Tangled Autumn. Betty Neels

I should warn you that the road ends at Dialach.’

      She stared at him, her brown eyes smouldering. ‘I know—I have a map. I’m going to Dialach.’

      He received this sparse information with an expressionless face, although she was aware of the glint in his eye as he straightened up, saying: ‘In that case, I’ll put some petrol in your tank—unless you would like a tow?’

      Sappha felt the stirrings of temper again and quelled them. After all, he was being helpful even though he appeared to find it tiresome.

      ‘No thanks,’ she said politely. ‘I’ll be OK., if I could just have the petrol,’ and watched while he fetched a can and filled her tank. When he had finished he came back to stare at her through the window once more, and she asked: ‘How much did you put in?’ and reached for her handbag. ‘I’d like to pay…’ to be interrupted brusquely by his ‘My dear good girl!’ uttered in such a tone of mocking arrogance that she coloured faintly and snatched her hand away from her handbag as though it was red hot, and when he made no further attempt at conversation, she said awkwardly: ‘Well, thank you very much,’ and switched on her engine, praying that she would make a smooth start. Anything else under those dark mocking eyes would be the last straw, but to her relief the Mini pulled away without a hitch, gathering a little speed as it breasted the hill, and at the corner, between the dripping birch trees Sappha looked in the car mirror—the man was still standing in the middle of the road watching her.

      She forgot about him in the next instant, allowing the little car to run steadily while she took her fill of the scene before her. Below and a little to her left she could see Dialach tucked cosily into the trees which lined the loch. It was a small place, with its houses crowded together around the tiny harbour and a scattering of larger houses on the hill behind it. There was a causeway on the left of the town, running out across the rain-smoothed water of the loch to a little island that supported a huddle of dwellings. Sappha, straining to see them clearly through the rain, concluded that they and the causeway were in ruins, and turned her attention to the church, its square grey tower standing in Dialach’s centre. Her patient was a guest at the Manse, her uncle had said, so presumably if she made for the church it would be the quickest way of getting there.

      She allowed the car to dawdle to a halt and sat, no longer looking at her destination below her, but straight ahead at nothing at all, a little pucker of unhappiness between her beautiful brown eyes. Despite the despondency of her expression, she was an extremely pretty girl, with an oval face framed by naturally dark curling hair, which although confined in a french pleat, had escaped in soft tendrils on either side of her cheeks. Her nose was straight and a little on the short side, and her mouth, released from its present downward droop, was soft and mobile. Her good looks were offset by the clothes she wore—well cut and fashionable, although not excessively so, and her hands, free of her driving gloves, were nicely shaped and beautifully kept. She leaned her rather determined chin on them now, thinking about her new job. When her Uncle John had offered it to her she had accepted without thought. To stay in London in the same hospital as Andrew was unthinkable—it offered a means of escape from an untenable position. She had given a sympathetic Matron her notice, and after a month in which she had learned to hide her real feelings under a cool, impersonal manner she hadn’t realised she possessed; she was free. She thought wearily back over the last few months, wondering where she had gone wrong—if, indeed, she had been at fault.

      She and Andrew had been engaged for several months, and although the actual date of the wedding had never been discussed, everyone had taken it for granted that it would be soon. She ignored the first spiteful whispers about him; she was sensible enough to know that in a hospital the size of Greggs’, there would always be someone ready to start rumours of that sort, and when they had persisted, she had even joked about them with Andrew, because Staff Nurse Beatty, although possessed of a lush blonde beauty, was hardly his type. He had laughed with her and agreed with an apparent sincerity which had made it all the harder to bear when she had come across them in a deserted Outpatients Department. Their embrace had been so close and so long that she had gone away without them even noticing…she had waited two terrible days for him to tell her about it, during which time it had become common knowledge throughout the hospital, and when he did, making out that it had been no more than a momentary impulse on his part and certainly the same on the part of Beatty, she had swallowed her pride and forgiven him, turning a stubbornly deaf ear to her friends’ guarded hints, and a still more stubborn ear to her mother’s thinly veiled warnings. She had known Andrew for more than a year; they loved each other and she trusted him… She shifted a little behind the wheel and laughed ruefully; at least she was wiser now—it would be a long time before she trusted any man again.

      She hadn’t believed the Sister from Men’s Medical when that young lady had told her, with tact and kindness, that Andrew and Beatty had been seen time and again together in various places by various people—it seemed that London, for all its size, wasn’t big enough… She had hotly denied it, because Andrew had told her that he was attending a series of post-graduate lectures, but in the end she had been forced to believe it, for she had seen them together coming out of Wheeler’s one evening as she was on her way back to Greggs’ after visiting her mother, who was staying with friends in Cumberland Terrace. She had got off the bus to cut through the complexity of small streets to reach the hospital and came face to face with them. This time she didn’t wait for Andrew to come to her; she waylaid him on the way to Outpatients the next morning and with almost no words at all had handed him back his ring and then gone straight to Matron’s office and resigned.

      It was her mother who had enlisted the help of Uncle John without telling Sappha that she had done so, and in any case, Sappha couldn’t have cared less what she did. She took the job he offered her so providentially and here she was. She sighed, switched on the engine, and drove down the winding road to Dialach.

      The Manse was easy to find, for it stood foursquare beside the church; a solid roomy house surrounded by a pleasant garden in which the autumn flowers and trees made a splash of colour even on such a grey day as this. Sappha drove up its neat short drive and had barely turned off the engine before the front door was opened and the minister appeared on his doorstep. He was a friend of her uncle’s, but she hadn’t expected quite such a warm welcome—it acted like a tonic upon her downcast spirits, she resolutely tucked her own troubles away in the back of her mind and greeted him with a quiet friendliness of her own which lighted up her face to a quite breathtaking loveliness.

      ‘You’re tired and chilly, I daresay, my dear Miss Devenish,’ said Mr MacFee. ‘My wife has tea waiting for you, and presently, when you are rested, you may like to go and see our district nurse, Miss Perch, so that she may tell you everything there is to know about Baroness van Duyren.’

      He had drawn her across the hall as he spoke and now opened a door into a pleasant room with comfortable shabby furniture and a blazing log fire. Sappha, feeling that she was being treated more as a patient than a nurse, allowed herself to be led across the room to where Mrs MacFee was standing, to be greeted by a kindness at least the equal of the minister’s, and then bustled into a chair and told to undo her coat and stretch her feet to the fire. She barely had the time to do this before she was being plied with tea and hot buttered toast, while her kind host and hostess talked with gentle inconsequence of the weather, her Uncle John, the excessive rainfall and the delicate flavour of the quince preserve she had been pressed to try on a scone. It wasn’t until she had followed the scone with a teacake and that with a slice of rich fruit cake that she was allowed to enquire about her patient, ‘for’, as she pointed out, ‘Uncle John has told me a great deal about the case, and I know he will be down to see her next week, but of course he hasn’t much idea of the nursing routine.’

      Mrs MacFee smiled comfortably. ‘Indeed one would scarcely expect him to, but you’ll find Miss Perch most helpful and your patient very co-operative. She and I are old friends, of course—your uncle will have told you that already. We went to school together—Switzerland, you know and we still see a good deal of each other. She and her husband used to come every year to visit us, usually with their children. She has a family of six…’ Mrs MacFee, who was childless, paused to sigh. ‘After his death she continued to come, but now of course all the children