Esmeralda

‘Go and tell ’em to come up here, there’s a good girl,’ Mr Peters begged Esmeralda, and she set off across the shining parquet.

For some reason everyone had paused just inside the doors, so that she had the whole ward to walk down, and as always when there was someone she didn’t know looking at her, she was conscious of her limp—more conscious than she need have been, too, she thought crossly; the man standing beside Sister Richards was staring at her as though she were exhibit A. She lifted her chin and stared back. He was something to stare at, she had to admit, tall and broad-shouldered and remarkably good-looking, with hair so fair that it was difficult to know if its fairness was silver. She looked away from his cool grey gaze as she reached them and addressed herself to Sister before attaching herself to the outer fringe of the party and going back up the ward once more. It was like Mr Peters to start in the middle of the round instead of at the first bed by the door like everyone else; Esmeralda received the little pile of folders from a harassed nurse and rearranged them quickly; it was too bad of Sister Richards to have had a moving day just before the consultant’s round, and now there was no time to sort out the notes or the X-rays. She sighed, and using the foot of a cot as a desk, set to work to remedy that.

She had taken care not to send more than a fleeting glance in Leslie Chapman’s direction, although she was well aware that he had been trying to catch her eye. How awful if their date for that evening had to be broken for some reason—their first, for though he had been unaccountably friendly towards her during the last week or two, it wasn’t until the previous day that he had asked her out. She stacked the notes tidily, frowning a little; when Leslie had first joined Mr Peters’ team, he had ignored her completely—worse, she had caught him eyeing her crippled foot once or twice with a kind of indifferent pity. And then one day he had stopped her in a corridor and asked some trivial question—she couldn’t even remember what it had been any more, and after that he had shown a decided preference for her company, and when, rather shyly, she had asked him why he bothered to waste his time on a girl with a crippled foot, he had dismissed it airily, just as though it hadn’t mattered at all, although he hadn’t asked how it came to be crippled in the first place, and she, who was so touchy with anyone else who dared to ask her that question, found herself wishing that he would. Perhaps he might even know of someone who could perform a little miracle and turn her foot into a normal one again.

So many specialists had seen it and suggested first one thing and then the other, none of them the least use, so that for the last few years she had refused to have it looked at at all, even kind Mr Peters, when he had mentioned casually not so long ago that he thought he might have a solution, had received a firm refusal, and rather to her surprise, he had accepted it without demur.

She handed Mr Peters the notes he was asking for, caught Leslie’s eye and smiled at him, and then stopped smiling rather abruptly because Mr Peters’ old friend was watching her. She met his look for a moment and then turned away, wondering why he was there; not for consultation, evidently, for he had had little to say so far. True, he was nice with the children and his manner was pleasant and unassuming, but he was making no attempt to draw attention to himself. Probably he was paying a casual visit at Mr Peters’ invitation, but she wasn’t sure about that. He had an air of authority about him, and he was remarkably elegantly dressed for a GP; nothing off the peg—she peeped quickly as she looked for another set of notes; silk shirt, and unless her eyes were deceiving her, expensive shoes on his large feet.

She limped round the cot to prepare the occupant for Mr Peters’ examination, taking care not to look at him again, although she found herself unwillingly wanting to know more about him. It seemed a little pointless to pursue this train of thought, though, for she wasn’t likely to meet him again and it wasn’t important.

But she was to meet him again; Mr Peters came back into the ward several hours later, just after Sister Richards had gone off duty, leaving Esmeralda with a list of jobs to be done, which, even if she had had twelve pairs of hands, she would have no hope of executing. She was toiling through the most tedious of them; arranging the written requests for holidays, days off and the like, so that her superior needed only to consult the neat list when she next made out the off duty, when the office door was opened and Mr Peters came in.

‘Ah, not busy, I see,’ he said; it was his usual greeting whatever the recipient of his attentions was doing, and Esmeralda, inured to constant interruptions, said politely: ‘Oh, no, not in the least, sir. Did you want to see one of the children?’

