A Weekend in The Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Ruth Dean walked slowly, gracefully and very thoughtfully past the front entrance of the hospital, ignoring its architecture and the Fair-bound crowds. There was an unusual concern in her calm brown eyes. She was really worried about her new staff nurse in Walter Walters Ward. The girl had no sense of responsibility. After Ruth’s last free weekend she had returned to find the new staff nurse hadn’t noticed that the first-years doing the Saturday afternoon extra-cleaning during Visitors, had left unchanged the lint collars on all the oil and emulsion bottles in the lotion cupboard. She knew perfectly well those collars had to be replaced every Saturday. Ruth had had to call her into her office and tell the girl to shut the door, an ominous sign they both recognized. She’d had to give the girl a good rocket. First-years had to learn to care for equipment properly before they learnt to care for patients properly, and if allowed to skimp on the one would later skimp on the other. ‘There will be no skimping of any nature in my ward, nurse, and it is your job to train your juniors out of their lazy habits. You are off-duty now, but before you leave my ward will you please replace all those collars. Thank you, nurse. Leave the door open on your way out.’

  Yes, Ruth decided, she’ll remember this afternoon. She had reached the War Memorial. She withdrew her mind from her ward, read the lists, and noticed the same surnames occurring in the names of the Oakden men killed on active service in both world wars. She shook her head. She came from a long line of what her mother termed ‘service people’ but she disapproved of War Memorials. They only upset people. She removed her attention to the two long queues filing patiently but briskly through the two be-flagged temporary entrances to The Green. The remainder of the frontage was roped-off by waist-high red, white and blue bunting but no one was yet attempting to duck in under without paying. This reticence was unconnected with the fact that the two voluntary stewards then collecting ticket-money were both ex-Regimental Sergeant Majors.

  It was another of Oakden’s unwritten laws that no one should duck under the bunting until after five o’clock when the entrance fees of 1/- for adults and 6d. for children, were cut in half, it being universally acknowledged that those who couldn’t afford the tanner or threepenny bit weren’t going to be any use to the stalls, but were welcome to provide a fresh audience for the entertainments and children’s races. At no time was there an entry fee for the races. The prizes were provided by the Organizing Committee from the communal fund financed by private subscriptions. Oakden Fair was purely an amateur occasion; there was no modern Fair-ground machinery, and professional Fair operators never wasted their time trying to obtain licences for the occasion. In the last century it had been used ostensibly as an event for raising funds for local charities, but fundamentally it remained the annual summer gathering for all Oakden that had been long-established before the bonfires were lit on Oakden Down to announce the first sighting of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel.

  Ruth was about to return to her car that she had left for convenience in the car park of The Lamb, when she spotted the Punch and Judy booth. She loved a Punch and Judy.

  ‘One shilling please, miss, and mind you hold onto your ticket. That pays for your tea and all entertainments. Much obliged, miss … And what can I do you for, sir?’

  She sailed purposefully through the ambling crowds and stood on a perimeter of the yelling children and silent adults grouped round the ancient red puppet theatre. Her concern over Walter Walters Ward was dispersed by the exquisite pleasure of watching Toby steal the string of sausages, the Hangman getting himself hanged and then buried by Punch with the inexplicable assistance of a doctor in a dirty white coat and outsize stethoscope. She laughed aloud when the Hangman reappeared as a ghost with luminous teeth. This was really great fun! She was far too amused to notice the interested glances she was collecting from a plump young woman in ‘dirty pink’ with a matching headscarf knotted at the back of her untidy light brown head and white-rimmed dark glasses. The ‘dirty pink’ was the only dress of that colour in sight, but every other young woman on The Green in the semi-county or would-be-semi bracket, wore a headscarf tied on backwards and white-rimmed dark glasses.

  Iris Gordon edged closer, removed her dark glasses and took a long look at the shining roll of brown hair and calm fresh face above the blue-and-white button-through. ‘I say ‒ excuse me ‒ but you must be Ruth Dean!’ Iris exclaimed joyously.

