You Took My Heart (4 page)

“I can’t possibly go to the ballet on Wednesday night, nor any other night,” she told him wildly. “I’m busy working for my first exam, Garth. Truly I am, so please don’t bother me.”

She opened the door then, and fled, not seeing the quick wound on his face, not caring. Because her own wound was so much too great for her. She never wanted to see him again, she told herself. She never wanted to speak to him. She wanted to be done with him now and forever, and she hadn’t the courage to explain to him the reason why. She never would have the courage. For the rest of her time at St. Angela’s she would just have to go on escaping from him in this foolish, unsatisfactory fashion.

Her cheeks were burning as she hurried into Dale Ward. The chestnut-bright hair edging her cap lay curled in damp childish rings on her forehead, her breath felt hot and tight in her breast. It was ridiculous to go on in this way! It was crazy! But Garth had been so much to her. Garth had stood for steadfastness and honor as well as for love. He had been like an anchor to her in the uncertainties of living since her father’s death. She had depended upon him more deeply, more vitally than she had guessed.

And he had failed her.

She reached the kitchen beyond the ward and Scatty was waiting for her, telling her, as usual, to hurry. The lunches, she said, were cooling on the service lift at the far end of the corridor.

Joan picked up a heavy enamel tray and went away dully to collect them. As she lifted the tin-covered plates from the lift she was aware of footsteps behind her. It was Vera Petrovna hurrying to room fifteen. Vera cool and fair and utterly desirable in a flimsy summer frock of delicate green.

She smiled at Joan, her quick, sweet smile, and her voice was eager asking if Ivan was all right this morning, if he had slept well?

Joan told her, yes, Ivan was wonderfully well today and actually sitting up playing.

With a nod of thanks she was gone, her feet
skimming
the corridor floor, her wonderful dancer’s feet with the lightness of thistledown in them. There were flowers in her hand for Ivan’s room, and a bulging, unromantic oil-cloth bag with Ivan’s clean pyjamas sticking out on one side of it, a decrepit Teddy bear on the other.

“Here I am, darling! Here’s Mummie!” she was calling joyfully, as she pushed open the door to room fifteen.

“Oh, Garth—you here, too! How nice,” Joan heard her say, and the door was shut again.

With hands that shook a little, she picked up the heavy tray, odorous now with the scent of roast mutton and cauliflower.

“Vegetables only, for number ten. The steamed sole for Mrs. Eldon,” she was forcing herself to remember. And with a dogged air she set herself to the task of propping pillows behind weakly backs, spreading napkins beneath chins, and shredding the little elegant portion of chicken for poor Mary Bree whose arms were still helplessly bound in plaster of Paris.

CHAPTER FOUR

After that day
Joan avoided Garth more desperately than ever. She even tried to avoid thinking of him, throwing herself into her ward work
with
frenzied energy. At nights, when she was off duty, she studied hard for her approaching examination, sitting at her schoolroom desk of varnished p
in
e in the lecture-room while Miss Don, grim and gaunt on the dais, talked stridentl
y
of circulatory systems and bone processes, of simple anatomy and simpler hygiene. She would illustrate her points on the blackboard, drawing the thin chalky rivers that were meant to be veins, and the pear-shaped blob that was meant to be a heart. (Though how could she know anything about that organ, Gemma whispered, when God had left her entirely without one herself?)

It came to Joan, smiling at this witticism, that it would be good indeed if a heart could be no more and no less than Miss Don was describing it ... a little chalk sketch on a blackboard, a queer, impersonal muscle with a complicated vascular and arterial equipment, a bundle of valves and pumps that had nothing to do with aching and grieving, that could not possibly lie like a lump of stone in a person’s breast day after day!

With her head wearily on her hand, she jotted down this note and that, her blue eyes lifting at times with unconscious pathos to the open window beyond Miss Don’s stern back. And there in the breathless August evenings the trees hung lifeless as painted shadows on a backcloth. And there in the drowsy, dusky square the humble lovers walked, the sound of their murmurous voices drifting into the lighted classroom with its rows of bright, imprisoned heads.

But to Joan, on the whole, those evenings of extra work in the lecture-room were a refuge and a relief. For one thing they kept her nicely out of the Nurses’ Home at the hours Garth might be expected to telephone. And he did telephone assiduously. But to all his messages, scribbled on the ’phone memo-pad by Greta the Home parlormaid, Joan turned a deaf ear. She did not answer any of them.

In this oddly unsatisfactory fashion she got through a whole fortnight of existence, a very long and dragging fortnight. Things would be better, she assured herself, when Ivan had left the hospital and she no longer had to come in contact with him, nor with Vera Petrovna.

And yet when the day came for Ivan to depart, she was perversely reluctant to see him go. She had come to like the small boy much more than she had ever intended to, and still more extraordinarily she had grown to like Vera. The truth was, she supposed, that the two Russians, with their quick, mercurial charm, were a bright spot of color among the rather drab personalities of the other Dale floor patients. She would find her step quickening quite unconsciously as she approached room fifteen, and she couldn’t help being touched by the way Ivan clung to her, the way he singled her out from among all the other nurses as His special friend. He would call her that with his absurd babyish dignity, enquiring of Gemma or Nurse Scatt with gravity, “Is my friend on duty this afternoon?” And if she were he would beg for her to be the one to wash him and make his bed.

