by Sheila Burns
‘Please don’t let’s discuss him.’
‘Oh, very well, as you will,’ and she laughed again to herself. ‘Now Bill has ideas! Ray would send me lilies, a flower you can buy at any shop, but it would be Bill who would get me white violets and send them. He is the only man in the world who would think of white violets.’
Just what Tenny had said! And Bill would also think of white hyacinths. I wanted to give her a good talking-to, but of course she had still got those stitches in and it wouldn’t have been very fair of me. Somehow I felt my patience with her ebbing. She wasn’t right about her husband, she wasn’t truthful. To-night just outside her door I had felt his hand possessively on my own and had seen his eyes. He wasn’t cold. He wasn’t the type she described. He really had deep feelings, and she had just bruised those feelings to the extent that he had to admit that their love was a failure.
It was a dreadful mix-up.
‘We are going to the sea almost at once,’ she said, ‘to Ventnor. It will be warm sunshine and flowers there and a Riviera-like atmosphere, so Ray says, and he can get down for the week-ends.’
‘I hope Captain Dawson won’t be there for the weeks,’ I reminded her. It was mean of me, but I could not resist letting fly that barb. She deserved it anyway.
She raised those thinly plucked eyebrows of hers.
‘Of course not. And anyway, even if he did why shouldn’t he stay where he likes? It’s a free country and hotels are public, anybody can stay in them.’
I knew that she was irritated, and only hoped that I had not hit the nail on the head, though I might have guessed that I had done.
It wasn’t a particularly happy thought.
She did not say any more, though I knew that she was bottling it all up, because she watched me all the time. I was taking the flowers out for the night. Tall crystal vases of roses, the long-stemmed variety. Lilies with their heavy scent, carnations in sheaves. I have never known any girl to have so many flowers when she was ill.
Last of all she had to say something.
‘I only hope you aren’t going to start butting in on my life, Nurse,’ she said a little peevishly. ‘Bill can come down to Ventnor if he wants to. Ray would not want me to be miserable there. It is most important that I should be happy.’
I said nothing.
I might have guessed that this was what she was warming up for. I might have known what the trouble was all about. He and she had arranged it all very neatly, and now they wanted me to be their ally.
I went on carrying out the flowers, and all the time she was watching me furtively from under her brows. I knew that she was thinking all sorts of things about me, whether I was to be got round, or whether I was going to be obstinate about this. I gave her no indication of my inward feelings at all. Why should I? I felt thoroughly angry with her. I was intensely angry that she could behave in this way when she was married to a man like her husband. Ray was forbearing and patient. It does seem hard in this world that the good husbands seem always to get the bad wives. You see a lot of it in hospitals and homes, for there you come into contact with the more intimate side of people’s lives, and know them themselves really better.
She went on watching, and last thing of all when I was just going off duty she called me back, and clung to my wrist and became quite hysterical.
‘You aren’t angry with me?’ she begged. ‘Please, please don’t be angry with me.’
And of course I had to make it up with her, and pretend that I agreed with all she said just to soothe her down.
This can’t go on, I told myself, it isn’t good enough. I must do something to stop it.
Chapter Three
There are times when the monotony and irksomeness of hospital life make you feel that you want to sit down and scream. I think that I had got to that pitch at that particular moment. I felt frightful.
Being called at six, going on duty at seven-thirty for twelve long hours. Perhaps there were patches off, a couple of hours in the afternoon, only long enough to parade down through Wigmore Street to catch a glimpse of the park, and then to return again before you could feel freedom.
Like this I never even knew what time of the year it was save by the baskets of flowers that the old women sell in the streets, or by the treetops waving along the Bayswater Road. It wasn’t living, it was existing. And every year one gets a little bit older. Every year something more that is precious and worth all else put together slips away from one, and can never be recaptured.
In everybody’s life there comes a time when one feels desperate at seeing oneself in a rut from which there is no escape. But I think that it must be almost worse for a trained nurse, because her life is so dreadfully stereotyped.
Patients coming and going; as soon as you grow fond of them they drift off again and out of your life for ever. Finishing for the night with all the flowers set about the corridors, and the night nurses coming on duty. Taking the day report books down to Miss Vaughan, and then trooping off to the basement dining-room to the same dull old suppers.
Always the print frocks and spruce apron, and the innate longing to get into a pretty evening dress, something fussy and frilly, something to make you feel young, and part of a glamorous crowd. All that longing pent up inside you until it hurts.
I felt it desperately that night.
It was always such innocuous conversation round that table at night, with Miss Vaughan carving and speaking to each one of us in turn. I felt like a schoolgirl, and it was absurd, because we were all grown women, with our own lives to live, and our own futures, and that future looked like going on and on like this for ever.
‘It is the most satisfying job in the world,’ said Miss Vaughan from her place at the head of the table. Yet I wondered if she had admitted the truth. Would it not have been more satisfying for her to have been Mrs. Somebody or other, and to have had children? Oh, I know we were all doing good and useful work, mending tired, broken bodies and setting them back on their road to life again, but sometimes there is yourself to think of, and just at that particular moment I was thinking hard of myself.
I had come to a crossways in my life.
