‘One assumes they know what they’re doing.’ From his tone he assumed the reverse. ‘Where’s Anchor Lane? Should I know it?’
I gave him the exact location.
‘You know your London, Mrs Marcus.’
‘Only that part as it’s so near my old hospital, St Martha’s. That could be very handy if we move up with them, as if we live in London I’ll have to work, as there I’d have to pay rent, which I didn’t on the farm. Food’ll be much more expensive, too, as in Sussex we ate mainly off the farm. But if I get a full-time job that’ll cover it, and, I’ve been thinking, if I work at night Marcy’s life shouldn’t be too disrupted. And in London there’ll be some school near for her.’
‘You seem to have done a great deal of thinking. I’d say you’ve worked it out for yourself.’
‘Not quite. My problem’s this: is it fair to move a kid from Holtsmoor to the east end of London?’
‘Turn that round, Mrs Marcus. Would it be fair to leave the kid where she is?’
I thought of Helen’s constant wails: ‘Marcy, not those muddy shoes! Marcy, mind that polished table! Marcy, your little dress is so grubby! No ‒ don’t touch me, child! Those hands! Really, Phillippa! How can you permit the child to get so grubby I cannot conceive; Nanny always kept darling Marcus so spotless!’
Privately, Marcy kept asking, ‘Do we have to stay here, Mummy? When can we go home to Aunty Ann, Uncle David, and Dusty?’
Dusty was the Clinton’s Dalmatian.
I tackled Helen in private about a puppy. She nearly had a stroke. ‘In my lovely house? Have you no consideration?’
The solicitor waited patiently.
I said at last, ‘I don’t understand Helen. She’s not enjoying having us around, yet she seems to want us.’
‘She may well consider she’ll lose face if you go. Helen’s an Edwardian. Face mattered, and continues to matter, to Edwardians. Of course, had Marcy been a boy, your present situation might be twice as difficult in one way, but very much easier in another.’
That was true, but his insight surprised me. Previously I had thought him coldly unimaginative. I realised in that second meeting that, whatever he was or was not, in our first meeting I had not seen him at all. Grief cuts out other people as efficiently as it cuts one off.
I asked how he thought I should deal with Helen?
‘She’ll undoubtedly make life very difficult for you.’ He eyed me as if I were in a witness-box. ‘She’s always liked and generally had her own way. I don’t think she’ll get it over this, and not only because you’ll be fighting for your own child. I think you should pull out for Marcy’s sake, and quite as much for your own. For one simple basic reason. Self-preservation.’ He paused awhile. ‘You must by now have realised Marcus lost out on that one?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes.’
That evening I wrote to Ann. She answered by return, offering me the self-contained half of their ground-floor flat. Then I talked to Helen.
‘I refuse to discuss the subject, Phillippa. As my only son’s widow, your place is here with me. I need you. And as for Marcy, my grandchild attending some ‒ some ‒ State school! Mixing with’ ‒ and she actually said it ‒ ‘common children! Never! There’s this nice little boarding-school I have in mind, and next year she can ‒’
‘Helen, next year Marcy’ll only be six!’
‘And perfectly old enough to enjoy her own little life amongst nice children of her own age. No more of this nonsense, Phillippa ‒ and don’t imagine Victor will be able to give you any help should you leave my house! Victor has children and grandchildren of his own to consider ‒ after his responsibilities to myself! We will forget this nonsense. My mind is made up.’
So was mine. Only over my dead body was Marcy going to any boarding-school next year. I had attended one from five to seventeen, and the memory of those earlier years could still make me sweat.
It took time. We stayed over Christmas. Helen alternated between tantrums and sulks. Victor Simmonds expressed no opinion until the afternoon he drove Marcy and me to the station. ‘I’ll miss you and the kid, gal, but you’re doing the right thing. Don’t fret about Helen. I’ll manage her.’
‘Victor, thanks! I’m sorry,’ I added, ‘to have made things so tough for you lately.’
