All That Matters

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

A sweeping, heartfelt novel from the original Queen of Romance - originally published in 1954, now available for the first time in eBook. Handsome, clever, successful, rich. Steven has everything. That is what worries Glynis about her fiance. She loves him despite the differences in their backgrounds, but she doesn't move in his expensive, luxurious world, and she doesn't approve of the hectic glamour of his social life. Can their marriage survive on love alone?

Release date: October 17, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

IT WAS the big night of the year at St. Martha’s Hospital—the night of the annual dance.

Glynis had attended three so far in her young life, and had thoroughly enjoyed them. Tonight’s dance she did not enjoy—she felt too unsettled and worried.

While she was dancing with the grey-haired lung specialist, Popham Gray, he said:

“You look extremely pretty tonight, my dear, if a man old enough to be your grandfather may say so, but depressed. What’s wrong?”

Her reply had been the classic one when a girl didn’t want a man to think she was thinking about a man.

“Nothing.”

To cover her confusion and an innate shyness which was painfully acute and almost ineradicable, she then tried to add the explanation that she was just a bit ‘tired’. Then he laughed and said:

“Steve working you too hard, eh?”

That had reduced her to silence. She always felt silent at the thought of her employer. The famous, the wonderful, the handsome and wholly successful Steven Grant-Tally, M.D., F.R.C.S. Glynis was his receptionist and personal secretary.

She thought, as she stood alone by the palms behind which a hired band was playing, that the fact that all women ‘fell’ so easily for Steve was frightening. Instead of making him seem more attractive, which was, perhaps, the normal reaction, it scared her. And having closely worked with him now for twelve months—getting to know him so well—she was even more frightened of falling in love with him.

There was little guile in Glynis. Hers was a frank and simple character with only one complexity—that queer alarm which very clever successful people aroused in her. While she admired them from afar, she doubted their sincerity—their ability to live as ordinary people. And, above all, Glynis, herself, believed in ordinary people, and the simple lives they led. Immense glamour was in her opinion something to be seen in a film or be read about in a book but to be avoided in everyday existence.

Yet the goddess Glamour held a stubborn halo over her head. She had very real beauty. And it was a natural beauty that made men draw in their breath and women long to possess that exquisite skin, that slim supple figure, those eyes that were more green than hazel under the longest of sweeping lashes. Her close-cut hair had the burnt gold colour of sun on corn. Despite the ‘gamine’ cut, it waved thickly, and one lock had a habit of falling charmingly across her brow. She kept pushing it back with slim nervous fingers.

She saw a tall, red-headed young man striding across the dance floor in her direction and made a hasty exit. She was very fond of Robin Gellow. He was a house doctor here. He had fallen very considerably in love with Glynis when she first came to St. Martha’s as a probationer three years ago. He seemed to offer what she needed in a man. Nice looks and common sense. Robin was steady-going as a rock. Why then hadn’t she fallen in love with him? There was only one answer: that he wasn’t her man. Life was a real enigma, madly irritating, and love was very illogical, Glynis soliloquized, as she rather heartlessly avoided Robin.

In the refreshment room she found her employer munching a sandwich, holding a mug of his favourite lager in one hand. He was talking to a stout lady with grey hair, wearing magnificent diamonds. Glynis recognized her as Lady Cookson-Reece, one of the wealthiest of Steve’s private patients who had first come under his wing when brought to St. Martha’s after a car accident. Since then she had patronized the hospital, endowed beds and treated them royally.

But the very sight of Steve with the fabulous old Countess (American-born and left with a fortune by a Chicago pork-canning father) depressed Glynis. Just another facet on Steve’s character, she thought; the way he pandered to the rich and manœuvred himself into the homes and hearts of his other well-to-do patients. His egotism. His superb belief in himself and that what he did was always right. His ambition to go up—up, up the ladder of fame. It seemed to suit him. He looked ridiculously young and happy for so brilliant a surgeon.

He had performed some of the most wonderful operations seen in St. Martha’s since his uncle’s time. The senior men here all said that young Steve Grant-Tally was “Sir Campion all over again”.

And he was so devastatingly handsome—she had to admit it as she looked at him now. He had seen her and beckoned to her before she could turn and fly again.

