You Took My Heart (5 page)

Garth was looking at her intently to the detriment of his driving. With a muffled oath he missed an oncoming taxi-cab by inches, then set his face to the road ahead of him in grim silence.

“It’s nice of you to run me back to the hospital,” she said formally. “Though I could quite well have got there on my own. There was no need for you to leave your friend, Madame Petrovna, on my account.”

She hadn’t meant it to sound bitter and small and spiteful, but somehow it did sound most frightfully all of those things.

Garth laughed. A very hollow laugh.

He said, “That’s right, Joanna! Come out with it. Let me have it in the neck if you feel like it. I’m glad we’ve got to the bottom of the mystery at last. It is because of my friendship with Vera Petrovna that you’re angry with me—it’s that and nothing else which has made you treat me like an outcast these last weeks. I might have guessed it if I hadn’t been such a blind fool. Own up, now! It
is
that, isn’t it?”

“
Yes,” said Joan in a muffled tone, and instantly wished she hadn’t admitted it. Her eyes were hot with pain turning to him. “It’s a little hard for me to understand, Garth. That’s all. She seems to be so very important to you—”

He put in grimly, “She is. Frightfully important.” She saw his face go oddly haggard, his mouth tighten. He said quietly, “Joanna, my dear, I’ve been wanting to tell you about Vera Petrovna for years but somehow I’ve never had the courage. But now you’ve got to know. Vera Petrovna is my wife.”

CHAPTER FIVE

For a moment
Garth wondered if Joan had heard him. His swift unhappy side-glance took in her clear profile, the jaunty new blue hat above the tender curls, the small straight nose, the sweet red mouth quivering a little ominously. So she
had
heard! But he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her eyes looked straight ahead under their warm dark lashes.

Garth swung the big car round into the hospital square. It was quiet suddenly with the traffic of the streets left behind. In the garden the trees stood motionless, tall beech and plane and sycamore touched now with autumn gold. Pigeons fluttered lazily across the roadway, so tame, so fat that they scarcely troubled to get out of the way of the slowly-moving car. High in the cool branches the doves called plaintively.

It was so much too quiet suddenly, too intimate, too sad in this windless evening peace. In the high
clock tower
that topped the hospital pile the bronze hands shone, small tongues of flame picked out by a westering sun, and Garth heard Joan’s quick-drawn sigh at the sight of it. Like a frightened child she was, turning to him now, her blue eyes wide, her face so ivory pale.

“I’ll be late, Garth,” she whispered in terror, as though that was all there could be for her distress!

“It’s five to six. I’ve got to change—” Her hand was already on the door, although the car had hardly stopped. She was out in an instant, running up the steps of the Nurses’ Home.

“Is that all you’ve got to say to me, Joanna?” he called after her, and his voice held a desperate note of entreaty.

But the look she flashed back at him had nothing of kindness in it, nothing of yielding. So hard, so cold she was now, it was as though the warm blue eyes had turned to ice. There was ice in her voice too, answering, “What else can there possibly
be
to say, Garth? You know I can’t stop now.” And even as she spoke she was glad that it was so, that she didn’t have to stay with Garth in this awful wounded moment; that she could so easily, because of her hospital duties, run away from him and hide.

“Then when—where—?” he was asking. “I’ve
got
to talk to you, Joanna!”

She didn’t even reply to that. With a nod of thanks to Greta the parlormaid, who had opened the door to her, she fled down the long hall with its shining, waxen floor, its faint smell of polish and cleanliness. She was breathless reaching her room at last, throwing off her hat and coat, snatching from her wardrobe her pink cotton frock, her apron, her cap. She’d never yet been late on duty. She mustn’t be late now. It was the worst thing you could do because it meant that you took five minutes or so from the person who was waiting to come off duty. It wasn’t only the principle of punctuality that was involved, but the much more important principle of loyalty to the tired Gemma who had worked all through the long day, and would not be released until Joan was there to take her place.

So that when Joan’s fingers shook fastening her stiff belt, it was for Gemma’s sake that she trembled, and for the sound of the great bell now striking the hour. In the back of her mind, in the dark bleeding of her heart that other terror awaited her, pushed now quite genuinely into the background by the fluster of being in time on Dale Ward. If the skies should fall on her and the whole of her world crumble she must still think first of her obligation to St. Angela’s.

