Visiting Consultant

‘I think not,’ he said, the laugh echoing in his voice. ‘I’m not in the habit of driving recklessly; and may I remind you that it’s I who have the right to be annoyed, not you? I dislike being forced to avoid small boys and large dogs—’

Sophy stared at him, and repeated ‘Large dogs?’ in a rather thin voice, and then—’ The Blot!’ in a tone of consternation. She whipped off a glove, put two fingers into her mouth and whistled piercingly, causing her two companions to wince, then turned to her brother.

‘Ben, I told you not to let the Blot cross the road without his lead!’

‘I didn’t, truly, Sophy. But Titus went with us and sat down in the park and wouldn’t come back; so of course the moment I took the Blot’s lead off, he went back for him.’ He paused. ‘I had to go after him, didn’t I?’

Sophy considered the point gravely, her eyes on the stranger’s well-cut tweed jacket. ‘Yes,’ she conceded, ‘I suppose you did.’

She stopped talking to watch a large black dog, who from his appearance had been richly endowed by a large variety of unknown ancestors. The dog crossed the road with all the care of a child who has recently learned his kerb drill; his liquid black eye fixed on the man, as if to challenge him to think otherwise. The dog was closely followed by a nondescript cat, whose obvious low breeding was offset by a tremendous dignity.

Sophy heaved a sigh of relief. ‘There they are,’ she cried unnecessarily. ‘They’re devoted to each other,’ she added, as an afterthought and in a tone of finality, as though that fact could explain away the whole episode. She heaved a sigh of relief which turned to a gasp. ‘They didn’t damage your car, did they?’

She looked up at the silent man beside her, and tried not to see how very handsome he was. The Blot had reared himself on to his hind legs, intent on making friends. The man patted him absent-mindedly, and looked down with resignation at Titus, who had wreathed himself around one elegant trousered leg. He shifted his gaze to Sophy, and said, ‘Bentleys don’t—er—dent very easily.’

‘I say, is she really yours, sir?’ Ben’s enthusiasm had overcome his fright.

The black eyebrows rose. ‘Most certainly.’

The boy looked at the graceful sweep of the car’s bonnet.

‘Well, I’d rather be run down by a Bentley than anything else,’ he stated. ‘Excepting a Rolls-Royce, of course.’

‘If I only I’d known,’ murmured the tall man, ‘I would have done my best to oblige you.’

Sophy, deprived of her tea, and anxious to be gone from this strangely disturbing man, said sharply, ‘What a great pity it is that you aren’t driving your Rolls today.’ And then stood abashed at his grave agreement and casual explanation that he seldom brought it to England. ‘The Bentley is usually sufficient for my needs,’ he concluded gently.

Sophy felt the colour surge into her face, and was thankful for the gathering darkness. She said in a stiff voice, ‘I beg your pardon. If you’re sure that Ben has done no harm, we’ll go… Ben, will you apologise for upsetting this gentleman?’

‘Do I look upset?’ He was smiling openly at her, and her cheeks caught fire anew. He listened to Ben’s apology and then put out a hand and tweaked the boy’s ear gently. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and turned away to his car, then, his hand on the door, looked over his shoulder.

‘Blot,’ he said. ‘Escutcheon or Landscape?’

‘Landscape,’ said Sophy. ‘We haven’t got an escutcheon.’

‘And Titus? One feels that it should have some Latin significance…but I’m at a loss.’

‘He likes porridge.’

His shoulders shook. ‘How slow-witted I’ve become; or perhaps my knowledge of your history is becoming a little rusty.’ He got into the car. Above the restrained purr of the engine they heard his voice wishing them a goodnight.

Sophy closed the door behind her small party, took off her coat in the hall, warned Ben to wash his hands, and went straight to the kitchen. Sinclair glanced up as she went in, and then went on pouring water into a comfortably sized tea pot.

‘You’re very late, Miss Sophy. Thought I heard you talking outside in the street,’ he went on innocently. The kitchen was at the back of the house, a point Sophy knew was not worth the mentioning.

‘Ben ran in front of a car—we stopped to apologise to the driver.’

‘Annoyed, was he? Ought to know better, these fast drivers; running innocent children down…’

Sophy perched on the edge of the kitchen table.