“Because you seem to have more time than the others,” he told her rather pathetically. “You don’t scurry me like Nurse Scatt does, and you never put soap in my eye, and you’re kind to Mr. Dippy.”

Mr. Dippy was the disreputable Teddy bear, and Joan had won Ivan’s heart forever the day she rescued him from the hygienic wrath of Scatty, who wanted to have him thrown in the waste-bin in the lotion-room.

“I can get him cleaned up, Nurse, really I can!” she had begged in a passion of anxiety, seeing Ivan’s grey eyes so perilously near to tears. “He’s made of real fur and he will wash beautifully,” she asserted, taking him away before Nurse Scatt could doubt her, scrubbing him to within an inch
o
f his sawdusty life.

When she brought him back with his shoe-button eyes firmly sewn in place and a fresh blue ribbon round his fat neck, Ivan was speechless with joy. He snuggled down with the treasured toy in his arms, and when Joan bent over him to say good night that evening he put a small, soft arm round her neck and kissed her soundly.

“That’s because
you’re
the kindest nurse in the world,” he said drowsily, adding gallantly, but still more drowsily,
“
And
the prettiest!”

And Joan went away with quite a flustered feeling ... because you weren’t supposed to kiss the patients, not even the baby ones, and the feel of Ivan’s soft lips against her cheek and the clutch of his arm round her neck had momentarily done something most disconcerting to the hard, cold knot of pain that served her for a heart these days.

So on that blustery September morning when Ivan was all ready to leave, she went along to room fifteen to say “good-bye” with quite a bleak feeling. And when Vera said in her husky, golden voice, “It hasn’t got to be a
real
good-bye, Nurse Langden. We’ve simply
got
to see you again very soon,” she couldn’t help being relieved. Not that she really intended to go on seeing Vera Petrovna and her little boy. But it was nice of them to be so friendly and appreciative of the trivial things she had done to help them during their difficult hospital days.

It might have been left like that, a courteous but vague invitation, only for Ivan, who was a very exact young man indeed and liked his plans to be definite. Couldn’t his friend come to tea with them tomorrow, or the next day? he asked, and Vera was most enthusiastic, seizing on this idea, making Joan promise in the end to visit them at their Bloomsbury flat on her very next afternoon off.

It was three days later that Joan set out to fulfil this promise. She was wearing a new autumn costume of rough, blue material, a clear deep blue that made her eyes look like gentian flowers under their warm dark lashes. It was a relief to be out of uniform for a few hours, she told herself, and wouldn’t admit, not even in her inmost mind, that the wearing of the new suit was in some way an armor against the beauty of the girl she was on her way to see.

But in the end she was a little ashamed of her smartness because Vera was so specially shabby that day in a worn and shiny serge skirt and a much washed cotton blouse. She was tired too, her dark eyes ringed with violet shadows, her hair a little lank and rough, as though she had not had the energy to brush it. At the theatre, she confessed, they had had to rehearse after the later performance the previous night because of the sudden illness of one of the stars. She was not the kind of star who could be understudied, and a fresh danseuse altogether had been introduced into the company. It had meant hours of work for the whole
corps de ballet
, and Vera had not got to bed until the early morning.

“And on top of that,” she went on with her cheerful little shrug, “I’ve been trying to housekeep—seeing to Ivan’s meals and doing the marketing and the washing-up. We’ve got, this flat but no service, you see,” she explained.

“This flat,” Joan discovered, was a euphonious term for the one large barn-like room in the basement where Vera had received her, and where she now served the somewhat ramshackle meal of coffee, cold sausages and bottled beer, which was her interpretation of an English afternoon tea!

There was, in addition, a damp-smelling flagged corridor outside this room, leading to a forlorn and vast kitchen which had once served the needs of the tall Victorian house, and beyond the kitchen a patch of sooty garden in which a few blades of grass and a handful of chrysanthemums struggled to survive. There was also a bathroom and one small bedroom, and it was all much too dark to be healthy, and much too underground. But it was very cheap, Vera said happily, and there was room to swing cats—and swing her own long lovely legs if she felt like practising. She hated with a kind of frenzy the awful little hotel bedrooms she had had to live in so great a part of her existence.

Nibbling at cold sausages and drinking the very excellent and quite un-English coffee Joan listened in amazement. She had imagined the surroundings of the lovely Vera so differently. Soft shaded pastel walls, she had pictured, and long velvet curtains, and divans heaped seductively with fat cushions. She had thought of Vera, if not wealthy, at least comfortable in an artistic kind of way, at least secure. But there was little of either artistic comfort or security about this dreary residence.

“Actually,” Vera was telling with her naive frankness over the rim of her glass of beer, “we do better in London than anywhere else. Our salaries are quite munificent in London. At the moment I’m getting five pounds a week. That’s why I’m able to rent this furnished flat.”

