Busman's Holiday, page 5
Aunt Joey said softly, ‘The ice is breaking.’ The other little party’s conversation was too quiet for us to hear, but we watched them discreetly as we talked among ourselves. Tom had put away his book and though from the first obviously delighted to chat up Psmith, to begin with he appeared to answer David’s queries with monosyllables or nods. Then David said something that made every member of the family stare at him.
We heard Ian’s high ‘Honest, Mister? Same as Tom, only on your two legs?’
Aunt Joey nodded to herself. ‘I thought he would.’
I moved next to her. ‘Would ‒ what?’
‘Just let me finish this row of pattern, dear.’
I watched openly as I waited. The other party were far too intent on the long conversation now going on between Tom and David, to remember we were there. Then David stood up and in turn flexed each knee and rotated his ankle. ‘Is he teaching the boy ballet?’ gasped Nicky.
I said, ‘No. He’s showing him the leg exercises the physiotherapist’ll teach him soon as he’s allowed to exercise his injured leg.’ Aunt Joey had stopped knitting. ‘Was ‒ was David ever in irons?’
‘Yes, dear. Both legs, poor child. He had two years in hospital when he was ‒ eleven and twelve, or twelve and thirteen. About that child’s age.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘He was in a bad car smash. Some friend of his father’s was driving. David’s legs were so broken that he needed bone grafting ‒ which took time, as you’ll know, Fran.’
I nodded unhappily. ‘Where was he in hospital?’
‘St. Catherine’s. He had been there nearly his first year before I knew anything about it. I would have loved to visit him, but at that time Gran was too delicate for me to leave her more than a few hours. Mercifully, being young and strong, David made a wonderful recovery, but I wasn’t at all surprised when he later told me he wanted to be a doctor, and in a very much later letter, that he particularly wanted to be a children’s doctor. I’m so glad he ‒’ she stopped, smiled. ‘Do come and join us.’
Tom’s mother had come over. She was small and fair, with a tired face and comfortable figure. ‘I just had to come to ask you to thank the gentleman. The good he’s doing our Tom! Not that they haven’t told him over and over at the hospital that he can be quite well, but he’s had such a time with all his operations and times ‒’ she sighed, ‘he loses heart. And being fourteen, though he looks younger being small, he has fretted all his friends’ll be getting on at school and though he has his lessons ‒ well ‒ it’s not the same as at school with your mates, is it?’ She glanced from David to Aunt Joey. ‘The gentleman says he had eleven operations.’ Aunt Joey nodded. ‘And had to see a specialist every six months till he was in sixth form, but it didn’t take long or hurt.’
‘That’s so,’ said Aunt Joey kindly.
‘And no trouble from his legs now though he’s always on them as he’s a doctor?’
‘A very busy doctor.’
‘There now.’ The mother’s eyes were bright with relief. ‘Our Tom wants to be an architect.’ She rose as David got to his feet across the way. ‘Mind, they’ve told us often enough up the hospital now, don’t you worry, he’ll be all right! But when it takes so long ‒ well ‒ you just can’t stop worrying, can you? You think ‒ they’re doing their best, but ‒ and then to meet someone as really knows, not just as a doctor, but having been through the same himself, and seeing him right as rain ‒ gives you new hope. He’s just said to our Tom ‒’ her voice shook, ‘ “of course, they’ll mend you, lad. Mended me, didn’t they? And you’re in luck, same as I was, to have all this extra time for your homework. Your mates’ll wish they’d done as much as you, when you start collecting the old O’s and A Levels and telling them you’ve got your place at Art College”.’ She brushed her eyes with her fingers. ‘You’ll thank him won’t you?’
Aunt Joey held out her hand. ‘With great pleasure. Good luck to Tom, and all of you.’
‘And to you. And to you.’
We never learnt that little family’s surname, where they were from, or more about them. When we left, shortly, all, including Tom, stood waving us off. ‘Good old Smithie!’ The boys bellowed. ‘Cheerio!’
