You Took My Heart (13 page)

With a choking sensation Joan crept through the curtained door, shutting it softly behind her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The
corridor in which she found herself was dark, with sudden, unexpected little flights of steps over which she tripped in her foolish tinsel frock. Before the old-fashioned house had been divided into separate flats, this passage had in all probability led the way to the servants’ staircase. Now it was just so much waste space—an untidy detail left over by the builder who had made the alterations.

Gasping, between laughter and annoyance, Joan stumbled along in the half light and found herself at last face to face with a door which she opened gingerly. It was the drawing-room-cum-waiting-room of her earlier visit. With a sense of relief she hurried across the hardwood floor, seated herself on a chair near the open piano and picked up at random a sheet of music. Now, if Vera came in she was safe! It would look as though she had been sitting here for ages, studying her pantomime part, and Vera wouldn’t know, not
ever,
that she had been trapped in the dressing room to overhear that strange conversation.

The hot cheeks began to cool. The hysterical desire to giggle subsided. Joan’s heart-shaped little face grew thoughtful. It was pretty disgusting when you came to think about it: Stefan in Vera’s own bedroom talking to her that way, saying—what? Queer, threatening sort of things about Garth, begging Vera to divorce him. And that last thing about Garth hating publicity!

With nervous fingers Joan picked up the plaited tail of her preposterous wig, and stared at it unseeingly. Probably Stefan had been saying horrible things about Garth for years. Five years. He’d been in love with Vera as long as that and Vera hadn’t done anything about it. So that she couldn’t be very much in love with
him.
She’d sounded affectionate, tender even, talking with him. She had wept in his arms. But there hadn’t been any of the hot passion in her voice that had been so plain in every word spoken by the man. Only when she mentioned Ivan ... she had been quite wildly emotional then. Maybe Ivan was the only person in the world Vera had ever loved—ever would love. She was an odd, incalculable creature, this Slavonic beauty, with her high cheek bones and great slanting brown eyes, her golden, amazing hair.

Restlessly Joan got up and crossed the room, seeing herself in the hanging wall mirror, a grotesque stranger in the coarse property wig. But the blue eyes were her own, the honest, puzzled eyes. Maybe it wasn’t such a dramatic conversation she had listened to as she had at first been inclined to suppose, she consoled herself. Maybe it wasn’t even very important. Just Stefan, whatever his name was, talking the way he had been talking for five years. It wasn’t likely Vera would take any notice of him or his fantastic plans for her freedom after all this time. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of,
for
Garth’s sake—not even that odd remark about his hatred of unsavoury publicity. Stefan and Vera couldn’t really do anything harmful to Garth.

There was the sound of an advancing step outside the room now. Joan scurried back to her chair, to her sheet of music, and Vera came in. She looked tired and shadowy, her great eyes smudged with tear stains, her red lips drooping. But her manner was ordinary enough, apologizing for her lateness, hoping Joan hadn’t been waiting too long.

“And in such a cold room!” she ended remorsefully, feeling the inadequate radiators beneath the enormous bleak windows, hurrying over to kneel on the soft toned praying mat and turn on the electric fire.

The rehearsal began. Joan sang heavily, conscientiously through her song, wishing she were not so bored with it. Lifelessly she recited her lines, parading about the room in obedience to Vera’s suggestions, trying to imitate the Russian girl’s slick, theatrical actions. But it was all hollow and unreal somehow. She felt such a fool!

Vera, too, it was clear was bored, out of humour today for this task of drilling yet another
self-conscious
uninterested nurse. Nurses ought to keep to nursing and leave acting alone, she was thinking dully, and as though she had read the thought Joan began to apologize for her wooden performance.

“It will be all right on the night of the actual play,” Vera assured her with her charming smile. “It always is. It is excitement that carries most amateur performances through successfully; the lights and the music and having an audience. You’ll all be marvellous on Boxing Night—you’ll see!”

Joan, snatching the untidy wig from her ruffled chestnut-warm curls, said she hoped to. goodness they would!

Then she was out in the crisp December dusk again, hugging her fur coat cosily around her, dodging nimbly through the busy traffic, trying to put out of her mind the memory of the uncomfortable few moments she had spent in Vera’s dressing-room. It was so sordid somehow, so
nasty
—Garth away on this important sick call in the country and Vera and Stefan discussing him, sneering at him. She didn’t want to go on thinking about it. It was all so muddled, so confusing. Because Vera wasn’t
really
Garth’s wife in spite of her legal position. She hadn’t a scrap of love for her husband, didn’t pretend to have. That made her affair with Stefan less blameworthy, perhaps. Or didn’t it? But it was hard on Garth all the same. And at the thought of Garth, Joan’s heart stood still with a hot pang of misery.

