A Surgical Affair by Shirley Summerskill Read Free Book Online Page A

important, especially as this was only the second meeting of the club she had attended.
    From then on she was seeing Richard a lot. They held tennis parties at each other’s colleges, went to dances together and met during the vacations. Diana usually found it difficult to make friends quickly, but with Richard it had been different. His complete lack of shyness and reserve drew her out of her shell.
    About this time she went through a girlish in fatuation. Whenever she thought about it , Diana felt extremely ashamed.
    It was all over a fellow medical student called Arthur Hudson. He was unusually good looking, or so she thought at the time, but as he was two years her senior, she only spoke to him occasionally. She would wait around the anatomy classroom to catch a glimpse of him. How silly it all seemed now! But how important it was at the time. When he left Oxford to do the rest of the course in Kenya, Diana thought she wouldn’t be able to go on living. But to her astonishment, she managed to survive and the memory of Arthur Hudson slowly faded.
    When she lived in London she didn’t see so much of Richard. The final exams were getting nearer, and there were more lectures and ward rounds to attend.
    “I can’t enjoy the ballet,” she would tell him, “when I’ve spent the afternoon in the pathology museum or in a hot pre-natal clinic examining patients. I’m just not in the mood for it.”
    Some of the students led a fun-filled life, of course. They went to parties at night and were wide awake for the lecture at nine the next morning. But Diana could never manage it. So Richard was the only boy friend she had.
    It was six months before she sat her final exam when he first asked her to marry him. They’d been to see a movie, because Diana said she couldn’t bear to look at textbooks any more that day.
    He proposed in a particularly noisy subway train.
    “Will you marry me?” he had shouted, as they drew out of Piccadilly station.
    Diana wasn't surprised at the question. They’d been going out together for years.
    “Let’s talk about it when my exam is over,” she said.
    “Now I’m a qualified lawyer, I’m not doing at all badly. We could get a little apartment somewhere to start with.”
    “Let’s wait, Richard, please.”
    During the next six months Richard proposed four more times. He said her exam didn’t matter, that he could keep her. He had the persistence of a spoiled child who’s told he can’t have another candy and keeps asking, “Why can’t I?” (In fact Diana had always noticed, when she stayed at his home, that Richard’s parents spoiled him dreadfully. He was their only child.)
    And now the exam was over. She hadn’t seen Richard since she qualified. Diana knew that when she did, she might still want to ask him to wait ...
    Suddenly she was feeling hungry. She realized she was completely lost and that it was nearly dark. She looked at her watch and found she’d been walking for over two hours.
    She turned around. The hospital was silhouetted against the sky. The lights from the houses twinkled below it.
    At that moment Diana wished she had a little house of her own. A white one, with a thatched roof, and not too big.
    “And perhaps a husband?” she thought vaguely. “And maybe eventually some children?”
    She was more cheerful now.
    “The hospital is only the place where I work,” she told herself, walking back briskly. “Disease and death are only a small part of existence. I mustn’t make them too important. It’s the world outside that matters.”
    And when Diana arrived at the hospital, she found there were buttered crumpets for tea.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    S o Sister said, in a terribly haughty voice—“it has come to my notice, Nurse, that you were seen leaving the resident doctors’ quarters yesterday evening. Is that so?”
    High-pitched giggles came from behind the screen in the sterilizing room.
    Diana was intrigued by this fragment of conversation. She had gone