Promise the Doctor (5 page)

‘It’ll have a nest not far away.’ Pete liked to study birds whenever they were in the country. ‘They never come close enough for one to trace them as easily as all that, though.’ He went on to talk at some length of the various means by which birds and other forms of wild life disguised the entrances to their homes as a protective measure, and for the time being his attention was diverted. Joy heaved a sigh of thankfulness. She loved Pete, but as an older brother. Until recently she had thought he felt the same way about her, but now she was not so sure, and she did not want any emotional complications in addition to the domestic changes into which they had all been plunged willy-nilly.

‘When I fall in love, ‘she thought as the car engine hummed beneath the bonnet and the miles fell behind them, ‘I’ll know, I’m sure. I seem to know I’ll feel ... differently, right from the beginning. It won’t be Pete or anyone I’ve known all my life. It’ll be someone right out of the blue ... but I know I’ll feel differently about him, whoever he is, right from the beginning!’

CHAPTER V

Vanmouth, of which she had heard much but never visited, proved a delightful surprise to Joy. The town was larger than she had expected, the traffic brisk and busy. There were several important-looking modern blocks of flats and offices which contrasted strongly with other parts of the town where the buildings were somewhat older although in an excellent state of preservation. Every road and traffic island bore its banks of flowers, and the streets were wide and tree-shaded. Around the town itself were cliffs on three sides, with what looked like a veritable forest of trees sweeping down almost to the sea and golden shore which made the fourth side of the township.

‘It’s lovely,’ Joy breathed as Pete slowed down to ask someone directions as to their route. ‘I think we’re going to like living here. I wonder where St Lucy’s is? Matron said it was in Vanmouth itself, but she didn’t say where.’

‘I expect someone will be able to tell us.’ Pete turned into a wide road and slowed down to ask further directions of a passer-by.

They had not much further to go. Ahead they could see the gleam and glitter of the sun-flecked sea, but the road curved more than once, with little side roads on either side, and, as Pete remarked as they turned again into a wide half crescent, the distance through the town and the distance of the shore to the nearest houses, must both be equally deceptive.

‘Mr. Belding said Fernbank stood alone, almost the last house in its road before the sea ... no,
the
last house,’ she corrected herself quickly, remembering about the piece of land beyond her future home which the Misses Barnes had tried in vain to purchase. ‘Do you think we’re on the right track, Pete?’

‘Navigation correct, ma’am!’ Pete swung the little car to a halt before a tall, old-fashioned pair of iron gates with the legend ‘Fernbank’ woven into the design as part of the decoration. ‘I should say we’re here.’

Joy descended from the mini suddenly feeling shy and just a little afraid. After all, whatever Mr. and Mrs. Wrenshaw proved to be as people it seemed she was in honour bound now to be responsible for their welfare, since that was how Miss Barnes had taken the promise she had made to ‘look after my interests...’

‘And I will,’ Joy vowed mentally, pulling herself together. ‘I can’t let Miss Barnes down now! Not after she’s put so much trust in me!’

With Pete closely beside her she walked firmly along the well-kept path to the wide, highly polished front door and pressed the bell. Almost before it had stopped ringing, or so it seemed, the door was opened and a small, round woman, barely reaching to Joy’s shoulder but with a healthy, rosy face beaming with welcome, stood there, holding the door wide open.

‘Come in, please do!’ she began at once, her voice crisp and firm and not in the least like Cousin Emma’s often weary-sounding tones. ‘You must be Sister Benyon?’ She looked enquiringly at Joy and then back at Pete. ‘Miss Barnes wrote to us about you, before she was too ill to write much at all, that is. She said you had the kindest and most compassionate face in the whole of her experience, and that a body only had to take a look at you to know their life would be as safe in your hands as it could be anywhere on this earth! And this will be your brother, will it? It ran in my mind that Miss Barnes wrote that he and your sister—one of them—were still at school, but it’s months ago now, and I forget so many things these days!’

‘That’s one thing you haven’t forgotten, Mrs. Wrenshaw,’ Joy smiled, her blushes at the unexpected words about herself from the old lady beginning to fade a little. ‘My brother and his twin sister, Sylvia, are both still at school. This is a friend of ours who has lived with the family for a number of years, Pete Bradley,’ she completed the introduction. ‘We shall have to look around Vanmouth and try and find work for him here,’ she ended in a teasing voice. ‘It won’t seem the same home without Pete around!’

