by Betty Neels
Mr van der Beek had returned to the house with the promise of help from Mrs Croft provided that she was fetched and returned each day; Mrs Perch was, for the time being, unable to leave home until her youngest child had recovered from a sharp attack of bronchitis. He had also visited the butcher and the general stores and, although half the things Miss Murch had demanded weren’t to be had, he had a useful supply of bacon and eggs, milk and bread. For a man who spent his days and quite often nights in the operating theatre or on the wards and Out-patients, leaving the mundane things of life for others to see to, he had done rather well. Of course Miss Murch would never forgive him for washing up and shovelling coal; she had been his housekeeper for a number of years and taken care that he had never had to lift a finger when there was someone else to lift one for him. As he unpacked his purchases in the kitchen and offered Basil a marrowbone, he reflected on how much he was enjoying himself. It was much later that evening, after a successful session with the book, that he realised that he missed Patience.
A watery sun shone the next day and a thaw set in, bringing with it burst pipes and water tanks, and flooded fields, but it also enabled the farm tractors to take milk to the main roads where it was collected by bulk containers, and Mrs Croft brought the milk and eggs with her when she came each morning, fetched by Mr van der Beek. She brought bread too but Miss Murch had to go without a great many things she considered were sufficiently good for her employer. It shocked her to see him demolishing plates of bacon and eggs and great slabs of bread and butter.
‘Is there no chance of returning to London until the winter is over?’ she had asked him, feeling quite faint at the thought of the months ahead.
‘None whatever,’ he had told her cheerfully. ‘This is ideal for my work, but when we do return you shall enjoy a quiet time, for I intend to go over to Holland—I have several lectures lined up there, papers to read and so on, and I have business to attend to at my home there. I shall be gone for some weeks.’
With that she had to be content. The flu had left her disinclined for work even though there was very little of that to do now Mrs Croft was coming each day; none the less, Miss Murch had to admit to herself that she missed Patience; there was no one to answer the phone now that it was connected once again, or to fill the oil-lamps each day, make the beds and do all the small tasks which she herself had never bothered about.
Patience was quite ready when Mr van der Beek called for her. She had enjoyed her two days at home. Mrs Dodge had done her best; the little house was clean and tidy but the old ladies had kept Patience busy, delighted to have her back again, and she had enjoyed going to the village shop and spending some of her wages on the little extras they so enjoyed. As soon as the weather improved, she decided, she would beg a free day from Miss Murch and go to Norwich and buy some make-up and a new skirt and a couple of woollen sweaters to go with it. Now, waiting for him to fetch her, she had on her best skirt, a tweed in dark grey, a white blouse and a cardigan the aunts had given her for Christmas—unfortunately it had been chosen for its usefulness and its pattern, in various shades of grey, was what the shop assistant had assured them was serviceable. Mr van der Beek saw none of this when he arrived for she was already in the Burberry with a scarf tied over her head. Thaw or no thaw, it was still very cold.
She bade the aunts goodbye, reminded them that she would be home again that evening, and climbed into the Land Rover beside Mrs Croft, and Mr van der Beek, after a suitable interval of polite exchanges with the old ladies, got in and drove back to the house. Here he deposited his passengers at the back door and drove on round to the garage with Basil beside him.
By the time he got back to the house Mrs Croft was hoovering the sitting-room and Patience, at Miss Murch’s request, was arguing with the coal merchant at East Dereham. He stood at the back of the hall, listening to her soft voice not so much arguing as wearing down whoever was at the other end. He had the time to study the grey outfit and find it dispiriting. Blue, he decided, or that soft silvery green—velvet or fine wool and soft suede boots instead of the sensible low-heeled shoes she was wearing. She put down the receiver and turned round and saw him watching her. She didn’t speak but slipped away back to the kitchen where Miss Murch gave her a list of things which needed attention. The laundry van was unable to call; there was a washing-machine in the scullery, and perhaps Patience would be good enough to load it. Miss Murch prided herself on the stock of linen she kept but Mr van der Beek’s shirts, although numerous, would shortly come to an end and now that they were living in a civilised way once more—this said with a sniff—there was a shortage of napkins and tablecloths.
So Patience sorted the laundry, laid the table in the kitchen for Miss Murch, Mrs Croft and herself, and a more elaborate tray for Mr van der Beek, and went upstairs to make the bed while the washing-machine did its work.
After their lunch she hung everything on the lines stretching across the scullery and then she opened the windows, letting in the cold dry air. Tomorrow she would do the ironing.
She and Mrs Croft were taken home at four o’clock, bidden to be ready at a quarter to ten in the morning and wished a good day.
‘Ever so nice, isn’t he?’ said Mrs Croft. ‘Saves us that nasty old walk along the lane. I reckon I’ll be able to go on foot in a couple of days, more’s the pity.’
‘So shall I. It must annoy him very much having to waste time driving us to and fro when he wants to get on with his writing. After all, that’s why he came here.’
