Ring O' Roses Read online

  I had to have quiet. I drifted out to the vegetable garden and sat on the bench against a wall. It was too far from the house for the voices on the front lawn to be more than a distant babble weaving into the background hum of tractors. On any fine Saturday at this time of the year, that hum lasted as long as the light. The air smelt as it always had; of new-cut grass, new-turned earth, diesel, lilac, and faintly of salt from the sea eleven miles away. My travel fatigue had gone, but thanks to the champagne I looked at our old house with nothing more than an affectionate incredulity that it should still be there, without us.

  Joss joined me so silently that I was unaware of the fact until he sat down. We exchanged smiles in a silence that picked up old threads far more tangibly than words. It had the unstrained quality only possible between old friends on the same wavelength and was as soothing as my former solitude. But watching him staring at nothing, I was amused to find myself thinking that had we only met today, this particular silence would have been the last thing I would have expected, or maybe even wanted from him. For the first time I understood why my local girl-friends used to envy my treating the vicarage as a second home and grumble at the waste of the best bit of local talent, when Joss brought home his dates from Cambridge, and later as a medic student from Benedict’s. The stream stopped once he was a houseman as then he seldom got home and when he did, he slept. When our house was sold he had been a junior surgical registrar at Benedict’s, with even less free time. Occasionally, in London, Ruth had mentioned him in connection with some girl, but in her letters this last year, only under the general ‘the family are all flourishing’. I wondered vaguely about his present sex life, and then with more interest why every old friend over thirty-five this afternoon had asked when I was going to find myself a husband and been so annoyed by my truthful reply that I was in no hurry to marry.

  ‘So many of you girls say that these days! You know your trouble? Too much freedom, too much money, and you mustn’t mind my adding, too irresponsible!’

  I had let that go with a weak smile since none of the speakers had worked in a hospital and someone, generally Joss, kept refilling my glass.

  He roused himself to ask how I felt about Danny’s rave. ‘Too tired to face it?’

  ‘No, but when I helped Ruth into her going-away gear she told me you only got down this morning. On call last night?’ He nodded, watching me thoughtfully. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Not too tired, but too old. I’d much prefer us to opt out for a civilized meal somewhere on our own. How about it?’

  I hesitated, though I was in no mood for another party. ‘Joss, I know you’re officially lumbered with me ‒’

  ‘And you with me, darling. If you can stand the strain a bit longer, I’ll continue to enjoy it.’ His expression was surprisingly kind. ‘Been very hellish?’

  I shook my head. ‘Mainly thanks to all the champagne you’ve been pouring into me. Anyway, I realized people meant to be kind ‒’

  ‘Dear old chums.’ He grimaced. ‘Theirs is “the loving kindness that is pity’s kin ‒ and is most pitiless.” What’s the verdict?’

  ‘I’d much rather dine with you. Thanks for the invitation and kind thought.’

  He stood up and held out a hand. ‘Darling, you’ve been living too long amongst the primitive colonials if you can now kid yourself any Englishman is ever prompted by kindness when he puts this proposition to a very pretty little dolly.’

  I laughed and stood up. ‘And will there be etchings on your lugger?’

  ‘On home territory? Only a chastely framed copy of the Vicar’s eldest lad’s Union Rules. Hence all afternoon, one miserable glass of champagne.’

  ‘Joshua! Such nobility!’

  ‘Such craftiness! I hoped I’d be driving the lugger.’

  We drove miles across the marsh to a newish roadhouse he said was good value. When the sun went down, the wide, empty sky was scarlet and gold; the wild roses in the low hedges were pale, ghostly; the cow parsley edged the flat green fields with white lace; and the dykes pointed long topaz fingers, seawards. The fat, omnipresent lambs were old enough to risk drowning as they slithered up and down the dyke banks, and everywhere the curlew rose in flapping black and white clouds.

  I thought aloud. ‘This was the kind of English evening that had the brain-drainers over the other side weeping into their Scotch or Bourbon.’

  ‘I’d miss it.’

  ‘I did.’

  He slowed, then glanced at me. ‘Would’ve had me back too. Many want to return?’

  ‘Around sixty per cent of those I met would be back tomorrow if they weren’t hooked on the lolly.’

