‘Dear me, you
must
be peeved.’ The voice behind her made her actually jump and she turned quickly and felt her face harden as she saw Harry Lackland standing there, his hands in his pockets and his square face carved into a wide grin. ‘Swearing? Don’t let Sister Spruce hear you - she’ll drag you off to a Bible meeting and convert you as soon as look at you if she hears that sort of talk.’

‘Hardly swearing,’ she said, trying to be light and knowing she sounded stiff and ungracious. ‘Just a touch irritated - ’

‘Now, why should so charming a girl as you succumb to irritation?’ he said and she felt her face harden even more. If only he wasn’t so dreadfully arch, she thought furiously. It’s bad enough he thinks it’s clever to flirt, without thinking he has to do so in so heavy-handed and obvious a fashion.

‘Because there are a great many reasons for irritation,’ she said sharply. ‘Not least the time one has to waste tracking down consultants. I’m waiting to speak to Dr Lackland.’

‘Won’t
Mr
Lackland do?’

‘It’s a psychiatrist my patient needs, not another surgeon – thanks all the same,’ she said and turned to go. ‘I’ll come back, and try to get him after the meeting - ’

‘Ah, it’s the Governors,’ he said and turned to walk away with her. ‘I’d forgotten. It’s the second Friday of the month, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Didn’t your wife mention it?’ she said, knowing she sounded spiteful and not caring. ‘She’s a Governor, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, yes, Lee’s a Governor,’ he said easily. ‘Good lass – did it to get me off the hook. I’d have to be one if she wasn’t. I’m very grateful to her - tell me, why do you want to talk to old Max? One of your patients gone mad at the sight of your beauty and running amok all over Spruce and frightening poor old Sister?’

‘Of course not,’ she said and now the anger really showed and he shook his head at her and said even more easily, ‘Just teasing, my dear. You’ll never get used to me, will you? And me a fellow American, too – we really ought to understand each other better than we do, you know.’

‘Indeed we should,’ she said, sharper than ever. ‘And I have to say I wish you’d understand that I really don’t enjoy these jokes. I’m here to do a job as much as anyone else and I really would prefer it if you treated me the same way you treat all the other resident medical staff.’

‘But they aren’t as pretty as you are,’ he said, unabashed, and put a hand on her arm. ‘Really, Charlie, you are very pretty, you know, and I do wish you wouldn’t be so - well, chilly. I’m a harmless soul, you know, just friendly and cheerful and -’

‘So your wife always says,’ she said savagely and pulled away from him firmly and went hurrying through the big double doors into Spruce, letting them swing back in his face, and leaving him outside in the corridor. He really was getting impossible, she told herself furiously as she marched into Sister’s office, and sat down with a little thump, and if he doesn’t stop it I’ll tell him exactly what I think of him and I won’t be polite about it. And she reached for the pile of notes Sister had left ready for her, and pulled them towards her with a savage little gesture. Indeed and indeed, she would tell him
exactly
what she thought of him.

Harry watched her go, standing there in the same easy posture with his hands in his pockets and a faint smile on his face, but he was hating himself. Why the hell did he
do
it? He knew she disliked the sort of badinage he used, knew that the look she gave him spelled disdain and not enjoyment, but all the same, out the stupid words came. As though someone else were speaking and not him. When would he find the way to get her to look at him as though she found him interesting rather than merely irritating? He didn’t have this effect on
other women; when he smiled at the nurses, offered them his little jokes and teases, they smiled and sometimes laughed, occasionally blushed, and always looked approving even though he wasn’t necessarily interested in going further with them. He just teased nurses because that was his way with pretty girls, and always had been. But now here he was, dealing with a woman he’d really like to impress, would really like to get to know better, and all he could do was behave like some sort of hobbledehoy. It really was too absurd; and he turned sharply and went clattering away to Elm, to see the gastrectomy patient he’d operated on yesterday.

