Romantic Encounter. Betty Neels

small, one of a row, but it was very clean and neat, rather like Mrs Twist—small, too, and bony with pepper and salt hair and a printed cotton pinny. She eyed Florence shrewdly with small blue eyes and led her upstairs to a room overlooking the street, nicely furnished. ‘Miss Brice ’as her breakfast downstairs, quarter to eight sharp,’ she observed, ‘the bathroom’s across the landing, there’s a machine for yer smalls and yer can ’ang them out in the back garden. I’ll cook a meal at half-past six of an evening, something ’ot; if I’m out it’ll be in the oven. Me and Miss Brice ’as never ’ad a cross word and I ’opes we’ll get on as nicely.’

      ‘Well, I hope so too, Mrs Twist. This is a very nice room and I’m sure I shall appreciate a meal each evening. You must let me know if there’s anything—’

      ‘Be sure I will, Miss Napier; I’m one for speaking out, but Mr Fitzgibbon told me you was a sensible, quiet-spoken young lady, and what ’e says I’ll believe.’

      Sister Brice was waiting downstairs in the prim front room. ‘There’s time to go back for half an hour,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m ready for the first patient; Mr Fitzgibbon won’t be back until just before three o’clock, and Mrs Keane will already have got the notes out.’

      They bade Mrs Twist goodbye and walked back to Wimpole Street, where Mrs Keane was putting on the kettle. Over cups of tea she and Sister Brice covered the bare bones of Mr Fitzgibbon’s information with a wealth of their own, so that by the time Florence left she had a sound idea of what she might expect. Nothing like having a ward in the hospital, she reflected on her way to the station. She would have to make her own routine and keep to it as much as possible, allowing for Mr Fitzgibbon’s demands upon her time. All the same, she thought that she would like it; she was answerable to no one but herself and him, of course—her bedsitter was a good deal better than she had expected it to be, and there was the added bonus of going home each weekend. She spent the return journey doing sums on the back of an envelope, and alighted at Sherborne knowing that the saucepans and washing-machine need no longer be pipe-dreams. At the end of the month they would be installed in the vicarage kitchen. What was more, she would be able to refurbish her spring wardrobe.

      ‘Mr Fitzgibbon seems to be an employer of the highest order,’ observed her father when she recounted the day’s doings to him.

      She agreed, but what sort of a man was he? she wondered; she still wasn’t sure if she liked him or not.

      She spent the next two weeks in a burst of activity; the spring-cleaning had to be finished, a lengthy job in the rambling vicarage, and someone had to be found who would come each day for an hour or so. Mrs Buckett was a splendid worker but, although Mrs Napier was very nearly herself once more, there were tiresome tasks—the ironing, the shopping and the cooking—to be dealt with. Miss Payne, in the village, who had recently lost her very old mother, was only too glad to fill the post for a modest sum.

      Florence packed the clothes she decided she would need, added one or two of her more precious books and a batch of family photos to grace the little mantelpiece in her bedsitter, and, after a good deal of thought, a long skirt and top suitable for an evening out. It was unlikely that she would need them, but one never knew. When she had been at the hospital she had never lacked invitations from various members of the medical staff—usually a cinema and coffee and sandwiches on the way home, occasionally a dinner in some popular restaurant—but she had been at home now for nearly a year and she had lost touch. She hadn’t minded; she was country born and bred and she hadn’t lost her heart to anyone. Occasionally she remembered that she was twenty-five and there was no sign of the man Mrs Buckett coyly described as Mr Right. Florence had the strong suspicion that Mrs Buckett’s Mr Right and her own idea of him were two quite different people.

      She left home on the Sunday evening and, when it came to the actual moment of departure, with reluctance. The boys had gone back to school and she wouldn’t see them again until half-term, but there was the Sunday school class she had always taken for her father, choir practice, the various small duties her mother had had to give up while she had been ill, and there was Charlie Brown, the family cat, and Higgins, the elderly Labrador dog; she had become fond of them during her stay at home.

      ‘I’ll be home next weekend,’ she told her mother bracingly, ‘and I’ll phone you this evening.’ All the same, the sight of her father’s elderly greying figure waving from the platform as the train left made her feel childishly forlorn.

      Mrs Twist’s home dispelled some of her feelings of strangeness. There was a tray of tea waiting for her in her room and the offer of help if she should need it. ‘And there is a bite of supper at eight o’clock, it being Sunday,’ said Mrs Twist, ‘and just this once you can use the phone downstairs. There’s a phone box just across the road that Miss Brice used.’

      Florence unpacked, arranged the photos and her bits and pieces, phoned her mother to assure her in a cheerful voice that she had settled in nicely and everything was fine, and then went down to her supper.

      ‘Miss Brice was away for most weekends,’ said the landlady, ‘but sometimes she ’ad ter work, so we had a bite together.’

      So Florence ate her supper in the kitchen with Mrs Twist and listened to that lady’s comments upon her neighbours, the cost of everything and her bad back. ‘Miss Brice told Mr Fitzgibbon about it,’ she confided, ‘and he was ever so kind—sent me to the ’ospital with a special note to a friend of ’is. ’E’s ever so nice; you’ll like working for him.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sure I will,’ said Florence, secretly not at all sure about it.

      She arrived at the consulting-rooms well before time in the morning. A taciturn elderly man opened the door to her, nodded when she told him who she was, and went to unlock Mr Fitzgibbon’s own door. The place had been hoovered and dusted and there were fresh flowers in the vase on the coffee-table. Presumably Mr Fitzgibbon had a fairy godmother who waved her wand and summoned cleaning ladies at unearthly hours. She went through to the cloakroom and found her white uniform laid out for her; there was a frilled muslin cap too. He didn’t agree with the modern version of a nurse’s uniform, and she registered approval as she changed. She clasped her navy belt with its silver buckle round her neat waist and began a cautious survey of the premises, peering in cupboards and drawers, making sure where everything was; Mr Fitzgibbon wasn’t a man to suffer fools gladly, she was sure, and she had no intention of being caught out.

      Mrs Keane arrived next, begged Florence to put on the kettle and sorted out the notes of the patients who were expected. ‘Time for a cup of tea,’ she explained. ‘We’ll be lucky if we get time for coffee this morning—there’s old Lady Trump coming, and even if we allow her twice as long as anyone else she always holds everything up. There’s the phone, dear; answer it, will you?’

      Mr Fitzgibbon’s voice, unflurried, sounded in her ear. ‘I shall be about fifteen minutes late. Is Sister Napier there yet?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Florence, slightly tartly, ‘she is; she came at eight o’clock sharp.’

      ‘The time we agreed upon?’ he asked silkily. ‘I should warn you that I frown upon unpunctuality.’

      ‘In that case, Mr Fitzgibbon,’ said Florence sweetly, ‘why don’t you have one of those clocking-in machines installed?’

      ‘I frown on impertinence too,’ said Mr Fitzgibbon, and hung up.

      Mrs Keane had been listening; she didn’t say anything but went and made the tea and sat down opposite Florence in the tiny kitchen. ‘I’ll tell you about the patients coming this morning. One new case—a Mr Willoughby. He’s a CA, left lobe, sent to us by his doctor. Lives somewhere in the Midlands—retired. The other three are back for check-ups—Lady Trump first; allow half an hour for her, and she needs a lot of help getting undressed and dressed and so on. Then there is little Miss Powell, who had a lobectomy two months ago, and the last one is a child, Susie Castle—seven years old—a fibrocystic. It’s not for me to say, but I think it’s a losing battle. Such a dear child, too.’

      She glanced at the clock. ‘He’ll be here