Seven Dials Read Online Free

he shook his head at her and said even more easily, ‘Just teasing, my dear. You’ll never get used to me, will you? And me a fellow American, too – we really ought to understand each other better than we do, you know.’
    ‘Indeed we should,’ she said, sharper than ever. ‘And I have to say I wish you’d understand that I really don’t enjoy these jokes. I’m here to do a job as much as anyone else and I really would prefer it if you treated me the same way you treat all the other resident medical staff.’
    ‘But they aren’t as pretty as you are,’ he said, unabashed, and put a hand on her arm. ‘Really, Charlie, you are very pretty, you know, and I do wish you wouldn’t be so - well, chilly. I’m a harmless soul, you know, just friendly and cheerful and -’
    ‘So your wife always says,’ she said savagely and pulled away from him firmly and went hurrying through the big double doors into Spruce, letting them swing back in his face, and leaving him outside in the corridor. He really was getting impossible, she told herself furiously as she marched into Sister’s office, and sat down with a little thump, and if he doesn’t stop it I’ll tell him exactly what I think of him and I won’t be polite about it. And she reached for the pile of notes Sister had left ready for her, and pulled them towards her with a savage little gesture. Indeed and indeed, she would tell him
exactly
what she thought of him.
    Harry watched her go, standing there in the same easy posture with his hands in his pockets and a faint smile on his face, but he was hating himself. Why the hell did he
do
it? He knew she disliked the sort of badinage he used, knew that the look she gave him spelled disdain and not enjoyment, but all the same, out the stupid words came. As though someone else were speaking and not him. When would he find the way to get her to look at him as though she found him interesting rather than merely irritating? He didn’t have this effect onother women; when he smiled at the nurses, offered them his little jokes and teases, they smiled and sometimes laughed, occasionally blushed, and always looked approving even though he wasn’t necessarily interested in going further with them. He just teased nurses because that was his way with pretty girls, and always had been. But now here he was, dealing with a woman he’d really like to impress, would really like to get to know better, and all he could do was behave like some sort of hobbledehoy. It really was too absurd; and he turned sharply and went clattering away to Elm, to see the gastrectomy patient he’d operated on yesterday.
    Maybe, he told himself as he went, maybe I could make even more out of the fact that we’re both Americans? He sometimes forgot that fact; he’d been living and working here in London for over a dozen years now and his youth and early manhood in Virginia seemed sometimes not to have happened to him at all, but to someone else he had known in a vague sort of way. Yet for all that, he reminded himself as he arrived at Elm Ward and Sister, bridling with pleasure at the sight of him, came surging forwards to greet him with all the deference due to his status as a senior consultant, for all that I
am
an American, and so is she. Perhaps I could ask her to come to see a film? - must remember to call it a movie, of course - say
The Best Years of Our Lives
- everyone was saying it was the best thing to come out of Hollywood ever; ask her to that, seriously, not jokingly, and see what happens?
    And he stared unseeingly at the chart in his hands and imagined the scene; he stopping to speak to her as she sat having her solitary lunch in the medical staff common room - she always sat alone for lunch, so that would work well enough – and saying casually, ‘I’m going to this splendid movie - several of my other American friends have told me it’s superb. Perhaps you’d care to see it? And then we could go on and have a bite at a rather nice