Betty Neels: The Mistletoe Kiss

Emmy, watching her mother coping with household bills, had given up her hopes of doing something artistic. She drew and painted and embroidered exquisitely, and had set her sights on attending a school of needlework and then starting up on her own-she wasn't sure as what. There had been an advertisement in the paper for a switchboard operator at St Luke's, and she had gone along and got the job.

She had no experience of course, but she had a pleasant voice, a nice manner and she'd been keen to have work. She'd been given a week's training, a month's trial and then had been taken on permanently. It wasn't what she wanted to do, but the money was a great help, and one day her father would find a better post. Indeed, he was already well thought of and there was a chance of promotion.

She made the tea, offered a saucer of milk to Snoodles the cat, handed a biscuit to George the elderly dachshund, and carried the tray into the sitting room.

Over tea she read her father's letter. He had been standing in for a school inspector, and had been away from home for a week. He would be coming home for the weekend, he wrote, but he had been asked to continue covering for his colleague for the next month or so. If he accepted, then it would be possible for Mrs Foster to be with him when it was necessary for him to go further afield.

'Mother, that's wonderful-Father hates being away from home, but if you're with him he won't mind as much, and if they're pleased with him he'll get a better job.'

'I can't leave you here on your own.'

'Of course you can, Mother. I've Snoodles and George for company, and we know the neighbours well enough if I should need anything. I can come home for my lunch hour and take George for a quick walk. I'm sure Father will agree to that. Besides, Father gets moved from one school to the other, doesn't he? When he is nearer home you can be here.'

'I'm sure I don't know, love. The idea of you being on your own…'

Emmy refilled their cups. 'If I had a job in another town, I'd be on my own in some bedsitter, wouldn't I? But I'm at home. And I'm twenty-three…'

'Well, I know your father would like me to be with him. We'll talk about it at the weekend.'

By breakfast time the next morning Mrs Foster was ready to concede that there was really no reason why she shouldn't join her husband, at least for short periods. 'For you're home by six o'clock most evenings, when it's still quite light, and I dare say we'll be home most weekends.'

Emmy agreed cheerfully. She was due to go on night duty in a week's time, but there was no need to remind her mother of that. She went off to catch a bus to the hospital, glad that the rain had ceased and it was a nice autumn day.

The switchboard was busy; it always was on Fridays. Last-minute plans for the weekend, she supposed, on the part of the hospital medical staff-people phoning home, making appointments to play golf, arranging to meet to discuss some case or other-and all these over and above the outside calls, anxious family wanting news of a patient, doctors' wives with urgent messages, other hospitals wanting to contact one or other of the consulting staff. It was almost time for her midday dinner when a woman's voice, speaking English with a strong accent, asked to speak to Professor ter Mennolt.

'Hold the line while I get him for you,' said Emmy. His wife, she supposed, and decided that she didn't much like the voice-very haughty. The voice became a person in her mind's eye, tall and slim and beautiful-because the professor wouldn't look at anything less-and well used to having her own way.

He wasn't in his room, and he wasn't on any of the wards she rang. She paused in her search to reassure the voice that she was still trying, and was rewarded by being told to be quick. He wasn't in Theatre, but he was in the Pathology Lab.

'There you are,' said Emmy, quite forgetting to add 'sir'. 'I've a call for you; will you take it there?'

'Only if it's urgent; I'm occupied at the moment.'

'It's a lady,' Emmy told him. 'She told me to hurry. She speaks English with an accent.'

'Put the call through here.' He sounded impatient.

It wouldn't hurt him to say thank you, reflected Emmy as she assured his caller that she was being put through at once. She got no thanks from her either. 'They must suit each other admirably,' said Emmy under her breath, aware that the bossy woman who went around with a clipboard was coming towards her. As usual she was full of questions-had there been delayed calls? Had Ermentrude connected callers immediately? Had she noted the times?

Emmy said yes to everything. She was a conscientious worker, and although it wasn't a job she would have chosen she realised that she was lucky to have it, and it wasn't boring. She was relieved for her dinner hour presently, and went along to the canteen to eat it in the company of the ward clerks and typists. She got on well with them, and they for their part liked her, though considering her hopelessly out of date, and pitying her in a friendly way because she had been born and brought up in the country and had lacked the pleasures of London. She lacked boyfriends, too, despite their efforts to get her to join them for a visit to a cinema or a pub.

They didn't hold it against her; she was always good-natured, ready to help, willing to cover a relief telephonist if she had a date, listening to emotional outbursts about boyfriends with a sympathetic ear. They agreed among themselves that she was all right-never mind the posh voice; she couldn't help that, could she, with a father who was a schoolmaster? Besides, it sounded OK on the phone, and that was what her job was all about, wasn't it?

Home for the weekend, Mr Foster agreed with Emmy that there was no reason why she shouldn't be at home on her own for a while.

'I'll be at Coventry for a week or ten days, and then several schools in and around London. You don't mind, Emmy?'

She saw her mother and father off on Sunday evening, took George for a walk and went to bed. She wasn't a nervous girl and there were reassuringly familiar noises all around her: Mr Grant next door practising the flute, the teenager across the street playing his stereo, old Mrs Grimes, her other neighbour, shouting at her husband who was deaf. She slept soundly.

She was to go on night duty the next day, which meant that she would be relieved at dinner time and go back to work at eight o'clock that evening. Which gave her time in the afternoon to do some shopping at the row of small shops at the end of the street, take George for a good walk and sit down to a leisurely meal.

There was no phone in the house, so she didn't have to worry about her mother ringing up later in the evening. She cut sandwiches, put Sense and Sensibility and a much thumbed Anthology of English Verse in her shoulder bag with the sandwiches, and presently went back through the dark evening to catch her bus.

When she reached the hospital the noise and bustle of the day had subsided into subdued footsteps, the distant clang of the lifts and the occasional squeak of a trolley's wheels. The relief telephonist was waiting for her, an elderly woman who manned the switchboard between night and day duties.

'Nice and quiet so far,' she told Emmy. 'Hope you have a quiet night.'

Emmy settled herself in her chair, made sure that everything was as it should be and got out the knitting she had pushed in with the books at the last minute. She would knit until one of the night porters brought her coffee.

There were a number of calls: enquiries about patients, anxious voices asking advice as to whether they should bring a sick child to the hospital, calls to the medical staff on duty.

Later, when she had drunk her cooling coffee and picked up her neglected knitting once again, Professor ter Mennolt, on his way home, presumably, paused by her.