You Took My Heart (14 page)

And quite suddenly she was talking to Garth Perros! Joan gasped behind her screen of palms and clasped small, hot hands together. Garth looked ill, tired, dishevelled almost in spite of his forma
l
“tails” and trim white tie. His face was grey and lined, his hair even more unruly than usual, and there was something a little wrong about the set of his starched waistcoat—as though he had tumbled it on in the greatest hurry. He had been working late probably, on a case that worried him.

She saw him smile and bow to Matron, and pass on, his eyes searching the room. He was looking for her. He was coming towards her corner. She stepped out from the sheltering palms, and saw his face light up.

“Joan!” he said quickly, a strange urgency in his tone. “I was so afraid you might not be here after all, that you might be on duty or something. I’ve come for just one thing, my dear, and that is, to talk to you. Where can we find privacy?”

Her heart was beating thickly as she led the way to one of the small fitting-out rooms which opened off the main ballroom. The first two they looked into were engaged by tender couples. The third, a dimly-lit place, hung with cigar scented velvet curtains, was blessedly empty. They sat down on a low couch, Garth turning about to the girl at his side with eyes blazing feverishly, eyes that scarcely seemed to see her.

“What is it, Garth?” she asked, the first wild jubilant beating of her heart subsiding, a cold sense of fear invading her. Garth was in trouble. Terrible trouble. She had never seen him look like this before. “What is it, Garth?” she repeated.

And still he regarded her with that blank look, struggling for words that would not come, swallowing once or twice, moistening dry lips.

“It’s Vera,” he said at last. “I’ve done it again, it seems. Driven her away. She’s gone. I don’t know where. She’s taken Ivan with her.”

Joan’s heart leaped once like a startled bird under the blue foaming ruffles, then lay still. Vera was gone. It was over—the experiment so gallantly tried had failed. Vera was out of it now. Garth was free. Free!

“Did you know she was leaving? Did you expect it?” she asked in a land of dream.

He shook his head. “We’d quarrelled today,” he admitted. “But that was nothing. We were always quarrelling. About Ivan mostly. I
’
ve tried to make her see the best things to do for him ever since she came back to me. But it was no use. She’s obstinate, stupid, almost mad, I think, where Ivan is concerned. Today I told her I’d arranged for him to go to a prep school this month—only a daily school, an hour
’
s bus ride from the house. She threw herself into a frenzy.” His voice went hoarse and weary.

“About Ivan going to school?” asked Joan in surprise.

He nodded. “She wanted him to have a governess at home, she didn’t want him out of her sight. She talked about bus collisions, traffic accidents, infection from the other kids at the school; the possibility of his being overworked. I tried to reason with her, but it was no good. In the end I told her I would have my son educated in the way I thought fit for him. That I wouldn’t have him made into a clinging mother’s boy for any woman alive. I told her I’d put his name down for Harrow later on. She went very quiet. I thought I’d won the battle. I might have known better!” He laughed bitterly.

“When I got back from hospital, round about five, I found the conventional, dramatic note on my consulting-room table. She was clearing out, she said, because she was too unhappy to stick it another moment. I’d made life impossible for her by my attitude to Ivan—as she had always feared I would. She ought never to have tried coming back to me. Anyway, she was going and it was no use my looking for her, because she wouldn’t come back a second time. She’s through.” He paused to wipe small beads of sweat from his brow.

“Do you
want
her back?” Joan asked in a low voice.

“It’s not that. It’s Ivan,” he said brokenly. “She says in this letter that she has got to have full control of him from now on. Wants me to give up all claim to him, and offers me a sort of bait for it by giving me permission to divorce her. There isn’t any man really in her life, she declares. And I believe her. But there’s a friend willing to pose as corespondent if I’ll agree to the divorce.”

In silence Joan twisted and untwisted the small delicately perfumed handkerchief in her hand ... Garth’s perfume. He would turn to her now, she was thinking, he would take her in his arms. Vera was gone and wanted him to divorce her, would give him the necessary evidence without any trouble. It was all so easy, so clear suddenly. Garth free, without a smirch to his name, his youthful blunder wiped out. Garth, free to come to her!

But Garth did not cone. He just went on sitting at the other end of the couch staring ahead of him as though he was scarcely aware of her existence. He went on presently, still in that dull, broken way, “She has given me three days in which to think it over. At the end of that time I’m to insert a notice in the agony column of the Continental
Daily Mail
—she has even arranged the notice for me, a cryptic agreement, of course, conveying to her that I’m ready to fall in with her plan.”

