A Surgical Affair Page 4

  Sister blew her nose. “It’s funny. The only other person who knows that story is my cousin Fay. I don’t often think about it.”

  “Probably you’re in a reminiscent mood because we’ve been to the cottage. That is really almost a turning point in your life, isn’t it?”

  “In a way I suppose it is. But I like to feel that I came to terms with life some years ago—put my frustrations behind me, I mean.”

  Later, when they stepped out into the cold air and under a full moon, walked along the cobbled street, Sister said to Diana, “I’ll always remember this day. You must be one of my first visitors when I move in.”

  Arriving at the hospital, Diana went quickly up to her room. It was the night of Tony Spring’s party, and she hated to be late.

  She put on her black taffeta skirt with a black Italian blouse that showed off her smooth, pale shoulders. She clipped on the jade necklace her mother had given her and dabbed under each ear a little of the perfume in a gold box, Richard’s Christmas present. Diana wondered whether Mark would be taking a girl friend to the party and couldn’t help feeling a little envious of her. Then she wondered why she was taking such very special care to look attractive for this party.

  She took a last look in the mirror and was satisfied with what she saw. How pleasant to be without a white coat for once, to feel so feminine!

  Diana found Tony’s room crowded with housemen and registrars, wives and girl friends, all laughing and talking through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  “You’re looking very beautiful tonight, if I may say so, Dr. Field.” Bill Evans, swaying slightly, was gazing at her with bleary eyes. “I never really approved of women doctors, but in your case I’ll make an exception.” The drink from his glass was spilling onto the carpet. “You see, a woman just hasn’t got the stamina.”

  Diana, now pressed against the door, was glad when Tony Spring introduced her to his fiancée and offered to fetch her a sherry. She took the opportunity to escape with him and found Dr. Pallie standing alone in a corner.

  “Do you know all these people?” she asked him.

  “Oh, yes, most of them,” he replied, smiling. “Sister Baker and I must be the hospital’s two oldest inhabitants. We’ve watched people come and go for years, but neither of us ever seem to leave.”

  “Did you qualify in England?”

  “Yes, in London. I have never returned to India and do not think shall now. It has changed so much since I was there.”

  Diana decided that, in spite of the things Mark had said about Dr. Pallie, he seemed a charming but rather lonely man.

  While they had been speaking, she noticed Mark standing at the end of the room. She knew that he had looked toward her twice.

  “Once this crowd thins out, we can have some rock ’n’ roll.” said Mike Simons, who had appeared with a tray of cocktail savories. Somebody turned on some music from a tape recorder. Dr. Pallie bowed his head and told them he must do some reading—for his Fellowship examination.

  Diana became aware of somebody standing behind her. A voice whispered in her ear, “You’ve had your hair done.”

  She turned. There was Mark looking very smart in a light gray suit and, as usual, extremely young and boyish.

  “So have you!” she replied, laughing, for his short hair was now even shorter.

  Mark was looking seriously into her eyes. “I began to think you weren’t coming.”

  She smiled. “Are you alone? No girl friend?”

  “No. She never comes to the hospital,” he said flatly. “I can’t mix business with pleasure.”

  For a moment, a great feeling of relief swept through Diana. “Have another drink,” Mark continued. “You’re too reserved. You should lose your inhibitions more often. We’re off duty tomorrow, so why not?”

  She clutched her glass. “Not yet, thanks. I’m feeling a bit warm inside already. Do you know, when I was seven, my parents had to carry me out of a restaurant—after half a glass of cider.”

  A few couples were dancing to Night and Day.

  “Let’s move around to this,” he said quietly, taking her glass and putting it down with his own.

  Then he moved toward her. His arm slid around her waist, their hands came together. For a moment they did not move. That first tender contact released all the tension of the last few weeks, when they had been so close but never touching, so full of fascination for each other.

  They danced. They were almost the same height, and when Mark’s cheek touched her hair he sighed contentedly. “You smell good.”

  He held her nearer to him.

  Diana noticed several people looking at them and pushed him away, laughing. “I’m a respectable house surgeon.”

  Then Ella Fitzgerald was singing Manhattan. A nostalgic expression came into Mark’s face. “This song was the rage when I was working in New York. It always makes me wish I was back there.”

  The great big city’s a wondrous toy,

  Just made for a girl and boy.

  We’ll turn Manhattan into an Isle of Joy.

  “Do you know, you’re the first Australian I’ve met?” said Diana. “Are they all like you?”

  Mark shrugged. “There’s no such thing as a typical Australian. My grandmother was from the Isle of Skye.” There was a hint of pride in his voice. “Most of us can find a European ancestor somewhere along the line.”

  “Don’t you miss the sun? I can’t stand this climate. I’d love to live somewhere hot.”

  “The suns’s all right if you can lie on Bondi Beach all day, but it’s no good to work in.”

  Diana sensed that Mark was rather puzzled by her. She had always known she was reserved and yet full of warmth. He had realized this. He must have been feeling unusually carefree and contented because, after a few minutes, he asked lightly, “When would you like to listen to my records?”

