Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  It was gratifying to see them nod agreement, but Mrs Ward surprised her on taking her to the door by putting a hand on her arm before opening it.

  ‘You are of course, quite right, my dear.’

  Chapter 26

  There wasn’t a lot he could do about it. Between them all, his parents, his doctors, Jenny Ross, whom he alternately turned to for support and backed away from, he knew that if he wanted to get better he must bow to their superior judgement, submit to being packed off to the sanatorium.

  He did need to get better, to be well again to claim Susan back from that bastard who’d tempted her away. Susan was easily led. It wasn’t her fault. She had this thing about sick people, but once he got himself back on his feet, all that would disappear.

  The sanatorium was bright, two-storeyed, with more windows than walls, and verandas positioned to catch every vestige of sunlight. The grounds had the benefit of sea air to help with the cure, and with one of the mainstays of cure being to keep up the patients’ spirits, make them feel at ease with the world, the nursing staff were attentive and cheery. He too was expected to feel at ease with the world, but he wasn’t. He was an inconvenience, to be put away. He had no means of getting to Susan from here, for the sanatorium was effectively a prison too. At home he might in time have evaded his mother’s eagle eye, boarded a bus for Mile End Road and burst in on Susan in the hope, vain perhaps, of getting her back. Here he could only wait to be declared fit before ever being allowed to escape and be his own man to do as he pleased.

  Do as he pleased! That was a laugh. It seemed all his life he’d been in captivity. Home, the Army, prison camps, hospitals; his mother, even Jenny Ross joining the ranks of his keepers. Where had all that free spirit gone he’d dreamed of in his youth? At twenty-eight he felt every bit an old man. There had been such thoughts before the war of one day leaving home to soar free as a bird. He had left, but merely to swap one form of imprisonment for another, and there was no way he would ever be free. Only with Susan had he been free, tasting a tiny morsel, enough to reveal the golden glory of it, before it had all been snatched away.

  Stuck here in this place, this morning watching his parents’ cautious approach like that of people about to confront a time bomb, he wondered what was the point of all the efforts to make him well while inside memories both wonderful and evil entwined in a form of torture until he could no longer tell them apart. These memories could not be shared with anyone because no one understood what it was like to love and have it snatched away, to be strong and have that snatched away, to ache for beauty and see only misery and privation and degradation and betrayal, to contrast the wife he had loved and trusted with the truth he had come home to face. Only one sure way to be free remained. This he contemplated with strange detachment as he sat watching his parents’ progress along the clean, bright ward towards him, and when they had each kissed him and asked how he was, he answered with a sort of perverse wish to witness their horrified reaction, a despondent need to gain their attention.

  ‘Tell the truth, I’ve just about had enough of everything. What’s the point of it all? I’d be better off finishing it and being no more worry to anyone.’

  His remark was ignored.

  ‘It’s time you started thinking what you’re going to do about Susan.’ He turned his face away from his mother’s probing eyes. ‘All this hoping for miracles, it’s just ludicrous, Matthew. She wants a divorce and she’s not particular how she gets it.’

  His eyes remained averted. No point responding when she got on this track, leaping on it the moment she arrived, and Dad putting his oar in as well.

  ‘If you think she’ll ever come back now, Matthew, you’re just banging your head against a brick wall, son.’

  ‘If she did come back,’ his mother’s tone sounded righteously adamant, ‘I for one wouldn’t give her the smell of my dish rag, much less house room …’

  But she wasn’t in love with Susan. At times his chest felt as if it was being torn out. Even his father no longer took his side. Matthew felt totally alienated seeing his father nodding at every word his mother said.

  ‘We’ve spoken to a solicitor, Matthew. He has written to her on our behalf advising her to get one of her own in this matter, and she’s done that now.’ All this had been done without once consulting him. ‘They both agree that the marriage is unsalvageable. Susan is quite happy to be cited as the guilty party.’ She was as eager as that? Something inside Matthew plummeted. ‘Apparently this Crawley fellow has no objections to being cited as her lover. His wife is apparently thinking in terms of divorcing him anyway. Pity it all has to take so long, and meantime the solicitor is running up a nice fat fee.’

