Cobweb Morning. Betty Neels
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her dressing gown doing her hair when someone shouted up the stairs that she was wanted on the telephone. She went without haste and said a grumpy ‘Well?’ into the receiver.
‘Good lord,’ Anthony’s voice sounded irritable. ‘What’s keeping you? You’ve been off duty for an hour or more.’
‘So I have, but not knowing where I was to meet you as usual or to which marvellous place you were taking me to dine and dance, there didn’t seem much point in doing anything about it.’
She heard his embarrassed laugh. ‘Look here, old girl, you must have known I only said that because that nonchalant type was standing there laughing at me. Come on now,’ his voice took on a wheedling note, ‘throw on a coat and we’ll go out and have a meal.’
She hesitated; she had missed her supper and all she had in her room was a tin of biscuits. She said, ‘All right,’ and added, ‘I think you were very silly,’ before she put down the receiver.
He was waiting for her at the hospital entrance when she got there, ten minutes later. Because it was such a dark and damp evening, she had put on a raincoat, belted round her slim waist, and dragged on a wool cap, shrouding her dark hair, then added a matching scarf, yards long, which she wound round her neck to keep out the cold; totally unglamorous, she decided, taking a quick look at herself, but sensible.
It was a nasty quirk of fate that Doctor van Dresselhuys should have been standing in the entrance hall, talking to Mr Thrush. He looked up as she went past them, his brows arching slowly as he took deliberate stock of her, while his mouth curved into a smile, conveying plainly that her appearance hardly tallied with that of a young woman on her way to dine and dance. She scowled at him, smiled sweetly at Mr Thrush, and joined Anthony, giving him a look which caused him to say: ‘You look like one of the Furies!’
She didn’t answer him at once; she was still smarting under Doctor van Dresselhuys’ amused, faintly mocking look, but as they went down the steps she asked: ‘Where are we going?’
‘How about that little Italian place? It’s not too far to walk and it’s cheap.’
He took her arm as he spoke, in much the same way, she thought resentfully, as a man might slip a collar on his dog. She freed her arm, and he muttered: ‘Huh—in a bad mood, are you?’ an unfair remark which hardly served to increase her good humour, so that they went down the street mentally as well as physically apart.
They patched up their differences during the evening. Anthony, with his hasty apology a little carelessly offered, plunged into a tale of how he had got the better of old Sister Tucker on Women’s Medical, which, seeing that that lady was a byword in the hospital for her short temper and cursory treatment of all doctors below the rank of consultant, should have made Alexandra laugh. She did indeed smile, but it struck her that Anthony had been a bit mean with the old tartar. After all, she had been at St Job’s for more than thirty years and was the best nurse the hospital had ever had; she was due to retire soon, and most people, while grumbling at her fierce tongue, secretly liked her, taking her tellings-off in good part. It was disquieting to discover that Anthony wasn’t quite as nice as she had thought him to be and this feeling was heightened by the fact that she was tired and a little depressed and he had insisted on their walking back, because, as he explained, the exercise was good for them both. She wondered secretly if he grudged the price of a taxi, but later, in bed and thinking about it, she came to the conclusion that she had done him less than justice; he had his way to make, like anyone else, and probably he would end up very comfortably off because he hadn’t wasted his money. She reminded herself that he was all that a girl could wish for—well, almost all, and closed her eyes. She was almost asleep when she realized that she wasn’t thinking about Anthony at all but of that beastly Doctor van Dresselhuys.
She saw him the next morning. He arrived with Mr Thrush, checked the patient’s progress, offered one or two suggestions in a diffident manner, and then blandly accepted her rather cold invitation to have coffee in her office. Once there, neither Mr Thrush nor he seemed disposed to leave—indeed, after ten minutes, Alexandra excused herself on the plea of work to do, and left them with the coffee pot between them, deep in a learned discussion concerning the pre-central gyrus of the brain.
She thought it highly likely that neither gentleman, although both had risen politely to their feet as she left them, had really noticed her going or heard a word of what she had said.
She had no occasion to go to her office for quite some time after that, but when she did she was surprised to find the Dutchman still there, at her desk now, writing busily. He looked up as she went in and said coolly: ‘Forgive me if I don’t get up—these are a few calculations and notes which must be written up immediately.’
The papers she wanted were in the desk; she edged past him and knelt down the better to reach the bottom drawer at one side of it, aware that he had stopped writing.
‘Have you made it up?’ he wanted to know.
She lifted her head and found his face bending over her, only a few inches away. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said indignantly.
‘Don’t behave like a schoolgirl,’ he begged her, ‘you know very well what I mean. You looked like a thunder-cloud yesterday evening, and don’t try and tell me that you went dining and dancing in that elderly raincoat—besides, you walked down the street as though you hated—er—whatever his name is. You have a very eloquent back.’
‘It’s none of your business,’ she told him hotly. ‘Really…’
‘Now, that is unkind; I like to see other people happy.’ His voice held a mocking note. ‘And you are not. I’ll wager my day’s fees that he walked you back.’
‘It’s healthy exercise,’ she declared, too quickly, ‘and he hasn’t got a car yet—not even a Morris 1000,’ she added nastily.
He ignored this piece of rudeness. ‘A nice little car,’ he observed smoothly, ‘reliable, cheap to run and not too fast.’
She was diverted enough to exclaim: ‘It doesn’t look your sort of car at all,’ and then remembered to add: ‘Not that I am in the least interested in what you drive.’
He was staring at her. ‘If I were to ask you out to dinner with me, would you come?’
‘No.’ The word had popped out before she had quenched the thought that she would like to, very much.
‘I thought perhaps you wouldn’t. Ah, well, I have survived worse disappointments. And now, young woman, if you have finished kneeling at my feet, perhaps I might continue to borrow your office for another ten minutes or so.’
She closed the drawer deliberately, clutching the papers she had sought; there was a great deal she would have liked to have said, but she thought that, on the whole, it might be better to hold her tongue, so she edged past him again and flounced out in such a bad temper that her staff nurse wanted to know if she felt ill.
She didn’t see him for the rest of the day, so that by the evening she believed him gone, which was a pity because she still hadn’t discovered just who he was. A good friend of Mr Thrush, that was obvious—perhaps he had a practice in England even though he was a Dutchman; that, combined with the fact that he had been at the scene of the accident, would be enough to make him take an interest in the patient.
No one had come forward to claim the girl; police inquiries, photos in the newspapers, none of these had had any results. Alexandra, hopeful of her patient’s recovery, wished that she could regain consciousness, so that they could discover her name, but at the end of another two days she was still unconscious, so that Alexandra, with two days off to take, was in two minds not to take them. But common sense prevailed; she needed a break, if only to get away from Anthony, so that she could make up her mind about him. She went off duty that evening and caught the train to Dorchester by the skin of her teeth, and instead of having a quiet think as she had intended, went to sleep, only waking as the train drew in at her destination.
Jim, her younger brother, was waiting for her, still in his anorak and gumboots