“Oh, why does life have to be so
silly, so
tangled up!” she cried aloud to the noisy uncaring street. A surge of impatience swept over her. The waste of it all! Garth loving herself. Garth tied to Vera. Vera unhappy, Stefan unhappy, everyone unhappy! It was all so ridiculous, she told herself bleakly, seeing the lighted Christmas shops about her, the happy, thronging family crowds; mothers and fathers with children newly released from their boarding schools, women with shopping lists and unashamed burdens of brown-paper parcels, pavement merchants kneeling in the dusk to set their ingenious mechanical toys tumbling and dancing with little stilted steps.

And suddenly, as she pushed her way into the crowded bus, her blue eyes were wet with tears.

* * * *

The days went by, the short, crisp December days. In the wards of Merlin House the air of excitement mounted. Christmas was coming! An air of gaiety began to pervade the whole hospital. There were festive red crinkly papers over the plain hospital lamps, colored paper-chains looped under the ceilings, night-nurses making silver-paper flowers and big red poinsettias that were really only bits of cleverly cut out flannelette, hampers of toys piled up in Sister’s office, in the big waiting-rooms, and everywhere the fragrant scent of evergreens, the pungent breath of pine.

Each ward had its own tree, its own ingenious scheme of decoration. In Joan’s surgical section they were doing nursery rhymes. There was Old Mother Hubbard and her dog peering dismally into an emptied medicine cupboard; Little Boy Blue, a life-size figure in cardboard, dressed in a real blue linen suit, blew his horn triumphantly beside the hearth; Goosey, Goosey Gander, a large and expensive stuffed toy, somewhat shabby from years of St. Angela Christmases, was perched on a window-sill. And in the centre of the ward rose triumphantly the House that Jack Built, complete with the rat that ate the malt, the cat, the dog, the cow with the crumpled horn, the maiden all forlorn, the priest all shaven and shorn and the cock that crowed in the mom. It was a work of art and patience. On Christmas Eve they took the concealing screens from it, Sister Perry and the staff nurses and Joan and the other probationers, all flushed with toil and triumph, waiting for the soft “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” from the surrounding beds.

Dilly Parsons, sitting up in a wheel chair, her stiff little plaits standing straight out from her head, all but wept with excitement. With dancing eyes she took in every detail of the beloved story. Oh, it was wonderful—right here in the very room with her, all these creatures she had dreamed of since she was small! Like living in a fairy tale, it was, and there was still more to come: the stockings pinned to the pink cots that would be filled by dawn tomorrow, the draped, mysterious tree just inside the ward door that the morning would reveal in all its glory. There would be a real Santa Claus, too, they said, and a sleigh and a deer, and lots and lots of presents. Dilly sighed with sheer repletion and clutched at Joan’s hand with tight little fingers.

“I’m glad I din have to go home before all this, Nurse!” she whispered in her hoarse Cockney wheeze.

Joan, finding another significance in the words, felt a lump rise in her throat. Dilly, with her intense and vivid enjoyment of things, her eager, warm little heart ... how beautifully oblivious she was to the fact that she might indeed
have missed this lovely Christma
s time if it had not been for the skill and devotion of a certain young doctor!

And then it was Christmas Day, with whistles and trumpets rending the decorous hospital air, drums being banged, mechanical toys whirring and whizzing about the floors. Dressings and treatments were out of the way as early as possible. Illness today was to be forgotten. At noon Garth himself unveiled the children’s tree, with Vera at his side, trim and conventional for once in a neat dark suit, a fur of silver fox draped round her slim shoulders. She was charming afterwards, helping to carry round the festive mid-day dinner, sitting by bedsides to admire new dolls and examine new games, chatting with Sisters and probationers.

In the ward kitchen Garth seized on a quiet moment to whisper good wishes to Joan, putting a small white paper packet into her hand. “It’s nothing, Joanna,” he murmured with kindly awkwardness. “Just a small something to remind you of my existence and—my—affection.”

Joan looked at him with misty eyes and popped the little packet into her pocket for future investigation. “You shouldn’t have bothered about me, Garth,” she said shyly. Adding with a wistful smile, “I’m not very likely to forget your existence, you know!”

