Nurse for the Doctor (3 page)

“Oh!” Josie exclaimed, and recalled that only that morning she had been wondering whether there was any truth in Rachel Richardson’s story of an unhappy love affair that had been the cause of Dr. Duveen’s accident.

“
Hoped
he was going to marry, I said,” Mrs. Duveen repeated, “because it’s all over now. It ended in a blaze of sunshine, somewhere down on the edge of the Mediterranean, while I was staying with friends in Ireland and wondering how soon we would be starting wedding preparations.”

“Oh!” Josie articulated again, and this time the word sounded as if it was wrung out of her, and was simply weighted down with sympathy—the first real sympathy she had felt for Mrs. Duveen. “What—what a disappointment that must have been for you,” she heard herself saying inadequately.

“It was,” the older woman admitted, “but it was something worse than a disappointment for Michael. As a result of it he ended up in a nursing home—and I thought I was going to lose him,” she finished, with a sudden look of anguish on her face.

Josie sat with her hands clasped in her lap, bereft of words before that naked display of feeling, behind which, she was convinced, there lay an almost unnatural bitterness and resentment. Mrs. Duveen’s mascara threatened to run as the tears coursed their way down her cheeks, and her bright blue eye-shadow looked absurd, as her age, and the strain of the past few weeks showed up with sudden vicious clarity. But she made a tremendous effort and conquered her passing weakness.

“However—all that is over now. All those dreadful days and nights when his life hung in the balance. And now that they are over I want to get him away—away before
he
has a chance to start serious brooding! It is always the readjustment period that follows on a broken engagement that is the most difficult to survive, especially when there is physical weakness as well, and Michael must be helped to get over it as quickly as possible. A friend of mine—the son of a very close girlhood friend—has invited us to stay with him in Spain, and not only would we escape the winter—or, at any rate, a part of it—but the Marquis de Palheiro is charming, and his sister is even more charming. She is a well known Spanish novelist...”

As Josie looked, for some reason that she herself didn’t completely understand, a little surprised, Mrs. Duveen said rather crisply: “There are novelists
and
novelists, my dear. Maria Cortes—which is of course a pseudonym—is brilliant but delightful, and she is also
young.
The marquis has a villa on the Costa Brava, and we are invited to stay there for as long as we care to do so. You can’t think how thankful I am that we have received such an invitation at this time...”

“It does seem as if it might—as if it might have very beneficial results,” Josie heard herself murmuring.

“It couldn’t fail to have beneficial results,” Mrs. Duveen stated quite definitely. “And that’s why I want to know how soon you think my son will be fit to travel.”

“But surely that is a question for Dr. Arbuthnot to decide?”

“Dr. Arbuthnot is a fussy old man, and he said rest for a few weeks in the country. Well, Michael can rest for a week or so ... And then I would like us to get away. You will come with us, of course. It was because I had this trip in mind that I insisted on a nurse who would not look too much like a uniformed attendant, and you struck me as being more the type who could act as a kind of companion to myself—as well as being on hand when, and if, Michael needs you. But I want him to forget this horrible episode of illness and disappointment as quickly as possible.

It was plain that she was obsessed with her plan to give Michael a new outlook on life, and to blot out the unhappiness in his past as quickly and effectually as she could. But as Josie made her way back to her patient at last, she wondered why the name of Maria Cortes had been so deliberately introduced.

“There are novelists
and
novelists ... brilliant but delightful, and she is also
young
...”

Surely, Josie thought, with a frown between her brows, not even the doting mother of an only son would be so foolish as to try and interest him in another woman when he hadn’t yet recovered from the effects of wantonly risking his life because one he badly wanted to marry had turned him down.

And when she entered his room and found him lying with a look of deep, quiet contentment in his eyes she found it difficult to believe that he
had
wantonly risked his life; that the past was something that had got to be blotted out for him.