I was driving at my own request. The last half hour had left me with a new, uneasy confusion. I tried to rationalise this to myself as being caused mainly by my dislike of not pulling my own weight, and I expected no small struggle before David granted my request. Instead, it was met with a disconcerting smile. ‘Go ahead. Double stint, if you feel up to it.’
Nothing would make me admit it, but the next ten motorway miles were nightmarish. It had turned much warmer, and the non-stop zoom-zoom of lorries, trailers and large cars flashing by our slow lane, in a haze of heat and exhaust fumes, were already tying knots in my shoulder muscles.
David and Aunt Joey were talking quietly in the back. He had to say my name twice before I realised he was addressing me. ‘Take the left fork at the next roundabout. We’re in such good time we’ve decided we can afford the few extra miles that’ll allow us to follow once more in the footsteps of the old Legions. Much more attractive country.’ (And much less nerve-wracking for him whilst I was at the wheel, I suspected.) That so annoyed me, that irrationally, I took the left fork downright mutinously.
I forgot the driving mirror. ‘Decided you now enjoy motorway driving, Frances?’
‘It’s just that they are quicker.’
‘True.’ He returned to his conversation with Aunt Joey.
That second Roman road cut through mile upon mile of flat fertile land. On either side the waist-high corn made a golden carpet to the horizon. The traffic was much sparser and I couldn’t remain mutinous as it was infinitely more pleasant driving. My shoulder tension relaxed as we ambled along between the cornfields, under a bright blue sky in which a handful of small chubby clouds were pottering towards the invisible sea like so many drowsy airborne sheep.
Occasionally the road ran straight through fascinating little grey stone villages, and at one stage it divided like an arrow the yellow and grey stone houses of a small market town crowned by a great church with the elegant proportions of a cathedral.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the countryside altered. The cornfields were small, and then vanished. The fields were greener and fringed with low trees. Then the land grew hillier and the trees larger and more luxuriant, turning the road into a green cavern, cool as the depths of the sea. The sunlight filtered through tall, slim ashes; flashed silver and copper on the beeches; set alight the red and white candles of the chestnuts and the summer snow of the elders in flower. Even the sun could not penetrate the thickly-leafed outstretched sheltering arms of the massive English oaks with their strong roots reaching down and down to the heart of the land.
I just caught David’s words to Aunt Joey. ‘I love roses and I’m glad they’re our national flower, but to this Englishman, an English oak, is England.’
Perversely, that jarred. I loved trees. Bart had never been able to understand why.
The wooded country was behind when the sky ahead turned hazy with more than heat. And then the high chimneys of an industrial town edged the skyline.
‘Back to civilisation.’ There was regret in David’s voice. ‘I’ll take over now, Frances. You’re well over your double stint.’
‘I ‒ I have driven through London often, David.’
‘I’m sure you have,’ he replied amiably, ‘but this isn’t London and we’re not going to drive through it. Be jammed, as the factories’ll just be closing. I know a way round, but it’s too complicated to explain. Lay-by coming up ‒ it’ll do.’
I had to remind myself it was his car ‒ and obey. He jumped out, closed the back door and opened mine for me. ‘Tired after your long stint?’
I stepped a little from the car so that the others wouldn’t hear. ‘I’m not made of eggshell!’
He smiled with his lips. ‘No, dear. Just prickles.’ As he turned to open the back door for me, a fawn business-type envelope fell out of his breast pocket and fluttered onto my feet, face upwards. Being type-written, I couldn’t avoid seeing how it was addressed as I retrieved it. I did a double-take. The address ran; ‘Dr. D. R. Loftus, MD, MRCP, Consultant Paediatrician, The Arumchester Group of Hospitals …’
I glanced up. His eyes were smiling now, very sardonically. ‘Thanks.’ He pocketed the envelope. ‘In you get.’
I was too surprised to move yet. ‘I ‒ I thought you were a registrar.’ I swallowed. ‘Not ‒ not your own boss.’
‘I’m not. My infants boss me. I just boss the Children’s Department.’
‘That’s why you’ve to work on your holiday?’
‘The buck has to stop somewhere, honey. Get in.’