Maybe, he told himself as he went, maybe I could make even more out of the fact that we’re both Americans? He sometimes forgot that fact; he’d been living and working here in London for over a dozen years now and his youth and early manhood in Virginia seemed sometimes not to have happened to him at all, but to someone else he had known in a vague sort of way. Yet for all that, he reminded himself as he arrived at Elm Ward and Sister, bridling with pleasure at the sight of him, came surging forwards to greet him with all the deference due to his status as a senior consultant, for all that I
am
an American, and so is she. Perhaps I could ask her to come to see a film? - must remember to call it a movie, of course - say
The Best Years of Our Lives
- everyone was saying it was the best thing to come out of Hollywood ever; ask her to that, seriously, not jokingly, and see what happens?

And he stared unseeingly at the chart in his hands and imagined the scene; he stopping to speak to her as she sat having her solitary lunch in the medical staff common room - she always sat alone for lunch, so that would work well enough – and saying casually, ‘I’m going to this splendid movie - several of my other American friends have told me it’s superb. Perhaps you’d care to see it? And then we could go on and have a bite at a rather nice little restaurant I know in Soho where they actually manage to fry chicken the way it ought to be done, Southern style.’ And she’d look up at him with those considering narrow green eyes under those straight brows and after a moment she’d smile and say, ‘Of course - that would be lovely - ’

But there his fantasy shivered and collapsed, and he smiled brightly at Sister as she handed him another chart, and tried to
banish Miss Charlotte Lucas and her disturbing effect on him from his mind in order to concentrate on the matter in hand. But it wasn’t easy. The senior registrar on the other surgical firm piqued him and fascinated him in equal measure and that was a heady combination, and the last thing he needed. He was quite susceptible enough to women without one who owned her upsetting qualities coming along to make matters more difficult for him.

He did his rounds, punctiliously checking every detail in every patient’s notes, inspecting yesterday’s gastrectomy’s wound and drainage tubes, removing stitches with his own hands from the very difficult bilateral hernia he’d repaired last Friday and going over with Sister the treatment charts and medication lists for every one of his patients, for no one could ever complain that Mr Haversham Lackland was anything but the most careful of surgeons into whose hands any and every patient could safely be entrusted. He knew himself to be less than reliable in matters to do with his private life, but when it came to his work he was good and no one would ever be able to deny that.

After he’d left the ward and was sitting in the shabby surgeon’s room in the main theatres, waiting for his first case of the day to be anaesthetized, he let his thoughts go back to Charlotte Lucas. Why was she able to creep into the interstices of his concentration so easily, disturbing his thinking, getting in the way of work? It wasn’t that she was so remarkably good looking, after all. A rather gawky girl in some ways, with a long lean body and a small neat head on which she wore her dark hair piled in a rather severe chignon. Her face was a long oval, with a thick pale skin that looked translucent in some lights and she had a full, slightly drooping mouth and a rounded chin that were far from obviously beautiful. Perhaps it was her eyes, those odd narrow green eyes which looked so oddly dramatic because their lower lashes were of the same length as the upper ones; a strange quirk, that, and one he wanted to look at a lot. Yes, he decided, it was her eyes that captured him. Or maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was that drooping mouth after all, which looked as though it could be a sensual one and -

Damn it all, he thought furiously, there I go again, thinking about that wretched woman with her cool stares and her look
of scorn; why let her get under my skin this way when there’s that staff nurse on Casualty who’s shown me every way she knows how that she’s interested, and she’s a good five years younger than the Lucas madam. Why do I let her do this to me? I must be mad -

In more ways than one. Why did he tomcat around this way with women at all, when there was Lee at home? Most of the senior men around Nellie’s deeply envied him his Lee; he knew that from the way they looked at her when she arrived at hospital functions, as she so often did these days now she was a Governor. And when he looked at her himself he knew why; she was a lovely woman, absolutely lovely, and as good as she looked too, warm and responsive and cheerful, a superb housekeeper - no man could be better cared for than he was - a loving and attentive mother, and a charming hostess. Yet Harry looked at other women, and often did more than look. He pursued, he wooed, and there were times when he won. More than one of Nellie’s student nurses had suddenly decided that she didn’t want to train after all, and had left in the middle of her second or even third year, unable to cope with seeing Harry around the hospital treating her like a stranger - albeit a charming one - when he had decided the affair was over. He knew he had spoiled more than one promising nursing career, and was ashamed of that, but it made no difference. He still did it -