A streak of white apron, she was flying across the square, trying to remember that Miss Darley didn’t like you to run, trying so hard not to notice that Garth’s car was still parked in the precincts—outside the medical library now so that he was probably in there in the long, dim reading-room, or even at one of the windows seeing her. Her heart was wrenched at the thought. But she mustn’t let Garth come into her head now!

Missing the lift by a maddening second, she took the stairs two at a time. It was two minutes past six when she got to Dale floor and Gemma was washing her hands in the ward-kitchen, humming to herself happily because she was going to spend the rest
of
the evening with her friend Alan Raine, the dispenser. They would eat at some little place in Soho, and then go on to dance. She was done with the irksome restrictions of hospital until nearly midnight, maybe even later than that if she could work it!

“I’m in the mood for love,” she announced in her pleasant little treble, and in the same breath told Joan that Scatty was in a fever about some instruments which had been found rusty in the surgical cabinet.

“Whoever sterilized them last, she said cheerfully. “evidently left them in the water to get cold and then forgot to wipe them. They are in an awful state! There’ll be the devil to pay if Millet spots them.”

“I’ll clean them,” Joan said dully, and went away to do so. Perched on a high stool in the lotion-room she rubbed at the offending probes and knives and forceps. There was nothing now to put between herself and the hot agony of her mind. The little bustle and excitement of coming on duty had served her so briefly and now, defenceless, and alone, she tried to adjust herself to the amazing thing Garth had to a her. He was married to
Vera Petrovna. She might have guessed at something of the sort, she told herself limply. Garth was hardly the man to have plunged into illicit loves. He was too chivalrous, too idealistic, too brave. She might have known. Vaguely she wondered what the details of the story might be. Though details didn’t matter very much. The bitter fact she knew was enough. Garth was married. He’d been married a long time. “I’ve wanted to tell you about Vera for years,” that’s what he had said. Probably he and Vera had quarrelled soon after their strange, secret wedding, and then she had gone away on her tour. And Garth hadn’t known about Ivan till now. That was most likely how it had happened. But no matter how it had happened, Vera Petrovna was Mrs. Garth Perros. Vera and Garth belonged to one another irrevocably.

Suddenly the bright blades of the knives and lancets went blurred with tears. Garth was lost to her hopelessly and forever! Just how much she had refused to believe so bleak a possibility Joan had not suspected until this moment. Secretly, hidden even from herself until now, had lurked the hope that Vera and Ivan might in some way not matter as greatly as they seemed to matter. That they might disappear again, explained or not explained. She had clung to the belief that Garth would come back to her cleared in some miraculous fashion of the dark mysteries which these past few weeks had enshrouded him. Well, he was cleared right enough. There was no mystery any more, and the dream of her whole girlhood was burned to ashes.

Garth! her heart cried in anguish, Garth! And suddenly he was so clearly in her mind, the dear sound of his voice calling her “Joanna,” the laughing, loving look in his grey eyes, the way his hair grew in its crisp, but ruthlessly brushed-out waves. It was as though he had come into the small, white-tiled room, filling it with his electric, vivid personality, talking to her, teasing her, drawing the very heart and soul out of her in hot and passionate response. She was shaken and sick with the longing for him.

For a while she was so lost, so swamped with pain that she thought she must truly die there with the bright knives twinkling before her. Then with a mighty effort she pulled herself together. People didn’t really die of heartache. Death was not so kind as that, nor peace so easily come by. Numbly she gathered the clinking instruments together and carried them back to the cabinet.

Scatty was joking cheerfully with a home-sick old lady in bed number five, rallying her, telling her that her operation the following day was nothing at all ... absolutely nothing.

“You’ll feel the little prick of a needle here in your own bed in the early morning,” she piped on with such stimulating confidence, “and then you’ll just have a lovely sleep, and when you wake up again you’ll feel like a two-year-old with all your pain behind you.”

