Prisoner of Love (2 page)

“Hullo!” Her brother caught up with her as she neared the flat. “You’re late, aren’t you?”

“A little. We’ve had a busy day.”

“Operating?”

“Yes,” Somehow she could not go over the events of the past few hours, even with Lance. They were still slightly detached in an aura of unreality, the personal element that had crept into them making her sensitive about repetition for the moment. “Done your homework?” she asked instead, putting a protective arm about his shoulders as they reached the low iron gate leading to the short flagged pathway to the front door.

“Ages ago,” he assured her. “I’ve been playing football in the park.”

Suddenly, unaccountably, their surroundings seemed infinitely drab. The long, seemingly endless street looked as if it stretched monotonously all the way into the future, with no hope of change for either of them, no bright prospect for Lance, and she felt suddenly far older than her years.

I’m tired, she thought. Tired with standing all day.

“Anne and Gillen have gone out,” Lance told her as they went up the narrow flight of stairs. “They’ve got a date. Gosh! you should have seen the car that came for them! An Allard! It went off—swoosh! Just like that! A hundred miles an hour!”

She smiled at the exaggeration, smacking him playfully on the seat of his pants as he climbed the last few stairs ahead of her.

“If that’s the case we ought to be picking them up at the police station at any minute now!” she laughed. “Have you had your supper?”

“No,” he said. “I waited for you.”

They shared the sitting room and a small bedroom beyond. The rest of the flat Laura had let out as bed-sitters to two of her hospital colleagues, who were rarely in for meals. Anne Meakin and Gillian Davis enjoyed life to the full. They slept at Chiswick and cooked their own breakfast when they managed to get up in time. They mended and washed their “smalls” in the bathroom one day per week, all the time they could afford from the full business of living.
Anne
was a good radiologist, but she would marry almost immediately, Laura supposed. Gillian was immersed in occupational therapy, “but not to the exclusion of everything else,” as she was quick to point out whenever the subject arose. She, too, would marry. They were neither of them “bachelor girls” in the true sense of the word.

Laura smiled. Life was like that for some people, a gay and irresponsible whirl, but she did not consciously envy Gill or Anne. They had proved to be bright companions in the flat, and the small weekly payments she received from them as rent allowed her to keep her home intact.

That had been the main consideration a year ago when she had set about putting her house in order. She wanted to keep her home, to make sure that Lance had the sort of background he needed. So far she had succeeded in making ends meet.

When they had finished their supper and Lance had gone to bed she sat beside the window, looking down the narrow street toward its far end where the gleam of the river showed like a strip of quicksilver in the moonlight. It was the same river, the same broad, romantic Thames that slipped past the hospital in the pulsating heart of a great city, yet here it seemed different. More ordinary, perhaps. It had not yet absorbed the full flow of life that awaited it farther on. Here it reflected only the little ways of little men.

Surprised and curiously troubled by the thought, she turned swiftly back into the room. It was madness to let her mind be colored by the fascination of these last two hours in the operating theater when the brilliance of one man had arrested time and everything else. It was more than madness to hope that she had played anything but the humblest of parts in the drama of Julius Behar’s outstanding achievement. He had seen her interest and commented upon it, but that was all. Yes, that was all.

CHAPTER TWO

The following afternoon Laura found herself in Harley Street. She had time off from the hospital and had come to do some shopping—alone, because everybody else seemed to be on duty—and quite unconsciously she had turned aside from the busy thoroughfares into Wigmore Street.

She walked rapidly, scarcely giving a glance to the shining brass plates that adorned almost every doorway, some of them bearing more than one professional name. But long before she came to the end of the quiet street with its air of greatness she turned back, half ashamed of the impulse that brought her there.

Why should I want to know about his life apart from the hospital? she asked herself, half angrily, yet she knew that it wasn’t idle curiosity that had taken her there. It was not even the desire for further knowledge of the man himself, but the strange, blind sort of fascination this small, sequestered area of London’s West End held for her. There was an aura about it that gripped her imagination and held her in thrall. It seemed as if even the pavements were hallowed by the tread of brilliant men. Names to be conjured leaped out at her, names from the past and names that adorned the present. Men who had been honored and knighted for their brilliance and their services to humanity. Men like Julius Behar...

