Sunshine Yellow (5 page)

CHAPTER VI

For t
he next three weeks Penny was a constant visitor at the hospital. Stephen’s room became transformed into a bower of flowers, which she carried up to him herself in her arms. She arranged them skilfully in vases while she talked to him, and because he couldn’t see them she carried the vases over to him and allowed him to smell them.

“H’m, quite nice,” he commented once, “but I prefer that lavender-waterish fragrance which seems to cling to you, Penny.” He listened to her footsteps moving about the room, and when she had set the vases of brilliant blooms down on his bedside table he reached forth his hand and tried to catch at her. “Come here!” he commanded. “You must remember that I can’t see, and therefore I like to feel! And you have such soft hands, and they smell lavender-waterish too!”

Once he carried one of them up to his lips and kissed each of the fingers gently. By this time the bandages had been removed from the lower part of his face, and she could see his mouth and jaw, and the deep hollows in his cheeks below the bandages that still concealed his eyes.

Only a few weeks ago he had had a light coating
of tan, but now his face was so wan that it made her heart turn over every time she looked at him. He held her hand against his cheek and spoke musingly into
her fingers.

“Have they told you I’m to have these things off my eyes any day now? Sir Robert Bolton is coming to give me the once-over when I’ve got them off.”

“You mean
...
make certain your eyes are all right?” Despite herself her voice quavered. “But they
will be, won’t they? I mean
—
”

“Of course they’ll be all right ... I hope!” He spoke lightly, releasing her hand. “And then the next thing will be to get out of here. I lie here making plans for the moment I’m released. We’ll go down to Old Timbers, the house I bought when I was expecting to marry your beautiful cousin”—she almost gasped at the lack of bitterness in his voice—“and I’ll have a few weeks’ convalescence before getting back into harness. If you only knew how deadly bored I’ve
been, just lying here.”

“You’ve been very patient,” Penny told him quietly, realizing that, for such a man, he had indeed been very patient.

Stephen sighed suddenly.

“It’s easy to be patient when you know that you were entirely to blame for a disaster that might have killed someone else.” He turned his face towards her. “You did realize that I was in a very black mood that
night,
didn’t you, Penny? So black that I felt as if there were a couple of demons sitting on my shoulders!”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He made that groping movement with his hand, and she felt his fingers close about her arm.

“But when I think that I might have killed you! I break out in a cold perspiration all over!”

“Then don’t think about it,” she begged him. “You didn’t kill me, and you didn’t kill yourself, and soon you’re going to be completely fit again.”

“I hope so,” he said fervently. She felt his fingers digging deep into the soft flesh of her arm. “I couldn’t stand being an inactive man, Penny, and I long to be back on the job. Every time one of these chaps here comes to have a chat with me—every time Matron stands beside my bed and tells me what to do instead of listening to the words of wisdom that fall from my lips!—I feel a surge of desperation because I’m no longer one of them, but a patient who can’t answer back! I’m on the wrong side of the fence lying here, and I feel that so acutely at times that it makes me feel physically much worse than I’ve any right to feel at this stage.”

Penny felt as if something plucked uneasily at the very strings of her heart, but he didn’t know it, and instead of grasping her arm he slipped his own arm round her.

“Penny,” he said huskily, “you’re so sweet, and we’ll make a good life of our own. We’ll be happy. Why shouldn’t we be happy?”

This time Penny felt as if her heart knocked, and as he put up a hand to draw her face down to his own, her pulses raced so that she could hardly breathe.

“Penny, you’re my wife,” he said, softly. “Don’t you think you could bring yourself to give me a wifely kiss?”

There was a moment when Penny wanted to withdraw from him, when she experienced such a strong revulsion of feeling—a sensation almost of panic—that she wanted to tear herself out of the grasp of his arm and keep her lips safely removed from the touch of his lips, when she knew very well that he didn’t love her. When all he was feeling was a kind of need—a sort of desperation—because he was secretly afraid, and she was very near and tempting and feminine—and his wife!

“What’s the matter, Penny?” he asked, a half laugh in his voice. “Haven’t you begun to think of me as a husband?”

She let herself sink slightly against him, and instantly his arm tightened. His lips felt warm and dry under hers, and then the dryness vanished and their mouths were clinging together. Penny sat up with a gasp.

“I—I’d better go,” she managed.

Stephen was silent for a moment, and then he smiled strangely.

“Yes, perhaps you had,” he agreed. “Otherwise when sister comes to take my temperature, she’ll decide that wives are not very good for patients!”

Two days later Penny had an interview with the matron in her own private sanctum, and because she had been warned by telephone that the matron wished to speak to her before she saw her husband, she felt very taut and anxious when she arrived at the hospital.

She had become used, by this time, to the inscrutable, smiling mask that was the matron’s face, but she had never before seen the inside of her sitting-room. It was full of chintzes and vases of flowers, and the
watercolours
on the walls were all of a lighthearted type to banish sensations such as those that were partly paralysing Penny’s limbs.

A probationer brought in a tray of tea, and Penny was induced to drink a cup before anything in the nature of serious discussion was entered into. This, she realized afterwards, but not at the time, was a bad sign, and although it relieved her tension and calmed her nerves it did not prepare her for the sympathetic words that were spoken only a short time later, when such subjects as the weather and her own recovery from the accident had been exhausted.

“Mrs. Blair,” the matron’s voice began diffidently, “
I’
m not at all sure that I ought to tell you this when Sir Robert Bolton himself is not entirely convinced that your husband’s case is hopeless. I am referring, of course, to the condition of his eyes.”

Penny sat bolt upright, and her tea cup wobbled perilously.

“What do you mean, Matron?” she asked.