“And I won’t see the the-ay-ter, nor those horrid doctors with the carving knives, nor the man with the chloryform?” the poor old lady asked incredulously.

“Of course you won’t,” Scatty said brightly. “That’s not the way we do things in St. Angela’s. You just have a shot of morphia and that’s all you’ll know about.”

The old lady shook her head in wonder. “When I was young and I had me appendick out, it wasn’t like that,” she told Scatty, and Scatty said that was in the dark ages, and that nowadays having an abdominal was just so much child’s play. “You’ll be at home eating fried steak and onions in less than a fortnight,” she prophesied, and hurried in Joan’s wake to cast her eagle eye on the neglected instruments.

“I’d just like to know,” she said fiercely, “whether it was you or Crosbie who threw those probes and things into the cabinet in such a disgraceful condition!”

Joan, knowing perfectly well that it
had
been Gemma Crosbie, said nothing to clear herself.

And somehow the evening dragged by and it was supper-time, and all around her the pink-clad probationers chattered and giggled and ate while she toyed with the food before her. It seemed as though at least a hundred years had gone over her head since she had come home with Garth and he had told her about Vera. A bare three hours or so stretched out in this fantastic pain ... and there was a whole life-time ahead of her to be got through somehow. Funny, she thought, the tricks time plays on you in moments of mental misery. Oh, very funny indeed!

“And how’s the fascinating Garth?” piped up the girl sitting opposite her. “I saw you driving with him in style this afternoon! Did he take you out to tea?”

Joan shot her a glance of fury and said nothing, which was so unlike her usual sunny response to such teasing, that her persecutor shrugged cotton-clad shoulders and left her alone.

It was heaven to get to her room at last, and to know she was safe even from Gemma until almost midnight. It was heaven—just for a moment—to be alone. Then with a surge her unhappiness came back to her. Garth was lost to her. Garth was gone. There was no Garth really—there hadn’t been for the last eight years. She had dwelt in a fool’s paradise at Dipley, waiting for his vacation times, dreaming of him, living for him. Yes, living for him ... fool that she was, so sure, so certain that in the end he would come to her forever, and that their lives would be one. Odd how strange that certainty had been, and yet she had not acknowledged it to herself until now. But it had been the mainspring of her whole existence.

She thought back over the years, the mystery of Garth’s behavior so clear now. He had liked her ... he had loved her perhaps ... he had wanted her. But all the time Vera was his wife—a phantom but terribly real Vera. Why hadn’t he told her? Confided in her? Anything would have been better than to have let her drift on in her warm, lovely foolishness. Oh, he had been cruel, this Garth. He had been so much more cruel than he knew!

She was dry-eyed, undressing at last, getting into her narrow, unfriendly little institution bed. In the dark she lay rigid, hearing the girls along the corridor calling to one another, hearing the lights snap out one by one and the hospital bells strike ten. The day was done. The high song was over. Where did that line come from? Ah, yes, she remembered ... that Humbert Wolfe thing her father had loved and so often read to her in his rich clerical voice ... the words came flooding back to her:

The high song is over. And we shall not mourn now.

There was a thing to say, and it is said now.

It is as though all these had been unborn now,

It is as though the world itself were dead now ...

“Requiem.” That’s what it was called ... there was a thing to say, and it is said now ... it is as though t
h
e world itself were dead now.

The final, sorrowful sound of it. The lovely, aching grief. Like music and like tears. And suddenly, blessedly, her own tears were loosed and, turning to press her head into the pillow, she sobbed and sobbed. Because it was the end of so much tension. For days now, for weeks, watching Garth and Vera, wondering about them, thinking this thing or that, and hope somewhere persisting in spite of everything. Like nursing someone very sick, she thought, hoping against hope that way, achingly hoping day after day. And now the end had come, and it was all over.

* * * *

The next morning she was pale but conscientiously forcedly cheerful. At breakfast-time she joked with Gemma, teasing her about her wan, blue-circled eyes, her suppressed air of dissipation.

“Shut up, idiot! Gemma whispered at last. “I didn’t get in till all hours. I came up the fire-escape, missing night-sister by the skin of my teeth!”