  Was that all they cared about, costs? He kept his face turned away.

  ‘It’s up to you, Matthew. How much longer are you going to let things drag on? There’s nothing you can do. She’s made up her mind, the slut.’

  Now he turned. ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘I will say that, Matthew. Because that’s what she is.

  How can you feel anything for her after what she’s done to you, you a prisoner of war, all you went through, while she enjoyed herself playing fast and loose.’

  How could he, even if he wished, tell them what he’d gone through and how it had been Susan alone who had kept him going? He still believed that, fervently, still believed she had thought of him, willed him to live. This adultery had come later. It didn’t matter what they said, there had been a time, at first, when she had willed him to live, prayed for his safe return, cried for him. If everyone would only stop interfering, he and she could come together again. He would forgive her everything. The war had done this to them, had taken all good things out of their hands. And he could, would forgive her. If only she would come back to him.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do about it, Matthew.’ This from his father, his tone pleading. ‘It’s gone too far. Gone on too long. You’ve got to file for a divorce, son. There’s nothing more you can do.’

  What did they bloody know? He looked at each of them, his eyes ice-hard, but there were no words he could say and he turned away again. Let them get on with it. They would, no matter what he said. But once he was out of here, then they would see a different Matthew. No longer did he contemplate suicide. He’d fight for what was his – once he was strong again.

  ‘I just feel I’m being buried here, Jenny, bit by bit.’

  The words seemed to come from deep inside his soul and Jenny fancied she felt every iota of his pain as if it were her own. She counted the days to each visit, coming to see him whenever she could get time off from her work.

  There had been a wild idea when he’d gone off to the sanatorium to give up her present post and follow him, but in time he would leave there and come home for good. It was always a fool’s game following others around the country. They always moved on, leaving behind a void much as before. Not only that, here she was a visitor, a friend, a confidante. As a nurse she would have become an overseer, an official figure, not to be trusted. Things were better as they stood.

  She sat now beside him on the veranda that caught the slanting, fast-diminishing warmth of an October sun. He was in a wickerwork easy chair, a cardigan about his shoulders, she on a hard chair that made her back seem unacceptably rigid. She would rather have been allowed to recline a little, to look more at ease. This way he had to look up at her which didn’t help an easy relationship. Though mostly he stared at the tiled floor as he emptied out his heart to her.

  ‘If I could only go to see her.’ He seldom mentioned Susan by name. By this time they all knew who her referred to. ‘I know I could sort things out. But no one agrees, they keep telling me it’ll put my health in jeopardy, but that’s an excuse. They don’t want me to try getting her back. They hate her so I must hate her too.’ He let his voice trail off and they sat on in silence for a while, then suddenly he looked up at Jenny, his eyes brightened by new hope.

  ‘But you could go.’
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br />   ‘Me?’ She was startled, lost for words. How could she go to his wife, trying to convey to her what was in someone else’s heart? It was impossible.

  He was looking at her from under his brow, his eyes slewing sideways towards her. She hurried on. ‘It wouldn’t be right for me to pay her a visit on your behalf. What could I say to her?’

  ‘No one has ever bothered to talk to her,’ he said bitterly. ‘Except to condemn her.’

  She waited. He had dropped his gaze and she could see his face working very slightly, could almost see the thoughts going through his head, the pain, the longing, the hope and the hopelessness that seethed there. And memories too, memories that would never die. All he’d suffered these past years would be with him always. But none of it, looking at him now with grief and emptiness showing on every part of his face, had scarred him as Susan had.

