Strange Recompense (7 page)

“That will come.” He looked neither disappointed nor impatient. “We must wait for it. I thought we had got somewhere in the church just now, but apparently not.”

They had reached the hospital gates and he set her down on the drive, directing her to the side entrance before he left her. He was evidently not coming to the villa for lunch, and Anna hurried back to Ruth, wondering if there was anything she could do to help her. She felt so much indebtedness to both the Melfords that she imagined she would never be able to repay them, but Ruth would not even let her mention it.

“Noel is deeply interested in your case and that’s the main issue,” she said as they sat over their coffee. “Besides, you’re evidently going to repay him in kind!”

“Doing the office work, you mean?”

“He loathes paper work,” Ruth explained, “so you see if you can help him out there while he is treating you there’s no need to feel so very dependent on either of us. I’ve been doing it for him lately, but I must confess it has been rather an effort.”

“He has said that I might start right away,” Anna explained. “It will help keep my mind off—the other business.”

“Sister Enman will be on duty when you go over to the hospital,” she said instead. “If you feel strange at first, or there is anything you can’t find, ask someone to take you along to her room and I’m sure she will put you right.”

Anna thanked her for the suggestion, but she felt that she would not want to appeal to Sara Enman unless it was absolutely necessary. Sara had not shown any desire to be friendly even at the villa, so why should she suddenly change her attitude when they met in the hospital, which was her own particular sphere?

With a quickening pulse beat she covered the distance to the larger building, going in at the door marked “staff.”

A young probationer came into view, halting on the stairs above her as if her presence there had almost shocked her into a cry of surprise.

Could you tell me how
I
get to Doctor Melford’s consulting rooms?” she asked, and Jill gulped and seemed to waken out of an unhappy dream.

“Upstairs, and first to your right,” she directed. “That will bring you to the east wing.” Jill hesitated, her cheeks flushing with a sudden impulse to confession, but all she managed was: “I helped when Miss Melford first brought you in. I hope you are better now.”

Anna thanked her with one of her vivid, friendly smiles.

“I think I must have been very faint with hunger and tiredness,” she explained, “but I feel much better now, thank you.”

“Is there anything wrong, Nurse?”

The voice was one Anna knew and she drew back, leaving the little probationer to answer Sara’s question.

“No, Sister. I’m just going off duty. Is there anything you want me to do before I go?”

“Only to remember that the corridors are not the place for idle gossip!
”
Sara turned the bend in the staircase, silenced by what she saw, and Anna looked upwards with a small, sinking feeling in her heart. Sara looked so competent and so cruel as she stood there in her blue dress with her stiffly starched apron and cap, bristling with efficiency, and Anna knew now beyond doubt that Sara did not like her.

“You can go, Nurse,” Sara told the waiting Jill without so much as looking in her direction, “but please remember that even when a nurse is off duty she is expected to behave with dignity and decorum, especially in the precincts of the hospital.”

“Lecture three, page five!” Jill muttered as she scuttled away, and Anna was able to meet Sara’s eyes with a smile in her own.

“It was really my fault that we were talking on the stairs,” she explained. “I asked the way to Doctor Melford’s consulting rooms.”

Surprisingly Sara smiled back.

“Come along,” she offered, “I’ll take you. One mustn’t be too lenient with these beginners, you know, or they will take advantage. Discipline always turns out the best nurses, just as it produces the best soldiers. I don’t think Doctor Melford is in his rooms at present, but we can go along and find out.”

“He won’t be in until late,” Anna explained to Sara’s apparent chagrin. “He gave me quite a lot of work to do which will keep me busy for most of the afternoon, but I’m sure I shall be happier working.”

“Possibly,” Sara acknowledged with a strange inflection in her
voice that was difficult to define. “But it would be much better all round, wouldn’t it, if you discovered your identity? Your people must be wondering about you, to say nothing of your husband!”

The last word startled Anna, sending the hot color flooding into her cheeks. She had forgotten she was married since Noel Melford had taken her wedding ring away to send it to London in an effort to trace its origin, but now the fact was being thrust at her by Sara in no uncertain manner. The action was quite deliberate, yet she could not guess at Sara’s reason for accentuating her marriage.

“It’s all so—difficult to imagine,” she said haltingly. “I can’t remember a wedding at all. Even in church this morning, the ceremony meant nothing personal to me. Doctor Melford thought it might, and probably that is why he insisted I should go.”

“I suppose Ruth took you.”

Whether it had been statement or question, Sara waited as if she expected some sort of answer.

