Seven Dials (14 page)

‘Cheeky!’ The voice seemed muffled and then there was a little squeal of laughter, and a breathless giggle and the voice said again, ‘Cheeky devil - just like an octopus -’ and there was a scuffling sound and Charlie stopped walking. The summer-house was now just a few feet away, but she could see nothing because there was no door to be seen and she walked round to the other side, peering as she went, seeking for the doorway.

And found it. In fact the whole front of the little building was open to the view beyond the lawn, where, when there was no mist to obscure it, there was probably a distant view of the sea. But Charlie wasn’t interested in the view; only in the people she could now glimpse inside the summer-house.

It was shadowed in there, but she could just recognize the gleam of a starched white apron and cap and beside them a darker shape and then again there was that little giggle, this time cut off short and Charlie stood there frozen, hating herself for being there and yet not being able to walk silently away.

After a moment, she coughed, feeling wretched and like a character in a bad play, and at once the huddled pair in the shadowed summer-house moved and she saw the apron pull away, saw a pair of hands smooth it down, and then Brin’s voice, that so familiar deep and exciting voice, said, ‘Oh, lummy, caught in the - oh, glory be! No need to flap, silly girl. It’s only my doctor! Good old Charlie! How are you? Why didn’t you let me know you were coming down? I’d have laid on a real welcome for you! God, but it’s good to see you!’

He had come bounding out and was standing beside her
now, holding both her hands in his and shaking them up and down, and his face was alight with real pleasure at seeing her, the uninjured side lifting into a delighted smile and even the damaged one seeming to look good. She stared at him and tried to collect her thoughts; she was wrong, she must be, he hadn’t been locked in that great embrace with anyone, she’d imagined it, imagined she’d seen his hands wandering all over his companion, tugging at that white apron - there’d been no one there, it had been all her own silliness -

‘Well, introduce me, Brin, do.’ The voice sounded pert now and not at all breathless and Charlie turned unwillingly to look at its source. A girl with round blue eyes and a pink and white face surmounted by a froth of yellow curls stood there with her head on one side and her pink button of a mouth half open, staring back at her, and Charlie was suddenly very aware of her own dark thinness compared with this obvious prettiness and felt old and dull and dowdy. Even in her uniform the girl looked delectable, her waist small and tightly defined inside a wide black belt over which her bust pouted lavishly, and her slender legs clad in black silk. Clearly she had plenty of contacts to get her good stockings, Charlie thought absurdly, and then, as Brin said cheerfully, ‘Oh, this is Nurse Macmillan, Charlie, a very naughty little handmaiden of Aesculapius who’s doing her bit to improve my state of mind here. This is my doctor, Miss Lucas, little Mack, and we have to talk. So go and take yourself back to old Mr Pillbrow and see if you can revive the poor old devil in time for his lunch. If you see the battleaxe tell her I’m out here yearning for a sight of her - that’ll keep her happy -’ And he slapped the girl on her neat bottom and she giggled again and went obediently, looking back over her shoulder at him as she did so.

‘Well,’ Charlie said after a moment. ‘I was worried that you might be miserable here! I took rather a dislike to the place when I got here and was feeling guilty for having sent you. Clearly I needn’t have worried.’

‘Oh, Charlie, it’s dreadful!’ he said cheerfully. ‘A positive hive of gentility. Matron works so hard at being a grand lady that she convinces me she started life as a counter hand in Wool worth’s. And the patients - they’re really at the bottom of the world, believe me. Fussing all day about who’s pinched their sugar ration and why isn’t there any jam for tea, and who
did what to who with which - ghastly.’

‘You don’t seem to be too unhappy, though,’ Charlie said, hating herself for the waspish note in her voice as the girl disappeared into the house with a last wave at Brin. ‘As far as I could see you were managing to console yourself pretty well.’

‘Chap’s got to do something to amuse himself,’ Brin said and tucked one hand into her elbow. ‘Come on. We’ll walk round this benighted patch of unlovesome garden and you shall tell me all the news. How is it with McIndoe?’

But she couldn’t leave it alone. She should have been as he was, insouciant and unconcerned, but that just wasn’t possible. ‘Is she someone special, that girl?’

