LITMIR.BIZ

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT HAD BEEN raining heavily from a leaden sky, so that the late September afternoon was already settling into an early dusk. People were hurrying home from work, their faces for the most part ill-tempered, for the morning had been fine and umbrellas had seemed unnecessary. The bus queues were long, impatient to get home; surging to and fro to avoid the fine sprays of dirty water thrown up by the traffic. The girl who joined the queue outside St Athud’s Hospital sighed gently; if she hadn’t been so late off duty, she would have missed the evening rush hour and been home by now; as it was the shops were already shut and she would have to change her plans for the evening meal. She frowned a little, debating the advantages of sausages over macaroni cheese. Sausages were quick of course…a sharp prod in her back reminded her that the queue was moving, but there were so many people ahead of her she had little chance of getting on the bus. Indeed, she was at the steps when the conductor came rattling down the stairs, bellowing ‘Full up!’ and rang the bell. At the same time he saw her and swung her on board just as the bus pulled out.

      ‘Cor, Sister, almost left yer be’ind,’ he declared cheerfully. ‘Yer should ’ave shouted…’

      She smiled at him and shook her head. ‘That was nice of you, Mr Collins. How’s the chest?’

      He handed out a few tickets before he answered her and she listened gravely, her fine grey eyes on his cheerful face. They were quite beautiful eyes, heavily fringed with curling dark lashes, redeeming an ordinary face from plainness, for her mouth, though sweetly curved, was too wide and her nose tiptilted, and her light brown hair was drawn back too severely from her face, although the damp air had allowed one or two curling tendrils to escape. But the conductor could see no fault in her. When he had been stricken with asthma, unable to breathe and scared to death, it had been she who had been ready with the ephedrine when the wheezing started, and if it grew worse, the aminophyline injections, and she who had calmed him down, assured him that he wasn’t going to die, restored his cheerful Cockney humour. He thought of her as an angel and good looks didn’t come into it.

      He went on down the bus presently, leaving her standing crushed against the door with an over-large woman flattening her on the other side, a circumstance so common to her that she hardly noticed. She was a serene young woman with plenty of common sense and while not quite content with her lot, prepared to accept it—indeed, she had reminded herself on several occasions, she hadn’t much choice. She was twenty-seven, and while not exactly unkissed, certainly unwed and as far as she could see, likely to remain so.

      Her journey was a short one. She got off at a busy junction and turned into a road of mid-Victorian houses, their uniformity broken here and there by a shop and occasionally by a small block of modern flats. It was a depressing road, still respectable and reasonably quiet, but she had never quite got used to it. At the end of the second terrace of houses there was a crossroads and she turned into the left-hand road, to stop a few doors down before a house which was rather better maintained than its neighbours and whose door bore a brass plate with ‘Doctor G. H. Forbes’ engraved upon it. It was still ajar, for although evening surgery was over the receptionist would be tidying up and getting things ready for the morning. The bleak little lobby opened on to a narrow hall carpeted in a useful brown and brightly lighted, showing a door on either side, shut, and one at the end, half open. She shut the door behind her and her brother’s voice called: ‘Christina, I’m in the study.’

      She went to the half-open door and into the room beyond, a small room, its walls lined with books, two elderly chairs by the empty fireplace, and a desk in one corner. Her brother was sitting behind it, a serious-looking man in his thirties, bearing the good looks which had passed his sister by. He smiled at her as she came in and she saw then that there was someone with him; a young man sitting easily in one of the chairs. He got up as she stood looking at him and smiled at her, and she, usually so calm and sensible, felt her heart lurch and thunder against her ribs. Here was the man, she told herself wildly, the one she’d been waiting for, tall and slim, with the kind of good looks one imagined and never saw… His eyes were the bluest she had ever seen and his hair, very dark, curled elegantly over his collar. She became aware that her mouth was a little open, so she closed it with a rush and smiled back at them both, once more her sensible self.

      ‘I’m late,’ she offered, ‘sorry about that,’ and waited to be introduced.

      ‘This is Adam ter Brandt, he’s over here to do a short course of anaesthetics—we met in Brussels last year at that seminar.’ And as she held out a hand: ‘Adam, this is Christina, my sister—she’s Medical Ward Sister at St Athud’s, and she housekeeps for me.’ As he spoke Christina noticed a strange expression cross his face and wondered what it was. She must remember to find out later; George Henry was worried about something and she wondered what, but only for a second. Their visitor was speaking, asking her questions about her work in fluent accented English, looking at her with an obvious admiration which quite threatened to take her breath.

      Presently she said: ‘How about coffee? It won’t take a minute.’ At the door she asked: ‘Supper, too, if you care to stay? Nothing exciting—macaroni cheese—the shops were shut.’

      The coffee was accepted but supper declined on the grounds of a prior engagement. And if I’d been offered macaroni cheese, I’d have had a prior engagement too, thought Christina, getting coffee in the kitchen behind the stairs, and she fell to wondering about their visitor. He looked a lot younger than George Henry; probably younger than herself. She paused in measuring out the coffee to take a quick look in the small mirror over the wall cupboard. She looked every day of her twenty-seven years, in no time at all she’d have wrinkles and grey hairs. There wasn’t time to have a good look now, but she would when she went to bed—there was that wildly expensive cream one of the older Sisters had been talking about, guaranteed to hold back the advancing years… But

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