Sister Mark was in terrific form. On the quiet Nurse White told me there had been some talk about Sonia returning to what was still officially her job and my going to the theatre.
‘Sister went stark raving bonkers and created to Matron herself! I actually heard her on the telephone. I’m so glad we’re going to be able to hang on to you, Nurse. Oh, yes ‒ Dave Druro asked me to give you his love. He was so sorry not to be able to say good-bye in person. Good weekend?’
‘Just fine, thanks.’
Johnny was in and out of the ward as much as ever, looking and acting just as he always did on duty, wasting neither time nor words. As the days went by I began to wonder if we had shared that picnic and unburdened to each other, or if I had just dreamed it up. Yet there were occasions on the ramp, or in Casualty yard, when we ran into each other and he stopped to chat or just smiled as if he was actually glad to see me.
As the theatre stood directly opposite Mark across the ramp, I saw a good deal of Sonia coming and going, but because of our different off-duties and the strange shift hours worked by the theatre staff, it was days before we met up for long enough to exchange more than automatically bright smiles.
She came into lunch as I was finishing, and sat next to me. ‘Darling Kirsty! It’s ages since we met! How are things?’
I said things were fine, congratulated her on her recovered health, and thought it more tactful to say nothing about her new engagement as there had been no announcement in any papers I had seen. ‘How’s the theatre?’
‘Madly exciting, darling! But do tell me ‒ have you forgiven me for pitching you into Mark?’
‘Nothing to forgive. I love Mark.’
‘Darling,’ she purred, ‘you obviously have the most generous heart.’
She could have been talking about my ward. I doubted it, I smiled, went on with my lunch.
She had not finished. ‘You really don’t mind? Darling, I can’t tell you how relieved I am about that. And I’m simply thrilled to see you’ve at last decided to bury the hatchet with my poor darling Johnny.’ She paused to let that sink in. ‘He’s so sweet ‒ but everyone knows he always used to be your pet hate.’
I recognized Richard’s wording. ‘Always covers a lot of territory, my dear.’ I stood up. ‘Forgive me, Sonia. The job calleth.’
‘Sure. See you around, sweetie.’
That was another bit of Richard. Sonia, I reflected on my return to Mark, must be every atom as serious about him as I had thought, to be copying him unconsciously. So perhaps he was not going to need my sympathy after all.
I had a long letter from Phil that week answering one of mine. She was still very distressed about lacking the courage to tell me what was cooking. ‘It must have been murder for you getting it from Johnny of all people. I feel an utter heel (female variety). Are you very mis.?’
I was off at five that evening, and took my writing-case into the empty sitting-room, as there was something I wanted to watch later on television.
I answered Phil’s letter first.
‘My dear,’ I wrote, ‘you must stop being in a state because you did not tell me about Sonia. Of course you are not any variety of a heel. I would have done the same. I won’t pretend Saturday did not reach an all-time low, or that Johnny was not the last man I would have wanted around, but he was, and that was that.’ I stopped writing momentarily. There was a good deal more I could add about Johnny, yet, although I had always told Phil everything, I hesitated. After all, I asked myself, what could I say? Johnny had his good side? But she had been telling me that for years. No. It could wait until she got back from Eire. ‘As of now,’ I wrote on, ‘the whole affair is something I refuse to discuss or remember. Do believe that, and stop feeling guilty.
‘Of course I understand exactly how you felt. So no more brooding, take good care of yourself, and come on down here just as soon as you can. I miss you like hell.’
Home Sister came in as I stuck on the stamp. ‘Going to the post, Nurse Francis? Would you take mine?’ She handed them over, then looked back at the corridor. ‘One moment ‒ isn’t that Nurse Dinsford? Ah, yes.’ Sonia joined us. ‘Going on duty, Nurse? Then perhaps you’ll kindly save Nurse Francis a journey. There’s just time for you to catch the late post out.’
Mark had been very busy that day. My feet were tired, and I was really grateful not to have to go out again; I relaxed alone on the sofa, enjoyed the programme I wanted to watch, and hoped Phil would snap out of her guilt complex when she got my letter.
