She felt almost elated as she started to prepare. Dropping her soiled uniform in the linen box – I’ll never wear that again – changing into a dress and coat, throwing as much as she could cram into her suitcase, and leaving without a qualm her lecture notes, her text books, all the paraphernalia of the student nurse, in the bookshelves. To be doing, to be busy, that was the thing.
She left her room, the room she had called home for so long, with never a backward glance, not even taking out the little pasteboard square that read “Student Nurse P. Oxford. Third Year” from the door. It just didn’t matter any more.
She went swiftly down the stairs and then on past the reception desk in the main hall, and the fussy little middle-aged part-time helper who sat there busily taking messages each day up until five p.m. looked up as she put down the telephone and called out, “Nurse Oxford, is that you? Oh, I am glad – that saves me traipsing up the stairs to find you, and I can’t deny I’m more than a little tired at this end of the day – now, what was it? – oh, yes. You’re to go to Matron’s office right away, they said. Can you go now, and not waste any time because Matron is waiting for you – you can leave that here, if you like.”
She peered curiously at the big suitcase Tricia was carrying. “Going on holiday, are you? Lucky girl! Anyway, you can leave that here behind the desk and I’ll watch it and tell Home Sister when I go off before you return, so that you needn’t drag it over to the hospital – it was lucky I caught you before you left, wasn’t it? Another couple of minutes and you wouldn’t have got the message. I hope everything’s all right? Or perhaps Matron just wants to see you before you go – ”
“Perhaps,” Tricia said, and then couldn’t resist adding, “And she’ll just have to want, won’t she?” and found a childish pleasure in the shocked look on the little woman’s face. No one ever spoke to her about Matron like that, you could almost hear her thinking; what had this naughty nurse done? But the pleasure to be found in the other’s curiosity and disapproval was short-lived, and she pushed her way through the big doors, and holding her head as high as she could, marched purposefully towards the back path by the Path. Lab. and the way out. Tricia Oxford, leaving, finishing what she started. Let ’em all look!
“I’ll take that.”
The voice startled her and she dropped the case and whirled, to see Adam Kidd ducking out from beneath the branches of the big beech tree.
“I was about to come and get you, quite honestly. I thought that for once I’d been wrong. But I wasn’t. I knew you’d do this.” He picked up her case, and turned and went back under the tree and she stood stupefied for a moment before following him into its shaded protection.
“What the hell do you mean? Give me my case at once!” she cried furiously, and reached to grab it from him.
“Oh, do sit down and stop being a bore,” he said, and shoved the case under the seat that curled round the tree, and then sat himself firmly above it, stretching out his legs in front so that she would have had to physically shove him away to get at her property. And for one mad moment she contemplated doing just that, but then looked again at his squared shoulders, and the way his white coat stretched across his chest, and hesitated.
“That’s better,” he said, “Good sense prevails. At the moment. Are you going to sit down? There’re a number of things to be said, and I’ll get a crick in my neck if I have to sit and look up at you all the time. Sit down. I won’t bite.”
“Would you kindly tell me what the hell you think you’re doing? Would you kindly return to me my case, and let me go? There is nothing I have to say to you or anyone else here, and I can think of nothing more boring than conversation with you now or ever!”
“Really? How limited your imagination must be.” He smiled then. “Oh, cool down, will you? You really are being remarkably obtuse. But then, you have been all the time. But you’ll learn, if you’ll give yourself half a chance. Come and sit down. Tricia, won’t you? Please?”
And almost before she realised she had moved she found herself sitting beside him, her hands gripped on her lap, and staring at her own outstretched feet crossed on the grass before her. And there was a pause, and then he said in an unusually soft voice, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Are you going to tell me where you’re going, what your plans are, or do I have to tell you? Choose which ever will take the least time, there’s a good girl. I’ve been sitting here waiting for hours, I assure you, and there’s work to be done, even among those despised private patients. Which shall it be?”
“You don’t need to waste a moment of your precious time on me,” she snapped, childishly. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re sticking your nose in where it isn’t wanted – ”
“Yah, yah, yah, I’ll tell teacher – ” he murmured in a soft chant and put a hand under her chin, and pulled her face round so that she had to look at him. “Come on, you can do better than that – ”
“Oh, go to hell,” she said again and pulled her head back.
“Eventually, no doubt,” he said equably. “Oh, very well, I’ll tell you then. You’ve been sitting there, in your little cell of a room in that – that pile of red bricks, and you’ve been thinking. Or trying to. Hating yourself, hating me, hating everything. And, I hope, hating that stuffed shirt boy friend of yours – ”
“How dare you – you, you – I could – ” She almost spluttered in her rage, and he laughed at her, his eyes glinting behind his glasses.
