The Healing Time

by Lucilla Andrews

  The Healing Time

  Lucilla Andrews

  Copyright © The Estate of Lucilla Andrews 2019

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1969

  www.lucillaandrews.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images © Sofia Zhuravetc / FenlioQ (Shutterstock)

  izusek (istockphoto.com)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Also by Lucilla Andrews

  from Wyndham Books

  The Print Petticoat

  The Secret Armour

  The Quiet Wards

  The First Year

  A Hospital Summer

  My Friend the Professor

  Nurse Errant

  Flowers from the Doctor

  The Young Doctors Downstairs

  The New Sister Theatre

  The Light in the Ward

  A House for Sister Mary

  Hospital Circles

  Highland Interlude

  One Night in London (The Jason Trilogy Book 1)

  A Weekend in the Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2)

  In an Edinburgh Drawing Room (The Jason Trilogy Book 3)

  Wyndham Books is reissuing

  all of Lucilla Andrews’s novels.

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  by signing up to our free newsletter.

  Go to www.lucillaandrews.com

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

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  Chapter One

  THIS IS HOW IT WAS

  There was a full moon that night and the river genuinely looked like a silver ribbon, exactly as I remembered. The same sets of traffic lights were still controlling the same heavy night traffic on the far embankment; a police-boat was still popping out from under the nearest bridge and making circles on the icy water; and the row of coal-barges covered with snow and floating at anchor up-stream from the hospital still reminded me of frosted sponge-cake.

  This is how it was, I thought, this is just how it was, even if it all looks that much smaller. It looked smaller as I was now standing on the ninth-floor balcony. During my training no block in the hospital had been more than five floors high, and the twelve-storey Wing had then been a planner’s dream in theory and a mass of scaffolding and giant building machines in fact. The building had been finished and opened by Royalty last year. It now held four hundred and ten beds and the most advanced medical and surgical equipment in the entire hospital.

  ‘If not the entire country,’ Matron added over afternoon tea. ‘Briefly, Mrs Holtsmoor, if it’s been invented we’ve got it in use in the Wing. Which presents certain problems, since our new baby inevitably overshadows its parent in more ways than one. Owing to the distances involved, we’ve had to appoint a separate Wing resident staff. I often feel more of a Group Matron when walking round my own hospital than on my rounds in our area. More tea, my dear?’

  ‘Thank you.’ The teapot was silver, the crockery nearly transparent bone china. ‘How many beds in all, Matron?’

  ‘At this specific moment, eleven hundred. Our erudite planners tell me we’re to go up to two thousand. They’ve not yet told me from whence I’m to obtain the nurses to care for that number, but I’m sure they will in their own good time. Have you heard I’ve been given a new title?’

  ‘No, Matron? No longer Matron?’

  ‘My dear, you are out of touch. Matrons, they tell me, are very old hat! So they’ve made me a Director of Nursing. I hope you’re impressed?’

  ‘Vastly, Matron.’

  We exchanged smiles at her little joke, then I glanced at my fluted cup. I wasn’t so much impressed as slightly shaken to find myself now treated as an equal by the Matron of my training hospital. Certainly Martha’s was traditionally polite to its own, and along with every other hospital in the country even the great St Martha’s, London, was short of trained nurses. I had finished training as Nurse Dexter, and this was my first appearance in Martha’s as Mrs Holtsmoor. I had expected my training would get me a Martha’s job now, but having been away so long it hadn’t occurred to me that my married name would turn my request for an interview into a social occasion that would include the use of Matron’s best crockery and armchair.

  It was a good hour before we got down to my letter. Matron said, ‘I think I’ve the very ward for you. Take a look at this plan of William and Mary, the Transition Unit, Wing, ninth floor.’ She passed it over. ‘William, left; Mary, right. Two six-bedded main wards, four single small wards on either side of the corridor, and those marked in red equipped to take major emergencies. But normally the ward deals only with sub-acutes, or actual convalescents waiting for true convalescent beds elsewhere. A very rapid turnover, which, of course, means a very wide variety of patient, coming from every ward in the Wing. Ideal, wouldn’t you agree, for any staff nurse returning to nursing?’ She patted her elegantly dressed blue hair. ‘What better refresher course? Naturally, once you’ve found your feet and caught up on the new techniques and treatments, we can discuss moving you to an acute ward. But for the time being ‒’ She paused. ‘You’re sure you only want night duty?’

  ‘Quite. If that suits you?’

  ‘My dear, I can always use trained night nurses. And I can see that if your little girl sleeps well, she’ll miss you far less if you work at night. But will you get enough sleep?’

  ‘I think so, Matron. During school hours.’

  ‘H’m.’ She appraised me, shrewdly. ‘You’ll work four nights on, three off. Yes. You should get by ‒ but what about the week-ends?’