They were going back to Ivan’s Christmas, he told her, with a sudden flash of joy in his grey eyes. “He’s enjoying himself today, the kid,” he explained. “We’re giving him the best time we know—his first real family Christmas!”

Joan winced at that “we”, but smiled bravely up at the man beside her. “I’m so glad he’s happy, Garth,” she told him.

And it came to her with a tiny stab of pain, that it wasn’t only Ivan who was happy today! She had never seen Garth in better spirits. Maybe, she reflected soberly, the muddle of his relationship with Vera was a small price to this man for the pride he had in his little son. Fervently, she told herself, that she hoped it was so.

She did not see Garth alone again in the whirl of festivities. The day was long and arduous, but it was very thrilling for all that, and Joan was young enough to be infected by the general air of excitement, to forget for a few hours her own abiding pain.

She was as merry as any of them the following night dressing for the pantomime, giggling helplessly over her unmanageable wig and tinselled train, helping Gemma into a witch’s hat and cloak, lighting the big cardboard pumpkin lamp for her with a candle that would wobble and fall over at every turn, threatening to set them all on fire.
There was a fairy queen with an attendant retinue of rather large and clumsy fairies, there were gnomes and
villains
and even a pantomime horse concealing two plump and perspiring young women whose antics were at times impeded by their outbursts of helpless laughter.

Vera was wonderful, keeping her head when all other heads threatened to be hopelessly and irretrievably lost. The orchestra struck up, the show began ... and somehow contrived to reach its triumphant conclusion with medical students throwing complimentary “bouquets” of carrots and sundry other vegetables on to the stage.

But it had been a wonderful evening, everybody said. The patients were wheeled back to their wards, the lights were put out and the worst of Christmas, the older nurses declared with a
sigh
of relief, was over.

It was during the first week in January that the staff dance was held, a splendid affair in one of London’s most glittering West End hotels. Joan dressed for it with a sense of anticipation, a trembling, feverish eagerness that she could scarcely control. Because Garth would be there! Garth would dance with her! It was dreadful of her to let it be so important to her. But she couldn’t help it. It was like a drink of water to someone dying of thirst in a desert—the prospect of being in his arms once more, having him hold her close even in the conventional setting of a ballroom!

Getting into the exotic tulle frock with its sapphire colored ruffles she sighed at her own foolishness, remembering again in what joyful mood she had bought this same frock for Garth’s delectation. Well, he would see it tonight, admire it, perhaps. With innocent vanity she surveyed herself in the modest mirror of her cubicle, a tall, slender girl with blue eyes shining under their curling lashes, and hair that shone silken and curling above a smooth young brow. Deftly she painted the line of her lips in soft crimson, touched the tips of her small white ears with perfume. It was an exquisite perfume with a number to distinguish it rather than any name because it bore the mark of one of the most exclusive of Paris perfumers! And Garth had given it to her—in the small white packet he had slipped into her hand on Christmas Day. It was clever of him to have chosen something so perfect, so right. She smiled now, contentedly, savouring its sweetness, thinking to herself of Garth, big and masculine and a little clumsy, going perhaps into one of those shining little shops in Bond Street to purchase it, consulting earnestly with the saleswoman, sampling a little doubtfully this perfume and that.

And her heart was singing suddenly as she slipped on her soft fur coat, thinking that after all it was
she
who had the most precious part of Garth Perros’ allegiance in spite of all that lay between them. Vera might have his name—his son. But to herself he had given his love. For that one clear, exquisite moment it was enough, and her head was held high as she went downstairs, seeing herself rich for life in this strange, ethereal fulfilment of her dream. She would grow old—perhaps here in this very hospital, serving the sick, working hard as year succeeded year, her youth and her loveliness dimming. A grey-haired night-
s
ister, she saw herself, an assi
s
tant matron like Miss Don. Perhaps in tune even an important personage like Miss Darley. But she would have her one perfect memory—her fragrant and hidden romance.

If it was a youthful and wholly unsatisfactory piece of self-dramatization she did not see it as such and it bore her off in a dreamy glow that was almost happiness to the warm shining ballroom and the festivities that lay ahead.

It was all the more hurtful after that to face the moments of bleak, incredible disappointment that followed. Garth didn’t arrive! Ten o’clock came, eleven, and still he had not appeared. With widening, wistful eyes she watched the later guests trickle in, dancing abstractedly with this partner and that.

