by Betty Neels
‘Yes,’ said Abigail briefly. It was, she told herself, no concern of his.
‘Which is no concern of mine, is it?’ concluded the professor with uncanny perception. He turned back to Professor de Wit. ‘I’ll be in to see you each day, but you are making good headway now and you have Juffrouw Valk, who, Nurse tells me, has proved an apt pupil in the compiling of your diet and so on.’
Abigail perceived that he had finished with her. She was still not sure what her patient was suffering from and if he didn’t choose to tell her, then she wasn’t going to ask. She got to her feet again, and this time no one suggested that she should stay.
She was quite ready by three o’clock, with her case in the narrow hall and her outdoor clothes on. She had said goodbye to Juffrouw Valk, promised Professor de Wit that she would visit him before she went back to England, extracted a promise from him to be good and do exactly what he should and thanked him with charm for the gloves he had given her. They were lovely ones, warm brown leather, fur-lined. She hadn’t had such a pair for a very long time. She put them on and declared that as long as winter lasted she would wear them every day, and because he looked so lonely sitting there she put her arms round his thin shoulders and kissed him, just as the professor came into the room.
‘Ah, Dominic, envious?’
His visitor smiled bleakly and turned such a look of ice upon Abigail that she blinked under it. He said briefly to his patient, ‘Hullo,’ and advised him that he would call in later, and then asked, in a voice to freeze her marrow, ‘You’re ready, Nurse?’
She told him yes, she was, in a voice as cold as his own, though it warmed as she bade her patient goodbye and followed the professor out to his car.
She sat silently beside him because it was obvious that he was in a towering rage about something or other. He had woven the car through the traffic on the Herengracht before he spoke.
‘Your patient,’ he began, ‘Mrs Macklin—she has been ill for some time. A peptic ulcer—I operated some six weeks ago, but she has been slow to recover. She is now much better, but naturally after so long a stay in hospital, she’s nervous of going home alone. She has no relations and isn’t the type to bother her friends. She has very little money, by the way—you will be good enough to say nothing to her about your fee. If she should ask tell her that it will be settled later. I will see that you are paid.’
Abigail took a quick look at him. He was staring ahead, his profile fierce and unfriendly, as though daring her to make any comment, so she said in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘Just as you wish, sir. How old is Mrs Macklin?’
‘Sixty-five. She is the widow of a Scottish Presbyterian parson.’
He didn’t speak again, even when he pulled up in the Begijnsteeg, got her case from the boot of the car and crossed the quiet Begijnhof to the end house on the semi-circle of quaint dwellings surrounding the church. The steps leading to its door were narrow and worn, and the front door creaked with age as he turned its handle and walked in, saying, ‘Hullo there,’ in a cheerful voice, the sort of voice he never used towards Abigail. She stifled a sigh and followed him into one of the smallest houses she had ever been in.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HALL CONTAINED two doors and a small circular staircase at its end, its wooden steps worn crooked with age, its floor was brick with a hand-made rug upon it, the walls were white plaster, upon which was displayed a fine plate of Delft Blue and nothing else. The professor opened the door nearest him and ushered Abigail inside, into a room which was small, low-ceilinged and rather dark, although the early February afternoon largely accounted for this.
It was an attractive room, though cluttered, with small tables laden with photographs in silver frames, a writing bureau against one wall and a display cabinet on the other. There were footstools and several small comfortable chairs; there was one large easy chair by the small old-fashioned pot stove set in its traditional tiles; the woman sitting in it spoke to them as they entered.
‘Dominic, my dear, how punctual. I won’t get up—you won’t mind? And is this my nurse?’
‘It is. Miss Abigail Trent—Mrs Macklin. I’ll take the bags up, shall I?’
