Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  Yes, she could. But not yet. First she’d set about making enquiries about Matthew, find out where they would send him once in England. A lot of the boys from that area came here after landing, because it was convenient from Southampton. If she could ask the right people.

  Whether her efforts had anything to do with it, there was no way of finding out; a few replies came from different quarters saying it would be looked into in due course but no one could give any promises. Her case, she suspected, was put aside, for the months had gone by and she’d heard no more.

  Two weeks earlier the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought about Japan’s capitulation. Great Britain celebrated VJ Day but, less energetically than VE Day, having done it all once. Her mother’s letters no longer mentioned Matthew or his family. Jenny made her way across to the TB wing, under a clearing September dawn which promised to become a fine day after twelve hours of rain, to relieve Staff Nurse Merriman from night duty.

  Merriman leaned back on her chair, flexing her stiff shoulder muscles, and yawned widely.

  ‘Ooh-ahh … What’s it like outside?’

  ‘Beautiful. It’s going to be a fine day. What sort of night has it been?’

  ‘Pretty quiet,’ came the answer. Merriman was already gathering up her bits and pieces. ‘Corporal Douglas haemorrhaged and got a bit panicky. Otherwise all quiet.’

  The wards were coming alive. Strident voices of nurses were urging patients not to fall back to sleep after having been aroused at five thirty with tea and wash basins. The clang of bedpans resounded from the sluice, and the corridors echoed to the rattle of crockery-laden trolleys bringing the breakfasts. A nurse going off duty hurried in to deposit an admission file on the desk, gave the incoming sister a brief smile, grabbed her cape off the peg behind the door and departed.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Merriman, pushing the notes across to Jenny. ‘I meant to tell you, Admission phoned a few moments ago. He’s probably on his way up now. Everything’s ready for him, so there’s nothing to do.’

  Jenny laughed. ‘Thanks.’

  She took the cup of tea handed to her by a skinny first-year nurse who surveyed Merriman with tired, hopeful eyes.

  ‘Is it all right for me to go off now, please, Staff?’

  Merriman was in an authoritative mood, still in charge for the while. ‘If you’ve left the sluices clean, yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Merriman.’

  ‘And charted the temperatures?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Merriman.’

  ‘Is the kitchen tidy?’

  The girl nodded vigorously. ‘Can Harvey go as well, Miss Merriman?’

  ‘If she has finished everything.’

  ‘Oh, she has. Thank you, Miss Merriman.’

  As the girl’s flat heels clicked urgently away along the corridor to be joined by Harvey’s, Merriman sighed and stood up. ‘Time I was off too. I need my bed. And I want to wash my hair.’ She made a stack of her notes on the desk, laying the admission file on top. ‘There, over to you.’

  The day staff were coming in, chattering. Jenny heard Staff Nurse Reid’s sharp tones reminding them who and where they were. The chattering ceased abruptly. Jenny reached for the admission folder as Reid burst in, her voice querulous.

  ‘You’d think this was a four-ale bar, not a hospital. To hear those girls, you’d never guess there were sick people here.’

  Jenny’s gaze was fixed on the now-open folder. She hadn’t heard what Reid was saying. Reid leaned over her shoulder to see. ‘Oh, no, not an admission this early in the morning. I’ll take it.’

  The file was snatched up from under Jenny’s eyes. ‘Why can’t they come at a convenient time? And we’ve a probationer coming on the ward today. All our time will be taken up telling her what to do.’

  A porter popped his head around the door, his attitude full of self-importance. ‘Where d’yuh want this one?’

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ Reid said briskly and clutching the folder waved the porter on, leaving Jenny staring into space. After all those letters she had written, all those enquiries, entreaties. They had paid off. Unbelievable. Quite unbelievable. If she hadn’t been on duty she’d have burst into tears.

  At first she thought she must have been mistaken, misread the file in that short time before Reid had snatched it so imperiously from under her hand. For a moment it was impossible to associate this patient with the man she had once known, the young man full of laughter and abrasive wit, the khaki-clad soldier she last remembered, so certain of where he was going, carrying himself with all the zest of life.

