Wish with the Candles

by Betty Neels

  Emma, torn between annoyance at his highhandedness and delight at the invitation, hesitated. ‘Thank you, but—but I’m going to bed early.’

  ‘So am I,’ he agreed placidly, ‘but I intend to eat first.’ He smiled and she found herself smiling back at him. They went on down the stairs and at the bottom he repeated, ‘Half an hour, Emma,’ and left her.

  Emma put on the pink dress; it was a warm evening, she wouldn’t need a coat. She put on her new sandals too and did her hair twice as well as wasting a great deal of time over her face. At first she gave it the full treatment, but her nice hazel eyes looked, to her at any rate, odd with their lashes heavily mascaraed and the eyeliner added. She scrubbed her face clean again and applied the mascara once more, thinly, left her expressive eyebrows alone and used only a hint of cream and lipstick. At least, she conceded to her reflection, she looked the same as usual and her kind of face wasn’t improved by elaborate make-up. And anyway, the professor wouldn’t notice.

  He was waiting for her when she went down to the forecourt and her heart lifted absurdly when he said, ‘Ah, I’m glad to see you wearing that dress. I thought it suited you admirably.’

  Emma got into the car, saying a trifle incoherently, ‘Oh—did you notice? I didn’t think—it’s such a warm evening.’

  To which disjointed remark he was kind enough not to reply to at all, but embarked on a gentle monologue about nothing in particular, which gave her time to recover her aplomb.

  They were travelling out of the city southwards and after a few minutes she ventured, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To Hamble—Hamble Manor—I’m sure you know it. Being by the river we shall be able to get some air as well as eat. Did you have a pleasant weekend at home?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ answered Emma, surprised. ‘It’s only a small village, but I like pottering in the garden and seeing to the hens and taking the dog.’

  ‘It sounds delightful.’ He sounded sincere; she was encouraged to go on.

  ‘It is—we haven’t lived there very long, not in the cottage, but of course Mother’s lived all her married life in the village—in another house. We three were born there.’

  ‘Three?’ The question was so casually put that she was barely aware of it.

  ‘Kitty and my brother Gregory and I. Greg’s married and has a practice in a village near Dorchester. They—that is, his wife Sybil too—have just had a baby. A boy, he’s got red hair.’ She stopped and looked at him, adding, ‘We all like red hair.’

  ‘A fortunate circumstance,’ murmured her companion, ‘for I have a strong feeling that there will be others of your family with hair of that colour.’

  Emma made no sense of this remark; red hair wasn’t all that common in the Hastings’ history. She decided to ignore it and went on, ‘Well, it makes a nice change, you know. Greg and I are both a very ordinary brown and so’s Mother. Kitty’s the lucky one, we’re all rather proud of her.’

  ‘I’m sure you have reason to be—she is indeed a most attractive girl. Let us hope she will finish her studies before she gets snapped up and married out of hand.’

  ‘But she will,’ said Emma seriously, ‘finish, I mean—she promised. Even if she married first, otherwise it would be such a waste.’

  She didn’t explain what the waste would be and he didn’t ask, and Emma went on talking about Kitty for some minutes because it seemed to her at that moment that she had known the professor all her life and could tell him anything she wished. It wasn’t until they were sitting over their Campari that he asked quietly, ‘Won’t you tell me why you didn’t train to be a doctor too? Your brother did, your sister is, why are you the odd one out?’

  She forgot that she had never meant to tell him anything, certainly nothing about herself. ‘Gregory qualified before my father died and I was all set to start, but if I had Mother wouldn’t have had enough money to live on and educate Kitty as well, even with a grant—so I decided to be a nurse and I can’t say I’m sorry now. I’ve a good job and…’

  ‘Kitty is able to go to medical school,’ finished her companion smoothly.

  Emma put down her glass, suddenly aware of how much she had told him. ‘I had no intention—’ she began severely.

  ‘You didn’t,’ his voice was placid, ‘I said it for you. In any case I think I had guessed something like that.’ He sounded so understanding that she smiled despite her discomfort and he said at once, ‘Let’s eat—I’m hungry.’