She stopped abruptly, covered in confusion by the look in Pete’s eyes, a look she had never intended to call forth where she and Pete were concerned. Hastily she plunged into talk of the house, details of the furnishings, wondering how much extra furniture the family would need to fill all these rooms, but Mrs. Wrenshaw seemed to sense what was running through her mind.

‘There’s more furniture in these rooms than we know what to do with, Miss Benyon, and that’s a fact,’ she said after introducing her husband, a small, neatly built man with snow-white hair and a small, trim white beard, a pair of twinkling blue eyes and the straightest back Joy had ever seen outside a military parade.

‘There’s a sight more up in the attics, too,’ he said now. ‘Old Mr. Barnes had a mania for auction sales. Never bought anything of great value once in his life, but always lived in the hope that one day he’d pick up what he called “a collector’s piece” somewhere amongst the rest of it. Most of the stuff is stored up there, but I dare say a lot of it could be put to some good use. There’s a little place in the town where there are two young men who love ... converting things, I think they call it. They’ll be full of ideas.’

‘We can talk about that when Mother has looked round,’ Joy said as Mrs. Wrenshaw proudly presented them with a lavish tea, ready laid in the dining-room. ‘At the moment I’m only anxious to change the paper on the walls and the paintwork. It will be a little depressing for Lana if she has to lie indoors very much if we leave it the way it is.’

‘That’s your invalid sister, Miss Benyon?’ Mrs. Wrenshaw refused to sit down with them, saying that she and her husband would prefer to have theirs in their own room at the back of the house, but she stayed there just the same, evidently anxious to give what advice and help she could.

‘Yes,’ Joy said gravely. ‘She can’t ... doesn’t walk, yet. We hope she will, given time. It was an accident ... when she was much younger, just at the start of a promising career.’

‘Miss Barnes wrote us all about it,’ Mrs. Wrenshaw told her. ‘And when I knew what she’d done about the house, Miss Barnes, I mean, I said to Eric here’—she indicated her silent husband—‘we can do the old gentleman’s study over for the young lady. She can use it as her bedroom. It opens into the conservatory which opens into the garden. She could have the best of things indoors and out, that way.’

‘What a lovely idea,’ Joy enthused, and when they were taken to see the study and discovered that there was a small alcove in it which would just take a single bed, she was more enthusiastic than ever. ‘We could take it in turns to sleep down here if Lana wanted us to,’ she pointed out. ‘It should be all very easy to arrange.’

Everything, it seemed, was ‘all very easy to arrange ‘, and by the time they had completed a full tour of the house, with the exception of the attics, gone round the garden which held full promise of the sunny days to come, and admired the bedding plants Eric Wrenshaw had already grown in the greenhouse ready to transplant, there was not much time left to them. Alice Wrenshaw said she ‘wouldn’t rest ‘until Miss Benyon had taken a look at the extensive stocks of linen, china and glassware, cutlery and all manner of such things with which the house appeared to be well packed.

‘You’ll be able to set your mother’s mind at rest, Miss Benyon dear ... or should I say Sister?’ she asked. ‘Tell her we have plenty of everything we need. There’s no need for her to buy anything extra at all, and there’s plenty of room for whatever you bring along from your own home as well.’

By the time they said goodbye to the Wrenshaws, knowing they had made two good and faithful friends, the Ap
ri
l dusk was falling, and Pete, after an anxious glance at his watch, announced they must not waste any time on the way if they did not wish to alarm Mrs. Benyon!

It was a little tricky, finding their way back along the winding road out of this quiet part of the town, but once on the wide main road they recognized, they settled down to enjoy their return journey. Ahead of them, under the modern street lighting, they saw a heavy lo
rr
y with a loaded trailer behind it. Just at the side of the lorry a boy riding an errand-boy’s bicycle pedalled hard to keep abreast of the lorry, but as they drew out of the thirty-mile limit and into the forty-mile zone of the town, the lorry put on speed and went ahead.

What happened next was, from Joy’s point of view, horrible, but something which also made her instantly thankful for a careful and thorough training which had taught her to be of some use in the world. Afterwards they heard the boy had seized on the idea of taking hold of the back of the lorry to give him a tow along the road, something he knew to be both unwise and dangerous, but they were facts he chose to ignore when he was tired. It was quickly evident that he had not seen the trailer behind the lorry, and almost before the automatic protest against what they expected to happen had reached Joy’s lips, the trailer had caught the lad a heavy blow and sent him reeling from his machine and almost into the electric light standard at the side of the road.

Like Joy, Pete had guessed what would happen, and it was his quick thinking and almost instant action which saved the boy from being run over in addition to his existent injuries, by Pete’s oncoming vehicle.

