The End of the Rainbow

All the same, she was a little apprehensive as they seated themselves in the elegant tea-room; the place seemed to her excited mind to be full of fur coats and what the fashion magazines always referred to as little dresses, which cost the earth, she had no doubt. She took off her headscarf and smoothed her neat head 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 van der Graaf came exactly two days later, although Olympia was unaware of his visit until Miss Snow came fluttering upstairs with a message that she was to go to her aunt’s office immediately. Olympia consigned old Mr Ross, tottering to slow recovery after a stroke, to Miss Snow’s care and went slowly downstairs, wondering what she had done wrong now.

She was quite unprepared for the sight of the Dutchman sitting calmly in the chair opposite her aunt’s desk, the very picture of a man who was confident that he would get his own way. He got up as she went in, smiling a little at her surprise, and said easily: ‘Good afternoon, Miss Randle. I have been persuading your aunt to allow you to act as guide; there are things I wish to purchase and I am woefully ignorant as to how to set about my shopping. I remembered you and I wondered if you would be so kind?’

‘Oh, that would…’ She paused and began again. ‘You’re very kind to think of me, but I’m working until eight o’clock.’

Miss Randle interrupted her in an irritable manner; she wasn’t used to people riding roughshod over her wishes, but she seemed quite unable to argue with this tiresome giant of a man. ‘I will make an exception, Olympia, you may take your free time this afternoon, but you will, of course, return to evening duty at half past five.’

It was barely half past two; Olympia murmured dutifully and got herself out of the room; her aunt would have to take over until she got back, there were no other trained nurses on duty—she might change her mind, thought Olympia, desperately tearing off her uniform and putting on the tweed suit like lightning. Thank heaven it was a fine day even if cold. She did her hair with a speed which did nothing to improve her appearance, tucked a silk scarf given her by a grateful patient round her neck, snatched up her gloves and bag and raced upstairs. He was still there. He took a leisurely farewell of her aunt, assured her of his gratitude, opened the door for Olympia and closed it with firmness behind him.

‘What do you want to buy?’ asked Olympia at once.

He stood on the pavement outside the house, deep in thought. ‘Well, let me see, something for Ria—my little daughter, you know. She is almost five years old and very precocious, I’m afraid. Her mother died a week or so after she was born.’

Olympia restrained her feet from the impatient dance she felt like executing; any moment Aunt Maria might change her mind and they were still standing just outside the door. Quite shocked at what he had told her, she said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and felt inadequate. Of course he would have been married; men like him didn’t go through life like monks; perhaps he had loved his wife very much, perhaps he was still grieving for her. She tried again. ‘It must be terrible for you.’

He looked taken aback, but only for a moment. ‘Ria is a handful,’ he said blandly. ‘Shall we go?’

They went to Selfridges, this time to the toy department, where, after a prolonged tour of its delights, Olympia, asked to choose a suitable present for a five-year-old girl without worrying too much about the price, picked out a doll’s house. It was a thing which she herself would have loved to possess and never had; it was furnished down to the last miniature saucepan in its magnificent kitchen, and was everything which a little girl could wish for. She spent a long time hanging over it, switching on the lights, opening and shutting the miniature doors, rearranging the furniture. When at last she looked up it was to find her companion’s blue eyes regarding her with a tolerant patience which coloured her cheeks with guilty pink. She said apologetically: ‘I always wanted a doll’s house—your little daughter will love this one.’

She watched while he wrote a cheque for it—a fabulous sum, she considered, and fell to wondering how it was that he was able to write cheques when he was a Dutchman, living, presumably, in Holland. She spoke her thought. ‘You live in Holland, don’t you?’

He smiled. ‘Oh, yes—I have a large practice in the country town called Middelburg. That is my home, but I do a good deal of lecturing, some of it in England.’

So that accounted for the cheque book. ‘Have you been here ever since we—since you helped me that day?’

‘No. I wished to see you again, so I came over three days ago.’

She had nothing to say to that, and anyway the saleslady wanted to talk to him about the packing up of the doll’s house. When he turned to her again it was only to say: ‘I think we have time for tea before you have to be back. Shall we go to Fortnum and Mason again, or would you prefer somewhere else?’

