Nurse in Waiting

by Jane Arbor

  “But the feeling will come back, Roger. It must!” The conviction in her voice was buoyed by hope alone.

  “It will. About by the time the humidity of our darling climate has me twisted into a gnarled knot with arthritis in my seventies! Wasn’t I reading somewhere that certain ailments take immediate hook at the mere suggestion of old man arthritis—or was it the other way about—he hops it at sight of them? Joanna, do you know?”

  Joanna turned about from the table where she had been measuring his medicine. Her lip twitched as she said gravely:

  “I believe in America they’ve discovered that arthritis doesn’t live alongside yellow jaundice, pregnancy, or starvation. If you think you’re likely to qualify, I hope you’ll let me know.”

  He laughed, and Mrs. Carnehill joined in before she left the room. But when she had gone his face darkened again, and he said morosely: “Mother destroys herself with worry about me. I wish she wouldn’t. What good does it do? And, as soon as she gets back from Naas, it’ll be Shuan next. ‘Darling Roger—’ No, Joanna, I can’t stand much more. You must keep her away, or make her pipe down or something—”

  “They—they care too much,” Joanna said slowly. “It’s understandable. And you don’t always bear with them as you might. Just now you were cleverer—you made Mrs. Carnehill laugh. You might try that more often.”

  “But why must they get so—so emotional about it? Why can’t they accept the dreary inevitability of it all and not let themselves get so worked up? You don’t!”

  “For me—it’s rather different, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Yes, I suppose it is. You know, I thought about you a lot while I was in the nursing home—”

  “Did you?” Even to Joanna her voice sounded as if it came from a long way off.

  “Yes. Don’t appear too interested, will you? Though I admit I’d have been tempted to have you strangled if you’d said: ‘Flattered, I’m sure,’ or ‘Did you? How nice!’ Anyway, don’t you want to know at all what I thought?”

  “Yes, go on—”

  “Well, I had fiendish nights, mostly, and I spent most of ‘em thinking. And I remembered an odd thing that Denis Johnston once said—he’s one of our dramatists, by the way. He said that none of us was convinced of the reality of anybody but ourselves. Anyway, I began to check up on the people who were real to me... Mother is, of course, and Shuan, and McKiley, blast him ... Howie only vaguely, I’m afraid. And that brought me to you. I thought: ‘Joanna?’ And do you know, I found that you were—utterly real?”

  “You were surprised at that?”

  “Yes. I think I was. I should have expected length of time of knowing a person could count a lot. And how long have you been at Carrieghmere? A few weeks, isn’t it? And then you’re so correct and impersonal about the job—and you haven’t talked much about yourself. In fact, you’ve got all the qualification for being a mere frontage. But you’re not, though of course I realize that, to you. I’m no more than a symbol in your case-book. Do nurses keep case-books?”

  Joanna smiled. “Only officially.”

  “But I am no more than that?” he persisted.

  She hesitated. Then she said slowly: “No. You are ‘real’ too.”

  “You’d have to say that, lest I think you completely case-hardened and soulless!”

  “No, it’s true. I’ve realized for some time that all of Carrieghmere and all the people in it and about it have as much reality for me as any place or almost any people I have ever known. It’s as—as if it were a place I’d had a nostalgia, a sort of homesickness for, all my life.” She laughed diffidently. “That’s impossible, of course. How could I be homesick for a place I’d never seen?”

  Roger commented: “It’s improbable, rather. You’ve lived in London all your life. You must hanker for everything it offers. Be honest, Joanna. One day you’ll turn a thankful back upon the rains and the loneliness and the interminable bog. Before long Carrieghmere and all it stands for will be part of your past?” He took the medicine glass from her and regarded her quizzically over the rim of it. “Do you know, I resent uncommonly the thought of being relegated to anyone’s past!”

  Joanna looked at her watch for, lightly questioning though his glance was, her own eyes did not want to meet it. She said briskly: “Well, you’re very much of my immediate present now. In fact, all of us revolve about you—you should be thankful for that!”

