Green for Danger, page 4
Something broke in her, and she went up close to him, grasping at his coat sleeves with her little hands, straining herself against him as though both giving and taking comfort. “Oh, Barney—I’m sorry, darling. Don’t look like that, my dearest; you break my heart, I’ll never hurt you or deceive you, Barney, honestly I won’t, I swear I won’t.…”
He looked down at her sadly, at the lovely little face and deep, deep into the limpid eyes. “Oh, Freddi,” he said, “my little love—don’t frighten me! The bare thought of ever losing you, makes me sick and dizzy.… You’re mine, Freddie, aren’t you? Promise me you’ll always be mine, Freddi, promise me.…”
She closed her eyes, pressing her forehead against his shoulder. “Yes, darling, I promise you; always, all my life.”
A man called from the ward. “All right. I’m coming. Look, Barney, you must go, dearest. The tib. and fib. will be in soon, and I must get all this cleared off.… (Yes, all right, nurse is coming!) Good-night, my love.”
The appendicitis case had woken and was in some pain. She gave him the last injection of morphia and went back to the bunk. The casualty in the corner bed was moaning softly; she shone her torch for a moment on his face, but his eyes were closed, and she went back to her work; but again there was a step at the door and Gervase Eden came in. “Hallo, Nurse Linley, my lovely one!”
“Oh, hallo, Gervase,” she said uneasily.
“You look like an orchid, Frederica, sitting there with the light shining down on your hair. How do you manage to be so full of colour when you’re wearing a plain grey dress?” He saw the look that lit up her eyes and added hastily: “I got that out of a book!”
“And you’ve been going round looking for a female in a grey dress ever since, to try it out on,” said Freddi, laughing; but her heart did a foolish little somersault in her breast.
“Why the devii can’t I just ask for Night Sister, and not go and make jokes that they take too seriously?” thought Eden, exasperated with himself. He hastened to ask where Night Sister was.
“On one of the other wards; do you want her?”
“Not a bit,” said Eden, and Frederica smiled again. “For a moment, Gervase, you looked at me as if I was Sister Bates!”
“My dear—have I got a special look for Sister Bates?”
“Gervase, of course you have! You look at her all cross and withdrawn, like this!” She assumed an expression of hideous ferocity, screwing up her lovely little face, drawing together the delicate eyebrows, pursing her full, red Burne-Jones mouth, in an effort not to laugh. “Do I look funny, Gervase? Do I? Do I look like you looking at Sister Bates?”
“Oh, Freddi,” he said, “you don’t look funny at all. You only look adorable.…”
Something shivered between them as real and potent as an electric shock; and she was in his arms, pressing her body against him, reaching up to him for kisses that he could not restrain. “Oh, Freddi—Oh, God! Oh, Freddi.…” But in a moment he had pushed her away from him, unfastening her hands from his shoulders, shifting away to the other side of the table, nervously fingering his tie. “I’m sorry, my dear. I—I lost control for a moment. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have done it.” He stood silent, violently pressing his forehead against the back of his hand. “I feel such a rotter, Freddi. Do forgive me and forget all about it.” He ignored the fact that, of the two, it was she who had most completely ‘lost control’.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Gervase. But as for forgetting.…”
He refused to recognise the significance in her tone. “Just let’s pretend that it never happened, Freddi. I feel so rotten about it.” He said deliberately: “Rotten to Barney, I mean,” and added, smiling shakily, “You must obviously never make funny faces again!”
She stood in stricken silence, staring at his face; and, at a step in the passage, escaped into the ward. Sister Bates came into the bunk. She said, spitefully, sick with jealousy and anger: “Oh, there you are, Major Eden! I thought I should find you here!”
“I’m making my rounds,” said Eden, who had finished them half an hour ago.
“Do you kiss the nurses in every bunk, when you’re making your rounds?” she said furiously, blurting it out in her pain and despair.
“No,” he said coolly. “Only the sisters.”