“Oh, my dear Tricia, you’re going to find out a lot about what I dare and what I don’t dare. I’m a law unto myself, do you know that? If I think a thing needs saying, I say it. Hadn’t you noticed? I rather thought you had. That’s why I’m here now. I’ve got something to say, in a moment. But first things first. Where was I? Hoping you’d at last seen that your – fiancé – it suits him, that label, doesn’t it? – your fiancé is not for you. Some girl somewhere is going to think the sun rises and sets in him, but not you. You never did, did you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said mulishly, but she slid her eyes sideways to look at him. And finding him looking at her with a sardonic gaze, immediately switched her eyes back to looking at her own feet.
“Oh, yes, you do. You’d be surprised how much I know about you. Know how you think, how you feel. I know how desperately frightened you are – ”
She looked at him very directly at that. “Frightened? Me? What of? Of course I’m not – ”
“Yes, you are,” he said gently. “Very frightened. Frightened of being lonely. Frightened of insecurity. Of making decisions. Of leaving one way of life behind you so that you can take up the next load and enjoy it as it should be enjoyed.”
“Look, you can go trying your – your parlour psychology on someone else. I don’t know where the hell you think you got your knowledge of me from, but it’s all surmise – pure surmise.”
He laughed then. “But it isn’t wrong surmise, is it? That’s why you’re still here. If I weren’t on the right track, you’d have shrieked blue murder long since and got your case back and gone marching off. Of course I’m right. I’ve got to be. I’ve been watching you and learning about you for some time now – ”
“Only a few weeks!”
“Yes. Only a few weeks. Long enough.”
“Anyway, I don’t see – ”
“ – what it has to do with me. We’ll come to that. Now, let me complete my – analysis. You sat there this afternoon, and you decided that since all is so hateful, you’d just quit. Just like that. You wouldn’t wait about to be nagged and bullied – you’d had enough, that hateful Private Wing, that hateful Sister Cleland, that hateful man Kidd – ”
“You have a point there!”
“I reckoned it’d take you about an hour to get to the stage of actually doing it. Well, I was wrong. It took you almost – ” he glanced at his watch. “Dear me. Three hours. There’s even more character to you than I guessed. That’s nice to know
– ”
“You – I – you are the most impossible – ” she started to say, but he laughed, and said, “I know. Maddening, isn’t it? Someone else being so right? Now, I’ve told you – and you’ve got to tell me something. Why? Why in the name of good sense did you choose to behave like that with Philip Bartlett when you must have known someone’d march in as it happens we did? Were you just being stupid? Or what?”
“It’s no concern of yours,” she snapped.
“I don’t agree – but you can say so if you choose, so now tell me. He is my patient, you know. Isn’t that a legitimate reason for me to show interest?”
There was a long silence, and then she said flatly, “I was sorry for him. So sorry for him. Poor wretched – it was a game he played. It made him feel better. Dying men don’t flirt with girls, only healthy men do that. So he had to pretend to have this whole thing going with me’ she shrugged. “And I played the game with him. That was why.”
He leaned back against the seat then, and she was startled at the way he suddenly sighed sharply; and she turned and looked at him. He had his eyes closed, and his lower lip caught between his teeth, and a half smile on his face. And then he opened his eyes and caught her gaze and said softly, “Now, that I didn’t know. That I thought was something you’d not learn for a long time yet.”
“Learn? What?”
“The – dynamics of the dying state. That sounds pompous, I know, but it describes what I mean. How people react to such desperate facts of life as love and birth and death and partings, they are the dynamics of human experience and they matter very much. And you’ve learned, somewhere, how to help a dying man come to some sort of terms with the fact of his own death. I did you an injustice. For a horrible while back there – I was afraid. I was afraid it was for real – that you were involved with him on a personal level. Or that you were perhaps quite different to the way I had assessed you, and were just behaving – ” he shrugged. “Stupidly. Unthinking. I’m glad you weren’t – ”
“You’re glad? You were? Horrible? What are you talking about?” She couldn’t look at him, but she was very aware of his bulk on the seat beside her, and grasped her gloved hands together even more tightly, knowing that they would shake if she relaxed for one moment. “What do you care about my involvements, either with Mr Bartlett or my – my fiancé? As far as I can see you’ve got plenty of personal involvements of your own. Including Sister Cleland – ” she added spitefully, and then could have bitten her own tongue.
He chuckled softly. “Well, well. That gets under your skin, does it, the Cleland thing? Interesting. And what about Maxine Bartlett?”
She shrugged, still not looking at him. “None of my concern.”
“Really? You should have seen the expression on your face the other evening, when you came into the visitor’s waiting room – ”
“I was disgusted.” She snapped it out, furiously. “Disgusted with her, with you – ”
“And with your own reaction. You were so eaten with – jealousy, for want of a better word, that you – ”
“Jealous! How dare you suggest such a thing! You can go necking with every blasted patient and visitor that the third floor gets for all I care, you – you – ”
“Oh, let’s not fence, Tricia, for God’s sake. You love me. You have done this past month or more, and you don’t know what the hell to do about it. Can’t even face up to it. Unless, this afternoon, you found out? Sitting there, all that time? Is that why you took so long to make your decision to go?”
