Never the Time and the Place

They rounded the lake, made their way through the grottos and went through the gates as twilight descended on the little cottages beyond it.

“Let’s go into the church?” suggested Mr. van Tacx, and took her arm. It was still open, the last of the daylight lighting up the stone knight on his tomb just inside the door. They wandered down the aisle and went into the tiny chapel on one side. Then they wandered back toward the door and stopped by mutual consent to look back at the dim gentleness of the interior.

“I should like to be married here,” said Mr. van Tacx surprisingly. And when Josephine gave him an amazed look— “To you, of course, Josephine.”

He sounded quite sure about it.

Romance readers around the world were sad to note the passing of Betty Neels in June 2001. Her career spanned thirty years, and she continued to write into her ninetieth year. To her millions of fans, Betty epitomized the romance writer, and yet she began writing almost by accident. She had retired from nursing, but her inquiring mind still sought stimulation. Her new career was born when she heard a lady in her local library bemoaning the lack of good romance novels. Betty’s first book, Sister Peters in Amsterdam, was published in 1969, and she eventually completed 134 books. Her novels offer a reassuring warmth that was very much a part of her own personality, and her spirit and genuine talent will live on in all her stories.

Never the Time and the Place

Betty Neels

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER ONE

THE RAIN pouring down from a grey, sodden sky had turned the gold and red of the October afternoon into a landscape of gloom, with rivulets of water trickling on to the road from the high banks on either side of it and a never ending shower of leaves drifting down from the trees clustered behind them. But the girl squelching along the lane didn’t in the least mind the weather; to be in the country, away from chimney pots and little mean streets of small dismal houses and the never ending noise, was contentment. She was going at a good pace, well wrapped against the weather, tendrils of bright chestnut hair hanging bedraggled around her pretty face, wet from the rain. She was a tall girl and well built and even the wringing mackintosh she wore couldn’t disguise her splendid figure.

There was a dog with her; a black Labrador, his sleek coat soaked, plodding along beside her with evident enjoyment, tongue lolling, his eyes turned to her face every moment or so, listening to her quiet voice. ‘So you see, Cuthbert, you’ll not have me to take you for walks—you’ll have to make do with Mike or Natalie when they’re home. Of course, I’ll come home whenever I can but Yorkshire is a long way.’ She came to a halt and stared down at the devoted creature. ‘I ought to be feeling very happy, but I’m not. Do you suppose it’s wedding nerves? I’ve got the awful feeling that I don’t want to get married at all. Oh, Cuthbert…’ She bent right down and twiddled his wet ears, and he licked her hand gently.

Very few cars came along the lane and what with the noise of the rain and the wind in the trees, she hadn’t heard the car coming up the hill behind them; a Bentley, sliding to a dignified halt within a few feet of them. She stood up then, hushed Cuthbert’s indignant bark, and went to poke her head through the window by the driver.

‘You should have sounded your horn,’ she told the man at the wheel severely. ‘You could have run us down.’

She found herself looking into two of the coldest blue eyes she had ever seen. His voice was just as cold. ‘Young lady, I am not in the habit of running anyone or anything down. Is this a private road?’

‘Lord no. It leads to Ridge Giffard from East Giffard and after that there’s Tisbury.’

‘I am aware of my surroundings. I was wondering why you had the effrontery to criticise my driving on a public road.’

Gently the girl’s softly curving mouth rounded into an indignant O and her large grey eyes narrowed. A rat trap of a mouth in a rugged, handsome face; pepper and salt hair, cut short, and a commanding nose; she surveyed them without haste. At length she said kindly, in the tone of voice one might use to humour an ill tempered child, ‘You’re touchy, aren’t you? And a stranger to these parts?’ She straightened up. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you. You say you’re aware of your surroundings, so I won’t need to tell you that they’ll be moving the cows across at Pake’s Farm a mile along on the next bend.’ She added, ‘A pedigree herd, too.’

The man in the car gave a low rumble of laughter although he didn’t look amused. ‘No, you don’t need to tell me, young lady, but I can see that it gives you a good deal of satisfaction to do so.’ He asked to surprise her, ‘Are you married?’