He went out of the room again and it seemed much larger without his bulk half filling it. Abigail said how do you do and stood quietly while she was inspected, carrying out her own inspection at the same time. Mrs Macklin was tall, though how tall it was hard to say until she stood up, she was also very thin, with a long, sharp-nosed face and bright dark eyes. Her iron grey hair was screwed into an old-fashioned no-nonsense bun, skewered with equally old-fashioned hairpins. After a moment they smiled at each other and Mrs Macklin said, ‘You’re exactly as Dominic described you. Shall we have a cup of tea together? Could you put the kettle on? The kitchen is behind this room and you’ll find the tray already laid. A neighbour kindly did it for me—she was here waiting when Dominic brought me home a couple of hours ago.’
Abigail took off her gloves and unwound her scarf and went to find the kitchen, small and a little old-fashioned, with a gay gingham frill round the mantelshelf above the small electric cooker and a row of pot plants on the windowsill. She filled the kettle and put it on, listening to the creak of the stairs as the professor descended them with measured tread. He had very large feet, thought Abigail lovingly, but then he was a very large man. She could hear the murmur of their voices in the room next door as she made the tea in the brown earthenware pot, put it on the tray and carried it through to the sitting room.
The professor took the tray from her at the door and Mrs Macklin smiled at her and said, ‘My dear, there’s a fruit cake in the tin on the middle shelf of the cupboard,’ so Abigail went back and found the cake, a plate to put it on, a knife and three little porcelain tea plates, all different in design and, she guessed, very old.
They had tea to the accompaniment of cheerful small talk, and Abigail, under the impression that she now knew the professor quite well, discovered another side of him entirely. It was as though Mrs Macklin had charmed away his ill temper and coldness, and although he spoke seldom to her, and then only briefly, she was aware of this. She didn’t talk much herself, but sat listening to her new patient and the professor mulling over the city’s news.
The professor got up to go presently, saying as he did so: ‘Be good enough to come with me to the door, Nurse Trent, I have one or two instructions for you.’ He wasn’t looking at her and his voice was as cold as ever it had been, but at the door, just as he was going, he halted and said in quite a different voice: ‘Hemel, I forgot the cat—I intended to fetch him …’
‘You have enough to do,’ called Mrs Macklin from the sitting room, ‘you know you haven’t a minute to spare this evening.’
‘I’ll get him,’ Abigail offered. ‘I know my way around Amsterdam very well now and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time this evening.’ She had a sudden unsatisfactory picture of the professor, spending his evening wining and dining some gorgeous girl who could make him smile instead of scowl as he was at that moment.
‘I can’t allow you to go trudging all over Amsterdam after a cat.’ His voice was polite and quite impersonal.
‘You exaggerate,’ Abigail pointed out reasonably. ‘I never trudge anywhere—you make me sound like Little Orphan Annie …’ She stopped, because although she wasn’t Annie she was an orphan. She fixed her gaze on the fine cloth of his car coat and clenched her teeth to stop the tears coming into her eyes. She gulped back the lump in her throat and said:
‘I shall enjoy it.’
‘And will you enjoy the shopping and housework and the cooking?’ he enquired.
‘Yes. There isn’t much nursing for me to do, is there? And it’s such a tiny house.’
‘I will get some kind of household help for Mrs Macklin by the end of the week. In the meantime I should like you to restrain her from doing everything. She has always been a very active woman and likes to have her own way.’
‘Most people do,’ remarked Abi
gail, and looked at him, to surprise an expression on his face which set her pulse racing—it was such a peculiar look, half wonder, half amusement, wholly tender. She met his eyes squarely and waited for him to speak.
‘I didn’t know that there were girls like you left in the world,’ he said slowly, and put up a hand and lifted her chin gently with his forefinger and scanned her face as though he hadn’t really looked at it before. ‘You’ve almost restored my faith in women, Abigail.’
He dropped his hand, turned on his heel and was out of the door, wishing her good afternoon in a perfectly ordinary voice before she could draw a difficult breath.
She had no time to ponder his remark because she went to fetch Jude the cat soon afterwards, and when she got back and had settled him with his mistress, Mrs Macklin began at once to talk.
