It was lovely being home; she helped her father with the small animals, drove him around to farms needing his help, and helped her mother around the house, catching up on the village gossip with Mrs Broom, who came twice a week to oblige. She was a small round woman who knew everyone’s business and passed it on to anyone who would listen, but, since she wasn’t malicious, no one minded. It didn’t surprise Sophie in the least to hear that the professor had been seen, looked at closely and approved, although she had to squash Mrs Broom’s assumption that she and he had a romantic attachment.
‘Oh, well,’ said Mrs Broom, ‘it’s early days—you never know.’ She added severely, ‘Time you was married, Miss Sophie.’
The week passed quickly; the days weren’t long enough and now that the evenings were closing in there were delightful hours to spend round the drawing-room fire, reading and talking and just sitting doing nothing at all. She missed the professor, not only his company but the fact that he was close by even though she might not see him for days on end. His suggestion of friendship, which she hadn’t taken seriously, became something to be considered. But perhaps he hadn’t been serious—hadn’t he said ‘Nothing serious’? She would, she decided, be a little cool when next they met.
He came just before eight o’clock on Sunday evening and all her plans to be cool were instantly wrecked. He got out of the car and when she opened the door and went to meet him, he flung a great arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek, and that in full view of her mother and father. She had no chance to express her feelings about that, for his cheerful greeting overrode the indignant words she would have uttered. He was behaving like a family friend of long standing and at the same time combining it with beautiful manners; she could see that her parents were delighted with him.
This is the last time, reflected Sophie, going indoors again. All that nonsense about casual friends and needing male companionship; he’s no better than a steam-roller.
Anything less like that cumbersome machine would have been hard to imagine. The professor’s manners were impeccable and after his unexpected embrace of her person he became the man she imagined him to be: rather quiet, making no attempt to draw attention to himself, and presently, over the coffee Mrs Blount offered, becoming engrossed in a conversation concerning the rearing of farm animals with his host. Sophie drank her coffee too hot and burnt her tongue and pretended to herself that she wasn’t listening to his voice, deep and unhurried and somehow soothing. She didn’t want to be soothed; she was annoyed.
It was the best part of an hour before the professor asked her if she was ready to leave; she bit back the tart reply that she had been ready ever since he had arrived and, with a murmur about putting Mabel into her basket, took herself out of the room. Five minutes later she reappeared, the imprisoned Mabel in one hand, her shoulder-bag swinging, kissed her parents, and, accompanied by the professor, now bearing the cat basket, went out to the car.
The professor wasn’t a man to prolong goodbyes; she had time to wave to her mother and father standing in the porch before the Bentley slipped out of the drive and into the lane.
‘Do I detect a coolness? What have I done? I could feel you seething for the last hour.’
‘Kissing me like that,’ said Sophie peevishly. ‘Whatever next?’ Before she could elaborate he said smoothly,
‘But we are friends, are we not, Sophie? Besides, you looked pleased to see me.’
A truthful girl, she had to admit to that.
‘There you are, then,’ said the professor and eased a large well shod foot down so that the Bentley sped through the lanes and presently on to the main road.
‘When do you have nights off?’ he wanted to know.
‘Oh, not until Tuesday and Wednesday of next week…’
‘I’ll take you out some time.’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Sophie cautiously, ‘but don’t you have to go back to Holland?’
‘Not until the middle of next week. Let us make hay while the sun shines.’
‘Your English is very good.’
‘So it should be. I had—we all had—an English dragon for a nanny.’
‘You have brothers and sisters?’
‘Two brothers, five sisters.’ He sent the Bentley smoothly round a slow-moving Ford driven by a man in a cloth cap. ‘I am the eldest.’
‘Like me,’ said Sophie. ‘What I mean is, like I.’
‘We have much in common,’ observed the professor. ‘What a pity that I have to operate in the morning; we might have had lunch together.’
Sophie felt regret but she said nothing. The professor, she felt, was taking over far too rapidly; they hardly knew each other. She almost jumped out of her seat when he said placidly, ‘We have got to get to know each other as quickly as possible.’
She said faintly, ‘Oh, do we? Why?’
He didn’t answer that but made some trivial remark about their surroundings. He was sometimes a tiresome man, reflected Sophie.
When they arrived at her lodgings he carried Mabel’s basket up to her room under the interested eye of Miss Phipps, but he didn’t go into it. His goodbye was casually friendly and he said nothing about seeing her again. She worried about that as she got ready for bed, but in the chilly light of morning common sense prevailed. He was just being polite, uttering one of those meaningless remarks which weren’t supposed to be taken seriously.
She spent the morning cleaning her room, washing her smalls and buying her household necessities from the corner shop at the end of the street. In the afternoon she washed her hair and did her nails, turned up the gas fire until the room was really warm, made a pot of tea, and sat with Mabel on her lap, reading a novel one of her friends had lent her; but after the first few pages she decided that it was boring her and turned to her own thoughts instead. They didn’t bore her at all, for they were of the professor, only brought to an end when she dozed off for a while. Then it was time to get ready to go on duty, give Mabel a final hug and walk the short distance to St Agnes’s. It was a horrid evening, damp, dark and chilly, and she hoped as she entered the hospital doors that it would be a quiet night.
It was a busy one; the day sister handed over thankfully, leaving two patients to be admitted and a short line of damp and depressed people with septic fingers, sprained ankles and minor cuts to be dealt with. Sophie saw with satisfaction that she had Staff Nurse Pitt to support her and three students, two of them quite senior, the third a rather timid-looking girl. She’ll faint if we get anything really nasty in, thought Sophie, and handed her over to the care of Jean Pitt, who was a motherly soul with a vast patience. She did a swift round of the patients then, making sure that there was nothing that the casualty officer couldn’t handle without the need of X-rays or further help. And, the row of small injuries dealt with and Tim Bailey, on duty for the first time, soothed with coffee and left in the office to write up his notes, she sent the nurses in turn to the little kitchen beside the office to have their own coffee. It was early yet and for the moment the place was empty.
Not for long, though; the real work of the night began then with the first of the ambulances; a street accident, a car crash, a small child fallen from an open window—they followed each other in quick succession. It was after two o’clock in the morning when Sophie paused long enough to gobble a sandwich and swallow a mug of coffee. Going to the midnight meal had been out of the question; she had been right about the most junior of the students, who had fainted as they cut the clothes off an elderly woman who had been mugged; she had been beaten and kicked and slashed with a knife, and Sophie, even though she saw such sights frequently, was full of sympathy for the girl; she had been put in one of the empty cubicles with a mug of tea and told to stay there until she felt better, but it had made one pair of hands less…
She went off duty in a blur of tiredness, ate her breakfast without knowing what she was