  It was about a week later. She was in the kitchen, preparing a tray for her patient, and Mrs. Carnehill was there too, knitting her brows over the adaptation of a Portuguese fish delicacy.

  They both looked up as the sound of heavy footsteps sounded in the yard outside, and Michael, the stable-lad of whom Dr. Beltane had said his heart “was in mechanics,” came rather diffidently into the kitchen.

  He blushed at sight of Joanna and said to Mrs. Carnehill: “Could I be sayin’ a word to ye. Ma’am?”

  Mrs. Carnehill regarded him vaguely. “Yes, Michael. What is it you want?”

  “Well, Ma’am—” He stopped and shook his head. “No. ‘Tis the terrible liberty, after all—”

  Mrs. Carnehill laid down a tablespoon and withdrew the pencil from behind her ear with an air of abandoning everything she was doing until Michael had got his message off his chest.

  “Look, Michael,” she said patiently, “we have all this modest blarney from you whenever you have a favor to ask. What is it this time?”

  “Well, Ma’am—would ye be wantin’ the car at all tomorrow?”

  “No. Why? But wait now—I would. I have to go to Belfast, and Shuan must drive me into Tulleen.”

  Michael, whose face had dropped, looked more hopeful. “Tulleen, is it? ‘Tis but the lick of a journey at all. The car’d be free after that, supposing—supposing anyone wanted to borrow it?”

  “It would—supposing you wanted to borrow it! And what would you want with it, you spalpeen?”

  “To take it to Dublin. To—to take Roseen to Dublin. For hasn’t she her heart set on one o’ thim husky film stars and will give me no peace till she has me at the Rialto to see him cavortin’ on the screen? ‘Tis a small thing, she says, to ask Mrs. Carnehill could you have the car one day, the way it’d be sittin’ on its four wheels the while nobody would be needin’ it at all. But, of course ‘tis not a small thing, as I told her—”

  Mrs. Carnehill’s eyes twinkled. “Go on with you, Michael! You know you thought of it yourself!”

  “I did not, so!”

  “Well, it’s all one. Yes, you can have it when Shuan brings it back from Tulleen. But no acrobatics, mind! And no staying till the last house.”

  The boy grinned his thanks and had toned away when Mrs. Carnehill reached for her handbag and produced a crumpled treasury note from it.

  “Here, you wretch,” she said as she thrust it into his hand. “Give Roseen a good time and see that she realizes that film stars aren’t for the likes of her nor for any of us!”

  When he had gone she chuckled. “Roseen’ll take him in the end,” she told Joanna confidently.

  “Oh—are they—?”

  “—like that? Yes, I think so. Though Roseen declares she has her heart set on going for a nurse, and you’d often say that the Kilkenny cats were nothing to the pair of them! But she has admitted to me that Michael has ‘char-r-m’; I’ve no doubt the loan of the car will put it high indeed!”

  Meanwhile Joanna, amused, was wondering in how many houses in England would the family car be lent for such an errand!

  The next day her employer, in the usual flurry which accompanied the preparations for her journeys, set off for several days in Belfast, and when Shuan brought back the car Roseen, in a sky-blue marocain dress and camel-hair coat, and Michael, almost unrecognizable in a bow-tie, left upon their own jaunt. And Joanna happened to be crossing the hall when the telegram came ... “for Merivale,” said the impersonal voice at the other end of the wire.

  “Merivale here,” said Joanna.

  “Handed
in in London. The message says: ‘Arriving Dublin unexpectedly seventeenth. Very brief stay Trinity College to watch important experiment. Must see you. Shall expect you T.C. any time during afternoon. Looking forward so much. Signed—Dale.’ Do you want a confirmation?”

  “No—no, it doesn’t matter.” Joanna replaced the receiver, wanting nothing so much as a little time now in which to digest the telegram’s contents. Dale in Dublin! And this was the seventeenth itself. He must have come over by the night mail to Kingstown and was already there.

  Her first impulse was to say that she could not possibly go—to ring up Trinity College in the hope of finding him and saying that she could not possibly get to Dublin at such short notice. For somehow—for a vague reason which she could not define—she felt that personally she needed longer notice before leaving to meet Dale again.