The straight figure behind the walnut desk, so impeccable in her starched blue and whiteness, with eyes that were no longer inscrutable but warm and human, pushed a box of cigarettes towards her visitor.

“Do smoke, Mrs. Blair, if it will help you,” she invited. “Those are Virginian on the right, and on
the left
—
”

“I don’t smoke,” Penny whispered.

The matron closed the silver lid.

“Then I’d better tell you what Sir Robert fears, hadn’t I?” she suggested. “Incidentally, he will be very happy to have a little talk with you when you feel up to it
...
Perhaps he can explain better than I can precisely what we are up against.”

“What are you up against. Matron?” Penny asked, as if she was bracing herself to hear the worst.

“The result of the accident, of course,” Matron said quietly. “Your husband was very badly injured,
Mrs. Blair—especially about the head—and that was one reason why he was flown from Paris to London, because Sir Robert is well known to be an authority on eye injuries. It was difficult to tell, at first, just what would be the outcome, and Sir Robert
hoped ...
we all hoped...
”

Penny’s lips barely moved.

“Yes?”

“That when the bandages were removed, and the healing process was over, your husband’s sight would be spared to him. Naturally, for a man in his position—a famous surgeon, young enough to have many worlds left to conquer—it was—
is
—highly important.”

“Go on,” Penny whispered, stiff-lipped.

“Are you quite sure you won’t have another cup of tea? There’s plenty left in the pot.” Matron peered into it as if this was simply a social function. Then she exclaimed quickly, as Penny didn’t even shake her head, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Blair, but I find this extraordinarily difficult. Not only is Mr. Blair one of our own surgeons—he walked the wards here, you know, when he first qualified—but you yourself are so young, and you have only just been married. Your honeymoon was turned into a tragedy on the very night that you became Mrs. Blair, and for that reason alone
—
”

“Please, Matron,” Penny said, wishing she would stop being so sympathetic, and let her know the worst without attempting to soften it in any way, “are you trying to tell me that my husband—that Stephen —has had his sight irreparably damaged by the car accident? That he—that he won’t see again?”

“We are very much afraid that he won’t see again,” Matron said gently. “At the moment Sir Robert
thinks
it highly unlikely, but miracles, of course, do sometimes happen
—
”

“But you don’t anticipate one in Stephen’s case?” Penny felt her lips frame the question.

“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Blair,” Matron answered.

CHAPTER VI
I

It
was a very sheltered cove, and the sand on which Penny loved to lie and invite the kiss of the sun was fine and white like powdered shells.

Today she had been having a bathe as usual, and beside her her swim-suit was drying in the warmth of the sun. She was wearing a cotton sun-suit which left her arms and shoulders bare, and already she was acquiring a delicate golden tan that made her bright yellow hair appear even more striking by contrast. She used very little make-up, but her mouth was vivid—rather like a flower that had no real right to show signs of drooping—and her big brown eyes were too serious for a girl who was only twenty-four, and a couple of months ago had looked nothing like her age.

In two months she hadn’t merely grown up, she had put the comparatively carefree days of her girlhood right behind her. She had become a woman and
a
wife—although only in the sense that she bore her husband’s name—and she had learned to face responsibility, to be patient and cheerful, long-suffering and secretive about anything that closely affected herself.

Impatient words that hurt, for instance
...
She
must never allow the truth to leak out that they hurt badly. Long periods when she was ignored, when her very presence seemed to arouse a form of irritability that was very difficult to cope with, and certainly to soothe. Angry tirades that reminded her of the futility of the Cornish seas hurling themselves against the granite cliffs, and a slightly hostile jealousy because she was free to come and go as she chose.

She looked up at the white cottage on the cliff-top where Stephen was at that moment anticipating her return for lunch. It was a sturdily built cottage that had once been a coastguard’s cottage and look-out, and in the brilliant morning sunlight it had a harsh attractiveness against the deep blue of the sky.

There was a little garden behind it, with paved walks and a lot of flowers like fuchsia bushes and gay clumps of valerian. In front there was a terrace raised
high
above the sea, and on that terrace Stephen took his exercise whenever the weather permitted, and when the sun was hot he sat in a cane chair and stared sightlessly through his dark glasses at the sea that was always very empty save where it met the horizon. And there the phantom shapes of passing ships showed up against the sunset, or in the early dawn light when a pearly phosphorescence edged each incoming wave.

The cottage had been leased to them through an agent, and it was Stephen’s idea that they take it because he had been very fond of Cornwall when he was a boy. And in Cornwall, as he said bitterly, you could be more quickly forgotten than in any other
corner
of England.

His doctors took the more optimistic view that the Cornish air would do him good. But Penny, who was beginning to know her husband fairly well, was not so much concerned with his physical health as with his condition of mind if he could not reconcile himself to the verdict that had been passed on him.

On the surface, he had been strangely fatalistic when he first heard the truth about his eyes. Grimly fatalistic. But Penny, who could see below the surface, knew that he could not have rebelled more violently than he did when the news was broken. Only it was a rebellion that was under iron control.

The Stephen who had been looking forward to his convalescence was a changed man overnight. To her he changed completely. There was no longer any tenderness, any moments when she felt near to him, and when he talked about making a future together. For him there was no future—nothing!—although Sir Robert Bolton had said that after six months there might be some reason to hope. He wasn’t prepared to say that he believed there would be reason to hope, but there might be ... and such a vague promise meant nothing to Stephen.

He wanted something more than an empty crumb of comfort to hug to himself. And that something more was not forthcoming.

Sometimes Penny, in the silence of a very lonely night, found herself wishing ardently that she had refused to marry Stephen when he asked. If only she had done so there would never have been that disastrous night drive on the other side of the Channel that put an end to everything for him.

He would have recovered from his broken engagement, but the shock of losing his eyesight
...
that was something he could not recover from.