  This man, propped up with pillows, bore no resemblance to that one. Her practised eye already noted that he did not yet have the high colour that went with his disease, which hadn’t yet secured such a hard grip on him as it had done on others. It was possible that with care and attention he’d overcome it. But of the man himself? The eyes, deep in their sockets, looked out not on a sunny ward but back in time to an existence that had all but destroyed him as it had so many thousands whose lives he had shared. Everyone now knew of the Burma Railway, the prison ships, the conditions of men incarcerated in jails throughout the Far East, the ghastly massacre of men and women in hospitals as they lay sick and wounded. Some, if not all of that, men like this one must have seen, struggling single-minded to survive. Here was such a man. It glowed from his eyes and Jenny shuddered.

  It was only after a moment or so that a slight movement of his head touched her as singularly familiar, at first vague but growing stronger so that all at once she wondered why she hadn’t been able to recognise him instantly. Gaunt, cheeks still sunken from years of starvation, eyes that dwelled on the past, it was nevertheless Matthew.

  As she spoke his name he looked at her, in those few short seconds his regard blank as hers had been: puzzled, uncertain, trying to pinpoint a memory. A spark of recognition lit up his dark eyes, coupled with disbelief.

  ‘Jenny?’

  She tried to laugh. ‘Jenny Ross. Sister J. Ross, Q.A.I.M.S.’

  It was a poor joke and she felt immediately ashamed, seeing the smile trying to reach his eyes, ridden as they were by dark ghosts. Her own eyes filled with sudden tears she tried hard to keep from showing. The last thing a man wanted was what would appear as a superficial show of sympathy, the giver with no idea what it had been like for him.

  Instead, she said simply, ‘I’m glad to see you, Matthew.’

  ‘Oh, Jenny.’ With a cry from the heart, that bond they’d once known formed itself anew, the way it had done when the promise stretching before them had been bright upon a horizon they hadn’t then known concealed the shadows of what was to come. It hadn’t been a bond of love then, and now it was more a renewing of a friendship that had flourished briefly only to be interrupted by circumstance. But now he was here, she’d nurse him back to health and for her, for the time being, it was enough.

  Thank God the disease was proving less advanced than she’d first feared. Despite the conditions under which he’d lived these last three years he’d retained a strong enough constitution to fight it in its early stages.

  For that at least, Jenny offered up prayers of thanks. If only his state of mind showed as much promise. He’d sit in the hospital grounds, wrapped up with a coat against the stiff, health-giving breezes from the Blackmoor Vale which patients were expected to endure daily, staring ahead, seldom glancing around him as people normally do. If she approached him, he’d tense, his gaze averted. Asked how he was – a nurse’s question after all – his reply would come back in a monotone. He offered no conversation, no observation of his own, leaving her to maybe lift the wrist, feel the pulse, play the nurse’s role. Should she try to further her concern for him she’d inevitably be fobbed off with a terse reply that nothing was the matter and why should there be?

  At these times Jenny would feel a blaze of anger against Susan Ward, for it could only be she who was the cause of such anguish. Of course some of his attitude stemmed from w
hat he’d endured as a prisoner of war. But with a loyal woman at his side he’d have surmounted it in time. His wilful, selfish wife had let him down – if her mother had been right, and no reason why she shouldn’t be. Susan’s letter to him had revealed her adultery while he’d been away and helpless to do anything about it. After all he’d been through, to come home and hear something like that! Worse, he never spoke about it and Jenny felt powerless to alter the situation. Even as she came up to him now, she knew there would be no help she could give him.

  To think she’d offered the girl friendship. Had she known what she was like, she’d have had nothing to do with her. Reaching Matthew’s side, she found herself hating Susan as she’d never hated anyone in her life before.

