LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER ONE

      THE ROOM WAS chilly and severe, as was the woman sitting behind the desk in one of its corners. The desk lamp, which only partly held at bay the fog of the darkened January sky outside, also served to illuminate her features, and the girl who had taken the chair on the opposite side of the desk in answer to the woman’s brisk nod occupied herself in giving her interviewer a softer hair-style, appropriate make-up and a more becoming dress. These alterations, mused Miss Abigail Trent, as she admitted to that name, would take away at least ten years from the age of her unconscious interviewer, who looked up and repeated, ‘Your age, Miss Trent?’

      ‘Twenty-four.’

      ‘Your education?’

      Abigail murmured the name of a well-known girls’ boarding school. when her father had been alive there had been money enough …

      ‘You are state Registered?’

      Abigail nodded and when asked to give the name of her training school mentioned a famous teaching hospital in London.

      ‘Have you family ties?’

      She thought of the two cousins in Canada; they sent her Christmas cards each year, but they could hardly be described as ties, nor, for that matter, could Uncle Sedgeley, her mother’s brother, married to a peer’s sister and landed gentry, and totally disapproving of her father, her mother’s marriage to him and to Abigail herself. She said quietly in her pleasant voice: ‘No,’ and when she was asked what branch of nursing she had most recently been in, said: ‘Surgery—the operating theatre, too.’

      ‘You’re willing to travel?’

      It sounded like the beginnings of an advertisement in the Personal Column of The Times. She said, ‘Certainly,’ and smiled at the woman, who didn’t smile back but looked at her watch as though time was rationed for her interviews and she had used it all up on Abigail. She got up briskly and went across to the filing cabinet against one wall and started pulling out its drawers. Presently she came back with a small folder and sat down again. ‘I think we could offer you a post immediately if you are prepared to take a medical case. A patient in Amsterdam—an American woman staying with friends there, in their flat. She has been in hospital with severe gastric symptoms and is now back with them—still in bed, of course, pending the doctor’s decision. She didn’t care for the hospital, for she speaks no Dutch and found the regulations a little trying. She is, I gather, rather …’ She wisely left the sentence unfinished and went on: ‘You will be paid twenty pounds a week and receive your board and lodging, and she is prepared to pay your fare at the end of a fortnight. The flat is, I believe, in one of the best parts of the city. You will have two and a half hours free every afternoon, and such other times as you can arrange for yourself. Should you take the post, you will pay this agency twelve and a half per cent of your salary until such time as you leave.’

      She finished speaking and sat, tapping her ballpoint on the blotting pad in front of her. After perhaps half a minute she enquired, ‘Well, Miss Trent, do you care to take the case?’

      It wasn’t quite what Abigail wanted, although she hardly knew what she did want—only to get away from London—from England, for a while, so that she could adjust herself to a future which no longer held her mother. And she needed the money. She got to her feet. ‘Yes, I’ll take it,’ she said. ‘When do you want me to go?’

      ‘Please sit down again.’ The woman looked more severe than ever. ‘I’ll give you the patient’s name and address and advise you on the easiest way of getting to the case. I suggest that you fly over early tomorrow, so that you will arrive in Amsterdam by lunch time—that should give you time to unpack, see your patient and begin your duties without delay.’

      Abigail blinked the fine silky lashes of eyes which were her sole claim to beauty in an otherwise ordinary face. They were brown and large and the brows above them were silky too. But her nose was too short, her mouth too wide and her hair too mousy to give her even a modicum of good looks. She wasn’t sure at this moment if the change would be for the better; probably not, but she could always go back to hospital again. She held out a hand in its slightly shabby glove and took the papers which the woman was holding out to her.

      Two minutes later she was outside in the street, standing rather uncertainly on the pavement while the passers-by pushed and jostled her first one way, then the other; not meaning to treat her roughly, but intent on getting to wherever they were going as quickly as possible. Presently she crossed the road, drawn by the cheerful lights of a Golden Egg restaurant, and went inside. It was almost twelve o’clock on this damp and foggy day in the first week of January; lunch in a pleasant warmth seemed a good idea. She chose egg and chips and coffee and while she was waiting for them got out her little notebook and started doing sums. Twenty pounds a week would be a godsend; she hadn’t earned any money at all for three months now. When her mother had fallen ill, she had given up her job at the hospital and stayed at home to nurse her, because the doctor had told her that her mother had only a few months to live anyway, and Abigail couldn’t bear the thought of her living out those last few weeks in some strange hospital bed. She had gone home for almost three months, and her mother had had every small comfort and luxury she wished for or needed, and Abigail had spent what money she had saved, which wasn’t much, to pay for them. Her mother’s pension had paid the rent of their small flat and the household expenses, but when she had died there had been nothing left at all. The furniture went with the flat, her mother’s jewellery, never very valuable, had been sold over the last five years, and Bollinger, who had served her father faithfully until his death and had refused to leave them after it, was owed almost a year of his low wages. The funeral had taken almost all the money she had, and now today, barely a week later, she had gone out to get a job, and it had had to be private nursing—that way she would get her board and lodging free and would get paid sooner.

      The egg and chips arrived and she ate them, still doing sums in her head. She would just about be able to get to Amsterdam and have a pound or two in her purse until she was paid. Two weeks wasn’t long to wait, and anyway it didn’t look as though she was going to get much free time in which to spend her money. Even when the twelve and a half per cent had been deducted, she would still be able to send Bollinger some money. He would retire now, she supposed, but he would only have his old age pension, and that wouldn’t go far in London. She began to worry about where he would live; after that night they would have to leave the flat and she wasn’t going to leave him to struggle on his own after the years of service he had given them, and he had been so kind and helpful to her and her mother. The food on her plate became dimmed by the tears in her eyes, but she fought them back and doggedly went on eating the chips on her plate and drinking the coffee she didn’t want any more.

      She took a bus back to the flat, the small top flat just off the Cromwell Road where they had lived since her father died and Abigail had started her hospital training. As she put her key in the front door at the top of the long flights of stairs, she could hear Bollinger in the kitchen; he came to its door as she went inside and said comfortably:

      ‘There you are, Miss Abby, the kettle’s on and I treated us to some crumpets. Nothing like a nice hot crumpet.’ He went back to the gas stove. ‘How did it go?’

      ‘I’ve got a job, Bolly—twenty pounds a week, in Amsterdam, nursing an American woman. I’m to go tomorrow, and isn’t it lucky I’ve still got my passport from that trip we had to Ostend? So everything’s going to be OK.’ She cast her coat and hat over the back of one of the wooden chairs at the table and went to get the teapot from the dresser. ‘Now, about you—did you manage to find anything?’

      ‘I did—the woman at the paper shop, remember her? She’s got a daughter with a house just round the corner from here. I can

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