“And you’re not going to fall in with it?” Joan forced herself to ask, her heart choked now with its sense of outrage, disappointment, disbelief almost. It was as though Garth had never loved her, never begged her with hot pleading to be secretly engaged to him while he put through his divorce from Vera—a divorce which would have been so much more dangerous than this present plan because he himself would gallantly have borne the part of the guilty one. It was as though there had been no wild, sweet holiday at Dipley last October, no years of frustrated love and longing between them. As though she were the veriest stranger sitting there listening to him, and the grief of losing Ivan was the only grief there could be. Didn’t she come into his mind at all at this moment of upheaval? she wondered savagely. Didn’t she count with him any more? Apparently she did not.

“Of course I’m not going to fall in with her plan,” he was saying angrily. “I’m going right over to Paris tomorrow to start looking for her. It may be that she has gone to her friends there, though the Continental
Daily Mail
circulates in many other places besides Paris. Still, it is a forlorn hope. You see, I’ve
got
to find her, Joan, I’ve got to reason with her. I can’t let Ivan go like this.”

“He means so much to you then?”

“Not only that, but he can’t be left to Vera’s tender mercies. I’d no idea until I lived with them just how bad she is for him. She isn’t—well, she’s not quite normal over Ivan. She’s obsessed by him.
Her emotional life is definitely warped, where he is concerned. I’m psychologist enough to see that and to guess at the reason for it.” His tired voice halted.

“Vera’s father was killed before her eyes
when
she was a little girl of eight,” he went on. “She adored him. You can guess what that tragedy would do to her—a sensitive, imaginative little girl,
an
d the violent shock she suffered all those years ago has hurt her vitally, fundamentally. She’ll never be able to love easily, reasonably, sanely if you like. Perhaps a grown man could manage her intensity without being injured by it—but she hasn’t ever loved a man. All her suppressed emotion has become focused on her unfortunate child. It’s a burden I can’t let him carry—wouldn’t dream of letting him carry. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do, nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice to prevent it. I’ve got to find Vera—and—bring her home again.”

The last words sounded as though they were dragged from him. He stood up, grey and shaken.

“I’ve been milling about all the evening at home,” he said, “wondering what on earth I could do. Then I remembered this dance, and the possibility of finding you here, Joanna—” She put out a small hand, and he took it abstractedly.

“I thought,” he said wistfully, “you might have some ideas—some advice for me, but that whether you had or not it would be a relief to talk to you.”

She tried to be grateful for that. She said bleakly, “Advice, Garth? I don’t know.” With a stab she remembered Stefan’s threatening words that day in Vera’s bedroom. Was this, then, the Russian’s scheme; that Vera should slip away with her boy, putting Garth into the portion of accepting her ultimatum or facing unwelcome publicity all over again, the publicity of a defended divorce perhaps, if Garth should ride rough-shod over her demand for her son? Or even police court publicity! Dr. Garth Perros issuing a summons against his wife for the kidnapping of his child. Could such a thing happen? She supposed it could. But in Garth’s case it was unthinkable. All the
dreary
dirty linen dragged out in daylight once more, hurting Garth’s work, breaking the hearts of the old people at Dipley, shattering their pride.

She passed a weary hand across her eyes, trying to think it all out clearly, bravely, trying to decide whether she should tell Garth about Stefan,
or not. In the end she mentioned his name falteringly.

He nodded. If he was surprised at her awareness of Stefan’s significance to his wife he did not show it. “I thought of Stefan Didyatski right away,” he agreed. “I rang him up this evening and found him at home. He was polite, non-committal—obviously I couldn’t say much to him, but I gathered he was pretty well aware of the situation between Vera and myself, and that he knew Vera had cleared off. But he swore he didn’t know her whereabouts, and wasn’t likely to know. I’ve a pretty shrewd idea, all the same, that it is Stefan who would be willing to be co-respondent if I agreed to this ridiculous, trumped-up divorce.”

“Then he
must
be in touch with her, must know where she is!”

Garth shrugged. “I couldn’t make him admit it,” he repeated.

They looked at each other dully, hopelessly. Beyond the closed door of the little room the orchestra broke into Auld Lang Syne noisily, making it sound like a “swing” tune.

“The last dance,” Joan whispered regretfully. “The party is over.” The words echoed in her heart, for indeed, she told herself, as far as she was concerned the party was most dismally and completely over. She had not danced with Garth. He had not even seen her pretty frock. She might as well have been bundled in sackcloth for all he cared tonight. Vera was gone away, and he was broken about it as though his most precious dreams had been shattered. Frankly, she couldn’t understand it. Though, of course, it was very sad about Ivan ...

