Christmas Angels

by Nadine Dorries

  Tappsy snapped off a square and looked at it. ‘Maybe I should save the rest for the sweetie jar,’ she said.

  Matron shook her head. ‘No, you will not. You will eat it.’

  ‘Pulling rank, Matron?’ Sister Tapps smiled. ‘I suppose you could be asking me to do something worse – like take Christmas Day as an off-duty. Now that would be bad.’ She popped the chocolate into her mouth and gave a little laugh.

  ‘But that’s exactly what I am going to do!’ Matron spluttered. ‘How did you know?’

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour and Blackie’s basket creaked as he shifted his position. He knew the precise time for his walk. It was when the clock chimed the hour. And when that happened, he knew exactly how to persuade Matron to leave her comfy seat.

  ‘Well, not Christmas Day exactly,’ Matron continued, ‘but we are closing ward four for ten days, to give you a holiday. Because, believe it or not, I know you never take your days off and no one knows when it was you last took a holiday. Actually, I do know. I sent you on it. I had to make you go. You remember too, don’t you?’

  The air between them crackled. The occasion Matron was referring to had never been spoken about since.

  Despite the heat from the fire, the blood had left Sister Tapps’s face and she had turned a ghostly shade of pale. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said. ‘I don’t want a holiday, and what about my children? I’ve been saving for Christmas all year. I have all number of plans for the ward. The Christmas trees are arriving tomorrow. I have twelve children to look after who couldn’t possibly be sent home and even if they could, they will have a much better time on my ward than at home. I have bought them presents and asked Dessie Horton to be Father Christmas.’

  The plate of chocolate banged down on to her knee and the final square flew across the floor. Matron shifted forward in her seat to retrieve it, but she was too late. Despite his age, Blackie had left his basket with lightning speed and stood with a defiant glare in his eye and a growl in his throat, daring Matron to take it. Matron had other things to deal with and Blackie, sensing victory, slunk back to his basket.

  Matron, playing for time to gather her thoughts, picked up the teapot. ‘Pass me your cup,’ she said as she held out her hand.

  Sister Tapps was silent. There was accusation in her eyes as she extended her hand, and the cup rattled on the saucer, betraying her deeper emotions.

  Matron took a breath. This was going to be much harder than she had imagined. ‘No, Sister Tapps, you do not have to be there.’ She had wanted to sound softer, more comforting. She had thought that Sister Tapps would jump at the chance of a Christmas off. She remembered that she had a sister, down on the south coast. She searched her memory for her name. She’d met the sister once, at Crewe station, and she remembered how caring she had been. Younger than Sister Tapps. Well adjusted, a former teacher – it was coming back to her. Edith was her name and she was married to the headmaster of the local school, which their own children also attended. She was happy. That was what had struck Matron the most. They had sat in the station café for an hour and chatted while they waited for the connecting train. A subdued Sister Tapps had sat between them. Over the years, Matron had enquired about Edith’s health and general wellbeing, but her recent enquiries had been met with the vaguest response and she had faded from Matron’s memory.

  ‘The children who cannot be sent home are being transferred to ward three so that you can have the break you deserve and need. No one can work every day of the year, day in, day out – it isn’t possible.’

  ‘You do.’ Sister Tapps’s eyes flared as she set her chin at Matron.

  ‘No, I do not. Over the years, I often visited my mother. That simply isn’t true.’

  ‘You do now.’ Sister Tapps was not backing down.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not always going to. In fact, I am planning a holiday right now. I have always wanted to visit France and next summer I am going to do just that.’ She was lying. She knew it, Sister Tapps knew it and Blackie, now sitting quite near, waiting, hoping for a further food catastrophe, also knew something was not quite right.

  Matron adopted a gentler tone. She was desperate for a good outcome. Things were not going at all the way she had planned. Her authority had deserted her in the face of a woman who had begun her nursing career even before she had. ‘I am doing this for you – you understand that, don’t you? I thought you might want to spend Christmas with your sister, Edith, and her family. They must miss you and I’m sure they’d be delighted at the prospect.’

  Sister Tapps looked as though Matron had just spoken in a foreign language. ‘Edith died six years ago.’

  Matron sat back in the chair. It was as though she’d been winded. She’d not been told this, had she? She knew Sister Tapps hadn’t left Liverpool since the incident, but she’d simply assumed that Edith came up every so often for a visit. She’d seen her around the hospital, more than once, with her children. Though now it occurred to her that this had been a very long time ago. How long? Years, many years.

  Matron recovered her equilibrium and, folding her hands together, tried to catch Sister Tapps’s eye. ‘I am so very sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember you telling me.’

  ‘That’s because I didn’t tell you,’ Sister Tapps shot back. ‘If I had, you would have made me leave my ward and attend her funeral.’

