No Time for Love

Chapter One ~ 1904-2

‘Instead of learning about the ancient Greeks and Romans,’ Larina told herself, ‘I ought to have been studying shorthand and learning how to type.’

The large noisy typewriters she had seen in offices and which had been used by her father’s secretary, were a complete mystery to her.

Now she thought how foolish she had been not to take the opportunity of at least trying to understand how it worked.

She had been just seventeen when her father died and was still having lessons with teachers who came to the house.

“I am not going to have a Governess living with us,” her father had said firmly. “And I do not approve of girls going to school and getting independent ideas. A woman’s place is in the home!”

It would have been a very nice idea, Larina thought to herself, if she had a home to be in.

“Turn over, I want to listen to your back,” Sir John’s voice cut through.

She did as she was told and felt the stethoscope against her skin.

‘I wonder what this is going to cost me,’ she thought. ‘It’s just a waste of time and money!’

“You can dress now, Miss Milton.”

Sir John moved away from her, pulling the screen back into position as he did so. Larina got down from the couch and started to put on her clothes.

She wore a very light corset. There was no need for her to have tight laces to pull in her waist with. It was in fact less than the standard eighteen inches.

But she was well aware that the rest of her figure from a fashionable point of view was much too thin.

“You must eat more, darling,” her mother had said to her in Switzerland. “Do you really think that such long walks are good for you?”

“I cannot just sit about doing nothing, Mama,” Larina answered, “and I love walking. The mountains are so beautiful and I only wish you could come with me along the paths through the woods. They have so much mystery about them. They make me think of all the Fairytales I have ever heard.”

“How you used to love them when you were a child,” Mrs. Milton had replied with a smile.

“I remember you reading me a story about the dragons who lived in the very depths of a pinewood,” Larina answered, “and I still believe it!”

Her mother had laughed.

“You belong to the sea,” she said. “That is why I called you Larina.”

“Girl of the Sea,” Larina had exclaimed. “Perhaps I have an affinity with it, I am not sure. We have never been to the sea long enough for me to find out. Here I feel I belong to the mountains.”

“As long as it is not too boring for you, my dearest,” Mrs. Milton had murmured.

“I am never bored,” Larina had answered and it was indeed the truth.

She put her hat on her head and fastening it securely with two long hatpins she pushed back the screen and walked across the room to where Sir John was sitting at his desk.

He was writing on a piece of foolscap and she saw her name at the top of it.

“I have something to tell you,” he said, “which I am afraid you will find very distressing.”

“What is it?” Larina asked.

She felt as if her heart had stopped beating and that every nerve in her body was suddenly tense.

“You have not contracted the disease that killed your mother,” he said, “but you have in fact only three weeks to live!”

*

Going back to the little house in Eaton Terrace, Larina could not believe that she had actually heard Sir John say the words.

It seemed as if her mind had ceased to function and she told herself that what he had told her was impossible to believe as the truth.

As she journeyed part of the way in the horse-drawn omnibus, she found herself looking at the passengers and wondering what they would say if she told them that a sentence of death had just been passed upon her.

After Sir John had spoken she had stared at him with wide eyes, shocked to the point when her voice seemed strangled in her throat.

“I am sorry to have to tell you this,” Sir John said, “but I can assure you that I am absolutely certain of my facts. You have a heart complaint which is very rare, but it is in fact a disease I have been studying for many years.”

He cleared his throat and went on,

“Every doctor who suspects it sends his patients to me for a final diagnosis, so I cannot suggest that you have a second opinion.”

“Is it – painful?” Larina managed to gasp.

“In most cases there is no pain whatsoever,” Sir John said reassuringly. “I will not burden you with the medical details, but what happens is that your heart suddenly ceases to beat. It may happen when you are asleep, it may occur when you are walking, sitting or even dancing.”

“And – there is no – cure?” Larina asked in a shocked tone.

“None that is known at the moment to the medical profession. What I can tell you, as an authority, is that it happens instantly and when it is diagnosed the patient usually has exactly twenty-one days before the end comes.”

“Twenty-one – days,” Larina echoed faintly.

As she walked through Sloane Square towards Eaton Terrace she felt that her footsteps echoed the number on the pavement. Twenty-one! Twenty-one! Twenty-one!

That meant, she told herself, that she would die on the 15th of April.

It was a time of year, she thought inconsequentially, that she had always loved. The daffodils would be out, there would be blossom on the trees, the chestnuts would be coming into bloom and the sunshine would be particularly welcome because one had missed it during the winter.

On the 16th April she would no longer be here to enjoy it!

She took her key out of her handbag and opened the door of number 6 Eaton Terrace.