They moved towards the ballroom mechanically, and with a frantic sense that she’d been somehow inadequate throughout the whole of this miserable discussion she clutched at Garth’s arm. “I’m sorry, my dear,” she heard herself murmur. “I’m truly sorry you are so worried, Garth. I wish I could help.”

For answer he closed his hard brown hand over her limp fingers and held them tightly.

Then they were back in the crowd again, in the lights and noise. Everyone was dancing to the traditional air in a great untidy circle. Everyone sang. The orchestra swelled and crashed. The fun was fast and furious. In a moment they had been seized upon, forced into the romping, laughing line, Garth between Sister Perry and a beaming Scatty, Joan between Gemma and her young man, Alan.

A few minutes later it was all over, and she was bundling into the hired motor coach which would take her back to the hospital, excited, voluble probationers all about her.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Garth
was in Paris a week, a strange topsy-turvy week for Joan, experiencing her first taste of night duty. It was the day after the staff dance that she had found herself listed for change, whisked without warning from the pleasant atmosphere of the children’s block. In the grey January mornings now she went to bed in a darkened cubicle on the top floor of the Home, away from Gemma, away from everyone but the other night probationers, shut in from the sounds of the daytime by double doored corridors and shuttered windows. For hours she would lie awake wearily, and usually about an hour before it was time to get up she would fall into a heavy slumber from which it was agony to emerge. After that came “breakfast,” bacon and porridge that tasted all wrong, strong cups of tea that were the only welcome part of the untimely meal. At eight she was on duty in the men’s surgical ward, a place already curtained and asleep. She learned to creep about silently in felt slippers, doing endless jobs of instrument cleaning and bandage rolling. At midnight it was her duty to descend to one of the vast kitchens in the hospital basement and see to the preparation of the night meal for her ward seniors. At two o’clock she sat down to a pile of mending, and pricked herself with the needle again and again in her heroic efforts to keep awake. At four they started the morning preparations: screens and temperatures for the more wakeful patients, special treatments, general rousing for everybody and breakfasts at five-thirty, the cleaning of the kitchens and bathrooms for the day staff. Until at last it was eight o’clock and she was free to crawl wearily across the raw dawn-lit square to another meal, a walk, and finally bed.

It was like living in a leaden colored nightmare of weariness. By and by, she was told by the more experienced nurses, she would adapt herself. She would learn to sleep by day. But the time dragged along, and as her weariness grew more, intense, her power to sleep seemed to diminish—save for that deadly sickening wave of drowsiness which would attack her in the small hours of the night when she sat nodding over her pile of worn sheets and surgeons’ hand-towels and pillow-slips.

Every night when she came on duty through the brightly lighted main hall her eyes would dart to the big notice-board where, the doctors’ names were listed. For seven nights the slot beside Garth Perros’ name bore the red tab which indicated that he was away. On the eighth night the notice-board. said, “Mr. Garth Perros, No. 5 Theatre, 8.45.” That meant Garth would be operating the next morning. He had got back from Paris.

For another week Joan waited for some sign from him, some message; but none came. In the nature of things she could not expect to run into him casually in the hospital now. He would be finished with his cases long before she came on duty. So that unless he rang her up or wrote to her the entire three months of her night duty might easily go by without any sight of him. She could not imagine him allowing that to happen, but as the days went by without any word from him, her heart grew cold and hot alternately.

Sometimes she was angry with him, furiously angry. It was mean of him, it was cruel, having told her of his anxiety and trouble not now to tell her how his visit to Paris had gone. It was thoughtless, it was unkind. It meant this and it meant that... finally she told herself, in an access of misery, that what it really meant was that he was finished with her, that even as friend and sympathizer he had no more use for her. He was so obsessed with his concern for his son that he had no room any more to be concerned about Joan Langden, who, after all, just stood for another possible complication in an already overcomplicated life.

In a way this was true. Garth was deliberate in his avoidance of his Joanna, Sick at heart at the fruitlessness of his Paris expedition, he had decided to keep out of her way. There could be nothing but worry for her and perhaps really serious and sordid trouble if their association were too marked at this time. He had nothing to offer her, nothing to say. He was shackled to Vera, and Vera had vanished. With more honor than imagination, with an utter disregard of what she might be likely to feel about it, he cut Joan right out of his life and heart for the time being. It was, he felt, the only decent thing to do. It had even occurred to him that Vera, in her frantic desire to end their marriage and secure full power over Ivan, might have him watched. It would be tragedy upon tragedy if, through any indiscretion of his just now, Joan should become involved.

