Doctor in Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

even knows that I really want to marry her yet.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Well, I can only hope it comes as a nice surprise.”
    “But I really think I will marry her one day,” I continued earnestly. “Of course, I’ve had plenty of girl friends before – we all had at St Swithin’s – but never have I met anyone in which so many delightful feminine qualities have been collected together. You see she’s so–”
    The telephone rang.
    “One second, Richard. Yes? Speaking. Yes. Right, I’ll be along in five minutes. Fits somewhere behind the station,” he explained. “It’s an old GPI I’ve been nursing along for years. Delighted to hear your plans, Richard, We must have a long chat about them. What’s her name again?”
    “Sally.”
    “Sally. Look here, we’ll split a bottle over it when I get back from this case. Then you can tell me all about her.”
    But after the fits behind the station and the gallstones in the Grand there was an acute retention down the road and a Colles’ fracture at the bus depot, so that my father didn’t arrive home until one-thirty. As the next morning I had to catch an early train, I left home without discussing my theoretical wife with anyone.
    The date of my return to work was fixed less by my physical condition than Sally’s impending official three nights off duty, two of which she was dutifully spending with her mother at home in Barnet. As soon as I reached St Swithin’s I sent her a note suggesting a meeting the following evening. Taking advantage of my involuntary saving through lying in bed, I had picked a fashionable restaurant in Soho in which a pair of Sicilian brothers carried on their family tradition of banditry. It was a small place, with tables, waiters, and diners so crowded together that it was difficult to eat the establishment’s famous spaghetti without it becoming entwined with a neighbour’s asparagus. But it had an orchestra of Charing Cross Road gypsies with a fiddler who breathed encouragingly down girls’ necks, and I thought it an excellent place to pursue my suit.
    I was sitting in the laboratory that morning thinking excitedly of the hours slipping past, when I was surprised to see Hinxman appear. He had not only refused to talk to me since my return to the hospital, but had pointedly got up and left rooms as I entered them. Now he seemed desperate to start a conversation. After making some distracted comments about glucose tolerance curves until the other pathologists were out of earshot, he exclaimed “She’s gone.”
    “Gone? Who’s gone?”
    “Sally Nightingale, of course.” I stared at him.
    “But gone where?”
    “For good.”
    “No!”
    “She has. She simply packed up this morning and left the hospital. She dropped her resignation in matron’s letter-box as she went past.” He sat down heavily on to a laboratory stool. “I’ve just this minute heard it from the staff nurse on Honesty.”
    My first feeling was of bewilderment. “But what on earth did she want to do that for? She seemed so terribly keen on nursing.”
    He made a despairing gesture over some samples of stomach contents. “It must have been Godfrey, I suppose.”
    “Godfrey? Godfrey who?”
    “John Godfrey. That air pilot she specialled when he was in Honesty with virus pneumonia. She’s gone off with him – that’s obvious. What other reason could there be for a girl to disappear? They’re probably half-way to South America by now. It’s either him or that fellow from the BBC who had asthma, or the stockbroker chap in Private Block with the ulcer.”
    “But I didn’t know anything about these men!”
    “Huh! You didn’t know anything about Sally. Fine monkeys she made of us, I must say.” He rested his elbows wearily among a batch of throat swabs. “There are far too many girls in this hospital who imagine a nurse’s uniform isn’t complete without a couple of housemen’s scalps dangling from the belt. And to think,” he added