Бетти Нильс – A Matter of Chance (страница 2)

It had been a wrench to leave the village in Dorset where she had spent her childhood and all her holidays since she had taken up nursing; she had gathered together a few of her parents’ most loved bits and pieces, packed her clothes, and gone to stay with her mother’s elder sister, a small, bustling woman who lived alone in a minuscule thatched cottage on the edge of a village in the same county. It was while she was there that she decided to give up her job at the big London hospital where she was Sister of a medical ward, and until she could make up her mind about her future, take private cases. And Aunt Emily had agreed; change, she had observed wisely, was absolutely essential when one had been dealt such a severe blow—and time, time to think about the future and come to terms with it. She thought privately that Cressida would certainly marry later on, once the icy grief which held her fast had thawed a little and she could laugh again and enjoy meeting people. But that was something she couldn’t tell her niece; all she could do was to tell her to regard the overcrowded little cottage as her home and know that she was welcome there.

A couple of weeks’ peace and quiet had helped Cressida a great deal. Armed with excellent references and a resolve to make a new life for herself, she went up to London and presented herself at an agency highly recommended by her hospital. The temptation to take the first job offered to her was great, but she still had a little money, enough to stay in a rather seedy hotel for a week, until a case turned up which would appeal to her, so she rejected the first few offered to her; a child film star with tonsillitis, a young drug addict, a wealthy widow who really wanted a slave, not a nurse. After the third day she wondered if she was being unduly fussy; some of the girls she met there came in, accepted a case, and were away again in five minutes. But there was another girl who was choosy too—Molly, a small, fair creature with a sweet, rather weak face, who confided to Cressida that she was waiting for a job as far away as possible because she had quarrelled with her fiancé and never wanted to see him again. It was towards the end of the week when she told Cressida that she had got a job, and not through the agency. ‘My uncle got it for me; at least, this doctor asked him to find a nurse who could type, and I can. You see, he’s writing a book and he needs an English girl—a nurse who’ll understand the medical terms—so that she can help him with the English and type it too—and he lives in Holland, so I can get away from Jim.’

She skipped away in great good spirits, leaving Cressida to make the difficult choice between a case of delirium tremens and an elderly lady who wanted someone to see her through the brief trials of having all her teeth out. Cressida decided against them both, was treated to a brief homily by the agency clerk on being too fussy, and left in her turn, to walk in St James’s Park and wish that the months could roll back and she could be on her way home for her holidays. She walked on steadily; she wasn’t going to cry, she told herself firmly, not in the middle of a public park, at any rate. She had sat down on a bench and made a great business of feeding the birds with the sandwiches she had brought with her for lunch and didn’t want.

She hadn’t seen Molly on the following morning and hadn’t expected to; probably she was on her way to Holland already. Waiting her turn, she promised herself that she would take the first case she was offered, but when she got into the office the clerk said briskly: ‘Sorry, there’s nothing today—if you’d been here half an hour earlier I could have fixed you up… Better luck tomorrow.’

She smiled her bright, meaningless smile and Cressida smiled back, not sure if she was relieved or not. She was standing in the agency entrance, trying to make up her mind what to do with her empty day, when Molly came dashing towards her.

‘I hoped I’d find you,’ she cried breathlessly. ‘I’ve a whole lot to tell you and it’ll take a minute or two. There’s a café down the street, come and have some coffee.’

‘You’ve made it up with your Jim,’ declared Cressida.

Molly caught her by the arm. ‘Yes, I have, isn’t it super? But that isn’t all.’

She had dragged Cressida down the street towards the café. ‘That job—the one I said I’d take in Holland—well, I can’t go now, can I? I mean, Jim wants us to get married straight away—so I thought of you…’ She had paused maddeningly as they entered the café, found a table and ordered coffee. ‘You can type, you told me so—and the job is about the alimentary system and its disorders, and you’ve had a medical ward…don’t you see? It’s just made for you.’