  I had been hoping she would not ask that one. ‘The cousins I mentioned in my letter are very helpful. I’m sure we can work things out between us.’

  She said slowly, ‘What you really need are nights off every week-end. Let me think.’ She consulted a massive off-duty rota. ‘Yes. I t
hink I can arrange that for you. I always like to help my married nurses, and particularly those with children. And frankly, unless one helps them with their domestic responsibilities one ends up losing them. Very well! William and Mary, with every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. All right?’

  ‘Very much so. Thank you, Matron.’

  ‘Good.’ She folded away the rota. ‘I should warn you that on occasions William and Mary can be very busy. When the acute wards are under too great a pressure they have to overspill into the less acute. I just hope you won’t find the physical demands too much for you. Admittedly your little girl is now old enough for school, but if you’ll forgive my saying this, I would have thought you had quite enough to do in your capacity as both parents, without taking on a full-time extra.’

  Since she had just given me the kind of job any woman raising a child alone would regard as a dream, in confidence I told her the truth.

  Momentarily, she was speechless with surprise. She recovered herself quickly. ‘Dear me. I had no idea this was your financial position. What a mercy it is that you are trained! And should have such good cousins to help you. And that Mrs Clinton should recently have inherited this house in Anchor Lane. Have you always lived with the Clintons?’

  ‘Apart from these last few months at Holtsmoor House and the first month after my husband’s death, we’ve been with them.’

  She nodded to herself. ‘The Dean told me your mother-in-law had married again. An Australian?’

  ‘From Queensland. A Victor Simmonds.’

  She gave me another of her shrewd looks. ‘You like him?’

  ‘Very much. He’s been sweet to Marcy and me and more than generous to my mother-in-law.’

  She said drily, ‘How very fortunate for Mrs Simmonds! And they are living in Holtsmoor House?’

  ‘Yes. It was left outright to my mother-in-law by my late father-in-law.’

  ‘Indeed? Such a beautiful house! So many Holtsmoors ‒ and your Marcy now the last of the line. Pity,’ she said, ‘pity. But we must leave the past where it belongs. I shall look forward to meeting your little one, and I really am delighted to welcome you back. I always take special pleasure in welcoming back my old nurses ‒ though that sounds absurd when applied to a girl like yourself. How old are you now?’

  I smiled slightly. ‘No girl, Matron. Twenty-seven.’

  ‘The fact that you think that old proves your youth! Dear, dear. So you were widowed at twenty-two. What can one say ‒ except ‒ such a dangerous occupation being a racing-driver.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘very.’

  Matron said not unkindly, ‘As he had done so well for so long, I imagine he thought he could carry on indefinitely?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Marcus had been forty-one when he was killed on a trial run two weeks after Marcy’s birth and a year after our marriage. He used to say, ‘I’ll know it’s time to pull out when I start piling ’em up.’ He only piled up one car.

  Matron hauled us firmly back to the present. ‘I must tell you privately that the Dean is as pleased at the prospect of another Holtsmoor working in St Martha’s again as I am!’

  Marcus had been the only non-medical Holtsmoor male in six generations. He had read history at Oxford, but had never taken a degree. He had been at Oxford when he drove his first racing-car, and being then the only child of a wealthy and youngish widow, the question of his earning a living had never arisen. As a racing-driver he had made, and spent, a lot of money. I only learnt how much after his death, and how much, in hard cash, his racing career had cost his mother. My mother-in-law had always insisted on managing her own business affairs, being convinced she had a flair for such matters. Unfortunately, in common with Marcus and her first husband, she hadn’t.

  Thomas Holtsmoor had been the greatest cardiologist Martha’s had yet produced. The acute male cardiac ward was still Thomas Holtsmoor Ward. The largest In-patients Laboratory was the Holtsmoor Lab, after Claud, Thomas’s father, a pathologist. Before Claud there was his father, Augustus. Augustus had once worked with Lister in Edinburgh, and had later been the surgeon responsible for introducing the carbolic spray to Martha’s theatres and for designing a particular type of long-handled forceps known as Holtsmoor’s Grips. These had remained in daily use when I did my general theatre training.

  Augustus had been the son of Septimus, a general physician. No department in the hospital was named after Dr Septimus Holtsmoor, but his memory was much cherished by Martha’s men. Septimus, they said, drank a bottle of brandy for breakfast daily, never made an inaccurate diagnosis when drunk, or an accurate one when sober. Up to my training the nearest pub to the hospital was still known as ‘Sep’s’.

  The first medical Holtsmoor had been another Marcus and a surgeon who invariably operated in a frock coat, silk stock, and riding-boots. It had been his pride that the coat was sufficiently stiffened with dried blood and pus to stand up alone. His portrait in that coat had ornamented the offices of rows of Deans of the Medical School.