‘No, you.’

‘Me?’ she asked blankly. ‘Whatever for?’

‘What did you think of Mr Bamstra?’ he wanted to know.

‘That very big…your friend who came this morning? Well, I—I don’t know—I didn’t speak to him.’ Anxious not to hurt his feelings, she added hastily: ‘He looked very nice…’ She was stuck there and finished lamely: ‘The children seemed to like him—he got on well with them.’

‘He gets on well with everyone. That foot of yours—remember how the last time you allowed me to look at it, I told you that what it needed was someone who was a genius with a hammer, to smash the joints and then put them together again properly? Well, Bamstra does just that—half a dozen times so far, and each case a success. I asked him to come over and take a look at you.’

‘You what?’ She wasn’t sure if she felt angry or excited or just disbelieving.

‘Don’t waste time pretending you didn’t hear, Esmeralda, I’m a busy man.’

His tone implied that she was very much at fault and she found herself apologising as he said impatiently: ‘Well, what do you say? He hasn’t time to waste hanging around while you think about it—he’ll want to talk to you and make certain that you’ve a good chance of a complete cure if he does operate. He seemed to think that he could do something from what he saw of you this morning.’

Esmeralda drew an indignant breath. ‘So that’s why you came into the ward first and went right to the other end, and then sent me all the way back with a message—so that he could watch me limp…’ She choked with her feelings.

‘That’s it—how else was he to get a sight of you?’ He added kindly: ‘He wasn’t looking at you, only casting a professional eye over your foot.’

‘Well!’ She had no breath left with which to be indignant. ‘And why, may I ask, am I singled out for his attention?’

‘Because you’re a nice girl and you’ve been taking it on the chin for years, and it’s time that stopped or you’ll turn into a frozen spinster.’

Esmeralda gave him an outraged look and he added quickly, ‘No, on second thoughts you wouldn’t, not with those eyes—my daughter has blue eyes, bless her, but I’ve always fancied green, myself.’ And when she gave a chortle of laughter: ‘I’ll ask Mr Bamstra to come in.’

And before she could say another word, he slid through the door.

For a man of such massive proportions, Mr Bamstra was remarkably silent; he had taken Mr Peters’ place while Esmeralda was still staring at the door. He said with a deceptive meekness which she didn’t for one minute believe: ‘Is it all right if I come in?’

She said vexedly: ‘Well, but you are, aren’t you? Sister left me with a great deal to see to, and I’m not even half way through it all.’

His smile was kind, it was also beguiling. ‘You’re put out,’ he observed, his voice kind too, ‘and I’m very much to blame, but it was a little difficult, you know. I could hardly drop in and say: “Oh, hullo, I’ve come to look at that foot of yours,” could I?’ He added more seriously. ‘I didn’t think you would want it mentioned until we had talked about it.’ He sat down on a corner of the desk, looking down at her with intent grey eyes. ‘You do want it put right, don’t you?’

Her vexation had given way to a rather doubtful hope. ‘Oh, more than anything in the world,’ she assured him fervently. Her green eyes were full of dreams, although her voice was prosaic enough. ‘A great many surgeons have seen it, you know, but just lately I’ve refused to let anyone see it.’

He pushed his large, well-kept hands into his pockets and studied his shoes. ‘Tell me as briefly as you can just how it happened and what treatment you have had.’

He didn’t look at her at all, which made it easier. ‘I was three. I fell off my pony and he trod on my foot—nothing else was injured, just that foot; he crushed the metatarsals, pulped them into a squashy mess. The surgeon who saw it said he could do nothing then, that perhaps when I was older the bones would separate again and he could operate; only they didn’t, they set themselves exactly as they were—they fused into a lump of bone. My mother took me to any number of specialists when I was a little girl, but none of them could do anything—they said that something should have been done when the accident happened. I’ve been to several other specialists since I started nursing, and they all thought that it had been left too late; that I would have to learn to live with it—that the limp didn’t notice very much…’

‘I noticed it,’ said Mr Bamstra with a detached candour which didn’t hurt at all. ‘Shall I have a go?’