I had been shocked by what Tenny had told me, and dreadfully upset by the scene we had had in the little nurses’ sitting-room; I had been almost more surprised by the way Ray Harper had talked to me, and by his confession that his marriage was a failure, and that he wanted me to help him with Iris.
Nobody thought about me at all.
In my dilemma I almost thought of pretending to be ill, anything to make my escape.
Of course with the morning I saw sense, and pulled myself together and faced the day properly. It was not any good making mountains out of molehills. The thing to do was still to make an attempt to avoid going away with Iris Harper, and, if the worst came to the worst, admit the truth to him. When the stitches were out it wouldn’t matter if she were upset.
And the stitches would be out soon.
When I went on duty with the breakfast in the morning, I found her in quite a different mood. She was bright and perverse and, I thought, determined to tease me.
‘You don’t like Bill?’ she asked me first.
‘My opinion doesn’t matter.’
‘I am quite sure that you think that I am rather a disgraceful sort of person, and that you disapprove of me frightfully.’
She waited for me to say something.
I said, ‘It isn’t for me to criticize my patients. All sorts and kinds pass through my hands. I don’t think about their private lives at all, only about making them well again.’
That didn’t satisfy her, and I had had a pretty good idea that it wouldn’t.
‘I am sure you would much rather that Bill did not come down to stay at Ventnor.’
Stung by her questions I said that I did think it was a great pity, and personally I would very much rather that I never saw him again.
‘I am so afraid that you may try to get out of taking me there,’ she said
plaintively, ‘and it would be awful to go away with a strange nurse. Some of them are too awful, aren’t they? I’d hate that. If I promise you that Bill shall not come down there, will that make it better for us both?’
Unfortunately I told her the truth, as I went round her room dusting it. The old maid who has been with Miss Vaughan for years does everything else for us, but the day nurses coming on duty have to dust after her; this always means a chance for the patient to ply us with questions when we have very little opportunity to escape them.
‘I have promised Dr. Harper that I will take you away afterwards and I shall not break that promise. I have also told him that I will see after you there, and I will. But it is not part of my job to chaperone you. It will be very much easier for me and for us both if Captain Dawson does not come down there, but it isn’t for me to ask you to make promises.’
Again she said, ‘He won’t be there,’ but I knew that she was very angry with me for talking straightly to her, and that quite probably she would get round that promise some way or other.
I finished my dusting and went off to the other patients on the floor. Outside I found that some more flowers had been sent to her, and as I took them from the porter there came the unmistakable scent of hyacinths.
I remembered what Tenny had told me, and instantly my heart missed a beat. I turned aside a corner of the tissue paper covering and saw that they were white hyacinths in a pottery bowl. Could they be from Bill? If he had stuck to his old policy of white violets, why not stick to the same routine with white hyacinths?
I wondered if he had become so scared at meeting Tenny face to face in the nurses’ little sitting-room that he had decided to finish the whole thing and not run the risk of meeting any of us again. It would of course be the wisest course of action. Then, just as I was hoping we were through with Captain Dawson, a card dropped out of the flowers, and I saw that it was a woman’s visiting card, and knew that I had allowed my imagination to run right away with me, for this was just an ordinary gift, sent quite accidentally by a woman friend.
I took them in.
Iris glanced up.
‘Surely you aren’t bringing me white hyacinths?’ she gasped.
Then I knew! I realized as though she had spoken the words herself that Bill had made a pledge with her as he had done with Tenny, and that the wretched old white hyacinths would be his signal of farewell.
What a man!
‘There’s a card with them,’ I said and handed it stiffly to her. The moment she read it she burst out laughing and then tore it up into little fragments.
‘It gave me quite a turn,’ she said, ‘and all the time they come from poor old Mrs. Pratt. I must be very weak to give myself the jim-jams like that, and all about nothing.’
Within the next two days the specialist came and got the stitches out (what a fuss she made over that too!). It meant that she was well on the way to convalescence. All the arrangements were now set going for us to proceed to the Isle of Wight, and I recognized the fact that there was not to be any escape for me.
I had got to go through with it.
Two days before Iris was to leave the home I went down to Miss Vaughan about it. She was sitting in her private room, where she always saw her nurses; generally it was a case of telling us off about something or other, because although she was very big-hearted and generous, she had definite ideas about duty and the sacrificing of self to the one object.
She told me that she had got everything ready and had engaged a temporary nurse to take my place. She hoped that I would not think because I was going away for a holiday that I could stop working, as it would be my duty down there as much as up here in the home to see that Mrs. Harper did not overtax her strength.
I stood there listening to her and saying ‘Yes, Miss Vaughan’ and ‘No, Miss Vaughan,’ and even as she was talking I wanted to scream. It was so frightful to think that this would be going on all my life, for ever and ever, and much worse when I was an old lady and white-haired like some of the Sisters in the home, that I should still be standing there gauchely like a schoolgirl and saying yes and no.
‘You will return in a fortnight, because I cannot spare you for longer than that,’ she said. ‘I have only engaged the new nurse for that length of time, and you must promise me not to try to extend it unless there are very urgent reasons for it.’
I promised.