  Matron drew in a sharp, deep breath. The image of Edith’s face flew into her mind. Her benevolent smile. Her concern for the wellbeing of her sister. How she had implored Sister Tapps, in the presence of Matron, over their tea at Crewe station, to leave Liverpool and work in a hospital nearer to her and her family. ‘Don’t you think that would be for the best, Matron?’ Edith had said, and Matron, not wanting to influence Sister Tapps either way, had replied, ‘I will always support your sister, whatever she decides to do. She knows that should she ever want to apply for another post, she will have a glowing reference from me. But, of course, she would be missed at St Angelus, very much indeed, not least by the children.’ The reference had never been sought. There had been no further incident, no cause for anxiety. Days and weeks had passed without event. The months had rolled into years and the ward that had temporarily become a cause for concern resumed its smooth running and required only minimal input from Matron. And Matron, being caught up with the day-to-day management of St Angelus, had been happy for it to remain that way. The incident on ward four, the broken heart of Sister Tapps, had faded from memory.

  ‘You didn’t attend your own sister’s funeral?’ Matron couldn’t supress the incredulity in her voice. ‘Why not?’ she rasped. She could never have anticipated in a million years that this was how the conversation would unfold. She found herself wishing that she had invited Sister Haycock to join them for supper. Maybe she could have shed some light on this unfathomable turn of events.

  Sister Tapps turned her face towards the fire and it was as if the fight had suddenly left her. As though she was struggling to understand herself what she had just said.

  The fire was about to go out. Matron stood sharply and, dusting imaginary crumbs off her skirt, moved towards it, lifted the coal scuttle, threw on a small shovelful of coal and watched for a second as the embers glowed red. She was giving them both time. Time to alter the course of the conversation, should they wish to. And then Sister Tapps spoke and Matron realized that these were the last words she ever wanted to hear. It was as if she was listening to herself articulate her own excuses for the many things she had not done over the years. The visits she had failed to make to her mother. The friends she had made excuses to – or had ignored, when the excuses ran thin and repetitive – and who then, weary of being sidelined, had disappeared and moved on with their lives without her. Matron had not always been alone.

  ‘Because Edith’s funeral was a list day. I told her husband, I tried to explain, to ask him to make it for the Friday – you know Wednesday has always been our day for the operating theatre
– but he wouldn’t listen. We had five operations on the list for theatre that morning. I couldn’t possibly have left the ward. Two appendixes, one of them an emergency admission from the night before. An inguinal hernia on a three-month-old baby, a pyloric stenosis that shouldn’t even have been in my ward, but ward three was full, as it often is in the winter, and to top it all, a tonsillectomy. When is there not one of those needing to be done? There was no way I could leave with all that going on, was there? I am sure you understand. What would you have thought if I had just abandoned all of my responsibilities and left you without a ward sister in the middle of winter at our busiest time? You would never have done that yourself.’

  Matron’s heart sank. Her heart beat a little faster and tears threatened to fill her eyes. She turned slowly from the fire and flopped back into her chair, feeling wearier than she could remember. This was all her fault. That speech, it had been rehearsed – not out loud, but Sister Tapps had obviously reiterated it to herself over and over. The justification for not attending her own sister’s funeral. The sister who had rushed to her in her hour of need. Who had written to Matron to check that Sister Tapps had readjusted back into the ebb and flow of hospital life. The sister who, when she visited Sister Tapps, used to bring a homemade cake for Matron and leave it with Elsie in her kitchen. How Matron would have loved to have had a sister just like that, and how different her life would have been if she had. Her own decision to devote herself to St Angelus had in part been because everyone else had married and she hadn’t met anyone who offered more than the life she now had. But Sister Tapps did have relatives and a family.

  Matron’s voice was small and tired as she spoke. ‘How did she die?’

  Sister Tapps didn’t reply but looked down into her lap at her folded hands.

  At least she has the grace to comprehend that what she did was wrong, Matron thought. ‘How did she die?’ she asked again.

  ‘Cancer. Her womb. It was all over very quickly, before I had time to visit. But it was such a difficult time. As I said, it was winter, the ward was so busy.’

  Matron frowned. Her head was almost shaking with the effort of trying to understand. You couldn’t even leave the ward for one day to honour the memory of your own flesh and blood, she thought angrily. This was serious. Shockingly serious. Something needed to be done about it at a deeper level, but in the meantime she would enforce the Christmas plans without hesitation.

  ‘Sister Tapps, ward four is being closed from the twenty-first. I will visit the ward tomorrow with Sister Haycock. Any walking wounded who can’t be sent home will be transferred across the landing to ward three, under our new Sister Paige. You will be on leave from the twenty-first. Maybe you could visit your niece and nephew and make up for some of the time you’ve missed with them.’ Time you didn’t spend with their mother, she had wanted to say. Time you chose to spend with the children of strangers instead. Children you will never see again, unless by some coincidence they happen to end up working at St Angelus or have a sibling admitted.

