To Have and to Hold

by Anne Bennett

  ‘Maybe, because you have tasted tragedy yourself and he knows that and because Mr Martin spoke to you first, you would possibly have a better reaction,’ Matron said. ‘Anyway, isn’t it worth a try?’

  Matron’s suggestions were really directives, as Carmel knew only too well. She very apprehensive as she returned to the room a few minutes later. Cassie went on her break and after she left, Carmel first busied herself in the room, tidying up and putting things in order and throwing the odd comment to Terry, which he chose to ignore. In the end, she decided she had dallied long enough and had to get started and so, feeling none too confident, she sat on the bed facing him and said, ‘D’you remember the day I told you about my husband, Paul?’

  Terry didn’t answer but his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  Undaunted, Carmel soldiered on. ‘Well, I’d just like you to know that that isn’t information I share with patients generally. But you asked and I told you, but you didn’t tell me whether you were married or not.’

  Terry glared at her, but made no effort to speak and Carmel suppressed a sigh. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Answer something else instead. Why did you ask me why I should be bothered with you, almost as if you didn’t deserve to be helped?’

  ‘Maybe that’s what I think,’ Terry growled.

  ‘But why would anyone think like that?’ Carmel said. ‘If nothing else, people with your skills are badly needed. This is everyone’s fight, every man’s, every woman’s and even every child’s because we are fighting to make a safer world for them to grow up in.’

  Terry’s eyes suddenly filled with tears at Carmel’s words. They poured from his eyes in a torrent and he sobbed and sobbed as if he never intended to stop, the weeping punctuated with gasps of sheer anguish that seemed to be tearing him apart. Eventually Carmel, alarmed by Terry’s condition, could stand it no more and leaned right over him in the bed and held him tight.

  She was heartily relieved when Cassie put her head around the door at that moment. ‘Fetch Dr Stevens,’ she said to the girl, who was staring almost transfixed at the man sobbing on the bed and Nurse Connolly nearly lying on top of him. Carmel, however, was too worried about Terry to consider her incongruous position. ‘Hurry,’ she urged, and the girl almost ran from the room.

  ‘Was that virtual collapse brought about by trying to talk to Martin about his past?’ Dr Stevens asked Carmel after he had sedated Terry. He added, ‘Matron said that you were going to try.’

  Carmel nodded, feeling incredibly guilty that she had brought about such a paroxysm of grief, however inadvertently. She tried to remember the conversation before Terry had broken down completely and recounted it to the doctor as well as she could.

  ‘D’you think that Mr Martin might have lost a child in one of the raids?’

  ‘I think that is quite possible,’ the doctor said. ‘And if the man has been holding that inside himself all this time, when he comes around, he might well need help to deal with it. I will alert the Psychiatry Department.’

  The next day, Carmel was summoned to Matron’s office and was surprised to see Dr Stevens already there. ‘Mr Martin was admitted to the psychiatric wing of the hospital last night,’ Dr Stevens said.

  Carmel was shocked. ‘Was that necessary?’ she asked and then blushed at her temerity. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to tell you your job. It’s just…’

  ‘I know how you feel,’ Dr Stevens said. ‘This wasn’t a decision I made lightly, I assure you, and I trust it will not be permanent, but I was too worried for his mental state. When he is more stable they will run some tests on him and maybe have some idea of the root of his problems.’

  For three days Carmel and Cassie worked on the main ward. Carmel worried and fretted over Terry, but no one seemed able to tell her anything. Visits to the psychiatric unit were discouraged and she felt helpless.

  Matron was waiting for Carmel when she arrived at the hospital the following morning. ‘Mr Martin wishes to talk to you. In fact what he said was you are the only person he will talk to. Though he is still in the psychiatric unit, he is in a private room so you won’t be disturbed.’

  After her last experience with Terry, Carmel was nervous of seeing him again on her own and she opened the door of his room tentatively, noticing straight away that his neck brace had been removed.