  Ruth turned in surprise. She didn’t at first recognize the speaker, yet something about her teeth was familiar. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, I’m afraid ‒’

  ‘Natch, you don’t get me! You can’t possibly remember me but I knew you at once! You were our Head Girl in my second year at The Haven before we evacuated to Wales. Iris Bennington-Fuller ‒ Iris Gordon now, actually and these,’ she gestured vaguely towards two small children each holding a hand of an elderly woman, ‘are my offspring and this is dear old Nanny! But, natch, you won’t remember a scruffy little junior but one always remembers Head Girls and you were an absolutely wizo Head Girl and we all thought you absolutely the bee’s knees! I keep reading about you in the Old School Mag. ‒ you’ve done frightfully well, haven’t you?’ The piercing voice vibrated with enthusiasm and the smugness of an insensitive young married woman talking to another young woman five years her senior and still single. ‘Frightful congrats! And what are you doing in our dear little Oakden?’

  Ruth heard only the enthusiasm and accepted it graciously. She knew that she had done well and having now placed Iris, it was obvious to Ruth that all that silly giggly little ninny who’d been hopeless at games could have done, was get herself married. It never occurred to Ruth that anyone should pity her single state. Obviously she hadn’t married. Everyone knew the very best nurses never married. In Martha’s, those that married were automatically relegated to second-best; the best in this lower category were those who married Martha’s men; those that married men from other hospitals were third best; those so lost to Martha’s traditions as to marry outside the medical profession were, it was generally considered, kindest forgotten.

  Ruth had enjoyed her school years and especially being Head Girl and whenever free made a point of returning to Old Girls’ functions. One of the many aspects of Catherine Jason that puzzled Ruth, was Catherine’s abhorrence of such functions either in her old school, or Martha’s. She had not yet made one appearance at the annual garden party on the hospital terrace that Matron gave for all Old Marthas. She didn’t, Ruth told her, know what she was missing.

  Within minutes the Gordon children and their Nanny were left to their own devices and the Old Havenites were relishing the enjoyment of exchanging the personal disasters that had ensued in so many of the lives of their former bosom school-friends. An enjoyment that continued whilst they patronized the various stalls, refreshment tent and each other.

  They were having tea when MacDonald arrived shortly after four-thirty for his expected visit to The Friends Of The Garden’s stall and as expected proffered a pound note for four white handmade men’s handkerchiefs labelled 2/- and refused the change. The Matron beamed on him with a proprietary air. She wore her best pre-war floral silk, a large white straw hat decorated with outsize daisies and introduced him to a series of elderly and middle-aged women in pre-war florals and large hats, and the Guest of Honour, the Member’s wife, in post-war dogtooth printed silk, a good corset and small feather cap on her elegant blue hair.

  ‘And what do you think of our Fair, Mr MacDonald?’ demanded the beaming Matron.

  He looked around and smiled more than politely. The Green was large enough for the stalls to occupy one corner, the refreshments and Committee tents another, the conjuror and Punch and Judy a third, the sack, flower-pot, egg-and-spoon and other races a fourth, whilst leaving enough space in the centre for the crowd amiably milling around under the watchful eye of a small army of manly stewards. ‘Without disrespect to Field Marshal Montgomery, Matron, I’d say this explains why we won Alamein.’

  She laughed with the Member�
�s wife who made a mental note to pass this on to her husband for use in his next speech in Oakden.

  Matron said, ‘How right you are, Mr MacDonald! Our stewards are here today in their Working Men’s cloaks, but they’re all ex-servicemen members of our local British Legion and all I can see now ‒ apart from Henry over there ‒ are ex-soldiers.’

  Henry wore an open green shirt and natty brown trousers that were not, yet gave the impression of being, bell-bottomed. All his fellow members of the Oakden Working Men’s Club and Institute in sight wore spotless, short-sleeved white shirts, discreet ties neatly pinned down and razor-creased grey slacks. A posse of these were suddenly, quietly and firmly clearing a wide oval space in the middle of the field. The announcement over the Fair tannoy was too broad Kent for MacDonald’s immediate interpretation.

  The Matron clasped her hands. ‘How nice. Deirdre’s going to dance again! You must watch this, Mr MacDonald! Such a clever dog!’