And when she shook her head, ‘Something for a man to be thankful for.’

She wasn’t in the least put out. ‘That could be a compliment,’ she told him sweetly. ‘Mind how you go.’

The cold eyes swept over her before he drove away. It was like a bucket of cold water.

‘Anyone else would have offered us a lift,’ she told Cuthbert. ‘Not that we would have accepted.’

She started walking again, the afternoon would soon turn into an early evening and they had another mile or so to go.

The pair of them negotiated a gate presently and took to the fields, going at a right angle to the road, to cross a stile at the end of the second field and come into a narrow lane running between trees. It went quite steeply down hill in a series of bends, passing a cottage or two on the way until the village appeared; a cluster of cottages, a shop or two and half a dozen larger houses, with ancient tiled roofs and eighteenth century fronts. The girl went past them all, waving once or twice to the few people in the street, and turned in through an open gateway at the end of the village. The drive was short, leading to an outbuilding used as a garage and then turning to broaden out before the low, sprawling house. It was built of red brick like most of the houses in the village but it had a thatched roof and mullioned windows and a very solid front door, ignored by the girl who turned down the side of the house, went through a tumbledown stone archway and opened a door leading from the garden.

The room she went into was small with a stone flagged floor, probably in earlier days a garden room, but now a repository for a collection of shabby coats and mackintoshes, shapeless caps and hats and an untidy row of footwear of all kinds. She took a towel from a peg on the wall, rubbed Cuthbert dry and then took off her own mac and opened another door leading this time to a short passage which in its turn ended in the kitchen. A large, low ceilinged room with an old-fashioned scrubbed table in its centre, windsor chairs at either end of it, and a wooden dresser taking up most of one wall. There was an Aga Stove and a rag rug spread before it on the brick floor, occupied by a tabby cat who hardly moved as Cuthbert flung himself down with a contented sigh. There were a number of doors leading from the room, one of which was partly open.

‘Josephine?’ asked a muffled voice from behind it, ‘is that you, dear? Where did I put the blackcurrant jam—I thought it was on the top shelf…’

The pantry door was pushed open and Mrs Dowling came into the kitchen. They were very alike, mother and daughter, the one still showing signs of the beauty of the other, both with grey eyes and gentle mouths, although Mrs Dowling’s hair was heavily streaked with silver.

‘Nice walk?’ she asked, forgetting the jam.

‘Lovely. I can’t think why I work in London, Mother, when I could spend my days here…’

‘Well, you won’t be there much longer, darling. In another month or two you’ll be married to Malcolm and I daresay the Yorkshire Moors are just as beautiful as our bit of the country.’

Josephine cut a slice off the loaf on the table and began to eat it. She said thoughtfully, ‘Well, yes, they’re beautiful, but they’re a long way away.’

‘You’ll have Malcolm’s mother and father,’ her mother pointed out.

‘So I shall,’ Josephine agreed slowly. She had fought a long hard battle with herself over her future mother-in-law; they didn’t like each other and never would. Josephine, voicing her doubts to Malcolm, had come up against an easy-going amusement which refused to recognise her difficulties. They would settle down nicely, he had assured her, half laughing, it was because they didn’t know each other very well, all that would be changed when they saw each other daily. A prospect which made Josephine shudder; Malcolm was going into his father’s practice and was perfectly content to live within a stone’s throw of his parents’ house; it was one of the things which worried her, especially if she were to wake in the night and think about it, although in the morning her worries seemed rather silly.

She said, ‘The jam—it’s on the bottom shelf, right at the back. I’ll get it.’ She emerged presently from the cupboard and put the pot on the table. ‘I met a man while I was out. In a Bentley—I’ve never seen him before—is there someone staying up at the Manor?’

Mrs Dowling was cutting bread and butter. ‘Not that I know of, but the Vicar’s wife mentioned someone saying they were staying over at Branton House. She didn’t know anything about him, though she’d heard that he was a foreigner.’

‘Never an Arab going to buy the place?’

‘Heaven forbid—the Forsyths have been there for hundreds of years. I daresay your father will know.’

