Читать книгу The Final Touch - Betty Neels, Бетти Нилс - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
THE burns unit was modern, built on to the original hospital, equipped with the most up-to-date beds, operating theatres and recovery-rooms. It could house twenty patients and was always full for hospitals from the surrounding countryside sent their patients there to be treated and, later, to have skin grafts. Charity, presenting herself for duty on a Monday morning, marvelled at the wealth of apparatus as she found her way to Sister’s office. Hoofdzuster Kingsma was sitting at her desk, a splendid figure of a young woman with regular features, very blue eyes and pale hair. She looked up as Charity tapped on the door and went in and said pleasantly in heavily accented English, ‘Ah, the new member of our team. It is nice to meet you, Zuster Pearson. Sit, please, and I will tell you of our unit and your duties and then we will go together and see all of it.’
So Charity sat and listened carefully; she wouldn’t be able to remember it all at once but she stored the information away, especially the last bit of her companion’s briefing. ‘You will expect, you understand, to work hard,’ she observed cheerfully. ‘The professor will have only the best; he does not look at the clock and he would not expect any of us to do so either. If we are off duty and he is still working, then we stay on duty. You understand? He is a hard taskmaster but he is also a very good man and most kind.’
Charity nodded her tidy head under its little white cap. She wondered who the professor might be. Perhaps Mr van der Brons was his registrar. She would have to find out…
She found out within seconds of the thought. Mr van der Brons came into the office and Zuster Kingsma rustled to her feet and said, ‘Goeden morgen, Professor.’ Charity, on her feet as well, murmured, ‘Good morning,’ with suitable politeness.
Quite wasted on him, for he clapped Hoofdzuster Kingsma on the shoulder with a friendly, ‘Dag, Els,’ and asked Charity if she was pleased to be working on the burns unit. ‘Hard, very hard work, Charity,’ he added ‘but I dare say you will enjoy it.’
‘I am just about to take Zuster Pearson round the department,’ said Hoofdzuster Kingsma, ‘but perhaps you wish to see a patient?’
The pair of them switched to speaking in Dutch then, which gave Charity time to look at him properly, something she had never quite achieved. She had, she remembered been too upset about Cor…
He was older than she had first thought, nearer forty than thirty, and undeniably good-looking… He turned his head suddenly and gave her a kind smile; his eyes were very blue, even more so than Hoofdzuster’s, half hidden under heavy lids. He said in English, ‘Sister will report on you in a week’s time. If you are not happy with us, don’t be afraid to say so, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t settle in nicely.’
He nodded in an absent-minded way and went off, leaving Hoofdzuster Kingsma to guide her round the department. It took quite a time, what with being introduced to the other nurses—and there was no lack of staff—and meeting the patients. There was a small ward for children, all four cots occupied; three of them had been scalded. ‘Hot coffee,’ explained Sister, ‘boiling water from the cooking-stove, and this one climbed into a bath—her mother had filled it with scalding water and gone to answer the telephone—and this one…’ she paused by a little boy of seven or eight years ‘…is to have a skin graft. He was here for four months last year; now the professor is going to repair the damage. His back is a mass of scar tissue—he will need several grafts over the next few years.’
She led the way to a large airy room where four women sat in comfortable chairs, knitting and sewing. ‘All for grafts,’ said Sister. ‘Do you know anything about grafting?’
‘Not very much, Sister. There’s the Thiersch method, isn’t there? Small pieces of skin bound on to the raw area? And Reverdin’s method—I’ve not seen that one—strips of skin taken from an arm or a thigh…’
‘That is right, we see both those here, and also the professor works a great deal with pedicles—he has had some splendid results.’
There was a men’s ward with six beds and another ward with women patients and two six-wards, both occupied. There was a splendidly equipped intensive care unit too. Charity followed the Hoofdzuster back to her office, reflecting that while she was on duty she was unlikely to have a moment in which to allow her thoughts to wander, and when she did get off duty she would probably be too tired to do more than climb into her bed. She found that she welcomed the thought; she would have no chance to mope over Cor and since the burns unit was in a separate wing of the hospital she wasn’t likely to meet him either.
She sat down in front of Hoofdzuster Kingsma’s desk and paid strict attention to what she was saying. ‘Now, as for the patients who come to us with burns, there is much to be done for them, and on admission the professor or his registrar will be present. There is shock and much pain and loss of fluid, of that you will already know—yes? And its treatment? Good. Morphia is given intravenously—the professor himself orders exactly what he wishes done.’