  She was shocked at that. Was it possible that in no more than a few weeks at Carrieghmere she had travelled so far from the routine of her life in London that she wanted warning of seeing Dale whom, there, she saw at least once or twice a week?

  It was no more than vanity, she told herself ... Instinctively, on taking the telegram she had made that mental feminine review. “What can I put on? I wish I had washed my hair“ But she knew in her heart that her reluctance went deeper. A meeting with Dale would call for adjustments...

  She was still standing irresolutely by the telephone when Shuan came into the hall. She stared at Joanna, whose hand still rested upon the receiver, and asked abruptly:

  “Is anything wrong? Have you had bad news?”

  Joanna pulled herself together with a jerk. “No. Only rather unexpected news. A—a friend of mine is in Dublin for a day or two, and he wired before leaving England to see if I could meet him there. It was all rather sudden. Probably that’s why I was looking a bit lost!”

  “Well—are you going?”

  “No. How can I? He wants to see me today and I can’t get even to Tulleen to catch a train. Besides—I oughtn’t to leave you alone with Mr. Carnehill.”

  “You mean you don’t intend to!” A dark flush mounted in the girl’s face as she went on passionately: “I told you what I felt about Roger and that I’d give up the idea of going to Dublin for a job, if it meant that I could do everything possible for him. There’s utterly no reason why you shouldn’t leave him to me for a day. But you don’t mean to, even though you could do it quite easily. You could have Patrick Sheehan’s taxi from Tulleen or, better still, you could go into Dublin with Justin. I’ve just met him, and he offered me a lift if I wanted to go, so why shouldn’t he take you?”

  Joanna took a sudden resolution. She said quietly: “Shuan, you know that since we talked that night I’ve tried to let you help with Mr. Carnehill in every way I could think of. And because I believe he will be all right with you I’ve decided to go to Dublin, if Mr. McKiley will take me.”

  Shuan’s face cleared as quickly as it had clouded. “You know he’ll be all right with me. Are you going to tell him?”

  “Yes, of course—”

  “Well, I’ll go and tell Justin to wait for you. I’ll say that he must bring you back too.”

  Roger’s acceptance of Joanna’s news was one of gloomy resignation. But before she left him to go to change he said: “When we were talking about the people who were our ‘realities’ I said I should resent being relegated to your past. Now I find I don’t want to believe that you’ve got a present which isn’t wholly concerned with me and your life here. But the young man—the hydrogen-bomb specialist—I suppose one’s got to accept that he’s one of your ‘realities’?”

  “Yes,” said Joanna firmly, “he is. I’ve known him far too long for him to be anything else.” At the door she paused, looked back over her shoulder, and said with a twinkle: “But he still isn’t a hydrogen-bomb specialist!”

  Before she closed the door behind her she had the gratification of hearing Roger chuckle.

  As she changed out of her uniform she found her mood altering. She did want to go to Dublin to see Dale after all! And she gave a good deal of care—though she had not much time—to what she would wear.

  When finally she ran downstairs to Justin McKiley’s waiting car she had chosen a full-skirted black coat with a dress of grey jersey under it. Her matching hat of jersey was half beret, half bonnet, and she carried a handbag of grey lizard which had cost far too much, and over which she had many purse-searchings before she had decided to afford it.

  Justin McKiley looked at her with frank admiration, but he made no remark upon her appearance until she told him how grateful she was for the lift. Then he said meaningly: “The person who should really be grateful to me is the fortunate man for whose sake I’m taking you to Dublin at all!”

  It was an open invitation to tell him more about her errand, and Joanna felt she could do no less than do so.

  He made no comment, but said casually: “Shuan asked me to bring you back again this evening. Is that right?”

  “If you are able—?”

  “Well, I’m giving Magda—you remember Magda?—a drink at the Greville at about half-seven. Could you come there?”

  Joanna did not know where the Greville was, but he told her, and though she was not anxious to meet Magda again she promised to meet him there.

