Loyal in All

  LOYAL IN ALL

  by

  MARY BURCHELL

  Original Harlequin edition published under the title “Nurse Marika—Loyal in All”

  This is the story of a half-English, half-Hungarian nurse, the Hungarian doctor with whom she worked, and the young English journalist who also shared her heart. It finds a sombre yet dramatic setting in the Budapest rising of 1956, and in its portrayal of those stormy times is tense without being horrific, while it is frequently lit up by flashes of the delightful humour characteristic of this author.

  CHAPTER I

  THE wild yet melancholy notes from a small Tzigany band ebbed and flowed sensuously, the warm, delicious scent of freshly brewed coffee hung on the air, waiters scurried hither and thither, balancing trays with miraculous dexterity, and all around people were talking, arguing, occasionally laughing.

  But to Marika Stevens, sitting opposite the young Hungarian doctor at the table in the corner, all this was no more than a vague background. What surprised and intrigued her beyond measure was that the usually reserved Janos von Raszay should have invited her to go with him to a coffee-house at all, and, still more, that, having brought her there, he should evince such concern with her personal affairs.

  “You should never have come to Budapest,” he was saying impatiently, “and you have already prolonged your visit to the point of foolishness. But now—to let your mother come out to join you is pure madness.”

  “I am not letting her,” the girl replied rather obstinately. “She is just coming, without my permission.”

  “But you can stop her, surely? Or your father can stop her.”

  “No.” Marika shook her head and smiled suddenly, showing wonderful teeth. “She is like me. It is not so easy to tell her what she may do or not do.”

  He looked taken aback for a moment, but then he brushed the implied reproof aside with a slight gesture of a strong, well-shaped hand and, leaning towards her across the table, spoke softly but with urgency.

  “Even in English one cannot say too much here. But will you believe me when I tell you that it is dangerous for your mother to come here—or for you to stay?”

  A queer little tremor shook Marika at the earnestness of this. But the British part of her refused to be drawn into melodrama. So she shrugged and said lightly.

  “Have you special sources of information, then, Herr Doktor?”

  “Perhaps.” He narrowed his intelligent dark eyes slightly. “Or perhaps I am just using the good sense which God gave me. In any case, you-are a foolish little English girl who has been here only a few months, while—”

  “Herr Doktor, I am not a foolish little English girl, Marika interrupted with emphasis. “I am, as you have yourself admitted, a capable nurse who has looked after herself very well up to now. I am even—if it makes you feel better about it—not entirely English. My mother is Hungarian—”

  “Which is why it is madness for her to come here,” he interrupted in his turn. “Cannot you see that?”

  “But she is British by marriage and has been for twenty-five years.” Marika spoke with the casual confidence seen only in those races who have never known conquest, occupation or a day-to-day tyranny.

  The doctor gave a short laugh, which expressed something between admiration and scorn.

  “Oh, you British! Even now you think the world must be safe for you, Why do I bother to argue with you? Except—”

  “Except what?” she asked as he paused, and her lips parted slightly, with an almost childlike eagerness of which she was unaware.

  He looked at her moodily for a moment, as though he were allowing himself to see for the first time that beautiful bright chestnut hair and the curiously violet-blue eyes which she inherited from her mother. Then he said drily,

  “One does not stand by unheeding when even a stranger insists on walking towards the edge of a volcano.”

  “O-oh—” She was inexplicably disappointed by that reference to a stranger. Then she bit her lip and, after a moment, she said, “Herr Doktor, I am grateful for your concern—” but he laughed shortly again, which annoyed her, so that she finished the sentence more sharply than she had intended—“but what I do—and, still more, what my mother does—is not your business. I would never have mentioned her visit if I had thought it would provoke so much argument. As it is, however, there is absolutely nothing I can do, even if I would. She is on her way here by now.”

  “You could telegraph to her en route.”

  “But in what terms?” She was astounded at his insistence. “She is determined to visit my grandmother here, for the first time in more than twenty years. Nagyanya is an old lady now. If they are to meet again it must be soon. Surely, then, it is best for my mother to come while I am here?”

  He was silent for a few moments, shifting one of the big wooden pepper mills backwards and forwards on the table, with a nervous, absent movement, while she watched his clever hands and wondered—not for the first time since she had come to work under him three months ago—what were the secret fires which burned behind that thin, set face.

  He was, she knew, a cool and clever surgeon, an unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding doctor—but what else did she know about him? Very little, except for an indefinable conviction that behind the surgeon and doctor there was a man of strong passions, iron determination and fierce loyalties. But—to what? and to whom?

  “What has your father to say to this proposition?” he asked suddenly, recalling her to the present.

  “He doesn’t know about it,” Marika admitted reluctantly.

  “He doesn’t know about it?” Fresh and angry consternation showed in the doctor’s face.

  “It’s difficult to explain.” She spoke rather hastily, even a little apologetically. “But, since you are so concerned, perhaps I should tell you that my parents have been—estranged for some while. Since before my father came out to Budapest two years ago. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was; both and neither, I suppose, as is so often the case. But I think they are both unhappy about it, and I am sure that Mother’s purpose in coming here is not only to visit Nagyanya. She hopes to see my father again and—Oh, there’s no knowing what might happen then.”