Charity spent the next few days getting to know her way around. She saw little or nothing of Mr van der Brons for the simple reason that she worked only on the wards where patients were either waiting for skin grafts or were being treated for comparatively minor burns. True, he came on to these wards, but most of his day was spent in Theatre or doing the dressings of his most badly injured patients, for these he liked to attend to himself.
It was at the end of her first week, with the prospect of a free day ahead of her, that she came face to face with him on her way off duty. He stood in front of her with the air of a man who had all day at his disposal. ‘Ah, going off duty? Do you like your work here?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes, very much—it’s different…’
‘Indeed it is. Have you done any Theatre work?’
‘Not very much. Only three months’ staffing. I enjoyed it.’
‘Then very soon you shall come into Theatre. Are you off duty now?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. We will spend the evening together and you shall tell me what you think of the unit.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty minutes? I’ll be in the forecourt.’
Charity grabbed at common sense as the prospect of an evening spent in his company threatened to swamp it. ‘That’s very kind of you, sir, but I’m not sure…’
‘Why not? I don’t bite. There is no time to discuss things while we are both working. We can do so at our leisure.’
Put like that it sounded completely sensible; moreover, she could think of no reasonable excuse.
She said in her quiet way, ‘Well, thank you. I’ll—I’ll go and change.’
She went past him and then stopped. ‘Nowhere too grand,’ she begged him. ‘I haven’t the right clothes.’
He assured her in a placid manner that the restaurant he had in mind required no dressing up.
She showered and changed into a soft grey jersey dress which, while well cut and in the best of taste, did nothing for her, topped it with her winter coat, dug her feet into her best shoes—quite unsuitable for the Dutch winter weather—found gloves and handbag, and went down to the entrance, telling herself as she went that she must have lost her good sense. Mr van der Brons could have found out all he wanted to know about her reactions to working at the hospital without the bother of taking her out for the evening. She made her way to the entrance, worrying as to whether she was wearing the right clothes. Cor had never happened to take her anywhere where clothes mattered, but she had the strong feeling that the professor was an entirely different kettle of fish.
She had worried unnecessarily; she was stuffed neatly into the Rolls and driven through the city to the Bodega Keijzer, opposite the Concertgebow, for the professor had a very shrewd idea of what she was thinking about behind her quiet face. The food there was excellent and the atmosphere was pleasantly warm and friendly, just the thing to put her at her ease, and the grey dress was exactly right… Charity relaxed, which was what he had intended, drank the sherry he ordered for her and conned the menu.
‘I’m famished,’ observed Mr van der Brons. ‘The groentensoup is delicious; shall we have that to start with? And the fish here is good—I can recommend the zeetong—sole…’
Charity, disarmed by the friendly informal atmosphere, agreed happily and applied herself to her soup and the easygoing conversation of her companion. They had eaten their soup and sole and she was halfway through a towering ice-cream swathed in whipped cream before Mr van der Brons asked her if she was happy.
She paused in conveying a spoonful of ice to her mouth. ‘Me? Yes, thank you. I do like the burns unit; it’s—it’s worthwhile, if you see what I mean.’
The professor, whose life work it was, saw what she meant. ‘Not working you too hard?’ he wanted to know pleasantly.
‘No. It’s nice to be so busy that there’s no time to think about anything else.’
She blushed a little, for she hadn’t meant to say that; it was a relief when he took no notice. He would have forgotten about Cor by now.
She swallowed the next spoonful of ice-cream very suddenly when he asked. ‘And young van Kamp?’
He expected an answer, she could see that. ‘I never see him,’ she told him, but she couldn’t quite keep the regret out of her voice.
He said kindly, ‘You have only to ask me if you should at any time wish to be transferred back to a medical ward.’
She said hastily, ‘No, that would be a mistake—he might think that I was… He’s taking out that very pretty nurse from the general theatre.’
‘Ah, yes. She is a charmer, isn’t she? Will you have another ice? No? Coffee, then… Do you hear from your stepsister?’
‘I had a card from Portugal, she’s modelling there for Harper’s and Queen magazine.’
‘It is to be hoped that she will get an assignment to Amsterdam, then you would be able to spend some time with her.’
‘It would be nice to see her.’ She looked down at her plate. ‘But I bore her and I can quite see why. She is really beautiful.’ She sighed unconsciously. ‘And she wears the loveliest clothes.’
