Cobweb Morning

‘Ah, yes. I’ve come to see the patient, if you would be so kind?’ He stood aside to let her pass and followed her into the unit, where he became all at once a doctor, asking questions in a calm voice, reading the notes, examining the girl with meticulous care. There was no hidden amusement now; he was absorbed in what he was doing, and Alexandra was no longer a lovely girl; she was a skilled someone in a white gown, who answered his questions with the intelligence expected of her. Finally he nodded, thanked her and went away; she didn’t see him again for quite some time, but when the theatre nurse came to escort the girl to theatre, she was treated to that young lady’s ecstatic opinion of him; he had, it seemed, charmed every female he had encountered. Alexandra was left with the feeling that she must be lacking in something or other.

The girl came back, holding her own well, and as far as was possible to judge at this stage, the operation had been a success. Alexandra set to work on her, and when Doctor van Dresselhuys came to see the patient in Mr Thrush’s company, she was far too occupied to spare a thought for him.

Late off duty, because she had been a little anxious about her patient, Alexandra took the lift down to ground level, nipped smartly along a succession of passages and crossed the small ornamental garden which separated the Nurses’ Home from the hospital. It was pitch dark by now and there was no reason why she should encounter anyone at that hour, so that the vague feeling of disappointment she experienced was all the more surprising. In her room, she kicked off her shoes, removed her cap and went along to run a bath; she met Ruth on the way back and delayed to share a pot of tea with her. Anthony had said that he would meet her, but he hadn’t said when or where; his airy remark about meeting her as usual meant nothing; they had gone out fairly frequently together, it was true, but he had implied that they went dining and dancing nightly. Frowningly, she could only remember two occasions in the last three months or so when he had taken her somewhere really decent for dinner, and never to a dance.

She accepted a second cup; let Anthony wait, better still, let him telephone over to the home and ask if she was ready.

She had bathed and was in her dressing gown doing her hair when someone shouted up the stairs that she was wanted on the telephone. She went without haste and said a grumpy ‘Well?’ into the receiver.

‘Good lord,’ Anthony’s voice sounded irritable. ‘What’s keeping you? You’ve been off duty for an hour or more.’

‘So I have, but not knowing where I was to meet you as usual or to which marvellous place you were taking me to dine and dance, there didn’t seem much point in doing anything about it.’

She heard his embarrassed laugh. ‘Look here, old girl, you must have known I only said that because that nonchalant type was standing there laughing at me. Come on now,’ his voice took on a wheedling note, ‘throw on a coat and we’ll go out and have a meal.’

She hesitated; she had missed her supper and all she had in her room was a tin of biscuits. She said, ‘All right,’ and added, ‘I think you were very silly,’ before she put down the receiver.

He was waiting for her at the hospital entrance when she got there, ten minutes later. Because it was such a dark and damp evening, she had put on a raincoat, belted round her slim waist, and dragged on a wool cap, shrouding her dark hair, then added a matching scarf, yards long, which she wound round her neck to keep out the cold; totally unglamorous, she decided, taking a quick look at herself, but sensible.

It was a nasty quirk of fate that Doctor van Dresselhuys should have been standing in the entrance hall, talking to Mr Thrush. He looked up as she went past them, his brows arching slowly as he took deliberate stock of her, while his mouth curved into a smile, conveying plainly that her appearance hardly tallied with that of a young woman on her way to dine and dance. She scowled at him, smiled sweetly at Mr Thrush, and joined Anthony, giving him a look which caused him to say: ‘You look like one of the Furies!’

She didn’t answer him at once; she was still smarting under Doctor van Dresselhuys’ amused, faintly mocking look, but as they went down the steps she asked: ‘Where are we going?’

‘How about that little Italian place? It’s not too far to walk and it’s cheap.’