He had not meant to say it, like that; he had not meant to refer to the past when she had been on night duty, when she had followed him round from ward to ward, when she had ‘happened’ to be in every bunk he arrived at. He had only just meant to pass it off as a light joke, to protect Frederica from her jealous curiosity. He said apologetically: “I’m sorry, my dear; I didn’t intend any wise-cracks. But I was not making love to Freddi Linley, and, to be honest, I don’t know what business of yours it would have been if I had.”
She looked at him bleakly. “Oh, Gervase—how can you say such a thing?”
“My God!” thought Eden; but he said, kindly and patiently: “Look, Marion—we must have this out, once and for all. You and I had a little affair. I never pretended to you for a moment that it was more than that. These things can’t last for ever, and they don’t. It was charming and it was delightful and I’m very grateful for all the fun we had together—but now it’s over.”
“It isn’t over for me,” she said desperately. “After all you said to me, Gervase—all you promised me: you can’t just leave me flat like this.”
“I never said a word to you that you could have taken as a promise of any sort.”
“You told me you loved me …”
But he interrupted her, saying sternly: “I never said those words to any woman in all my life.”
“Oh, words!” she cried passionately. “Who cares about words? Men think that they can do what they like, can treat you as they like, and as long as they don’t say those three magic words, ‘I love you’, they’re free of all responsibility in the matter. Well, you aren’t free, Gervase. Kisses can be promises and—and just looks and silences.… Whatever you may have said about loving me, you let me love you; and now I’m not going to be thrown away because you’ve gone and fallen for a silly little chit like Frederica Linley. I shall go to Barnes and tell him about it. I shall tell him he must put a stop to it, that it’s ruining his life and mine.… I won’t let you go, Gervase. I can’t; it would kill me. I’m not going to.…” She broke off and cried, wretched and helpless: “You can’t be in love with her!”
“I’m not in love with anyone,” he said steadily.
“You’re in love with Frederica Linley. I suppose you want to marry her.…”
“You know I’m not in a position to marry anyone, Marion,” he said impatiently. Once, long ago, one of the lovely ladies had been importunate, and he had not then acquired his skill in evading desperate situations. He had not seen her for several years, but she formed a shield against similar assaults upon his liberty.
“But you don’t love me any more?”
“Oh, Marion,” he said wearily, “do let’s not go over this again. Men fall in love and fall out of love, and that’s all there is to it.” You could not explain that you had never even fallen in love, that the worst you had done was to accept attentions flung at your defenceless heart. “I—I want to remember our little affair with affection and gratitude; let me do that, my dear. Don’t spoil it all by trying to hold on to something that’s gone, past recall.”
But she looked at him with blue eyes, stupid with pain and misery, defeating her own hopes by her uncontrollable need to put those hopes into words. “All the same, Gervase, I won’t let you go; I’ll tell everybody how you’ve treated me, I’ll tell everybody how you’re letting me down for that Linley girl, I’ll make you stay with me.…”
He caught her by the wrist, staring down, grim and angry into her frightened face. “Don’t you dare!” he said.
“I will, Gervase, I swear I will. I’ll—I’ll sue you for breach of promise.… I’ll make it so that everyone thinks what a rotter you are.… All those women in Harley Street.…”
He flung her away from him in disgust and marched off out of the bunk and into the hall; she stayed for a moment, leaning against the wall, sick with realisation of her own behaviour; and then crept out after him; neither of them gave a backward glance towards the ward.