‘Sit down, my dear. You must be wondering about me and why I should need a nurse, for I’m sure Dominic neglected to tell you anything at all, except the number of pills I’m supposed to take each day. I was his mother’s dearest friend, you know, and when she died I promised that I would keep an eye on him, because I’ve known him ever since he was a baby, but now I’m older and the boot is on the other foot. It’s he who keeps an eye on me now, although I will say that he still listens to me with a fair amount of patience and even takes my advice from time to time. When this silly ulcer business started, nothing would do but that I must go into hospital, and when he saw that medical treatment wasn’t going to cure me, he operated himself and insisted on me staying there much too long, I consider. He seems to think that I need a nurse for a short time, though I told him that I was as fit as a fiddle, and now he tells me that he’s arranging for someone to come each day and help in the house when you go.’ She snorted delicately. ‘I never heard such nonsense, though I must admit, my dear, that I’m going to enjoy your company—to tell you the truth, I was just a little nervous, and since he tells me that it will cost me nothing … I didn’t know that the Ziekenfonds paid for private nurses, but they’ve improved these things so much in the last few years, haven’t they, and I’ve never had occasion to make use of them before.’
Abigail made a sympathetic murmured reply. So that was what the professor had told her patient, and that was why she was to say nothing about fees. He was paying them out of his own pocket. She reflected with brief tenderness upon him, then remarked calmly:
‘I’m sure the professor knows best; it really does seem a bit strange when one comes back from hospital. We could use this week finding out just how much you can do without getting tired, don’t you think? Then if you have someone in to do the housework, you’ll be able to cope with the cooking and perhaps the shopping—isn’t that a good idea? Now, shall I get some supper for us—and what about Jude, he’ll want a meal, I expect—supposing you sit there and enjoy his company for a while and I’ll explore the kitchen.’
Mrs Macklin agreed to these suggestions readily enough and Abigail retired to the kitchen; her patient was more tired than she wished to say, and a week of cosseting would do her good. Abigail nodded her neat head in confirmation of her own opinion and began opening cupboard doors and peering at their contents.
She saw her patient into bed quite early that evening, with Jude on his own shawl at her feet and a bell within reach, and then crossed the landing to her own room. It was extremely small and rather sparsely furnished, but the bed and the chest in the window and the chair beside it were very old and glowing with the loving polishing of many decades of housewives. She undressed slowly, despite the chill, thinking about the professor and wondering what exactly he had meant that afternoon. Why had he lost his faith in women in the first place—or had he been joking? That was unlikely—he wasn’t a man to make that kind of a joke. She went downstairs, dressing-gowned and slippered, and had a shower in the cubicle squeezed in beside the kitchen, then crept upstairs again and into bed, her thoughts still centred on him. Perhaps he was in love with someone who didn’t love him, although this seemed to her to be quite inconceivable—she was still worrying about it when she went to sleep.
She got up early the next morning to find a light powdering of snow once more and a snarling wind whining round the little square. She made tea and took Mrs Macklin a cup, suitably weak, then let Jude out for his morning prowl. Mrs Macklin, sitting up in bed to eat her breakfast, said cheerfully that she had slept like a top and she hoped that Abigail had too. ‘And my dear,’ she went on. ‘I really cannot call you Nurse or Miss Trent—I shall call you Abigail, such a pretty name and seldom heard these days. Was there a reason for it?’
Abigail explained, and her companion said admiringly: ‘What a good idea—how imaginative some people are.’ She bit into a slice of paper-thin bread and butter with relish. ‘I was sorry to hear about your mother, child.’
Abigail almost dropped an empty porridge plate she was removing to the kitchen. ‘My mother?’ she faltered. ‘How could you possibly know?’
Mrs Macklin gave her an innocent look. ‘Dominic told me, of course—should he not have done so?’
Abigail shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that—it’s just that I didn’t think he knew …!’
‘Dominic knows everything,’ remarked her patient complacently, ‘as you will discover for yourself, no doubt.’
