Original title: Only Time Will Tell
Alison Gray wanted so much to forget the unhappiness of her last weeks at St. Hilda’s Hospital that it seemed providential when Merlin Bleckworth asked her to come as industrial nurse in his father’s factory. But was Merlin only interested in her professional ability?
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“Too much agreement is as bad as too much argument.”
“Life’s not too bad. It’s a great deal what we make it, and the unexpected turning up—like your theoretical thunderstorm—can often be a challenge and quite interesting. It depends how we tackle things.”
REVIEW:
Alison Gray was training to be a nurse when she fell hard
for the young cad Dr. Graham Hoyland, who never returned her affections and
ended up marrying the daughter of a rich patient. From her tragically broken
heart Alison recovered, throwing herself into her studies so that now, a year
later, she’s graduated with top honors and is able to work alongside Graham in the
ED with nary a flutter to her healed heart. Nonetheless, when the hospital
matron out of the blue tells her, “I feel it is important for you to get away for
a time,” suggesting Alison take a job in a hospital far away and giving her no
reason why this is “the best course for her to take,” Alison curiously is suddenly
certain that this is what she should do so that “she need never again have to come
into contact with Graham Hoyland or his wife-to-be.” That afternoon she tells
her friend Lisa she’s resigning, with no plan for what she’ll do next, only “the
strangest feeling everything in my life is being arranged for me.” How convenient!
So she and Lisa head off for a three-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—when Alison leaves her job, and when that’s over, as she’s driving out for an interview for a job she doesn’t want, she sees a small boy fall off a cliff—he and his brother are hunting for gull’s eggs, yum yum—and rushes to his aid. Another car, “a big, opulent estate car,” pulls up, and handsome young Merlin Bleckworth bounds out, assists with the rescue, and helps drive the young victim to the hospital. From there it’s only natural that he should take Alison to dinner, learn she is a nurse, and offer her a job caring for the workers at his family’s industrial manufacturing business.
They drive to his house that night, where Alison is welcomed as one of the family—subjected to frank, heart-to-heart conversations with the housekeeper, his sister, and his mother, all of whom hint to varying degrees that Alison should stay and marry Merlin. When she doesn’t run screaming from the building, they pop her in the old nurse’s suite—the last nurse they had, now leaving to get married, lived in the house—and the next day driver her out to the factory. There she immediately aids with a young worker who has crushed his foot to a jelly, doses an anxious man with a toxic medication no longer in use, diagnoses him with too much stress from living with his in-laws who won’t let him work in their garden, and suggests to Merlin’s father Joseph, the owner of the firm, that he build housing for his factory workers. Then she flies everyone back to the family manor in her invisible jet.
This all having taken half the book to cover, now pretty much nothing else happens. We meet a new character, Dr. Ian Meltham, whom Alison immediately identifies as “a philanderer.” He incessantly pesters Alison for a date, though she never once agrees, except for the time they meet by accident in a department store, where Alison’s ability to say “no” departs her, and she is coerced into having tea with him—and the ensuing scandal requires pages of maneuvering to recover from! Merlin’s would-be girlfriend, the “tall, extremely slender, elegant girl with jet black hair and slanting green eyes,” falls for Dr. Meltham halfway through the book and is therefore completely wasted as one of those evil, scheming gold diggers out for our heroine’s man—though she does show up at the house to ask Alison in a “deadly quiet tone” if she is in love with Dr. Meltham, and Alison randomly decides the woman is on the verge of a “hysterical attack” and diagnoses her with bipolar disorder and calmly talks her out of what we are told is mania, but the description reads more as if she’s just upset and under a lot of pressure from her family to marry Merlin.
Truthfully from this scene on it seems that Alison is the
one who has lost her mind, as, realizing she is in love with Merlin, “she would
make no plans, no special moves, to draw him towards her,” so she plans to move
out of the area that very afternoon without telling anyone because she decides
she’s not going to be dumped again, a sentiment that has not haunted her one
bit through the year after Graham picked someone else and all the time she’s
been at Merlin’s home. Of course there’s an accident that rights everything
again, but all through the book runs the theme of trust, and after this very
bizarre stunt of Alison’s, It’s hard to believe anyone would ever trust her,
again much less propose marriage to keep her from sneaking off. I, on the other
hand, having been disappointed and blindsided by the wild leap of her otherwise
sturdy character, was not sorry to see the back cover close on Nurse Alison.
