by Sheila Burns
It was easy for her, she had her colonel, who would be taking her out to the Casino that night. She had more than I had.
I didn’t try to vindicate myself.
In a month we should start for Sydney.
In one month I should be turning my back on England, and setting off for a new land, where there would be bluer seas and brighter skies and new people.
Meanwhile Tenny spent every spare moment with Hugh. He would be returning to India a fortnight after we sailed for Australia, if we ever were to sail; I had an idea that this might get held up. It was quite obvious to me from the first that Hugh was terribly attracted to Tenny, and although she refused to think of anything like that, I realized that she had a St. Martin’s summer that she could dispose of. Her first love had been Bill, and hard though it might seem, it always would be Bill. I believe that there is something about a first love which does not come again ‒ a brightness, a quality which is too precious. But what she could give to Hugh was possibly a more enduring emotion. It was something sweeter still.
‘Oh, that’s just nonsense,’ she said.
But of course it wasn’t nonsense! She told me a fortnight later, when our passages were booked and when everything was actually in readiness. I was arranging some Riviera flowers in the nurses’ sitting-room, and all the time I was wondering how the other two were getting on on the Riviera, when Tenny burst in.
She said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, Katy ‒ it’s Hugh.’
‘I’ve known all along,’ I admitted, and it was the truth.
‘Why, I never knew. I couldn’t believe it. He has been so frightfully unhappy and so lonely. It’s going to be rather wonderful, Katy, only it worries me about Australia. You’ll throw up the whole thing now, and it will be my fault. You oughtn’t to stay on here; it is all wrong for you, with Dr. Harper coming back and working here. Yet I feel you won’t go away without me.’
I said I’d try.
After all, I knew as well as she did that I couldn’t stay on in the home, and that she was quite right. It would be impossible to go on meeting him.
‘I’ll go,’ I said.
She didn’t know the tremendous resolution that demanded of me. It was something almost too big for me, because I realized how lonely that journey would be.
‘You will? Oh, Katy, then I can marry Hugh happily. It was the idea that I was letting you down. It was the thought that it would spoil all your plans.’
‘I’ll be all right. After all, I’m grown up, and we have to make our own way in life. I can’t always expect to have a companion with me.’
She flung her arms round me and kissed me. ‘Oh, Katy, you’re a brick! I’m going to be so happy, and I do hope you’ll meet somebody like Hugh in Australia.’
I didn’t hope that. I’m very much the one-man girl, I’m sure, and I didn’t see myself meeting anybody else.
‘It won’t be like that,’ I said.
‘You never know. It might be. There was a time when Bill absolutely absorbed me and I could have sworn that there would never be anybody else. But I got over that. Now I can’t think how I ever came to think of Bill at all. You’ll feel like that about Ray. You will, really.’
But it never seemed to me that you could compare the two men, for Bill had always been quite a different type.
She and Hugh asked me out to sup with them, and I went one night because I could not go on refusing. It was all very different from the life that I was used to, very restful and calm. I envied Tenny. She had had her bad time but now she was going to have her good time. They were very much in love though I don’t suppose that she realized it, because Tenny still believed that she had given her best to Bill. What she had given him was just infatuation, a mad moment or two, and then a loyal clinging to a memory. It was never anything more.
I should be setting out for Australia, and alone. It needed some pluck to face that journey and to start a fresh life under different conditions, conditions which as yet I did not understand in the least. But Miss Vaughan had said that I had courage. It was the courage that I was drawing on now.
Then one day I saw that I was down for duty in the theatre. I saw the little notice in the report book when I came on duty, my name as the nurse, the patient’s name, the disease and then the surgeon.
It was Ray!
‘I can’t,’ I told myself quickly, ‘I can’t face that.’
I had gone through the agony of seeing him go into the hall to his wife, and, as I had thought out of my life for ever, now it looked very much as though I had got to see him again. They must have come back from the Riviera sooner than they had been expected. In that moment I thought of pretending to be ill. I have never malingered before and it was of course a dreadful thing to think of now. Then I remembered that we were already short of nurses in the home, for it was holiday time and a Sister and another nurse had gone away. There would be nobody to take my place.
I had to get my patient ready, and she was in a panic, little knowing the horror that was in me.
Perhaps her alarm made me feel better, or at least decided me to take a grip of myself.
‘It makes it easier to know that you are going to be with me,’ she said, ‘you will hold my hand, won’t you?’
How could I fail her?
A nurse has a duty to her patient, and that comes before self. I knew that then.
When she had her first dose of nerve soother which they always give them first, I laid her hand in mine and felt the pressure of her fingers in a grateful response. I went on holding fast to it long after she herself was entirely unconscious. I helped the anaesthetist to carry her, holding her head, and I laid her on the table. She looked like a child.
Then I saw Ray for the first time since he had left to start life again. He was standing there waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect. Ray, in his white overall with his hands grotesquely dark in their rubber gloves. Ray, who might have been any man in the world, and yet I knew all the time that he was my man. I knew that. He could not cheat me, because although there was the linen mask across his mouth, I could see his eyes.
