Cruise to a Wedding. Бетти Нилс

so big a fortune.’

      Loveday shook her head. ‘No, I couldn’t do that,’ she protested. ‘It wouldn’t be cricket.’

      ‘Cricket? But I do not wish to play cricket, I wish to get married.’ Rimada looked put out. ‘You English and your games!’ she added irritably.

      ‘Sorry, ducky.’ Loveday got off the bed and stacked the tea-things on to the tray. ‘I’d love to help you, but not to go behind your guardian’s back. I still think that you—and Terry, why not?—should go to Holland and see him. He can’t be that awful.’ She paused as a thought struck her. ‘Why not get at him through his wife?’

      Rimada giggled. ‘He has no wife, he is a footloose bachelor.’

      Loveday padded along to the pantry, Rimada behind her. The guardian, she imagined, was a Professor Higgins without the charm, and with a middle-aged eye for the girls. ‘Let’s sleep on it,’ she suggested. ‘There must be something—some way of getting round him. And there’s no hurry, is there? I mean, you’ve only known Terry for a few weeks, haven’t you?’

      ‘I shall love him for ever,’ declared her friend dramatically. ‘But I will have patience for a day or two while you think of something, dear Loveday; you are so clever.’

      She smiled winningly, said good night and tripped away to her own room, to reappear a moment later. ‘There is a hat in a little shop in Bond Street,’ she rolled her fine eyes, ‘it is so charming—it would do for my wedding—pale blue…’

      ‘And wildly expensive, I’ll be bound.’

      Rimada shrugged. ‘Oh, yes, but I want it.’ She smiled with great charm. ‘And I shall buy it tomorrow.’ She disappeared once more, and Loveday, left alone, got ready for her bath while she pondered Rimada’s wish to marry Terry Wilde. She felt sure that if she could persuade her to wait a week or two, she would either have fallen out of love, or realized that the only thing to do was to get her guardian on her side. Loveday, brushing her hair as she paced round her room, frowned in thought, she didn’t like Terry very much—he was young and good-looking and had a charm of manner which somehow didn’t ring true; there were quite a number of nurses in the hospital who found him attractive, but she thought that there was very little underneath the facile charm. He had worked in theatre once or twice and she hadn’t been impressed; she had had the feeling that he wasn’t very good at his job and hid the fact under a showy pretence of knowledge. She got into bed and turned out the light, quite resolved to have nothing to do with her friend’s hare-brained schemes.

      A resolve she was to break within a very short time—the next day in fact. The list had been short and had gone without a hitch; there was a heavy list for the afternoon, though, and the first operation was to be done by some specialist, Gordon had told her, apologizing at the same time for not having warned her earlier in the day, but Mr Gore-Symes hadn’t been perfectly certain that he was coming; it was some new technique this professor something-or-other had perfected, and the old man was deeply interested in it. ‘I believe the fellow brings his own instruments,’ he concluded.

      ‘In that case,’ Loveday had told him, ‘he’d better hand them over pretty smartish, or we shall all be standing around waiting for them. Do the CSD do them or am I supposed to see to it, I wonder? Why doesn’t someone tell me?’

      Gordon had grinned. ‘Haven’t the faintest, but I’m sure you’ll cope.’ He had gone off to his lunch, whistling cheerfully, and she, in her turn, had gone off to hers.

      She had stayed longer than she had intended, sitting at table, sipping her post-prandial tea, deeply absorbed in the ever-interesting topic of clothes—so long, in fact, that she had no time to go to her room and do her hair and her face; not that it would matter a great deal, for she would be wearing a mask for the rest of the afternoon. She tore through the bleak Victorian corridors which would bring her to the lift taking her to the theatre block; the Royal City had been modernized on several separate occasions, various well-meaning persons taking it in turns to have an architect’s finger in their Utopian pie, so that the whole place was a complexity of antiquated staircases, underground passages, gigantic pipes which made hollow noises in the dead of night, and hyper-modern lifts, automatic doors and a magnificent entrance hall, which had been designed to contain the very latest in communication panels, kiosks for visitors, a flower stall even, and which had never quite got to this stage, so that Parkinson, the head porter, still held its traffic in the hollow of his aged but iron hand.

      The theatre block had been completed, however, and it was a splendid one, with Loveday in charge of it, aided by two junior Sisters, who ran the smaller theatres and relieved her when she went off duty. They got on well, the three of them; she was thinking about that as she skipped down a quite unnecessary flight of steps and began to run along the curved passage which ran round the back of the entrance hall. She was lucky, she considered, unlike poor Rimada, who disliked and was disliked by Big Bertha and was unable to laugh about it. She quickened her pace slightly and shot round the next bend, slap into the arms of someone coming in the opposite direction. A man, a very tall, very large man, no longer young but possessing the kind of good looks which would catch any female eye. Loveday just had time to see that for herself as he put his hands on her shoulders to steady her and then held her away from him to take a good look. His eyes were blue, she noted with interest, and at the moment positively frosty. She smiled nicely, none the less, and said pleasantly: ‘So sorry—I’m in a hurry.’

      ‘My dear good girl,’ he drawled in a deep voice and in what she considered to be a very ill-humoured tone, ‘I find it surprising that a member of the hospital staff—a Sister, are you not?—should so far forget her dignity as to run, one might almost say, race on duty. You are on duty?’

      Loveday eyed him with a slightly heightened colour and answered him with a decided snap. ‘My dear good man,’ and her voice was as cool as his, ‘I don’t know you from Adam, and what I’m doing can be none of your business!’

      She twisted away from his hands as she spoke and continued on her way, her back expressing—she hoped—dignified disapproval, while she beat back a quite unworthy desire to turn round and have another look at him. She almost stopped when she heard his chuckle, but she was late already—besides, he had been very high-handed; a most unpleasant man, she told herself safely in the lift at last, but undeniably good-looking.

      Staff Nurse Cross, bless her, had everything ready, and she still had ten minutes in which to sort the special instruments which had been delivered to her office, get them into the autoclave, and scrub up. She was nicely settled behind her trolleys well before the surgeons’ unhurried entry. Mr Gore-Symes first, with his guest—her eyes widened at the sight of him; the man in the corridor, no less, behind. The blue eyes met hers with a blandly impersonal glance while Mr Gore-Symes introduced him as Professor de mumble van mumble, from mumble. Loveday, none the wiser from her chief’s indistinct remarks, inclined her head with hauteur and was affronted at the stranger’s grunt.

      ‘Loveday Pearce,’ said Mr Gore-Symes, quite distinctly for once. ‘My Theatre Sister, you know. Runs the place very well.’

      His companion raised thick fair eyebrows in what she could only describe to herself as an offensive manner, and turned to speak to Gordon before taking his place by the operating table. The three men arranged themselves without haste around the unconscious patient, covered on the flanks, as it were, by two housemen, looking apprehensive. Loveday waited until they had settled themselves before motioning her own team into place; Staff at her elbow, as always, the two student nurses well back from the table, ready to do anything she might require of them; Mrs Thripps, on duty, for the afternoon, standing back even further, her experienced eyes everywhere. And Bert in his corner, surrounded by the various electrical appliances which might be needed from time to time. She took a final look at them all, nodded her pretty head in satisfaction, and handed Gordon the first towel.

      The operation was to be an adrenalectomy, and both kidneys were involved. As it proceeded Loveday felt bound to admit that this foreign surgeon was good; he worked fast and thoroughly, and not until he reached the stage where his own new technique was involved did he speak more than