The Final Touch

They sat over their meal for a long time until she glanced at her watch and exclaimed at the lateness of the hour.

‘You have a day off tomorrow,’ he pointed out. When she nodded without speaking, he asked, ‘What do you intend to do with it? A week tomorrow I’m going to Leiden…’

He was sitting back in his chair, a cup of coffee before him. ‘I am lecturing there. I’ll give you a lift there, only you will have to be outside by half-past eight.’ He smiled suddenly so that she found herself smiling back, when in actual fact she had intended refusing coldly, for he had sounded arbitrary.

She said hesitantly, ‘Well…’ Of course he would be used to his sisters; she imagined that an elder brother might adopt a tone of voice like that when addressing them; perhaps he thought of her in the same category. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said in a little rush.

He took her back to the hospital presently, bade her a pleasant goodnight at the entrance and waited until she had disappeared down the corridor on her way to the nurses’ residence before getting back into his car and driving himself home.

He was letting himself into one of the beautiful seventeenth-century red brick town houses overlooking the Herengracht when he was met in his hall by a small neat man of middle years who addressed him with the civil familiarity of an old servant and a decided cockney accent.

‘Evening, Jolly,’ said the professor.

‘Good evening to you, sir—me and Mrs J. were getting that worried. As nice a dinner as I ever seen all ready to serve and you not ’ome.’

He took his master’s coat and laid it carefully over an arm. ‘Rang the ’ospital, I did, and they said as you ’ad gone hours earlier.’

‘On a friendly impulse I took someone out to dinner, Jolly. I had no intention of doing so, but she looked very lonely. English, Jolly.’

‘Ah, a tourist, sir?’

‘No, a nurse at the hospital. So I will come to the kitchen and apologise to Mrs Jolly and beg you to eat the dinner she had so kindly cooked for me.’

‘Well, as to that, sir…’ Jolly bustled ahead and opened the narrow door at the back of the hall and they descended a few steps to the kitchen, an extremely cosy place even if semi-basement; warm and well lit with a vast Aga along one wall and an open dresser filled with china along another. There were Windsor chairs on either side of the Aga, each occupied by a cat, and sprawled before the fire was a large shaggy dog who heaved himself up and pranced to meet the professor. He stayed quietly by him while he made his excuses to his housekeeper, speaking Dutch this time to the plump little woman before going back to the hall and into his study, the dog close on his heels. Here he sat down at his desk and, despite the papers waiting for his attention, did nothing at all for quite a while but sat deep in thought.

Presently he stirred. ‘I am almost forty years old,’ he addressed the dog, who looked intelligent and wagged his tail. ‘Would you consider, Samson, that I am middle-aged? Past the first flush of youth? Becoming set in my ways?’

Samson rumbled gently in a negative fashion and the professor said, ‘Oh, good, I value your opinion, Samson.’ He pulled the papers towards him and applied himself to them. ‘She has a day off tomorrow,’ he went on, ‘but I shall see her after that…’

He saw her the next day under rather trying circumstances.

Charity had gone out early; it was a cold clear day, frosty, with a blue sky and a hint of snow to come. Since she wasn’t going to Leiden until next week she had her day planned; she intended to follow the Singel Gracht, the outermost gracht of the inner city, from one end to the other, and when she had done that she would spend an hour or two in a museum and treat herself to a meal in a coffee shop. She had planned to buy some new clothes but somehow she felt restless and a day spent walking and getting to know Amsterdam suited her mood.

She kept to the Singel for some time and then just past the Leidse Plein she crossed over to the Lijnbaans Gracht; she was approaching the Jordaan now, its streets named after flowers and plants, for Jordaan was a corruption of Jardin. Presently she wandered down one of them to become happily lost in a maze of narrow streets lined with small old houses, threaded with narrow canals. She was almost at the end of one such street when she saw smoke billowing from the upper window of a gabled house, bent with age, seemingly held upright by its neighbours. There was no one about, since it was that time in the morning when even the most hardworking of housewives stopped for her cup of coffee. Charity raced down the street and banged on the house door, yelling, ‘Fire,’ at the top of her voice. No one appeared to hear, understandably, for somewhere close by there was a radio blaring pop music.

No one came to the door; she thumped again, still shouting, and then tried the handle. The door opened and she plunged inside. The smoke was rolling down the narrow ladder-like staircase leading from the tiny hall but there were no flames yet. She looked into the room downstairs, cast an urgent eye into the tiny kitchen behind it, tore a towel from a hook on the wall, splashed water over it, and, holding it to her face, began to climb the stairs.

They led to one room under the roof, with a small window at each end, furnished with a large bed, a chest of drawers, a chair or two and a cot under the back window, all of them shrouded in thick smoke. There was a baby in the cot and, lying by an overturned oil stove, there was a toddler, clothes alight, screaming in terror and pain. Charity snatched a blanket off the bed, flung it over the child and rolled it away from the stove, which was now beginning to blaze fiercely. Very soon the whole place would be in flames and already the smoke was beginning to choke her. She hardly noticed the pain as she slapped out the flames on the child’s clothing; even through her thick gloves she felt the sting of fire. She picked the child up, laid it gently in the cot and went to the window and took a deep breath. This time her screams for help were heard; kindly people from the surrounding houses came running into the street and moments later feet pounded up the stairs and two young men came blundering through the smoke.