But presently, sitting round the fire in the comfortable, shabby drawing room, she forgot about him. Her father, the local GP, had been at Salisbury Hospital, visiting a patient and an old friend after lunching with colleagues, and the talk was of them and their doings. Presently he got up to take evening surgery. Josephine cleared away the tea things and washed the delicate old china and rubbed up the silver spoons which her mother had always used each day, and then started to prepare the supper. Tomorrow evening, she thought with a sigh, she would be back in London, sitting in her office writing the report; it would be a busy day—theatre day—the gyny ward was always full but the turnover was brisk and for the most part the patients were very cheerful. She loved her work and she was going to miss it when she married Malcolm. It was only recently that she had had niggling doubts; things that hadn’t seemed to matter too much now mattered a great deal; Yorkshire was a far cry from Ridge Giffard and she was essentially a home loving girl. She had always been content, living in the old house, coming home from boarding school and then leaving it to train as a nurse, but even then she had come home on her free days, and now, a Ward Sister and the possessor of a second-hand Mini, she found it easy enough to drive to and fro when she had her free weekends. She would miss Mike and Natalie, she didn’t see much of them these days for they were both away from home for a good part of the year, Natalie at school taking her O levels and Mike in his first year at medical school. And the house she and Malcolm were to have—it was small and modern and had what she considered to be a pokey little garden. It worried her that she minded that so much. Surely, if she loved Malcolm, it shouldn’t matter?

She fed Cuthbert his supper and Mrs Whisker, the tabby, and fetched the lamb cutlets from the fridge. She liked cooking. Now she set to work cooking cucumber gently in a big pan, egg and breadcrumbing the cutlets and adding them to the cucumber and while they were simmering gently, she put on the potatoes and peeped at the celery braising in the oven. Her father would be hungry; the waiting room had been full and the phone had been ringing often enough; by the time he had done his evening rounds it would be eight o’clock or half past. Apple crumble and cream would make a nice afters; she set to work happily.

Putting her pie in the oven presently, she wondered idly about the man in the Bentley; he would be hundreds of miles away by now and would have forgotten her entirely. It surprised her that she felt vague regret about this.

He wasn’t hundreds of miles away; he was a bare half dozen, having a drink before dinner with his host and hostess at Branton House, exchanging polite conversation about the weather. During a comfortable pause—for they were old friends and didn’t need to keep up an unceasing chat—he remarked idly, ‘I met a girl as I was coming here. A strapping creature with a lovely face and enormous grey eyes. She had a Labrador with her and they both appeared to be enjoying the weather. She gave me a sound telling off for not sounding my horn. I might add that she and the dog were standing in the centre of the road and seemed to consider it to be theirs.’

His hostess laughed. ‘Josephine Dowling—she’s a darling, the eldest of our doctor’s three children. She’s a Ward Sister at St Michael’s—I daresay you’ll meet her.’

The man’s eyes were half closed. ‘I look forward to that. But perhaps she won’t recognise me…’

‘Don’t be silly, Julius.’ His hostess smiled widely. He was a tall man powerfully built and dressed with a quiet elegance; moreover, he had a face which a woman wouldn’t forget easily. She had no doubt that when Josephine saw him she would know him at once. A pity she was to be married—she might have taken Julius’s mind off his recently broken engagement…

Twenty-four hours later, Josephine was sitting exactly as she knew she would be, in her office at the end of the landing outside the ward, with the door open so that she could keep an eye on the comings and goings of the visitors. It had been a very busy day; there had been four cases for theatre and Mr Bull, the surgeon, had been in a fiendish temper for all of them so that the Student Nurses who had accompanied the patients had come back with eyes like saucers and a greatly increased knowledge of rude words. After the last case he had come on to the ward looking like a thunder cloud, dragging behind him a posse of reluctant lesser fry, trying to avoid his eye and terrified that he might shoot questions at them as he went from bed to bed. Josephine, quite used to him, gave him a soothing good afternoon and watched him blow out his moustache, a sure sign that he was put out.

