impatience. In her room she got out of the tweed and combed through her wardrobe, intent on finding something suitable to wear. Not the velvet or the crêpe; she kept those for rare parties. There was a perfectly plain jersey dress buried behind her summer dresses. She had had it for years because it was such a useful colour, nutmeg brown. It had a high round neck and long sleeves and a wide, rather long skirt.
She was ready long before the hour was up so she went down to the sitting-room, relieved to find no one there, and read a yesterday’s newspaper someone had left there. She was doggedly working her way through a long political speech when the warden poked her head round the door.
‘Nurse Doveton, Professor van der Brink-Schaaksma will be ready in five minutes.’ She added severely, ‘I must say I am surprised.’ She eyed Trixie’s heightened colour and sniffed. ‘I didn’t know that you knew him.’
Trixie was pulling on her gloves and making last-minute inspections of her face and handbag. The warden was a sour lady of uncertain years, overflowing with unspoken criticisms of the younger nurses and disliked by them all. Happy in her own small heaven, Trixie wanted everyone else to be happy too.
‘I expect you are,’ she said blithely. ‘I’m a bit surprised myself.’
He was there waiting, and he came across the hall to meet her.
‘Is everything all right?’ she wanted to know. ‘Has she settled in?’
‘Yes, and I think that she will be a good patient.’ He opened the door and they went out to the car and got in.
‘Have you finished for the day?’
He drove out of the forecourt and edged into the evening traffic. ‘Yes. There is nothing much I can do till the morning. I shall have to see her doctor—she’s a private patient—and talk things over with my registrar.’
She had the feeling that just for the moment he had forgotten that she was there. She sat quietly as he drove across London until they reached the quieter streets, lined with tall old houses, leading to equally quiet squares, each with its enclosed garden in the centre.
‘You’re very quiet,’ said the professor suddenly.
‘I was thinking how different this is from Timothy’s…’
‘Indeed yes. My house in Holland is different again. In a small village near Leiden—very quiet. You like the country?’
‘Yes, very much.’
He had turned into a narrow street lined with Georgian houses and he stopped halfway down. He turned to look at her. ‘This is where I live, Beatrice.’ Then he got out and opened her door. She stood and looked around her for a moment; the houses were what she supposed an estate agent would describe as bijou and those she could see clearly in the lamplit street were immaculate as to paint and burnished brass-work on their front doors, and the house they approached was immaculate too with a fanlight over the black-painted door which was reached by three shallow steps guarded by a thin rail. There was a glow of light behind the bow window and bright light streaming from its basement.
The professor opened the door and stood aside for her to go in, still silent, and she went past him into the long narrow hall, its walls white and hung with paintings, red carpet underfoot and a small side-table against one wall. Halfway down its length a curved staircase led to the floor above and there were several doors on the opposite side. It was the door at the end of the hall which was opened, allowing a short stout elderly woman to enter.
The professor was taking Trixie’s coat. ‘Mies…’ He spoke to her in Dutch and then said, ‘Mies speaks English but she’s a little shy about it. She understands very well, though.’
Trixie held out a hand and said how do you do, and smiled at the wrinkled round face. Mies could have been any age; her hair was dark and glossy and her small bright eyes beamed above plump cheeks, but the hand she offered was misshapen with arthritis and her voice was that of an old woan. Her smile was warm and so was her greeting. ‘It is a pleasure, miss.’ She took Trixie’s coat from the professor, spoke to him in her own language and trotted off.
‘In here,’ said the professor, and swept Trixie through the nearest door and into a room at the front of the house. Not a large room, but furnished in great good taste with comfortable chairs and a wide sofa, small lamp tables and a display cabinet filled with silver and porcelain against one wall. There was a brisk fire burning in the polished steel fireplace and sitting before it was a large tabby cat accompanied by a dog of no particular parentage. The cat took no notice of them but the dog jumped up, delighted to see them.
Trixie bent to pat the woolly head. ‘He’s yours?’
‘Mies and I share him. I can’t take him to and fro from Holland—sometimes I am away from here for weeks on end, months even—so he lives here with her and I enjoy his company when I’m here. He’s called Caesar.’
‘Why?’ She sat down in the chair he had offered.
‘He came—from nowhere presumably, he saw us and decided to stay and conquered Mies’s kind heart within the first hour or so.’
He sat down opposite her and the cat got up and went to sit on the arm of his chair.
‘And the cat?’
‘Gumbie.’
Trixie laughed, ‘Oh, I know—from TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.’ She added in a surprised voice, ‘Have you read it?’
‘Oh, yes. I have a copy in my study. Gumbie belongs to Mies; the pair of them make splendid company when I am away.’
‘Mies doesn’t mind being alone here?’
‘There is a housemaid, Gladys. They get on very well together.’ He got up. ‘May I get you a drink? I think there’s time before dinner.’
They sat in a companionable silence for a few minutes then Trixie asked, ‘Do you have to go back to the hospital this evening?’
‘I shall drive you back later and make sure that all is well with my patient. I have an out-patients clinic in the morning, which probably means more admissions, and a ward-round in the afternoon.’
‘You don’t plan to go back to Holland just yet?’
‘Not for some time, but I hope to before Christmas. I’ve some examining to do in December and a seminar in January so I shall be over there for some time. I come over fairly frequently. It is a very short journey by plane and I need only stay for a few hours.’
Mies came to tell them that dinner was on the table then and during the meal the conversation, to Trixie’s disappointment, never once touched on themselves. Had the professor a father and mother living? she wondered, spooning artichoke soup and making polite remarks about the east coast and their day out and going on with the braised duck with wine sauce to a few innocuous remarks about the weather and the delights of autumn, and then with the lemon soufflé, fortified by two glasses of the white Burgundy she had drunk on top of the sherry, and with her tongue nicely loosened, she allowed it to run away with her.
‘I don’t know your name or how old you are or where you live exactly. I should have thought that by now you would have been married. You must have been in love…’
She