After all I did not think that I should want to make the holiday much longer. It was not going to be very happy for me seeing Iris with her husband in their own intimate private life. I could not imagine now why I had ever been induced to say that I would go. I suppose I had not realized how deeply and desperately I was growing to care for Ray. I ought to have done, because I am not the sort of girl who is easily carried away by men. I can say quite honestly that there has never been anybody else in my life, and I know that there never could be. Which makes it all the worse. I remember my grandmother saying to me once, ‘It is hard for you, Katy, harder than most girls, because if ever you do fall in love, you will fall hard and hurt yourself badly’.
I was falling hard enough.
But then love like that, which lights itself as a torch within you, is an undying flame. It was something which would go on as long as I lived, it would sear its way right through my own heart, and become part of me for ever.
I hadn’t been wise to say that I would go away with Iris Harper, but then love is not wise.
‘I envy you,’ said Tenny, when we discussed it in the nurses’ room, though of course she did not know the ins and outs of it all. ‘Fancy going away and being with her in some lovely hotel and then having him down for the week-ends! He always makes me feel that he is too good-looking. He ought to have been on the movies and not in medicine at all. I do envy you.’
‘I wish that you were going in my place,’ and in some ways I did wish it.
Tenny laughed.
‘Yes, but you wouldn’t say that if it could really happen. ‘I’d give a lot to be in your shoes, and to have her lovely clothes, even if it were only to handle them, and to meet amusing people and have decent meals for a change and not to be just Nurse.’
‘Yes, but what about my uniform?’ I asked. ‘That will give me away, and I shall be just Nurse.’
Tenny ignored that.
‘Being Nurse in a home where there are lots of you, all disgruntled spinsters, and being Nurse in a hotel where you are a rarity, are two very different kettles of fish,’ she said.
‘Anyway, I don’t suppose it will be much fun.’
‘It will be a change, and I’d give a lot for a change,’ she answered.
I had been quite wrong about the uniform. Iris mentioned it to me that last evening in the home, when I was seeing her into bed for the night. She said that hotels were fussy and some of them objected to a nurse being about the public rooms, because they thought that it made other inhabitants nervous. Wouldn’t it be almost better if I took some plain clothes with me and wore them?
I suppose my face showed by its utter blankness that I hadn’t got much that I could take. As a matter of fact I had practically nothing. Nurses don’t want a lot of plain clothes, and I had lost interest in them. The chance to wear them appeared so infrequently that I had gradually given up buying them, and at that identical moment, although I could have raked up an old skirt and a couple of blouses and a rather seedy black evening dress, which would do duty for dinner, or smart tea, or a theatre or anything, and nothing really adequately, that was just about the limit of what I could do.
She said that she could make that right for me, if I wouldn’t be offended, as she was wildly extravagant over clothes and bought hosts of things that she never wore. We were about the same size too. She explained that she had had the impertinence to order a trunk to be sent to me and I could take what I fancied, and throw the rest away if I liked.
I did not know what to say, and tried to begin expressing my thanks, but words rather failed me.
Sh
e had the trunk sent round, and when it appeared next morning insisted that I should choose myself some things out of it. They were marvellous clothes. There was a neat coat and skirt for travelling, with satin blouses. My wretched voile ones would look too shabby for words beside them. There were a couple of semi-evening frocks, and an evening coat.
‘You mustn’t thank me,’ she said, ‘it was really Ray’s idea. He thought you wouldn’t object and that it would make it so much easier for you.’
His idea! It was so like him to think of other people, so like him to be so helpful.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I stammered.
‘Well, keep your thanks for him. Do you know that I believe you are the first woman he has ever noticed since he married me? I ought to be jealous; still, I think I’m safe,’ and she laughed.
I knew that I was blushing. I knew that the colour simply rushed to my face, and no wonder. Even if she were right (and of course she wasn’t), it was a horrible thought. It was something that I could hardly bear.
I said good-bye to everybody at the home, and they were wild with envy at my luck. A fortnight away, a fortnight without their rice pudding and cold mutton meals, with Miss Vaughan presiding, and the hours spent in the nurses’ sitting-room, and the eternal life which went on in its monotonous circle.
I did not see Ray before we left. It was a busy morning, and I heard that he was doing three operations, one here and two up the road at the enormous new nursing home which towers over all the others.
I put on the new coat and skirt which Iris had discarded, and when I looked at myself in the glass in my room, I was a new woman. Clothes make such a enormous difference. I was no longer just a nurse off duty in a reach-me-down serge suit with a voile blouse and a dowdy hat. I was actually smart for the first time in my life. Never before had I seen that there was a possibility behind my plainness. I’d got used to the fact that I was an ugly duckling. You get terribly used to plain looks; the inferiority complex which they breed is something which it is difficult if not impossible to choke down. I had always envied beauty, always been hungry for lovely eyes and a sweet mouth, or a skin like those you see some women possess. They were things that I should never have, I felt. In my family life at home all my relations had thought it amusing to laugh about my plainness. They did not mean to hurt and I don’t suppose they ever realized for a single moment that it did hurt me. They just took it for granted that I was plain, and therefore fair game to be teased about it.