‘Fools,’ he uttered strongly, ‘I have nothing but fools to work for me.’ Josephine drew herself up to her splendid height and met his choleric eye. ‘Not you, Jo—depend on you, don’t I? And why you have to go and marry some young fool of a GP. I don’t know… How’s that last patient? I knew I’d find CA, but I think she’ll do.’

Josephine led him across the ward to where the operation cases were sleeping peacefully behind their screens. ‘She’s doing nicely, sir. She came back from the Recovery Room an hour ago. I’m glad she’s okay—her husband phoned—he’ll be in presently—not to see her, he just wants to know what’s happened.’

Mr Bull might have a nasty temper but he was a kind man as well. ‘I’ll be in the hospital for another hour, if he comes before then let me know. I’ll have a word with him.’

Josephine beamed at him. ‘How nice of you, he’ll be so relieved.’ She went to the bed while Mr Bull took a look at his patient and then went in turn to the other three.

‘Might as well do a quick round,’ he muttered and set off with Josephine keeping pace, her Staff Nurse, Joan Makepeace, trotting behind, closely followed by the students.

There were sixteen patients in the ward and half of that number were sufficiently recovered from their operations to gather, cosily dressing-gowned, in little groups and discuss and enlarge upon their various conditions. They did this cheerfully, their troubles nicely behind them, the prospect of going home in the near future buoying up their spirits.

Mr Bull waited a little impatiently while the nurses hurried these ladies back to sit by their beds, and then spoke a few words to each of them. For some reason which Josephine never quite fathomed, his patients, almost without exception, adored him. He wasn’t particularly nice to them, but even when imparting some unpleasant news to them he managed to convey his certainty that he would be able to cope with it and restore them to their homes in perfect health.

But most of his time was taken up with the patients who hadn’t reached the happy state of shuffling along to the day room, with these he spent time and trouble, reassuring them, reading up their notes carefully, sometimes asking questions that were pertinent to the apprehensive students behind him. His quick round had taken a good half hour and had left Josephine busier than ever, rearranging her patients once more, sending nurses to a tea they had almost missed, giving the Staff Nurse a hand with the evening medicine round. She sat now, waiting for the last of the visitors to go so that she could do her final round and then finish her report, turning over in her mind Mr Bull’s parting shot as he marched out of the ward. ‘I’m off to Brussels for a month, Jo, lecturing and marking exam papers, heaven help me. An old friend and colleague will be standing in for me—clever bloke, well known and highly thought of.’ He had given a guffaw of delighted laughter. ‘Don’t let him oust that fellow you are going to marry.’

She had said a little starchily, ‘That’s not likely, sir. I hope you enjoy your stay in Brussels.’ And at the same time she had felt a twinge of excitement and interest.

The night staff, coming on duty, interrupted her thoughts; she dismissed them at once and started reading the report.

This took some time; the four operation cases were gone into with meticulous detail and then the remaining ladies discussed at varying lengths. ‘And Mrs Prosser,’ finished Josephine, referring to an elderly lady who had given more trouble than the whole ward put together, ‘Mr Bull sees no reason why she shouldn’t go home in two days’ time—that’ll be Saturday. She’s dead set on staying the weekend, though. Says there’ll be no one at home to look after her. Nobody came to see her this evening, so I couldn’t discover if that’s true or not, but we do need the bed and she’s already been in several days longer than usual.’

She got up to go. ‘And Mr Bull tells me he’ll be going away for a month. He’s got someone coming to do his work, though. Have a good night.’

She picked up the big bag she took on duty with her, filled with the impedimenta needed by a young woman cut off from such things as she might require in the way of make-up, her purse, the letters she hadn’t had time to read, and an assortment of pens, her gold watch and a spare pair of tights, and left the ward. The nurses who had been on duty with her had already gone, the landing was silent as she crossed it, went through the wide swing doors at the further end and started down the stone staircase. She was in the more modern part of the hospital, but not as modern as all that; woman’s surgical and the gyny ward had been built some thirty years before and attached to the central, early Victorian block, a not very happy union, architecturally speaking. It was even worse on the opposite side, where the hospital had been enlarged only recently. It held the most modern of equipment and boasted colour schemes in the wards and such refinements as a tasteful waiting room for relatives, cloakrooms for the nursing staff and silent swift lifts which never broke down. But strangely, the nurses preferred the Victorian wing, despite the lack of colour schemes, even preferring in many cases to work in the central block, where the medical patients were housed in gloomy wards which no amount of modernising would ever disguise.

