Busman's Holiday, page 1
Busman’s Holiday
Lucilla Andrews
Copyright © The Estate of Lucilla Andrews 2019
This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1971
www.lucillaandrews.com
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork images © michaeljung / PhotoFires (Shutterstock)
izusek (istockphoto.com)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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Also by Lucilla Andrews
from Wyndham Books
The Print Petticoat
The Secret Armour
The Quiet Wards
The First Year
A Hospital Summer
My Friend the Professor
Nurse Errant
Flowers from the Doctor
The Young Doctors Downstairs
The New Sister Theatre
The Light in the Ward
A House for Sister Mary
Hospital Circles
Highland Interlude
The Healing Time
Edinburgh Excursion
Ring O’ Roses
Silent Song
In Storm and in Calm
One Night in London (The Jason Trilogy Book 1)
A Weekend in the Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2)
In an Edinburgh Drawing Room (The Jason Trilogy Book 3)
A Few Days in Endel (writing as Diana Gordon)
Marsh Blood (writing as Diana Gordon)
Wyndham Books is reissuing
all of Lucilla Andrews’s novels.
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
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Chapter One
The only member of the household absent from our farewell party at the gate that afternoon was Psmith. (Psmith with a P, because as a fat, amiable, puppy he had reminded Grandpa of a long-forgotten school friend of that name.)
Aunt Joey, my cousin Nicola and I had tried to coax Psmith from the front hall. Our guides, comforters and friends of one day’s standing, the three removal men, had clucked encouragingly from the huge white van. ‘Come on then, lad! Say t’a-rar!’
Psmith was staging a sit-in by Aunt Joey’s suitcase and ignored us all. Good manners had their place, his eyes said plainly, but at twelve a labrador knew more than how many bones made five. Aunt Joey never left home without that case, he knew it was going somewhere, he didn’t know or mind where, so long as it was clearly understood he was going with it. He did not object to all the furniture disappearing into the van, to moving house the length of England, to moving to the moon ‒ if he could set up house on the moon with Aunt Joey. Psmith was strictly a home is where the heart is dog. All his life his heart had been safely lodged with Aunt Joey.
She looked up at the clear summer sky as the van rumbled off down the lane. ‘I’m glad it’s so fine.’ Her quiet voice was tinged with excitement and nostalgia. ‘It is so much more pleasant to burn one’s boats whilst the sun is shining.’
Aunt Joey was Miss Joanna Allendale. She was two years older than my father, the eldest of her four brothers. Nicola’s father was the second son. All our uncles were married and had families, but Nicky, as she was always called, and myself, were the only girls. I’m Frances, and made family history by being an only child, but having so many cousins and Nicky close as a sister, as a child I never noticed my lack of real sisters and brothers. Now I had grown-up I realised how much of this I owed to Aunt Joey and the countless holidays Nicky and I spent with her and Gran and Grandpa, from kindergarten upwards.
Seeing them together now, I thought how much Nicky had altered, and how little, Aunt Joey. Nicky, at twenty-one, had blossomed from the grubby little dumpling she had been until she left school, into a small, chubby, exceptionally pretty and very trendy brunette. Not one kindly line on Aunt Joey’s fine-boned thin face had changed. She had worn her greying dark brown hair in that same tight french knot as long as I could remember. I recognised her blue summer dress as ten years old, and though crisp and neat and with its length now midi, no one could call it fashionable. Yet it looked charming, probably as Aunt Joey was so slim, but also as it made her look ‘just like Aunt Joey’.
She slid a hand through our arms. ‘Girls, you’ve worked so hard and been so good! What would I’ve done if I had had to manage this move without you?’
‘For starters,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t have had to do all the superb cooking you’ve done all week! And we’ve had such fun!’
‘Right groovy!’ Nicky hugged us both. She was a gay extrovert, and when not working for or taking an exam, her high spirits constantly bubbled over like champagne. She waltzed round the lawn then struck a pose with one hand on my shoulder. ‘I think Fran and I are in the wrong trades. Instead of her slogging through four years’ general training as a nurse and me bashing my brains trying to get a good history degree next year, we should’ve gone straight into the removal business! Fran and Nicky, Inc. Limited, furniture shifters, packers, bonfire lighters, wall-washers, extraordinary! Have tea chests ‒ will travel!’
‘Tea! Aunt Joey, I clean forgot!’ I exclaimed untruthfully. ‘Professor and Mrs. Somers came over early this morning when you were busy and said would I be sure to tell you they’d have the kettle on directly they saw our van leave. Nicky ‒ wasn’t there some book you want to return to the Professor?’