“You fit in here, Nurse,” he told her, watching her cross the carpeted space to his bed. “That green uniform makes you look like a dryad—or it would if you didn’t cover it up with an apron.
Must
you wear the complete outfit?” he demanded rather querulously, as she possessed herself of his wrist and checked the steady beat of his pulse with her cool fingers.

She looked down on him in the way she had been trained to look at patients when they had to be humored.

“Would it make very much difference to you if I didn’t?”

“I’d like it—my mother would like it, too! It might rob you of a little of your authority, but I’d feel less as if I was still at Chessington House. It’s the psychological approach when a patient has reached the convalescent stage that is so important you mustn’t forget, Nurse.”

She smiled, a dimple appearing at one corner of her mouth; and while she produced a thermometer and prevented him from making further utterances he lay regarding that dimple with a sleepy look in his eyes. The sleepy look was still there, but the dimple had vanished by the time she had reassured herself that his temperature was normal and as she straightened his top sheet and turned his pillows for him she suggested: “I’ll draw the curtains, and then you might like to have a little nap before tea.”

But he reached out and caught her by her arm and prevented her from moving toward the wide window with its silken hangings flowing from a pelmet of the same rich color.

“Don’t be in such a rush. Nurse. I want to know whether my mother has told you about this Spanish idea of hers.”

Josie admitted that she had.

“Have you ever been to Spain?” he asked.

“No, never.”

“Then you’ll enjoy the Costa Brava—and you couldn’t possibly wear a uniform on the Costa Brava!” He was fighting against waves of sleep, and his long eyelashes were drooping downwards, but he still had something to say. “I used to think you were rather a mouse-like person, Nurse Winter—although there’s nothing in the least wintry about you—but now I’m not so sure. You’ve got brown eyes and fair hair, and that’s an uncommon combination in this country. You’re a brown-eyed, fair-haired mouse.”

And then he was asleep.

CHAPTER
III

For
the
next two weeks Josie found it less difficult to assert her authority in the Duveen household than she would have believed possible when she left London.

Her patient improved markedly, and was reasonably amenable to having his waking hours supervised and his hours of sleep insisted upon, even though they frequently encroached on a period of the daytime when he would prefer to be awake. As a doctor he probably recognized that it would be absurd to be unco-operative and delay his own return to health; but as a man in his early thirties, with all sorts of things that he would almost certainly have preferred to do rather than lie in a long chair with an adjustable footrest and a cushion stuffed in at the right angle behind his sleek dark head, he was, Josie considered, remarkably patient. And in spite of his mother’s fears of serious brooding, he spent many hours in the library browsing over the contents of its shelves with the lovely young woman in the beaten silver frame sitting almost at his elbow on the roll-topped desk.

He had but to turn his head to meet those breathtaking Irish eyes and that smile that should have been the very thing to retard his convalescence, but so far Josie had never caught him doing so. She was a little surprised that the photograph remained where it was, but decided that this was too delicate a matter to be dealt with even by Mrs. Duveen, and that unless Michael himself desired the picture’s removal, it would remain where it was. And apparently he didn’t desire it.

Daily he grew stronger, alerter, more interested in his own return to health, and above all amazingly affable to both of the women who shared so many of his waking hours with him. His mother saw to it that she passed much of her time in his company, but Josie absented herself whenever she could without feeling that she was neglecting her job. It was glorious, early autumn weather, and she prowled happily in the garden, ablaze with all the wonderful colors of autumn—the rich reds and mauves of dahlias and spiky asters, the yellow of goldenrod, the pale flame of a creeper that overhung the walls of the kitchen garden—and sat on a bench in the orchard where the russet apples glowed between the leaves. She spent a good deal of her time in the tiny sunken rose garden, where the paths were littered with petals, red, yellow and white, like crumpled butterflies’ wings, and the air was heavy with scent, and thought what a perfect house King’s Folly was when she looked back at it framed in trees. Michael had told her that it dated from the time of the second Charles, and that according to a local story the Merry Monarch had handed it over to one of his lady friends, who in turn had handed it over to one of her own particular friends—hence the name King’s Folly.