Frederica had retreated into the dark recess of the screens round the newcomer’s bed; she came to the door and stood there, staring after them. “My God—supposing she does tell Barney!” Their unconsciously raised voices had reached her clearly through the thin partition. “Supposing she tells Barney—he’d never speak to me again; he’d never love me again! I should lose him, and all for a man like Gervase Eden.… Gervase would love me for a week or a month, and then just let me go. ‘I want to remember our little affair with affection and gratitude, Freddi; be a little darling, my pet, and let me go!’ He has every woman in the place running after him, and he doesn’t want any of them … any of the others. But he does want me! It was only because of Barney.… Oh, my God! Barney, why don’t I just stick to you, when you’re so decent and sweet and you love me so much more than I deserve … but the moment Gervase comes along—he doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t do anything, he never even touched me before to-night … but my heart turns over and my knees go to water … it’s disgusting, really it is, it’s nothing but sex, that’s all! It’s just my misfortune to look like a blinking machine and all the time be a raging furnace underneath. Oh, well!” she shrugged her little shoulders and smoothed down her apron and settled her starched white veil, “I suppose I’d better stop having inhibitions and look to my suffering patients.” The man in the corner bed said something as she went over to him, taking his hot hand in her cool and gentle one, she thought: “Anyway, thank goodness Esther and Woody don’t know!”
6
Esther had just arrived back from the ward and was sitting in their quarters with Woods, discussing Frederica’s infatuation. A benevolent providence had placed a small row of labourer’s cottages at the main gates of the park, and here the V.A.D.s were accommodated, three or four to each little two-roomed house. The cottages were small and dark and inconvenient, but the plumbing was adequate and each had a tiny kitchen with a gas stove; to three girls unused to community life and especially to life among sixty women of greatly varying ages and drawn from every imaginable class, their cottage was a haven of privacy and relaxation and peace. Frederica, being on night duty, did Box and Cox with Esther in the room upstairs; Woods had a camp bed in the communal sitting-room.
The whole place rocked with the deafening roar of the guns, but the bombs seemed fewer and the flares were dying down. They sat very comfortably with their feet on the fender, drinking cups of cocoa, in defiance of all orders that nobody was to remain in their quarters after black-out, during a raid. Esther said thoughtfully: “What people can see in Gervase, I never could understand. I mean, he’s nice and he’s funny, but he’s as ugly as anything, so thin and grey and, well, he must be at least forty.…”
“Thanks very much,” said Woods.
“Well, I don’t mean that, darling, you know what I mean. He’s not a glamour boy; and he never seems to try and make women like him.”
“Ah, but you’re a lady icicle, Esther.”
“Well, I must be, because I seem to be the only female in the hospital who can see Gervase Eden without swooning at his feet. How did the great Act go to-night?”
Woods grinned. “Not bad at all. I caught up with Casanova as he came out of the concert, and I put on a terrific air of indifference and tried to look anxious to get away, and it was such a change for him, poor lamb, that he fell for it like a log.”
“Mind you don’t fall yourself, Woody. That would be a laugh!”
“I should say it would,” agreed Woods, cackling with ribald mirth. “However, it would do no harm, Esther, and the effect would be the same. Frederica would see that some other female has only to whistle and off he goes like a shot.”
“She must know that anyhow; look at poor old Bates.”
“Ah, yes, but it’s one thing for Gervase to sicken of Bates and turn his attentions to Freddi; and quite another for him to start running after fat old Woody, right in the first stages of his affair with Frederica!”
“Are you so sure it’s an affair, darling?”
“Well, Freddi goes round looking like a love-sick hen all the time he’s about; and love may be blind, but if it gets any worse, Barney’s bound to see it. Barney wouldn’t take a thing like this lightly, you know, Esther. It would break his heart, but he’d just write Freddi off for ever: he loves her too much and too sort of deeply, for her to try playing fast and loose with him. It’s as much for Barney’s sake as Frederica’s that I want to put an end to it if I can.”
“I hope this won’t get you into a mess though, Woody,” said Esther, still not satisfied.
