by Betty Neels
‘Stop!’ commanded Laura, and without waiting to see if her companion would do so, undid her seat belt and put an urgent hand on the door. Doctor van Meerum drew up smoothly, put out a restraining hand to stop her and said calmly, ‘Stay where you are—I’ll go and look.’
‘Don’t you dare leave him there!’ she urged him fiercely. ‘They drove on, the brutes—and look at all those miserable people, staring…’
He didn’t answer her, but got out of the car and crossed the street to where the dog lay, squatting on his heels to examine it and then picking it up carefully and carrying it back to the car, quite unheeding of the warning voices telling him that he would get bitten for his pains. The unhappy creature he held didn’t look capable of biting anything or anyone; Laura whisked the scarf from her neck and spread it on her knees, and opened the door to receive the stricken creature on to her lap.
‘Hind legs broken,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you suppose there’s a chance of patching him up in Casualty?’
Laura gave him a grateful look. ‘Yes—the Sister in charge is a great friend of mine, she could hide us away somewhere…could we hurry?’ She put a gentle hand on the whimpering little creature. ‘He must be in frightful pain. If only I’d seen who ran him down.’ Her voice was wobbly with her rage and the doctor gave her a long look, although he said nothing as he got back into the car and drove with what speed he could to the hospital, where he drove round to Casualty entrance, told Laura to sit still and went inside, to return almost immediately with Sylvia Matthews. She greeted Laura with a cheerful: ‘Hi there, ducky, what’s all this about a casualty?’ She cast an eye over the bedraggled little beast and grinned at the doctor beside her. ‘A hushed-up job, I gather? Do you want to do it, sir, or shall I get the CO?’
‘Oh, I’ll do it, I think, Sister, then if there’s any trouble I can deal with it. But we shall need someone to give the dope. Are you busy?’
‘Not at the moment. There’s an end cubicle you can have; whoever does the round hardly ever goes there, and if they do…’
‘I’ll take the blame,’ said the doctor easily, and opened the car door. ‘Laura, it would be less painful for that little beast if you could manage to get out and hold him at the same time.’
She nodded and slid carefully out of the car and into Casualty, where, obedient to the doctor’s advice, she sat down carefully again in the poky little cubicle at the end of the passage while one of the anaesthetists was fetched. He stared rather when he saw the patient and began an indignant: ‘I say, Laura old girl, I can’t…’ before he caught sight of Doctor van Meerum and stopped. ‘Sorry, sir—you’re the old man’s—I should say, Mr Burnett’s Dutch colleague, aren’t you? We were told that you would be here.’
‘Splendid,’ murmured the doctor, and stripped off his jacket. ‘If I could have an apron, and if you could knock this little chap out for long enough for us to set him to rights, I should be greatly obliged.’ He smiled with great charm. ‘I don’t know your name…’
‘Clark, sir, Jeremy Clark. I’m with Mr Burnett for six months. I’ll get the dope.’
To save the dog more pain, he rather gingerly put him under with Laura still holding him on her lap, but the moment the small creature had been transferred to the table she stood up, rolled up her sleeves and professed herself ready to help. ‘I’m not on duty until eleven o’clock,’ she explained, ‘and if anyone comes, you can head them off, Sylvia.’
Her friend nodded. ‘And there’ll be coffee when you’re through—in my office.’ She whisked away with a wave of the hand and a conspirator’s wink.
The dog’s legs were miraculously clean breaks. Doctor van Meerum set them, put them into plaster and set about checking for other injuries. When finally he straightened his massive frame, he remarked: ‘Nothing else, bar some bad bruising. What are we going to do with him?’
Jeremy spoke first. ‘What about a dogs’ home?’
‘Certainly not!’ exploded Laura. ‘And he must surely belong to someone—ought we to advertise or tell the police, and I’ll keep him in my room until…’
The doctor interrupted her. ‘I doubt if he belongs to anyone,’ he observed, ‘he’s half starved and he hasn’t a collar. I think, if you would agree, Laura, that he should come with me.’
