Comes the Dark Stranger - Jack Higgins [58]
16
IT was quiet when he awoke - very quiet and he found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. He was lying in a narrow hospital bed and the walls of the small room and its furniture were all painted white.
After a while he tried to sit up. For some unaccountable reason his head felt detached from the rest of his body and when he raised a hand to his forehead, he encountered a heavy bandage.
He tried to push himself up even further and at that moment the door opened and a nurse entered the room. She was a large, middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and large, capable hands. She moved forward quickly and gently pushed him back against the pillows. ‘You mustn’t do that,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t even move.’
‘Where am I?’ Shane said weakly. ‘What happened?’
‘You’re in a private room at Burnham General Infirmary,’ she said. ‘You’ve been here for the past five days.’
Shane frowned. ‘Five days?’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand.’
She smoothed the sheets quickly and lifted a temperature chart from a hook on the wall. ‘You’ve had a very serious operation. It’s a miracle you’re here at all.’
For a moment her voice seemed to recede into the distance, leaving him alone as he considered the implication of her words and then he took a deep breath and said slowly, ‘Are you trying to tell me that I’ve had the operation that was needed to remove shrapnel from my brain?’
She nodded. ‘That’s right. You were brought in here in a terrible state. Sir George Hammond flew up specially from London to perform the operation. He was hoping you’d regain consciousness before he left, but he had another important operation in Germany so he had to leave yesterday.’
‘So I’m not going to die after all?’ Shane said slowly.
She laughed cheerfully. ‘Good heavens no. You’ll be here for a week or two yet, but you’ll be perfectly fit when you leave.’
She went out of the room and he lay back against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling drained of all emotion. Perhaps at some later time he would feel elation, but at the moment he was conscious of nothing - only of an emptiness, a coldness that moved inside him and was not to be explained.
A few minutes later a doctor came in to see him and gave him a routine examination and afterwards, the nurse brought him something to eat.
As she was arranging the tray across his knees, he noticed some flowers in a vase by the window and asked her who had brought them. She smiled. ‘They were from the young lady,’ she said. ‘Miss Faulkner, I think the name is.’
Shane tried to sound casual and unconcerned. ‘She’s been here?’
‘Every day,’ the nurse told him. ‘I’ve promised to phone her the moment you come round.’
After she’d taken the tray away, he lay back against the pillow, staring out through the window at the driving rain and thinking about Laura Faulkner. His senses seemed sharper, more acute than he had ever known them before. He could even smell the perfume of the flowers from across the room and he was filled with an aching longing for her. The door clicked quietly open and he turned eagerly.
Lomax was standing there, a light smile on his face. ‘You look disappointed,’ he said. ‘Expecting someone else?’
Shane grinned weakly. ‘I thought it might be Laura Faulkner.’
Lomax shook his head. ‘Her father was brought in here the same day you were,’ he said. ‘He died yesterday. I understand the funeral is this morning. She’ll probably be pretty busy.’
Shane’s hand tightened over the edge of the sheets and he cursed softly thinking of her on her own. He pushed the thought away from him and said, ‘Got a cigarette?’
Lomax handed him a cigarette and said, ‘She’s got a lot of guts that girl. They buried her brother three days ago and she followed the coffin right to the graveside. That took some doing under the circumstances. From what I can make out he never did much for her or the old man.’
Lomax gave him a light. Shane inhaled gratefully and sighed. ‘I never thought I’d live to enjoy things like this again.’ He gestured