Joan said, “Gosh!” in a suitably awe-struck tone, and Gemma looked pleased. She’d had a rip-roaring good time, she confessed proudly. “We went out to a place on the river. Didn’t get there until nearly midnight. There was cabaret and dancing, and a gorgeous moon and—oh—it was heavenly! I couldn’t possibly have missed it. Alan would have been furious if I had broken up the part for the sake of my mingy eleven-thirty pass.”

Gemma went on to say that it was an especially gay party because Alan’s girl cousin was celebrating her engagement. “There were five of us altogether. The odd man out was Barney O’Crea, an Irish chum of Akin’s. I wish you’d been there to partner him. He’s awfully nice—a journalist. I know you’d like him.”

“I’m sure I should,” Joan murmured a little doubtfully as they left the dining room. In the hall-rack the morning post peeped forth invitingly from the initialled pigeonholes. Joan searched her own and saw Garth’s handwriting. Her face went stony.

“Then come and meet him with me on Sunday night,” Gemma was saying. “That is, unless you’re too taken up with your boy friend, Garth.”

“I’m not taken up with any boy friend,” Joan answered steadily. “And I’d love to meet your Irishman.”

“Good!” said Gemma delightedly. “Then that’s fixed. I’ll tell Alan when I go down to the dispensary for the boracic this morning.”

They were laughing, talking, going up the stairs. In her apron pocket Joan clutched at Garth’s letter. It felt like a hot coal between her fingers.

This was the interval for bed-making and room-tidying before getting back to the morning work on the wards. Joan flung the covers over her bed in double quick time, flipped a duster over her dressing table and fled. She couldn’t let Gemma see her face when she was opening Garth’s letter. She couldn’t let anyone see. In the lobby behind the big linen cupboards there was peace. She ripped Garth’s envelope and read the few lines he had written. He would be along in Dale about four that afternoon. Would she make a point of seeing him for a moment? It was desperately important to him that she should. “Darling, Joanna,
please
!”
he ended. Joan tore the sheet of notepaper into a hundred fragments and went over to the hospital. In the gutters of the square as she passed through, she scattered the fragments of Garth’s pleading, to the indignation of the fat pigeons who had fluttered down hoping for crumbs.

All morning she worked like a fury, polishing, cleaning, serving early lunches of milk and egg-flip, making swabs, packing surgical drums, fitting the trolley out for its round so perfectly that Scatty complimented her, and even Sister Millet looked mildly pleased and forebore to find fault.

At noon for the first time in her training she was left alone in charge of the ward while Sister and Nurse Scatt went away to their midday meal. She felt proud of the responsibility, hovering over the old lady in bed number five who had had her operation and was now sleeping uneasily still under the influence of her anaesthetic. Scatty had told Joan to watch her pulse, to give her a sip of boiled water if she asked for it, to ring the Staff Nurse on the next floor immediately if any emergency arose.

But there was no emergency. Only poor Mary Cree crouched under her bedclothes having one of her sobbing fits. Joan comforted her as well as she could, fetching an armful of cheerful magazines from the library, finding a specially lovely vase of roses and a plate of grapes from the stock of flowers and fruit which had just come in from some Church Harvest Festival.

And all the time she was a little envious of the luxury of the other girl’s tears. Mary Cree could he in bed and sob quite openly, she could seek for sympathy and find it. No one expected her to be anything but broken up because her young man had died. Everyone was sorry for Mary. But Garth was dead too, and there must be no tears. No weakness. If love went out of your life because of some other woman you had to hold your head up, remember your pride.

Soberly, with her lips in a grim line, Joan went off presently for her own meal. Garth was coming to the ward at four o’clock, but she wouldn’t be there. There was a kind of wretched triumph in the reflection. Sister Millet had asked her to go down to Out Patients to relieve a probationer who was ill, and she had only been too glad of the chance of escape.

All through the bright hours of the afternoon she filled in case-sheets, helped visiting patients in and out of waiting rooms and dressing rooms, ran in the wake of fussy, overworked staff nurse who was furious when she didn’t know by instinct just where all the files in the receiving office were kept.