  Diana looked at him, sensing the direction in which their relationship was moving.

  She laughed. “Isn’t that rather like saying, ‘Come up and see my etchings’.”

  She wanted time to think, to decide what to do. She felt she was rushing into something that would bring despair, not happiness.

  He seemed to ignore her remark and grinned. “Do you know something? You’re very attractive.”

  “But you hardly know me!” protested Diana, thinking he must be joking, or merely flirting.

  Mark looked shocked. “Don’t you believe in love at first sight?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she replied vaguely, feeling that the conversation was getting out of hand. “He can’t be serious,” she thought.

  They had stopped dancing now and stood at the side of the room, gazing intently at each other, unaware of the people around them.

  “I think I’d like to kiss you,” Mark said calmly, in the same matter-of-fact tone he would use to comment on a book he’d read.

  Diana decided the time had come to speak plainly. “Look. I’ve led a very sheltered life really, compared with yours. I was at boarding school until I was 18. I fell madly in love—well, infatuated—with a man at Oxford, but he went to live in Kenya, nothing came of that. Now Richard, he’s a lawyer, wants to marry me. Those are the only men I’ve really known.”

  Diana suddenly wondered why she was telling him all this.

  “I suppose Richard wears a bowler hat and carries a rolled umbrella?” he asked, grinning, making this sound like a crime.

  “Yes, he does as a matter of fact,” she replied, almost apologetically, but was glad the conversation had taken a different turn and was less personal.

  They began dancing again and did not talk any more. Soon the room was empty, except for Tony Spring and his fiancée who were clearing up some glasses. Diana saw them both leave, and she was left facing Mark in the dimly lit room.

  “Please,” he said softly.

  Then they came together. And into that long, hard, searching kiss went all their desire for each other. In that precious moment of discovery, Diana knew
a surge of happiness.

  “I’d better go,” she whispered, trembling slightly.

  “Yes, perhaps you should,” he said quietly.

  Then he smiled. “Do you know, you’re the first female house surgeon I’ve ever had? And you’re as efficient and tough as any of the men. That day we were both up at five for an emergency operation, I followed right on with the morning’s list, no breakfast, nothing to eat until lunch time, just to see if you could stick it. And you did, without a murmur. Well, one thing’s for sure. You’re not going to get hurt. From now on, our relationship will be strictly a surgical affair.”

  Diana walked slowly back to her room, stunned and bewildered. She had to admit that she found Mark Royston attractive, intelligent, interesting. But it was quite clear he was only intent on having a flirtation with her and didn’t mean to let his feelings involve him in anything deeper. She had tried to show him that she was not interested in that sort of thing. Anyway, what did he mean by, “You’re not going to get hurt”? That was a strange thing to say.

  When she fell in love, it would be with a man who was in love with her, who would ask her to marry him. Diana suspected that for Mark marriage was the one thing above all else to avoid, that his relationship with women was always frivolous and superficial.

  Diana wondered why this should trouble her so much. After all, she had come to the hospital to work, not to worry about her registrar.

  But she could still feel the thrill and, at the same time, the deep contentment that had filled her body, when Mark held her in his arms. Nobody else had ever made her feel quite like that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was always a horrible anti-climax to come off duty at the stroke of one o’clock. For three days and nights there had been a succession of operations, ward rounds and emergencies to cope with.

  Now Diana sat miserably in her room with nothing to do. The buzzer in her white coat was silent at last. The other surgical team had taken over. She remembered her mother always used to say, “Nobody is indispensable.”

  “You’re free!” Diana told herself. “You can sleep undisturbed until tomorrow. You can read that novel you bought six months ago and write some letters. You can see that new musical at the Odeon, or go to London for your favorite meal of roast duck, with two jam pancakes to follow.”

  But Diana didn’t move. She didn’t want to do any of those ordinary things she used to enjoy. She was quite happy to go on and on being a house surgeon. Her whole life and all her thoughts were bound up with Mansion House Hospital. The world outside seemed dull and lonely.

  Lonely, that was it. People rushing about, worrying about their own problems. Inside the hospital it was different. There was no time to be lonely. And Diana knew everybody there by sight even if not to talk to. They all had the same purpose—to make the hospital an efficient, happy place.

  Diana took off her white coat and hung it behind the door. Immediately, she felt uncomfortable and strange. Now she wasn’t a doctor any more. She was an ordinary girl, wearing a gray pleated skirt and a blue cotton blouse. She felt dull, uninteresting, stripped of her identity.

  She thought, “This is terrible! I’m behaving like a nun. Cutting myself off from the world. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be an ordinary person ... I must go out somewhere. I’ll just walk and walk, and remember how things used to be.”

  It was a cold gloomy day, so she wore her thick coat and fur-lined boots. Even the air outside the building was like an enemy, stinging the face, chilling the throat with every breath she took.

  Across the road from the hospital there was a new housing estate, beyond that, open country. Diana walked past the rows of semi-detached houses with their neat, well-kept yards. Lights were on in some of the rooms, and the fires were flickering in the window panes.