The relief flooded over her face like a burst of sunshine. ‘Oh, could he? But where will you keep him?’ She frowned uncertainly. ‘You can’t have him with you, he’d be dreadfully in the way.’
‘I’m staying with someone who I have no doubt will be glad to keep an eye on him if I have to leave him, and he should be well enough to travel to Birmingham with me.’
‘Yes, but what will happen to him when you return to Holland?’
The doctor was washing his hands at the sink. ‘I’ll take him with me. I have an elderly sheepdog who will be delighted to have company.’
Laura heaved a sigh. ‘Oh, won’t that be nice for him,’ she declared. ‘But would you like me to have him now? He won’t come round for a little while, will he?’
‘Quite soon, I should think. Would it not be better if someone were to find me a box or basket, and I’ll keep him with me.’
‘Aren’t you addressing a post-graduate class, sir?’ asked Jeremy doubtfully.
‘Certainly I am, but I hardly think that this animal will disturb us.’ He had put on his jacket and was standing placidly, waiting for someone to do as he had suggested. It was Laura who found a suitable box, lined it with old papers and a layer of tow and watched while the dog was laid gently into it. They had coffee then, although she didn’t stay more than a few minutes, excusing herself on the grounds of getting into uniform after thanking the doctor for her lift and Sylvia for the coffee. She made no mention of seeing him again as she wished him goodbye and nor did he suggest it, but as she stooped to stroke the animal’s matted head she said earnestly, ‘Thank you for stopping and making him well again.’
He eyed her gravely. ‘If I remember rightly, you ordered me to stop in no uncertain terms, although I can promise you that I would have done so even if you hadn’t said a word.’
She smiled at him; she had a sweet smile, which just for a moment made her fleetingly pretty, although she was unaware of that. ‘I shall hear how he goes on from Joyce,’ she told him guilelessly.
Someone had brought her case in from the car and she picked it up as she went through Casualty, already filling up with minor cuts and burns, occasional fractures and dislocations; all the day-to-day cases. She glanced round her as she went; she wasn’t likely to get anything sent up to the ward as far as she could see, although probably the Accident Room would keep her busy. She hoped so, for there was nothing like work for blotting out one’s own thoughts and worries, and her head was full of both.
She climbed the stairs to her room in the Nurses’ Home feeling alone and sad and sorry for herself, and cross too that she had allowed herself to give way to self-pity. As she unlocked the door and went into the pleasant little room she had made home for some years now, she bade herself stop behaving like a fool; she wasn’t likely to see the doctor again and she would start, as from that very moment, to forget him.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE saw him exactly two hours later, for he accompanied Mr Burnett on his bi-weekly round, towering head and shoulders over everyone else. He wished her good morning with cool affability, remarked that they seemed to be seeing a good deal of each other that morning and added, ‘The little dog is doing very nicely.’
‘Oh, good.’ Laura spoke warmly and then became a well-trained Sister again, leading the way to the first bed, very neat in her blue uniform with the quaint muslin cap perched on top of her neat head.
She handed Mr Burnett the first set of notes and advised him in her clear, pleasant voice: ‘Mr Arthur True, facial injuries, concussion and severe lacerations of the upper right arm—admitted at eleven o’clock last night.’
Mr Burnett rumbled and mumbled to himself as he always did, cleared his throa
t and said, ‘Ah, yes,’ and turned to his registrar. ‘You saw him, George? Anything out of the way?’
George White was earnest, painstaking and thoroughly reliable, both as a person and as a surgeon, and he was quite unexciting too. He gave his report with maddening slowness despite Mr Burnett’s obvious desire for him to get on with it, so that Laura, aware of her chief’s irritation, wasted no time in getting the patient ready for examination; no easy matter, for he was still semi-conscious and belligerent with it. But she coped with him quietly with a student nurse to help, and presently, when Mr Burnett had had a good look and muttered to Doctor van Meerum, his registrar and Laura, they moved on.
