The Little Doctor

CHAPTER ONE

T
he jeep towing the Mobi
l
e Unit turned in between the hospital gates, coming to an abrupt stop in the quadrangle facing the door marked Casualty Department. The small saloon car, following directly behind it, pulled to one side and came to rest almost opposite the
j
eep, a neat piece of manoeuvring that Jane Langdon had perfected from long practice.

“You going out again, Doctor?” Joe Otley asked as he climbed from the seat behind the Jeep’s steering wheel.

“Not just yet, Joe.” Doctor Langdon got out and slammed her own door. “I’ll stock up for tomorrow before I go home. We’ve got a fairly heavy day—anti-polio injections and what not—but you can put the caravan out of the way now and get off home. I can easily walk across to it in the parking lot.”

The tall, raw-boned young driver stood his ground a moment longer.

“
I’ve nothing special to get home for,” he announced tentatively. “If I could give you a hand—carry over the drugs or something for you.”

He paused, a sudden painful embarrassment chasing the smile from his honest blue eyes.

“That’s kind of you, Joe, but I think I’ll be able to manage,” Jane replied. Her own smile was swift and generous, even if her deep gray eyes were slightly remote. Joe’s words had stirred up a memory. “Everything will be packed ready for me to stow away, but I have to sign the requisition, and I’d like a word with Doctor
Jeffrey.” She glanced at her watch. “We’re fairly late as it is, and you ought to finish at five.”

“I never worry about that.” Joe’s expression said that he would cheerfully have worked until midnight in the interests of the polio campaign or whatever else Doctor Jane had on hand. “I never was one to keep looking at the clock, and as I said, I’ve nothing much to get home for.”

That was it, Jane thought. The phrase that hurt, the too telling suggestion of loneliness, of four walls holding little more than the creature comforts one had become used to and had accepted as necessary. In Joe’s case they would consist of a “telly” for w
h
ich he had put down a substantial deposit, the remainder to be paid by weekly sums carefully budgeted for, and a dozen budgies he bred as a hobby and showed locally with considerable success.

In her own case? Momentarily she thrust the question aside to watch Joe backing the caravan onto the spare piece of ground that served the hospital as a parking lot. She could not, however, escape the thought of the flat, of its prim bachelor-girl efficiency—its soullessness.

The last word struck out at her. What was she trying to say? That the word “home” meant a man and a woman building something together, a warm, alive, vital place that had nothing in common wit
h
the immaculate, almost clinical atmosphere of number twenty-eight, The Mews, where she now lived?

That was true of Joe, too. He was in digs in the less fashionable end of town, “living in” with a young married couple who both went out to work. They allowed Joe the run of the house when they were not there, but that scarcely compensated for the home Joe had lost. Jane had listened to Joe’s story with compassion. His family had been wiped out during the blitz on Coventry. Joe, evacuated to the country, had found himself, at ten years of age, without a relation in the world. He had drifted happily and unhappily through a succession of foster homes until he had left school. Then, through a series of jobs, he had found employment that had finally satisfied something in him he could not put into words.

“It’s being useful,” he had said once. “Feeling that you’re doing a job that matters.” And then he had flushed scarlet, looking
d
own at his big, capable hands as if he wished he could have taken it all back, but Jane had respected the confession, knowing that it had come straight from a sensitive heart.

She wondered why she should be thinking so much about Joe and how alike their lives really were, although they appeared on the surface to be poles apart. All day the heavy sense of loss had persisted in her own heart. All day, for no reason that she could justifiably accept, Maxwell Kilsyth’s name had repeated itself again
and
again in her thoughts.

Joe stood beside the jeep, which he had brought back to the paved quadrangle.

“If you’re sure I can’t help,” he began.

“No, Joe, thanks all the same.” Jane took her white coat out of the back of her car. “I’d like to get away early in the morning, though,” she added, almost as if to soften the blow of her refusal, “so if you could be ready before nine—”

“I’ll be ready.”

He smiled a trifle wistfully. Don’t, please don’t say that you’ve nothing else to do, Jane thought painfully.

“There goes a young man who would most cheerfully lay down his life for you, Doctor!”

Swiftly, almost guiltily, Jane turned at the sound of the familiar voice. Nicholas Pell had come through Casualty and was standing, framed in the open doorway behind her, smiling his half-amuse
d
, half-rueful smile.

“How long have you been there?” she asked sternly.

“Long enough to hear that you have no pressing engagement for this evening, which is, I hope, where I come in,” he suggested.

“Nicholas, I—”

“ ‘Nicholas, I’m sorry, but I’ve so much work to get through before tomorrow,’ ” he mocked. “It has become a formula, hasn’t it? Work first and work afterwards, too. Quite soon,” he added with deceptive gentleness, “you’re going to work yourself to a standstill, Doctor Langdon.”

