She went down the back stairs and out of the kitchen door and through the little wicket gate at the bottom of the vegetable garden and so into the woods beyond. It was quiet there, the house stood equidistant between Great Sampford and Little Sampford, a mile or so away from the country road which connected these two villages, so that there was nothing but the quiet Essex countryside around her. She wandered on, and presently came out on to the crossroads, where four lanes met and parted again to go to Finchingfield, Steeple Bumpstead, Cornish Hall End and, behind her, back to the Sampfords. She chose the way to Cornish Hall End, because it went through the neck of the woods once more and at its end she could take the path back through the trees.
It was September and warm for the time of year. Arabella pulled off the cardigan she had snatched up as she had left the house and walked on, wishing she was wearing something thinner than the cotton shirt and rather shabby tweed skirt she had on. There had seemed no point in wearing anything else when she had got up that morning; she had known in advance that she would be asked to pick fruit some time during the day, and later, when she would have changed, she had had the twins wished on her. Thinking about them reminded her of Hilary’s request, and her pleasant little face became thoughtful—it was a pity that her cousin had got entangled with Mr Thisby-Barnes, but Arabella knew from experience that it wouldn’t help in the least if she were to argue with Hilary about him. Hilary had always done exactly what she wanted to do, in the most charming way possible, and would brook no interference.
Arabella dismissed the vexing matter from her mind, sensibly realizing that there was nothing to be done about it except hope that Hilary would tire of Mr Thisby-Barnes as quickly as she had tired of so many other of her admirers. Having disposed of one worry, however, Arabella found her mind turning to another—the bus trip with the children. She would have to find out more about it, and about a passport and what she was supposed to take in the way of clothes. It would be necessary to go and see Sister Brewster, who would probably hate her going just as much as she herself was beginning to.
She turned off the road and started back home, thinking vaguely now of all the things she would like to do and wondering if she would ever get the chance of doing half of them. She would like to marry, of course—some paragon whose hazy picture in her head was a splendid mixture of good looks and charm and endless adoration of her homely self, besides being possessed of sufficient money to give her all she should ever ask for. That she wasn’t the kind of girl to ask for anything seemed beside the point, as did the fact that the young men of her acquaintance tended to treat her like a younger sister and seldom showed any sign of even the mildest interest in her. It would help, she thought a trifle wistfully, if Hilary were to marry and go and live somewhere sufficiently far away to leave her a clear field; not that that would help much, although there had been Jim Besley, a casualty officer at Wickham’s who had shown signs of fancying her—he had driven her home for her days off, though, but Hilary had been home too, and although she had made no effort to charm him, he had had no eyes for Arabella after that. And there had been Tony Clark, a dull young man from the Path Lab—he had got as far as suggesting that he should take Arabella to the cinema one evening, only Hilary had come along just as he was getting down to details as to where they should meet, and somehow they didn’t go after all. He took Hilary out instead and spent so much money on her entertainment that Arabella’s kind heart was wrung by the sight of the economical meals of eggs and chips he was forced to live on in the canteen until pay day came round again.
She had walked rather further than she had intended; she got back to the house only just in time to get ready for dinner, and her aunt, meeting her in the hall as she went in, her mousy hair hanging untidily down to her waist, her cardigan slung anyhow round her shoulders, asked her with some asperity where she had been, and would have doubtless delivered a short, not unkind lecture on her appearance, if Hilary hadn’t come running downstairs, looking like a fairytale princess, to rescue her with a few careless, charming words. Arabella gave her a grateful glance. Hilary was a dear, it was mean to feel annoyed, however faintly at having been coerced into taking her cousin’s place on the children’s outing; it was, after all, a small return for the kindness she had received from her cousin since she had gone, as a small, unhappy girl, to live with Hilary’s parents.
She was still of the same mind the following morning as she drove the Triumph back to London with Hilary beside her, and although she was disappointed when her cousin declared herself too bored with the whole matter to give her any more information about the trip she was to take, she agreed readily enough to wait until Sister Brewster had been informed of the change. ‘She’ll send for you,’ laughed Hilary, ‘and fuss and fret about a hundred and one things, but you don’t need to take any notice, love—I can’t think what Lady Marchant was about, suggesting that old Brewster should be in charge.’
‘How many children?’ asked Arabella.
Hilary shrugged. ‘Do you know, I can’t remember—not many, though, most of them…’ she stopped abruptly and made some remark about the traffic, so that the sentence never got finished.
Wickham’s looked as grey and forbidding as it always did, even on a lovely autumn day, its brick walls and rows of windows looked uninviting, and now, today, under a pale sky with a threat of rain, and a wind blowing the first of the leaves from the row of plane trees across the London square, it looked more inhospitable than ever. But Arabella didn’t notice, and if she had, she wouldn’t have minded; she was happy at Wickham’s—in a year’s time, when she had finished her training, she would probably take a job in some other hospital, but that was a long while yet. She parked the car in the corrugated iron shed set apart for the nursing staff and walked with her cousin to the side entrance which would take them to the Nurses’ Home. She had barely half an hour before she was due on duty; she bade Hilary a swift goodbye and raced along the complexity of passages which would get her to the Home.
On the third floor, where she had her room, there was a good deal of laughing and talking. Second dinner was just over, the young ladies who had eaten it were making themselves a cup of tea. They crowded into her room, obligingly filling a mug of the comforting liquid for her, and carrying on a ceaseless chatter while she cast off her green jersey dress and tore into her blue and white striped uniform. Between heartening mouthfuls of scalding tea, she answered her companions’ questions as to her days off, exclaimed suitably over the latest hospital gossip, and agreed to go with a number of her friends to the cinema on her next free evening. It wasn’t until they were crowding through the door that she told them she was going to take her cousin’s place on the children’s bus trip.
The dozen or so nurses milling around her paused in their headlong flight back to their work on the wards. ‘Arabella, you can’t!’ exclaimed Anne Morgan, one of her particular friends. ‘Old Brewster’s in charge and there are to be twenty-two kids and they’re almost all more or less helpless—it’ll be terrible!’
‘Why can’t your cousin go?’ a voice wanted to know.
Arabella got out of answering that one by exclaiming, ‘Lord, look at the time!’ and belting down the stairs. Going on duty at two o’clock after days off was bad enough, it would be ten times worse if one were late and incurred the displeasure of the Ward Sister.
She slid into Women’s Medical with thirty seconds to spare, and when Sister came through the door a minute later, Arabella was making up an empty bed for all the world as though she had been at it for five minutes or more.
She had no time to herself after that, and when she went off duty that evening, her impending journey was quite overlooked in the scattered conversations carried on between baths and cups of tea and the trying on, by at least six of her closest friends, of a hat which had been delivered to Anne that evening. She was to be bridesmaid to her sister within a short time, and the hat was a romantic wide-brimmed affair, all ribbons and lace. It suited Anne very well—it suited them all, it was that kind of a hat, but when it was offered to Arabella she laughingly refused;
