with a nervous hand and met his eyes, twinkling nicely, across the table. ‘Tea?’ he inquired. ‘Earl Grey, I think—and buttered toast and little cakes.’ His firm mouth turned its corners up briefly. ‘I enjoy your English tea.’
She enjoyed it too; her companion had the gift of making her feel at ease, even amongst the Givenchy scarves and crocodile handbags. She found herself telling him about Aunt Maria and the nursing home and then stopped rather suddenly because she was being disloyal to her aunt and he was, after all, a stranger. He didn’t appear to notice her discomfiture, however, but talked on, filling awkward pauses with an easy blandness, so that by the time she got up to go she was a little hazy as to what she had actually said.
He talked nothings in the taxi too, so that by the time they arrived outside the nursing home she had quite forgotten, for the time being at least, a good deal of what they had talked about during tea.
He got out with her and walked to the door and when she had bidden him good-bye and opened it, he gave the cold, austere hall the same shrewd look as he had given her, but he made no remark, merely said that he had enjoyed his afternoon without evincing any wish to see her again, as indeed, she had expected. She was not, she reminded herself sadly, the kind of girl men wanted to take out a second time; she had no sparkle, no looks above the ordinary, and living for years with Aunt Maria, who liked to do all the talking, had hardly improved her conversation. She wished him good-bye in a quiet little voice, thanked him again, and went into the house.
If she was more subdued than ever that evening, her aunt was far too absorbed in her conversation with Mr Gibson to notice; certainly she had no time to question her niece as to how she had spent her afternoon, something for which Olympia was thankful. She got the supper and cleared it away again, then went to her room with the perfectly legitimate excuse that she was on duty early the next morning. But she didn’t go to bed immediately; she sat and thought about Mr van der Graaf; she thought about their tea together and then, a little uneasily, of the things she had told him; she was still hazy as to exactly what she had said, but as she would never see him again, she consoled herself with the fact that it wouldn’t really matter, he would have forgotten her already; he had whisked in and out of her life, large and elegant and very sure of himself. Olympia sighed, frowned at her reflection in the old-fashioned dressing-table mirror, and went to bed.
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WENT QUIETLY BY. The local doctors made their visits and relations made their infrequent appearance, and Olympia went about her duties with her usual quiet competence, and very much against the counsel of her common sense, found herself thinking far too much about the man she had met so unexpectedly. It took her several days to discipline her thoughts into more workaday channels, and she had just achieved this laudable object when she went to open the street door because the daily maid hadn’t come that day, and found him on the doorstep. Not alone—he was with old Doctor Sims. Doctor Sims was an old dear, kind and wise, and despite his advanced years, still clever. He was untidy, too, and rotund and addicted to smoking cigars. He had one in his mouth now; the ash from it fell on to his coat and he flicked it on one side with an impatient finger which scattered it disastrously.
He said cheerfully: ‘Morning, Olympia—don’t stare so, girl, you’ve seen me a hundred times, anyone would think that you were seeing a pair of ghosts.’ He waved a careless hand at his companion. ‘This is Doctor van der Graaf, son of an old friend of mine, now alas, dead. I’ve brought him along to see Mrs Parsons.’
Olympia stood aside to allow them to pass her into the hall, said: ‘How do you do?’ to the Dutchman’s sober tie and shut the door carefully behind them. He answered her with a casual friendliness which took away her awkwardness immediately. ‘Hullo again—have the bruises gone?’
She nodded, on the point of finding her surprised tongue, when Doctor Sims asked testily: ‘Where’s the girl who opens the door? Why are you doing it?’
‘She’s taken a day off—she does sometimes, and nobody says anything because daily maids are hard to get. My aunt’s out. I’ll take you up to Mrs Parsons, shall I?’
The old gentleman grunted, flicked ash on to the pristine floor and took off his overcoat.
‘Well run place,’ he mumbled to no one in particular. ‘Clean—food’s quite good too. Warm enough, plenty of bed linen, but it’s all too stark, not enough nurses either. Your aunt’s a woman to make a success of a place like this though—gets a packet out of it, I don’t doubt. But you do the work, don’t you, Olympia?’
He started up the stairs with her behind him, trying to think of some suitable reply to make to this remark, and behind her came Doctor van der Graaf, silent but for his few words of greeting. Despite his silence, though, she was intensely aware of him, and as they reached the first floor she was annoyingly sure that her appearance could have been improved upon; her hair had escaped from the severely pinned bun and was bobbing around her ears in wispy curls. She put up a tentative hand and arrested it in mid-air when he said quietly: ‘It looks nice like that, leave it alone.’
She didn’t turn round, though she put her hand down again as she led the way up the next flight of stairs and then pausing to allow Doctor Sims to regain his breath, started up the last narrow staircase.
Mrs Parsons shared a room on the top floor with three other old ladies because the pension she received as a rather obscure Civil Servant’s widow didn’t stretch to anything else. She was very old now, afflicted with a variety of minor ailments and quite alone save for a nephew who came to see her at Christmas, who criticized the treatment she was receiving, presenting her with a box of rather inferior handkerchiefs when he had done so, before returning to some obscure country retreat. No one, certainly not his aunt, took much notice of him, and Olympia, backed up by Doctor Sims, had done her best to act as substitute for the family she no longer had.
She was a garrulous old lady, given to repeating herself continually and forgetting what she had said as soon as she had said it, but the two doctors sat down beside her chair and talked pleasantly about the small things which might amuse her, and listened with patient kindness to her jumbled answers. She had accepted Doctor Sims’ companion without surprise, merely stopping to ask him every few minutes what his name might be, and each time he answered with no sign of impatience. Olympia, straightening beds nearby, decided that he was the nicest man she had ever met and certainly the handsomest, and when he looked up suddenly and smiled at her, she smiled back, the whole of her quiet little face lighting up.
The two men went away presently and Olympia stifled disappointment because Doctor van der Graaf said nothing more than a brief good-bye. Making beds after they had gone, she told herself that she had no reason to be disappointed; he had asked after her bruises, hadn’t he? and said hullo and good-bye. What more could she expect? Distinguished and good-looking men who wore gold cuff links and silk shirts and exquisitely tailored suits wouldn’t be likely to look twice at a rather colourless girl who, even if she had had warning of a meeting, would still have looked unremarkable despite all her best efforts. He had been nice about taking her to tea at Fortnum and Mason, though, and he had told her to leave her hair alone and it had somehow sounded like a compliment.
She dropped the blanket she was spreading and went to the mirror over the washbasin. Her face was faintly flushed with the excitement of the visitors and the exertion of bed-making, so that her hair was still curling in little tendrils round her ears. She gave one an experimental tug and then let it go; the front door below had closed with the decisive snap which was the hallmark of Aunt Maria’s comings and goings. Olympia turned away from the mirror, finished the bed and went soberly downstairs; her aunt would expect her to go immediately to her office and render an account of what had happened during her absence.
Aunt Maria dismissed the visitor with a shrug; Doctor Sims had a habit of bringing friends with him from time to time; they seldom returned, she didn’t even inquire closely about him, so that Olympia was saved the trouble of saying much about him, something she had felt curiously unwilling to do; he was a secret, a rather nice one and the only one she had. Her aunt dismissed her with a curt nod and sent her back to her duties without any further questions.
Doctor