Tall and debonair in his well-cut tails. A carnation in his buttonhole. Collar stiffly white against a brown skin—Steve had just come back from a fortnight’s holiday in the Bahamas. (Spent in the villa of a rich American, full of gratitude because his small daughter had recently benefited from Steve’s skilled surgery. Her hearing, endangered by serious mastoid trouble, had been saved.) Oh, Steve was strong-looking and fascinating, as well as clever, Glynis thought. Who should know better than she what vigour he put into his work; his tireless energy, his enthusiasm for his profession, was one of the nicest things about him. But she did wish he would concentrate more on the poor. The rich man’s specialist; the handsome, luxurious Weymouth Street consulting rooms appealed less to Glynis than that other side to his life. There were only occasional days spent here when he worked without pay. His charity work, as she called it. Steve was one of the smart and lucky ones. He didn’t need, like most young, rising doctors, to make money. He already had it. Sir Campion had bequeathed a fortune to him—cunningly made over most of it to his nephew before the death duties sucked the Grant-Tally estate quite dry. That was what maddened Glynis. Steve had everything. She was terrified of his glittering triumphs and the way things fell into his lap. It wasn’t, of course, fair to hold it against him. Especially as he was such a hard worker. But somehow it seemed an insuperable barrier between him and the young girl with her quiet backwater nature and her sincere love of the ‘under-dog’. Steven was the reverse of all her ideals. And yet … he was her ideal. Could anything be more maddening and more complicated? she asked herself tonight as she walked unwillingly toward him and Lady Cookson-Reece.

“You two young things should dance,” said her ladyship in her gushing, throaty voice. “Go along, dear boy,” and she tapped Mr. Grant-Tally on the arm, smiled benevolently at Glynis, and having just spoken to her, thought, “Such beauty, but no brains, I’m sure,” and sailed majestically on.

“What about it—most estimable stenographer? Will you trip the light fantastic with me?” Steven grinned at the girl who had become his right hand. It always seemed to him incredible that this ‘child’—a mere twenty-four, and so pretty—should be so dependable. She was such a relief after Miss Packing, who, although a loss to him when she left, had looked so unattractive. A busy man needed the joy of such beauty and grace as little Miss Glynis Thorne shed around her. He had marked her out when she was a ‘pro’ here, as being the best-looker of the nurses. She had a small but valuable amount of nursing experience to add to the qualities of a good secretary.

“Enjoyed your evening? You’re looking depressed,” he said, as Pop had done. “What’s wrong?”

She made the same negative reply rather crossly.

“Nothing …”

The band struck up a samba. Steven, who danced well and lightly, quickened his pace.

He had what Glynis called his ‘schoolboy’ look which belied the keen mature brain behind it.

“Can you manage it, Goldilocks?”

She set her teeth and strove to conquer that furious blush that would stain cheeks and throat.

“You know that I hate being called Goldilocks.”

He laughed. Glynis amused him when she showed a spurt of temper. She was as a rule so cool and self-contained.

Dancing with her in the gay laughing crowd of nurses, doctors and their friends on the cold, frosty Boxing Night, Steven, not for the first time, wondered what lay behind the mask. He certainly had seen her eyes when she was dealing with a patient who suffered; watched them grow darker, soft with compassion under the black silk fringe of lashes. Sometimes, when he saw the rich corn-coloured head bent over writing-pad or typewriter, he had a crazy wish to stroke it. And lately, busy though he was, he had found his thoughts being distracted and his senses swimming with sudden violent longing to pull the lovely girl into his arms and kiss her awake. Make her respond to his passion. Break through the cool barrier, the stiff shyness, until she melted into his embrace.

Strange feelings, not common to Steve Grant-Tally. So far in his thirty years he had only known one love. The ‘calf love’ of a medical student for a nursing sister ten years his senior. He had thought his life ended when she, wiser than he, and self-sacrificing (for she had loved him), sent him about his business and quietly resigned from the hospital in which they both worked. But he had soon found how right she was, and, turning from the love of women, engrossed himself in the passion for his work. Soon it had become his life. That and the ambition to get to the top of the tree as his uncle had done.

