The Final Touch. Бетти Нилс

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…’