  Jenny could foster only contempt for the girl which instinctively she knew she must smother for his sake. If she did consent to being his errand boy, she would have to be sweet and understanding to gain Susan’s confidence. It smacked of an unsavoury business because subterfuge did not come easily to her. But wasn’t she resorting to subterfuge at this very moment, visiting him in the guise of a friend, when her whole being cried out to touch his hand in love, to kiss his lips and be kissed in return, the way he had kissed her before he’d gone away and it had all gone cold for her when he had met Susan?

  ‘Please, Matthew, don’t ask me to do that,’ she pleaded. But for his sake, for the sake of the love she had for him, if he pressed the point …

  As well she had been looking at him or she’d have missed the hand half-raised in a small poignant gesture of defeat, of humiliated pride, an effort not to recognise that he must rely on her to do his work for him. He needed help yet felt belittled by that need. Innocently she was belittling him. He would not ask her again, that she knew. She knew too that their friendship was being placed in jeopardy, that he would never trust her again. She needed his trust as much as he needed hers. It was a kind of love in its way.

  ‘I’ll have to see,’ she added lamely; not a promise nor a denial, neither one thing or the other, a way of avoiding the total commitment she knew she was in danger of being held to. To escape it, she got up to gather up her coat and handbag, preparing to murmur some sort of farewell, when, only halfway out of her seat, she was taken by surprise as his hand closed about her wrist.

  ‘You will see her, Jenny? You promise.’

  ‘I haven’t …’ The commitment was already being made for her. Blackmail, trading on the affection she had for him, the thought shot through her head. He knew, he must know, how she felt about him, and was using it. That was unkind, cruel. For a second Jenny was aghast at the anger that swept through her. But the eyes staring up into hers were filled with pleading, not craftiness, were sunken with desolation, dark with pain, and though that in itself was a form of blackmail, how could she refuse him?

  Yet still she hesitated. He was asking too much of her love. And she had expected him not to ask again, so was now taken off guard. ‘What on earth could I say to her, Matthew?’

  ‘Just that I … I want her to come back to me.’

  ‘I can’t tell her things like that. If you wrote a letter, I could take it to her.’

  ‘I’ve written letters.’

  ‘This time I’d be there to hand it to her, while she reads it, tell her how you are, how you feel.’

  Oh God! She had walked right into it. Hope had begun to glow in his eyes. Hope was filling him as a deep hole is filled with lifegiving soil to nurture the tree with which it is about to be planted. And it was glorious to see him come suddenly alive. How could she destroy that?

  ‘All right, Matthew. Write to her. I’ll wait.’

  She sat down again, put her hat and handbag aside and watched him fish a small writing case from his locker, feverishly open it and pull out the fountain pen resting inside to write his private letter to his wife.

  All the while Jenny’s heart was pounding against her chest wall, partly at the prospect looming before her, partly at feeling herself being used as a sacrificial lamb, partly with the same emotion he himself suffered – love that tore at the very being but which the sufferer knew to be quite futile no matter what they did.

  The feeling of being made a sacrificial lamb still lingering, she reluctantly prepared herself to visit Susan.

  She made three calls that week, during break times from the London Chest Hospital, none of them successful. She received no reply to her knock and had no way to tell whether they were out or merely pretending to be. Each time it had rained, not heavily but with miserable persistence that carried all the odours of the East End with it, and after her three separate attempts, standing on the doorstep wet and fed up and growing more and more annoyed, she gave up. There was only so much one could do. Besides, it was all pointless anyway. Susan would never go back to the man she had rejected. Obviously happy with her lover, what did she want with a sick man? Which Matthew still was.

  In a way it was a relief not seeing Susan, loathing the girl as she did for the way she’d behaved. But more than that, a tiny spark kept leaping into her mind that the longer Susan stayed away from Matthew, the more chance there was of his coming to terms with it. Would he one day see the futility of chasing after her and turn to someone else – herself perhaps? His friend all these years, always there for him, he was fast becoming dependent on her. Could that one day lead to love?