The snow was slow in going but the roads, even the smaller lanes, were passable. Mrs Croft and Mrs Perch went to work again at their usual time and Patience did too, which meant that now she almost never set eyes on Mr van der Beek. The house was quiet again; he wasn’t to be disturbed on any account, said Miss Murch, and they crept around, polishing and dusting as silently as possible, and Patience took care to answer the phone the moment it rang. It rang less often now and they were almost all calls from hospitals or those who gave their names as ‘Dr this’ or ‘Mr that’ and demanded to speak to Mr van der Beek personally. She was surprised to find that he received these calls without complaint. Just once a woman’s voice had insisted that she be put through to him, declaring that it was a most urgent matter. Patience, her head full of dire domestic disasters, rang the phone in the study, to be blown off her feet with his blast of rage as he came out of that room to find her.
‘Did I not say,’ he asked in a cold voice to chill her bones, ‘that only urgent calls were to be referred to me? Are you not capable of understanding the word urgent? Did I not, at Mr Bennett’s suggestion, hire you for the purpose of deflecting such calls so that my time should not be wasted? Have I not—?’
‘Just a minute.’ Patience’s voice was small but clear; she sounded like a kindergarten teacher calling the children to order. ‘There is no point in working yourself into a bad temper,’ she pointed out in a reasonable voice. ‘If you are able to tell me how I am to know the difference between urgent and urgent then I will have no need to pass on calls you don’t want. You told me that all calls which were urgent were to be taken by you, and this—this lady said it was an urgent matter. It could have been your wife, your children, your mother, your—your girlfriend.’
He stared down his nose at her. ‘You must not let your imagination run away with you, Miss Martin. I have no wife, no children to the best of my knowledge, and my family live in Holland.’
She looked at him calmly. ‘I didn’t know that, did I?’ She gave him a forgiving smile. ‘Never mind. I’ll try not to do it again.’ And then she allowed her thoughts to trip off her tongue. ‘Haven’t you got a girlfriend?’
He stared at her for a long moment. ‘You are an impertinent young woman,’ he told her, and laughed quite nastily, and then turned on his heel and went back into the study.
She didn’t see him for the rest of the day and went home quite sur
e that she would be told that her services would no longer be required.
CHAPTER FOUR
MISS MURCH MET Patience in the morning with the news that Mr van der Beek had driven himself off to London. ‘He’s much sought after,’ she said importantly. ‘He has a splendid reputation in the profession.’ It was plain that there was only one profession worth mentioning in Miss Murch’s eyes. ‘You are to sort through his mail and if there is anything urgent you are to telephone him. He has left the number on his desk. It is a good opportunity to clean the study; you had better do it, Patience. I need not warn you to take great care not to disarrange anything on his desk.’ She sniffed. ‘And do give the hearth a good polish. I really don’t know what the world is coming to with Mr van der Beek insisting on lighting his own fire each morning. I cannot wait for our return to London. Oh, the sooner the better.’
Patience sorted the post; quite a few letters were addressed to Julius—a nice name, she considered, and it suited Mr van der Beek. They were written in another language—she supposed it to be Dutch. She laid them on one side and didn’t open the envelopes with ‘Private and Confidential’ written upon them and heavily underlined. The girlfriend? He might even now be with her. Patience, sorting the bills, allowed her imagination to take over. The girl would be tall and willowy, strikingly good-looking with flashing dark eyes and dark hair to go with them. She was mulling over her clothes when Miss Murch put her head round the door to ask if she was going to be all day. ‘I want that study cleaned and polished before you go home,’ she insisted.
The room looked nice by the time Patience had finished with it. She had laid the fire in the burnished fireplace, polished the furniture and hoovered every inch of the floor, and then skipped into the garden and picked some more of the forsythia, perked up again once the snow had gone, and arranged it in a vase on the table by the window. She had wasted time peering at the papers on his desk too, feeling sorry for whoever would have to decipher his awful writing and render it fit for the publisher’s eye. In any case, even if she could have read it, she was sure she wouldn’t understand any of it. The papers were arranged very untidily and she longed to straighten them into neat piles, but probably he liked to work in a muddle. She had read somewhere that very clever people were hopelessly disorganised and she supposed that he was very clever. She sat down at the desk and wondered about him. He had a home in London presumably, but what about his family and real friends? And did he sit in elegant consulting-rooms all day dispensing wisdom about people’s insides? Or did he pace the hospital wards with a horde of lesser fry behind him, the way doctors did in films?
Unfortunately for her, he was doing none of these things. The faint sound of the door opening roused her from her daydreaming and the sight of him standing there sent her on to her feet.
‘And what might you be doing here?’ he asked in a silky voice she didn’t much care for. ‘Do not tell me that you are cleaning the room because you aren’t—you are sitting at my desk, probably poking your nose into my papers, idling away the time in which you should be working for me.’
He came into the room, not hurrying, which somehow made him rather more alarming, but Patience, over her surprise, faced him calmly enough.
‘I’ve cleaned your room and not touched anything and I sat down for a moment to catch my breath, that’s all.’ Being an honest girl she added, ‘I looked at some of the papers but I haven’t touched them and, anyway, I couldn’t understand a word. If you had come back when you said you would—tomorrow—you would have found the room just as you had left it and been none the wiser.’