  Flanked by the Matron and the Member’s wife he had no alternative, though he disliked watching performing animals as much as visiting zoos. He had refused to visit another zoo since taken to his first as a schoolboy. Had the Matron not been there, he would have used The Garden as an alibi and got away. But the Matron knew his presence demonstrated the fact that the hospital hadn’t needed him when he left and that should the need have arisen since, the telephone message to the temporary set in the Committee tent would have had the announcement over the tannoy in seconds. In the event he found the performance less offensive than he had anticipated.

  Deirdre, billed as The Dancing Dog, was an ex-police Alsatian prematurely retired on account of her over-friendly, kindly nature. She patently enjoyed bounding round her handler to the strains of The Girl That I Marry from Annie Get Your Gun. The handler, a local kennels-owner, wore purple satin pyjamas and a purple bow in her grey hair to match the huge bow on Deirdre’s collar and had as an assistant an elderly man (her brother), in black satin shirt and dinner-jacket trousers who MacDonald decided had understudied Henry Irving’s Hamlet and was still working on the part.

  Standing there on one edge of the front row of the crowd, surrounded by large hats and florals, and listening simultaneously to the handler’s ‘… and one, two three, Deirdre … and one, two three …’ to the renewed yells of the children watching the renewed repetition of the Punch and Judy show, to the second group of children pillorying the conjuror ‘… under ye arm … we can see it … under ye arm … it’s under ye arm … we can see it … ye’re no good, Mister …’ and to the waltz booming over the tannoy, MacDonald found himself thinking, Christ. The things I do for England. He grinned to himself, then recognized the source. His grin fell off and his head jerked up as if he were a puppet and someone had tugged the string. He stared over the heads of the crowd opposite and up at the red turrets of The Garden.

  The ripples of final applause were dying away when the piercing, ‘I say, George!’ from behind turned more than MacDonald’s head. Iris was bulldozing a path to him followed effortlessly, if to him surprisingly, by Ruth. ‘I say, George, isn’t it too frightfully wizo! Ruth Dean and I were at school together and when we bumped into each other I just couldn’t believe my eyes! Natch, she didn’t recognize me ‒ I was frightfully young and all that sort of thing when we last met ‒ but she was our Head Girl! Natch I spotted her, and we’ve been having the most wizo natter and when I heard all about her cousin and her staying down for the night and knowing you so well I said she’d just had the vicarage! We’ve fixed it all up! She’s going to have Mummy’s room ‒ at least that’s what we always call the room just beyond ours ‒ Mummy often stays for a night or two when she’s feeling a teensy-weensy bit lonesome but never on Saturdays ‒ her bridge night. Isn’t it all too frightfully wizo?’

  MacDonald said evenly, ‘Indeed’. He looked around to introduce Ruth to Matron, but as the latter shared her Night Superintendent’s opinion of Mrs Gordon, she had removed herself and the Member’s wife. MacDonald smiled at Ruth, ‘This is a pleasant turn-up for the book.’

  She smiled back with her lips. She had earlier been quite pleased by the prospect of spending the night in the Gordons’ house rather than on her own, being too unaccustomed to her own company to enjoy it. But that ‘George’ from Iris, annoyed her. She said in her clear, authoritative voice, ‘It’s kind of you to be so hospitable, Iris, however there is still that small problem I mentioned ‒’

  ‘In the bag, Ruth! All we’ve got to do is nip along to the vicarage and drop a note ‒’

  Ruth ignored the interruption. ‘… and Catherine Jason is waking an hour earlier than usual as I said I’d run her up to see her husband. He won’t be disappointed as he’s not expecting her, but I must let her know ‒’

  ‘I could run her up,’ MacDonald put in politely, looking at his watch. ‘Just gone five. I’d intended going back to The Garden now, and if all’s still quiet, driving up to the San. Foreseeably, I can leave that for a wee while longer. Will that save you the problem, Ruth? Or have you left a suitcase with the Westons?’

  ‘No. Still in my car.’ She hesitated, then read the professional thought beneath his impassive expression. ‘Yes. You’ll catch Mark awake in the early evening.’ He nodded slightly. ‘If you will do this for me, Mack, I know Catherine will be grateful and you can save her from having to make up her bed clean for me. You’ll explain things?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Iris was listening with mixed feelings. She said accusingly, ‘I say, George, you never told me you knew Dr Jason.’