Before he was twenty-four Steven had done his National Service in the Navy, and returned to St. Martha’s as Registrar. Then he got his M.B. and B.S. and later his Master of Surgery. By the time he had added F.R.C.S. to his name he had inherited his uncle’s money, and stepped into his place as an ears, nose and throat specialist. So far he had succeeded. He had no time for marriage; although the one member of his family still left—his elder sister, Kitty, now Lady Barley, who had a baronet for a husband, and a beautiful Georgian house in Thurloe Street—laid innumerable traps for him. But Steven had eluded the débutantes she produced—the smart, good-looking Society types like Kitty herself, who would gladly have become the wife of Mr. Grant-Tally of Weymouth Street.

Steve did not want to be tied down—yet. He knew perfectly well the day must come (and soon) when he would want a wife and have to slow up a bit. Also that he was working and playing at too feverish a pace to last—his superb health, which was a legacy of youth, could not last either.

He shrank from the matrimonial tie. Yet this very moment he was remembering how a week before Christmas he kissed Glynis under the mistletoe which a romantically-minded housekeeper had hung in the hall at Weymouth Street. He had kissed her lightly on the corner of the mouth—that wide, sweet, serious young mouth which she rouged to a pale rose, matching the almond-shaped nails. Glynis had charming, well-kept hands. He saw her face grow scarlet, and her eyes widen as though with fear. She broke away and he laughed it off by saying, “Silly, nice little thing.” But he wanted, all the rest of that day, to snatch her back, to make her give him kiss for kiss. Not mistletoe kisses. Deep, passionate, significant ones as between a man and woman who are in love.

And suddenly Grant-Tally knew that he had fallen irrationally in love with his secretary-receptionist.

A young medical student threaded his way through the dancing couples and waylaid the famous Mr. Grant-Tally.

“This is for you, sir, urgent, and I believe there’s a car waiting for the answer.”

Steven drew Glynis on one side. He was a little glad this interruption had come. He had been experiencing an unusual insanity and was half afraid he might lose his head and kiss Glyn’s incredibly lovely little face right there in front of all St. Martha’s Hospital.

When he had read the note his expression changed. Glyn watching knew what it meant. The swift reversal from ‘playboy’ to surgeon. Frowning, he said:

“I must go at once.”

“Emergency op, sir?” asked the student sympathetically.

“Not exactly,” said Steven, and turned to Glynis.

Her heart was beating somewhat quickly. She, too, had been enjoying that dance with every fibre of her being. And if he left the dance—well, there was no denying that for her the dance would be over. That was the maddening part of it.

He said:

“I’d rather like you to come with me, Glyn. I’ll explain as we go.”

“Work?” she said.

“Work,” he said, grimly.

Without hesitation she followed him, found the camel-hair coat and scarf to put over the demure black evening dress which her mother had given her for Christmas—the only gay note was struck by the wide rose-pink sash swathed around the hips trailing at one side. Then she followed her employer out of the hospital and into the frosty starlit night where a big black and silver Rolls-Royce waited for them!

A CHAUFFEUR drove them swiftly away from the hospital down the Whitechapel Road toward the West End. Glynis, glancing at her wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly midnight. She glanced at Steven. He wore a thick light-grey coat, collar turned up, and a soft hat on the side of his head. He was reading the letter again, and she did not speak for he was obviously immersed and very serious. She wondered what it was all about. Waiting with her usual discretion for him to make the first move, she thought of the sequence of events which had led up to her becoming this man’s personal secretary.

Glynis’ father was a dentist. He had been operated on in St. Martha’s twice and his life saved. That was how Glynis had first come to know the place and love it. She had always wanted to be a nurse. It used to be a joke in the family even when Glynis was small, because she went round with tiny bits of sticking plaster and bandage in her pockets and in her small grave way attended to the hurts (either real or imaginary) of animals, grown-ups, and other children.

Her father used to ruffle the thick shining hair and laugh. “Little Nurse Glyn,” he would call her.