  Before long, the car was sliding into the neat suburbs of the city and Justin was asked where he should leave her. She asked to be set down on O’Connell Bridge, and when she had watched the car go on up O’Connell Street she crossed over to Trinity College and, glancing briefly at the benign stone countenance of Oliver Goldsmith on his pedestal, she inquired with some trepidation at the porter’s lodge for Dale. It was all wrong to be feeling so—so apart from him in so short a time!

  She was asked to wait in a waiting-room and there, presently, he came to her.

  “Joanna!” Both his hands came out to take hers. “So you got my wire?”

  “Yes. What—what a surprise. Dale!” She sounded a little breathless.

  “It was. But you may imagine that I jumped at the chance to come over.”

  “How long is it for?”

  “Three days. I’ve got to be present at two experiments and a lecture tomorrow. But today I’m free. That’s why I was able to give you so little notice. What shall we do? What is the city like?”

  They walked out side by side into the pale sunshine, and Joanna knew that she was thinking: “I wish he would say that I look nice or—or even well.” But she remembered that Dale rarely said anything like that. Which was comforting when you knew you weren’t looking your best, but was rather dampening when you hoped that you were.

  As they walked up O’Connell Street he asked again. “Well, what are we going to do? Is there anywhere we could go to talk? What do you do yourself when you come here?”

  “I don’t,” said Joanna quickly. “I’ve been only once before, when I had to bring Mr. Carnehill to the nursing home for treatment. But if you want to see sights, there’s the Hill of Howth up there”—she waved a hand vaguely northwards—“or there’s Killiney down there. You climb them and get a magnificent view, I gather—”

  “I said,” repeated Dale patiently, “that I wanted to talk, not look at views, however magnificent.”

  For the first time he seemed really to look at her. “Besides, you’re in your best bib-and-tucker. You’re not dressed for climbing things.”

  Subtly—and most unreasonably—Joanna felt irritated. The reluctant sunshine was warm now; she felt stifled by the city and would have welcomed a tramp at Dale’s side, reliving the many times when they had walked over Box Hill or Berkhampsted Common together. Her clothes weren’t unsuitable for it! And he had no right to imply that she had only one “party best” to her name!

  But he was asking: “How long shall we have together, Joanna? When must you be back?”

  She told him then about Justin McKiley’s having brought her and that she must be at the Greville at half-past seven at latest.

 
“Then we shan’t have time for much more than tea,” said Dale sensibly. And, feeling ashamed of her irritation, she agreed that they wouldn’t.

  They found an underground cafe of “Ye Bog Oak” type and as she followed Dale’s familiar back down the stairs she thought:

  “It’s best like this. This is where we belong.” For in London they had talked across the tables of a score of such cafes. They would talk here, and she would be rid of this feeling of “apartness” from him which nothing had served to dispel.

  Downstairs, the lantern-lit atmosphere was as warm as that of a sheltered cave. Dale took off his overcoat, passed his hands over his hair, and looked approvingly at the deserted tables.

  “We can talk here,” he said. “Might be in our own home.”

  Joanna smiled. It was a remark which he made regularly whenever they achieved unexpected solitude in a public place. At the back of her mind lurked the suspicion that a time might come when she would be tired of hearing him say it. But for the moment it seemed to bring him back into focus, as it were. And she was glad of that.

  He began to tell her of the experiments he had come to Dublin to see, of his own recent work, of a new assistant in the laboratory—a girl who was “a fool but fairly easy on the eye”—and all the gossip he had been able to cull from her own headquarters, the Marrone Nursing Home.

  Suddenly he looked at her more closely. “There’s an idea going around among your old cronies that you are overworked. You don’t appear to have written much to anyone. Now I come to think of it, you do look tired.”

  Joanna refilled his cup. “It’s the lighting,” she said more shortly than she intended.

  “It’s not. I noticed it outside. It’s what I said in one of my letters—you’re taking the whole thing too seriously, you’re exhausting yourself over these people. I’ve never known you to do it before when you were on a case. And the chap sounds such a curmudgeon. That alone must be nervously exhausting.”