‘But I can’t,’ said Cressida. ‘I don’t know this doctor and he doesn’t know me.’

Molly opened her handbag and dragged out a small pile of letters. ‘Here are all the letters so’s you can see that it really is a job—and my uncle says if you could go and see him—he lives in Hampstead, he’s got a practice there—this afternoon after surgery…’ She had sugared her coffee and continued: ‘Oh, you must! You wanted something interesting and different, didn’t you? Uncle says it would take about six or seven weeks, and the pay’s good. At least go and see my uncle.’

And Cressida had said yes quickly before she could change her mind.

Molly’s uncle had been nice; elderly and a little slow, and although he had asked her a great many questions, he had been so nice about it that she hadn’t minded answering them. ‘It seems to me,’ he told her finally, ‘that this job is just what you need. I appreciate your need to get away, Miss Bingley, and Doctor van Blom is most anxious to find someone who can type adequately as well as give him occasional help with the turn of a phrase and so on.’ He smiled kindly. ‘May I take it that you will help him out?’

Cressida had said that yes, she would like to very much, but she would have to get her passport renewed and pack a few things. He had nodded and said, ‘Quite—could you be ready in four or five days’ time?’

They had made their arrangements there and then, but it was Cressida who had decided to leave two days earlier and spend them in Amsterdam. One of her friends at the hospital gave her the name of the hotel and she had had no difficulty in getting a room.

She had spent her two days exploring the city, spending hours in the museums, walking endlessly beside the canals, looking at the old houses which lined their banks, eating frugally at lunch bars, and window-shopping. And now, in the morning, she would catch a train to Leeuwarden where she would be met.

She glanced at the clock and began to coil her hair rapidly; the dining room was only open for a short time each evening; the hotel guests were expected to dine out, the snacks were for those who had just arrived, or who, for some reason or other, were going to spend their evening in their rooms.

There was a very small room by the entrance where one could get a drink or coffee, but Cressida had never seen anyone in it. She did her face and washed her hands and went down the staircase once more, to the basement, where she sat down at a table for one, drank the coffee she ordered and ate two ham rolls. They were excellent, but she had very little appetite. Indeed, she had grown thin during the last few weeks; meals, like so many other things, had become just something to get through as best she might. She supposed that in time everything would be normal again, as the incoming rector had assured her when he had called to make himself known to her and arrange to move into the rectory. Time he had said, healed everything, and she hadn’t disputed that fact; only time, when it lay heavy, took a long time to pass.

She went back to her room presently and packed her case, had a shower in the cramped cabinet down the passage, and got into bed. She wasn’t sleepy, but bed gave an illusion of cosiness. She had a sudden, vivid memory of the sitting room in her old home, with a log fire blazing in the hearth and the shabby armchairs pulled close to it, and for a moment she couldn’t see the map she was studying for the tears in her eyes, but she brushed them away resolutely and applied herself once more to its perusal. Molly’s uncle had told her that Doctor van Blom lived in a village between Groningen and Leeuwarden, he had told her the name too, but the two cities were thirty miles apart and from the numerous villages between, not one of their peculiar-looking names rang a bell of recognition. She would have to wait and see.

The tram Cressida took to the station in the morning was packed with early morning workers, but the train, when she eventually found the right platform and caught it by the skin of her teeth, was almost empty. She sat in her corner seat, watching the small flat fields give way to the woods and heaths of the Veluwe and then fields again, but now they had become wide and rolling and the towns less frequent. She had chosen to go via Groningen, and that city, when the train reached it, looked invitingly picturesque as well as large and bustling. As the train pulled away from the station she craned her neck to see the last of its spires and towers and then turned to look at the countryside with some eagerness. Somewhere close by was the village where she was to spend the next few weeks. She stared at the strange names on the station boards as they passed, but both Dutch and Friesian names were quite incomprehensible to her. However, she had been told not to worry about the language; Doctor van Blom spoke excellent English and the people she would meet would have a sufficient knowledge of it to make her lack of Dutch no problem at all.