‘Mack? Ye gods, of course not! She’s just number seven.’ He chuckled and hugged her arm closer to his. ‘I thought when I first saw that matron, I’ve got to do something about her, so pompous - it’s unbelievable! So I set out to flirt with her, quite outrageous I was, but it worked! Eats out of my hand now, and then I thought - well, if I can captivate that old bag, even with a face like mine, let’s see what I can do to other women here. And I’ve been flirting with ‘em one after another. Promised myself I’d get every girl on the staff well and truly kissed before I left - and finish with the old bat herself -’

‘Oh! Then it doesn’t matter after all, your scar? You’ve proved to yourself that you can be as attractive with it as you were without it?’

‘Oh no.’ Suddenly he was serious again. ‘It’s one thing to flirt with silly nurses who’ve nothing better to look at than a scarred chap, because all the other men in this place are older than God and about as attractive, but it’s quite another to deal with a career as an actor with this sort of handicap. I still want to know when McIndoe can put it right for me. You’ve fixed it, haven’t you? That’s why you’re here? To tell me it’s all arranged?’ And he looked down at her eagerly, his eyes alight with excitement.

She looked back at him, trying to sort out her feelings and knowing she was a fool. From the moment this man had become her patient she’d been fascinated by him, and for the past few months positively obsessed. She who had always been too busy with her work, with her studying and her patients and her career to be bothered with men, to have been
bowled over so very thoroughly - it was shaming, and her face reddened now as she looked at this man who had been occupying her thoughts for most of the time for so long and realized that as far as he was concerned she was his doctor, his ally, perhaps his friend - but no more than that. He did not see her in at all the way he saw girls with round baby-blue eyes and silly pouting mouths and fluffy yellow curls. They were for holding and kissing and for letting his hands explore as she had seen him in that summer-house exploring -

With an almost physical effort she pulled her thoughts back to the moment and to his question. If that was all she was to him, his doctor and his ally, then that was what she would have to be. To attempt to be otherwise was to be stupid in the extreme and that she must never be - or at least not so that it could be noticed by others. Bad enough that she knew herself to have been stupid. No need to display it -

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not quite - I -’

‘Not quite -’ Brin’s face flattened, every trace of the pleasure that had been there vanishing, and he stared at her with his mouth half open. ‘No quite?’ he said again. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I went to East Grinstead and saw the sort of work he does,’ she said. ‘Appalling injuries. A great deal worse than yours. I can see why he says he has no room for you in his ward. So would you if you could see what sort of people -’

‘I don’t give a damn about other people!’ Brin burst out. ‘Why the hell should I? Why does everyone try to make me feel guilty because I want to be well? Haven’t I as much right as anyone else to be cared for? Are doctors now measuring the sort of treatment they give according to some sort of worthiness table? Are you going to start refusing to help people with - with cancer on the grounds that their cancer is only a little one and that other people have much worse ones? Doesn’t it matter that both lots’ll die if they’re not treated? Doesn’t it matter that I’m as unhappy and as disabled by my injury as a man with a much bigger one? What do I have to do to get across to you doctors that I’m miserable like this? That life isn’t worth living? That I’ve got to be helped? Ye gods -’

‘I know, Brin,’ she said, and she spoke loudly, to over - whelm the almost shrill pitch of his voice. ‘I know - I’m not trying to award scores for misery. I’m just trying to explain to
you why McIndoe won’t take you at present. But I’ve got a plan. I’m going to try to work there with him -’

‘You’re leaving Nellie’s?’ His voice sharpened.

‘Yes. I applied for a job at East Grinstead as a houseman - it’s a step down as I’m a registrar at Nellie’s, but it’s worth it - and I’ll train as a plastic surgeon myself. If he can’t take you after I’ve done my stint there, then damn it, I’ll operate myself. I’ll have all the skills you need by then and -’

‘Is that the best you can offer, you and your bloody McIndoe?’ Brin roared and now his face was mottled with colour and the blood vessels in his neck stood out. ‘All I need is a couple of weeks, surely - a simple operation and then -’

‘Brin, it isn’t as simple as you think. Your scar isn’t as bad as many I’ve seen, but it is involved with several very delicate facial muscles. To operate on it successfully will take a lot of skill. I’m prepared to work at getting that skill for you. I can’t do more. If you can’t accept that, then -’

She stopped and turned away from him, and began to walk back towards the house. ‘Then there’s nothing more I can do for you. I’m sorry, but there it is. Either you wait till I can learn enough to be the surgeon you want, or you find yourself another practitioner to take care of you. I’ve gone as far as I can - I’m sorry, Brin, but that’s the best I can do. It’s up to you, now.’