‘Oh, Sinclair, it wasn’t like that at all. It was Ben’s fault, and this man was…very nice,’ she ended tamely. Nice wasn’t at all the right word… She thought of a great many adjectives which would describe him. He had annoyed her, and mocked her, and made her feel silly, as though she had been a brash teenager; but she knew, without having to think about it, that if Ben had been knocked down he was the man she would have wished to be first on the scene.

She asked on a sigh, ‘What’s for supper, Sinclair? I missed tea.’

‘Your grandma said a nice cauliflower cheese, miss. You go and have a cuppa, and I’ll get it on the go for you.’

The three occupants of the sitting room all looked up as Sophy entered. And they all spoke simultaneously.

‘Sophy, what is all this about a man and a car?

‘He wasn’t English, was he, Sophy? Even though he did understand about Titus… He said he had a Rolls, didn’t he? Penny says I’m fibbing.’

‘He looked gorgeous!’ This from her sister, Penelope, in the tones of a love-sick tragedy queen.

Sophy put down the tea tray, poured herself a cup, and answered the questions without hurry or visible excitement. She smiled across the room at her grandmother, sitting comfortably by the fire, solving the Telegraph crossword in a leisurely fashion.

‘Ben was almost knocked down by a car—it was his fault. We stopped to apologise to the driver. He was very nice about it.’

Her grandmother looked up, her pretty, absurdly youthful face full of interest. ‘Well, well. A man? Very good-looking, Penny says.’

Sophy replied composedly, ‘Yes, very. And I think Benjamin’s right in supposing him to be a foreigner.’

Penelope sighed gustily. At fifteen, she was full of romantic notions which at times made her very difficult to live with.

‘He was a smasher. I couldn’t see him quite clearly from the window. You might have asked him in, Sophy. Why didn’t you?’

Sophy looked surprised. ‘I didn’t think about it,’ she replied honestly, and then took pity on the pretty downcast face of her young sister. ‘He wasn’t very young,’ she ventured.

‘I’m old for my years,’ Penny insisted. ‘Age doesn’t matter where true love exists.’

This profound remark drew forth general laughter in which Penny quite cheerfully joined, and then she said, ‘Well, perhaps he was a bit old for me, but he would have done nicely for you, Sophy. You always said that you wished a tall handsome man would load you with jewels and furs and carry you off to his castle.’

Sophy looked astonished. ‘Did I really say that?’ Half-for-gotten dreams, smothered by the prosaic daily round of her busy life, made her heart stir. She shook her head and said briskly. ‘That must have been years ago.’

She was almost asleep in a sleeping house, when she remembered that he had said goodnight and not goodbye. She told herself sleepily that it meant nothing at all; but it was comforting all the same.

The tide of early morning chores washed away all but the most commonplace of her thoughts. Even on her short walk to the hospital her thoughts were taken up with her elder brother, Luke, who was in his last year of medical school at Edinburgh Royal. He was twenty-two, almost four years younger than she; and clever. What money there was she used ungrudgingly to get him through his studies. Another year, and he would qualify, and the money could be used for Penny, and later, for Benjamin. The darkling thought that by then she would be in her forties dimmed her plans momentarily, but she wasn’t a girl to give way to self-pity, and she was cheerful enough as she went along to the scrubbing room, and then into the theatre. Staff Nurse had already laid up—the theatre was ready.

Sophy began to thread her needles. She could hear the murmur of men’s voices in the scrubbing room. The first case was to be a tricky one—a duodenopancreatectomy—and Mr Giles Radcliffe, the senior consultant surgeon, would be doing it. Probably the RSO would assist, for Mr Radcliffe’s houseman was fresh from his training school, and though painfully anxious to please, still leaned heavily on Sophy’s unobtrusive help, given wordlessly by means of frowns and nods and seeing that the correct instrument was always ready to his hand. She looked up as they came in, and her ‘Good morning’ froze on her lips. There were three men, not two. The third one was the man with the Bentley. Even gowned and masked, it was impossible not to recognise those pale blue eyes. They were staring at her now, with an expression which she was unable to read.

CHAPTER TWO

THE THREE SURGEONS strolled across the theatre with an air of not having much to do. Mr Radcliffe glanced at the patient before he spoke.

‘Sophy, this is Professor Jonkheer Maximillan van Oosterwelde—he will be operating this morning.’

He turned to the tall man with him. ‘Max, this is Miss Sophia Greenslade, Sister in charge of Main Theatre.’