The girl dragged her arm free and lay back in the chair again, looking up at her spitefully from under her pale, reddish eyebrows. She said: ‘What will Richard say?’ and added in her silly, faint dying-away voice: ‘You know he and I are in love?’
‘I know you’ve been pursuing him round the hospital ever since you came there,’ said Stella. ‘But all doctors get that kind of thing and I’m sorry if I disillusion you, but you’ve been nothing to Ricky but a bloody bore. All these ringings-up in phoney voices, all these sloppy little notes….My dear girl, my husband is fifteen years older than you are, he’s married, he’s a very busy man—he hardly even knows you exist.’
The girl had been leaning back in the chair quietly listening. Now she opened her eyes. She said: ‘Of course you’d be the last to know, wouldn’t you?’ and closed her eyes again.
It was all no use: just a silly, obstinate, hysterical little bitch, trying to make herself interesting. Stella lost all patience. ‘All right, have it your own way; but now I’m bored with you, as bored as Richard is. Will you kindly get up and get out of my house.’
The girl said in her dying-away voice which yet was half-mockingly triumphant: ‘But I’m going to have a baby,’ and pulled aside the cheap little, tarty little coat for a moment, and softly folded it again over her body.
Stella sat down on the edge of the examination couch and for a moment gave herself over to a sick despair. For what a muddle, what a sordid, endless, desperately damaging muddle might not this dreadful little creature land them all in, to satisfy her craving for notice. A doctor….And the wretched girl had been, in some sort, his patient; he had attended her for a couple of days up at the hospital for a poisoned finger—that was, in fact, how all this nonsense had begun. But if she’d been his patient—then that meant the attentive interest of the General Medical Council….And the girl was undeniably pregnant. A physical nausea rose up in her at the thought of the gossip to come, the leering eyes and the whispering tongues, the goggling excitement of the hospital staff, the no-smoke-without-fire routine; the ceaseless threat from the girl herself of scenes and dramas and collapses and recurrent phoney suicides. Marriage to Ricky had been dull enough in all conscience; but now how precious it began to seem in its monotonous security. For what if patients began to fall off, if poverty and struggle came to be added again, as in the old days of their building up of the practice, to the dreary round of surgeries and night calls and cancelled parties and always-arriving-late….I couldn’t face it, she thought; I couldn’t go back to the scraping and saving, the petty economies, the cheeky tradesmen, the little, niggling, mounting debts….But if this girl persisted in this charge of hers….
There was a step in the hall and Frederick Graham, Ricky’s partner, came into the surgery:
Ricky would have stood for a moment, rather helpless, hesitant, diffident; but Frederick, the debonair, just lifted a devil’s eyebrow and said with his easy smile that he was sorry, he hadn’t realised there was anyone here….
If this stupid little bitch had had to fasten upon one or other of them, why couldn’t it have been Frederick?—who, after all, was ten times more glamorous, surely, than poor, self-effacing, quiet Richard. Frederick was a bachelor and consequently far less susceptible to this kind of blackmail. And yet… After all, he was a bachelor; and in that case….Like a sick thrust into her heart came the knowledge that she couldn’t have borne that: the thought of Frederick in the arms of this creamy-soft, sleechy-soft little creature. For many months now, when the hum-drum of life with Richard had become too much to bear, she had titillated herself by pretending that she and Frederick….The truth is, she thought, that I’m no better than this miserable little strumpet here. But at least she had made no scenes, played out no dramas—Frederick had no more idea of her day-dreams than had Ricky himself.
The girl in the chair opened her eyes and gazed up starrily at Frederick. ‘I know you! You’re Mr. Graham, the surgeon.’ She added in a silly, baby voice: ‘I’m Ann.’
Frederick drew his brows together in one of his quick black frowns. ‘It’s Nurse Kelly from the hospital, isn’t it? What’s she doing here?’ But the truth began to dawn. He said: ‘Not still chasing after Ricky?’
‘She and he are going to have a darling little baby—’ said Stella.
‘Oh, for heavens’ sake—!’
‘—and she’s taken an overdose of morphia: can you imagine?’