At six, draggled and tired, she was sent into the main waiting-hall to tell the patients still sitting
there
hoping for their turns to come that the work of the day was over and the doctors leaving. She saw a black bonnet nodding frantically to her, a beaming smile. It was Mrs. Eldon. Joan stopped for a word with her. The old lady was quite well again, she said happily, and almost done with the hospital. Today she was merely waiting for the nice young man in the dispensary to bring her the last bottle of her tonic.

Joan talked to her for a while, wa
rm
ed by her friendliness, her gratitude. “It was all due to you, dearie,” Mrs. Eldon told her, “that I had such a good long convalescence. The lady almoner got me a lovely place in a home by the sea. Now I’m fit for work again, and looking for a job.”

Joan asked her what sort of job, and while the old lady rambled on about her prowess as a housekeeper or a plain needle-woman, she recalled with a stab of pain Vera Petrovna, who wasn’t really Vera Petrovna at all, but Mrs. Garth Perros. Vera wanted someone badly for a few hours in the mornings to take Ivan for a daily walk in the park.

Somehow or other Joan made herself say Vera’s name quietly, repeating to Mrs. Eldon again and again the address of the Bloomsbury flat until she had got it thoroughly into her head. Mrs. Eldon was once more filled with gratitude. She seized Joan’s hand and shook it. She said, “You’re my good angel, Nurse. I can’t thank you enough!” Her wrinkled old eyes were filled with tears.

Joan was quite touched by all this. She was young enough to feel just a shade important over the things she had been able to do for Mrs. Eldon. Helping people had a queer satisfaction about it—made you all warm and good inside, she decided. Maybe she would give her life to just this, and no more. Maybe it would be enough. She thought of nuns with their calm, still faces, of wonderful Sisters of Charity who went out to Leper colonies, of Miss Darley, rather less remote than these beings; Miss Darley so proud and so powerful and fulfilled in her responsible work as Matron of the big hospital. There were lots of things for women in life besides love and marriage after all. It was silly to fret yourself sick because the dream of your heart had been shattered, silly to go back to the Nurses’ Home and find yourself quite without appetite for supper, to creep up to bed afterwards and sob yourself to sleep for the second night in succession. Yet that is precisely what she did!

And the next day she had forgotten all about Mrs. Eldon and about good works. Garth came into the ward kitchen when she was making a surreptitious cup of tea for Scatty and herself just before six o’clock. Sister was having her half day off, and they had had a gruelling afternoon. But now, suddenly things had slackened off a bit, and the green distempered kitchen with its screen of leafy trees was swimming in the gold light of evening. On the gas-ring the silvery aluminium kettle hissed cheerfully. Joan turned to find the canister, the little pink enamelled teapot, and found Garth instead! He had come in so quietly and Scatty was miles away at the other end of the corridor. There was no one in the world to disturb them, to object to his being there.

He said gently, “Joanna!” and she caught her lip between small, white teeth, and looked at him with the tears held back in her blue eyes, the tears somehow held back. He had caught her here so suddenly, so unawares. But it was only for a moment, her weakness. She was steeling herself already, drawing herself back from the touch of his hand, saying so frigidly, “Garth, you’ll get me into trouble if anyone comes along and finds you in here!”

“Yes, I know,” he said penitently. “But I just had to come, Joanna. I won’t stay a moment. All I want is to fix up a date with you. This is—let me see—Tuesday. What about tomorrow? You still have your Wednesdays, don’t you? It’s so long since we’ve had a Wednesday together.”

She drew a sharp breath at that. There were patches of white suddenly on her soft cheeks. Just at first she didn’t answer him, turning to switch off the flame beneath the hissing kettle. She took the canister and teapot from the dresser and set them on the table. She was peering into the depths of the canister when she said in a tight little voice, “I’m busy Wednesday. Sorry, Garth!”

She heard him sigh, half impatiently. “Joanna, my dear!” he pleaded. “You mustn’t be like this. You’ve got to stop being so angry with me about Vera. It isn’t fair, until you know everything. You’ve
got
to come out with me soon and listen to the rest of my story. It probably isn’t quite what you think it is.”

Joan said drily, “I don’t see that it has got anything to do with me, no matter
what
it is.”

