Seven Dials Read Online Free Page B

hospital treating her like a stranger - albeit a charming one - when he had decided the affair was over. He knew he had spoiled more than one promising nursing career, and was ashamed of that, but it made no difference. He still did it -
    And why? He sat there in the surgeon’s room amidst its sagging armchairs and scratched linoleum and piles of old
Lancets
and coffee cups and listening to the distant rattle of instruments and the anaesthetist’s booming voice as he soothed his patient into acceptance of mask and ether, and shook his head at his own behaviour, not finding himself at all an attractive person. Though it isn’t all my fault, is it? he asked himself, self-pity rising in a comforting tide. If Lee hadn’t been so - well, the way she had been those first years after we married, it would have been different. If she hadn’t been so obsessed with her own longing for children that she had shut him out, if she had been all a new wife should have been instead of sending him, as she undoubtedly had, headfirst into Katy Lackland’s arms - but now he refused to think of himself and his affairs another moment. With Katy Lackland back in London and likely to fall under his feet at some family functionor other any day now such thinking was dangerous. As dangerous as thinking about Charlotte Lucas, so he would think instead about something else.
    Like the difficult bypass of the duodenum he was about to do. A jejunal anastomosis demanded great skill and concentration; he had plenty of the first, and it was now up to him to make sure he supplied enough of the latter. And he pulled his cotton theatre suit into more comfortable creases, tied his mask over his mouth and nose, and went into the anteroom to scrub up. Later today he would come back to the matter of Charlotte Lucas. One way or another he’d find a way through that young woman’s absurd defences. One way or another.

3
    In the boardroom cigarette smoke was beginning to wreathe around the ceiling, wrapping its tendrils round the handsome plaster work and muffling the fading colours even more than the long years of the War had done, when no one could possibly justify spending time and money and effort on mere repainting. Lee tried not to cough, not wanting to seem to be criticizing the smokers, but it wasn’t easy, and she blinked down at the papers in front of her, trying to concentrate. But it was hard because Brodie’s voice was so very soporific. He was droning on still about the costs the hospital had had to meet in the past three months, since the last meeting of the Governors; about the price of drugs and bandages and sheets and blankets, when, that was, they were able to get them, for the Ministry of Supply had been less than helpful – and now a note of indignation crept into his voice – in spite of the fact that they had lost so much of their stock when the flying bomb had made such a mess of the pathology and pharmacy block.
    ‘We shall have to find more money, I’m afraid, a lot more money, if we’re to avoid the need to close down a ward, or even two. I do all I can to make ends meet, but even I can’t manage the impossible. With most of our original legacies running out - after all it’s over a hundred years since we were founded and excellent as some of our benefactors were, and their gifts well administered, nothing lasts for ever – well, money is hard to come by. Unless we get a sizable injection of new funds the patient, poor old Nellie’s, you know - the patient is liable to take a very nasty turn for the worse.’
    And rather incongruously he giggled at his own joke and then sat and stared lugubriously at them as they stared back or shuffled their papers and tried to absorb what all the numbers he had thrown at them actually meant.
    ‘Closing wards is, of course, out of the question,’ Max saidafter a while, as no one else seemed inclined to say anything. ‘We have waiting lists for operations, I’m told, and that is something I