Her hands were clasped on her aproned lap, the fingers entwined so tightly that the knuckles showed white. There were no reasons to suppose that this man was any different from the others who had wanted to help her, and yet she felt no hesitation in saying yes: ‘Only it might be a bit difficult. I mean, I’d have to get leave and all that—would it take long?’

‘A couple of months, perhaps. Of course you would be in a walking plaster in no time, so you would be able to get about.’ He stopped looking at his shoes and looked at her. ‘Will you let me see what I can arrange? You would have to come to my hospital, you know.’

‘Oh—where’s that?’

‘Holland—either Utrecht or Leiden, whichever has a bed for you.’ He got off the desk. ‘Think it over,’ he advised her. ‘I shall be here until tomorrow evening.’ He nodded with casual friendliness and left her sitting at the desk, her head in a whirl.

But a look at the clock warned her that sitting and thinking about her own affairs was inadvisable; she couldn’t hope to get finished before Sister Richards came back on duty, but at least she could get as much done as possible. She rushed through the rest of the requests and went down the corridor to check the clean linen, working with such a will that she was all but finished when Sister arrived. She went off duty herself an hour later, her head no longer full of Mr Bamstra’s visit but of the evening ahead of her.

This was her first date for quite some time. Of course she went out often enough with the other nurses, frequently a bunch of them, together with housemen or students, made up a party, but although she was popular in a quiet way, no one had singled her out for an evening à deux, not that that surprised her in the least. If she were a young man, she wouldn’t have bothered with a girl who couldn’t dance, who couldn’t even run for a bus without looking grotesque; she had no brothers of her own but she was aware that young men didn’t like to be made conspicuous. Her mother and old Nanny Toms, who still lived at her home and did the house-keeping, had both assured her over and over again that when Mr Right came along her foot wouldn’t matter to him at all, but here she was, all of twenty-six, and no one, let alone Mr Right, had even taken a second glance at her—not until now. Leslie Chapman’s sudden attentions had taken her by surprise at first, but now, finally won over by his apparent desire for her company and his disregard for her limp, she was allowing herself to respond to him, and because her warm nature had been frustrated, hidden behind the matter-of-fact manner she had learned to assume against pity, it was threatening to take over from her hard-learned common sense.

She made her way to her room, refused the offer of a cup of tea with a handful of off-duty friends, and opened her wardrobe door. Unlike many of the girls she worked with, she had plenty of clothes, pretty and quite often expensive, for again unlike them, there was no need for her to help at home. Her mother had been left comfortably off in the small manor house in the New Forest, and she herself had, over and above her salary, a generous allowance from the substantial capital her father had left for her. Only if she should marry before she was thirty would she come into full possession of her sizeable fortune, and in the meantime the fact that she was by way of being a minor heiress hadn’t altered her independent nature in the slightest; she recognised that it was pleasant to have sufficient money to buy the things she wanted, but she had no highflown ideas about her inheritance and it said much for her nice nature that her friends, even if they were at times envious of her, never cast it in her teeth. And she, for her part, never mentioned it to them, nor, for that matter, did she mention the countless small acts of generosity she performed; the small sums she had lent and never wanted back, the countless times she had stood treat without anyone quite realizing it…she would have been horrified if anyone had found out.

She stood now, debating the merits of a pinafore dress in a soft pink with a white muslin blouse to go with it, or a green-patterned voile dress with a tucked bodice and short sleeves. She had no idea where they were going. Leslie had mentioned, rather vaguely, going out to eat; she had been a fool not to have asked him where. She chose the dress finally, if she wore her thin wool coat over it it would pass muster almost anywhere, and she hardly expected to go to Claridges or Quaglino’s. She bathed and changed rapidly, slid her feet into pale shoes, wincing at the ugly built-up sole on one of them, matched them with a handbag and took a final look at herself in the looking glass. She supposed she looked as nice as she could; her mousey hair shone with brushing and she had coiled it smoothly on top of her head, although one or two tiny curls had broken free at the back of her neck. Her face was nicely made up, the dress was in excellent taste even if it was a little on the plain side, and she forced herself to take a matter-of-fact look at her feet. Standing very still with her crushed foot tucked behind the sound one, it hardly showed, but that was cheating. She brought it into full view and contemplated it in all its clumsiness.

