by Betty Neels
She liked Mr White, he was elderly and balding and kind, and reminded her of her own father. She agreed at once and he looked relieved, and when she looked across at the stranger, she saw, not relief on his handsome features, but satisfaction—so it was he who had been behind their scheme, she decided shrewdly. She asked on impulse: ‘Could I have this doctor’s name, sir? We shall need it for the report.’
She hadn’t spoken loudly, yet before Mr White could answer, the subject of her question was crossing the room to join them. ‘You agree to what we ask?’ he wanted to know, and when she nodded: ‘My name is van Dresselhuys, you will need it for your report, no doubt.’
‘Thank you. Mine’s Dobbs.’ She gave him a little nod, said ‘Excuse me,’ smiled brilliantly at Doctor White and went back to where Sister Pim was busy with the patient.
The ambulance left four hours later with Alexandra, her packing done in a swift ten minutes or so, in attendance. The stranger and his aunt had disappeared; vaguely, at the back of her busy mind, she was disappointed at this, but there really was no time to indulge in her own thoughts. She supervised the transfer of the girl to the ambulance, and collected the charts and notes from Lucy, who had volunteered to stay on duty until they went. No one had inquired about the girl; the police had drawn a blank and there was nothing in her handbag to give them any clue as to her identity; there was no driving licence there either and the car, a write-off, had borne a Midlands number-plate. Their search for her identity might take some time. Alexandra, hearing this, gave a resigned shrug and went out to the ambulance, primed with Mr White’s instructions for the journey.
There was a Morris 1000 drawn up beside it, in it sat Miss Thrums, and bending over its open, middle-aged bonnet was the strange doctor. He took no notice of Alexandra; it was his aunt who thrust her head out of the car window and said cheerfully: ‘We are accompanying you, Sister—we have to go to London in any case, and my nephew is anxious that the girl should have every care.’
Alexandra bristled. ‘Perhaps he would prefer to travel in the ambulance?’ she asked with dangerous sweetness.
The doctor answered this for himself, without bothering to take his head from under the bonnet. ‘My dear good woman, why on earth should I wish to do that when you are perfectly competent to attend to the patient? We shall travel behind you, and if you need my help you have only to signal me.’
‘Just as you wish,’ said Alexandra, still very sweet, ‘and be so good as not to address me as your good woman.’
She turned her back on his deep chuckle and flounced into the ambulance.
It was a great pity that she had to stop the ambulance twice during the journey and ask for his help; something which he gave with a calm despatch which she was forced to admit was all that she could have asked for. On the second occasion they were delayed for half an hour, working over their patient in the confines of the ambulance, with the ambulance men hovering, helpful and resourceful, at their backs, and when at last the doctor pronounced it safe to continue their journey, he added a rider to the effect that they should make the best speed they could. Luckily they were on the outskirts of Woking by now and at two o’clock in the morning the roads were fairly clear. They arrived at St Job’s without further alarms and the patient was taken at once to the Intensive Care Unit, with Alexandra, her eyes very bright in her tired face, accompanying her. She hadn’t stopped to speak to the doctor; the all-important thing was to get the girl back on to the ventilator again and she heaved a sigh of relief at being back in her own department once more with two night nurses waiting and everything to hand. The girl responded fairly quickly, and once she was sure of that Alexandra gave her report to the Night Sister, repeated it to the Registrar and yawning widely, started off for the Nurses’ Home. She hadn’t seen any more of the doctor and she didn’t expect to; probably he would see Mr Thrush’s registrar and then continue his journey.
She went sleepily down the stairs and found him at the bottom, deep in conversation with the Casualty Officer on duty, but as she reached them, he bade the young man good-bye, took her by the arm and led her through the front hall and down the main corridor, opening a door half way down it and pushing her gently inside.
‘I can’t go in here,’ Alexandra, now very much awake, pointed out, ‘this is the consultants’ room.’
‘I know, but they aren’t here at this time of night—only Aunty. The Night Super sent some coffee down for us and I promised her that I would see that you had a cup before you went to bed.’
Miss Thrums was sitting at the large table in the centre of the room, very upright and looking as though staying up all night in awkward circumstances was something she was quite accustomed to. She nodded bracingly at Alexandra, begged her to take a seat and poured her some coffee.