  ‘The subject never arose,’ he drawled.

  Ruth smiled possessively. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much time for what you always call a wee blether, Mack. Not in ‒ what? Just about twenty-four hours?’ She looked at Iris. ‘Ages ago, Mark Jason was Mack’s houseman. Obviously, after years and years we’re all old friends.’

  Iris flushed. ‘And Mrs Jason?’

  ‘In a way ‒ though you’ve never really known Catherine well, have you, Mack?’

  MacDonald shook his head and glanced back at his watch. ‘I’ll take another look at the hospital. If you’ll excuse me ‒ see you both later.’

  They watched the back of his black head until hidden by the crowd, in a slightly strained silence.

  Iris was too curious to stay silent. ‘Raaa-ather an odd sort of chap, actually. Raa-ather glam. I simply don’t understand why he hasn’t married again. I’d have thought all you nurses would have thought him a piece of cake.’

  Ruth’s annoyance returned. ‘Martha’s nurses, Iris, are interested in nursing, not men,’ she retorted with dignity. ‘Unfortunately, we occasionally get the wrong type, but they seldom last longer than their first year. Mack is a senior pundit. In fact,’ she never thought she could bear to say this, but now she couldn’t bear to withhold it, ‘he’s on the point of being appointed a Professor of Surgery. If you seriously imagine any Martha’s nurse would regard a Professor as a piece of cake, I’m afraid your husband can have told you very little about Martha’s. Not that that’s really surprising. I believe you said he only did a post-grad. refresher with us after the war and qualified in one of those places up north.’ Having demolished her would-be hostess, she could be generous. ‘Why don’t we go and have another look at Punch and Judy?’

  Chapter Six

  ‘If you’re wanting the vicar, young man, you’re wasting your time ringing that thing!’

  A small self-derisive smile lit MacDonald’s eyes as he turned from the vicarage front door bell he had just pressed three times. It was a long time since he’d been addressed as ‘young man’ and a few seconds since he had reminded himself he was over forty. The tiny white-haired speaker looked over seventy, frail as a bird, and carried a large gardening trug equipped with implements and watering can. ‘Thank you, but ‒’

  ‘If you’re wanting Mrs Weston, utterly wasting your time. She’s still at the Fair ‒ I know ‒ just left her. The vicar took himself off some while back. He must b
e in as that outer door’s open. Undoubtedly working on his sermon. Bit deaf, poor man, and works so hard on his sermons. Total waste of time. An excellent parish priest but no preacher. His sermons are our penance. Good for our souls. If you’re seeking his attention what you have to do is walk into the hall and give his study door a good hard wallop. That front door’s unlocked. We don’t lock up our houses down here. The study’s the middle room across the hall. Remember, a good hard wallop.’

  He grinned. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘No trouble, young man. You’ll forgive my not lingering. Have to see to my people.’ She waved at the churchyard. ‘If I don’t come once a week in this season the jungle takes over ‒ eleven to see to ‒ I’ll make the round dozen and then the jungle will take over. Last one and I was always considered the delicate one. Ninety next birthday.’ His genuine response delighted her. She flitted off chuckling to herself and disappeared through a side lychgate into the churchyard. He waited a few more seconds then rang the bell again. He had underestimated the traffic. The short drive from the hospital had taken so long it was already twenty-past six. Presumably, she’d over-slept. He kept his finger on the bell. Useless. He’d have to disturb the sermon. He opened the dark-brown glass-panelled door and went in.

  The cool dimness of the hall and the smell of floor and brass polish, dusty hymn books and old clothes evoked an immediate memory of a long-forgotten school holiday in a Manse. There were the same aged cardboard boxes holding jumble awaiting the next sale under the heavy hall table that was covered with the same green-baize bobbled cloth spread with neat piles of leaflets awaiting collection and distribution by church workers. He could almost see the old Minister coming out of his study, ‘You’ll be George, my young cousin Ian MacDonald’s laddie. You’re welcome to my house. Have you scraped the mud from the soles of your boots?’