by Betty Neels
‘A query coronary for observation, a nephritis and a leukaemia. I’ll be up to see them—let me know as soon as you’ve got them will you?’
They were all ill, indeed the leukaemia looked as though she wouldn’t last another day, but Julia had seen such cases before; a blood transfusion and rest and good food, and the patient would be able to carry on again at least for a time. She accompanied Dick Reed when he came to examine them and then left him in the office to write up his notes while she gave out the medicines. It was almost six o’clock by the time she got off duty and she was tired. But she shook the tiredness off as she walked back to the flat. Nigel would be coming round presently and she wanted to have a meal ready for him. It would have to be ham and salad, there wasn’t time to prepare more; she stopped at the delicatessen on the corner, bought what she needed and hurried to see Wellington, shower and change into a blouse and skirt and lay the table. The room looked pleasant with a small table lamp alight, highlighting the flowers she had brought back with her; the right setting for a talk about the future.
Nigel came a little after eight o’clock and she saw at once that he was tired. ‘You’ve had a busy day.’ Her quiet voice was sympathetic, ‘Sit down and have a glass of beer before supper.’
He went over his day’s work then; a tricky operation he wasn’t very happy about, a bad road crash which had upset the theatre list, one of the theatre nurses fainting…
‘A real Monday,’ commented Julia, ‘what a blessing it’s Tuesday tomorrow.’
He laughed and caught her hand and kissed her. ‘You’re too good to be true sometimes, Julia. I don’t think I know the real you underneath that serenity.’
It struck her forcibly that he didn’t; she had tried hard to batten down the occasional fiery moments of temper. It was a shock to realise that the only person who knew of her occasional flashes of rage was the professor, and that was because he was invariably the cause of them.
She didn’t mention their future while they had supper, only when she had cleared the table and put the coffee tray between them did she ask: ‘Heard any more about the new job?’
She shouldn’t have said it. He said irritably: ‘How could I possibly? You know as well as I do that it takes a couple of weeks at least for the official letter to be sent.’
He drank his coffee and sat back and presently his eyes closed and he slept. Julia, although disappointed, wasn’t in the least put out; he’d had a long day and things hadn’t gone right and probably he’d have to be up during the night as well. She sat quietly, allowing her thoughts to wander. Her own day had gone well enough and she’d had a weekend at home too. She smiled, remembering Madge and small Harry. Madge was five years younger than she, small and dark and pretty, they were so unalike that those who didn’t know them never believed that they were sisters. It will be nice to be married, mused Julia and have children and a home, although it might be some time before she had a home of her own choosing. Madge had gone straight to Jim’s farmhouse and spent a happy six months changing the curtains and carpets and polishing the furniture, handed down from one generation to the next and then, content with her surroundings, she had produced Harry. The first, she assured Julia, of the family she intended to have. ‘At least two boys,’ she had said seriously, ‘Jim’s buying more land and there’ll be something for them—and a girl or two to even things up.’ Julia felt a pang of envy; she doubted whether Nigel would want more than one child—two, perhaps, and she would have to have them quickly. She frowned fiercely, thirty was a depressing age…
Nigel had opened his eyes. ‘What’s the matter?’
She smiled. ‘Nothing, just that I remembered that I was thirty.’
‘A sensible age—they asked about you at Bristol—I forgot to tell you—they thought they might have a part-time job to offer you if you were interested. Two sisters will be retiring next summer; you could go full time if you wanted to.’
Julia sat up straight. ‘But Nigel, I don’t want to. You’ll be getting enough for us to live comfortably without me having to work, even part time. I want to be a housewife and have a couple of babies and cook…’
He said easily. ‘Hey, you don’t need to be so indignant about it, and there’s loads of time for a baby.’ He shrugged, ‘Of course if you’re dead set on doing nothing that’s fine. If you worked for a year, even, we could save all your salary and start buying a house…’ He leaned forward and dropped a kiss on her downcast face. ‘Anyway you’ve a matter of eight or nine months to decide, darling. And no one would guess what an old lady you are; you’re really the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.’