He said mildly, ‘Your grammar is rather sketchy, isn’t it? But I get your meaning. Where is Miss Murch?’
‘Oh, she came in here a little while ago to say that she was going down to the village—a taxi came for her.’
‘A taxi just to go to the village?’
‘It’s not dry underfoot yet.’
‘And Mrs Perch and Mrs Croft?’
‘Oh, they went with her—a bit early but they’d finished. I’m to stay until Miss Murch gets back.’
‘And when will that be?’
‘Well, she didn’t say exactly, but they went about half-past three and I said that I didn’t mind if I didn’t go exactly at four o’clock…’
‘It is well past half-past four. Have you had your tea?’
‘I have it when I get home, with the aunts. Shall I make a pot for you?’
‘If you please, and when you have done that you may go home. I shall be here when Miss Murch returns.’
She collected her dusters and polish and the hoover and went to put on the kettle and presently went back to the study. It was empty, so she put the tray on the table by the window, put a match to the fire and went to get into her outdoor things. There was no sign of Mr van der Beek. She let herself out of the side-door and as she reached the corner of the house the Bentley nosed to a halt where the path joined the sweep before the house.
Mr van der Beek opened the door. ‘Get in,’ he invited in what she described to herself as his ordering voice.
‘Your tea,’ she reminded him.
‘If you will get into the car I shall be back here within five minutes.’
So she got in. Outside the little terraced house she said, ‘Will you explain to Miss Murch, please? She expected me to stay—and thank you for the lift.’
He bade her good evening gravely and drove away. The aunts, watching from the sitting-room window, chided her gently for not inviting him in.
Two weeks went by and January gave way reluctantly to February. There was no more snow but plenty of wind and rain and occasionally a heavy frost. Patience, tramping to and fro in her wellies, sniffed the air and even decided that there was the merest hint of spring in the air. She was kept busy enough during her day’s work, and, to give Miss Murch her due, the house ran on oiled wheels; Mr van der Beek had wanted complete quiet and she made sure that he had it. Patience glimpsed him from time to time, leaving the house with Basil for his early morning walk, or crossing the hall on the way to the study, but beyond a brief greeting he rarely spoke to her. She dealt with his post, made her neat lists and coped with the answering of most of his letters, and in between whiles kept the vases filled with catkins, Christmas roses and chrysanthemums, flourishing in the greenhouse once more now that old Ned was looking after them. Despite Miss Murch’s constant demands for a greater variety of vegetables, he doggedly persisted in nurturing daffodils and tulips, which had been neglected since the aunts had left the house. In a week or so he would allow Patience to cut some of them for the house; in the meantime she foraged around the lanes and banks for the first primroses and snowdrops, setting small bowls of them around the rooms, even sneaking into the study and leaving primroses on the table, just where the thin sunlight would highlight them. Mr van der Beek had paused to look at them and the next morning he had scrawled, ‘I like the primroses; please keep the bowl filled!’ on top of his laconic directions as to what she was to do with the post.
It was a week later that he thrust open the study door as she was crossing the hall. ‘Patience—come here and help me clear up this mess.’ And when she followed him in, he said, ‘I opened the window and a gust of wind blew almost everything on to the floor—heaven alone knows what a muddle it has made of my papers.’
‘Well, I dare say it isn’t as bad as it looks,’ said Patience soothingly, and she got down on her hands and knees and started piling the sheets one by one into tidy bundles. ‘If I do this you can go through each bundle and sort out the pages. They are numbered?’
‘Yes, of course they are. This is going to take all day…’
‘A couple of hours. You really ought to get all this lot typed.’
‘And have still another of you here? I wanted peace and quiet…’
‘You get it, Mr van der Beek. You are left
undisturbed for hours on end and it isn’t very nice of you to say that when we creep round the house all day, hardly daring to sneeze.’
He let out a crack of laughter. ‘No one would think to look at you…’ He didn’t finish but presently said, ‘So I’m to get a typist?’ He was at his desk sorting rapidly. ‘Who would you suggest; yourself perhaps?’
She ignored the smooth sarcasm. ‘But I’m already working here as a general factotum, aren’t I?’
‘You can type?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t look up from the rapidly diminishing chaos.
‘I suppose you can do shorthand as well?’
‘Well, yes, actually I can. I’m a little out of practice. I took a course when I left school; the aunts thought that I should be occupied doing something useful. We had a housekeeper then, you see.’
For anyone else he would have felt pity at the dullness of her life but Patience, he was quite certain, neither needed pity, nor expected it.
‘I shall arrange for a typewriter and you may try your hand at deciphering my writing and transforming it into something my publisher can read.’
‘I’m not sure that I can read your writing…’
‘At least let us give it a try. If you feel you can cope that will be splendid and then you shall become my personal assistant.’
‘Thank you, Mr van der Beek, but who is to do my work around the house?’
He said carelessly, ‘Oh, we will get extra help from the village. You will continue to answer the telephone and parley with the tradespeople and so on. You will of course be paid a suitable salary. Let me see…’ He mentioned a sum which widened her lovely eyes.