But all unaware of this excellent and commendable train of reasoning, Joan went about those dark January days and nights feeling as though a leaden weight had settled upon her forever. She was unhappy now in a hopeless, lifeless way that made her feel physically numb and stupid. She was tired out after three weeks of night-work and sleeplessness, and a dull resentment of many of her tasks pervaded her.

Why on earth should they have to
sew
of all things? she asked her staff nurse in indignation one night. It wasn’t as though it were of any use to the patients. It was simply a job invented by Matron to keep them going
on
their on-duty times, and sure
l
y it was unnecessary.

“Why couldn’t we have a couple of hours off in turn instead like the day staff do? Why couldn’t we go to
sleep
even?” she asked.

The staff nurse looked shocked. “Night-nurses never have had any time off during their twelve-hour stretch in the whole history of nursing,” she pointed out. “We’re supposed to sleep enough by day, and if we don’t, we have to put up with it.”

“But it’s so illogical, so useless,” Joan protested, and the staff nurse had to admit that it was, but that there was nothing to be done about it. Hospitals were like that. For a worn-out night-nurse to be given time to sleep at night was unthinkable!

After a month of this torment there was a luxurious two nights’ holiday. On the first night Joan went to bed and slept the clock round. Then late in the afternoon she staggered half drugged down to the nurses’ recreation-room and found a note from Barney O’Crea. He had discovered from Gemma Crosbie that she was having some free time and wanted to take her out somewhere. Wouldn’t she have dinner with him?

Still feeling half asleep Joan went to the telephone and called Barney to
say
that she would love to dine with him. There was really nothing else to do, and it would be nice to get away from the atmosphere of St. Angela’s for a few hours.

He came for her at seven, smiling and handsome and sure of himself. He took her to the Carchester and feasted her royally. He told her amusing stories about his newspaper life, he let her grumble to her heart’s content about hospital and night-work and was altogether charming and sympathetic and big-brotherly.

After they had eaten he asked her what she would like to do next. There was no hurry tonight, no foolish eleven-thirty pass. The hours were her own. They went to a night club called the Cat’s Whiskers, and danced. Then they got into a taxi and Barney said they would go to a French place called Le Diable Rouge. It was new and amusing, and there was something rather strange there he wanted to show her or rather someone strange, “The exact double of your friend Mrs. Vera Perros—Petrovna that was,” he said with a grin. “I’ve never seen so extraordinary a resemblance. If I didn’t know Petrovna had given up the stage, and that anyhow this kind of show is not her sort, I’d have staked my life she and Mademoiselle Lucinde were one and the same person.”

In the dimly-lit cab Joan looked at him with eyes that were suddenly afraid. “What kind of show?” she asked hesitatingly. Supposing it
were
Vera, supposing she were right here in London living under an assumed name, working under it. And of course she would have to work at something. She had no other way of keeping herself and Ivan ... unless Stefan ... Joan’s thoughts raced on.

Mademoiselle Lucinde, it appeared, gave an exposition of the Can-Can. Not very well done, Barney added, but daring and amusing, and quite good enough for a night club in the small hours of the morning.

In a gaudily-lit room a few moments later Joan sat breathlessly at a small marble-topped table and waited. The cabaret was in full swing. At an upright piano a wishy-washy young man with a chalk-white face sang wishy-washy songs in Montmartre argot. Joan couldn’t understand a word of them, and felt it was probably just as well. He was really rather a horrible young man. Then the lights were lowered, a purple spotlight danced ... and Vera was there!

Yes, it was Vera. There was no mistaking her. Joan’s heart thumped with excitement as she watched those queer slanting eyes and pouting red mouth. It was Garth’s wife,
here
in this doubtful place, thin and worn and haggard in spite of her grease-paint. She looked
wild
, Joan decided, a little mad even, her great eyes moving restlessly from face to face in the blurred audience as though she were afraid of what she might find there, her smile too fixed, too strained. Mechanically she carried out her performance and then vanished.

Joan stood up and clutched at Barney’s arm. Her breath was like a knot in her chest, her hands trembled. “Barney,” she whispered, “we’ve got to follow her—Lucinde, I mean! We’ve got to find out where she goes when she leaves here. Where is the stage-door—the back, I mean. How does she get out? Oh,
do
get your bill and come on quickly!”

Barney did not argue. He was too good a newspaper man for that. He did not show any surprise.

With a flick of his finger he called the head waiter and there was the flutter of a crisp note exchanging hands. In a moment he had learned that Mademoiselle Lucinde would be leaving the place when it closed at three o’clock. She was due to dance again before then, but if Monsieur wished to speak to her...?