  The dining-room was pleasant and not too full, and the professor, although most unassuming in manner, was one of those men to get instant attention from waiters. Emma settled in her chair and confronted by the menu wondered what to order. If she had been out with Little Willy she would undoubtedly have asked him without embarrassment how much he intended to spend on their meal—indeed, in all probability, he would have already warned her to choose something not too expensive. But she hardly thought that the professor was a man to tolerate such an action on the part of his dinner companion, so it was a relief when he asked:

  ‘Shall we start with iced melon? I think I’ll have a carpet-bag steak, but I daresay you would prefer something a little less hearty. If you like chicken I can recommend the Suprème de Volaille Richelieu, and I think a bottle of burgundy would suit us both—Chambertin ‘52 should do nicely. We can decide on a sweet later, can we not?’

  Having thus smoothly disposed of their meal he steered the conversation back to Emma and her family, but this time she was on her guard; she had, she thought uneasily, talked far too much about herself already. She countered his gentle questions with some of her own, which he answered with deplorable vagueness, so that she knew no more about him than she already did. She had more success when she turned to another subject though, he was more than willing to talk about his own country and proved an amusing talker as well as an informed one. She ate her chicken with a nice appetite and when offered Fraises Romanoff ate those too, but she declined the brandy he suggested with their coffee, leaving him to drink his. She wasn’t overfond of it anyway and she had already had two glasses of Burgundy as well as the Campari, a combination which had made her surprisingly lighthearted, but not so much so that she didn’t realize that her tongue had been loose enough for one evening.

  They sat for a long time over the meal and when at length Emma said with regret, ‘I should go back now if you don’t mind—it’s theatre cleaning day tomorrow,’ which remark naturally enough led to the list on Monday.

  ‘A valve replacement, isn’t it?’ queried the professor. ‘A nice child—I hope we can do something for her.’

  Emma got into the car, liking him even more because he always said ‘we’ and not ‘I’. They talked in a friendly, desultory fashion for the rest of the journey back to the hospital, and when they arrived there he got out of the car too and walked with her to the Nurses’ Home front door, took her key and opened it for her and held her hand for so long that for one exciting moment she thought that he would kiss her. But he didn’t; he gave her back her hand and said merely, ‘A delightful evening, sleep well, Emma.’ So she said ‘Goodnight and thank you’ quietly and went into the home, through the rather bare hall and up the stairs and into her room, where she sat on her bed, just as she was, going over every second of the evening; remembering every word he had said and every smile and the way his eyes crinkled at their corners and how bright those eyes were when he looked at her. At length she got up and undressed slowly, for all the world as though she wasn’t getting up at seven o’clock the next morning, and even when she was in bed she didn’t at once go to sleep, for every time she closed her eyes he was there, behind their lids.

  Sunday was a dull day on duty; books to write up, stores to check, instruments to examine and clean and the laundry to check for mending. Monday was a relief although the morning got off to a bad start—Jessop, within minutes of the first case starting, tripped over a swab bucket and, because the little group round the operating table were sterile, none of
them could stretch out a hand to save her fall, and Tom, the technician, who could have helped, was in the sluice. She was a big girl and she fell hard, letting out an ear-splitting ‘Ow!’ as she did so, so that what with her protest and the bucket rolling around the tiled floor, the noise was enough to justify the surgeons making a protest of their own. In the silence which followed Emma waited for the professor to say something, but beyond a grunt and a few muttered words in his own language which didn’t sound too wrathful, he said nothing at all, and Little Willy and Mr Bone remained silent too. Emma lifted a gloved hand and Jessop lumbered to her feet breathing heavily and came carefully close.

  ‘Get the swabs back in the bucket, Nurse,’ said Emma, carefully calm, ‘and make certain you’ve got them all, then go outside and make sure you’re not hurt anywhere—Tom will cover for you.’

  ‘Yes, Sister—sorry, Sister,’ said poor Jessop, and Emma, hearing the misery in her voice, said kindly, ‘Never mind, there’s no harm done, just try and be very careful for the rest of the list.’