Joy was out of the car almost before it stopped and kneeling beside the boy as he lay at the edge of the road. Pete had signalled the lorry-driver with his lights, and the lorry was pulled up too, just a little way ahead.

Where the people came from she never realized, but suddenly the road which had appeared almost deserted was crammed by curious sightseeing people of all ages and types.

‘I’ve sent my boy to telephone for the doctor,’ a man told Joy as she lifted the boy’s head into her lap. ‘Is there anything else I can do, miss? You look as though you know what you’re about.’

‘I’m a trained nurse,’ Joy told him briefly. ‘Yes, there is something you can do. Pop across to one of those houses on the other side of the road and try and borrow a broom or something of that nature. And some long strips of linen or sheeting or anything that will make a strip long enough to tie the broom to his leg. He’s fractured it.’ She gave the brief explanation as the man hesitated. ‘I want to put on a temporary splint, then he must be taken to hospital. Have you asked your boy to telephone for the ambulance as well?’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ the man confessed, still somewhat shaken by what he had seen. ‘I just thought of Doctor Moyser...’

‘Don’t!’ Joy spoke the one word sharply as a woman from the little crowd gathered round the boy moved forward to lift him.

‘He’s moaning,’ the woman complained. ‘And his ears are bleeding. I can see.’

‘He very
probably
has a fractured skull,’ Joy said crisply, ‘and to move him when it isn’t necessary is likely to do more harm than good. I hope’—she ended almost under her breath as she worked on the temporary splint under the watchful eyes of the crowd of onlookers—‘your Doctor Moyser won’t forget to telephone for the ambulance before he leaves wherever he is!’

‘I couldn’t help it,’ the lorry-driver was protesting. ‘I passed him, normal like. Next thing I know is this young man here signalling me with his lights, and when I get back it’s to find this young shaver on his back in the gutter and his bike smashed to bits, and it looks likely I’ll get the blame for it. Folks always think it’s the driver ... but it seems to me he didn’t even
see
the trailer, never mind about waiting to see if it was clear behind me and that he
could
hang on. It tells them in the Highway Code not to do it.’

‘You weren’t to blame, old man,’ Pete assured him gravely. ‘We saw what happened.’

‘And now let’s take a look at the result.’ A firm, young man’s voice came from somewhere just above Joy’s head. She looked up to see a charming, thin face with curiously slanting eyes looking down into her own, and suddenly, as their glances met and locked, it seemed that an electric current had passed between them. Whether anyone else had observed anything different about the moment or not, Joy neither knew nor cared at that moment. She knew she was trembling suddenly, and quite without reason, and with an effort she pulled herself together to listen to the stranger’s words.

‘Let me introduce myself.’ He was giving an expert eye to the now finished job of the temporary splint. ‘My name is Quentin Moyser. My father and I are doctors in practice around these parts. If I may say so’—he smiled suddenly directly into Joy’s eyes and the smile seemed to be especially for her and her alone—‘you’ve made a splendid job of that. Miss...’

‘Benyon,’ Joy finished for him. ‘Sister Joy Benyon, of the General Infirmary, Wilborough ... at least until the end of the month.’

Uneasily Pete moved forward, and there was just time for Joy to introduce the two men to each other before the ambulance halted beside them and the uniformed figures of the ambulance men jumped out and took charge of the boy. A policeman had appeared, it seemed from nowhere, and as he came on the scene the little crowd melted discreetly, returning back to wherever it had emerged from and melting into the night.

The policeman took statements from Joy
and Pete as well as from the lorr
y-driver, and muttering dark words about youths who wanted ‘everything easy, even if they know it to be wrong and dangerous’, he went on his way after saying a cheerful goodnight to the doctor, whom he appeared to know very well.

‘Well!’ Quentin Moyser dusted his hands on the seat of his grey trousers and smiled again. ‘You’re probably anxious to be on your way,’ he began hesitantly, ‘but after an experience like that I think you might feel a little better for some hot coffee or tea ... what do you say? I live just up the road. If you would allow me...’

‘You’re very kind,’ Pete began stiffly, ‘but it
is
late, and ... someone will be getting anxious about Miss Benyon here.’

‘Can you telephone whoever it is?’ Quentin asked promptly. ‘How far have you still to go?’

‘To Wilborough,’ Joy told him before Pete could utter the ‘not very far’ she could sense was trembling on his tongue.

‘That’s all of fifty miles!’ Quentin took her arm purposefully, obviously aware that Pete would automatically follow without waiting further invitation. ‘You
need
that drink, and you can telephone from our house. Mother will be delighted to help.’