Mark was even busier next day. Sister Mark’s temper always improved when we were hectic. She cheerfully assured me every surgical bed in the annexe was occupied. ‘Always the same. All the wards are heavy together, or all slack together, and no one can ever properly explain why. Now, then’ ‒ she studied the off-duty list ‒ ‘I have been wondering if you would object to changing off-duty with me to-day, Nurse. I would rather be free this afternoon and on this evening, even though I shall be off tomorrow and Sunday.’
‘I’ll change with pleasure, Sister.’
‘Then off with you to lunch, now. You are a little late. Bustle to.’
It was much colder. I hugged my cloak round me, shot down the ramp and directly into Johnny. He jumped aside, but the file of notes under his arm slipped and scattered case-history sheets all over the ramp and yard.
‘I’m so sorry.’ I dived to help pick them up, handed him back those I had retrieved, and smiled apologetically. ‘I hope they’re all there.’
He did not smile back as I had expected after his recent more human behaviour. Instead he gave me an old-fashioned glare. ‘Why the devil don’t you look where you are going just for once?’
I was really surprised. He sounded his old bad-tempered self. But I had changed and was out of the habit of fighting with him. I went on smiling. ‘You do sound cross. Had a tough morning in the theatre?’ And as he was still glaring, I apologized again. ‘I was not thinking what I was doing.’
‘Do you ever? I wouldn’t bet on it. Which reminds me, as you are here now’ ‒ he reached into a breast pocket, took out an envelope, and thrust it at me as if it was hot ‒ ‘you had better have this in person instead of my wasting more time dropping it into your pigeon-hole at the Office. Richard Bartney won’t yet have had time to send back the letter you presumably wrote me and shoved into his envelope. When it arrives, don’t bother to send it on.’
‘Johnny! What are you talking about? What is all this?’ I looked from the envelope in my hands that was addressed to me in his writing, to his face, ‘I just don’t follow you.’
‘That’s just dandy since I’ve no intention of, or inclination to, lead you anywhere. I’m sure you’ve got a splendid explanation. Unfortunately, I’m just not interested.’ He walked on into Mark.
I slit the envelope with my scissors. There was another inside. It was addressed to Johnny, stamped and postmarked with this morning’s date. It must have come in the second post that always arrived between twelve noon and 1 p.m. The writing was almost exactly like my own. Clipped to that envelope was a scrap of paper on which was written: ‘Opened in error for obvious reasons. J.M.D.’ Inside was my letter to Phil.
I was first astounded, then angry, and finally I felt plain sick. Presumably this was Sonia’s idea of a joke. It had not amused Johnny, and if I had believed that letter had been written to Richard by the girl he had just given such a public brush-off, it would not have amused me.
I read again the specific reference to Johnny, and was very tempted to rush back into Mark and somehow make him listen to the truth. It was his final remark as much as my training and the thought of Sister Mark that made me go on to the dining-room. The handwriting on his envelope was such a good copy of mine that it would even take in Phil. I knew it was not mine. I could not prove it or connect it in any way with Sonia at the moment. So whatever I said he would clearly think I was just trying to talk my way out of a tight corner. And in any case, I told myself as I stopped feeling sick and
turned angry again, what did I care what Johnny thought of me? I had never bothered about his good opinion before. Why start now? We had just gone back to square one.
We had not. From that afternoon my sometime enemy, sometime friend Johnny Druro turned into a frigidly polite stranger.
I never thought the day would come when I would long for him to snap my head off about instruments boiling to a jelly, or asking unnecessary questions, but, thanks to Sonia’s little joke, it came.
I called it a joke to myself, for want of a better word. I was convinced Freud would have had one, but what puzzled me was why she should have bothered to break up what was only a very minor friendship between Johnny and myself, when she had already been so successful at removing Richard from my life. The only conclusion I reached was that she had always been very possessive. Such people, unhappily for themselves and those around them, never can bear to share anything, from their toys in the nursery onward.