  An injunction which Jessop obeyed to the letter so that by the end of the first long-drawn-out case, Emma’s usually calm nerves were on edge from Jessop’s painful efforts to be a model theatre nurse. When at last the patient was borne away and the men had stripped off their gowns and gloves and gone along to the office for coffee, Emma, leaving the readying of the theatre to Staff, followed them with some misgiving. Only a saint would operate with someone like Nurse Jessop puffing and blowing around the theatre and the professor, she felt sure, was no saint. He was sitting back with his eyes closed when she went in, but opened them at once to give her a long stare so that she said hastily:

  ‘I’m sorry about that, sir—I’ll put Nurse in the sluice for the rest of the list, but if I hadn’t allowed her to stay for the rest of the case she would have lost her nerve.’

  ‘Quite so, Sister,’ agreed the professor gravely. ‘I almost lost mine,’ and when Emma gave him a guilty look, he smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t banish her, I daresay that one day she will prove her worth.’

  Emma poured the coffee. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she exclaimed in a relieved voice. ‘I’m still sure she’ll do well once she’s found her feet.’ An inept remark which set everyone laughing.

  The day went badly all the same, for the next two cases proved to be ones which, however great the professor’s skill, weren’t going to profit very long from it. But the last case was better; the patient would have a good chance of recovery and the results, if he did, would be entirely satisfactory. The professor took off his mask and gown for the last time that morning and left the theatre, tiredness creasing lines between his magnificent nose and his firm mouth. ‘Can we manage to start in half an hour, Sister?’ he asked over one shoulder as he went, and Emma, already frenzied at work on the instruments, nodded cheerfully, knowing that her lunch would be a hastily snatched cup of coffee and a sandwich in the office.

  She organized the work, sent Staff and Cully and Mrs Tate to a hurried dinner and turned back to her own work. Jessop, who worked far better on her own, was clearing theatre with a will as Emma finished the instruments and went into the scrubbing room to put out the gowns and gloves then back again to pick out what they would need for the afternoon’s list. Not very much, thank heaven; they had got through the heavy cases, so the afternoon should be a piece of cake. She went into the sterilizing room, added the instruments to those already in the wire baskets ready for the autoclave and went back to see how Jessop was faring. She had finished and Emma sent her to her dinner as Staff and the others returned and she was able to go herself to the office with her coffee and sandwiches. She had just over ten minutes, time to fill in the book as she ate. She was wolfing down the last sandwich and pouring her second cup of coffee when the professor, with the merest pretence of a knock, walked in.

  ‘Why aren’t you at dinner?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘No time,’ said Emma, her mouth full, ‘and I must get the book written up. Besides,’ she added truthfully, ‘I hate Irish stew.’

  He laughed. ‘If I fetch a cup may I share your coffee?’

  She pointed with her pen. ‘There’s one in the wall cupboard. Do you want some sandwiches? Haven’t you had lunch either?’

  ‘Nothing to eat. I came back to see if we could fit in a repair of diaphragmatic hernia this week. How about Wednesday?’

  Emma leafed through the tidy heaps of papers and notes on the desk. ‘Yes, if you don’t mind starting an hour earlier or work an hour later.’

  ‘Wednesday then. We’ll start early if you can manage that. Now, if you’ll let me have those case notes I’ll get them started.’

  She handed them across the desk and he pulled up the chair and sat down opposite her, taking up far too much room, his vivid head only inches away from her. She studied his downbent head covertly. There was no sign of a grey hair and there really should be; he was forty, after all. He looked up suddenly to surprise her and there was a gleam in his eyes which she imagined to be laughter as she bent her head hastily over her own work and kept it so until Staff put her head round the door to tell them that the theatre was ready.

  The afternoon, unlike the morning, went with incredible smoothness so that she got off duty punctually and after changing, went to meet Little Willy in the forecourt. As he had followed the professor out of the theatre that afternoon he had hesitated and then returned to where she was bending over a trolley.