She would have this operation Mr Bamstra had suggested, even if she had to go to the other side of the world and stay for months; Leslie liked her now, perhaps more than liked…surely if she had two good feet he might actually fall in love with her? She turned away from her image, rather defiantly sprayed Dioressence upon her person, and went down to the Nurses’ Home entrance.

Leslie was waiting for her in his Lotus Elan, a showy, rather elderly model with far too much chrome-work on it, and painted an aggressive yellow. Esmeralda didn’t much care for it; her father had always driven a sober dark blue Rover, and her mother, since his death, had merely changed one model for another. She herself had a Mini which she drove rather well despite the drawback of her damaged foot, and that was a sober blue too, but this evening, with Leslie sitting behind the wheel smiling at her, she told herself that she was becoming stuffy in her tastes, even slightly priggish. She hurried towards him, quite forgetting her hideous limp.

He opened the car door for her, his eyes on her face, not on her foot, and at any other time Esmeralda might have asked herself with her usual common sense what there was about her ordinary features which should cause him to look so enrapt, but she had no common sense for the moment. She was spending the evening with one of the best looking young men in the hospital, and these emotions were going to her head like champagne, giving a glow and sparkle to her usual calm.

She got in beside him, scraping her lame foot over the door, and he winced, although when she looked at him he was smiling. ‘You look charming,’ he told her warmly. ‘I thought we’d go to that Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street, if you would like that?’

Esmeralda said with all the eagerness of a happy child: ‘Oh, yes, very much,’ and then sat back while he drove through the hospital gates and joined the evening traffic. He was a showy driver, full of impatience and blaming everyone else except himself, but she wouldn’t admit that, staying quiet until he pulled up with a squeal of brakes outside the restaurant.

It was a small pleasant place with candlelit tables and an intimate atmosphere. They decided on kebabs and Leslie made rather a thing about choosing the wine, so that Esmeralda felt a tiny prick of irritation deep under her pleasure, but she lost it once he had made his choice and settled down to entertain her, and presently, as they ate, he began to tell her of his hopes and ambitions. He had set his sights on a consulting practice, rooms in Harley Street and a pleasant house not too far away. ‘It will be hard work,’ he commented, laughing, ‘but worth it if I have the right girl with me.’ And he had looked at her in a way which quickened her breath.

‘You’ll need an attractive wife,’ she told him, ‘someone who can entertain for you and run your home and join in your pleasures—dancing…’ She drank some wine and looked at him with a calm little face.

He moved restlessly in his chair, although he was smiling at her. ‘There are other things than dancing.’ He added: ‘You’re thinking about that foot of yours, aren’t you? It’s unimportant compared to a great many other things.’

She didn’t stop to wonder what the other things might be; she said eagerly: ‘Oh, don’t you really mind? I’m used to it, of course, but it’s not…’ She smiled widely.

‘That surgeon who came today—Mr Bamstra—he says he can cure it. He’s already done several—he asked me to think about it.’

Leslie looked at her sharply. ‘Did he indeed—he’s a foreigner.’

She looked bewildered. ‘Well, yes—Dutch. But nowadays people don’t seem foreign any more, do they? I’ll have it done…’

Her companion’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t know anything about him—he might just be after your money.’ And when she stared at him in surprise, he went on quickly: ‘Probably he’ll charge enormous fees and you’ll have to borrow to pay him. I know what you nurses get—you’ll be the rest of your life paying it back.’ He smiled then. ‘I only wish I could pay the fees for you.’