They were still hungry.
They were not the eyes of a man who had found satisfaction or happiness, or any of the things that he had been seeking on a second honeymoon. They were the eyes of a man in Hell.
I knew instantly that the whole affair had not been a success, and that Iris had probably failed him again. She did not understand loyalty. She did not understand truth. He was standing on the threshold of a difficult future and I had to brave myself to withstand that pleading in his eyes. The affair had not ended as I thought, even though I did leave for Australia.
All through the operation my heart was not in my work. I was standing there thinking, ‘What is the good of our going on like this? What is the use of pretending about it like we both are doing? Why should I go away to a new country and be lonely, and lose my friends and everyone else just so that Iris should go on making us both so desperately unhappy?’ Surely the happiness of two people is far more important than that of one?
Happiness.
It seemed as though this were the golden butterfly which it was impossible for any of us to capture.
I knew now as I stood here, outwardly so calm beside the operating table, that from this point onwards we had reached the pitch of snapping. I was getting out; I was quitting, and the thing I wanted most in this world was to stay and fight the whole affair out to its bitter end.
I knew that I could not bear to have stayed on seeing Ray day after day, intimately and closely going about our mutual work in the home. It was asking too much of any woman. I had stood it so long, but I just could not stand it any more.
The operation finished.
The last stitch was in place; the bandages were folded round the limp body by Ray, always insisting on doing everything himself. He was most meticulous in the bandaging of his patients, and I had watched those deft fingers working too many times before.
She was on th
e stretcher now, and being lifted gently away. There was the sound of a starched frock rustling after her; the clink as the anaesthetist gathered up his things; Sister making her adieu. I was left. I was tidying up the theatre, because the actual theatre nurse had failed them yesterday; she had gone down with migraine and could not attend to her duties. I was putting things back into place, picking up used swabs and dirty instruments, throwing rubber gloves into the sterilizing jar. One by one the others drifted out, but I knew that he was still left. I thought frantically, ‘Surely not here, here of all places?’
Then I knew that it was going to be here! We were alone together for the first time for many a long day.
He had torn off the mask and the cap; he had crumpled up his overall and had flung it aside. He was washing his hands, as I pushed the instruments back into their place on the trolley, then he came towards me drying his fingers on the towel.
He said, ‘I did not know that you would be on duty here this afternoon.’
‘I did not know that you were back.’
I thought that he was evasive in his reply to that.
‘Yes, I’m back. I wish I had never gone away from work, it is all so difficult, all so utterly hopeless.’
‘But you are feeling better? You will now keep quite fit, I hope.’
It seemed so silly, so hopeless, this stupid, banal conversation, playing at talking, playing at being natural when both of us were so desperately unnatural.
‘You know,’ he told me, ‘that I am feeling quite dreadful.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We can’t go on like this.’
Everything had suddenly come to a climax, and here we were two people very much in love standing together in the empty theatre still smelling of the anaesthetic, with the last traces of the operation in the bins and in the stained instruments. A man and a woman who had appeared to be machines, but who had been anything but machines at heart.
I said, ‘I know we can’t go on like this, that is why I have decided to go away. I am leaving here at the end of the week and going to Australia.’
‘Away?’
‘I must. You say that you can’t go on like this, I know that I can’t. It isn’t fair to ask that much of me. It is so dreadful! I couldn’t go on seeing you and knowing how things were. It is far, far better that I should do the wise thing ‒ make a clean break and go.’
He stood there staring at me quite helplessly. Automatically he went on wiping his hands on the towel marked ‘theatre towel’, but it was only automatic. I realized that he had not expected this, and that it had been a desperate blow to him. When at last he spoke, he was resigned. He had controlled himself and had got that mask over his face once more; the mask significant of the doctor who does not betray his emotions.
‘No, you’re right. You are brave about it, far, far braver than I am. Oh, my dear, what a fool I’ve been all along, but it isn’t any use. I’m no good to you, or to myself. There is nothing I can do to put right some of the things that have happened, nothing at all. There isn’t any way out, and the part that hurts most is the fact that we have only the one life to live.’
He pushed the towel back into place and rolled down his sleeves.
He said, ‘I’m telling the truth now, and I suppose that we shall never see one another again. If you go to Australia it is a long way off, and I have to stay here; this is my bread and butter. But I know that my heart will always be in Australia with you.’
I said nothing. If I had tried to speak I think that I should have broken down, and somehow I did not want this to happen. Tears might be a relief, but they would hurt us both, and goodness knows we had been hurt enough.
He went on.
‘The first time I ever saw you I knew that this would happen. I’d been unhappy for so long. Lonely for so long. I’ve got to go on being unhappy and lonely, there isn’t any way out. I’m being full of self-pity, but I can’t help feeling sorry for myself, and for you too, Katy, so much might have been possible, so much might have come to both of us, only that it was too late. Nothing can undo what has happened.’