Jane smiled at him.

“I’m small, but I’m amazingly tough,” she tried to say lightly.

“Quite so.” Suddenly he had taken her by the arm, propelling her toward the large black limousine waiting in the parking lot. “All the same, I think you need some tea. In fact, I prescribe more than tea. In other words, I’m determined to see that you eat a large meal, leisurely and in comfort, for once in your life.”

“But, Nick,” she protested, “I cook myself large, substantial meals every evening—”

“
Every
evening?” His raised brows were frankly incredulous.
“Besides, I don’t mean you to cook this one. I’m going to have it cooked for you for a change.”

She felt grateful, but she still wanted to resist.

“I have to stock up for tomorrow,” she protested, “and I can’t leave my car stuck there right in front of Casualty all evening. Do you want to see me severely reprimanded for obstruction?”

“I’ll attend to your car,” he told her, opening the door of his own. “In you get and don’t argue. It looks undignified, to say the least of it.
”

Suddenly she felt that it might be easier to obey than to go on arguing with Nicholas. She felt strangely and inexplicably tired.

“
I have to hand in my report,”
s
he said.

“I can do that for you, too,” he assured her, holding out his hand. “There’s no need for you to work overtime every evening, you know.”

“If
you insist—”

“Of course I insist.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s well after six o’clock and I dare say you’ll be fussing over this wretched caravan of yours by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. It appears to be your only love.
”

He turned away and Jane got into the car, watching his tall, slightly stooped figure until it disappeared from view. How well Nicholas knew her! Yet surely she was not becoming a martyr to her job? “It appears to be your only love.” She smiled ruefully, because Nicholas had sounded exasperated, yet he himself had given what most people considered the best years of life to his own work. At thirty-four, Nicholas Pell, M.D., M.R.S.C., was Senior Surgical Consultant to the hospital and was likely to go a great deal farther in his chosen profession. There was, at t
h
e present moment, talk of a Professorship at his old university, although he had told Jane that he did not consider himself quite ready to accept such a post
.

Wondering about Nicholas, her thoughts slipped all too readily into the past, to her own university years, to the companionship
and
the laughter and the fun that had gone hand-in-hand with lectures and examinations and the awful agonies of waiting for results. She had passed through it all unscathed, except in one respect. She had fallen in love.

Thrusting the past away, she turned back to the present. Her work was a large part of her life, practically all of it, s
h
e supposed. A great deal of her leisure was given over to some facet of medical activity or another: committees, lecturing, first-aid classes. She had embraced them all. To fill up the loneliness? Perhaps that had been part of the reason, although she had never faced it consciously until now.

Until Nicholas Pell had thrust it upon her. She had known him for two years, ever since she had come to work in the hospital, and almost from the start she had found herself attracted to him. His tall, almost too-thin figure had dominated her horizon, his quiet,
p
ersistent friendliness warming her heart when, otherwise, it might
h
ave frozen with the bleakness of her despair.

When he reappeared in the Casualty doorway that same heart lurched a little in pleasurable anticipation of the evening before her. Going out with Nicholas was always a delight to her, and to go on living in the past was a form of madness with which she must break with all the strength she possessed.

She sat up as he got in behind the steering wheel.

“You’re most proficient,” she allowed.
“I’d
never have been able to park as neatly as that.”

“It’s all part of a surgical training,” he said lightly. “Putting bulk back into a confine
d
space! That clutch of yours needs taking up, by the way,” he added more seriously as he let in his own. “In fact, you could very well do with a new car, but I suppose you’ll continue to hang on to that inefficient specimen until it drops to pieces on the road.”

“I don’t like parting with old friends,” Jane confessed.

“Or old loves?” Nicholas queried.

There was a brief silence. Jane had been pulling on her gloves and she continued to look down at them for a moment or two before she spoke.

“I would part with it willingly, if I could,” she said.

Nicholas looked around at her before he turned the car into the main road.

“Willingly or unwillingly,” he remarked deliberately, “we have to bury the past some time or another. A life is wasted that is lived out with regret.”

“Yes,” s
h
e admitted, catching her breath, “I know that. But just now, Nicholas—”

“You’re still determined to go on remembering?” His voice was hard.

“I don’t think it’s quite that.” She let her breath go in a sharp little sound that was half a sigh. “I have tried, but always it catches
up with me—the little argument ‘If only—!’ It’s the most heartbreaking phrase in the world and the least easy to di
s
miss.”

“It’s also the most frustrating.” His handsome mouth was tight, the direct blue eyes no longer kind.

“I think I know that, too,” Jane agreed in a voice that was not as steady as she would have liked it to be. “I’m not a romantic child.”