  She sat on the bed so that she could see him. His face was white with exhaustion and there were black smudges under his eyes. She felt sympathy well up inside her and she felt bound to say, ‘I am so sorry, Terry, that I upset you so much when I spoke to you a few days ago.’

  ‘That wasn’t your fault and I know you were trying to help,’ Terry said. ‘I had a few sessions with this psychiatrist chap and he said I had to talk to someone. “Release the demons,” was the way he put it, before they destroy me. I knew he was right because the memories are ripping me apart and all this time I really thought I was coping.’

  ‘Some things are just too hard to cope with alone,’ Carmel said gently.

  Terry nodded. ‘I know that now and I wanted to talk to you first because you really seemed to care. You asked me if I was married. Well, yes, I was, to a girl called Brenda and we had two children, a son, Andrew, who was only six months old and a daughter called Belinda. She was as pretty as a picture and two and a half years old. God, when you told me your little girl was the same age, it was like a knife had twisted in my heart and I resented you for having a living child when mine was dead. I’m really ashamed now that I felt that way.

  ‘We lived in a back-to-back house in Bell Barn Road down the Horse Fair way only a few doors from Brenda’s parents. And since the raids started, we’d all had a bad time of it, living so close to the town.

  ’Anyway on this evening, 19 November, the sirens wailed out just as we’d finished our tea, like, and we got the kids ready to take them to the public shelter in Bristol Street like we’d done many times before. Brenda’s parents and younger sister were waiting for us, and we all walked down together.’

  ‘I remember that raid,’ Carmel said with a shiver as she recalled the hospital packed with the injured, the maimed or those desperately searching for news of their loved ones. ‘It was a dreadful night, that.’

  ‘And it went on for hours and hours,’ Terry said. ‘And then about midnight a warden came in and asked for some men to help. A pub had collapsed, trapping people in the cellar, and they were being gassed to death. Naturally, I went and so did Brenda’s dad. Some time later, after we got the people out and I had disconnected the gas pipe to prevent any explosion and we were on our way back to the shelter, we heard the planes coming closer. We both ducked into this entry. I was at the end of it, looking out into the street, and there were that many fires burning it was like bloody daylight. Brenda’s dad had gone further in. Next thing I knew, I was blown to the other side of the street in the blast from the bomb that had landed on the entry and Brenda’s dad had been killed. I was wondering how I was going to tell Brenda and her mother, sort of rehearsing it as I walked back, you know…’

  Carmel wondered if he was aware of the tears that he was brushing impatiently away and she suddenly knew what he was going to say, but that didn’t minimise any of the horror. With a grim and humourless laugh he went on, ‘Huh, I needn’t have worried. When I got to the shelter it was just a mound of rubble, sandbags seeping everywhere and people uncovering bodies and bits of bodies that were buried in the debris.’

  Terry’s eyes, which sought Carmel’s, were bleak as he said, ‘I never found any of them. The two babies, Brenda, her mom and sister were probably all cuddled together and were blown to pieces. I asked myself over and over, why them and not me? Why was I the only one in the whole family to be alive and everything I cared about taken from me?

  ‘I knew I couldn’t have stood seeing them in bits. I ran away from it and so now I don’t even know where they are buried, nor Brenda’s dad either. What sort of a useless person does that make me? I feel so bloody bad about that now, like
I have let them all down.’

  ‘Don’t torture yourself,’ Carmel said. ‘You weren’t thinking straight. God, you must have been in shock.’

  Terry nodded. ‘It was the house that was the last straw. Funny that, my family wiped out and when I found the house gone too, something snapped. Suddenly everything went black and I just fell in a heap across the rubble. I came to in a hospital bed the following day and after a couple of days, there was a pastor came round to talk to me and he sorted me out with a new ration and identity card because Brenda had them in her shelter-bag, and as far as I know that was never recovered. He got me some clothes too, and found the place that I am living in, and even contacted my boss at the Gas Board, who thought I had been killed.’