She saw that he didn’t want to discuss their future seriously. She uncurled herself from her chair and said a little too brightly: ‘I’ll get another cup of coffee, shall I? It’ll wake you up before you go.’
He laughed. ‘Being thrown out, am I?’
‘That’s right,’ she laughed with him, uneasily aware that even if she had let him, he didn’t want to stay. Not that she would have allowed him to but it would be fun to be tempted…
It was the professor’s round the next morning. Not in the best of tempers Julia decided as he stalked into the ward, his face a bland mask, his, ‘Good morning, Sister,’ so crisp it was positively terse. She instantly became very professional, reciting the information he required in a precise voice and handing forms, Path Lab reports and X-ray forms just half a second before he asked for them; she felt a wicked delight in doing it, for she knew it annoyed him. He brings out the very worst in me, she thought, watching him examining the woman with leukaemia, and yet the patients doted on him. He straightened his vast bulk and before he could put out a hand she had the Path Form ready. Just for the moment his eye met hers and she could have sworn that somewhere under those composed features he was laughing.
Inevitably the conversation turned to Nigel’s new job as Julia, the Professor and Dick Reed had their coffee after the round was over. ‘A flat with the job,’ observed the professor airily, ‘do you intend to get a job there, Julia?’
After his distant manner of the ward, the airiness seemed to Julia a bit much.
‘I’ve hardly had time to think about it,’ she told him, ‘time enough to decide…’
He gave her a long steady look. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, but you will have to find that out for yourself.’
She stared at him, for it seemed a strange thing to say and as far as she could see there was no point in answering him.
Nigel was on call until midnight and although some of her friends had asked her to go to a film with them, she had refused. A quiet evening, she had decided, in which she could have a good think. It was fast being borne in upon her that she and Nigel were drifting towards an uncertain future neither of them was quite happy about—at least, speaking for herself, she wasn’t happy.
She handed over to Pat soon after five o’clock, fetched her cloak and left the ward. It had been growing dark for the last half-hour or so—too dark for the time of year—a storm brewing; she hurried down the stairs and across the entrance hall just as the first heavy drops of rain fell. She paused at the doors, uncertain whether to make a dash for it and get wet or hang around until the storm was over. The whole sky was black now and it could last an hour or more. She decided to chance it and took a step outside to be plucked back by her cloak.
‘You’ll be drowned like a rat,’ said the professor matter-of-factly. ‘Wait here, I’ll get the car and then drive you back.’
He gave her no chance to answer but had gone, walking fast to the consultants’ car park close by, and when he drew up in front of the door a few moments later, she got in thankfully enough for the rain was streaming down and there had been a low grumbling of thunder.
‘Where to?’ asked the professor.
She told him and he nodded. ‘Close by. Better than living in I dare say.’
She agreed pleasantly. ‘Although the neighbourhood isn’t very inviting, but it’s reasonably quiet.’
There really wasn’t much time for more conversation. He stopped before the house and she had to admit that in the rain and under the grey, dreary sky, it looked uninviting. She thanked him and started to open the door.
His ‘Stay where you are,’ was uttered in a voice which was intended to be obeyed, so she didn’t move. If he chose to get wet that was his business.
He opened the door, said ‘Run for it,’ and shut the door behind her. On the doorstep she realised that he was beside her, opening the door and urging her inside just as a brilliant flash of lightening heralded a clap of thunder to shatter the eardrums. Julia, who was quite cowardly when it came to storms, caught the professor by the coat sleeves and buried her bright head in his chest. She remembered who he was at the last minute and shot away from him as though he had been red hot. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t like lightning.’
He didn’t answer, merely held her lightly for a moment and then said, ‘Shall we go to your flat and you can take off that wet cloak? He pushed her gently towards the stairs. ‘At the top?’ he wanted to know.