She didn’t enlarge upon that; somehow she felt that her companion didn’t mind about clothes, though without saying a word he had given her the impression that he had found the grey dress quite acceptable.
She gave another little sigh, this time of pure pleasure; Mr van der Brons was an undemanding and restful companion. With Cor she had had to exert herself to be lively and appreciative of his remarks; with her companion there was no need to be either. Indeed, their small talk was easy and their silences were comfortable and there was no need to break them; she was quite at ease with him.
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?’
‘She said not, though her clothes were ruined. We took her back to the nurses’ home a few minutes ago…’
The professor was gently lifting shreds of the child’s clothing away from the burns with fine forceps. ‘Zuster here will give you all the details you will want; we must get this child to the burns unit without delay.’
The toddler remained unconscious so that he could work on the small thin body without hindrance. They were very severe burns and even if she recovered the scars would be deep; she would need to come back time after time for skin grafts. He continued his painstaking work while his registrar attended to the plasma drip, making an occasional remark from time to time, his face calm and unworried, not allowing his thoughts to stray for one moment from the desperately ill child. At length he straightened up. ‘Good, let us get her up to Theatre. Get this cleaned up and dressed before she rouses. We will keep her sedated but I want her specialled for the next forty-eight hours.’ He glanced at his registrar. ‘See to that, will you, Wim?’
He turned away while a nurse took his gown. ‘Get another plasma up before we start, please. I’ll want the theatre in fifteen minutes.’
He walked away, taking the phone from inside his pocket as he did so. By the time he reached the nurses’ home, the warden was waiting for him.
He greeted her in his usual calm way. ‘Zuster Charity Pearson—she has just returned here; she has been involved in a fire in the Jordaan. If you will come with me? She works on the burns unit and I wish to make sure that she is unhurt, Zuster Hengstma.’
The warden was a homely body, rather stout and inclined to gossip, but she was a motherly soul. ‘The poor child. I’ve not seen her, Professor, or, depend upon it, I would have made sure…’
‘Of course you would.’ He smiled down at her. ‘But I think we had better take a look, don’t you?’
They went up in the lift to the third floor where Charity had a room, the warden looking worried, the professor his usual bland self.
Charity, having gained her room without being seen, had sat down on her bed and hadn’t moved since. She still wore the coat, which smelled of burnt cloth and oil, and she hadn’t taken off her gloves. She realised that she was in a mild state of shock, for her teeth chattered still and she couldn’t stop shivering. She sat there, telling herself to get out of her clothes, have a warm bath, make a cup of tea and then get into bed and have a nap, all sensible things to do, and later, her old self again, she would go along to the warden and beg some mild treatment for her scorched hands. However, her body refused to obey her; she just went on sitting there with no interest in what should happen next.
She didn’t hear the warden’s gentle tap on her door; it wasn’t until it was opened and the warden entered, with Mr van der Brons looming behind her, that she looked up. The sight of his vast reassuring figure was too much for Charity; she burst into tears.
Zuster Hengstma trotted to her, making soothing clucking sounds and put her arms about her. Her English, always fragmental, gave way to a flood of Dutch, but what she was saying would have sounded kind in any language. Charity buried her face into the kind soul’s ample bosom and sobbed.
Mr van der Brons said nothing at all, only sat himself down on the rather flimsy seat and waited patiently. Presently Charity’s sobs became watery snorts and sniffs and he got up then, handed her a large, snowy handkerchief and sat down on the other side of her.
‘We will have that coat off for a start,’ he suggested mildly, ‘and the gloves.’ He viewed the ruin of her woolly cap atop the chaos of her hair. ‘And the cap.’
She gave a prodigious sniff. ‘So sorry,’ she muttered. ‘So silly of me to sit here like this. I’m quite all right, you know, just dirty.’
He didn’t answer but smiled and nodded at the warden, who removed the cap and began to unbutton the coat, while he picked up first one hand and then the other and very gently drew off the gloves. She had been lucky; save for first-degree burns on the backs of her hands, she had escaped unhurt, although they were painful. He examined them carefully and put them back in her lap. ‘We won’t bother you with a lot of questions now,’ he told her, with an impersonal kindness which she found soothing. ‘Zuster Hengstma is going to help you to undress and have a bath and get you into bed and I will return and see to your hands. Not badly damaged, I’m glad to say, but they must be treated and you must have something for the pain.’