Doctor Melford took me himself,” Anna told her. “We went in his car and sat in a side pew during the ceremony, but evidently it didn’t bear fruit.”

They had come to a white-painted door at the end of a long corridor and Sara paused before it, her fingers closing tightly over the handle.

“Has it never occurred to you that you might be wasting a considerable amount of Doctor Melford’s time?” she asked icily. “You don’t appear to be making progress or even to be making any concentrated effort at remembering, but perhaps that doesn’t suit your purpose.”

“How can you say a thing like that!” Anna cried. “You can go out of this hospital and know yourself to be among friends who love you and know all about you, who will go back down through the years in your company—remembering; but I can’t do that. I have no past, and no friends who can remember for me, so how can you go on believing that I am not making an effort to free myself?”

“Simply because I do not think you were free before,
”
Sara told her cruelly. “You are married. There seems little doubt about that, at least, but it may be that you were unhappily married and your subconscious finds this an excellent way out.
”

“How could you believe such a thing!” Anna gasped.

“It may be the truth,” Sara pointed out mercilessly. “In any case, I should concentrate on that line of mental effort if I were you. It might get you somewhere.”

She opened the door, ushering Anna into a trim, business-like apartment with a desk set at an angle beside one of the windows, several easy chairs and a high couch spread with a blanket under a convenient wall light.

“You’ll find the office through there.” Sara indicated a second door. “It will probably feel cold to work in,” she warned. “I’ve told Noel several times that he would do better to leave his paper work to the girls downstairs who are capable of dealing with it, and I dare say he will waken up to the truth when you begin to have difficulty with the medical terms,” she prophesied as she swept out.

“She’s not going to make life pleasant for me,” Anna thought, “but if I can please Noel by the work I do I won’t care.”

Noel! Strange how easily the name had come to her lips, strange how inevitable it had seemed that they should be drawn together in that shadowy church on the windy hill! Could there have been someone named Noel in the past—a friend perhaps—a lover?

She found the filing he had mentioned and set to work. Everything was dovetailed to perfection, stored away for future reference—case histories, treatments, interviews, results, they were all there against the day when they might be needed again.

Working for him like this was to think of him constantly, to wonder about him and his career, but it was also to think about the man himself. How strong he was, and how patient! She would not have had the courage to come here to work for him if she had not been quite sure of his patience.

Towards five o’clock Dennis Tranby put his head round the door of the outer room while she was collecting the pencilled notes of a report from Noel’s desk. He looked surprised to see her, but he said approvingly enough:

“
Quick work! Noel doesn’t believe in wasting time, of course. How have the first afternoon’s chores gone down?”

“I’ve enjoyed doing them,” Anna told him. She liked Dennis Tranby and he gave her confidence. “I only hope I have not made too many mistakes with the filing.”

“I always thought filing was child’s play until I tried it for a spell,” he confessed. “It has an absolutely hypnotic effect on me. I go on doing it in my sleep!”

“So long as you sleep.”

“Don’t you?”

“Not very well. But then, I had slept a lot during the afternoon.”

“Noel would rather you slept naturally than give you something
to put you over, but if it gets too bad you must tell him. What did you do this morning?” he asked.

“Doctor Melford took me to church. There was a wedding in the little chapel on the edge of the moors.”

“I see.” He stood sorting through some papers. “I’ve just come back from a nasty case,” he informed her out of the blue. “An accident. Car overturned—glass flying everywhere and blood all over the place.”

She flinched as she listened and then she covered her face with her hands and gave a little shuddering moan.

“Oh—please, no!”

He swung round the end of the desk and came to her.

“I’m sorry, but that almost seemed to ring a bell, didn’t it?” He caught her elbow, propelling her towards a chair. “Sit down for a minute and try to think back,” he urged kindly. “Were you in a car, Anna, and was that car involved in a smash? Did you hit another car? Can’t you remember—travelling fast or something, travelling along a road and then—smash, and darkness all of a sudden? Was that something like what happened, Anna? You ought to know.”

“Yes,” she muttered from behind her hands, “I ought to know, but I can’t remember a car that crashed. I should have been hurt in that case, shouldn’t I?” she added logically.

“There is superficial bruising on your thigh and your left arm, and another bruise on your head. Can you remember nothing about it?”

“Nothing.”

There was such abject misery in her voice that he left it at that, and she turned towards the door as it opened and Noel Melford came in.

He looked from one to the other questioningly, and Anna passed him and went into the inner room.