  ‘How about a meal out?’ he had asked, and looked so beseechingly at her that she had instantly agreed. Now she got into his Austin Cooper waiting in the forecourt and exchanged a casual greeting as he turned out of the gates, where they passed the Rolls, whispering past them in the opposite direction. The professor lifted a hand in greeting and Emma longed to stop and run after him and tell him that she was only going with Little Willy because he had looked so lonely—a ridiculous impulse, she chided herself, for Professor Teylingen wouldn’t care tuppence who she went out with.

  Little Willy turned the car towards the city’s centre. ‘That man works like an ox,’ he remarked. ‘This afternoon after I’d asked you to come out he asked me if we had a date this evening and when I said yes, he said he’d got nothing much to do; he’d go in himself and have a look at the valve replacement.’ He crossed a square and shot down a side street. ‘Will Pip’s suit you?’

  Pip’s was a small restaurant where one could eat substantially for a moderate sum. ‘Fine,’ said Emma, and wondered if the professor imagined that she and Little Willy were keen on each other. The idea annoyed her so much that she frowned and Little Willy, settling himself opposite her at a small table by the window asked her if she felt ill, then without bothering to wait for a reply wanted to know if ham salad would suit her. His manner was so absentminded that she was constrained to ask, ‘What’s the matter, Willy? Do you want to tell me something?’

  His answer was far too quick. ‘Lord, no, whatever made you think that? It’s your weekend, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma, and waited patiently.

  ‘Your—that is, Kitty’s coming down again, I suppose?’

  So that was it. ‘Yes, she is,’ said Emma kindly. ‘She’ll be here on Thursday evening about five and I never get off until at least half past. If you see her as you leave theatre will you rush her over to the Home and tell her to go to my room and make herself some tea?’

  He brightened visibly as she had known he would. He was twenty-eight and she suspected that he hadn’t had a great deal to do with girls. He had told her once that he liked her because she didn’t frighten him and she had wanted to laugh then, but since that time she had come to know that he was fiercely shy, but once that shyness had been breached, he was a very nice man. She started, in the most casual way imaginable, to talk about Kitty.

  It was Thursday afternoon at last, the last case had left the theatre and Emma was bustling about, clearing up in a hurry so that she could get away on time for once. Staff was back from tea, so
were Cully and Mrs Tate, she only needed to get the needles sorted and Staff would take over. Little Willy had gone half way through the last case and Peter Moore had taken his place; he had left the theatre too, walking importantly because he had done the skin stitches and was still glowing from the professor’s ‘Very nice, Moore.’

  Five minutes later Emma left the theatre and made for the office to collect her cloak and bag. The professor was sitting at the desk writing and without looking up, said quietly, ‘Ah, Emma, do sit down a minute.’

  She sat reluctantly. Kitty would be there by now and time was precious.

  ‘Relax, Emma,’ said the professor, still not looking up. ‘You have plenty of time; you’re going with me.’

  Emma’s nicely shaped mouth dropped open. She closed it firmly and said with equal firmness, ‘No, I’m not. It’s my long weekend—I’m going home, Kitty’s waiting for me.’

  ‘I know. Your mother has been kind enough to invite me for the weekend too—I had a letter from her, I can’t think how I overlooked telling you about it.’ He looked vague. ‘We’ve been busy, haven’t we, and it slipped my mind. It seems sensible that you should both come in my car, does it not?’

  Emma goggled at him, nodded wordlessly and then frowned. ‘However busy we were I can’t think how you came to forget,’ she said severely, and then was quite disarmed when he said:

  ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure if you would like the idea, but I very much wanted to meet your mother again. It seemed wise to say nothing until it was—er—too late.’

  ‘Well, really,’ said Emma, quite exasperated, ‘anyone would think that I was a—a—’ She paused, at a loss for words.

  ‘I’m sure you’re not,’ interposed the professor in a soothing voice, ‘and I hope you will forgive me.’

  ‘Why ever should I forgive you for coming to stay the weekend?’

  ‘No, for dissembling,’ he corrected her, looking so humble that she burst out laughing.