  ‘They probably think that again this time,’ Carmel said.

  ‘This time I wanted it to be true,’ Terry said.

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’

  ‘It’s true,’ Terry said. ‘Or it was. I just thought, what have I got to bloody live for? I was sort of holding part of this bombed house up so the people trapped in the cellar could get out and then I just let go and let the lot fall on me. I wanted to die. I had had enough, but there were people everywhere pulling at the rubble, trying to save the life I didn’t want saved and I wanted to tell them that, but I found suddenly that I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move either and that terrified the life out of me. I wanted to be dead, not paralysed.’

  Carmel felt her stomach turn over for this poor tortured and very lonely man, and she had the urge to put her arms as tight around him as she was able to and hold him tight. She knew, though, she couldn’t do that.

  Instead she said, ‘That is one of the most tragic tales I have ever heard and I feel touched that you have shared this with me. And now I am off to see if I can have you moved back to the surgical ward, because you certainly don’t belong here.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Are you sure that you are thinking of Terry as just a patient?’ Lois asked Carmel one day.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Matron will have your guts for garters if there is the slightest hint of impropriety.’

  ‘There isn’t and, anyway, I know that, Lois. I’m not stupid and I do know how to behave as a nurse, thank you very much.’

  ‘Don’t go all mardy on me,’ Lois protested. ‘It’s only you I am thinking of, and if you only knew how much you talk about him, how his name creeps into every other sentence…’

  ‘I am with the man day in and day out—what do you expect?’ Carmel asked testily. ‘I realised only the other day that I know more about him than any man alive, including Paul, and that came as a bit of a shock. I also know every inch of his body, even the most intimate areas, because for some weeks the confines of the cage meant he was able to do little for himself. That is bound to make you closer to a person than the average nurse/patient relationship, but that doesn’t mean I would forget myself entirely and leap on him in a fit of rampant lust.’

  ‘All right, all right. Point taken,’ Lois said with a grin. ‘But, seriously, how does he feel? You know, even on the General Ward, many male patients fancy themselves in love with the nurses. I mean, does he—;’

  ‘Terry’s fine,’ Carmel said shortly. ‘He knows the score.’

  Lois wasn’t convinced, but she knew that there was nothing to be gained by keeping on about it and she said nothing more.

  Carmel was glad she had dropped the subject because she had been less than honest. Each day she longed to see Terry again, and when he smiled at her when she went into the room, she felt her heart turn somersaults. He brightened her day and her life. She felt like a young girl again. She had been brought up sharp the first time she had recognised that feeling. She had thought all emotion like that died with Paul, and she had never felt even mildly sexually attracted to anyone before, but she had been careful not to allow any glimpse of this to creep into the way she had cared for Terry.

  Each day she would buy a paper on the way to work and either she or Cassie would read bits out to him. It was Cassie’s idea because she said that time must hang heavy for him. He didn’t even have visitors to break up the day and tell him what was happening outside the walls of the hospital.

  Carmel thought it a very good idea and though she did most of the reading and discussing afterwards, Cassie was the best one to help him with the crossword. This was because at least a couple of the clues usually centred around the stars of the silver screen, or the title of the film they had starred in, and Cassie was never away long from the cinema.

  Her favourite films were romances, so Carmel and Terry would hear about the elegance of Joan Crawford in Mademoiselle France, the glamour of Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes, the beautiful and sexy Veronica Lake and Marlene Dietrich in anything at all, and, of course, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, which Cassie had seen three times.

  Carmel, knowing of the penny-pinching of her student days, asked her one day where she got the money from.

  ‘Oh, we don’t pay,’ Cassie said. ‘One of my roommates’s sister is an usherette at the Gaumont and she gives us free tickets, so I can go when I like usually.’

  ‘No wonder you have all the answers,’ Terry commented wryly from the bed. ‘So come and help me with fourteen across.’