‘A trying evening,’ she observed. ‘I can only trust that the girl will recover.’
Alexandra murmured, because the doctor had nothing to say, and then asked: ‘Have you somewhere to go for the rest of the night? I could get Night Super to let you have the rooms we keep for relations—you could at least have rest…’
This time the doctor spoke. ‘Very kind, Sister Dobbs, but we have been offered beds at Mr Thrush’s.’ His tone implied that it really was no business of hers, and if she hadn’t been so tired, she might have felt inclined to take him up on that, instead she drank her coffee, said good-bye to Miss Thrums, and taking a brisk farewell of the doctor, started for the door to find him with her as she reached it.
‘You have been very kind,’ he told her, ‘I’m grateful. Let us hope that the patient repays you by recovering.’
‘Yes,’ said Alexandra, vague with tiredness, ‘and I hope they find her family soon, too.’ She knitted her brows, trying to think of something else to say by way of a pleasant farewell and he smiled a little. ‘You’re asleep on your feet. Goodnight, Miss Dobbs.’
It was as she was tumbling into bed that she remembered that he hadn’t said good-bye, only goodnight.
CHAPTER TWO
IT had been a very short night; Alexandra got up and dressed with the greatest reluctance and went down to join her friends at breakfast, a meal eaten in a hurry, although she still found time to answer the questions put to her.
‘And what’s this I hear,’ asked Ruth Page, Women’s Surgical Sister, ‘about you arriving in the small hours with a tall dark stranger? I met Meg coming off night duty and she was full of him—driving a Rolls, I suppose…’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Alexandra, ‘his hair’s grizzled and he was driving a Morris 1000. Oh, and his aunt was with him.’ When the shrieks of laughter had died down, she added demurely: ‘It went like a bomb.’
‘Yes, but what about him?’ persisted Ruth. ‘What’s his name—how old is he—did he turn you on?’
Alexandra considered. ‘His name’s van Dresselhuys, that’s Dutch, isn’t it—though his English was perfect. I’ve no idea how old he would be and I thought him rather rude and bad-tempered, though,’ she added fairly, ‘he was pretty super when the girl had a cardiac arrest.’ She swallowed the last of her tea and got to her feet. ‘I’d better be on my way, I suppose; there’s a long list and if she’s fit enough they’ll want to operate, though heaven knows where they’ll fit her in.’
Several of her companions got up too and as they walked through the hospital to their various wards, someone asked: ‘This girl—who is she?’
‘That’s just it, no one knows yet. She hadn’t any papers or anything with her, the car was hired from a garage in the Midlands—Wolverhampton, I believe, and until the police can trace her family or friends she can’t be identified.’
‘It’s to be hoped that she’ll be able to tell us herself before long,’ Ruth spoke soberly. ‘I’ll get her once she’s out of the ICU, I suppose?’
‘I should think so—lord, there’s the panic bell, someone’s arresting.’ Alexandra was off down the corridor like a bullet from a gun.
It was old Mr Dasher, who had bee
n in her unit for five days already, he had been admitted a few hours before Alexandra had gone away, and here he was still, she thought worriedly, looking not one scrap better; she got to work on him and was getting a little response when Anthony Ferris arrived. It wasn’t until the old man was once more breathing and she had spent a careful five minutes with the unconscious girl that she felt able to leave things in the hands of her staff nurse and go along to her office, so that she might go through the various papers and messages on her desk. And of course Anthony went with her, and when she sat down, sat down too, on the only other chair in the room.
Alexandra, short-tempered from lack of sleep and an unexplained dissatisfaction with life in general, frowned at him. ‘Anthony, I’ve heaps of jobs to catch up on and that girl will probably be going to theatre…’
He smiled at her with a condescending tolerance which set her splendid teeth on edge and made it worse by saying: ‘Poor little girl—I hear you had to put up with some foreign type, ordering you around. One of those know-alls, I suppose.’
‘Then you suppose wrong.’ Alexandra had forgotten the Dutchman’s arrogant manner and couldn’t spring fast enough to his defence. ‘He was extremely civil and he knew exactly what to do— I should never have got the girl here alive if it hadn’t been for him.’