His voice was very soft now, and she sat frozen into immobility, but her pulse thumped in her ears so loudly she felt the whole world must be able to hear it, and there was a deep cramping pain in her chest that hampered her breathing and made her feel almost ill. But somewhere, deep inside her, under the thumping pulse and the breathlessness the little voice that inhabited the most secret corner of her mind was singing, and shouting, and crying out in a great paean of joy.
But she kept her eyes resolutely on her feet, and managed to say, “I saw you – of course I did. And I – wondered – ”
“Do you think you have a monopoly on understanding, you silly, silly creature? Do you think that only nurses develop an instinctive way of helping people – patients and their relatives – over the hurdles of living? Those two, Maxine and Philip Bartlett – they have a very special relationship. Based on love and care and habit, and companionship and friendship, and garnished with games, all the years they’ve been together, garnished with games. She knows he’s dying, and she’s mourning in desperate grief already. But she’s playing the game his way, too. Pretending to flirt with me, when I’m in the room with them, because that’s how it’s always been when they’ve met interesting people. And by going on with her flirting game, she’s trying to convince her Philip that all is well, that he’s going to get better, because if he were dying, she wouldn’t play the game any more, would she? And he – seeing what she was doing, and loving her as he does, he played the same game for her benefit. Both of them desperately acting for each other, doing all they can to get each other through their private hell. As for me – that evening, she needed someone to let her stop acting, someone to let her cry out her grief and her terror and her knowledge of loss. That’s what I gave her. A shoulder to cry on, a person against whom she could spit her rage at what was being done to her, a person who’d let her come creeping into his arms for comfort afterwards. A father, if you like. That’s what you saw. And were jealous. You were, weren’t you?”
She said nothing for a moment, her mind twisting and whirling with confusion, and then she heard his voice sharpen as he again took her chin in his hand and made her turn her head towards him.
“I’ve got to be right, Tricia. Got to be. Because God help me, I couldn’t be less personally involved with Maxine Bartlett or poor yearning Sister Cleland, on account of I’m involved, up to my ears, with a silly, gangling, long-legged, immature, incredibly sexy, student nurse.” He looked at her for another long moment, and then said, his voice infinitely tender. “You silly, stupid, idiot. Life with you is going to drive me mad – but what can I do about it?”
And then he was kissing her, and she felt herself drowning in a wash of feeling she had never before known, and was almost shocked at the intensity of it, frightened by it, and tried to pull back, but he held her closer and enveloped her in his own strength and she lost her fear, and clung to him, and let the voice inside her sing its wild joy in her ears.
They sat there for a long time after that, saying nothing, and holding on to each other’s hands, and he let one finger tip trace the pattern of their interlocked hands, and smiled at her, and she smiled tremulously back.
“You’ll have a lousy life with me, you know that?” he said at length. “I’m a selfish bastard in many ways. It’s got to be my way. Not yours. Can you take it?”
“I know. I can take it.”
“I’ll make you want to kill me sometimes, we’ll probably fight like cats.”
She smiled secretly to herself, contemplating the joys of a life spent fighting like cats with Adam. “I know.”
“You’ll hate me often.”
“I know. I often have already.”
“Your friends will say you’re mad.”
“One won’t.”
“The funny little New Zealander? No, perhaps not. That’s a girl of parts. I like her.”
“I’m glad. She needs liking.”
“We all do. Tricia – ” he let go of her hand, and stood up, and pulled her to her feet, and stood very close to her, looking at her face, inch by inch, as though he were taking an inventory. “I love you. Try to remember that, will you? I didn’t want to. I tried not to, but there – ”
She smiled at him, very serenely, suddenly feeling very old, very wise. “Poor Adam. I know. I know just what you mean. I’ve tried not to, as well. Very hard. Loving you is going to be painful. Being loved by you is going to be worse, in some ways. I know. But that’s th
e way it’s got to be, isn’t it?”
He stood back from her, still holding her hands, and peered at her in the deepening afternoon light. And then nodded.
“Yes. You understand. All right. No more problems. All you’ve got to do now is go and see Matron. Tell her the why’s and wherefore’s of this afternoon’s episode with Bartlett, just as you told me. She’s – quite a wise old bird, that one. It’ll be all right. Go on – ”
“No – please, Adam. No, I can’t – I’ve got to leave, you must see that – ”
“And later, tonight, you’re to contact David and tell him. It will hurt like hell, and he’ll be very difficult, but you’ll do it.”
“No – ”
“Tricia! Let’s not start the fighting yet, for God’s sake! It’s been a long day, damn it. Do as you’re told, will you? You know you’ll have to eventually, so let’s save all our energies and do it now, all right?”
“But – ”
“Because that’s the way it’s got to be, isn’t it? Now and always?”
She took a deep breath then, and put her head back, and stood, her eyes tight closed, feeling the cool evening air against her hot cheeks. And then nodded submissively.
“Very well, Adam. If that’s the way it’s got to be.”
The Private Wing Page 15
