LITMIR.BIZ

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hugged them, teased them gently, told them he would see them at breakfast in the morning and bade them goodnight. As they went, he reminded Araminta that dinner would be in half an hour.

      The boys were asleep within minutes. Araminta had a quick shower and got into another skirt and a pretty blouse, spent the shortest possible time over her face and hair and nipped downstairs again with a few minutes to spare. She suspected that the doctor was a man who invited punctuality.

      He was in the drawing room still, but he got up as she went in, offered her a glass of sherry, enquired if the boys were asleep and made small talk until Bas came to tell them that dinner was ready.

      Araminta was hungry and Jet was a splendid cook. She made her way through mushrooms in a garlic and cream sauce, roast guinea fowl, and apple tart with whipped cream. Mindful of good manners, she sustained a polite conversation the while.

      The doctor, making suitable replies to her painstaking efforts allowed his thoughts to wander.

      After this evening he would feel free to spend his evenings with friends or at the hospital; breakfast wasn’t a problem, for the boys would be there, and he was almost always out for lunch. Miss Pomfrey was a nice enough girl, but there was nothing about her to arouse his interest. He had no doubt that she would be excellent with the boys, and she was a sensible girl who would know how to amuse herself on her days off.

      Dinner over, he suggested that they had their coffee in the drawing room.

      ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Araminta, ‘I’d like to go to bed. I’ve written down the outlines of a day’s schedule, if you would look at it and let me know in the morning if it suits you. Do we have breakfast with you or on our own?’

      ‘With me. At half past seven, since I leave for the hospital soon after eight o’clock.’

      Araminta nodded. ‘Oh, I wondered where you worked,’ she observed, and wished him goodnight.

      The doctor, politely opening the door for her, had the distinct feeling that he had been dismissed.

      He could find no fault with her schedule for the boys. He could see that if she intended to carry it out to the letter she would be tired by the end of the day, but that, he felt, was no concern of his. She would have an hour or so each morning while the boys were at school and he would tell her that she could have her day off during the week as long as it didn’t interfere with his work.

      He went back to his chair and began to read the patients’ notes that he had brought with him from the hospital. There was a good deal of work waiting for him both at Utrecht and Leiden. He was an acknowledged authority on endocrinology, and there were a number of patients about which he was to be consulted. He didn’t give Araminta another thought.

      Araminta took her time getting ready for bed. She took a leisurely bath, and spent time searching for lines and wrinkles in her face; someone had told her that once one had turned twenty, one’s skin would start to age. But since she had a clear skin, as soft as a peach, she found nothing to worry her. She got into bed, glanced at the book and magazines someone had thoughtfully put on her bedside table and decided that instead of reading she would lie quietly and sort out her thoughts. She was asleep within minutes.

      A small, tearful voice woke her an hour later. Paul was standing by her bed, in tears, and a moment later Peter joined him.

      Araminta jumped out of bed. ‘My dears, have you had a nasty dream? Look, I’ll come to your room and sit with you and you can tell me all about it. Bad dreams go away if you talk about them, you know.’

      It wasn’t bad dreams; they wanted their mother and father, their own home, the cat and her kittens, the goldfish… She sat down on one of the beds and settled the pair of them, one on each side of her, cuddling them close.

      ‘Well, of course you miss them, my dears, but you’ll be home again in a few weeks. Think of seeing them all again and telling them about Holland. And you’ve got your uncle…’

      ‘And you, Mintie, you won’t go away?’

      ‘Gracious me, no. I’m in a foreign country, aren’t I? Where would I go? I’m depending on both of you to take me round Utrecht so that I can tell everyone at home all about it.’

      ‘Have you got little boys?’ asked Peter.

      ‘No, love, just a mother and father and a few aunts and uncles. I haven’t any brothers and sisters, you see.’

      Paul said in a watery voice, ‘Shall we be your brothers? Just while you’re living with us?’

      ‘Oh, yes, please. What a lovely idea…’

      ‘I heard voices,’ said the doctor from the doorway. ‘Bad dreams?’

      Peter piped up, ‘We woke up and we wanted to go home, but Mintie has explained so it’s all right, Uncle, because she’ll be here with you, and she says we can be her little brothers. She hasn’t got a brother or a sister.’

      The doctor came into the room and sat down on the other bed. ‘What a splendid idea. We must think of so many things to do that we shan’t have enough days in which to do them.’

      He began a soothing monologue, encompassing a visit to some old friends in Friesland, another to the lakes north of Utrecht, where he had a yacht, and a shopping expedition so that they might buy presents to take home…

      The boys listened, happy once more and getting sleepy. Araminta listened too, quite forgetting that she was barefoot, somewhere scantily clad in her nightie and that her hair hung round her shoulders and tumbled untidily down her back.

      The doctor had given her an all-seeing look and hadn’t looked again. He was a kind man, and he knew that the prim Miss Pomfrey, caught unawares in her nightie, would be upset and probably hate him just because he was there to see her looking like a normal girl. She had pretty hair, he reflected.

      ‘Now, how about bed?’ he wanted to know. ‘I’m going downstairs again but I’ll come up in ten minutes, so mind you’re asleep by then.’

      He ruffled their hair and took himself off without a word or a look for Araminta. It was only as she was tucking the boys up once more that she realised that she hadn’t stopped to put on her dressing gown. She kissed the boys goodnight and went away to swathe herself in that garment now, and tie her hair back with a ribbon. She would have to see that man again, she thought vexedly, because the boys had said they wouldn’t go to sleep unless she was there, but this time she would be decently covered.

      He came presently, to find the boys asleep already and Araminta sitting very upright in a chair by the window.

      ‘They wanted me to stay,’ she told him, and he nodded carelessly, barely glancing at her. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed, she thought, for he looked at her as though he hadn’t really seen her. She gave a relieved sigh. Her, ‘Goodnight, doctor,’ was uttered in Miss Pomfrey’s voice, and he wished her a quiet goodnight in return, amused at the sight of her swathed in her sensible, shapeless dressing gown. Old Jenkell had told him that she was the child of elderly and self-absorbed parents, who hadn’t moved with the times. It seemed likely that they had not allowed her to move with them either.

      Nonetheless, she was good with the boys, and so far had made no demands concerning herself. Give her a day or two, he reflected, and she would have settled down and become nothing but a vague figure in the background of his busy life.

      His hopes were borne out in the morning; at breakfast she sat between the boys, and after the exchange of good mornings, neither she nor they tried to distract him from the perusal of his post.

      Presently he said, ‘Your schedule seems very satisfactory, Miss Pomfrey. I shall be home around teatime. I’ll take the boys with me when I take Humphrey for his evening walk. The boys start school today. You will take them, please, and fetch them at noon each day. I dare say you will enjoy an hour or so to go shopping or sightseeing.’

      ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Araminta.

      Peter

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