  The thought made her laugh. Little hope of that. But a week from now she’d have to confront him with her admission of failure, see his face. She found herself putting it off and on that Saturday decided to postpone seeing him until another of her days off. Instead she’d try to see Susan one last time, have something she could tell him. But that morning it rained again …

  It was his mother who forced her hand that very morning. It came as a shock to open the door and find his mother standing there, an umbrella above her head. Mrs Ward demeaning herself to come across in the rain to a lesser neighbour’s door revealed the extent to which some of her high-necked values had taken a nose-dive since the war.

  She looked almost supplicant, the weight of her son’s plight making her a wholly different woman from the one who’d once lorded it over others. Her principles, however, had not slipped to the extent of agreeing to Mrs Ross’s invitation to come inside.

  ‘It’s Jenny I wish to speak to,’ she said, her voice as sharp as it ever was, and turning to Jenny she asked directly, ‘When do you next hope to be visiting Matthew?’

  ‘I was thinking of perhaps going this afternoon,’ Jenny lied, trying hard not to sound reluctant.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Mrs Ward compressed her lips in a manner natural to her. ‘We’ll be seeing him too today, as soon as Mr Ward gets the car out. You can come with us. Save your train fare. Could you be ready in, say, half an hour?’

  Still some of the old Mrs Ward there. Assuming everyone would fall in with her plans came as naturally to her as breathing. Jenny chewed on her lip. She and Mumsy had planned on a quiet afternoon together, but it could probably be put aside. They’d have all evening. And part of her did want to see Matthew very much, despite her trepidation at what she had to tell him.

  ‘Yes, I could be.’ His parents being there might soften his reaction.

  Mrs Ward inclined her head in a small gesture of acknowledgement. ‘He often asks after you, Jenny,’ she said, but broke off abruptly as though that information had embarrassed her in some way.

  This woman would never let her high standards slip entirely no matter what the circumstances, but Jenny had detected more than once, as she did now, a ring of suppressed hope in Mrs Ward’s voice that she might one day see her as part of the family. A daughter-in-law perhaps? Vain hope, that, but she smiled as Mrs Ward added a little too briskly, ‘Well, we’ll pick you up in half an hour then,’ before turning and going down the steps and back along the road to her own house.

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bsp; Matthew was in the day room, it being too wet to go outside. October, nearly at its end, already heralded a bad winter, and the room buzzed with families and patients. Jenny prayed he wouldn’t ask her what she had achieved.

  She sat by while his parents put their offerings of fruit and a bar of Fry’s chocolate from their sweet ration before him, asked him how he was and began on all the trivialities of their lives since last seeing him. He murmured his thanks for the gifts, after a while turning aside from what they were telling him, his attention wandering while he muttered occasional comments in whatever seemed the appropriate place.

  Several times Jenny saw his eyes come to rest on her, saw the query in their depths. She smiled weakly, knowing he would wait for a moment when they were alone. As if he had planned it, his father went out on to the veranda to smoke his pipe; his mother joined her husband, leaving Jenny to hold the fort. It was a moment she had been dreading.

  The second they were out of hearing, his question came direct. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Your wife?’ She stalled, trying to remember how she’d rehearsed this moment. He said nothing, but the look in his dark eyes said, ‘Who else?’

  Jenny steeled herself, ‘I went there several times, Matthew, but there was never any answer to my knock.’

  He sat silent for a moment, then said, ‘You didn’t speak to her.’

  ‘I tried. Oh, Matthew, I did try so hard.’

  ‘I expect you did.’ His tone was soft but full of condemnation. ‘It was unfair of me to ask that of you.’

  ‘No, it was right.’

  He shook his head, throwing off the failure. ‘I’ve let myself down. The only one to go and see her is me. Can’t ask things like that of you. My fault, expecting too much.’

  ‘No, Matthew. I understand how you feel.’

  He looked directly at her. ‘Do you?’ The look made her squirm, a look one would give one’s executioner, defiant yet resigned.