Free Seven Dials by Claire Rayner Page B

and hating herself and him in almost equal measure.
    ‘So there it is,’ Charlie said and couldn’t look at him. Standing there beside his bed, her hands jammed into her pockets as usual, she kept her head bent, looking only at his hands folded on the red blanket that covered him. ‘I had hoped that perhaps with his added support I might be able to overcome McIndoe’s objections, but -’
    ‘Miserable bastard,’ Brin said, and moving fretfully drew up his knees to sit with his arms round them, staring furiously across the ward. ‘What the hell do I have to do to get people to understand how
important
this is? Cut my damned throat and give them two scars to mend?’
    Now she did look at him, sharply, for one moment hearing Max’s words again at the back of her mind, but then, refusing to listen to them, shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly, Brin. You can’t force people to do what you want them to do just by -’
    ‘I’m not trying to force anybody anywhere,’ he said and looked at her and as she caught his glance he smiled, that crooked smile that could make her feel so stupid and giddy. ‘All I want is what any patient in this place wants - a cure for my ills. But no one seems about to give me one, or to care whether I get one or not -’
    ‘That’s hardly fair, Brin,’ she said after a moment and hereached out and patted her arm.
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Charlie. You’re right, of course. You care and damned grateful I am for it. If I didn’t have you, I don’t know what I’d do. So, tell me, what else did the old devil say? Miserable sod that he is. I should have known what sort of help I’d get from him. You should have seen the way he was at the VE night dinner. As cheerful as the hangman, so help me, sitting there crumbling his bread into pellets and saying not a dicky bird, I swear to you, all evening - a right misery -’
    ‘I believe his wife was killed in a doodlebug raid,’ Charlie said unwillingly, as angry with Max as Brin was but needing to be fair. ‘I dare say it was a bad night for him. People remembered things that night - I know I did. I kept thinking about Cousin Mary, even though she didn’t actually get killed by a raid, but it happened during one and -’
    But he was paying no attention. ‘So where do we go from here? I’m going to get into that man’s hospital if it’s the last thing I do, one way or another. If money won’t help, then -’
    ‘He’s got all the patients he can handle,’ she said, feeling a moment of chill. ‘So it isn’t a matter of paying. Anyway, the patients at East Grinstead don’t pay, as far as I know. It’s like us here at Nellie’s - people in the open wards are treated free. They raise their money by voluntary contributions - and -’
    ‘And then they can be lordly about who they’ll treat and who they won’t,’ Brin said, furiously again, and he threw himself back against his pillows. ‘Why shouldn’t they take me on as well as any other patient? I need treatment, don’t I? You said yourself that I did, so why refuse me the way he has?’
    ‘I told you. I sent him the photographs, spoke to his secretary on the phone, but he was adamant. He said he had too much other more severe injury to treat at the moment and couldn’t take you. In a year or two perhaps, when there’s less work for him to do, now the War’s over and there won’t be any more of the sort of injuries he’s been treating there -’
    ‘A year or two!’ Brin said with huge scorn. ‘I haven’t got a lifetime to waste! Damn it, I’m almost at my peak as it is! I’m thirty-five, not a baby of nineteen! I’d have thought on the grounds of my age and my occupation alone that ought to give me some priority over these kids he’s filled his hospital with -’
    ‘They were injured in the War, Brin. Airmen mostly and -’
    ‘Well, I was injured in the War too, wasn’t I? The fact that Ihad a bloody bomb dropped on me instead of going off to drop them on other people