“I wonder how she shaped out this afternoon by herself,” he said, sitting down at his desk and moving the letters that had come by the late post to one side. “I gave her a fairly comprehensive intelligence test before I went out and she seems to have coped with it all right.” He glanced down at the empty filing tray on the desk. “I had very little fear of her failing in that respect,” he added, “but it’s a routine check up and it is best gone through.”

“What happened in church this morning?” Dennis asked.

“She told you about that, did she?” Noel smiled. “Well, there was a certain amount of reaction during the actual ceremony and the service itself seemed to mean something to her, but on the whole it was an unhappy reaction.” He paused, examining the tips of his fingers with the utmost concentration for a moment. “One could deduce from it that she had been unhappily married,” he added slowly. “I’m quite convinced that she is not the type who would take her marriage vows lightly, hence the suggestion of being trapped inside the marriage bond. A subconscious suggestion that, by the way.”

“And five minutes ago, just before you came in just now, I had more or less got her reacting to the suggestion of an accident,” Tranby said. “Could it be that there was some sort of accident on the honeymoon journey resulting in the condition in which Ruth found her?”

“That could be a theory,” Noel agreed, “but why no car for miles around on the moor roads? We can’t rush at this too quickly, old man,” he cautioned. “It’s no ordinary case—or so I feel.”

His friend gave him a brief, searching scrutiny.

“What now?” he asked.

“I’m not quite sure. The ring is still a possibility, of course, though I’m not expecting a great deal from it.”

“What about drugs?”

“You know what I feel about sodium pentothal,” Noel said abruptly. “One doesn’t always get the best results that way, and nine times out of ten it leads nowhere. I fancy we’ll get the truth from Anna without using too many drugs—the truth as far as she remembers it.”

“And when we get that far, what then?”

“Hypnosis, perhaps. We’ll see how things go first, in the course of the next few days. I always believe in giving a patient plenty of time to react normally.”

“And in the meantime?”

“She stays on with Ruth, I think. I feel that she would not react over here in the hospital quite so well.”

Tranby grunted.

“You know best,” he agreed. “You mean to let her go on working here, though?”

“She isn’t exactly in the hospital up here,” Noel pointed out. “Her work will be isolated from the wards. It will also give me the opportunity of keeping an eye on her, and when she is with you you can do the same. You know what to look for.”

“I hope I shall find nothing more than that,” Tranby observed laconically as he turned away from the desk. “The Big White Chiefs word is absolute law, of course!”

Noel laughed.

“I hope I haven’t been too autocratic,” he said, “and apparently my word isn’t absolute law to you on occasion! I told you, I think, that little Mrs. Whittacker in Ward C was in no fit state to be left alone, but you apparently thought otherwise. She was found wandering about the grounds in her night attire at two o’clock this morning, determined to pick flowers.”

“Good lord! I’m sorry, Noel,” Tranby apologized swiftly. “I had no idea it was quite so bad as that, and I understood she slept like a log once she was safely tucked up for the night.”

“The old lady’s afraid of life just now like a little child afraid of the dark, and she seeks reassurance in familiar places. I don’t think that’s the position with Anna, by the way,” he added, as if he could not quite let the other case out of his mind. “She wants life; she’s even eager to embrace it, but there’s this business of the unremembered past holding her back.” He paused, his brow furrowed in thought. “Anna! Anna
what
?
It won’t be complete, Dennis, until I know the whole story. She’s helping all she can.”

Tranby took out his case and offered his friend a cigarette.

“I’d relax a bit, Noel, if I were you,” he advised. “You’ve been steadily overworking yourself these past few months, piling job on job, and here you have another tough nut to crack. Why not send the girl over here to the hospital and let Tim Wedderburn handle the whole thing when he gets back?”

“I’m hoping we’ll have it cleared up before Tim gets back,” Noel returned shortly. “Days—even hours—are precious time lost to anyone in Anna’s condition.”

“Yet,” Dennis pointed out, “when it’s all over and she gets her memory back she won’t remember any of this. That’s the way it goes, isn’t it?”

“Mostly.” Noel strode to the window and looked out. “A complete forgetfulness of all that happened in between,” he added from that distance.

Dennis Tranby could not see his face, but he imagined a certain flatness in his friend’s voice which was unusual. He did not challenge it, however, nor did he make any further reference to Anna’s future.

As he observed to Ruth later in the day; “Noel seems decid
ed
ly touchy about this case, but I always thought he liked something he could get his teeth into.”

“You don’t think Noel might be—attracted by her?” Ruth asked uneasily. “So soon, I mean. We know so little about her, really. I’d never forgive myself for bringing her home if that happened.”