Joan stammered, “Five pounds a week! But I thought ballet dancers got much more than that.”

Vera shook her golden head and said, “Oh, no. The leading dancers of course, the few with great names, are paid more. But even they don’t get anything like the same money a third-rate film actor can command. As for the dancers like me—the nameless struggling ones, life is just hard work and long hours and small thanks at the end of it.”

“Then why do you do it?” asked Joan.

Vera shrugged again and said she didn’t know. “My mother was in ballet. I was brought up in the atmosphere. I’ve never been particularly good at it,” she confessed, “but I like the drifting life and the music and I love the stage. What I really want to do is to work in legitimate drama. Once I did for a little while. I was lucky enough to be taken on in an English Repertory company playing in the provinces. We toured such lovely old towns—York and Harrogate and as far north as Edinburgh. We came south to Bath and Bournemouth and Torquay. It was spring and I was so happy. Then Ivan was born—”

She stopped abruptly.

Joan felt the stab of hot blood in her cheeks and a wave of utter confusion swept over her. Suddenly she was so hurt and so panic-stricken inside that she could neither speak nor move. She just sat there huddled in the cheap velvet armchair, watching Vera’s cool, beautiful hands lighting a cigarette.

She would die, she felt, if she were forced to listen to any more confidences. She didn’t want to know any more about Vera Petrovna
’
s struggles nor the tragedy of Ivan’s birth. Though of course, Vera Petrovna would hardly be likely to tell her the truth about
that
!

With an effort she stood up. “I’ve got to get back on duty,” she stammered, though actually she still had plenty of time to spare, as Vera would know very well.

Vera’s red lips drooped. “I’ve been boring you with my egotistical grumblings,” she said wistfully. “But please do not yet go. Ivan will be so sad not to see you. He is out driving in the park but he will be home at any moment, indeed I am surprised he is not back already for he knew you would be here at four.”

And even as she spoke there was the sound of a car drawing up before the area railings, and that other sound that sent Joan’s pulses racing in alarm. It was Garth’s voice out there, Garth laughing and talking as he came running down the area steps with the small, warmly bundled invalid in his arms.

They had had the most exciting drive round the Serpentine, he said, rushing into the room in his big, impetuous fashion. He stopped short at the sight of Joan but Ivan in his arms whooped with joy and scrambling from his hold ran to greet his friend with such noisy welcoming that it tided the awkward moment safely over.

After that Joan couldn’t get away easily because Ivan had so much to tell her, so much to show. There was Mr. Dippy to be brought out for a kiss and a new jig-saw puzzle to be inspected, a puzzle that was so enormous it took all the hearth-rug to hold it when it was completed.

Joan tried to keep her mind on these important matters but with every nerve in her body she was aware of Garth’s eyes watching her. He was lounging in the cheap velvet armchair which she had abandoned, teasing Vera with an easy familiarity that smote Joan like a sword. When he laughed at her choice of eatables for tea she offered to go into the kitchen and make him some toast instead. He said, “If you bring me the bread, old thing, I can make it myself here at the gas-fire.”

He seemed so immensely at home, so even comically domesticated, if anything could have been comical about that nightmare half-hour for Joan.

He made the toast most expertly for himself and for Ivan. He went into the kitchen to fetch Ivan’s milk, warming it in a saucepan on the gas-ring. He told Vera he did not think small boys should be given cold sausages to eat, and she replied a trifle sharply that they were perfectly good sausages, and much better for Ivan than the dreadful plum cake she had seen English mammas give to their young. They quarrelled mildly for a few minutes about the rival merits of plum cake and cold sausages, and then they both apologized to Joan and switched the conversation with a jerk to more conventional paths.

But Joan had no heart any more for her visit. She kneeled there on the hearth-rug with Ivan and his toys, so pale and diminished, all the life, all the color drained out of her. Not even the new blue costume could save her now from the awful feeling of defeat that had seized on her. And presently she said once more that she would have to get back to St. Angela’s, glad this time that it was true and that she would
h
ave to run through the intervening streets like a whirlwind if she were to be on duty punctually by six o’clock.

Garth picked up his hat with an air of determination. He would drive her back, he said, and beat down her protests with an almost bullying air.

"Don’t be ridiculous, Joanna!” he commanded. “Trot up those stairs and get into my car this very minute. You know you’ve barely got time to make it even if I drive you. You’d never do it by bus.”

She gave in limply. There was nothing else to do. Vera Petrovna was charming in her farewell, begging her to come again soon, to come any time. “We are really so near to you,” she pointed out. “We are practically neighbors, so you must come whenever you are off duty, whenever you like.”

Ivan said bleakly, “You got to come back I can’t possibly do this ole jig-saw puzzle if you don’t. You’re better at jig-saw puzzles even than Mr. Perros.”

But there was one puzzle she would never solve, Joan was thinking miserably, as she took her seat beside Garth in the big, open car ... the puzzle of Garth and Vera Petrovna, the puzzle of the far-off beginning of this strange story whose climax had so curiously engulfed her too, and shattered her life within her.