  ‘Understandable.’ He drove on in silence for a little while. ‘What was working and living over there really like, Cathy?’

  We had finished dinner before I finished telling him and asked his news. ‘The last I heard, you’d both parts of Fellowship and were running Benedict’s Accident Unit. I remember, as that was when I went to ours. Still there?’

  ‘No.’ The way he was watching me through his thick dark lashes struck a forgotten chord. Half-closing his eyes when shy or nervous had been one of his mannerisms as a boy. ‘I’ve crossed the river.’

  ‘To Martha’s’? I smiled widely. ‘How? When? Why?’

  ‘I answered an advert for Hoadley East’s senior registrar. Six months ago. I wanted to work with him.’

  ‘Joss, I’m impressed! You must be very good!’ That was true. Sir Hoadley East was our senior consultant orthopaedic surgeon. Martha’s Establishment was notoriously addicted to appointing Martha’s men to Martha’s jobs, no matter how well advertised. Any outsider who beat the system had to be demonstrably better than Martha’s best. ‘Congratulations,’ I added.

  ‘Thanks.’ He pushed back his chair as the record player switched from ten-year-old pop to a Glenn Miller album. ‘Come and dance to this soothing syrup before the good impression wears off ‒ or are your feet killing you?’

  I stood up. ‘My feet are fine, thanks.’

  ‘Good.’ He held out his arms. ‘We’ll do a nice decorous turn around the floor.’

  A few minutes later, he asked, ‘When did we last dance together?’

  I had to think. ‘Before ‒ before you went to Cambridge. You wanted to practise in the schoolroom. Didn’t work out. You said I was too short for you.’

  He brushed his chin over the top of my head. ‘Not now. You’ve grown.’

  I looked up. ‘Not since I was thirteen, but you have.’

  He smiled. ‘A very young and foolish lad. I like your scent. Handsome present from a well-heeled brain-drainer?’

  ‘From my step-father.’

  His hold tightened slightly. ‘Very generous of you to wear it, Cathy.’

  ‘I felt I should. He’s being so good to Mum ‒ and he insisted on paying my fare home. He’s generous, plus.’

  ‘Sounds a good chap.’ He was briefly silent. ‘Meet many Canadian good chaps?’

  ‘Quite a few.’

  ‘Husky, well-scrubbed, manly characters?’

  ‘To a man.’

  ‘Yet you came back?’ He held me a little off to look at my face. ‘Does this mean you prefer decadent Englishmen?’

  I opened my eyes wide. ‘I have this weakness for crumbling civilization.’

  He drew me closer and rested his face on my hair. ‘Rule Britannia.’

  We danced in silence and extraordinarily well together until the record ended. ‘Come Dancing,’ said Joss, ‘must see us.’ He breathed as if he had been running and we went back to our table without touching each other again, and tried to pretend that the dance had altered nothing. But the new tension between us was tangible as the dinner-table. As always when that happens, we were having two simultaneous conversations. Neither of us paid much attention to the one we put into words. Our silences grew more frequent and were as strained as that earlier one had been easy, for much the same basic reason.

  The vicarage lights were on when we drove round to
the garage behind the vegetable garden. Being so far from the house, once the garage light was off, momentarily the country darkness blinded my now unaccustomed eyes. A few hours back I would have grabbed for Joss. I grabbed for the garage door.

  ‘Want a hand, Cathy?’ He could have been a polite stranger, only had this been our first date a stranger would not now have had to ask that.

  ‘Thanks.’ I felt his hand reaching for mine, but very slowly. ‘And for a splendid dinner, Joss.’

  ‘Thank you. Can we rep mist some time? I’d like that very much.’

  ‘I would, too.’

  ‘Good.’ He kissed my hand. ‘How’s the champagne?’

  ‘Wedding or dinner?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Nicely assimilated by all that good food and coffee. How’s yours?’

  ‘Did you lace mine with vodka?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Must be this moonlight,’ he said and lightly kissed my lips.

  I looked at the dark moonless sky as somewhere an owl hooted. ‘How many times did you get called up last night?’