The big room was dusty and cold and the peeling old green paint and the skylights, still crisscrossed with wartime sticky tape, admitted as little light as possible, yet for all that the place was crackling with excitement and Katy took a deep breath of the chill musty air and felt better than she had for a long time.

This was what she had missed, she now realized; the reality of work. It was all very well to be a film star and have all the fuss that was made of you going on, but filming wasn’t real work, what with all the long boring waiting between shots and the fussing about camera angles and lights and microphones. Real acting started in places like this, rehearsal rooms where a show was put together, painful step by painful step, over long hours of concentrated effort which finally erupted into the high excitement of a long night’s sustained performance.

And she looked round contentedly as all the frustration and loneliness of the last few weeks, ever since
The Lady Leapt High
had been released to such horrid notices, seemed to melt away and smoothed her already perfectly fitting slacks over her hips and pushed up the sleeves of her big baggy sweater - very American that, and she could feel the envious eyes of the other women on her and loved it - and settled down to enjoy her morning.

Across the room Letty was sitting with one buttock perched on the rough deal table that had been set up with a few battered bentwood chairs to accompany it, her head down over a sheaf of papers with smoke rising round it in a lazy tendril from the cigarette she had clamped between her lips. Her eyes were squinted against the smoke, and her hair looked ruffled and messy and her clothes - trousers and an old shirt - were far from exciting, though clearly well cut and expensive, yet for all that she looked good, and Katy grimaced a little at the sight
of her. If I can look as interesting as that at her age, I won’t complain, she thought. It’s as though she’s a spring, all coiled up and only just held in place, waiting for the least touch to explode into vigorous action.

Not like the man on the far side of the table, sitting quietly in his chair, and also watching Letty from deep-set shadowed eyes. Katy couldn’t remember when she had last seen a man so thin; his features were so sharp they could have been carved out with a razor that very morning, and his head looked more like a skull with dead skin stretched, only just, to cover it than like part of a living man. His wrists, emerging from the big shaggy coat he was wearing, were as fragile as a bird’s and his hands looked like great claws from this distance, fleshless and less than human. Yet for all his oddness, there was a familiarity about him.

Katy stared and frowned, trying to think who it was he looked like, and then as he turned his head to reply to something Letty said to him, recognition hit her like a shock wave. It couldn’t be Peter, could it? She’d heard he’d come back to England after doing heaven knows what in the War, and wasn’t too well, but she’d had no idea he was as changed as this, and she sat and stared at him, more subdued than she would have thought it possible for her to be.

To see Peter looking as sick as that made the War suddenly seem to have been important. Sitting in California all through the six years of fighting, working in films, going to parties, swimming and picnicking and being photographed wherever she went and whatever she did, the War had seemed to her to be little more than stints at the Stage Door Canteen and Bond Drives and public appearances at aeroplane factories; but looking at Peter now in a cold rehearsal room in Earlham Street in London’s Seven Dials a full year or more after the War was over, the death and the horror of it became real to Katy for the first time, and she shrank back in her seat, and stopped feeling quite as good as she had. It was as though she were a child again, and a rather stupid one at that, who had suddenly learned to understand what being a grown up was all about. And didn’t like it.

‘All right, everyone, let’s settle down, shall we? Settle down -’ Letty called and the little knot of dancers who had been giggling together in a corner in the time-honoured way
of dancers straightened up and pulled up their thick hand-knitted socks and came padding over to the middle of the room to collapse into elegant heaps at Letty’s feet. The singers, who had been sitting by the old upright piano picking out notes and loudly complaining about its dreadful pitch, closed the instrument’s lid and came across also to sit primly on the chairs provided and the rest of them, actors and speciality acts and musicians, arranged themselves behind them so that everyone was paying attention to Letty, who sat there calmly waiting for silence. And eventually got it.