She hurried away. Suppose he had seen her there she thought with a burning sense of confusion.

It was, of course, a remote possibility, and for the next two weeks she did not see him at all. He used another theater when he was operating, and she tidied up after a series of minor surgical jobs with a peculiar sense of loss.

Then almost dramatically, they were face to face.

“The head nurse wants you in number three,” Molly Bryant told her one morning, half an hour before a series of tonsillectomies was due to begin. “You’re to drop everything and fly! I gather there’s something of an emergency along there and you’ve been asked for.
R
ather you than me!” she added thankfully, wheeling a meal trolley away in the direction of Agnes Ward. “I’m not cut out for surgery.”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea who’s operating in number three?” Mary Roath asked somewhat testily when Laura passed on the information of her transfer. “We’re going to be up to the eyes in it here, too, but I suppose that doesn’t matter if it’s Julius Behar that’s waiting along the corridor!”

Normally a genial sort of person, Sister Roath hated her arrangements to be upset at the last minute like this, but the head nurse had to be obeyed after all.

Laura’s heart was beating hard and fast as she hurried along the corridor to the second group of operating rooms and a deep color rose into her cheeks as she saw Julius Behar standing in the anteroom, waiting to scrub up.

Bending over the taps, with an attendant nurse on either side, he seemed to fill up all the room, yet he was not abnormally tall. He turned as she went in, holding up his hands for his gloves, and before the mask was clipped across his mouth she saw his profile for a moment silhouetted against the harsh northern light from the window behind him. The high cheekbones and long narrow jaw were sharply outlined and the arch of the nose looked more prominent than ever.

“Ah, here you are at last, Sister!” The head nurse said. “I shall have to ask you to help us out, I’m afraid. Nurse Hanford has had a slight accident and we are very short staffed.”

The head nurse probably went on to explain about Maud Hanford’s accident, Laura realized later, but she did not hear, or what she heard seemed to have little significance. All that mattered was that she would be able to watch Julius Behar at work again, that she would be contributing to his eventual success.

The list was long and proved complicated. They worked steadily until six o’clock, with only a half-hour break. By that time even Julius Behar was beginning to look tired. Yet Laura knew he could have gone on working twice as long if the situation had demanded it, and her mounting regard for him increased. She knew that she had fallen completely under his peculiar domination as they worked, although she did not imagine for one moment that he even noticed her. She was no more than a unit, a necessary factor to help him complete the job at hand, a trained person who should not make any mistake.

He washed and changed in the anteroom as usual, walking off afterwards with the head nurse in tow, and Laura found herself helping to clear up in the theater with a strange feeling of anticlimax. He had been casually polite
,
apologizing for keeping them so late, and that, after all, was the logical sequence of events. The personal touch was missing. It was only by chance that they had come together for a brief moment after that other operation, because the operation itself was unusual, perhaps. She had no right to expect it to happen again. In the interval he had forgotten her.

When the lights in the operating room had been switched off she took her leave and hurried to the main door. It was raining, and she hesitated a moment, buttoning her cloak securely under her chin as she prepared to dash across the glistening quadrangle toward the gates. Close against the boundary wall a line of cars was parked. They were deep in shadow, but suddenly a pair of headlights were switched on, catching her fully in their powerful beam. She could not see beyond them because they blinded her, but somehow she knew that the man behind the wheel was Julius Behar.

“Come on!” he commanded. “Run for it. You’re going to get wet standing there!”

She ran then, splashing through puddles and all but slipping on the treacherously wet stone slabs.

“I knew it was raining,” she confessed as she got in beside him, “but I had no idea it was anything like this! Thank you,” she added gratefully as she closed the door.

“I owe you this, in a way,” he said. “I kept you late.”

“That didn’t matter,” she assured him, and he drove off in the ensuing silence.

It was a rather embarrassed silence because she felt suddenly shy in his company. Sitting within inches of him in the warmth and intimacy of a luxurious car, she could feel all the old intoxication returning, the dangerous, heady sense of belonging on the same plane as this man, of being part although a very minor part, of the world she knew was his whole life. How little she knew of him really, she mused. And how much she wanted to know!