Charity wasted no time in talk; she thrust the child into a pair of arms, snatched the baby from the cot and gave it to his companion. ‘Quick,’ she shouted at them, quite forgetting that she wasn’t speaking their language, ‘get out…’

It was a situation where words were unnecessary; they disappeared down the stairs and she tumbled down after them, her teeth chattering with fright. Outside a small crowd had gathered. ‘Ambulance,’ said Charity, and then began desperate attempts at Dutch. ‘Ziekenwagen,’ she said urgently. ‘Doctor, Ziekenhuis,’ and, stumped for the words, ‘Fire Brigade.’ While she shouted all this she was taking a look at the children. The baby was a nasty bluish white but untouched by the fire. Charity gave it to a competent motherly-looking woman standing by. It was alive but it would need urgent treatment. As for the toddler, a little girl, she was severely burned but mercifully unconscious. Someone spoke to her but she couldn’t understand a word, all she could do was repeat ‘Ziekenhuis’ loudly and then, hopefully, ’Politie.’

They arrived just as she was repeating another despairing cry for speedy help. A small car with two thickset, reassuringly calm policemen inside. Everyone spoke at once, but, calmly, Charity, terrified that the children would die unless they were helped quickly, cut through the din.

‘The hospital,’ she bawled at them, ‘and do be quick, for heaven’s sake.’

‘English?’ asked one of the policemen. ‘The ambulance comes, also the fire engine…’ As he spoke the ambulance arrived and, hard on its heels, the fire engine. The house was well alight by now but Charity could think only of the small creatures being loaded carefully into the ambulance. It drove away quickly and one of the policemen went around telling everyone in the small crowd to move along please—in Dutch, of course, but there was no mistaking it. She stood, rather at a loss, feeling a bit sick from the smoke and her fright and was rather surprised when the two men who had carried the children to safety, and had been talking to the policemen, came and shook her hand. The Dutch, she discovered, liked to shake hands a lot. She smiled and winced as hers were gripped and the scorched flesh under her gloves throbbed. Nothing much, she told herself, just the backs of her hands—not even her fingers—as one of the policemen came over to her.

‘You will tell me, please, how this happened?’

It was a relief that he spoke English and understood it too. She gave him a businesslike account. ‘And these two young men were so quick,’ she finished. ‘I hope that someone thanks them.’

‘They will be thanked, miss. And you? You are OK? You were also quick. I wish for your name, please. You are a tourist?’

‘No, I work here…’ She told him of her job at the hospital. ‘It’s my day off.’

‘You wish to go there now?’ He smiled in a fatherly fashion. ‘You are dirty from the smoke and your coat is a little burnt.’

It seemed the sensible thing to do. ‘Well, yes, I expect I’d better.’

Then he said, ‘We will take you. It is possible that we shall wish to see you—perhaps tomorrow? At the hospital?’

She nodded. ‘I work in the burns unit…’

They ushered her with clumsy care into the car as though she might fall apart at any moment, and they had good reason; her face was chalk-white, covered in greasy, sooty smoke, her coat was peppered by small burn marks where hot sparks had fallen upon it, and her hands were shaking so much that she had clutched them together, aware that they were painful but unable to do anything about it.

There was still a good deal of confusion; the firemen were getting the fire under control, the small crowd had rearranged itself, melting away when told to move on and then edging forward again.

‘The parents?’ asked Charity. ‘Where are they?’

One of the constables spoke soothingly. ‘They will be found, miss—we have information from the neighbours.’

‘And the two men? Were they burnt?’

‘No, no—just the smoke and that not much. They go also to the hospital.’ He turned in his seat to smile at her. ‘All is well, miss.’

She nodded, struggling with the urge to burst into tears, and minutes later they were at the hospital.

‘Eerstehulp—we take you there…’

‘Oh, please, no, If you would stop here I can go to the nurses’ home…’

‘There is someone to attend to you?’

‘Yes, oh, yes. Thank you both so very much. I’ll be here if you want me, tomorrow.’

The fatherly constable got out of the car and walked with her to the entrance, where he opened the door for her, patted her reassuringly on the back with a great hand like a ham, and waited until she had skimmed across the hall and disappeared down the corridor.

In the car again he said, ‘We had better go and see how the little ones are.’ When they had driven the short distance to the other department of the hospital, he spoke briefly on the car phone and then got out with his companion.

The baby had been borne away to the resuscitation room, and Professor van der Brons, called from his ward round, was bending over the toddler, not pausing in his careful examination when he was told that the police were there.

He questioned them closely without pausing in his work. ‘She pulled the oil stove over,’ he observed, ‘poor little one. She is severely burned; did you get her out?’

The fatherly constable explained. ‘This English girl was passing, went inside and put out the flames—two boys heard her screams and went to help her…’

‘An English girl? Was she injured?’