‘Mr Alfred Trim,’ Laura enlightened her audience, ‘double inguinal hernia, stitches out yesterday.’ She lifted the bedclothes and Mr Burnett stood studying his handiwork, apparently lost in admiration of it until he said finally: ‘Well, we’ll think about getting him home, Sister, shall we?’ and swept on his way.
The next bed’s occupant looked ill. ‘Penetrating wound of chest,’ stated Laura. ‘I took the drain out an hour ago…’ She added a few concise and rather bloodthirsty details and Mr Burnett frowned and said, ‘Is that so?—we’ll have a look.’ He invited Doctor van Meerum to have a look too and they poked and prodded gently and murmured together with George agreeing earnestly with everything they said until Mr Burnett announced, ‘We’ll have him in theatre, Sister—five o’clock this afternoon.’
His gaze swept those around him, gathering agreement.
Five o’clock was a wretched time to send a case to theatre; Laura exchanged a speaking glance with her right hand. She was due off duty at that hour herself, and now it would be a good deal later than that, for Pat wouldn’t be back from her afternoon until then and there would be a lengthy report to give. She checked a sigh and looking up, found Doctor van Meerum’s dark eyes on her. He looked so severe that she felt guilty although she had no reason to be, and this made her frown quite fiercely, and when he smiled faintly, just as though he had know exactly what she had been thinking, she frowned even harder.
A tiresome man, she told herself strongly, walking into her life and turning it topsy-turvy, and whoever had made that silly remark about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all needed his head examined. She had been jogging along, not quite content, it was true, but at least resigned, and now she felt as though she had been hit by a hurricane which was blowing her somewhere she didn’t want to go…
She swept past the next bed, empty for the moment, and raised an eyebrow at the hovering nurse to draw the curtains around the next one in line. Old Mr Tyler, who had had a laparotomy two days previously—Mr Burnett had found what he had expected and worse besides, and Mr Tyler wasn’t going to do. Laura looked at the tired old face with compassion and hoped, as she always did in like cases, that he would die in his sleep, and waited quietly while the surgeon chatted quietly with a convincing but quite false optimism. He drew Doctor van Meerum into the conversation too, and she listened to the big man saying just the right thing in his faultless English and liked him for it. She supposed she would have loved him whatever he was or did, but liking him was an extra bonus.
The next three patients were quickly dealt with; young men with appendices which had needed prompt removal and who, the moment they were fully conscious, set up a game of poker. Laura had obliged them with playing cards, extracted a promise from them not to gamble with anything more valuable than matches and propped them up in their chairs the moment they were pronounced fit to leave their beds. And here they sat for the greater part of their day, a little wan, but nicely diverted from worrying about their insides.
They greeted Mr Burnett in a cheerful chorus, assured him that they had never felt better, that Sister was an angel, and that they couldn’t wait for the pleasure of having her remove their stitches. All of which remarks Laura took with motherly good nature, merely begging them to refrain from tiring themselves out before steering her party forward to the neighbouring bed. Its occupant, Mr Blake, was thin and middle-aged, and although his operation had been a minor one, a continuous string of complaints passed his lips all day and far into the night.
Mr Burnett, his entourage ranged behind him, stood by the bed and listened with an impassive face to details of uneatable porridge for breakfast, the callous behaviour of the house doctors and nurses, and Sister’s cruelty in insisting that he should actually get up and walk to the bathroom. He shot her a look of great dislike as he spoke and Mr Burnett said quite sharply that since he was making such excellent progress he would do better to convalesce at home, where he would doubtless find nothing to grumble about. ‘Though I doubt if you will find a better nurse or kinder person than Sister Standish,’ he concluded severely.
He stalked away, muttering to himself, and Laura hastened to soothe him by pointing out the excellent progress the next patient was making.
‘I don’t know how you put up with it, Laura,’ said Mr Burnett, half an hour later, when they were all squashed into her office drinking their coffee. ‘For heaven’s sake get married, girl, before you lose your wits. That Blake—I’ll have him home tomorrow; he’s fit enough, and besides taking up a bed he must be driving you all mad.’