Josephine sped down the staircase, poked her head round the swing doors of the ward below her own, and finding Mercy Latimer already gone, went on her way. On the ground floor she crossed the entrance hall and went down a dark passage at its back which ended in a large door with ‘Nursing Staff Only’ painted on it. She went through this into another passage, very clean and smelling of furniture polish, and started up the stairs at the end. The Sisters had bed sitting rooms on the first floor, reached by a swing door on the landing and once through that she could hear the steady murmur of voices coming from the end of the corridor before her. She unlocked her door, flung her cap and bag on the bed and went on towards the sound of rattling tea cups.

There were half a dozen young women crammed into the small kitchen, intent on making tea. She was on good terms with them all, for they had all trained, just as she had, at St Michael’s.

‘Late off, aren’t you?’ asked Mercy.

‘Mr Bull did a round and it took me the rest of the afternoon and evening to catch up. He’s going away for a month…’

‘Bully for you,’ the small fair-haired girl spoke. ‘Think of all the empty beds.’

‘You’ll be lucky.’ Caroline Webster, the Senior Theatre Sister, spooned tea into a giant pot. ‘There’s someone coming to do his work for him. A glutton for work, so I’m told. Coming into theatre tomorrow afternoon with Mr Bull to cast an eye around. I expect you’ll get him, too, Jo.’

Jo put milk in a mug and spooned in sugar lavishly. ‘I hope not, you know what it’s like the day after ops, one long rush with drips and dope and the poor dears not feeling their best. And Mrs Prosser,’ she added gloomily, ‘he’ll be someone new to complain to. You see, just as we’ve got her all fixed up to go home on Saturday, she’ll get him to let her stay.’

The night had not gone well, Josephine discovered when she went on duty in the morning. The operation cases had, true enough, slept their way through the night in a drugged sleep, but everybody else had been disturbed on several occasions by Mrs Prosser, who declared herself to be dying, neglected and in need of cups of tea, cold drinks and bed-pans. That she had been on her feet for days now and perfectly able to get herself to the loo was an argument delivered in a fierce whisper by the night Staff Nurse, which she swept aside so noisily that they were forced to give in to her. She lay in bed now, looking smug, having declared herself incapable of getting out of her bed.

Josephine listened with a sympathetic ear to the night Staff Nurse’s report and sent her and her junior off duty with a promise that something would be done before the night, and once her nurses had dispersed to see to breakfasts she asked Joan to stay behind for a few minutes.

‘The side ward, the one at the other end of the ward that we don’t use unless we have to—we’ll put her in there. She’s not to be neglected, mind, but she must get up as usual—she can sit there and have her meals there, and when Mr Bull does his round I’ll see if he’ll talk to her.’

Josephine supervised the move. Mrs Prosser, at first delighted at getting so much attention, became incensed when she discovered that she was to be on her own. Josephine waited until she had finished her diatribe, forcefully delivered, about the cruelty of nurses and herself above all, and then she pointed out reasonably, ‘Well, Mrs Prosser, if you are feeling as poorly as you say, then I think that you should be kept as quiet as possible. I think Mr Bull will agree with me. He’s doing a round later this morning and you can tell him exactly what is wrong. Your temperature and pulse are quite normal, and you ate your breakfast and you haven’t been sick.’

Mrs Prosser said a rude word, but Josephine, inured to the colourful vocabulary of the majority of her patients, took not a bit of notice. She left Mrs Prosser’s door half open and swept back down the ward, distinctly eye catching in her dark blue cotton uniform and frilled cap; other hospitals might dress their nurses in nylon and paper caps, St Michael’s hadn’t changed the material or the cut since they were first designed in the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps they weren’t as comfortable as the modern overall, but the St Michael’s nurses wore them with pride and spent time getting their caps just so.