When I calmed down I would have liked to do something about Johnny. The trouble was, I did not know what. I did tackle Sonia one evening about a week later.
‘A letter to Phil, darling? Did I post it? One evening with Home Sister’s? I’m so sorry, I didn’t notice. I just pushed them all through the lodge box. Hasn’t she got it?’ she asked innocently.
‘No. I wondered if you’d dropped it.’
‘I don’t think so, darling. Of course, one can’t be sure. But if it’s gone astray ‒ surely it’ll come back to you?’
‘Yes. I expect so,’ I agreed, and left it at that. Demands for the truth would get me nowhere, and by leaving things in mid-air at least she was not going to have the satisfaction of knowing just what she had done.
Those next few weeks were the most miserable I had ever known. I was enjoying Mark, and getting along with Sister much better than I had ever anticipated, but although I had been trained to forget my private affairs on duty, my training was no longer a complete armour, as it was quite impossible to forget Johnny. He was always there. My ward was his ward. He had to talk to me, work with me, daily. His new icy civility became more intolerable with every day that went by.
There was one consolation for me ‒ my reputation for being allergic to our Mr Druro. Not even Sonia could have any notion of what was now, even to me, the astonishing truth.
Often at night, as time went by, I thought of the past and how crazy I had been to look at Richard, for all his movie-star appearance, when there had been a man like Johnny glowering in the background. He really had the most glorious glower, I thought, and some words Charles Lamb once wrote ran through my head:
Anger in its time and place
May assume a kind of grace.
It must have some reason in it
And not last beyond a minute.
That might have been written for him.
Sonia was still in the theatre. Phil’s shoulder was taking far longer to recover than had first been expected, and she was still in Eire. Sonia’s engagement to Richard was now an accepted and barely discussed fact. But from snatches of conversation at meals and in the Home I gathered her latest engagement was having as little effect as the old on dimming her interest in our Mr Druro.
‘Trust Sonia not to waste the long winter evenings just because her ever-loving house-surgeon has to work in Simeon’s proper. Have we not a fine annexe theatre filled with fine surgeons?’
‘My dear, have we not! And what’s a houseman all those miles off compared with a registrar on the spot?’
And another time: ‘Johnny Druro should work for M.I.5. He never gives a thing away. He doesn’t seem to notice women, but Sonia says there’s not one thing he misses. And he’s always trying to date her.’
I wished Phil was back. I badly wanted to talk to someone about it all, but there was no one in whom I could confide to that extent. I had got out of step with my own set, was over the great dividing-line between the trained and the untrained, and often in my free time as autumn turned to winter I felt a stranger in my own hospital. My fellow staff nurses, with the possible exception of Sonia’s immediate circle, were not intentionally unfriendly. They were just very much my senior, had their own friends and interests, and it took them a while to realize my position.
The first to do this was the most senior staff nurse in the annexe. Her name was Aline Sands. She was a prim, angular young woman in the early thirties, the senior theatre staff nurse, and due to turn into a Sister Theatre in the New Year. She asked me to tea in her room one night after work, then again a few nights later, and then it became a habit.
I never remembered her as anything but a staff nurse, and because of her manner had been good and scared of her when I was a junior. I discovered over those teas that her primness was nothing more than shyness, and once she began to shed it she was beneath a quietly amusing and very interesting person. The theatre was her great passion in life; she loved nothing better than talking theatre shop. Being an expert on her own subject, what she said would have fascinated me, even without the many little cameos of Johnny at work that she inadvertently gave me. She considered him one of the brightest of our present bunch of rising young surgeons. ‘He’s got the right neat hands, of course, and the physical strength. You need to be strong to tolerate all those hours of standing.’ She refilled our cups. ‘He’s looking hideously tired lately. It’s time he took that holiday he keeps talking about.’
‘Is he due for one?’
‘My dear, yes. He always has four weeks all in one to coincide with the fishing season. He’s missed it now. I don’t know why.’
I did. I kept it to myself.