Anthony was too conceited a man to be worried by her championship of someone he hadn’t even met. ‘My poor sweet,’ he said, ‘how kind of you to stick up for him…’
‘If I might echo those words?’ queried Doctor van Dresselhuys from the door.
She stared at him, her pretty mouth slightly open; she hadn’t expected him, though she had thought of him several times, and here he was, in her office, of all places. She said, inadequately: ‘Oh, hullo, I thought you’d gone.’
He leaned against the wall, dwarfing Anthony, and looking, despite his well-worn clothes, elegant. Indeed, he made the other man’s rather way-out style of dressing look rather cheap. ‘Er—no. Mr Thrush asked me if I would give the anaesthetic—he intends to do a decompression.’
His cool eyes flickered over Anthony, and Alexandra made haste to introduce the two men, but they had little to say to each other; after a few minutes Anthony announced, rather importantly, that he had work to do and edged to the door, saying over-loudly as he went: ‘I’ll see you as usual this evening, Alexandra—we might dine and dance somewhere.’ At the door he turned. ‘’Bye, darling.’
Doctor van Dresselhuys hadn’t moved, he still leant against the door, the picture of idleness, only his eyes gleamed. When Anthony had gone, he asked casually: ‘Going to marry him?’
‘No, I’m not!’ declared Alexandra explosively. Anthony had behaved like a bad-tempered child and she had given him no right at all to call her darling; he’d been showing off, of course, hoping to impress this large man, whose very largeness, she suspected, had annoyed him, and who, unless she was very much mistaken, was secretly amused.
He didn’t say anything else, just went on looking at her with his blue eyes until she felt the soft colour creeping into her cheeks. It deepened when he said softly: ‘You’re a remarkably lovely girl.’
She disliked him, she told herself seethingly, as much as she disliked Anthony—as much as she disliked men with a capital M. She pressed her lips together and lifted her chin at him, and was outraged when he asked, still casually: ‘Did I come at the wrong moment—was your young man on the point of proposing?’
‘No, he was not,’ she snapped, ‘and even if he were,’ she went on crossly, ‘I really don’t see that it’s any business of yours.’ She got up. ‘And you really must excuse me, I have work to do.’
‘Ah, yes. I’ve come to see the patient, if you would be so kind?’ He stood aside to let her pass and followed her into the unit, where he became all at once a doctor, asking questions in a calm voice, reading the notes, examining the girl with meticulous care. There was no hidden amusement now; he was absorbed in what he was doing, and Alexandra was no longer a lovely girl; she was a skilled someone in a white gown, who answered his questions with the intelligence expected of her. Finally he nodded, thanked her and went away; she didn’t see him again for quite some time, but when the theatre nurse came to escort the girl to theatre, she was treated to that young lady’s ecstatic opinion of him; he had, it seemed, charmed every female he had encountered. Alexandra was left with the feeling that she must be lacking in something or other.
The girl came back, holding her own well, and as far as was possible to judge at this stage, the operation had been a success. Alexandra set to work on her, and when Doctor van Dresselhuys came to see the patient in Mr Thrush’s company, she was far too occupied to spare a thought for him.
Late off duty, because she had been a little anxious about her patient, Alexandra took the lift down to ground level, nipped smartly along a succession of passages and crossed the small ornamental garden which separated the Nurses’ Home from the hospital. It was pitch dark by now and there was no reason why she should encounter anyone at that hour, so that the vague feeling of disappointment she experienced was all the more surprising. In her room, she kicked off her shoes, removed her cap and went along to run a bath; she met Ruth on the way back and delayed to share a pot of tea with her. Anthony had said that he would meet her, but he hadn’t said when or where; his airy remark about meeting her as usual meant nothing; they had gone out fairly frequently together, it was true, but he had implied that they went dining and dancing nightly. Frowningly, she could only remember two occasions in the last three months or so when he had taken her somewhere really decent for dinner, and never to a dance.
She accepted a second cup; let Anthony wait, better still, let him telephone over to the home and ask if she was ready.
She had bathed and was in 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.