Olympia could not, from her limited experience, think of any place to better it, so she murmured a polite: ‘That would be nice,’ while her sober head buzzed with the effort of guessing why he had wanted to see her. They were in the taxi, travelling in a companionable silence, before a possible reason struck her. He was looking for a governess for his small daughter and had picked on her. The possibility of such a miracle filled her with a warm glow of delight, to be instantly quenched by the recollection of her promise to her aunt—only if she were to marry might she leave, Aunt Maria had said. She clenched the cheap handbag on her lap with suddenly desperate fingers so that her companion, watching her from his corner, asked: ‘Supposing you tell me what’s bothering you?’

Her voice rose several notes in its urgency. ‘Nothing—nothing at all.’

He said, his manner very placid, ‘We haven’t known each other very long, but I hoped you might feel able to confide in me.’

She turned to look at him. ‘Confide…?’ she began, and then: ‘In you?’

‘Next time, perhaps,’ he replied casually as the taxi stopped, and for the rest of their afternoon together, he talked about nothing in particular. Only as he walked up to the front door of the nursing home with her and she put out her hand did he say, ‘I’m coming in—I wish to see your aunt.’

Olympia allowed her hand to drop back to her side, pausing before she opened the door. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I should like her to understand quite clearly that I wish to get to know you,’ he said to astonish her.

She stared up at him for a long moment and spoke wistfully: ‘It won’t be any good, you know, she won’t let me go…’ And she was unaware of what she had said.

He smiled, but his voice was firm. ‘I think that she will.’

Olympia opened the door. She had never known anyone get the better of Aunt Maria, but presumably there had to be a first time for everything. She wished him success from the bottom of her heart. ‘I’ll see if she’s in her office,’ she offered, and left him standing in the chill of the hall.

She was back within a minute. ‘Aunt will be pleased to see you,’ she told him, and shivered. He paused beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘This damned cold hall,’ he remarked feelingly, then astonished her by asking, ‘Why are you called Olympia?’

She smiled then and her eyes widened and twinkled at him so that she looked pretty. ‘Father was an archaeologist, he met Mother during a dig in Greece. I—I like it.’

‘So do I.’ He went through the door behind her as he spoke, leaving her to run downstairs and change back into uniform.

She had no moment of time in which to think about him after that; her aunt had done none of the things the nurses did towards easing the evening’s work. There were beds to turn down, medicines to give, supper trays to lay, the old people to help with their preparations for bed, and Miss Snow, if she were to be believed, had been left to cope with the patients’ teas all by herself and was so incensed in consequence that Olympia took ten minutes of her precious time to soothe her down and persuade her not to give in her notice then and there. Perhaps, she thought, as she dished out the light supper at a great rate, it would be as well if Aunt Maria told Doctor van der Graaf not to call again.

But she hadn’t, or if she had, he had taken no notice of her, for he came again the very next day, this time in the morning just as Olympia was going off duty for the split her aunt insisted was necessary for her to take twice a week—that meant that she went on duty at half past seven in the morning, was free from half past ten until one o’clock, and then worked through the remainder of the day until the night staff came on, a wretched arrangement which no hospital nurse would have tolerated unless circumstances made it vital. She found him standing in the hall on the way down to her room and had given him a rather surprised good morning, followed by an inquiry as to whether he wished to see her aunt again.

‘God forbid,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve come for you. Your aunt gave me the times of your off duty—I thought we might go somewhere and have coffee—lunch is out of the question, I take it.’

He stood looking at her, his head on one side. ‘I thought that the modern nurse had improved her lot to a certain extent; it seems that doesn’t apply to this place.’

‘My aunt hasn’t many nurses—only me and Mrs Cooper, and she’s part-time. Miss Snow and Mrs Drew aren’t trained—they’re very good, though.’

‘You do not complain. I suspect that the writer of that poem—I can’t remember much of it—had you in mind when she wrote: “While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.”’

She was quite shocked. ‘Oh, you mustn’t think that; I’m not kind at all. Sometimes I could leave everything just as it is, and run through the door—if you knew how I want to escape…’

‘But you don’t?’

‘I promised… I explained to you…’

He didn’t answer, only smiled at her and told her to go and put on something warm; the March wind was cold, as though it were making a last effort to keep April at bay. Olympia put on the suit again and tied a scarf over her hair because the only hat she had was a dreary affair reserved for church. They were going to have coffee, he had said—there were plenty of small cafés not too far away, and none of them had a smart clientele. She sighed unconsciously as she ran upstairs to join him; perhaps today, if he had got his way with Aunt Maria, he would offer her a job. Her heart leapt at the prospect and she beamed at him as she reached the hall.