“No, no,” Barney put in quickly. “But perhaps as she is leaving I might have a word with her. Or if you could tell me where she lives—”

The man grinned meaningly. Unfortunately, no. He could not do that. Mademoiselle resided somewhere in the country, he believed, and drove away every night in her own small car, a Horace, which was kept parked in a back street at the rear of the building.

Barney thanked him with a nod of dismissal. After that it was all like a rather feverish dream to Joan, rushing back to Barney’s garage to get out his car, explaining as much as she dared about Vera’s disappearance, begging the young reporter to have mercy on the Perroses this time, to leave this dramatic development of their story alone.

He was glad enough to promise that he would for he had wanted just such an opportunity of winning his way back into Joan’s good graces. “I’ll prove to you that a newspaper man can have a heart,” he said, adding in an undertone, his hand closing over her own, “far too much heart, my dear, at times, to be truly comfortable!”

She ignored the sentimental implication, hardly, indeed, conscious of it. She was in a turmoil in case they should miss Vera, in case she should be gone by the time they got back to the street of Le Diable Rouge.

“We’ve simply got to follow her, Barney,” she kept on explaining, “no matter how far she goes. We’ve got to find out where she lives.”

Barney said crisply: “We will!”

In the shadow of a closed warehouse door they waited close to the shabby little Horace car, Joan shaking in her thin evening cloak, her teeth chattering with excitement and cold. Then the clocks of the sleeping city struck three and presently there were footsteps in the quiet back street, waiters and scullions huddled in their worn coats, musicians with music cases under their arms, all pouring out of the back entrance of Le Diable Rouge.

At last Vera appeared wrapped in a long black coat, quite unmistakable with her uncovered golden head and lithe, graceful movements. Joan gripped Barney’s arm and held her breath. Vera got into the Horace, threw in the clutch and started a little jerkily.

“Let her get away first,” Barney whispered to his too eager companion. By the time they were gliding along in Barney’s open sports car the tail-light of the Horace was already rounding the bend ahead of them.

But it would be easy to follow at this time of night, Barney assured Joan again and again. There was practically no traffic on the road. The difficulty would be to keep the car in front unaware of their existence.

In a daze, Joan crouched in her seat, huddling away from the icy wind. It ruffled her brown-gold curls, whipping them against her cheeks, it cleared her head a little, making her suddenly doubt the wisdom of this wild thing she was doing. For a moment she was distracted with indecision, wondering whether she should tell Barney to turn back. Perhaps Garth knew by this time that Vera was Mademoiselle Lucinde, knew where she was living, where she had hidden Ivan! It might even be he had come to some agreement with her. It might be ... oh, anything ... she was so utterly in the dark these days, so out of his confidence. Since the night of the dance she hadn’t as much as set eyes on him, and anything might have happened in his domestic crisis in the long interval.

They were coming to the suburbs now, the long tree-lined streets, the darkened houses. And for the life of her Joan couldn’t tell Barney to turn back. Something stronger than any doubt held her silent—sheer, primitive curiosity perhaps. But at all events, she consoled herself, no harm need be done by tonight’s escapade. She needn’t even tell Garth about it if it came to that.

Watching the wavering little red light ahead of them, she settled down drowsily. Vera drove badly, Barney was saying; Vera drove abominably. He wondered how she got away with her life—but the angels, it seemed, were kind to. fools and drunkards and women on the roads.

The houses thinned out. There was a by-pass full of glaringly-lit factories. There were hedges and ditches suddenly and the sharp, clean scent of the country.

Joan was almost asleep when it happened, the great truck lurching out of a side turning, the red tail-light of the Horace wobbling ineffectively along the wrong side of the road. Then the crash, the ear-splitting, heart-tearing crash!

For a moment she was aware of the tiny fluttering of her heart. Then she fainted blankly into darkness.

When she came to she was lying alone on the grass verge of the road, the sky, with its pale stars incredibly high above her. With a groan she sat up as recollection returned. Barney and an A.A. man were coming towards her. There was the truck, still halfway across the road, and the little crumpled Horace beneath it.

The A.A. man was stooping
over
her now. Barney was asking her if she were all right. The A.A. man pressed a
pungent
flask of smelling salts into her face, making her sneeze. She tried to stand up and found herself in Barney’s arms. He was holding her very close, but no matter how tightly he held her she could not control her shaking. He was telling her that she would have to be brave. There was the sound of an ambulance bell clanging. People appeared from somewhere miraculously at this dead hour—people in cars and on foot, a policeman or two, fussy and authoritative.

Barney said, “She was killed outright, Joan. She didn’t suffer at all. She wouldn’t even know about it.”