“Nor are you a fool,” Nicholas Pell told her, guiding the car through the thronged market place out on to the broad reaches of the Great North Road. “How long is it since you fell in love—that first time?”

“I went to St. John’s when I was seventeen,” she said, at last. “We were students there together. Max was two years ahead of me, a third-year medical student when we met. Almost from the beginning we went everywhere together. We collected for charities dressed in fearful costumes of our own design and shook collecting-tins under the noses of long-suffering citizens—always together. Life was pretty wonderful then, without a cloud on the horizon for either of us. Not even my first professionals daunted me. Somehow, I knew I was going to get through. Nothing could happen to mar this enchanted time, I thought. Nothing but Max leaving me.”

“Which he did?”

“Not for three years. It went on a little longer—the happiness, the
ecstasy
, the togetherness.” She drew in her breath again. “Three years,” she repeated, forgetting him. “I was twenty-one when Max told me he was going to marry Valerie Lisbon.”

Nicholas’s long, delicate hands tightened on the steering wheel as he put his foot down on the accelerator.

“Sir Francis Lisbon’s daughter,” he said.

Jane looked up in surprise.

“You knew him?”

“Who didn’t? He was one of the finest brains in the profession. His death was an absolute tragedy.”

“Yes,” Jane acknowledged. “He died just before Max married Valerie. It was all very quiet—the marriage, I mean—because of Sir Francis’s death. He—they were married just as soon as Max graduated. They went to London. I think Sir Francis made sure of an appointment for Max before he died. He could pull so many strings.”

She paused, ashamed of her own momentary bitterness.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she apologized swiftly. “Max was brilliant. He always did everything well. He took things in his stride, and he was more than popular. He was always right at the center of things, yet his work never seemed to suffer. He was a natural, and
j
ust to be with him was living, I suppose.”

Nicholas drove very fast in the small, grim silence he allowed to elapse before he said:

And you’ve never come across him since?”

“No.”

She had managed to control the emotion in her voice, but the one small, bleak word told him all he needed to know. She was still in love with Maxwell Kilsyth.

Swiftly the car covered the distance to the luxurious roadhouse where they had often dined together. Although it was right on the edge of the main highway, a secluded and lovely garden lay behind it. When it was warm enough, cocktails were served among the roses.

The white-coated waiters recognized them as regular visitors, and Jane wondered just how often she had come with Nicholas like this, resting on a small island of peace and tranquillity before they plunged again into the busy stream of their careers.

These, quiet little dinners seemed to lend her a new confidence, giving impetus to her endeavor, but they had not been quite as frequent of late, and she had missed them.

Yes, she was forced to admit that as she watched Nicholas paying for their drinks, seeing him as the distinguished professional man, tall and poised; sure of himself and the mark he would eventually make in the world of medicine. Not arrogant, she assured herself: There was nothing arrogant about Nicholas. It was just that he was completely free from pretence, utterly certain of the way he wanted to go.

“Drink up,” he said, “and then we’ll go in and eat. You look decidedly underfed.”

“Slim is the word you ought to use, Doctor Pell!” Jane admonished, determined to shake herself free from the peculiar apathy that had gripped her all day. “You have, I see, a great deal to learn. I never could put on weight.”

He let that go, but his eyes were decidedly critical as he followed her along the softly-carpeted passage to the dining room.

It was rather wonderful to feel cared for in this way, Jane thought involuntarily. That was one of the nicest things about Nicholas. He made her feel cherished. She had battled her own way up for so long that at times she recognized “being cared for”
as the ultimate happiness, the end of desire, perhaps. No more clinics, no more en
d
less details to fill in on endless forms; no more “difficult” children and far more difficult mothers; no more driving for weary miles after the long day of consultations was over, with the caravan swaying and bobbing on the road ahead; no more petty conflict over this and that, no more dispirited tears when, eventually, sleep would not come.

Was she so sure of Nicholas, then, that she could think about him in this way? He had not asked her to marry him, although he had not tried to hide his concern for her. He had always been kind and considerate and a little grim when they spoke about the past. His own past had been full of work. He had told her once that there had been no time for him to fall in love. Or perhaps it was that he had wanted more to offer a woman than the first struggling years as a doctor’s wife.

How wrong that was, she thought, and how eagerly she would have struggled with Max by her side!

An orchestra played softly on a raised platform at the far end of the long room, and the little red shades on the candles at their table cast a becoming glow across her face. Not a beauty in the fullest sense of the word, she was, nevertheless, lovely to look at, her small, delicate features offset by a halo of soft brown hair, drilled and dragooned into shape by much brushing and a determined desire to dispel any illusion of frivolity. Yet when she was tired and ran slim fingers through her hair in the characteristic little gesture that endeared her to so many people, tiny errant tendrils would form and curl about her brow, giving her the look of a small girl lost. She abhorred this image because it was neither dignified nor in any way professional-looking. It was the look that had first caused some of her patients to refer to her as “the little doctor,” and after a while the name had stuck.