He had a face like an old fleshy walnut and a very good head of white hair. He had married Helen fifteen months after his first wife’s death ended forty-three years of marriage. He smiled gloomily. ‘A good scrap’s better than a tonic to some women. Helen’s one of ’em. My old Mary was another. She was a fine wife to me, mind, but she’d a tongue like a lash ‒ rest her soul.’
‘That never upset you?’
‘Tell you this, Phil. No sense in getting old if you don’t get bloody artful with it. I stopped listening to women years ago. I just like a woman around.’
It began to snow as we left Hampshire. In London the snow had turned to sleet. Our taxi drew up outside a tall, grey, ugly Victorian house in a row of similar houses, and most of them had ‘Bed and Breakfast’ signs in their lower front windows. Marcy looked around thoughtfully from under my umbrella. ‘Is this place home, Mummy? It doesn’t look anything like the farm.’
Oh, God, I thought. Have I done right by her?
Ann opened the front door, then grabbed at Dusty’s collar as the elderly Dalmatian suddenly went berserk with the hysterical joy of a highly bred, highly strung bitch. Marcy flung her arms round Dusty as David flung open a door and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. ‘What in hell’s going on? If I don’t have quiet I’ll kill the lot of you!’ He picked Marcy off Dusty, kissed her, handed her to me like a parcel, kissing me at the same time, before vanishing behind his slammed door.
I lowered my beaming child.
‘I say, Mummy! Isn’t it nice to be home!’
And I breathed out.
Later that night when she was asleep Ann asked if I was wise to return to Martha’s. ‘Won’t it be hellish going back after making a marriage that must still be hospital history? London’s full of hospitals, and they all need trained nurses. Why go back and raise old ghosts?’
‘Because Martha’s is just round the corner,’ David answered for me. ‘And if one doesn’t raise old ghosts, how in hell does one ever get shot of ’em? In any event, Marcus wasn’t in medicine.’
I said, ‘Six years is a long time in the life of any hospital. Whole sets I never knew will have trained and gone. I doubt there’ll be more than a handful of faces other than those belonging to very senior sisters and pundits whom I’ll recognise or vice versa. Anyway, though I think she probably will, I still can’t be sure Matron’ll have me back.’
‘Only one way to find out.’ David topped up our glasses with the wine he had produced specially for the occasion. ‘Write and ask her for an interview, Pippa.’
It was three weeks after that conversation that I started work on the Monday night the worst cold snap of the winter started in London.
Chapter Two
REUNION WITH AN ENEMY
The William and Mary night junior was an exceedingly pretty brunette in her second year. Her name was Linda Parsons and she was twenty. After our first three hours together she had given me potted biographies of all the ward nurses below the rank of staff nurse; the inside stories of our patients’ personal problems; her views on sex in general; and a detailed account of the running battle she was having with her current boyfriend. ‘As if I’d swallow that “if you loved me” codswollop having just done three months gynae!’
When I got in from the balcony, Nurse Parsons was sitting at the desk in the corridor alcove watching the battery of bulbs and gauges in the electronic panel that occupied all the lower half of the wall ahead. The top half was plate-glass. She stood up, yawning. ‘I’ve just been round to keep myself awake. All flat out and all I got were snores.’
‘As I recall the most peaceful sound for any night nurse.’
‘I’ll say!’ She was eyeing me with a
new interest. ‘Staff, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’ve only taken in your name since you went off. Any relation to THE Holtsmoors?’
I didn’t feel strong enough to do more than hedge. ‘My late husband wasn’t in medicine.’
‘Late ‒ you’re a widow? But you’re so young ‒ Oh, God ‒ is that the wrong thing to say?’
I smiled slightly. ‘No.’
She was not only bright, she was kind. Instead of the usual uncomfortable silence, she plunged straight on. ‘Is it very grotty, coming back?’
‘Not so much grotty as funny, peculiar.’ I looked along the pale blue corridor to the end away from the wards off which lay Sister’s day-office (which I must stop calling the duty-room); the linen-room; clinical-room; television room; relatives rest-room (a new one on me); and the ward kitchen (which I had to remember to call the pantry). At the end of the corridor a double opaque glass door led to the lifts and stairs. ‘With all these new home comforts and electronic gadgets, this strikes me as more like some space-age hotel than the Martha’s I knew. Going to take a lot of getting used to.’