  As Jenny had anticipated, he did not look up at her as she too let her gaze wander to the trees on the horizon, their billowing of full-leafed heads darkened by distance against the sky with its small lamb-clouds marching in procession across the azure expanse. Matthew had said nothing and she tried not to see herself as an intrusion as he continued to ignore her, his hands curled into tight fists against the arm supports of the hospital Bath chair in which he sat. Yet she couldn’t walk away, not with the torment she could see in the tightness around his mouth, the fine brows drawn together, the eyes seeing nothing but what must be seething inside his head.

  Unbidden, she sank down on the small bench beside him. This time she didn’t go through the motions of taking his wrist ineffectually to feel the pulse. He would know it as only a ruse. Nor did she speak. Making smalltalk would only reap a sarcastic response and send her away hating herself for having stupidly intruded. The time spun itself out, slowly, the silence between them heightening the faint hum of traffic on the road, the musical trill of a nearby thrush, the soft twitter of a myriad other birds in the grounds, the distant intermittent conversation of people further off, enlarging the silence between them as though they sat within a vacuum. When he did speak, low as his voice was, Jenny’s nerves jangled sharply although her body itself did not move.

  ‘I’m trapped here,’ was all he said. She remained silent, encouraged for a hopeful moment or two, but he didn’t appear to want to say anything more, and her hopefulness died.

  She reached out and laid a hand on his clenched one, letting it lie there. He didn’t draw away as she had half expected. The fist remained there, unmoving beneath hers, the warmth of the skin penetrating hers, her nurse’s enquiring mind immediately registering that he might be feverish. A little maybe, nothing to be concerned by; temperature could go up and down. It was expected, so long as it did not flare. She did note something else, that the fist began slightly to relax. He moved his head a fraction and let his gaze fall on to her consoling hand. Did it seem to be a consoling hand to him?

  A nurse’s voice nearby startled them both. Then the nurse and her charge moved on, the voice fading. Jenny followed their departure with her eyes, so it was a second or two before she became aware of Matthew speaking, of what he was saying, his voice halting and so low as to be hardly audible except for the sibilant sounds.

  ‘Places like that – you need someone. Something. To cling to. In my head. She was in my head. Fever. Does weird things to you. But she was real. Thinking of me. Far away. Thinking of me.’

  He was talking about Susan. ‘But for her I’d have gone under. She kept me going. Once – a mouth full of ulcers – vitamin deficiency – couldn’t eat …’ There came a low mirthless chuckle. ‘Starving, and I couldn’t eat … She kept me going. In my head. And all the time I didn’t know. Had no idea she was …’

  He broke off this time with an intake of breath that sounded more like a sob caught in his throat.

  Jenny had said nothing, letting him talk. She hadn’t expected this. His need to talk had come out of nowhere, unprompted, unless it had been the way she had lain her hand on his. But she’d done that before only to have him snatch his hand away. There was no reason for her to congratulate herself, nor did she try to probe what had prompted him. She merely sat saying nothing, letting him get it all out of himself, or praying that he would.

  He hadn’t looked at her once. He seemed to be trying to fight the emptiness that was consuming him, but she was glad he hadn’t given way to tears which she knew instinctively would have destroyed his dignity in his own mind. All she could do as he lapsed into silence was to wait and listen if he chose to say more, and if he didn’t then she must let it go at that and keep her platitudes to herself. But the emptiness he nursed proved too strong for him. Startling her, he suddenly pulled his hand from under hers and she thought he was about to reject her. Instead, he took her hand and lifted it to his forehead as though in dire need of her comfort. No sound came from him, though she could feel his silent grief as a faint vibration on her arm. When again he spoke, the words were muffled by the cuff of her uniform. ‘I love her, Jenny. I should hate her. But I can’t.’

  Jenny nodded, stifling emotions of her own. The comfort she’d thought he sought from her was merely what he would have sought from anyone. He still loved Susan.

  Chapter 25

  People were putting the war years behind them; forgetting was perhaps another matter. Rationing still gripped hard, so Christmas had still been frugal, but it had felt more relaxed than for six years. New Year 1946, this first full year of peace, held out fresh promise for the future.