  “It’s a good day for hot buttered crumpets,” she thought. “Richard always liked those.”

  At last there were no more houses; only green fields and narrow winding country lanes.

  Sometimes Diana had to think hard before she could remember where and when she first met Richard. He was one of those people who slid unobtrusively into a circle of friends and acquaintances. There was no dramatic meeting; no unforgettable moment when their eyes met across a crowded room. In fact it had all been very ordinary and unromantic.

  It was at a meeting of the English Club at Oxford, held one spring evening in a small hall. An eminent author (she couldn’t remember his name) had come from London to give a talk on Sir Walter Scott.

  At the beginning the Chairman said, “Now, I’d like nominations for the club committee.”

  To Diana’s amazement, a voice from the back said, “I’d like to propose the girl in the second row, Mr. Chairman. That is, if she’s willing to stand.”

  It was Richard’s voice.

  “Do you agree to be nominated?” asked the Chairman. Before she could answer, Richard said, “We must have a girl on the committee—to arrange our tea meetings.”

  Then Diana realized that she was the only girl at the meeting apart from the club secretary, and that tea-making is traditionally not a man’s job.

  So she replied, “All right, I agree,” and thought that to be on a club committee must be terribly important, especially as this was only the second meeting of the club she had attended.

  From then on she was seeing Richard a lot. They held tennis parties at each other’s colleges, went to dances together and met during the vacations. Diana usually found it difficult to make friends quickly, but with Richard it had been different. His complete lack of shyness and reserve drew her out of her shell.

  About this time she went through a girlish infatuation. Whenever she thought about it, Diana felt extremely ashamed.

  It was all over a fellow medical student called Arthur Hudson. He was unusually good looking, or so she thought at the time, but as he was two years her senior, she only spoke to him occasionally. She would wait around the anatomy classroom to catch a glimpse of him. How silly it all seemed now! But how important it was at the time. When he left Oxford to do the rest of the course in Kenya, Diana thought she wouldn’t be able to go on living. But to her astonishment, she managed to survive and the memory of Arthur Hudson slowly faded.

  When she lived in London she didn’t see so much of Richard. The final exams were getting nearer, and there were more lectures and ward rounds to attend.

  “I can’t enjoy the ballet,” she would tell him, “when I’ve spent the afternoon in the pathology museum or in a hot pre-natal clinic examining patients. I’m just not in the mood for it.”

  Some of the students led a fun-filled life, of course. They went to parties at night and were wide awake for the lecture at nine the next morning. But Diana could never manage it. So Richard was the only boy friend she had.

  It was six months before she sat her final exam when he first asked her to marry him. They’d been to see a movie, because Diana said she couldn’t bear to look at textbooks any more that day.

  He proposed in a particularly noisy subway train.

  “Will you marry me?” he had shouted, as they drew out of Piccadilly station.

  Diana wasn't surprised at the question. They’d been going out together for years.

  “Let’s talk about it when my exam is over,” she said.

  “Now I’m a qualified lawyer, I’m not doing at all badly. We could get a little apartment somewhere to start with.”

  “Let’s wait, Richard, please.”

  During the next six months Richard proposed four more times. He said her exam didn’t matter, that he could keep her. He had the persistence of a spoiled child who’s told he can’t have another candy and keeps asking, “Why can’t I?” (In fact Diana had always noticed, when she stayed at his home, that Richard’s parents spoiled him dreadfully. He was their only child.)

  And now the exam was over. She hadn’t seen Richard since she qualified. Diana knew that when she did, she might still want to ask him to wait...


  Suddenly she was feeling hungry. She realized she was completely lost and that it was nearly dark. She looked at her watch and found she’d been walking for over two hours.

  She turned around. The hospital was silhouetted against the sky. The lights from the houses twinkled below it.

  At that moment Diana wished she had a little house of her own. A white one, with a thatched roof, and not too big.

  “And perhaps a husband?” she thought vaguely. “And maybe eventually some children?”

  She was more cheerful now.

  “The hospital is only the place where I work,” she told herself, walking back briskly. “Disease and death are only a small part of existence. I mustn’t make them too important. It’s the world outside that matters.”

  And when Diana arrived at the hospital, she found there were buttered crumpets for tea.

  CHAPTER SIX

  So Sister said, in a terribly haughty voice—“it has come to my notice, Nurse, that you were seen leaving the resident doctors’ quarters yesterday evening. Is that so?”

  High-pitched giggles came from behind the screen in the sterilizing room.

  Diana was intrigued by this fragment of conversation. She had gone there to collect some syringes and needles. The screen partitioned off the side of the room where the bandages and some of the linen were kept. Two of the nurses were obviously sorting and checking the supplies.

  “I felt myself blush scarlet!” the voice went on. “She said that I should know that a probationer nurse is strictly forbidden to go to a doctor’s room. As I’ve only been here a few months she’s not telling Matron, but, she will if I’m caught doing it again.”