  Soon, however, these sessions had to be severely curtailed, for Terry was on the road to recovery. Carmel went with him when they removed his supportive cage. When they started the intensive physiotherapy the treatment was explained to her, and she and Cassie worked together with him on the ward each day to strengthen his muscles.

  It was Carmel who often had to bully him in the early days, despite feeling sympathy for the pain he usually endured afterwards. She would watch him as he lay back in the bed, knowing he would be aching all over, but she never let a hint of pity enter her voice or manner as she tended him, well aware that if he wanted to return to full health he had to suffer this.

  Then came the day he was lifted to his feet where, supported by Carmel and a physiotherapist, Terry shuffled between two wooden bars. His excitement to be on his feet again brought tears to Carmel’s eyes but she never let them fall. It would not help Terry to have people crying all over him, and she helped him progress first to crutches to get around and then eventually to sticks.

  And now even the sticks had been thrown aside. He was completely recovered and fitter, he claimed, than he had ever been. Carmel knew that, happy as she was to see him so much better, there would be a big hole in her life when he left the hospital, which he was due to do the first week in November.

  The morning that he was due to leave, he suddenly caught hold of Carmel’s hand and said, ‘I am really going to miss you. You have given me back my reason for living and I can’t thank you enough for that.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ Carmel said, trying to keep a lighter note in the conversation, because Terry’s words were causing her stomach to turn over most alarmingly, and his holding her hand was sending a tingle running all through her arm.

  ‘No,’ Terry said. ‘Nursing is your job. You have done far more for me than mere nursing. I don’t know how you feel about me and have no right to say these things to you, but I think—no, I am sure—that I love you dearly.’

  Carmel willed her voice not to shake as she said, ‘It’s a well-known fact that many male patients fall in love with their nurses.’

  ‘This goes deeper than that,’ Terry said earnestly. ‘Can I—can I see you sometimes, when I am out of here?’

  Carmel knew what he was asking, but she wasn’t ready yet for any sort of relationship, so she said, ‘Why? You’re better now, you don’t need the services of a nurse.’

  ‘No, and it isn’t the nurse I want,’ Terry said. ‘But I do want Carmel Connolly the woman.’

  ‘No, Terry,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be wise. I’ll see you at Christmas anyway, won’t I? By then you will feel differently. Trust me.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’
/>
  ‘I am still making no promises, Terry.’

  She had worried how Terry would spend Christmas and with whom. She knew it was an intense and emotive time for many people anyway, and she didn’t want Terry to slip back into depression again. Ruby fully understood her concern and said she should invite Terry to spend Christmas at her house.

  When Carmel issued the invitation to Terry, just before he was due to leave, she knew by the look on his face that he was pleased beyond measure and that he had been worried himself.

  ‘You’re quite sure about this?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Carmel said. ‘There won’t only be me and Lois—you know, my friend that I told you I share the house with. We always spend the day with next door neighbours, the ones who look after Beth in the day. It helps to pool the rations and then, of course, Jeff has all manner of contacts and we don’t enquire too closely where he gets some of the stuff he brings.’

  ‘Isn’t Jeff your father-in-law?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Won’t he mind me muscling in?’

  ‘No. Why should he?’

  ‘Well, you know…’

  ‘No, I don’t know,’ Carmel said. ‘They know all about you anyway.’

  That, of course, had been before he had made the declaration to her, but she had given him her answer. She had to be content with that and so had he.

  Carmel couldn’t seem to shake off the despondency that surrounded her after Terry left the hospital. It was almost tangible. Lois watched her pick at her food, her face become pasty white and her eyes develop blue smudges beneath them.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Lois demanded one night after Carmel snapped at Beth over nothing.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know full well what I mean. You have been going around like Lady Misery for a couple of weeks and now you have started to take your bad humour out on Beth.’

  ‘I’m just out of sorts,’ Carmel said.