Suddenly Nicholas Pell leaned across the table and covered her fingers with his.

“
I don’t think I meant to say this quite so soon, Jane,” he told her while his eyes held her half-reluctant gaze, “but I’ve been in love with you for a long time. Two years, to be exact. That about makes it ‘love at first sight’, doesn’t it?” he smiled. “But it’s not exactly what I mean. What I
am
trying to say is that I’ve grown a very deep affection for you that started off as a firm belief we had much in common, a great deal to offer one another. Am I making all this sound rather difficult or staid?” he asked when she did not speak. “If so, I’m sorry. What I wanted to say is that I
’
m in love with you and I want you for my wife—if you’ll have me.”

The crisp, decisive tone so typical of the consultant was suddenly submerged in the humble petition of the lo
v
er. Nicholas was making no bones about it. He wanted her; he needed her for the completion of his life’s happiness, and in turn he could make her happy.

Of course he could make her happy. Jane was aware of that with a quiet conviction, which should
h
ave put to flight all her doubts,
and
she knew that in time she would conquer them. She would forget Max. She would steel herself to forget. Like the memory of her student years, her love for Maxwell Kilsyth would fade in time. There would be no more remembering, no more useless tears.

“I don’t expect you to give me an answer right away,” Nicholas said. “But the old
cliché
that neither of us is growing any younger rather applies,” he added. “At least, for me, I’m thirty-four,
and
I don’t want to wait till I’m forty before I can put my feet up in my own home.”

“I couldn’t expect you to do that,” Jane agreed.

She wished she could give him her answer now. She ought to be able to say “yes” right away, because she intended to marry Nicholas, but something held her back. It was more than indecision, more than the sentimental reluctance to relinquish the past or face the future with one tiny reserve in her heart. It was almost a
p
remonition of something not yet fulfilled, of fate standing silently
b
ut watchfully in the background ready to weave another strand through the delicate web of her life’s pattern.

“How long will it take for you to sort things out?” Nicholas asked.

She toyed with the food on her plate, aware that the surest, the most honest way was to cut right through her memories and look only to the future, but she could not.

“
I have no right to keep you waiting,” she said. “I ought to tell you to forget me altogether.
”

He looked straight at her.

“Do you think that would be easy under the circumstances?” he demanded.

“No,” she admitted. “Not easy when we practically work together—when we meet each other almost every day. Allingham is too small a place, but soon you will be going away—to Leeds or perhaps even to London.”

“If I go to London or even to Leeds,” he said steadily, “I want you to come with me.”

How foolish to hesitate, Jane thought. How easy to say “I’ll come!” Their life together would be full and pleasant and rewarding.

She ate her slice of melon in silence. The orchestra was playing a very old waltz tune, something she had danced to long ago, but she could not put a name to it. It nagged at her mind. Remember? The little yearning refrain kept repeating, but the words evaded her. Something silly and sentimental
and
reeking of the past? Something young and vital and pushed aside with all her other dreams.

“
I
should have given you time to change,” Nicholas was saying. “Then we could have danced.”

“I should have given you time
...
” He was offering her time, and now, in a sudden panic, she didn’t want it. She wanted to tell him without further demur that she would marry him—now, in three weeks’ time, if he so desired. Now—before their youth had fled away.

She was twenty-seven. Not a great age, but Nicholas was thirty-four and he had said that he didn’t want to wait for a home until he was forty.

She was sure she could make that home for him, sure that she could offer him companionship and friendship and trustworthiness and—yes, love in the end. Love grew out of little things, in time.

“Nicholas,” she began, looking out through the uncurtained window into the shadowy night, “If you would really like my answer right away—
”

A man was getting out of a car that he had parked in the open space before the main door, a tall man, as tall as Nicholas, wit
h
a lined brown face and dark, unruly hair; a man so like the image in her heart that her lips even formed its name.

“Max!”

The man stooped to speak to someone in the car. It was too dark for her to see, but she thought it was a woman, and when he straightened again she saw that he was too old to be Max. Yet the little incident had thrown her into the old panic. If it had been Max, what could she have said to him or he to her?

“I don’t want your answer now,” Nicholas was assuring her. “I want you to tell me when you feel you are quite sure.”

The woman in the
c
ar got out and came toward the door of the hotel, waiting in the porch for her companion to follow her. I mustn’t see them, Jane thought. Even if it isn’t Max.