Appointment with Yesterday Read Online Free Page A

others, bolder and more experienced , were seriously out to get him. These were the girls who knew how to flash provocation from their cool downcast eyes as they stood by a bedside receiving instructions about a saline drip: who knew how to wear their sober uniform as if it was part of a strip-tease. Some of these sorceresses even managed to date the great man, now and again, and subsequently dined out (or perhaps cocoa’d out would be more accurate) for weeks afterwards on tales of wine and orchids and whispered words of passion.
    Not that Julian Waggett had been rich—not in those days. He was only a house-surgeon, two years qualified, andearning such a salary as protest marches are based on. But it made no difference. Although he was only twenty-six, and among the lowest-ranking doctors at the hospital, the indefinable bloom of success was already upon him. Already one felt that the deep-pile carpets of Harley Street were unrolling under his feet as he trod the wards; and when he glanced off-handedly at the bed-end chart, or threw out a casual syllable that would light up a pain-racked face, you knew, you knew without any doubt at all, that those unhurried steps were taking him into his future swifter than the speed of sound.
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    And the woman who was to step into the future with him? Not for her would be the harried existence of an overworked GP’s wife—tied to the telephone, meals drying in the oven, never a night’s unbroken sleep. No, whoever finally succeeded in capturing Julian was in for a life of pampered luxury and ease. Service-flats. A town house and a country house. Luxury holidays in the Bahamas. Did he know, Milly (Nurse Harris, that is to say) sometimes wondered, how many thousands of rollers were rolled into how many acres of hair at the Nurses’ Home each night, just for him? How many little pots of eye-liner, eye-shiner, skin freshener, pore-cream and all the rest were lined up in sacrificial array on his hundreds of unknown altars in little cell-like bedrooms? And could he ever have believed that those fluffy little heads, which seemed to find it so impossible to understand the blood-plasma tables, were nevertheless capable of compiling timetables far more complicated than anything dealt with at head office, when it came to engineering “chance” meetings with him on corridors or in doorways? And did he know—did it perhaps even amuse him to know—that several young lives had been drastically reshaped —for good or ill—simply by the fact that it was rumoured that he didn’t like virgins?
    And after all the sound and fury, what happened? He married Milly —Nurse Harris, that is to say! Nurse Harris of the gingery hair, and the freckles. Nurse Harris of the thickwaist, and the stubby fingers, who couldn’t wear eye-make-up because it brought her out in styes. And a virgin to boot. It was no wonder that when the engagement was announced, the whole, vast humming hospital seemed to stop in its tracks for a moment, from the top consultant to the lowest-paid washer-up, all of them asking the same question. Why? Why?
    All their guesses were wrong. Nurse Harris wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t inherited half a million pounds from a deceased uncle. Nor was Julian trying to call the bluff of some disdainful glamour-puss by making her jealous. He really did want to marry Nurse Harris. He did marry her. There were flowers, champagne, congratulations, and after that, of course, all that the mystified well-wishers could do was to sit back and wait for the marriage to crack up. Six months, most of them gave it.
    But it didn’t break up. Not in six months, nor even in a year. Two years passed—three—even five; and during this time Julian went from strength to strength. House-Surgeon, Registrar , Senior Registrar…. Before he was thirty-five he was a consultant, and with a private practice on the side that was rapidly becoming fashionable. His name, now and then, began to appear in the papers, in