She mentioned Sonia occasionally, but only in connection with work. She thought her an excellent theatre girl. That night she added, ‘Dinsford would be a future Sister Theatre for sure, and might well have got a gold medal if only we had no men round Simeon’s. She’s got a real theatre talent, but I guess she’ll waste it.’ She frowned. ‘I get so annoyed when people waste their talents.’
I said, ‘I’ve heard Dinsford was good. I didn’t realize she was that good.’
‘Then you’ve never worked with her in a theatre. You know how you either are, or are not, a theatre girl?’ I nodded. ‘She is. And although I’ve never liked her as a girl, I do admire her on the job and the way she’s stuck to the job. Nursing’s a good job we all love, or we wouldn’t be doing it, but only a fool would pretend it isn’t very hard and not always pleasant work that has to be done day after day, week after week, year after year. Our hours are shorter than they used to be. They’d still send most factory workers straight out on strike if they had to work them for one day. And as for overtime ‒ you ever heard that word used in Simeon’s? I haven’t. One is just late off. Sonia must have a very good streak in her somewhere to make her put up with it all, considering the kind of gay life she could have just for the asking with her looks and money.’
‘That’s true, though I hadn’t realized it before.’
‘It took me quite a time ‒’ She broke off as her great friend Dolly Gray, the staff nurse in the children’s ward, burst in on us, beaming widely.
‘Aline, guess what! My clever, clever Henry has got his Membership!’
Mrs Gray’s husband was one of the senior house-physicians in Simeon’s proper. When we had congratulated her she told us about the party she planned to give next evening. ‘Henry and I have just been fixing things on the phone. It’s my half-day; he’ll be off from two, and he’s bringing a carload down with him and is asking every resident free down here. I’ve promised to rustle up enough girls. You’ll come, Aline ‒ you’re not on call ‒ and you too, Francis? You know my husband, don’t you?’
‘Yes, indeed. Thank you very much’ ‒ I was delighted to have an alibi ‒ ‘but I am afraid I’m on until nine. It’s Sister Mark’s free weekend, and she’ll be off from four.’
‘Oh, dear!’ Then she brightened. ‘Never mind. Come along just as soon as you can. We are going to start at six, but we’ll just go on and on. I
n the residents’ sitting-room across the way.’
‘That’ll be just fine.’ I hoped I sounded more enthusiastic than I felt. I loved hospital parties, but I did not want to go to this one. Friday was Johnny’s free evening. Tomorrow was Friday, and he, along with every resident off duty at the annexe, would be there, and those on duty would look in for a few minutes to slap Henry Gray on the back for becoming a Member of the Royal College of Physicians.
With Johnny free, Sonia would somehow manage to be free. Richard might even get down, although in the old days Henry Gray had not been one of his particular friends, and I would have to watch Sonia playing off one man against the other. My heart sank at the prospect.
It sank still further next day when Sister Mark came out of the duty-room just before lunch and told me she had been speaking to the Professor on the telephone. ‘He cannot get down for his round before five, and then has to go straight on to Bournemouth by road for that Surgical Conference. He is taking our S.S.O. along with him. I am afraid this means I must ask you to change your off-duty with me again, as I must be here for the Professor. Would you mind going off at five, Nurse?’
‘Not at all, Sister,’ was all I could say, while inwardly cursing all professors.
Sister looked worried. ‘There is another problem, Nurse. Until I see the Professor I cannot give you a full weekend report.’
I had a wonderful idea. ‘Couldn’t I come back for that later in the evening, Sister?’
‘If you have no objection that would be a great help. Eight-thirty? Good. I’m much obliged, dear.’
The theatre-list was due to start at half-past one that afternoon. When I left the dining-room Johnny walked a few yards ahead, making for the theatre. He was walking unusually slowly, his head bent, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. He walked like every other man in the hospital, but totally unlike his normal self. I remembered what Aline Sands had said about his looking tired. If he got much more tired he would be asleep on his feet. I had either to pass him or stand still. As I went by he looked at me, said nothing.
Flowers from the Doctor Page 10