‘You hadn’t seen the Wing before?’
‘Not even the building up.’
Her wide brown eyes regarded me as if I had just announced working with Miss Nightingale in Scutari. ‘You’ve been gone ages! Which was your last ward?’
‘Albert.’ It flashed through my mind how enchanted she would be if I truthfully added, ‘And there one night in my second month as night senior I met my husband when he came in to see one of his mechanics we’d had in as a road accident. The Night Super recognised Marcus, got out the red carpet and told me to give him tea in the duty-room. He’d dated me before he’d finished his first cup.’ I felt almost guilty when I merely added, ‘Albert still in Block Three?’
‘Oh, no! The old Albert closed directly this joint opened. Two floors down from us, Major Male Accidents.’
‘It was that in my day.’ She was pulling a face. ‘What’s up?’
‘I forgot to tell you Albert rang while you were eating. Can we lend ’em two quarts of milk till breakfast? We’ve masses to spare. Sorry. Should’ve told you before.’
‘Never mind. Anyone else ring?’
‘Not a soul. We’re so slack I think people forget we’re here.’
‘I wouldn’t say that seeing we’ve already been visited by our medical and surgical registrars plus their housemen, the Night Super, and the Wing dispensary porter for our basket. Who else are you expecting? Surely not the S.M.O. and S.S.O. since we’ve only one patient who properly qualifies as sub-acute?’
‘The S.M.O. and S.S.O. don’t come here ‒ unless the Wing falls in or something. They run all Martha’s, being Top Residents ‒ but, of course, not the Wing!’
I remembered Matron’s remark about the new baby. ‘Who runs the Wing?’
‘The S.M.R., W. and S.S.R., W. ‒ “W” for Wing,’ she added obligingly, to put me in the picture. ‘I say, should I take that milk down to Albert? They did sound in a slight tiz.’
‘I never remember Albert not in one ‒ or come to that not short of milk. They on take-in this week? Maybe they need it for relatives’ tea. You take some down if we’ve got enough.’ I took a ward torch from the desk. ‘I’ll take another look round then get started on my 2 a.m. report.’
She had turned to go. She turned back, apologetically. ‘Staff ‒ er ‒ do you mind my telling you you won’t need that torch? They’ve all got those push-button lights in their bedhead rails just to the left of their nurse-call buttons.’
‘So they have. Thanks.’ I looked at the torch before putting it away. ‘This just for power failures?’
‘Yes. The emergency battery lamps are stacked at the end of the clinical-room.’
‘That’s right. Sister showed me. Like I said, Nurse Parsons, these home comforts are going to take a lot of getting used to.’
There was a relieved air about her as she went off for the milk. I sympathised with her, remembering very well how I had felt as a junior when suddenly confronted with an unknown senior. I had not yet told her how long it was since I last nursed, partly as she had talked too much to give me the opportunity, partly as it seemed less than discreet to broadcast the fact to my unknown junior my first night back. On paper I was almost certainly the most senior staff nurse on nights in the entire hospital. In Martha’s, if a nurse was good enough, once trained, promotion to at least a junior sister’s rank was rapid. If a nurse wasn’t considered good enough ‒ and every training hospital has its unofficial impossibles that somehow manage to survive the training ‒ that nurse was out, staff shortages notwithstanding. Poor kid, I thought, and then thought how odd it was that memories I hadn’t recollected in years should now seem as recent as yesterday because I was back in uniform. I didn’t even have to remind myself to walk pigeon-toed as I went round. My feet remembered for me that that was the quietest way to walk a ward.
The patients were all sleeping as well as she had said. In William main ward I stood for some time by Bed Six. The occupant, a Mr Yates, was the only truly sub-acute patient we had in that night. He was a young lorry-driver who had been badly injured in a six-vehicle pile-up five weeks ago. His notes showed he had spent his first week in Albert Ward on the Dangerously Ill List and was remaining in William temporarily as Albert needed his bed for a more acute case. He was due to return to Albert at the end of this week for a second-stage operation on his grossly fractured right leg. His op notes were signed, W. H. Brown, Senior Surgical Registrar, Wing.