He took her arm as he spoke, in much the same way, she thought resentfully, as a man might slip a collar on his dog. She freed her arm, and he muttered: ‘Huh—in a bad mood, are you?’ an unfair remark which hardly served to increase her good humour, so that they went down the street mentally as well as physically apart.

They patched up their differences during the evening. Anthony, with his hasty apology a little carelessly offered, plunged into a tale of how he had got the better of old Sister Tucker on Women’s Medical, which, seeing that that lady was a byword in the hospital for her short temper and cursory treatment of all doctors below the rank of consultant, should have made Alexandra laugh. She did indeed smile, but it struck her that Anthony had been a bit mean with the old tartar. After all, she had been at St Job’s for more than thirty years and was the best nurse the hospital had ever had; she was due to retire soon, and most people, while grumbling at her fierce tongue, secretly liked her, taking her tellings-off in good part. It was disquieting to discover that Anthony wasn’t quite as nice as she had thought him to be and this feeling was heightened by the fact that she was tired and a little depressed and he had insisted on their walking back, because, as he explained, the exercise was good for them both. She wondered secretly if he grudged the price of a taxi, but later, in bed and thinking about it, she came to the conclusion that she had done him less than justice; he had his way to make, like anyone else, and probably he would end up very comfortably off because he hadn’t wasted his money. She reminded herself that he was all that a girl could wish for—well, almost all, and closed her eyes. She was almost asleep when she realized that she wasn’t thinking about Anthony at all but of that beastly Doctor van Dresselhuys.

She saw him the next morning. He arrived with Mr Thrush, checked the patient’s progress, offered one or two suggestions in a diffident manner, and then blandly accepted her rather cold invitation to have coffee in her office. Once there, neither Mr Thrush nor he seemed disposed to leave—indeed, after ten minutes, Alexandra excused herself on the plea of work to do, and left them with the coffee pot between them, deep in a learned discussion concerning the pre-central gyrus of the brain.

She thought it highly likely that neither gentleman, although both had risen politely to their feet as she left them, had really noticed her going or heard a word of what she had said.

She had no occasion to go to her office for quite some time after that, but when she did she was surprised to find the Dutchman still there, at her desk now, writing busily. He looked up as she went in and said coolly: ‘Forgive me if I don’t get up—these are a few calculations and notes which must be written up immediately.’

The papers she wanted were in the desk; she edged past him and knelt down the better to reach the bottom drawer at one side of it, aware that he had stopped writing.

‘Have you made it up?’ he wanted to know.

She lifted her head and found his face bending over her, only a few inches away. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said indignantly.

‘Don’t behave like a schoolgirl,’ he begged her, ‘you know very well what I mean. You looked like a thunder-cloud yesterday evening, and don’t try and tell me that you went dining and dancing in that elderly raincoat—besides, you walked down the street as though you hated—er—whatever his name is. You have a very eloquent back.’

‘It’s none of your business,’ she told him hotly. ‘Really…’

‘Now, that is unkind; I like to see other people happy.’ His voice held a mocking note. ‘And you are not. I’ll wager my day’s fees that he walked you back.’

‘It’s healthy exercise,’ she declared, too quickly, ‘and he hasn’t got a car yet—not even a Morris 1000,’ she added nastily.

He ignored this piece of rudeness. ‘A nice little car,’ he observed smoothly, ‘reliable, cheap to run and not too fast.’

She was diverted enough to exclaim: ‘It doesn’t look your sort of car at all,’ and then remembered to add: ‘Not that I am in the least interested in what you drive.’

He was staring at her. ‘If I were to ask you out to dinner with me, would you come?’

‘No.’ The word had popped out before she had quenched the thought that she would like to, very much.

‘I thought perhaps you wouldn’t. Ah, well, I have survived worse disappointments. And now, young woman, if you have finished kneeling at my feet, perhaps I might continue to borrow your office for another ten minutes or so.’