  “No. There is no knowing what might happen,” her companion agreed with a touch of irony. But he shifted his ground in the argument at last and asked, rather heavily,

  “How long does your mother propose to stay? Can you persuade her to make it a short visit?”

  “But, if she comes at all—”

  “Listen to me,” he broke in impatiently. “You have known me as a man and a doctor for three months—”

  “Only as a doctor,” murmured Marika, a piece of youthful impertinence which he ignored.

  “—You have had some opportunity of judging if I am a fool who panics at nothing or a man who weighs up a situation coolly. If I told you a patient was in a dangerous condition, would you believe me?”

  “Of course! But—”

  “I am telling you that a situation is dangerous. I am judging it as coolly and perhaps with as much specialized knowledge as I bring to a case. That being so—”

  “Good evening, Raszay.” A tall, rather elegant-looking man stopped at their table and greeted the doctor with a smile which curved his lips but did not touch his cold, light eyes. “I had no idea you spoke such fluent English.”

  Von Raszay got to his feet—reluctantly, Marika thought—and presented the other man.

  “Dr. Anday, a colleague of mine,” he explained briefly. “Miss Stevens has been here in Budapest nursing a case at my clinic.”

  “Kezit csokolam—” The other man bent over Marika’s hand. Then he also spoke in English, though rather heavily accented English. “We do not often see an English nurse here.”

  “No. I daresay not.” She smiled at him, though something about him secretly repelled her. “I came in charge of a little Hungarian boy who had been flown to England for a rather special operation and—”

  “The Kolnagy child?”

  “Why, yes. How did you know?”

  He laughed slightly and not, Marika thought, very pleasantly.

  “Not many children are flown from here to England, even for a special operation,” was the dry retort. “It would not have happened in this case if the father had not been influential. The boy could have been treated here. Our medical service is excellent.”

  “Of course.” It was not the first time Marika had come across a fanatically jealous resentment over even an implied criticism of anything Hungarian. “But specialized knowledge is not the exclusive property of any nation. One takes advantage of it wherever it is found, surely?”

  “That depends on what else goes with it. But we are grateful for anything which brings so charming a visitor to Budapest.” The alternation, between curtness and flattery was almost sinister. Like the contrast between the cold eyes and the smiling lips. “But you are not still nursing the Kolnagy child, I imagine. He should be well by now—after such specialized care.”

  The veiled sneer secretly angered Marika, but she made herself reply quite pleasantly.

  “He is almost well now. But I stayed with him during his convalescence. We grew really fond of each other. And now I am having a few weeks’ holiday. My mother—”

  “Miss Stevens was just telling me how much her mother misses her in London,” von Raszay put in coolly. “She will be returning home very soon, no doubt.”

  “I see.” The other man bowed. “I hope you will enjoy the remainder of your visit,” he sa
id to Marika and then he passed on.

  “Why did you tell him that?” Marika spoke rather sharply, as soon as he was out of earshot.

  “Because if it is not true, it is at least as well that he should think it is,” was the dry reply. “Shall we go?”

  She was surprised, and not a little disappointed, for she had not supposed that their visit to the coffeehouse would be so short. In Budapest, as in Vienna, the coffee-houses are the centre of social life. Here the natives discuss business, make love, pick quarrels, compose differences, or just sit, talking endlessly, through the hours of the day or night.

  But Marika had been too well trained even to think of querying the suggestion of her professional chief, and she prepared to comply immediately, though with more regret than she cared to admit, even to herself. For, even though they seemed to have filled most of the time with argument, she had had the feeling that, for the first time, she was actually beginning to know something about the man who had ruled her life professionally since she had come to Budapest three months ago.

  It had been during June—when Marika was on the nursing staff of one of the little publicized but professionally distinguished London private clinics—that little Joszef Kolnagy had been flown to London from Budapest, in the last hope of saving his life by a dangerous and unusual heart operation.

  His father was one of the few prominent men in Hungary who had survived ten years of political upheaval, and the event would, in any case, have attracted a certain amount of publicity. What transformed it into a first-class journalistic sensation was the fact that the Hungarian nurse who accompanied the child had hardly landed before she declared that she wished to seek political asylum.

  She refused resolutely either to contact her Legation or have anything to do with her charge. Then, to the romantic satisfaction of everyone, an American fiancé put in an appearance. To an approving chorus in the more popular Press, he married the girl and swept her off to the United States in triumph, while the little Kolnagy boy was left to be nursed by the regular nurses in the clinic.

  Marika was specially detailed for the case, since she spoke quite fluent Hungarian. Her mother, as she had told won Raszay, was Hungarian, she had a grandmother still living in Hungary, and, in addition, she had a further tie with the country in that her father was now occupying a minor diplomatic post in Budapest.