Mr Yates’s pulse was excellent, his leg plaster was intact, his right toes were warm and he was sleeping deeply without sedation. I took his notes out to re-read them in the corridor light. I wondered if I knew this Brown? I remembered a John, Pete, and Dick Brown. W.H.? I didn’t think so.
Someone coughed in Mary main ward. It was Mrs Jenkins in Bed Three and our only other surgical patient. She was a post-hysterectomy going home tomorrow.
‘Ta, duck.’ She accepted a drink. ‘Not a proper cough. Just a frog in my throat.’ She noticed my wedding ring in the beam of her bedhead light. ‘Your hubby one of the doctors here, Nurse?’
‘No.’ I turned her pillows and the conversation. ‘Looking forward to tomorrow?’
‘You don’t know how much, duck! It’s not that you nurses haven’t been lovely and the doctors is ever so kind mostly, but you’ll know how it is when you got kiddies yourself. You can’t help missing ’em, cruel.’
‘I can imagine.’
It was the first night of Marcy’s life that we had spent apart. I knew I’d left her fast asleep in the spare room next to my cousins; that it had an adjoining door; that Ann was reliable as well as kind and Marcy had yet to have her first restless night. And yet I felt physically incomplete. I hadn’t expected this, being now over the vaguely lost sensation of her first week at school and having ignored the effects of darkness. Not even the very real necessity to concentrate on the job in hand had so far succeeded in stifling the primitive maternal urge to guard my own child through the night. I felt so guilty I had constantly to remind myself I was both parents and unless I earned regular money the new life Marcy was much enjoying would be over before it got properly started. That helped, but only a little. Reason, as I was fast discovering, had a nasty habit of turning lightweight when balanced against the second strongest and most primitive of all the instincts. All I could then do was hope time and habit would help me to get this in proportion. That first night it hurt like hell.
I did not hear the opaque door open or anyone come in, but when I got back to the corridor a tallish, very broad-shouldered and very dark-haired man in a long white coat was standing at the desk. His back was to me and so instantly familiar that having the name Brown in mind, I ran over my mental list again. Hadn’t Dick Brown had dark hair?
The newcomer turned and I stopped on one foot. He wasn’t the S.S.R., W. as his name was not Brown. It was Joel Kirby and when I had last seen him he had worn a houseman’s
short and generally crumpled white coat, his hair had been much shorter and less tidy and the knot of his tie usually under one ear. His present very smooth haircut was strictly adult London male, 1969, the sideboards suited his square-jawed face, though he looked more than seven years older. His white coat was pristine even at 1.30 a.m., and beneath it he wore a good dark suit and downright snazzy waistcoat. There was very little about him now to remind me of the crazy, fast-talking senior student I had met in my first year, and who later became one of my greatest friends, until Marcus. The little that was the same was the expression in his tobacco-coloured eyes.
There had been a mobile fish-and-chip stall on the Embankment one hot summer night just after I got engaged. I could practically smell the mixture of fish, rancid oil, traffic exhaust, and steaming pavements in the shining, aseptic pale blue corridor. I could as clearly see that younger Joel in shirtsleeves with his loosened tie limp as string. ‘As you’ve got no parents to straighten you out, Pip, someone’s got to do the job. Someone’s got to tell you you are out of your mind! Belt up, girl, and listen! You aren’t in love with Marcus Holtsmoor! You just think you are. You’re in love with the Big Deal he’s handing you ‒ but for Christ’s sake, he’s old enough to be your father! He’s never held down a decent job ‒ sure, sure ‒ I know his rating as a playboy and behind a wheel ‒ but what sort of a marriage will you have with a spoilt sod of a Peter Pan like that? He’s middle-aged, moron! Don’t kid yourself you’re going to change him! What he is now is what he’ll always be ‒ if he doesn’t bust his neck at the next Grand Prix which at his age is too bloody likely. He may kid himself his reactions are good as new, but in the forties they aren’t and they can’t be. He’s passed it, Pip ‒ and you’re so bloody immature you’ve not even got started. You can’t marry him!’
The Healing Time Page 2