As she let herself into the narrow hall, off which opened a small dining room with a tiny study behind it, she was conscious of the silence and the loneliness of the empty house.

If only her mother was in the drawing room, she could run to her to tell her what had happened.

Her mother would have put out her arms and held her close.

But there was no one to help her now and, taking off her hat, Larina walked slowly up the stairs.

Some detached part of her mind noted that the stair carpet was very worn, it must have been given hard wear while they were away in Switzerland.

Then almost sharply she told herself it was of no consequence.

In twenty-one days she would not be in the house to notice that the carpet was threadbare, that the curtains had faded in the drawing room or the brass bedstead in her room had lost a knob.

Twenty-one days!

She went up another flight of stairs to her bedroom.

There were only two bedrooms in the house, unless one counted a dark airless place in the basement that had been intended for a maid they could not afford.

Her mother had occupied the front room on the second floor and she had a small slip of a room behind it.

She went into it now and looked round her. All her possessions were here, all the small treasures she had accumulated since childhood.

There was even a Teddy Bear she had loved and taken to bed with her for many years, a doll which opened and closed its eyes and in the bookcase, beside the volumes she had acquired as she grew older, were the first books she had ever owned.

‘Not much to show for a lifetime,’ Larina told herself.

Then as if the horror of what she had heard swept over her like a flood tide, she moved to the window to stand looking out over the grey roofs and the back yards of the houses behind them.

‘What can I do? What can I do about it?’ Larina asked herself.

Then almost as if the thought came like a lifeline to a drowning sailor she remembered Elvin.

She wondered as she thought of him why he had not come into her mind from the very moment that Sir John had pronounced her death sentence.

She supposed it must be because she had been shocked into a kind of numbness that had made it impossible for her to think of anything except the twenty-one days that were left to her.

Elvin would have understood exactly what she was feeling, Elvin in his inimitable manner would have made everything seem different.

They had talked of death the very first time they had met.

It had been a day when Mrs. Milton had been very ill and Larina had known by the expression on Dr. Heinrich’s face that he was worried.

“There is nothing you can do,” he said to Larina. “Go and sit in the garden, I will call you if she needs you.”

Larina had known if she was called it would not be a case of her mother needing her, but because Dr. Heinrich thought that she was dying.

She had turned and gone blindly out into the garden of the sanatorium.

For the first time she did not see the brilliance of the flowers or the beauty of the snow-capped mountains that had never failed to make her heart leap whenever she looked at them.

She moved out of sight of the buildings to a place among the pine trees where there was a seat that had been specially put there for patients who could not walk far.

It was very quiet. There was only the sound of the cascade pouring down the side of the mountain into the valley below and the buzz of the bees as they sucked the honey from the mountain plants that grew among the rocks.

It was then, because she thought that no one could see her, that Larina had put her hands over her face and begun to cry.

She must have cried for a long time before she heard a movement beside her, and a man’s voice said gently,

“Are you crying for your mother?”

Larina with tears still running down her cheeks had turned to see who was there.

A man seated himself beside her and she saw that it was Elvin Farren, an American who she had not spoken to before because he slept in a hut by himself in the gardens of the sanatorium and never came to the dining room for meals.

“Mama is not dead,” Larina said quickly as if in answer to a question he had not put into words, “but I know that Dr. Heinrich thinks that she may be – dying.”

She drew her handkerchief from her belt as she spoke and wiped the tears from her eyes almost fiercely. She was ashamed of having given way so completely.

“You must go on hoping that she will recover,” Elvin Farren said.

Larina did not speak for a moment and then she answered,

“I am frightened, but then I suppose everyone is frightened of death.”

“Perhaps for other people,” Elvin Farren replied, “but not for one’s self.”

Larina looked at him and knew that he was very ill. He was extremely thin, there was something almost transparent about his skin and the tell-tale patches of bright colour on his cheekbones were all too obvious.

“You are not afraid?” she asked.

He smiled at her and it seemed to transform his face.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He looked away from her towards the panorama of mountains where the sun shining on the snows remaining after the winter was almost blinding.

After a moment he said,

“Do you want the true answer to your question or the conventional one?”

“I want the true answer,” Larina replied. “I am afraid of death because it must be so lonely.”

She was thinking of herself as she added,

“Not only for those who die but also for those who are left behind.”

“For those who die,” Elvin Farren said, “it is an adventure, a release of the mind and that in itself is something exciting to look forward to!”

He glanced at her to see if she was following him.

Then he went on,

“Have you never thought what an encumbrance one’s body is? If it was not hampering us, keeping our feet on the ground, so to speak, we could fly wherever we wished to go! To other parts of the earth, to the moon or, more especially, to the Fourth Dimension.”