  When the little boy was well enough to return home, it was, almost inevitably, Marika who was invited to accompany him to the Budapest clinic where his treatment was to be continued. Adventurous by nature, and eager to visit both her father and her unknown grandmother, Marika willingly accepted the chance which offered. And, one fine day in late July, she and her charge flew to Budapest.

  At first, Marika was surprised to find how seemingly normal life was, in this little-known country behind the Iron Curtain. She fell in love immediately with the fabulous twin city on the Danube—the old town of Buda crowding round the ancient castle on the hill, and the superficially gay modern town of Pest, flaunting her beautiful buildings along the river bank.

  Somehow, she had not expected to find trams running, shops displaying a variety of beautiful, if high-priced, goods, and people pursuing an ordinary day-to-day life. She even discovered that there was a certain degree of rather feverishly gay night-life. A sort of operetta atmosphere, with dark, minor chords sometimes sounding incongruously in the orchestra.

  But, after a while, it was borne in on her by indefinable degrees that this was all just the thinnest of gold paint on a sad and sullen and frightened city. The men might be superficially gay and good-looking, the women as beautiful as tradition had always described them. But the former looked over their shoulders before they spoke with occasional, bitter frankness, and the latter smiled with their lips while their eyes remained wide and apprehensive.

  Her father was unfeignedly glad to see her, and though she actually lived in the clinic where the convalescent child had been taken, she often visited him in his small flat overlooking the Danube.

  He asked eagerly about his family—his son, who was at Cambridge, and Marika’s sister, Caroline, who was married now and expecting her first baby. About his wife he did not ask directly. But whenever Marika volunteered any information about her, he was not, she noticed, at all averse to hearing every detail.

  Almost her first visit was to her grandmother, who lived about an hour’s journey outside Budapest, in two rooms of the huge, sprawling mansion which had once been hers.

  Indescribable social and political changes had passed over her elegant head during her long life, but even now she remained erect, dignified and awe-inspiring. It was easy to see where Marika’s mother—and, to a certain extent, Marika too—got her good looks. The faultless bone-structure of her oval face, the fine, smooth silver hair, the characteristic violet-blue eyes combined to make an unforgettable picture even now.

  Present circumstances might decree that she lived in two rooms and did most of her own work, but she still carried herself as though she were mistress of the big house overlooking the endless, rolling Puszta, and as though her long-dead husband were still lord of the golden acres of corn and grassland and the dozens of peasants and small farmers who now divided the estate between them and farmed it sullenly for an all-grasping State machine.

  She welcomed her grandchild with an emotion which seemed to surprise herself, and thereafter Marika visited her every week, telling the old lady every detail she could think of about the daughter she had not seen for so many years.

  It was impossible not to realize how she yearned for a sight of her only child, and Marika had not scrupled to let her mother know about this. Indeed, it was, she supposed a little guiltily, a great deal owing to herself that her mother had taken the decision which seemed to have staggered and angered Dr. von Raszay.

  That he should display any personal interest in her affairs at all had surprised her. But, in a curious way, it gratified her too. As her immediate chief at the clinic, he had shown himself impartial, patient and appreciative of her undoubted nursing skill. But she had gathered that even the other nurses, who must have known him much longer than she, regarded him as something of an enigma.

  No one knew much about his private life, except that he was unmarried and lived in a small apartment near the clinic.

  “He is a fine surgeon,” Ilona Patasky declared—she was the theatre sister and had become unexpectedly friendly with Marika. “Perhaps the finest young surgeon we have. But—” she smiled and shrugged—“if there is anyone to enjoy his triumphs with him, I do not know it. Maybe his work is his mistress. Maybe someone else is. Who can say?”

  To Marika, who had been trained in one of the strictest of the great London teaching hospitals, this sounded unorthodox, to say the least. But she thought that perhaps Ilona had used the offending word in a wide sense, and so she made some suitable murmur in reply and let the subject drop. Though, to tell the truth, she would rather have liked to pursue it.

  Little Joszef Kolnagy remained in the clinic for three months, during which time Marika nursed him devotedly. She divided her off-time between her father s flat—where she met almost exclusively diplomatic people, either British or Hungarian—and her grandmother’s place in the country, where she had the sole company of the proud old lady, who lived in the grandeur of the past and the austerity of the present with equal dignity and self-sufficiency.

  At the end of that time, the Kolnagy child was well enough to go home, and Marika prepared to transfer from her quarters at the clinic to an hotel, as her father’s flat was too small to accommodate another person. Besides, she had already arranged that her mother should join her in Budapest, and she looked forward to a few weeks of genuine sight-seeing, with possibly a family reconciliation to complete her happiness.

  It was on this—her last—day at the clinic that Dr. von Raszay had so unexpectedly invited her to have coffee with him and, even more unexpectedly, displayed such dismay at her casual announcement that, far from leaving Budapest, she was staying on as a visitor and that her mother was joining her.

  Together they went out into the street now and began to walk the short distance to the clinic, which was situated in what used to be the aristocratic quarter of Pest. It was still possible to see where great town houses had existed, but these were now divided and subdivided, and few signs still lingered of the brilliant social life which had once made Budapest perhaps the gayest and most romantic capital in Europe.