But whatever the folly of Charles the Second, Josie knew that if she had possessed such a house herself she would have never wished to leave it. Reflecting, during her solitary walks, on the behaviour of a young woman who had not only turned down a man like Michael Duveen, but a gracious home such as King’s Folly, she found it hard to credit. The young woman must have been extremely difficult to please. Michael alone would have been all that many women would have asked for.

Josie, at twenty-two, had never been in love in her life, and no man had been in love with her, but sometimes she ventured to think about Michael ... She caught herself recapturing mental images of him when he was sitting alone in the library, his head bent over a book, and the sunlight picked out that bronzish patch in his hair. She saw him when he was plainly growing a little tired, and every womanish impulse in her longed to do something to help him ... to take away that exhaustion. Alone in her own room she recalled the grasp of his fingers when he caught at her arm for support, and the way his dark blue eyes smiled at her apologetically in case he was burdening her with too much weight. Sometimes at night she found it difficult to sleep because she thought she heard the tap of his stick on the polished boards, and the slight dragging noise his foot made when he moved about the house, and she wanted to leap out of bed and make sure that nothing was wrong with him.

As the nurse who was responsible for his continued progress she knew that she could always go along to his room and make sure that he was all right. But there was a bell he could ring if he needed her. Over-absorption with the wellbeing of a patient was something that could hardly prove beneficial to the patient himself, and Josie began to be a little alarmed because there could be no denying that she was over absorbed with the wellbeing of Dr. Duveen.

She began to be afraid that he might notice it, or his mother might notice it—and of the two she knew she would prefer that the man himself should suspect her acute anxiety where he was concerned rather than the immensely shrewd Irish widow.

In order to protect herself from suspicion, therefore, Josie seized every opportunity to keep well out of the reach of them both, and it was Michael himself who protested at last that she was as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp save when she was actually needed, and he wanted to know what she did with herself when she was alone.

“I like being alone,” she answered defensively, “and there are always the walks. There are wonderful walks here, and I love them.”

“Then you must permit me to accompany you sometimes.”

“You can’t do that. Your foot isn’t strong enough.”

He seemed very tall when he was standing near to her, and without looking at him, she could feel him gazing down at her with an odd expression in his eyes: an amused, but also, in some curious way, frustrated expression.

“Then you must take shorter walks. I can hobble across the lawn at your side, and we can watch that family of ducks who live on the island in the middle of the lake.”

“Wouldn’t that be very boring?” she suggested, smiling up at him.

“Then we’ll get out a boat—there is one in the boathouse—and you can paddle me across to the island. How about that?” he asked.

She continued to smile as if she was quite certain he was merely joking.

“And supposing I upset you? What would Dr. Arbuthnot say to that?”

“So long as you didn’t drown me he couldn’t say very much. The time is rapidly approaching when I shan’t be a patient of his much longer, and if you did upset us I might even now be up to rescuing you.” And then he shook his head at her. “You’re making excuses, young woman! It’s my belief that you like your own company. I selected you for a nurse because I was certain you wouldn’t try to organize my every waking moment, but I didn’t bargain for your carrying out your duties with monotonous conscientiousness and washing your hands of me between whiles.
Do
you like your own company?” he demanded, as if he thought of her doing so intrigued him.

For once she was not wearing a uniform, and her slim light woollen dress that was a kind of autumn brown made her hair look honey-gold by contrast. The country air had brought a peach-like glow to her cheeks, and her eyes were limpidly brown and almost disturbingly placid, as if at the heart of her she was essentially remote and placid.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “I’m not one of those people who hate their own society, and in the country one is never alone. There is always a feeling of kinship with something—even if it’s only the endless activity in these hedgerows.” She reached out to pluck a scarlet rose-hip and admire it.