consulting-rooms took up the whole of the first floor. Besides Mr Fitzgibbon’s room and the waiting-room, there was a very small, well-equipped dressing-room, an examination-room leading from the consulting-room, a cloakroom and a tiny kitchen. ‘He likes his coffee around ten o’clock, but if he has a lot of patients he’ll not stop. We get ours when we can. I get here about eight o’clock—the first patient doesn’t get here before half-past nine, but everything has to be quite ready. Mr Fitzgibbon quite often goes to the hospital first and takes a look at new patients there; he goes back there around noon or one o’clock and we have our lunch and tidy up and so on, he comes back here about four o’clock unless he’s operating, and he sees patients until half-past five. You do Theatre, don’t you? He always has the same theatre sister at Colbert’s, but if he’s operating at another hospital, doesn’t matter where, he’ll take you with him to scrub.’
‘Another hospital in London?’
‘Could be; more often than not it’s Birmingham or Edinburgh or Bristol—I’ve been to Brussels several times, the Middle East, and a couple of times to Berlin.’
‘I can’t speak German…’
Sister Brice laughed. ‘You don’t need to—he does all the talking; you just carry on as though you were at Colbert’s. He did mention that occasionally you have to miss a weekend? It’s made up to you, though.’ She opened a cupboard with a key from her pocket. ‘I’ve been very happy here and I shall miss the work, but it’s a full-time job and there’s not much time over from it, certainly not if one is married.’ She was pulling out drawers. ‘There’s everything he needs for operating—he likes his own instruments and it’s your job to see that they’re all there and ready. They get put in this bag.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘There’s time to go over to my room; you can meet Mrs Twist and see if it’ll suit you. She gets your breakfast and cooks high tea about half-past six. There’s a washing-machine and a telephone you may use. She doesn’t encourage what she calls gentlemen friends…’
‘I haven’t got any…’
‘You’re pretty enough to have half a dozen, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Thank you. I think I must be hard to please.’
Mrs Twist lived in one of the narrow streets behind Wimpole Street, not five minutes’ walk away. The house was small, one of a row, but it was very clean and neat, rather like Mrs Twist—small, too, and bony with pepper and salt hair and a printed cotton pinny. She eyed Florence shrewdly with small blue eyes and led her upstairs to a room overlooking the street, nicely furnished. ‘Miss Brice ’as her breakfast downstairs, quarter to eight sharp,’ she observed, ‘the bathroom’s across the landing, there’s a machine for yer smalls and yer can ’ang them out in the back garden. I’ll cook a meal at half-past six of an evening, something ’ot; if I’m out it’ll be in the oven. Me and Miss Brice ’as never ’ad a cross word and I ’opes we’ll get on as nicely.’
‘Well, I hope so too, Mrs Twist. This is a very nice room and I’m sure I shall appreciate a meal each evening. You must let me know if there’s anything—’
‘Be sure I will, Miss Napier; I’m one for speaking out, but Mr Fitzgibbon told me you was a sensible, quiet-spoken young lady, and what ’e says I’ll believe.’
Sister Brice was waiting downstairs in the prim front room. ‘There’s time to go back for half an hour,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m ready for the first patient; Mr Fitzgibbon won’t be back until just before three o’clock, and Mrs Keane will already have got the notes out.’
They bade Mrs Twist goodbye and walked back to Wimpole Street, where Mrs Keane was putting on the kettle. Over cups of tea she and Sister Brice covered the bare bones of Mr Fitzgibbon’s information with a wealth of their own, so that by the time Florence left she had a sound idea of what she might expect. Nothing like having a ward in the hospital, she reflected on her way to the station. She would have to make her own routine and keep to it as much as possible, allowing for Mr Fitzgibbon’s demands upon her time. All the same, she thought that she would like it; she was answerable to no one but herself and him, of course—her bedsitter was a good deal better than she had expected it to be, and there was the added bonus of going home each weekend. She spent the return journey doing sums on the back of an envelope, and alighted at Sherborne knowing that the saucepans and washing-machine need no longer be pipe-dreams. At the end of the month they would be installed in the vicarage kitchen. What was more, she would be able to refurbish her spring wardrobe.
‘Mr Fitzgibbon seems to be an employer of the highest order,’ observed her father when she recounted the day’s doings to him.
She agreed, but what sort of a man was he? she wondered; she still wasn’t sure if she liked him or not.
She spent the next two weeks in a burst of activity; the spring-cleaning had to be finished, a lengthy job in the rambling vicarage, and someone had to be found who would come each day for an hour or so. Mrs Buckett was a splendid worker but, although Mrs Napier was very nearly herself once more, there were tiresome tasks—the ironing, the shopping and the cooking—to be dealt with. Miss Payne, in the village, who had recently lost her very old mother, was only too glad to fill the post for a modest sum.
Florence packed the clothes she decided she would need, added one or two of her more precious books and a batch of family photos to grace the little mantelpiece in her bedsitter, and, after a good deal of thought, a long skirt and top suitable for an evening out. It was unlikely that she would need them, but one never knew. When she had been at the hospital she had never lacked invitations from various members of the medical staff—usually a cinema and coffee and sandwiches on the way home, occasionally a dinner in some popular restaurant—but she had been at home now for nearly a year and she had lost touch. She hadn’t minded; she was country born and bred and she hadn’t lost her heart to anyone. Occasionally she remembered that she was twenty-five and there was no sign of the man Mrs Buckett coyly described as Mr Right. Florence had the strong suspicion that Mrs Buckett’s Mr Right and her own idea of him were two quite different people.
She left home on the Sunday evening and, when it came to the actual moment of departure, with reluctance. The boys had gone back to school and she wouldn’t see them again until half-term, but there was the Sunday school class she had always taken for her father, choir practice, the various small duties her mother had had to give up while she had been ill, and there was Charlie Brown, the family cat, and Higgins, the elderly Labrador dog; she had become fond of them during her stay at home.
‘I’ll be home next weekend,’ she told her mother bracingly, ‘and I’ll phone you this evening.’ All the same, the sight of her father’s elderly greying figure waving from the platform as the train left made her feel childishly forlorn.
Mrs Twist’s home dispelled some of her feelings of strangeness. There was a tray of tea waiting for her in her room and the offer of help if she should need it. ‘And there is a bite of supper at eight o’clock, it being Sunday,’ said Mrs Twist, ‘and just this once you can use the phone downstairs. There’s a phone box just across the road that Miss Brice used.’
Florence unpacked, arranged the photos and her bits and pieces, phoned her mother to assure her in a cheerful voice that she had settled in nicely and everything was fine, and then went down to her supper.
‘Miss Brice was away for most weekends,’ said the landlady, ‘but sometimes she ’ad ter work, so we had a bite together.’
So Florence ate her supper in the kitchen with Mrs Twist
