Purposes of Love Read Free

meeting you this morning, Lingard? He is like you, isn’t he? I said to Walker as soon as I saw you out together, That must be Lingard’s brother, you could tell it anywhere. He looks very clever. I expect he reads a lot, like you.” And, hopefully, “I expect it’s rather boring for him when you’re on duty, isn’t it?”
    Dilling’s was dowdy and comfortable, had no wireless, and was not much patronised by the hospital staff.
    “Dilling’s. Eleven,” he said. She did not urge him to write it down; he never forgot things he intended to remember. “I’ll bring Mic along, shall I? I think it would do him good.”
    “Do if you like,” said Vivian; a defence-mechanism, which practice had made nearly automatic, concealing the fact that she was hurt. But the invitation stopped short of warmth.
    “No? Good, we leave Mic to do his house-painting. We can talk better by ourselves.”
    The intrusion of Mic was wafted away. For a moment Vivian clung obstinately to her receding indignation; but, as usual, it turned to mist in her hands. Jan leaned over the edge of the cot, and absently stroked the baby’s stomach with the back of a bent forefinger. Its crying sank at once to an unconvinced whimper. He went on stroking with a half-smile; but his eyes were not smiling and his thoughts seemed on other things.
    “When you meet Mic—if you do—” he said slowly, “be easy on him.” He surrendered his finger, without looking, to the child’s sleepy clutch. The whimper became a faint hiccup, then silence. “He’s had a very—”
    But Vivian’s eye had been caught by the balcony door.
    “I believe Page saw you then. She’s still looking. Suppose I tell her who you are? She might give us another few minutes presently, when I’ve changed the child.”
    “What? Oh, no, leave it. Too much fuss. See you tomorrow.”
    He was gone. At the top of the iron stairs he smiled over his shoulder and disappeared; and the baby, after an instant of shocked silence, broke into a wail shrill with outrage, astonishment, and loss. Vivian picked it up. It slobbered indignantly into her neck, its fat year-old face creased with grief under a bandage that sat, like a lopsided turban, over one ear. She rocked its damp softness for a moment in her arms, its cries blending with Thora’s dimly-remembered sobbing at the back of her mind.
    On the threshold of the ward Page met her, peering out.
    “Whatever was Mr. Herbert doing out there all that time? I particularly wanted to speak to him. Has he gone ?”
    “It wasn’t Mr. Herbert. It was my brother looking for me. He’s just arrived from Scotland. Stupid of him to come here, but people don’t realise, you know. I told him I was on duty and sent him away.”
    The staff-nurse’s eyes had lost their narrow look, and quickened with interest.
    “What a shame. You needn’t have sent him off like that, kid.” (She was two years younger than Vivian, but all juniors were “kid” to her unbent moods.) “He could have stopped a minute, and had a look at the ward.” A pity, she reflected. You could let Lingard have little things; she was a good kid and didn’t take advantage. Besides, her brother would be sure to be a nice type of boy, probably an undergrad. Undergraduates came next after housemen in the scale of achievement.

-2-
    V IVIAN WOKE EARLY, BEFORE the maids came trampling along the corridors, thumping the doors, and popping a shrill head through each like a cuckoo out of a clock.
    “Twenty-to-seven-nurse.”
    “Thank you,” said Vivian. The sun was shining, and she wondered for a moment why this was making her so pleased. Then she remembered that she was meeting Jan. She lay and looked at the light leaping on a favourite bowl of thick green glass; liking even her room, a square cream-coloured box eight feet by seven and identical, down to the seams in the lino, with a hundred others, the bed, chest and chair disposed in positions ordained by regulation and unalterable. The