They all got up to go presently, and Doctor van Meerum, who had said very little anyway, merely murmured vague thanks in her general direction as he went through the door. She went and sat at her desk again when they had gone, doing absolutely nothing until Pat came to remind her that she had expressed a wish to inspect the previous day’s operation cases.
She managed to forget the Dutch doctor more or less during the next few days; she had plenty of friends, she was popular in a quiet way and there was no reason for her to be lonely. And yet she was, and the loneliness was made worse when Joyce telephoned at the weekend and told her gleefully that Reilof van Meerum was spending it with them. ‘We’re going out to dinner,’ she bubbled over the wire. ‘I shall wear that blue dress—and on Sunday we’re going out for the day in that super car of his. Laura, do you think he’s rich?’
‘I really don’t know. Did he say anything about a dog?’
‘Yes—rather a bind, really; he has to bring the creature with him, he says, because it’s broken its legs. Still, I daresay we can dump it on someone.’
Laura didn’t answer. Somehow the doctor hadn’t struck her as being a man to opt out of something he had undertaken to do, and he had promised her… She said mistakenly, ‘It’s only a very little dog.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Joyce after a tiny pause, and Laura, sighing for her unguarded tongue, told her, ‘It was knocked down by a car just as we reached the hospital—we took it into Cas…’
‘Have you seen Reilof?’
‘He did a round earlier in the week with Mr Burnett. I didn’t talk to him at all—or rather, he didn’t talk to me.’
She knew exactly what her young sister was thinking; that no man, no young, attractive man at any rate, would bother very much about a young woman who was looking thirty in the face. Thirty, to Joyce, was the absolute end.
Laura went home again at the end of the following week without having seen the doctor again, although she had found a note on her desk one morning to tell her that he had gone back to Holland, and that he had the little dog, now in excellent health albeit hating his plasters, with him. He was hers, RvM. She put the note away carefully and told herself once again to forget him.
Easier said than done, as it turned out, for when she did get home he was Joyce’s main topic of conversation; they had had a super weekend and he was coming again just as soon as he could manage it. ‘I’ve got him hooked,’ declared Joyce happily. ‘He’s a bit old, but he’s very distinguished, isn’t he? and Uncle Wim says he’s carved himself an excellent career—he’s got a big practice somewhere near Hilversum. I imagine that the people who live round there are mostly well-off.’ She added dreamily, ‘I expect he’s rich.’ She smiled beguilingly at Laura. ‘Look, be a darling—I don’t dare to ask Uncle Wim any more questions, but you could, he dotes on you, and I do want to know.’
Laura shook her head; her godfather might dote on her, but he was the last person in the world to gossip about anyone. ‘Why do you want to know so badly?’ she asked.
Joyce grinned wickedly. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a doctor’s wife, as long as he was very successful and had masses of money and I wouldn’t have to do the housework or answer the door, like Doctor Wall’s wife does in the village.’
Laura kept her voice matter-of-fact; Joyce fell in and out of love every few weeks, maybe her feeling for Doctor van Meerum was genuine, but on the other hand someone else might come along. ‘Chance is a fine thing,’ she remarked lightly, and wished with all her heart that she might have that chance.
‘Like to bet on it?’ Joyce looked like a charming kitten who’d got at the cream. ‘I’ve bowled him over, you know; he’s thirty-eight and he had a wife years ago, only she died, and now he’s met me and discovered what he’s been missing.’
Laura had been sitting in the window, perched on the open window sill, but she got up now, shivering a little; it was still a little chilly in the April sun, but that wasn’t why she shivered. ‘I must go and get tea,’ she said. ‘Are Father and Uncle Wim still playing chess?’
Joyce shrugged and yawned. ‘How should I know? Why don’t you go and see for yourself?’
In a way it was a relief to be back at work again, although Laura loved being at home, but on the ward there was little time to bother with her own affairs. It was take-in week and the empty beds were filling fast, so that there was more than enough to do. She went her calm, sensible way, checking drips, seeing that the cases went on time to theatre and when they returned, were dealt with with all the skill available; and all the while being disturbed times out of number by housemen, George at his slowest, the Path Lab people, the lady social worker, and Mr Burnett, never at his sunniest during take-in week.
Moreover when she did escape to her office to catch up on her paper work, it was to be interrupted again by nurses wanting their days off changed, evenings when they had mornings, mornings when they had afternoons free…she did her best to accommodate them, for she could remember her own student days and the agonising uncertainty of days off not fitting in with one’s own private life. Staff was going to have a long weekend, which meant that Laura would be on call for a good deal of that period, something which she didn’t mind about, for to go home and listen to Joyce eulogising about Reilof van Meerum was more than she could bear. It would be better, she reflected, when he had either gone for good or he and Joyce…she tried not to think any more about that, but Joyce could be ruthless when she wanted something or someone.
It was a pity that her father had told her that she need not look for another job, she could stay home and do the housekeeping; he engaged a daily housekeeper at the same time, for as he was at pains to tell Laura, Joyce wouldn’t be strong enough to cope with running the house on her own. And that meant that she would idle away her days, cooking up schemes with which to ensnare the doctor yet more deeply.
Laura went home the following weekend, and although her father had told her on the telephone that either he or Joyce would bring the car in to Chelmsford to meet her train, there was no one waiting, for her when she arrived. She waited for a little while and then telephoned home. Mrs Whittaker, the new housekeeper, answered. She sounded a dear soul but a little deaf and not at her best with the instrument, for she wasted a good deal of time saying ‘Hullo’, until Laura, getting in a word edgeways at last, asked for her father or Joyce. She had to repeat her question and when Mrs Whittaker finally grasped what she was saying, it was disappointing to be told that there was no one home.
Well, it had happened before. Laura left a message to say that she would get old Mr Bates to fetch her in his taxi from the village, and rang off. It took her a little while to get hold of him, and then she had had to wait half an hour for him to reach her, and she was tired and peevish by the time she opened the house door and went inside.
The hall was cool and dim, but the sitting room had a great many windows, allowing the spring sunshine to pour into the room. There was no one there, though; she went through the house then, and found the kitchen empty too, with a note on the table ‘Soup in saucepan’, presumably meant for her. She went upstairs to her room next, unpacked her overnight bag, got into a rather elderly tweed skirt and a thin sweater and went downstairs again.
It was almost one o’clock by now and there was no sign of lunch or anyone to eat it; possibly her father and godfather had gone off on some expedition of their own and forgotten all about her arrival, but Joyce knew that she was coming. Laura hunted round the sitting room once more, looking for a note, and found none. She wandered into the kitchen, served herself some of the soup and sat down on the kitchen table, supping it from a bowl while she decided what she should do with her afternoon, for it looked as though she would have nothing but her own company for the next few hours.
But in this she was wrong; she had finished her soup and was sitting doing absolutely