  ‘I dunno.’ His arms were round me and he began kissing me properly. ‘Serendipity,’ he murmured, ‘that’s the word I want.’

  I was having even more difficulty in touching down than after the flight. ‘For what?’

  ‘The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Cathy, this is bloody absurd ‒’

  ‘Crazy. We should go in.’

  ‘We should, but that’s not what I meant.’ His deep voice was unsteady. ‘You’ve hit me so hard I can’t think straight. All I can think is that I ‒ hell ‒ I think I bloody love you. Mind?’

  I hadn’t any breath for speech. I shook my head. He did not say anything or move for about two minutes. Then he said conversationally, ‘You’re right. Time to go in.’

  The Vicar came out of the kitchen with a glass of milk on a tray as we went in by the back door. ‘Ah, there you are! Pleasant evening? Good, good. Your mother’s rather tired so I’m just taking this up ‒ oh yes, Joss ‒ your hospital rang about an hour ago. Your Senior Surgical Officer asked if you would be good enough to ring him directly you got home. I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll have to leave us prematurely? I’ll just take this up and be with you both, shortly.’

  Joss and I had exchanged similar glances. After the Vicar vanished up the back stairs, I asked, ‘This your free weekend?’ He nodded dreamily. ‘He can’t want you to drive back tonight?’

  ‘Your hospital, darling. Like to bet?’

  I looked at the time. It was a quarter to one on Sunday morning and fifty miles from London. ‘No.’

  Joss raised both arms from his sides then let them fall in a gesture that was both triumphant and defeated. ‘If it’s not union rules, it’s suffering humanity. Come and comfort me whilst I find out what’s bugging Michael Roth, but I warn you ‒ don’t offer me an apple or a flagon as I don’t fancy either!’

  I took his offered hand. ‘I won’t.’

  He rang from the Vicar’s study. He had to drive back that night, as a man called Stan Lawson had a temperature of one hundred and three.

  Chapter Two

  Stan Lawson was Senior Accident Officer in our newish Accident Unit. In Martha’s the job had the same status as the deputy Senior Surgical Officer, and was a yearly appointment open only to Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons with at least six months full-time accident experience. It appealed only to a minority of individualists, owing to the irregular and generally very long hours, the necessity for making and acting on their own immediate decisions, and the professional vulnerability consequent on constant contact with a litigious general public.

  Stan Lawson had been Junior Accident Officer when I worked in our A.U. up to leaving for Canada. When we said goodbye, he told me he intended applying for the job when the then S.A.O.’s contract ended. ‘I’m thirty and I’ve been someone’s stooge long enough. I want the buck.’

  I wished him luck and said I hoped he would not collect the ulcers that seemed to go with that buck. He’d shrugged. ‘There’s no interesting job without massive problems, but at least, in the A.U., we’re spared the super bloody problem bugging most of the human race ‒ why am I in this business? Here we’re in business to save healthy lives. I think that’ll keep me off the tranquillizers.’

  It was his weekend on and he had worked all day feeling terrible but was too busy to do anything about it. When he got back to his flat, his wife, a junior ward sister, had taken his temperature, then rung the S.S.O. The latter told Joss Stan was the sixteenth member of the staff to go down with the new ’flu virus since Joss left that morning. ‘Yesterday ‒ two. Today ‒ this! The S.M.O.’s being revoltingly smug. For the last two or three weeks, every time he’s heard of the odd case in London he’s said once it got a hold it would rip round like bloody dynamite. This is the new bug that hit the States a few months ago and as none of us here have met it, my learned opposite number says it won’t surprise him if even the immunized pick it up. When not slapping himself on the back tonight, he’s forecasting closed wards before the month’s out. Ghoulish bastards, physicians. I’m sorry to do this to you, but I can’t get hold of George Charlesworth (the J.A.O.) as he’s spending his weekend touring. In any event, he hasn’t enough experience yet to take over for more than a day or so. Can you make it tonight to move in first thing tomorrow? Today was a bloody shambles. If this weather lasts, tomorrow’ll be worse.’

  Joss rang off and linked his hands behind my waist. ‘You get this bug across the water?’

  ‘Me and two-thirds of the hospital. If it’s the same, it’s dynamite all right. Makes one feel like death before, during, and after.’