Was it possible that this night of all nights he had been called away on one of his urgent cases? she wondered. Oh, she couldn’t bear it, if that were so. It was unfair, cruel. Just this one little interval of his companionship she had longed for, this gay moment of festivity, and it was to be denied her.

She was scarcely conscious that it was her arch enemy Barney now speaking to her, coolly taking the chair by her side, so stupidly unaware of him until it was too late to avoid him.

“You’re angry with me, Joan,” he was saying. “About that
Clarion
scoop of mine. I know all about it. Gemma has told me. And I’m sorry, more sorry than I can say. I haven’t dared to come near you for weeks because of it, and I didn’t mean to come tonight only that Gemma roped me into her party at the last moment.”

She regarded him coldly, wearily, saw his handsome, flushed young face bent seriously towards her, his eyes straight and honest and quite unashamed in spite of the humility of his words.

“I had no idea Perros was so close a family friend of yours,” he said. “Maybe I would have kept off him if—” The explanation trailed away.

“I don’t see that his being my friend makes any difference. No matter whose friend he was it was a beastly story to print.” Her words were hard and clipped, one small silver-shod foot tapping the floor beneath the fluffy clouds of tulle.

Barney said, “Listen, Joan. It wasn’t a ‘beastly story.’ News is news. I’ve tried to explain that to you before. When someone as
well-known
as Vera Petrovna and Garth Perros get into a matrimonial mix-up, it’s good human interest stuff. People like to read about it.”

“But why? It’s none of their concern.”

“Yes, it is. Perros and Petrovna are in a small way public figures, and when you’re a public figure the things you do don’t altogether belong to you. The more important you are the less your private life is your own—like Royalty, for example, or the big film stars. It’s my duty to provide what we call feature stories with plenty of human appeal, and when I stumbled upon the Perros romance—well, I thought it was just fine. I had no idea it was going to get you mad with me. If I had I might have left it alone—duty or no duty.” He smiled at her engagingly, and she sighed—a rather tired little sigh.

“Well, I suppose it is very nice of you to apologize to me, Barney,” she conceded. “Even if I don’t quite understand your arguments. It will always seem in bad taste to me to put intimate family matters in glaring type in any newspaper, but I suppose I’m just silly, old-fashioned. In this case you didn’t do the harm you might have done, not at the hospital, anyway. I don’t know about Garth’s other connections—”

“Well, if any of his friends drop him simply because he has a beautiful wife who is a ballet dancer, and because they quarrelled and made it up again, they aren’t friends worth having. If society were to cold-shoulder every married couple, who had ever had disagreements there wouldn’t be many people left to say ‘how-do-ye-do’ to!” His Irish grin was disarming. “Come on and dance with me! Come on and say you forgive me!” he coaxed. “After all, it’s still Christmas tune, the time for peace and goodwill! I’ll leave your friends alone in future, little Joan. You can trust me. They can stand on their heads now, the two Perroses, if they like, in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, and I won’t whisper a word of it to the
Clarion
.”

With a reluctant smile she stood up. It mattered so little suddenly about Barney, whether she forgave him or whether she didn’t. She was limp in his arms as they circled the floor, her eyes still searching feverishly among the crowd of dancers for Garth’s broad shoulder, his dark, untidy head.

Gemma, passing on the arm of her dispenser, shot them a delighted, significant glance, and turned to whisper to her companion. They were glad, of course, because she had made it up with Barney O’Crea. But Joan didn’t care. It all seemed most frightfully unimportant now.

Then it was midnight and supper time, and still Garth had not shown up. The ball would be over by three, Joan remembered, with an intolerable tightening at the heart.

“It’s the blue frock,” she told herself childishly, “something always goes wrong with me when I wear this dress ... Last time it was Vera and Garth turning up at the Carchester ...”

The dancing began again, the fun grew fast and furious. Hiding herself from pursuing partners behind a clump of potted palms, Joan looked on disheartenedly. It would have been such fun if one had been in the mood—this transformation of all the familiar capped and aproned figures of hospital life—stocky little staff nurses in taffeta, dancing with perspiring young medicals, probationers in greens and pinks and white, probationers with bare shoulders and daring backless confections prancing under the very eyes of Miss Don who looked almost festive herself in a plum-colored net and amethyst ear-rings. Miss Darley was regal in black velvet, not dancing very much, but standing by the door chatting to the greater ones present, members of committee, paunchy directors, an odd honorary or so.