‘Well, that would be nice,’ conceded Laura mildly, ‘for he does wear one down, you know. But they’re not all like that, you know, sir.’
He passed his cup for more coffee and snorted: ‘If I wasn’t a married man and old enough to be your father, I’d marry you myself just to get you out of this ward,’ he assured her, and they all laughed, because Laura was considered to be one of the Sisters in the hospital whom no one could ever imagine leaving. Young but settled, the principal nursing officer had once described her, and Laura, who had heard of it through the hospital grapevine, had considered that it amounted to an insult.
They all got up to go presently, and Doctor van Meerum, who had said very little anyway, merely murmured vague thanks in her general direction as he went through the door. She went and sat at her desk again when they had gone, doing absolutely nothing until Pat came to remind her that she had expressed a wish to inspect the previous day’s operation cases.
She managed to forget the Dutch doctor more or less during the next few days; she had plenty of friends, she was popular in a quiet way and there was no reason for her to be lonely. And yet she was, and the loneliness was made worse when Joyce telephoned at the weekend and told her gleefully that Reilof van Meerum was spending it with them. ‘We’re going out to dinner,’ she bubbled over the wire. ‘I shall wear that blue dress—and on Sunday we’re going out for the day in that super car of his. Laura, do you think he’s rich?’
‘I really don’t know. Did he say anything about a dog?’
‘Yes—rather a bind, really; he has to bring the creature with him, he says, because it’s broken its legs. Still, I daresay we can dump it on someone.’
Laura didn’t answer. Somehow the doctor hadn’t struck her as being a man to opt out of something he had undertaken to do, and he had promised her… She said mistakenly, ‘It’s only a very little dog.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Joyce after a tiny pause, and Laura, sighing for her unguarded tongue, told her, ‘It was knocked down by a car just as we reached the hospital—we took it into Cas…’
‘Have you seen Reilof?’
‘He did a round earlier in the week with Mr Burnett. I didn’t talk to him at all—or rather, he didn’t talk to me.’
She knew exactly what her young sister was thinking; that no man, no young, attractive man at any rate, would bother very much about a young woman who was looking thirty in the face. Thirty, to Joyce, was the absolute end.
Laura went home again at the end of the following week without having seen the doctor again, although she had found a note on her desk one morning to tell her that he had gone back to Holland, and that he had the little dog, now in excellent health albeit hating his plasters, with him. He was hers, RvM. She
put the note away carefully and told herself once again to forget him.
Easier said than done, as it turned out, for when she did get home he was Joyce’s main topic of conversation; they had had a super weekend and he was coming again just as soon as he could manage it. ‘I’ve got him hooked,’ declared Joyce happily. ‘He’s a bit old, but he’s very distinguished, isn’t he? and Uncle Wim says he’s carved himself an excellent career—he’s got a big practice somewhere near Hilversum. I imagine that the people who live round there are mostly well-off.’ She added dreamily, ‘I expect he’s rich.’ She smiled beguilingly at Laura. ‘Look, be a darling—I don’t dare to ask Uncle Wim any more questions, but you could, he dotes on you, and I do want to know.’
Laura shook her head; her godfather might dote on her, but he was the last person in the world to gossip about anyone. ‘Why do you want to know so badly?’ she asked.
Joyce grinned wickedly. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a doctor’s wife, as long as he was very successful and had masses of money and I wouldn’t have to do the housework or answer the door, like Doctor Wall’s wife does in the village.’
Laura kept her voice matter-of-fact; Joyce fell in and out of love every few weeks, maybe her feeling for Doctor van Meerum was genuine, but on the other hand someone else might come along. ‘Chance is a fine thing,’ she remarked lightly, and wished with all her heart that she might have that chance.
‘Like to bet on it?’ Joyce looked like a charming kitten who’d got at the cream. ‘I’ve bowled him over, you know; he’s thirty-eight and he had a wife years ago, only she died, and now he’s met me and discovered what he’s been missing.’