‘ “So there was!” ’ Being a better actress, Nicky’s apparent absent-mindedness beat mine hands down. We had arranged this ploy with the kind old friends across the lane without consulting Aunt Joey, as we had all known she would have felt bound to refuse in order to finish the final sweep round, before we moved out to the other neighbours putting us up for the night. The Somers had offered to have us, but as their cottage was small and their adored cat had been involved in a semi-cold-war with Psmith for years, had agreed the alternative might be more suitable.
Aunt Joey still hesitated. ‘I don’t like leaving you, Fran ‒’
‘Psmith’ll keep me company and vice versa.’ We were back in the hall. ‘You wouldn’t want to go to a tea-party, Psmith.’ Nicky crouched down. ‘Cats, Psmith! Ugh! Not your scene.’
Old Psmith ignored us and watched Aunt Joey. Her ‘You wait, Psmith, I won’t be long,’ was all he needed. He stretched out beside the suitcases and was nodding off before they were through the gate.
I waited a couple of minutes, then began sweeping through the empty house with the broom Mrs. Somers had loaned us this morning. The emptiness of that house that was so much a part of my life, was as strange as the silence. In the silence, I seemed to hear the heart of the old house beating away the minutes, and then the years, so many years, so many long-gone visits, suddenly as real as the broom in my hand.
The frail figure of Gran when I was very small with my broken doll in her paper-thin hands. ‘We’ll ask Aunt Joey. Aunt Joey’s good at mending dolls.’
Nicky and I complaining together as subteenagers. ‘Aunt Joey will fuss about washing our hands and not reading late in bed! She thinks we’re still children?’
By then, Gran had become a sweet, distant, memory. Tall Grandpa, with his fringe of white hair and smiling at us over his glasses, we had adored till the night he died peacefully in his sleep without a day’s illness, last year. Aunt Joey had long been my favourite aunt, but in this last year she had become my greatest friend. How strange, I thought, sweeping mechanically, that it had taken a man she had never met and I never wished to meet again, to open my eyes about her ‒ and so much else.
His name was Bart and I thought he loved me as I did him, until our last date when he blurted out the truth. Then he said, ‘Can I see you again, darling?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sure your wife wouldn
I had not written to Aunt Joey, or even Nicky. It hurt much too much. I wrote about my hospital life, I thought as usual to Aunt Joey. Then she sent me a rail ticket, and list of trains in one of her letters. ‘Time you had some country air, Fran. Anytime will suit me.’
Much later, when I had confided it all, I asked, ‘How did you guess?’
In a voice I had never heard her use before, or since, she said, ‘There are some things one never forgets and can always recognise in others. A bruised heart, is one such thing. If the cause in my case, was different, it had the same effect. I ‒ was very fond of someone when I was your age. I believe he was very fond of me. We weren’t engaged, his career was just beginning and in those more formal, slower days, convention insisted he waited until he was in a position to support a wife. Then the war came and he joined the Royal Navy. His ship was sunk with all hands before the first Christmas.’ Her eyes had looked backwards, so sadly. ‘Time heals, but one still remembers.’
I had been deeply touched and as deeply shocked by my own blindness. Till then, it had never occurred to me that Aunt Joey had ever been young, ever dreamed and hoped as all girls dream and hope. To me, to all our family, she was the sensible, practical, quiet Aunt Joey who could always be depended upon to cope in any family crisis, whilst still caring single-handed for her elderly parents, the rambling old house and huge garden.
After Grandpa’s death, at family gatherings, ‘What’ll Joey do now?’ replaced ‘Joey’ll manage,’ on our elders’ lips. Grandpa’s pension died with him, and though he had managed to make some small provision for Aunt Joey, the very long lease he had taken on the house expired in four years’ time.
Whilst the family discussed, Aunt Joey kept her own counsel and found a temporary job as receptionist to a local doctor whose usual receptionist wanted a few months abroad. The family sighed with relief ‒ and a few months later with great pleasure for Aunt Joey, when a solicitor wrote telling her one of Grandpa’s old friends, a bachelor without near relatives, had left her his small, terraced house in Arumchester, a little cathedral city in the south of England. The contents and all his personal possessions the generous old gentleman left to various charitable institutions.
The family telephone wires buzzed. ‘Of course, Joey’ll sell or let the house ‒ she should have no difficulty ‒ and as she lives quietly and is so thrifty she’ll be able to take a little cottage near the old home when the lease expires as it’s too big and expensive …’
Then Aunt Joey wrote to us all: ‘A nice young couple with three small children are desperate for a home up here and more than willing to take on this lease, so I am letting them have this house from early July. I shall move to Arumchester and try to let a room or two and, perhaps be able to find another job to make ends meet …’
The family telephone wires turned red hot. ‘Move the length of England! Paying guests ‒ a job ‒ uprooting herself from all her friends ‒ at Joey’s age! Most of her contemporaries will soon be thinking ahead to their retirement, not planning a new life ‒ and it won’t be easy to make new friends ‒ she doesn’t know what she’s letting herself in for. We must stop her!’