She closed the drawer deliberately, clutching the papers she had sought; there was a great deal she would have liked to have said, but she thought that, on the whole, it might be better to hold her tongue, so she edged past him again and flounced out in such a bad temper that her staff nurse wanted to know if she felt ill.

She didn’t see him for the rest of the day, so that by the evening she believed him gone, which was a pity because she still hadn’t discovered just who he was. A good friend of Mr Thrush, that was obvious—perhaps he had a practice in England even though he was a Dutchman; that, combined with the fact that he had been at the scene of the accident, would be enough to make him take an interest in the patient.

No one had come forward to claim the girl; police inquiries, photos in the newspapers, none of these had had any results. Alexandra, hopeful of her patient’s recovery, wished that she could regain consciousness, so that they could discover her name, but at the end of another two days she was still unconscious, so that Alexandra, with two days off to take, was in two minds not to take them. But common sense prevailed; she needed a break, if only to get away from Anthony, so that she could make up her mind about him. She went off duty that evening and caught the train to Dorchester by the skin of her teeth, and instead of having a quiet think as she had intended, went to sleep, only waking as the train drew in at her destination.

Jim, her younger brother, was waiting for her, still in his anorak and gumboots because he had come straight from the farm where he was finishing the last few months of his course at the Agricultural College. He greeted her with off-handed affection, caught up her case as though it had been a paper bag and led the way to where the Land Rover he had borrowed was waiting.

‘Nice of you to pick me up,’ said Alexandra, disposing her person as comfortably as possible. ‘Is Father busy?’

‘Up to his eyes—’flu.’ He started the engine. ‘You’re OK?’

‘Yes, thanks. How’s work?’

She sat listening to him talking about his job as he drove them at a great rate away from the town, through Cerne Abbas and then beyond, turning presently into a country road leading to the village where her father had his vast rural practice. The lights were shining a welcome as he brought the Land Rover to a squealing halt before her home; a rambling, thatched house of no great size but lacking nothing of picturesque architecture.

She ran inside, glad to be home, to find her mother in the kitchen getting her supper. Mrs Dobbs was like her daughter—indeed, her husband always declared that she had been twice as pretty as her daughter when she had been younger. Even now she was still a comely woman, who hugged her daughter with real delight and advised her to go and see her father in his study while she dished up.

Doctor Dobbs was catching up on his book work, but he cast this aside as Alexandra went in, declaring that she was a sight for sore eyes, and just in time to add up his accounts for him, something she did quickly before carrying him off to the dining-room while she ate her supper.

Her parents sat at the table with her, not eating, but plying her with food and questions and answering her own questions in their turn, and presently Jim, finished for the day, joined them and then Jeff, studying to be a vet in Bristol and home for a week’s leave. Only her eldest brother, Edmund, was absent; qualified a year ago, he was now a partner in his father’s practice with a surgery in a neighbouring village where he lived with his wife and baby daughter.

Alexandra beamed round at them all. ‘It’s super to be home,’ she declared. ‘Every time I come, I swear I’ll give up nursing.’

There was a general laugh, although Mrs Dobbs looked hopeful. She was too clever to say anything, though, but instead inquired about the girl Alexandra had been looking after. ‘The local papers have had a lot to say about it,’ she told her daughter, ‘how strange it is that no one has come forward. And who is this doctor who saw the accident? There was a lot about him too, but no facts, if you know what I mean.’

‘I don’t know much about him, either,’ said Alexandra. ‘He—he just came in with her, you know, and when we went up to St Job’s, he came too.’

‘In the ambulance?’

‘No—his car. A Morris 1000.’

Even her father looked up then. ‘He can’t be doing very well,’ he observed. ‘It’s a nice enough car, but more suitable to elderly ladies and retired gents than to a doctor. Is he elderly?’

She shook her head. ‘No—forty or thereabouts, I suppose. Perhaps younger—it’s hard to tell.’

‘Good-looking?’ Her mother had been dying to ask that.

‘Well, yes—I really didn’t notice.’