“Don’t go out of your way, Doctor Behar,” she said when they had crossed the river. “I can quite easily get a bus from here.”

He said, with the finality that defeated all argument, “I am in no particular hurry. I can quite easily put you down on your front doorstep.” He turned to glance at her. “Where to?”

“Chiswick. Arlton Gardens. But it’s so very far out of your way.”

“I have nothing else to do.” Once more he glanced at her. “Unless you would allow me to take you to dinner somewhere?" he suggested. “I could almost say that I owed you that, too!”

Laura bit her lip. There was nothing—nothing in the world—she would have liked better than to accept his invitation, but quite apart from still being in her uniform, there was Lance’s supper and the homework she had promised him to help with.

“I should have loved to come,” she confessed, “but I have chores to do. My brother is still at school and I look after him. He’s almost fourteen, but I don’t like the thought of children being left alone all evening.”

He did not press the point, driving westward through the early theater traffic with a sureness and precision that seemed to characterize his approach to most things. When she thought of the dinner they might have shared she wondered if they would have spoken about his work, if she might have come to know something of his background and the driving force that had lifted him at thirty-four far ahead of his fellows on the perilous ladder of success.

“Your parents are dead?” Julius Behar asked the question as if he hardly needed an answer. “There’s just you and your brother?”

“Yes.” Laura sat a little way forward in her seat, her small, sensitive face illuminated by the passing headlamps of other cars. It was a piquant face, pale now in the artificial light, with a vague hint of sadness about the mouth, which the man at the wheel had been swift to see. “My people were killed in an accident nearly two years ago. It was a terrible shock, especially to my brother. He was so young—”

“Twelve? Yes,” he agreed, as if he were remembering his own youth. “Too young for tragedy. And you,” he added, “you were just at the beginning of your career.
”

“It was a career I could go on with,” she answered. “I took night duty for a time and had someone from next door in to sleep with Lance, and then I sublet part of the apartment, which solved more than one problem for me.” She paused, smiling. “But I must be boring you with all this family history,” she said. “Life has just gone on fairly uneventfully ever since.”

“Surely not entirely uneventfully at St. Clement’s?” His smile, in the dimness of the less brilliantly lit side street into which they had turned, was slightly cynical. “One could hardly complete one’s training there without at least the usual romance,” he suggested.

Quick color stained her cheeks, although she knew that he could not see. “I don’t think I’ve had time,” she said, “even for romance.”

Not a love affair, she thought honestly. Not anything deep and passionate and lasting. It was true that she had scarcely had time for love. It hadn’t come in search of her as determinedly as all that!

“Which might be a mistake,” Julius Behar suggested unexpectedly. “Where do we go from here?”

“To the right,” she directed. “Then first left and right again.”

They were nearing her destination and she had spent the time talking about herself, whether by accident or by Julius Behar’s design it was impossible to say. She supposed if he didn’t want to talk about himself, if he had no intention of allowing a comparative stranger to probe into his personal background, it had been easy enough to let her chatter. He probably thought her too loquacious. She glanced at him, wondering what he was thinking.

The handsome, clear-cut profile had engraved itself on her mind now, so she had no need to look at him. When he pulled the car up to the curb before number ninety-five Arlton Gardens she got out immediately.

“It was most kind of you to bring me home,” she said.

He gave her a brief smile.

“What about that dinner?” he asked almost abruptly. “I shall be having some friends in on Thursday—Dermot and Mary Strang. Can I persuade you to join us?”

Laura’s heart lurched forward excitedly as she attempted to thank him once again.

“I’d like to come,” she confessed. “It’s very kind of you.”

She supposed she was repeating herself foolishly, but her thoughts were chaotic, with a confusion about them that matched her quickened heartbeats.

“Harley Street,” he said as he let in his clutch. “You know the number.”

She didn’t, but she could so easily find out. Any directory
of
Who’s Who
would list his name and qualifications. Yes, it would be easy. Easy and exciting beyond anything she had ever dreamed about!