She led the way and unlocked her door, to be met by a terrified Wellington, who frenziedly tried to climb up her legs. The professor shut the door behind him, removed the kitten gently, tucked him under one arm and went to close the curtains and turn on the lamp.
‘That’s better.’ He stood in the middle of the room, making it seem very small, looking around him. ‘This is where you live?’ he said softly. ‘I have often wondered.’
Julia had taken off her wet cloak and was pulling off her ruined cap. ‘They call it a flat,’ she told him, ‘but of course it’s really only one room with hot and cold and a cooking stove. But I’m happy here.’
‘Are you? Are you really, Julia? You are an outdoor girl. You should at least have a garden…’
‘Well, it’s not for ever. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’ He sat down in the chair Nigel always used and looked completely at home in it and Wellington curled up against his waistcoat, the kitten’s small head buried against him. He stroked the kitten gently. ‘He doesn’t like storms either. Isn’t he lonely all day?’
Julia was filling the kettle. ‘I’m sure he is but I found him in the street a week or two ago, half starved. I took him home for my weekend and he loved it.’
The professor somehow seemed a different man, sitting there so very at ease, so much so that she was tempted to ask him if his wife wasn’t expecting him home, but perhaps Martha had learnt not to ask him questions like that. She searched around in her head for a safe topic of conversation and came up with, ‘Is your son happy at school?’
‘Yes. He’s just starting his second year. You know of the place, I expect?’ He mentioned a prep school.
‘Oh, of course, Father is the Latin coach there,’ she said at once.
‘Ah yes, you did tell me—a retired schoolmaster. Latin, Greek and Maths I presume?’
‘That’s right.’ She turned to look at him as she spooned Nescafé into two mugs, and almost dropped the jar as the room was lighted by a blaze of blue light and a crack of thunder made everything rattle. The professor got up, still with Wellington under one arm, and took the jar from her shaking hand. ‘Alarming,’ he observed soothingly, ‘but no damage done.’ He put the jar on a shelf and reaching for the boiling kettle said, ‘Sit down and take this creature, will you, while I see to this.’
She sat feeling a fool and saying so. ‘Rubbish,’ he told her firmly, ‘besides, it’s a sop to my ego that I’ve at last discovered a chink in your armour of chilly calm.’
She blinked at him. ‘Chilly calm,’ she echoed. ‘I’m not…’
‘The very epitome. The ideal ward sister in person, you wear the image like a second skin. I wonder what’s underneath?’
She said distantly: ‘I think you’re being rather rude.’
He handed her a mug of coffee and sat down again. ‘You’ve always thought that, haven’t you?’ His voice was silky.
She made haste to say: ‘The storm’s going away…’
He laughed softly: ‘How providential, Julia.’ He drank his coffee and got up. ‘I must go, Martha will wonder what has happened to me. No, don’t get up, I’ll see myself out.’
He had gone before she could think of anything to say.
The storm had rumbled away and presently she got up and fed Wellington and made herself some supper. She had been going to sit quietly and ponder the future, she reminded herself, but somehow she found it difficult to concentrate on it, instead she found herself thinking about the professor. Natural curiosity, she told herself, quite forgetting that until just lately she hadn’t been in the least curious about him, but then it was only just lately that he had ever bothered to talk to her. There had always been talk of a professional nature, of course, and polite nothings at Christmas and the annual hospital ball, when he had danced with her, very correctly, just once. It was a kind of unwritten law that the consultants should dance with their ward sisters and he had observed it although he had never been sufficiently carried away to repeat that performance. And as for the conversation while they drank their coffee after his rounds, that was almost always shop with the odd off-hand remark about the weather or whether she had enjoyed her holidays offered her with rather impatient politeness. He might be quite a different person, she considered, if one could get to know him and he wasn’t so rude. The faint suspicion that he was rude on purpose to annoy her crossed her mind and was instantly dispelled for there was no sense in it. She dismissed his image with difficulty and got pencil and paper and started to calculate just how much money she and Nigel would need to live on, she did it neatly, so that she could show it to him next time they were together, and prove that there was really no need for her to work.