There was a taxi waiting and she looked at him questioningly as she got in. ‘A wretched day,’ he offered. ‘I thought we might go somewhere warm and cheerful.’

They went to a small Viennese café near Bond Street and over their delicious coffee and creamy cakes, Olympia found herself talking to her companion as though she had known him all her life. Indeed, afterwards, when she was back in the home, once more at work, she chided herself for talking too much. She would have to guard her tongue, for he had a way of asking questions…she frowned, not that that mattered; he had said nothing about seeing her again.

But it was the first of a succession of similar outings. Olympia, longing to ask him what he had said to her aunt so that lady had raised no objections to his continued visits, made wild, unsatisfying guesses as to his reasons for wishing to seek her company; surely if he had wanted her for a job he would have mentioned it by now. But his visits continued, sometimes with Doctor Ross, but more often his arrival was timed to coincide with her off-duty. It was at the end of a second week of afternoon walks and leisurely coffee drinking that she ventured to ask him if he was on holiday. They were strolling round the Zoo at the time, taking advantage of the thin April sunshine and watching the antics of the monkeys.

He turned to look at her. ‘No,’ he told her with deliberation, ‘I have been attending a seminar—it finishes tomorrow. I am also visiting an aunt—an Englishwoman, the widow of my father’s elder brother.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘I should like you to meet her. You are free tomorrow afternoon, are you not?’

She nodded.

‘Good—I will call for you about two o’clock.’

‘Then you will be going back to Middleburg?’

‘Yes.’ They strolled on in silence while she thought that this was the end—well, almost the end, of their friendship. She was going to miss him very much, there was no denying that fact; what to him had been a small interlude had been for her a delightful few weeks in her dull life. Of course, she knew very little about him and nothing at all of his life—just as well perhaps, since she was unlikely to have a place in it after tomorrow. These rather unhappy thoughts were interrupted by his cheerful: ‘How about tea? There’s time enough before you have to go back.’

She dressed with extra care the following afternoon; the same tweed suit, of course, but having received her miserable salary a day or so earlier, she had bought a new woolly from Marks and Spencer—a pale apricot which gave her face a pleasant glow and cheered up the suit enormously; she had bought a brown velvet bow to set in front of her bun of hair, too; studying herself in the long looking glass at the back of the hall, she decided that she was at least presentable although woefully dowdy. It was to be hoped that the aunt wasn’t a fashionable old lady who would despise her.

It seemed at first that her forebodings might prove true. They had walked, she and the doctor, for it was a fine day and his aunt lived in Little Venice, in one of the terraces facing the Grand Union Canal. They had entered the park through the Gloucester Gate and crossed it diagonally to arrive within a stone’s throw of a row of substantial houses.

‘A flat?’ hazarded Olympia, gazing up at their solid fronts, with their well-painted doors and window boxes. Her companion took her arm and guided her through a solid gate set between equally solid walls.

‘No—the whole house.’ He pealed the bell and the door was opened with alacrity by a neat elderly woman who smiled at them as they went in. In the hall he helped Olympia out of her jacket, divested himself of his own coat and threw it on a chair in what she considered to be a rather careless manner, and upon the elderly woman begging them to go upstairs, did so, taking Olympia with him.

The room they entered was very fine; large, and filled with large furniture too, covered with silver photo frames enclosing a variety of out-of-date photographs, an astonishing assortment of china and silver and the whole shrouded with heavy dark blue curtains half drawn over the old-fashioned Nottingham lace which screened the windows. And the lady who came across the room to meet them matched it very nicely for size; she was tall and stout, with a straight back and a proudly held head crowned with iron-grey hair, dressed smoothly. She might have been any age from the lightness of her step and the elegant timelessness of her clothes. Olympia’s heart sank; she had no idea why Doctor van der Graaf had brought her here with him, but she felt sure that it had been a mistake. Only his firm hand under her arm, propelling her gently forward, prevented her from turning tail and racing away from someone she felt instinctively would make her feel dowdier than she already was.

She couldn’t have been more mistaken; her companion’s, ‘Hullo, Aunt Betsy,’ changed everything. The majestic, elegant woman surging towards her wasn’t anyone to be nervous of after all; her exquisitely made up face wore a beaming smile and her voice when she spoke could only be described as cosy.