Nicky’s university was far from London and we had not met much during the last two years. She rang me up out of the blue one May evening. ‘My Mum’s getting at me to get at Aunt Joey. How about yours?’
‘She and Dad are worried. They wish they weren’t stuck out in India on this new project of Dad’s firm. They feel it must be a mistake as Aunt Joey’s never done anything like this before.’
Nicky’s snort echoed across three counties. ‘She couldn’t! She’s never been free to do her own thing before. I’m right behind her!’
‘Me, too. I say, Nicky ‒ couldn’t we help her move? I’m due for a holiday and isn’t early July in your Long Vac?’
‘Fran, you’re a genius! We’ll do that ‒ oh no! I’ve just remembered I’ve promised Charles I’ll go to Finland with him, early July and even Mum and Dad approve of Charles! Bother!’
Charles was a new name, but as we had lost touch, I had to ask, ‘Charles important?’
‘Sort of.’ She hesitated, then, ‘No! He can go to Finland alone ‒ why should I want to chop trees? I’d much rather move Aunt Joey. Fran, you’ve got yourself a date! Will you write to Aunt Joey? I’m so bad about remembering to write letters.’
‘I’ll check with Matron, then write at once. Charles aside, how’s life?’
She groaned. ‘Exams next week and I know nothing about King Stephen!’
I was still sympathising when she ran out of sixpences and had to ring off.
I saw Matron next day.
‘Yes, Nurse Allendale, those dates will be quite convenient. Arumchester?’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘Indeed, I know it quite well ‒ what’s the address? Yes, indeed, a delightful little square of terraced houses not half a mile from the Close and with Arumchester County Hospital just round the corner. If your aunt is seriously considering letting a room or two, I know Miss Best, the Matron there, will be most interested. Finding convenient accommodation for living-out staff is a problem we all share. You remember Miss Best, surely? Our Assistant Matron up to ‒ four ‒ no ‒ three years ago. Please give her my kindest regards should you meet.’
I promised I would, though the prospect of my running into the young, super-efficient Assistant Matron who had scared the daylights out of my set in our first year was as unlikely as it was terrifying.
The sweeping was done. I rinsed out one of the many cloths waiting to be added to the smouldering bonfire in the back garden, and started wet-dusting the window-sills, delighted the tea-party was lasting so long. It was the first little break Aunt Joey had had all week and whilst Nicky and the Professor were swapping present with fifty-year-back university shop, I suspected Mrs. Somers was loading Aunt Joey with more cuttings from the Somers’ microscopic garden. How we would transport them was another matter, but as my aunt was an ardent gardener, we’d manage somehow. I smiled to myself at the prospect of cramming into the boot of her small and decidedly aged car, the precious pots of geraniums, fuchsias, a cutting from the old fig tree, a snip from the flowering currant, and the almost overpoweringly healthy and rather ugly succulent with an unpronounceable name that we called The Monster, now waiting with the rest outside the garage. As The Monster flourished on the kitchen window-sill, Nicky and I had tactfully suggested it might be happier left with the new owners. ‘I did offer,’ explained Aunt Joey, ‘but they didn’t seem to care for the poor thing ‒ and how can I abandon it?’ Being her, she couldn’t, so The Monster was driving the three hundred and something miles with us tomorrow.
Refreshed by his snooze, Psmith had pottered in and out, keeping one eye on me, another on the suitcases. Suddenly he charged upstairs, along the first floor corridor to the old sewing-room. ‘What’s up, ‘Psmith?’ I followed to investigate. ‘Mice?’ A deep growl, heavy thud, and groaning floorboard came from the sewing room, but when I reached it, the room was empty.
I made straight for the small, open dormer window. It overlooked the roofs of the spare room and garage that had been added to the house sometime between the world wars. The drop was only a few feet and in his prime, Psmith had leapt in and out like a yo-yo, as had my cousins and myself, though it was strictly forbidden. But an old apple tree growing just close enough to be reached from the garage roof, made it an exciting and speedy route to the back garden when Aunt Joey and Grandpa weren’t looking.
A pathetic black face looked up at me from the spare room roof. ‘Psmith, you poor darling, stuck?’ I dropped down and stroked him gently. He was winded, but otherwise seemed unhurt. ‘Poor old boy! You’re not as young as you were and you have put on a bit of weight. Get your breath and I’ll try and get you back up ‒ oh, no!’ I squealed with horror as Psmith showed his appreciation by laying a dead mouse on my foot. I patted him not to hurt his feelings and kicked the tiny limp form off the roof.
‘One’s heard of it raining cats and dogs,’ announced a deep voice below, ‘so why not mice?’
