Free Nurse in Waiting by Jane Arbor

correspondence’—and all that?”
    “A telephoned telegram is hardly ‘private correspondence’, is it? I couldn’t complain if the whole of Tulleen knew what it contained!”
    “No, but—well, hang it, haven’t you a grouse at all?”
    Joanna laughed. “You sound as if you want me to have one. All right—I was annoyed —”
    “Come, that’s human of you!” He seemed relieved as he regarded her shrewdly beneath lowered lids. “You’re annoyed—aren’t you?—because you think I’ve been let in on a scrap of that private life of yours that you were so starchy about keeping from me the other day?”
    “No, of course not. And I wasn’t ‘starchy’. It was simply that I felt you couldn’t be interested in gossip about what I do with my time in London.”
    “But I could be!” He was serious now. He put out a hand to take her wrist in a grip which hurt. “I wanted you to talk the other day. Not because I’m nosy or curious, but because I’ve got to make myself remember that there’s a world outside all this.” Her eyes swept from cornice to floor and from wall to confining wall of the room. “Don’t you see how easy, how damnably easy it is to forget? And that everyone here seems intent on making me believe that this is my whole future?”
    Joanna gently disengaged her wrist and wished she hadn’t when he looked rebuffed. “I do understand,” she said, pitying him. “But you’re wrong when you think no one helps you to get outside it. You don’t always help yourself, you know!”
    “Don’t I know it? It’s a kind of black despair that grips me. Sometimes—d’you know, Joanna?—I even use it against them to pay them out for—for swaddling me here!”
    “You use it against yourself more.” Her tone held a quiet conviction which seemed to impress him.
    “I know that too. But it’s the only rebellion I’ve got to my hand, d’you see?” He relaxed slightly and gave her a wry smile. “I’d use it against you too — only you don’t seem to mind. It’s your English imperturbability, I suppose.”
    “Well, don’t trade on it too much,” warned Joanna, smiling. “Even English worms will turn!” Suddenly she felt happy, as if she saw a way to help him opening out before her. Somehow, by talk about herself, by bringing him news of his own estate, by encouraging him to tell her about his life before his accident, she would try to give back to him a belief in a future which lay beyond the confines of this room. She remembered the station-master’s flowery description of him ‘riding through Tulleen with the pride of the wind in his hair’, and knew that she would give much to have seen him so.
    He was saying: “Well, now you know something of the black devils I contend with. Do you have any of your own?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “You’re—happy?”
    “Mostly—yes.”
    “I suppose the young man helps. Are you going to marry him?”
    Joanna, taken aback by the question, said nothing, and he repeated like an importunate child: “Well — are you?”
    “He hasn’t asked me.”
    “You know that’s hedging And no answer to what I asked.”
    There was nothing but to be frank with him. She said slowly: “You see , I’ve known Dale for a very long time. He is a research chemist; when I’m in London we go about together and—and perhaps we’ve always supposed that —”
    “—That when he makes up his mind, you’ll be nice and handy, and then he’ll pop you into a box of a house in the suburbs and you’ll see him off on the 8.15 every morning of your lives!”
    “Well—doesn’t that sound like the happy ending?” Joanna was glad to escape into badinage. “Though, as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be like that at all. More likely I should have to keep his bag packed, ready for when he would be dashing off somewhere to watch or take part in experiments.”
    “Well then, he’ll probably go in for the hydrogen bomb and bore you to death talking nuclear