I got in more confused than ever. Being a nurse I knew how hospital departments worked. Any houseman when confronted by an insoluble problem passed it to his registrar; the registrar turned to the senior medical or surgical officer; as a last resort, these turned to their consultant. Consultants had to solve their problems for themselves ‒ that went with their jobs.
Aunt Joey was chatting to Nicky, but I didn’t hear a word. I stared at my hands and remembered my first impression of David. Not only so like Bart, but an irresponsible layabout. It had only taken twenty-four hours to show me over and over, how wrong had been that second impression. Was I as wrong over the first? I couldn’t pretend Bart, in David’s place, would have sacrificed his holiday for any reason though he genuinely loved children. In actual fact, it had only been his love for his two little sons that had finally forced him to tell me he was married. ‘I can’t risk losing them,’ he said, ‘even for you.’ Those were the only words he had ever said to me that I could bear to remember.
The industrial town was long by-passed before I surfaced from the depths into which those thoughts plunged me and discovered we were climbing a very steep and seemingly endless hill. ‘The last hill before the run down into Arumchester,’ said David. ‘Miss Allendale, when you visited the city to see Mr. Thornton’s solicitor and the house, did you come by train? You did? I wish I’d known. I could’ve met you at the station, showed you around.’
Nicky chipped in, ‘And given Aunt Joey the lowdown on her new neighbours seeing you live just across the square from this house Mr. Thornton’s left her.’
‘Alas, Nicky, I couldn’t and can’t, having only lived there a few months myself. I’ve been so busy, that I’ve barely done more than pass the time of day with my neighbours, pleasant though they seem. That’s why it took me so long to learn it was my Miss Allendale who was coming to Mr. Thornton’s house ‒ and I only learnt that via Holly Mill! Mrs. Frampton mentioned it in her last week’s letter to Sue who only told me on Friday. I intended writing immediately, but this last weekend left me no breathing space till I was off Monday morning, and having already arranged to go north, I thought I’d show up in person. And Frances slung a dead mouse at me by way of welcome!’
‘She told us!’ laughed Nicky.
Aunt Joey smiled. ‘Poor Davie! What a welcome! But Fran didn’t know you were there!’
‘I’ve forgiven her. Miss Allendale! I’ve a very noble nature!’ he joked.
I said nothing.
Nicky took the subject back to Sue Frampton. ‘Did she train at St. Catherine’s, with you?’
‘No, St. Martha’s. Same as Frances, but some time previously. Sue must have moved to Catherine’s as a staff nurse in our Paediatric Unit before Frances started training. Come to think of it,’ he added reflectively, ‘Sue was in paediatrics a few months before I settled for that line. She moved to Arumchester Hospital as Sister Children eighteen months ago. I followed her there this January. I seem to have been following Sue around since I was about ten ‒ but that’s enough of the David Loftus Story as we’re coming to the top.’ He put the car in bottom gear. ‘Do me a favour, ladies! As of now, close your eyes. I’ll say when to open them.’
Nicky obeyed. ‘This is fun!’
Smiling, Aunt Joey followed suit.
Again, I forgot the driving mirror.
‘Why are you cheating, Frances? Don’t you trust the gentleman?’
The others laughed, thinking he was only joking. For their sake, I closed my eyes.
The car stopped. ‘Right, ladies! Look down on your left.’
We were on the crest of a long ridge of hill encrusted with bracken in flower that gleamed gold in the evening sunshine. From that crest, the hill fell sharply to a wide green plain criss-crossed with streams coming from a placid, curving river lined with willows. On an incline, cradling like outstretched arms a loop in the broad silver ribbon of water, stood the ancient little city of Arumchester. A little city clustered around the exquisite grey lace towers of the great cathedral that for nearly ten centuries had dignified what was still a little country town with that proud title. And all around the soaring towers, smaller towers and spires reached skywards with delicate fingers, and in their shelter the soft pink regency houses, the mellow orange of the hand-made medieval bricked buildings, and the black and white half-timbered homes that had been young when Tudor England was old, seemed to have grown from and not been built on, the green land.