He had quite liked the idea of seeing his only daughter join the famous teaching hospital. But her mother, more ambitious, had hoped that her beautiful Glyn would marry a rich man and lead an exciting life. That is the ambition of most mothers. And Mrs. Thorne had lived and worked through two world wars and always had to struggle, as the wife of a dentist in Barnet. She had wanted something more for her child who had been born with such superlative good looks. Glynis, herself, knew that Mummy had been bitterly disappointed because there was no ambition of that kind within her to lift that dazzling loveliness of hers to the high peaks of social success.

Mrs. Thorne complained:

“I can’t understand it—Glyn’s so painfully shy and retiring. She seems to prefer a domestic life. It just isn’t natural.”

But to Mr. Thorne it was perfectly natural. Glyn had inherited those qualities from him. He had always been a shy, retiring man, devoted to his home.

Glynis’ first year as a probationer at St. Martha’s had been a mixture of great happiness and bitter disappointment. All her innate love of nursing and medicine was there to form a buffer between her and the grim spectres of pain and death which must necessarily haunt a hospital and make life difficult to bear at times. But she did not even mind the most painful and detestable forms of nursing. She was immensely popular in the wards, and with her fellow nurses. Nobody was jealous of Glyn because she looked so angelic in her little white Dora cap, and with the pale blue cotton frock rolled up above her elbows and her flushed serious face.

Then the blow had fallen. A slight weakness of back which Glyn had always had as a child began to show itself more seriously. She struggled on for a few months until pain and discomfort conquered even her passionate longing to qualify as a nurse. The Matron had had finally to tell her that she must give up nursing as a career. The heavy lifting and carrying were just things that Glyn couldn’t take on.

“A little rest and care and you’ll soon be normal again, but much as I want to keep you on my staff, my dear, there isn’t one single doctor that you’ve seen who does not tell you that you are not physically cut out to be a nurse.”

So, in tears, Glynis had left St. Martha’s and gone home and thought her life was finished. Such devilish irony—all the will in the world, and that stupid weak flesh of hers! But of course it was as Matron had prophesied—she soon recovered health and strength. She could not risk hurting her back again. So she took a course in shorthand and typewriting, and looked for the next best thing to nursing—a job in a doctor’s house.

Robin Gellow, who had continued to see her and take her out and never stopped asking her to marry him, was actually the means of her becoming Steven Grant-Tally’s receptionist. He had heard Steve saying that his own ‘treasure’ was leaving and Robin had thought it the job for Glyn.

She hadn’t been so sure. She knew Steven, of course. Almost her first evening in the nurses’ Common Room she had heard him being discussed. He was the big E.N.T. surgeon consultant here and quite an amazing person, because he was barely thirty-one. Brilliant Steven who had raced away with the honours when he qualified at St. Martha’s at the age of twenty-one.

Glyn had listened to her colleagues ‘raving’ about Steve and as a result was immediately biased against him. But when she had seen him for the first time coming down the ward in his white gown, examining patients with a little crowd of students reverently following, and listening, she had to admit that most of the nice things she had heard about him were justified. But when he glanced at her, smiled and said, “You’re new here, aren’t you, Nurse?” her face had gone crimson. She had remained tongue-tied. But at a hospital dinner later on he had managed to draw her into a discussion, and he had told her that he had found her shyness most intriguing. It was so rare, he said.

After that—well, she continued to admire him from afar and to blush when she met or talked to him.

Eighteen months later she took Robin’s advice and applied for that job.

Now a whole year had passed since she had been accepted by Steve as his secretary-receptionist in the big beautiful house in Weymouth Street where he had his consulting rooms.

Suddenly she was jolted out of these reminiscences.

Steve said:

“I feel rather a cad taking you away from the party. I had better explain. It is rather a difficult case.”

“I don’t mind leaving the party if I can help,” she said.

He told her that the car belonged to Lord Marradine.

Her eyes widened.

“Not the peer who married a film star?”

“That’s it.”

Glynis puckered her brows. She seemed to remember that she had read something in the paper lately about the wealthy young peer who had married a beautiful Swedish film actress. They had been living in Washington, where Marradine held a diplomatic job. Both had returned with severe sinus trouble and both became Grant-Tally’s patients.

More of Steve’s rich paying propositions, Glynis thou. . .