‘I’m on duty in the morning…’
‘No. You will have a day off. If you feel all right you may return on the following day, but only to light duties.’ As she opened her mouth to protest, he said, ‘No, no arguing.’
He got off the bed and went to the door and had a low-voiced conversation with the warden, then turned round to say, ‘You are a very brave girl, Charity; we are all proud of you.’
Which for some reason started off the tears again.
An hour later she was sitting up in bed; Zuster Hengstma had bathed her despite her protests, washed her hair and anointed her face liberally with a nourishing cream. Mr van der Brons, ushered in with the deference due to a senior consultant, reflected that a shiny face and still damp brown hair were hardly aids to female beauty, and yet Charity managed to look decidedly—not pretty, he conceded, more like a child who had just been got ready for bed. He dismissed the thought as nonsense and listened composedly to Zuster Hengstma’s recital of Charity’s injuries.
She had got off lightly, he told her her; her scorched hands would heal in no time at all, and the scratches and bruises she had sustained would disappear within a few days.
‘The baby?’ she wanted to know. ‘And the little girl? Are they going to be all right?’
‘The baby is in the paediatric unit; it’s early days yet…and the little girl is with us; early days for her too, but children are very resilient. I think that she has a very good chance—thanks to you—and she will of course have to come back from time to time for skin grafts.’
‘Their mother and father…’
‘The father was at work; the mother had gone down the street to get food.’ He saw the look on her face and went on kindly, ‘Don’t condemn her, Charity. Will she not have to live with it for the rest of her life?’
‘No no, I won’t, only it’s so sad,’
‘It could have been even sadder.’
He went away presently, bidding her eat her late lunch like a good girl and take a nap afterwards.
She ate the lunch Zuster Hengstma brought to her but she had no intention of going to sleep. Lying in bed on her day off was a complete waste of time; she would go along to the nurses sitting-room and see what was on TV. She pushed the tray to one side and lay thinking about the rest of her day. When the warden slipped into the room ten minutes or so later Charity was asleep.
She was still asleep when the professor came to take another look at her. He nodded his satisfaction, handed the flowers he had brought to Zuster Hengstma and left a pile of magazines and books on the bedside table.
‘Just keep her in bed for breakfast,’ he suggested. ‘She can get up and dress during the morning. I’ll be along to see her about noon.’
The directrice had accompanied him this time, a stern-visaged lady with a heart of gold which was never allowed to show. She stood looking down at Charity, lying there with her hair all over the pillow, her mouth slightly open, her poor scorched hands lying neatly on the coverlet.
‘We must let her see that we appreciate her bravery, Professor.’
‘Indeed we must. If she is fit tomorrow I shall take her out to lunch.’ He ignored her sharp look. ‘And is there any way in which her clothes can be replaced? Could you suggest that she is covered by insurance or something similar?’
The directrice’s stern mouth twitched. ‘I’m sure that I can think of something, Mr van der Brons.’
They went away together and when Charity awoke it was to see Zuster Hengstma standing by the bed with the tea tray.
‘The professor came again,’ explained that lady. ‘He has brought you flowers and books and after tea you may have visitors.’
The flowers were beautiful and the books would keep her happy for hours. And visitors… She wondered just for a moment if Cor would come and see her and then dismissed the thought.
Of course he didn’t, but several of the nurses came, eager to hear all about the fire and her part in it, being friendly and kind and talking a lot so that by the time she had had her supper she was ready for bed again. She lay back against the extra pillows the warden had brought for her, dipping into the books and glancing every now and then at the vase of lilac, carnations, roses and freesias on the dressing table. Mr van der Brons was really very kind, she thought sleepily: he didn’t say much but somehow he didn’t need to; he was the kind of person one could confide in without feeling a fool. She began to wonder what kind of life he led away from the hospital. It would be interesting to know, but she thought it unlikely that she ever would; he wasn’t a talkative man and to try to find out about him from other people seemed sneaky.
She put down the books and turned off the bedside light. When she saw him again on duty she must thank him for his kindness. He must have been thinking of his sister in Edinburgh, she thought sleepily, a little muddled in the head, but knowing exactly what she meant.
She closed her eyes and thought about the next day; she had been told to stay in bed for breakfast but after that she would go out and buy a new coat. Grey or brown, she debated, useful colours which would go with everything she had; she would have to spend the money she had earmarked for a dress and boots. It was her last waking, regretful thought.