There wasn’t anything that I could say. The thing was ending. It was better that it should end, but I wished we could have spared one another this last scene.
He turned sharply in the doorway and took a last look at me as I stood there, and I think I shall always remember him as he glanced back. Then he walked straight out of the theatre and left me.
I knew that there wasn’t anything more for either of us.
Quite mechanically I went on picking up the instruments and putting them on one side ready to be sterilized. Quite automatically the routine of which I had become so much a part went on, but it seemed as though something inside me had stopped dead ‒ something that would never go again.
I told Tenny that night.
She came into my room for a chat. She had got patterns of frocks, and she was absorbed in her trousseau. Hugh was behaving like a dear, and he knew that she had not got very much put by, so he had paid for this for her.
‘I feel like a kept woman,’ she said, and laughed. ‘He has been so unutterably sweet over everything, but do you think I ought to let him pay?’
‘Of course. What does it matter who pays as long as you both are happy?’
She said, ‘He has given me so much that I have felt desperately worried about marrying him. You see, Bill has been on my conscience a lot. I’ve lain awake at night wondering what I ought to say about that, wondering what I ought to do about it.’
I only hoped that she was not going to rake up the earth which buried the corpse of the past. No good could come of that.
‘You see,’ I said, ‘the shutters are closed fast on all that, and nobody wants to remember it. Take my advice and forget it.’
‘I couldn’t. Some people are made that way; they can draw down the shutters and forget everything that ever happened. I can’t. A horrid ghost comes plucking at my sleeve. I kept thinking all the time, “If Hugh knew about Bill he wouldn’t marry me.” Then yesterday I knew that I couldn’t go on with it. I mean on with it without Hugh knowing. I’d got to tell him. That took some courage, Katy.’
Misguided courage, I felt. She had suffered enough already without giving herself an additional burden to bear. But apparently she could not have rested until she had told him.
‘Yes, it wasn’t so awful once I had started, but it was rather dreadful getting started. I think he knew what was coming, because after a little while he said there wasn’t any need to tell him any more. He had always guessed that there had been somebody, and anyway that somebody had gone right out of my life now, and did not matter any more. He’d like to leave it at that. Oh, Katy, you may think that I did wrong to tell him, but the enormous relief was something unspeakable! Afterwards when I felt the load lifted, it was just as though I had suddenly got well after a dreadful illness.’
I knew by her face that she was a different Tenny. Always before there had been the feeling that Bill still mattered to her. He didn’t matter any longer. I had a firm idea that he would never matter again.
I suppose in her joy she had been blind to the fact that I had something to tell her, then she caught sight of my face and stopped talking about herself.
‘Oh, Katy, I’m being rather a pig. I’d forgotten about you. I’ve let you down shockingly about Australia, and now I’m letting you down by not listening to what you’ve got to say. It’s about Ray, I suppose?’
‘I was theatre nurse when he was operating to-day.’
‘And he talked to you?’
‘And he talked to me. The second honeymoon was a failure. It must have been dreadful, or he would not have admitted it as he did, as though there was nothing left to live for any more, as though he felt he could hardly go on.’
‘Did you tell him about Australia?’
‘Yes, I told him about Australia, and he was upset, but he knew it was the best thing for us to do. We could not go on meeting, more especially now t
hat the curtain is up between us, and each realizes how the other one feels. Oh, Tenny, it is so dreadful that we can’t do anything to help ourselves.’
‘If only Providence would see fit to remove Iris! If only something could have gone wrong in that op of hers!’
‘Don’t say things like that!’
‘But I’m feeling things like that. She has behaved vilely. If only she had run off with Bill it would have been easier for everybody. And he would have bought a packet full of trouble, too.’ She laughed at that. ‘It really would serve Bill right after he has played about with anything and everything in a petticoat if he bought it in the end by marrying a Tartar.’
‘Perhaps he has married a Tartar, only we don’t know it!’
‘Perhaps he has.’
It wasn’t getting me anywhere. We sat there and we talked, but it was merely going round and round in circles.
In the end I tried to put her mind at ease. ‘Tenny, don’t think that you have let me down by backing out of Australia. You haven’t done. I know it will be lonely and awful for a bit, and I may find the climate difficult and everything will take some getting used to, but I won’t let that worry me. The bigger change that I can get the better. It is the only thing to shake me up and make me realize that there is something in life to go on for. I sound melodramatic, but I don’t mean it that way.’
‘You’re being terribly brave.’
‘No, I’m not. I feel all squirmy inside, but I’m going on.’
She kissed me before she went. ‘I’ve got a hunch, Katy, that life has got something nice tucked up its sleeve for you; I have a hunch that it isn’t going to end here and that there is a good time ahead. Oh, I do hope it comes true.’
‘I hope so, too.’
But I realized then that there was the present moment to be lived through and that the present moment had it in its power to hurt me more than anything else in life. I determined I would not look too far ahead, and I would try to choke down that feeling of squirminess and go forward courageously. To-morrow never comes, they say. To-morrow was coming a great deal too often for me.