  That first Marcus had made money. Septimus drank it. Septimus’s son, Augustus, had been hard-working, prosperous, and thrifty. He had handed on his talents as well as a fair fortune to his son Claud. Claud had been as good with money as he had been at pathology. It had been Claud who had built the huge, chilly, late-Victorian gentleman’s residence, Holtsmoor House in Hampshire. Thomas, Marcus, and then Marcy had all been born in Holtsmoor. Claud had died a very wealthy man.

  Thomas, from all accounts, took to medicine as Septimus to brandy. He had been that rarity, a genuinely inspired physician and utterly uninterested in his wealth. He had left everything in his wife’s hands during his lifetime, and outright to her after his death. As he had died of a coronary at thirty-seven after only six years of marriage when Marcus was four, it was possible he had never had time to discover his very beautiful, rather stupid, and totally unimaginative wife was so extravagant. Holtsmoor House had always been, and still was, her pride and joy. She loved entertaining, travelling, and interior decorating, and anything she did she did in the most expensive style possible. She raised her son to regard that style as his birthright. She still took great comfort from the reflection that during his lifetime she had never been forced by circumstances to deny Marcus anything. The eventual financial consequences of all this had been given me by the family solicitor after Marcus’s death.

  The solicitor had been to school with Marcus. He was a neat little man with a clever face and cold-blue eyes. ‘I can dress it up, Mrs Marcus, but I suspect you would prefer plain facts?’

  At that time I was punch-drunk. ‘Please.’

  About an hour later he asked, ‘How’ll you manage with the baby and no husband to support you?’

  I showed him the letter I had had from my only and eleven years older cousin, Ann Clinton.

  He allowed himself a brief smile. ‘I’d hoped you might have family of your own to rally, but as Marcus had told me both your parents are deceased, I didn’t care to set much store on the hope. Good. I feel better about letting Holtsmoor. That’s our only hope, as Helen’s doctor insists she must get right away and she seems to have this irrational wish to visit Australia. That, plus the mortgage, should take care of her trip and the annuity we’ve managed to scrape out of the mess for her. I wish we could’ve done something for you and the child.’

  I said, ‘Thank you.’

  He fingered his shirt-collar as if it were too tight. ‘Most of the mortgage’ll go straight to the Inland Revenue. Arrears have to be paid.’

  ‘I realise that.’

  ‘Yes. You do.’ He shrugged uncomfortably. ‘As I’ve said, this isn’t for want of warning. We’ve been warning Marcus and Helen for years. But how does one make people hear who won’t listen?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  Someone came in with tea. During that period wherever I went someone produced tea. I used to wonder what the automatic English reaction to death had been before tea was first introduced to this countr
y.

  Before I left the solicitor said, ‘Any time you want help come and see us. Please, Mrs Marcus.’

  It was five years before I took him up on that. I called on him last December. He had put on weight, his face was more lined, and his patently middle-aged appearance shook me. Despite the gap in our ages, Marcus had seemed so much my contemporary, yet had he lived the two men would now be the same age.

  We exchanged brief personal histories, agreed Helen’s remarriage had been an unexpected all-round blessing and that Holtsmoor should now more properly be called Simmonds House. He said he had heard Marcy and I had been living with the Simmonds for some months. ‘How’s it working out?’

  ‘It isn’t. That’s why I’d be grateful for your advice. I want to do the right thing for Marcy, but I’m too involved to know what that is.’

  He sat back in his chair and played with his watch-chain. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that inconvenient Victorian museum of a house was an ideal establishment for any normal, healthy, which means rowdy, small girl. Why did you come back?’

  ‘Helen wanted us. She kept writing and writing, and as Marcy is her only grandchild, I thought we should try it.’

  ‘Might sound all right in theory. Three generations together may have worked when there were servants to keep ’em apart, or there was acute poverty to bind ’em together. In my experience it never seems to work now. And though Helen must now be in her seventies, I can’t say I can see her as the doting grandmother. Is she?’

  I had never liked Helen any more than she had me, but for my own self-respect I wanted to try to be fair. ‘She’s fond of Marcy, but she doesn’t like being called “Granny”. She says it make her feel old. So we call her “Helen”.’

  ‘Quite so. And Marcy isn’t settling too well?’

  ‘No. She’s missing my cousins, the farm, the lot.’

  He said, ‘Then you’d better take her back to Sussex.’

  ‘I can’t do that. They’ve sold up and moved to London.’

  ‘A farmer?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s the man living on?’

  ‘Temporarily, hope and money left over from the sale. David Clinton’s always preferred writing to farming, and as his wife’s got this biggish house in Anchor Lane and he’s recently sold two television scripts and one short story, they’ve decided to chance it. They’ve no kids or other dependants. Ann should make some money letting rooms to students, and if all else fails she can go back to being a secretary. She was one, previously.’