There was a long table running down the middle of the room and although there were no flowers, there were lighted candles, rather dimmed by the midnight sun but nevertheless festive. She was sat at the centre of the table, with the boss on one side and the senior engineer on the other. The doctor, she was vaguely annoyed to find, was sitting as far away as possible.
The meal was, perforce, out of tins and whoever had opened them had been lavish with the can-opener—there was more than enough for everyone and a good deal over, and Annis found it a little pathetic the way they asked her every few minutes if the food was good. She praised it lavishly, hoping her inside wouldn’t rebel against the strange mixture which it was sampling. Everyone must have had a hand in preparing the meal; she worked her way through soup, cod, covered with a rich sauce which seemed to contain everything in the cookery book, a variety of vegetables, and rounded off with a steamed pudding. Over coffee they explained that they were due to fetch their stores very shortly, when she would find a much larger selection of groceries. They looked at her hopefully as they said it and she hoped that Freddy hadn’t made her out to be up to Cordon Bleu standard.
They had had drinks first and wine with their meal, although she suspected that the men would have preferred beer. She was touched with their welcome, though, and resolved privately to feed them well as well as nurse them, although it seemed unlikely that there would be much of that; a tougher bunch of men she had yet to meet.
‘Where did your cook come from?’ she asked the boss.
‘Oslo—Sven’s sister…’he nodded across the table towards a fair young man who didn’t look more than twenty. ‘She was a nurse too, and a typist. Do you type, Annis?’
She was glad that she could tell him that yes, she could type. ‘Not very well,’ she explained, ‘but I’m a bit rusty at it.’ Her pretty mouth curved in a smile. ‘Is there an awful lot to do?’
‘No, no—just once or twice a month, reports and so on, very simple.’
‘You’re not English?’ she asked him. ‘Although you speak it perfectly.’
‘Finnish—we are a very mixed bunch, mostly Norwegians though, with a couple of Swedes and of course Jake, who is Dutch.’
‘Yes, someone told me. What a blessing everyone speaks English, because I can’t understand a word of Norwegian or Finnish or Dutch—I don’t think I’d know them if I heard them.’
He laughed comfortably. ‘We shall all teach you a few words and you will get quite expert.’
The dinner party broke up presently, and Annis said goodnight to everyone, thanked them prettily for her welcome and dinner and made for her hut, secretly appalled at the doctor’s cool: ‘Don’t forget you are on duty tomorrow morning at seven o’clock, Annis. The shifts change over at eight so that the men going on duty breakfast at seven-thirty and the men coming off at eight o’clock.’
She thanked him coldly for the information. He was just the irritating kind of man to remind one of one’s duty…
The kitchen, she discovered the next morning, was remarkably up-to-date. Being a new broom she intended to sweep clean, so she was ten minutes early, making coffee, setting the table with what she hoped the men ate for breakfast. There was a huge side of bacon hanging in the larder too, but she was relieved to see that a large quantity had already been sliced. She found a frying pan as large as a football field and started frying, helped half way through by Freddy who was to go on the day shift but hadn’t hurried from his bed.
‘Six rashers each,’ he told her. ‘Just put the bread on the table—there’s orange juice too.’
On the whole, Annis felt that she had acquitted herself rather well. The ten men who presently sat down to their breakfast did justice to it, complimented her on her cooking and hurried away to their various stations, all except the doctor, who had another cup of coffee, asked her rather carelessly if she had slept well, handed her a timetable of the day’s work so that she knew where she was and then requested her presence in the surgery at nine o’clock. ‘One of the engineers slipped early this morning and cut his leg on the rock—nothing serious, but we shall need to tidy it up a bit.’
Having said which, he took himself off, leaving her to clear the debris and get the next lot of bacon into the pan; presumably she ate with the men coming off duty. It was an agreeable surprise when two men came into the kitchen and told her that they were doing the washing up. ‘We take it in turns,’ they explained. ‘There’ll be two more for the next batch.’
They grinned at her cheerfully and eyed her with interest, while she, happily unaware of their glances, bent over the stove, unaware of the pretty picture she made. She had sensibly packed slacks and a variety of tops, and she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt over blue slacks now, enveloping the whole in a large apron she had found behind the door, a legacy from the previous cook and nurse. She hadn’t bothered much with her hair, either, only brushed it out and tied it back in a ponytail. She looked considerably less than her twenty-seven years and pretty enough to eat.
The men coming off duty were tired, but they ate just as heartily as the first lot had. Annis dealt with gigantic appetites, ate her own meal and leaving two more volunteers to wash up, made her way to the surgery, a hut standing a little apart from the rest, a roomy place with a well-equipped surgery, a two-bedded ward, a portable operating table and a cupboard well stocked with instruments. The doctor was already there, bending over a man on the table. Without turning round he said: ‘Ah, there you are—there’s a white gown in that closet beside the door.’ And as she put it on: ‘Bring me that covered kidney dish, will you?’
Unfriendly to the point of being terse, she considered, and while she stood beside him, handing things, swabbing the leg, cutting gut, she had time to take a good look at him. Her first impression had been right; he was enormous and rather more heavily built than she had thought and his high-bridged nose and heavy-lidded eyes made him look ill-tempered, although that didn’t seem likely, for he seemed universally popular. She wasn’t sure if she was going to like him; he hadn’t done so yet, but probably he was going to throw his weight about. He looked, she considered, more like a ruthless high-powered executive than a doctor. But within half an hour she found herself eating her words. The doctor, while not attempting to charm her in any way, was placidly good-natured, not saying much but responding to his patient’s remarks with goodhumoured patience. The injury wasn’t too severe; a day or two resting it and he could return to his work in the hut at the far end of the tongue of rock. Annis was to dress it daily after the doctor had seen it. The doctor glanced at her as he spoke and smiled and she found herself smiling back at him.
She discovered within two days that the doctor was the silent one of the team. He never joined in any of the arguments or made any but the mildest of comments on any subject, yet she noticed that the men turned to him when a deciding opinion was needed, and when the argument became too fierce it was he who damped it down with a few quiet words. She wondered what he did with his day until Freddy told her that he was carrying out a series of experiments, monitoring hearts and lungs after each man came off duty as well as taking samples of everything vegetable which was living; and that wasn’t much. Annis had been there for several days before she found her first flower, a minute buttercup-like plant clinging to the rock in the warm sunshine. She took care not to disturb it; it took decades for seeds to germinate in the unfriendly climate which existed for nine months of the year; each small flower was a precious thing. She was so delighted with her find that she told the doctor while she was clearing up the surgery after he had treated a boil on a Norwegian’s neck, and he had told her that there were many more if she looked carefully. She waited for him to suggest that they might go together in their leisure to look for them, but in this she was disappointed. He remained silent, and she, not a