Woods sat staring into the fire, a shawl clutched round her bosom, her exquisite legs stretched out towards the blaze; the lines of laughter ironed, for a moment, out of her face. She said slowly: “My dear, I’m past getting into messes. I’ve led a bit of a comic life, Esther, one way and another, getting in and out of messes and not doing any harm to anyone, that I could see; except perhaps to myself; and even then I don’t know—I don’t think I’d have it any other way if I could do it all over again. Freddi’s different. She’s so young and she’s so pretty and attractive; she must settle down with Barney, Esther, and run his house and have lots of lovely babies and be a little Madam … the charm about Freddi is that she’s so cool and sure and—well, sort of pleased with herself; isn’t she? Not in a nasty way, I don’t mean, but just rather funny and sweet. If she went and got herself a past, she’d lose all that; she’d lose her faith in herself, and, you know, I don’t believe she’d marry Barney. She wouldn’t be able to deceive him, and yet she wouldn’t be able to confess her weakness by telling him. I don’t know. I may be all wrong; I’m rotten about knowing people’s characters … but anyway, if I can prevent her from going off the rocks with this Don Juan of hers, by fair means or foul, I will. I don’t think there’s the earthliest chance of my getting hurt in the process, but if I do, well, I’ve been hurt before and I can take it again.” She belched vigorously and patted her chest. “My Godfathers! That stew!”
“Well, I hope it works, Woody, and I hope you ever get any thanks from Frederica, if it does!”
“I don’t want any thanks,” said Woods calmly; and Esther, looking at her, sitting there bundled up in shawls, fat and jolly and rather common, with her made-up face and shining, shrewd, dark eyes, said to her lovingly: “No, darling, you never do.”
CHAPTER III
1
It was always a miracle, after a heavy raid, to look out in the morning and see one’s world still intact about one. Esther walked across the grounds with Woody, wrapped in her short red-lined cape against the cold, dawn air. “I believe there’s a new crater in the field over there … that must have been the one that fell at about ten. I could have sworn it was nearer.”
“Stick of three,” said Woody comfortably, in the familiar jargon of life under the blitz. “Look, there’s another one, up in the woods—you can see where it’s broken the branches of the trees. Good thing it wasn’t a bit more to the left or the third would have given the Sisters’ Mess a conk. That would have shaken them up!”
“Never run, except for a land mine!” said Esther, mimicking Matron.
The fractured tib. and fib. was agreeably surprised to see her, on the ward. “Hallo, I haven’t met you before!”
“I’ve met you,” she said, smiling, not pausing in her assault upon his person with a large wet flannel. “I saw you last night being wheeled across from the theatre, but you weren’t taking much notice at the time.”
I can’t have been,” he said grinning.
He was a young man, a slim, blond, smiling young man with bright blue eyes and something pleasant and clean and reliable about him. Esther was profoundly bored with dependable young men, but she recognised in him something a little different from the ordinary run. She said kindly: “How are you feeling to-day?”
“Oh, I’m not too bad for seven o’clock in the morning. They say I’ve fractured my tibia and fibula or something. What does that mean?”
“It means that you’ve broken the two bones running down the front of your leg; they generally get sort of—overlapping, you know, and you have to have them pulled apart so that the bones can meet and have a chance to unite again. I expect you’ll be strung up like this to an extension frame for a little while—several weeks; but it won’t hurt, not very much; and then they’ll fix you up in a plaster and you’ll be able to hop about, and when it comes off it’ll just be a matter of getting the leg strong again and you’ll never know the difference. It’ll take a long time and it isn’t exactly heaven, but that’s the worst there is to know.”
He looked at her intently. “Are you just telling me this?”
“No,” said Esther. “I don’t ‘just tell’ people things. Give me your other hand.”
“Are you going to hold it for me?” he asked, laughing.
“Only as long as it takes to wash it; and don’t try to flirt with me—I don’t like it.” She pulled down his pyjama sleeve with a jerk and picked up the basin and towels.
“I’m sorry,” he said, surprised and rather hurt.
“That’s all right.” She looked at the remains of his clothing folded away in the locker, at the shoes beneath it, which, though cut and scratched by debris, were of the rich, chestnut colour that only comes of polishing beautiful leather. “Are you a civilian?”
“No, I’m a simple Able Bodied in the Navy. I happened to be home on leave and I was helping out with my old job.”
She did not inquire as to what his job had been, but the word ‘home’ caught her attention. “Do you live in Heronsford?”