‘Long ago,’ said David softly, ‘when the pilgrims came to Arumchester as to every cathedral city, this was the way they came. After trudging up that hill, this is very much what they saw. And long before the pilgrims, this is the way the Romans came. Do you see that dark grey crumbling ruin of a Norman castle just right of the cathedral? That’s built on the foundations of the fort that housed a Roman garrison for three centuries. The Romans drained the land and built a town round their fort. One Roman, who may have been a soldier but was certainly a craftsman, knew what he was building in a wild, green, damp and cold foreign land. He carved some words on a tablet that is still in one of the castle walls. “Marcellus built for tomorrow and the gods smiled”.’
None of us spoke and he drove on down the hill. He did not speak again until we were near the river and heard, first faintly, and then the full glory of the cathedral bells ringing out over the city, the river, the wide green plain. ‘Tuesday evening is the ringers’ practice period. Yet even when they are practising, those bells never sound to me as if they’re singing the same song. Can you hear the song they’re singing now, Miss Allendale? Listen.’ His deep voice had a magical note. ‘They’re singing for you. They’re singing, “Welcome to Arumchester! Welcome to your new home today, and all the tomorrows!” ’
Nicky and I glanced at Aunt Joey and quickly away. The tears on her rather tired, rather worn, delicate face were not tears of sadness and her brown eyes had a new, youthful, glow.
As we drove over the river and on through the ancient city gates, I could have forgiven David anything.
Chapter Three
St. Anthony’s Square had been built in the early nineteenth century and by Arumchester standards was new. It was a square of small, pink-bricked terraced houses surrounding a single-track road and iron-fenced, communal patch of lawn. Outwardly, every house was identical, with the same minute front garden, and yard of paved path leading from a low wrought-iron front gate to the few steps to the front door. Aunt Joey’s new house stood in the middle of the terrace facing towards the cathedral. The furnished house David rented was directly opposite.
Last night he had explained the difficulty he had first had trying to find somewhere to live when his present job started. Then a retired surgeon from his teaching hospital, St. Catherine’s, heard of his problem and offered to rent him a house in the square. ‘I’d been concentrating on flats, but this is so handy! Though I have regular clinics in the other hospitals in the Arumchester Group, the Children’s Department is based in the hospital here. The door in that high wall running the length of that footpath you can see leading off between the corner houses on the right, is one of the side entrances to the hospital garden. I never cease to bless my landlord, or my luck!’
‘How kind of your old colleague to come to your rescue!’ exclaimed Aunt Joey. ‘I presume he’s moved from Arumchester?’
David shook his head. ‘His home’s just round the corner, but though he’s the kindest and most admirable of men, I can’t claim the eminent surgeon who taught me as a student, as a colleague.’
Nicky was curious. ‘Why’s he want two houses?’
‘He bought two several years ago when his only child, a daughter, married. Her husband’s job took him all round the world, and my landlord planned the second house as a home base for them. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. They spent the first three years of their marriage in the States, and then, tragically, the husband had a fatal accident skin-diving whilst they were holidaying in the Bahamas. His widow didn’t want the house, she’s no children and as her father’s a widower, she’s at present living with him. He was able to offer it to me at short notice as the last tenants had taken it whilst looking round for a house to buy and suddenly found one. Suits me in every respect, being one of the smallest houses in our square. I’ve two bedrooms to your three, Miss Allendale, and only half your back garden.’
Aunt Joey, Nicky, Psmith and I spent that night in an hotel. Psmith was made so welcome there that he was reluctant to leave his new fan-club when we made another early start in the morning. But as Aunt Joey’s house had been standing empty for several months, we wanted to get it thoroughly aired and as clean as possible before her furniture and possessions were delivered during the morning. David had offered ‘the odd broom’ for this. The array of cleaning equipment awaiting us on the front steps made us gasp. ‘Must’ve taken David hours to carry this lot over!’ exclaimed Nicky.
‘Only a couple of journeys,’ said David’s voice.
Nicky wolf-whistled as we spun round. ‘Hey! It’s Dr. Loftus, sir, this morning! I fancy that suit, David ‒ and covet that dishy tie!’