Garth put his hands on the little white scrubbed table and leaned close to her, too close! Disturbingly she was aware of him ... the deep grey eyes fixed on her so compellingly, the browned, healthy skin, the strong jutting jaw with the dark line of the close-shaven hair beneath its tan. The whole aura of him now, so dear and male and desirable stirring her, threatening her.

“
It’s got everything to do with you, Joanna
,”
he said deliberately,
“
because I love you
.”

She gave a little cry at that. There were red circles now in the pallor of her face, and all at once her blue eyes were blazing. She was so angry. So beautifully, gloriously angry, the hot tide of her wrath quite suddenly saving her from the glamour of his nearness.

How dare he talk to her like this! How dare he! She said in a choking voice, “You must be mad, Garth. Quite mad! I don’t understand you. I don’t think I
want
to understand you—not now. All I want is that you will leave me alone. And that I insist upon. Will you please get it into your head once and for all that I will
not
come out with you, and that I’m not in the least interested in the story of your marriage to Vera Petrovna. I’m just—just a little bit sorry for Vera, that’s all.”

And with that she walked out of the kitchen and into the ward, where he could not follow her with his outrageous, incomprehensible statements about love. Love indeed! Like a young fury she set about the business of giving the ward its final straightening for the night, pulling red blankets tightly over still, meek forms, folding white quilts and carrying them away to the big locker in the corridor. She did not even see him go, did not care whether he went or not. He could stay there in the kitchen and wait for Scatty for all she cared. Scatty might even give him tea. She was done with him. She was clear of him. There wasn’t even any pain left for him, she told herself with a wild sort of delight. For eight years he had fooled her along. Eight long years. And now he wanted to go on fooling her, talking about love, imagining he could explain Vera away as though she were nothing. As though wives didn’t count in the least. Probably they didn’t to a man like Garth Perros, she decided, heaping her condemnations on him now, burying him in them until he was quite lost. Until there was no Garth at all but the fiend in human form she had made of him. She was so angry that she felt magnificent. Garth could never touch her again, never hurt her.

And when the anger had died a little, when she was sitting limply at supper with Gemma beside her she was still beautifully free of the old enchantment. Her horror against Garth’s words of love, his lack of loyalty to Vera were very real indeed. It didn’t occur to her that he had been guilty of that same disloyalty almost ever since she had grown up—that his looks, his kisses for her were all stolen ones. It was his conduct today that she felt illogically enough to be the greatest offence. But then Garth’s marriage had not existed for her before. Now that she knew about it everything was different. She had been brought up in her country parsonage to regard the marriage tie as something very binding and sacred. That Garth was the husband of another woman finished everything for her. It was as clean and swift an ending of her relationship with her lover as though he had died.

In the days that followed it was that which saved her. So completely had she turned away from Garth in her heart, so utterly had she put him out of her mind that she began to adjust herself very quickly. Only at night sometimes the thought of him would come to her in dreams of haunting sweetness. But she didn’t let the dreams disturb her. She threw herself into her work with fresh vigor, worked hard for her examination, and on Sunday night she went out with Gemma and Alan Raine, the dispenser and, met Barney O’Crea. He was a freckled, good-tempered looking boy about her own age, and he had an irresistible smile. She liked Barney.

He took them out of town in his ramshackle little car. It was a warm, windless evening, more like June than late September. They saw the autumn day dying over the Surrey downs, and with the rising of the harvest moon they came to the sea. Alan and Gemma wandered away on the sandy dunes, their arms frankly entwined. Barney and Joan sat in a sheltered hollow and, scooping the white, salty sand through her fingers, Joan listened to the boy’s soft, Irish voice rambling on in a dreamy, companionable way. He told her about his ambitions, about his wonderful job on a great London daily—the job that had transplanted him from a little town in Sligo where he had been reporter, sub-editor and man of all work on a local weekly rag. He didn’t worry her with compliments or try to make love to her. He just lay in the warm sand beside her and talked, or didn’t talk. It was wonderful how comfortable those silences were ... as though they had known each other a very long time indeed. Joan told herself she was really happy tonight, marvellously at peace.