  Spring, welcomed in with open arms, saw hoardings going up around bombed areas, cranes being ferried in to shift the rubble in preparation for rebuilding. Soon, the damage covered over with new buildings, no one who hadn’t been here would know there had been any. The old raw fear for one’s life was giving way to all the petty concerns of peacetime – politics, nuisance neighbours, making ends meet, keeping children clean. Demobbed men, this time in orderly fashion unlike the mad release of the First World War, were going back to old jobs to demand the sort of wages enjoyed by those essential workers who’d been kept out of the forces. For some the way ahead looked rosy. For those still nursing grief, remembering loved ones never to return, it hardly glimmered.

  Watching Matthew’s slow progress, Jenny knew it wasn’t glowing for him either. He had at last been told the whole truth about Susan by his well-meaning parents: how she’d walked out of the house while heavily pregnant, not a word of warning, not a word of thanks for all they’d done for her; how she had treated them when they’d found where she was living, was still living (they told him the address); the affair she’d had, still ongoing, with her landlady’s husband, Geoffrey Crawley; Mrs Crawley finally leaving him; how distant and rude Susan had been to them when they had called on her to persuade her to go back home with them; how they had found her and this Crawley fellow living together, but how without a qualm she had let them take her daughter – Matthew’s daughter – away from her, the child in a terrible neglected state, as though she had no care or love for Matilda at all; how not once from that day to this had Susan asked after her. (They brought photos of Matilda, now a bonny three-year-old, but they hadn’t brought her in person, for fear of infection.)

  He had listened to it all without comment, but afterwards Jenny had found him abstracted and unresponsive, his expression frozen, his lips a tight white line in his narrow, set face. Jenny had wondered if now had been the best time to tell him everything. Of course he would have had to know at some time, would have known soon enough once he went home. The drug Streptomycin was now helping to save sufferers from the old resort to surgery. Matthew had escaped the trauma of the knife, and was declared fit to go home and attend checkups at a local hospital. But how would he face going home, knowing what he did? Not only from his parents but from Susan herself. She had not once visited him or written to him, but she did that Christmas.

  It was just after Christmas when Jenny came upon him asleep on his bed one cold afternoon. The windows as ever stayed open to admit draughts of vital fresh air against which patients must huddle under blankets and wool cardigans.

  For a moment Jenn
y allowed herself the luxury, or perhaps the imposition, of watching him asleep, an intrusion upon his privacy she knew, but he looked so peaceful that she needed to take more than a brief glance at him. It was then she noted that his sleep wasn’t as peaceful as it first appeared. Nothing specific, just something about the expression, even with his eyes closed, caught her attention and made her frown.

  Her gaze travelled to the hand lying limp above the coverlet where she saw that his fingers, that had been curled about a sheet of notepaper, had loosened their hold. Without touching the letter she bent forward, conscious of the cruelty of her intrusion into an unsuspecting person’s privacy, to read what she could see of it, a few words only. But they were enough. In fact one word had been enough: divorce. The childish handwriting was that of Susan.

  Compressing her lips to stem the seething anger that rose up in her, she could only hurry away, knowing there was nothing she could do to help him. She could not know, not until he told her, and he would not do that. He would keep his pain to himself as he’d learned to do all through his three hard years of suffering while Susan, the treacherous little bitch, had been having a good time with some other man.

  *

  All this time, Jenny felt instinctively that her presence had been a bolster for him; she sensed that he clung to her as a friend who would hold his hand should he need it. Now he was leaving. Who would he have to hold his hand against the onslaught of Susan’s infidelity? Not his mother, who meant well but who found it impossible to unbend. His father? Perhaps. What he needed was someone who loved him as she loved him. Yet what right had she to presume that her silent love, which would always be there for him although he wasn’t aware of it, was what he needed?

  On the day of his leaving, he took her hand, grinned up into her face and said, in the same way as he had once told her she would be one of the nicer of his memories, ‘I’ll miss you, Jenny. Keep in touch.’