  ‘Bundle of sunshine, aren’t you, darling?’ He kissed my neck. ‘Wonder how many people Stan Lawson’s handed it on to today.’

  ‘I was wondering that. The invasion’s very short. Poor Stan. This’ll worry him a lot.’

  ‘Chum of yours?’

  ‘Just to work with. He’s sweet ‒ so’s his wife. She’s three years senior to me.’ I held his face away. ‘You met her?’

  ‘No. I’m the new boy, remember? I’ve met old Stan. Decent chap. So’s George Charlesworth.’

  I smiled. ‘There you’re one up on me. I know his name, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.’

  ‘Quiet little man with glasses. I’ve heard he doesn’t know much but learns fast.’ He frowned to himself. ‘I’ve also heard one of the three Unit staff nurses is particularly good but can’t remember which.’

  ‘How come you’re such a mine of information on the A.U.? And who’s Sister there now? Know that too?’

  He grinned. ‘Yep. A girl called Naomi Butler. Benedict’s girl. We worked together in our Unit.’

  ‘A Benedict’s ‒’ I laughed with him at my reaction. ‘Just fancy!’

  ‘And knowing your own hospital, how do you think they’ll fancy this Benedict’s take-over?’

  ‘Oh ‒ maybe just a complaint to the Race Relations Board.’

  His triangular eyebrows shot up. ‘Only that? No tar and feathers?’

  I stopped smiling. ‘Joss, have you had much of that?’

  ‘The occasional dirty crack’s inevitable if one muscles in on any enclosed community.’

  ‘Do you dirty crack back?’

  He laughed quietly. ‘I just wear my Benedict’s tie.’

  ‘My dear man! Why haven’t you been lynched? Got a death wish?’

  ‘Oh no, my love,’ he said in a different voice, ‘oh no. So don’t look at me like that, Cathy, or I’ll be in danger of losing my job tonight.’

  I backed rather breathlessly. ‘I’ll make you some tea whilst you change.’

  ‘Tea?’ The Vicar had joined us. ‘I must say I’d enjoy a cup myself. You’ll find your way round, Cathy? Splendid!’

  Joss followed me into the hall. ‘Thank God,’ he said piously, ‘there’ll always be an England ‒ just as long as there’s a tea-leaf left.’<
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  After he had gone the Vicar and I finished the pot in the kitchen. Mr Desmond looked round the huge Victorian room as if seeing it for the first time. He was a slight, neat man with fine-drawn very regular features and thick grey hair. He looked ten years older than he had in church that afternoon. My father had been his great friend. We had exchanged general family news, but neither of us had mentioned either my father or Ruth. Danny was still out and the big house was very quiet.

  He took off his glasses to rub his tired eyes. ‘Parenthood, Cathy, is a blessed but disorientating experience.’ He sighed. ‘For around twenty years the uproar created by one’s children frequently causes one to fear for one’s sanity and eardrums ‒ and then the silence becomes even more disturbing. Come and see us whenever you can spare the time.’

  ‘Vicar, I’d love to. Thank you.’

  ‘That will give Margaret great pleasure. She is going to miss ‒ our daughter. And if, when you visit us, you’ll kindly turn that lamentable record-player in the schoolroom to full volume and cause Margaret to protest you’re disturbing my sermon, you’ll be doing more than one act of charity.’ His dark eyes smiled like Joss’s. ‘The Lord has given to me greatly, but in His wisdom omitted a talent for sermon-writing. Disturbed concentration has long provided an equally cogent excuse for my unfortunate parishioners and my ego.’

  It was the longest conversation we had ever had, possibly as Ruth had always been around formerly and she talked as much as her mother. I was too tired that night to work out whether her marriage, or absence, had been the catalyst with him, or even what had happened between Joss and myself. I was merely conscious of a new and wholly unexpected joy simmering inside me exactly like water coming to boil in a kettle. The sensation lasted all weekend. Before I left Mrs Desmond echoed her husband’s invitation and said how delighted she was that Joss and I were working in the same hospital. ‘Naturally, I realize St Martha’s is a big place and you may not see much of each other, but I expect you’ll manage to keep in touch, won’t you?’