She spent the morning tidying the house and shopping and cooking their simple meal, which they had barely finished when the professor arrived. The visit seemed more social than professional; he greeted Abigail with his usual distant manner and then sat for ten minutes with Mrs Macklin, talking about nothing in particular. As he got up to go he remarked to Abigail, ‘I see you brought Jude safely back. You had no difficulty in finding the place?’
Abigail said that no, she hadn’t, thank you, and forbore from mentioning that she had had to pay a week’s board for the animal before they would let her have him. The professor had paid all the previous bills; he had forgotten this, the final one; a mere thirty gulden for him perhaps, but a large slice of the money she had left in her purse. She hoped that he would remember it when he paid her, for she had given Bollinger most of the money she had earned from looking after Professor de Wit. She still had her fare to England, but not a great deal besides.
He nodded carelessly in reply. ‘I imagine Mrs Macklin is going to rest for a couple of hours. Get your hat and coat and I will take you along to see Bollinger—and Annie.’
Abigail opened her mouth to refuse this high-handed disposal of her free time, but was thwarted by her patient.
‘What a splendid idea!’ declared that lady. ‘I shall lie down here on the sofa and take a nap until you return. Run along and put on your things, Abigail, Dominic can make me comfortable.’
Abigail, running a professional eye over Mrs Macklin when she came downstairs again, had to admit that he had done his work very well—the old lady looked not only comfortable, but pleased with herself. She wished her goodbye and followed the professor out of the house and walked with him across the cobbled square and into the car. He didn’t speak for the entire journey, and she, who had hoped that perhaps his remark of the previous day might have meant a breaking of the ice between them, was disappointed. They got out, still silent, at his front door and went inside, where he cast his coat in an untidy heap into one of the chairs, his gloves after it, and strode across the hall to the room where she had had tea with Bollinger. And all he said was: ‘Bollinger will be in directly,’ as he went away.
It was nice to see Bolly again—and Annie, tucked cosily under his arm. They sat by the fire and drank their coffee which Mevrouw Boot had brought to them and Abigail listened to Bolly’s account of his day in Friesland and saw how happy he was. It seemed a pity that he couldn’t stay for always. She voiced the thought. ‘Bolly, if the professor asked you, would you stay here? It’s just what you like, isn’t it, and it suits you, doesn’t it? I should be perfectly all right in England—you know what private nursing is, first one place, then the other. I shall be away from home a grea
t deal.’
He looked shocked. ‘Miss Abby, what’s ever come over you?’ he wanted to know. ‘I must own it’s nice here, but the other bloke’ll be back before long anyway and I doubt if the professor would want me. Besides, we want a home, don’t we?’
‘Yes, of course, Bolly,’ she agreed hastily, ‘it was only an idea. How’s Annie?’
‘See for yourself, Miss Abby. Flourishing, and such friends with Colossus; sleeps with him too, and sits in the dining room while the boss has his meals. He’s that fond of her.’
‘I’m so glad.’ She stroked the kitten on her lap. ‘I didn’t think he would be—I mean, I knew he’d be kind to her and give her a home …’
‘Lord love you, miss, the boss ain’t a bit like he seems—very soft-hearted, he is. Does a lot, quiet like, so I hear.’
‘I’m sure he does, Bolly—and now I must go because I don’t want to be too long away from Mrs Macklin. I’ll come again very soon. I still think it would be the best thing for me to go back alone and you follow me when I’ve found something.’
He nodded reluctantly. ‘OK, Miss Abby, anything you say, and you’re to go out the front door, the boss says. Real narked, he was, that you should use the servants’ entrance.’
Abigail’s nice eyes rounded with surprise. ‘Was he? I should think that would be the last thing to worry him.’ A thought struck her. ‘Bolly, did you tell him much about us—I mean Mother and …’
‘Only a trifle, here and there, so to speak.’
With which remark she had to be content. She wished him a warm goodbye and went, obedient to the professor’s wish, through the house door. At the bottom of the steps stood the Rolls with Jan at the wheel. He got out when he saw her and said: ‘Dag, miss. I take you back, the Professor’s orders.’