She wasn’t on until one o’clock the next day, for Pat had a half-day before her days off. Nigel had an hour to spare too which meant that they could meet at the café down the street and have coffee together.
He was waiting when she got there, sitting at one of the plastic tables piled with the last customer’s coffee cups and plates of crumbs. The café owner came over as she sat down, swept the debris on to a tray, gave the table a token wipe, said, ‘Two coffees?’ without being told anything, and then went away to get them.
Julia wrinkled her lovely nose at the smell of hot vinegar and chips. ‘This place is a dump,’ she observed, ‘but at least it’s somewhere to go.’ She smiled as she spoke. ‘Did you manage a quiet night?’
‘Yes, not too bad. Can you get an evening tomorrow? I shall be free and there is that film we both want to see. There won’t be time to eat first but we can get a sandwich and coffee afterwards.’
‘Pat’s got days off but it just so happens that the part-time staff nurse asked if she could work from two until eight o’clock. Couldn’t be better, could it?’
Their coffee came, surprisingly good in its thick white pottery cups and they drank it slowly, talking idly. Nigel didn’t mention his new job and there really wasn’t time to have a serious talk about anything. They walked back to St Anne’s and parted at its entrance. Nigel’s, ‘See you, old girl,’ struck Julia as unromantic.
They met again the following evening, rather later than they had intended, so that there was only time to say hullo before hurrying to Nigel’s car and driving up to the West End. There were queues outside the cinema and they joined the shortest one even though it was for the more expensive seats. ‘I should have booked, but I forgot,’ said Nigel, ‘but I don’t suppose we’ll have to wait long.’
They didn’t talk much, for one thing there wasn’t much to talk about except their work which was hardly conversation for a public place, they exchanged a few remarks about nothing in particular and it struck Julia that other than their work they hadn’t a great deal in common, something which she had never realised before. She looked at Nigel for a reassurance she badly needed although she wasn’t sure why, and she got a casual smile. ‘I
t won’t be long now,’ he observed, ‘I only hope it’ll be worth the waiting.’
As it happened it was. Julia, coming out of the cinema a couple of hours later was still bemused with its splendour, and she hesitated on the pavement, momentarily separated from Nigel by the crowds.
‘Lost?’ Professor van der Wagema’s bland voice sounded quietly in her ear.
‘Certainly not. Nigel’s here, only I can’t see him for the moment.’
‘In that case, stay here and I’ll find him for you.’ He turned his head and said something to a girl behind him, then: ‘You can keep each other company until I get back.’
He disappeared into the crowd and Julia and the girl eyed each other warily. If this was Martha, and who else could it be, anyway, thought Julia, she had been sadly mistaken in her guessing. This girl was only a little younger than herself, exquisitely made up and beautifully dressed and very, very pretty although just at that moment she was frowning with annoyance. I suppose I’d frown too if my husband went off looking for someone I’d never met and left me with a woman he hadn’t even bothered to introduce, mused Julia and tried a smile on her companion. ‘Wasn’t it a splendid film?’ she essayed.
‘Not too bad if you like that kind of thing.’ The blue eyes rested on hers for a moment and then searched the crowd, dismissing her. Julia, whose manners were practised, tried again: ‘I’m sorry if you are being held up, I’m sure Professor van der Wagema won’t be long…’
He came towards them as she spoke, head and shoulders above the people still milling around, and he had Nigel with him. She thanked the professor nicely and his cool, ‘Not at all, Sister Mitchell,’ chilled her before he took the girl’s arm and cleaved a way through the crowds.
‘Sorry about that, old girl,’ said Nigel, ‘decent of van der Wagema to come looking for me.’ He took her arm. ‘There’s quite a good pub down the street, let’s get a sandwich.’