  The clock struck ten. Blackie leapt from his basket and, grabbing his lead from the peg on the back of the door, ran across the room and dropped it at Matron’s feet. In a voice loaded with sadness and very different from the one she had used at the beginning of the evening, but nonetheless, one that made it clear that no dissent would be tolerated, she said, ‘It’s time for Blackie’s walk. Come along, we will escort you back to your room.’

  5

  Freddie leant his bike against the lamp-post at the top of the cul-de-sac as Norman, having given up trying to keep up with him, huffed and puffed, pushing his bike as he walked alongside it. ‘I thought that hill was going to kill me,’ he gasped. ‘Hang on, Freddie, I need a fag to help me catch my breath before we find the house.’

  ‘What, one of those gold-tipped things?’ Freddie almost laughed out loud.

  ‘No, those are for my lady friend. I’ll have one of my Capstans.’

  Freddie waited while Norman bent over and flipped open his bicycle clips then dug around in his deep trouser pockets for his cigarettes and matches. ‘You still seeing your lady from Skin Street then?’ He’d nearly used the word ‘young’, but then he remembered that she looked considerably older than Norman.

  ‘I am, thank you very much. It is an amicable arrangement that suits us both well. Mrs Poultice has no complaints.’ Norman sounded defensive, which is exactly what he was. His Mrs Poultice from Skin Street had done his washing and ironing and made him a supper of cocoa and butties every evening for the past eight years and asked for nothing in return. Norman had met her when her house had been burgled. Skin Street was on his patch and he’d been the officer on duty. What had begun as popping in for a cup of tea during his shift had slowly drifted into the satisfactory arrangement Norman found himself enjoying today. Both appeared to be happy: she liked having someone to look after and he liked having the company at the end of his shift, before he returned to his own police house. A house that Mrs Poultice had never visited and, as a respectable single woman approaching sixty, nor would she.

  Norman’s face lit up briefly in the flare of the match as flakes of flaming red tobacco flew off the end of his cigarette. Freddie watched the first puffs of smoke rise and noted the pleasure on his colleague’s face as he closed his eyes.

  ‘That’s better,’ Norman said as he exhaled and looked about them. ‘I’ve never been up this way before. They never got the bombs here, too far from the docks, lucky bastards.’

  The glow of the orange sulphur street light above them fell across the two lawns at the top of the cul-de-sac and Freddie saw a cat arch its back against the fence as it regarded them both with suspicion. ‘Where’s the bobby who covers this beat?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea. My guess is he called into the station for refreshments and refused to come back out again. He probably thought it would take the best part of forty minutes to get here on the bike, and we were the nearest. Do you reckon that’s the cat?’ Norman inclined his head towards the feline observer as it slunk behind the fence. ‘Have we been sent all this bloody way for a cat?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Freddie. ‘It’s a long way to cycle for a bogus call. Look at these houses – they’re all separate. No outhouses or two-up two-downs here. It’s the same on all these roads off the avenue.’

  ‘We have indoor lavvies in the police houses too,’ said Norman. ‘Not everyone has to live like the people on our beat do. I’m just grateful I don’t have Clare Cottages on mine.’

  Clare Cottages were notorious and they were on Freddie’s patch, but he didn’t rise to the bait, just looked around at the dimly lit houses. There were trees and hedges up here – something else that was lacking down on the dockside streets – and he craned his neck to see what he could of the white render and pebbledash in the amber glow.

  Norman liked to use whatever means he could to assert his authority over Freddie, even though they were both beat constables. It helped that he had the beat with the fewest problems and the cleaner streets. On his patch, steps were scrubbed with a donkey stone every morning and pavements washed. When a dusty cargo was unloaded down at the docks, the women in his neighbourhoods raced out into the street to clean their windows and wash down the sills before the ship had even sailed back out of the dock and reached the bar. Almost all of his residents worked either up at St Angelus or on the docks; Freddie’s pretty much all worked down on the docks. Norman’s patch took in Lovely Lane, with its nurses’ home opposite the park and the undertaker’s next door. Freddie’s patch included the processing plants, wood yards and smelters that surrounded the docks. There was no competition and Freddie tried hard never to give Norman the opportunity to rub that in.

  ‘Are you done then?’ he asked as Norman dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with the toe of his boot.

  ‘Aye.’ Norman surveyed the street. ‘Which one looks empty then?’ They were on Vienna Close, off Princess Avenue and the houses stood tall and proud
in the middle of their own plots, each with a large lawn to the front and rear. ‘Too bloody quiet up here. There aren’t even any dogs roaming around. I wouldn’t like to work on streets as quiet as this – a bit creepy if you ask me. I bet none of them talk to each other. All keeping themselves to themselves in their big houses.’

  ‘I think you can tell that by the size of the privet hedges around each garden,’ said Freddie. ‘They can’t even see each other’s houses, never mind each other. Look, there’s not a leaf out of place on any of those privets.’

  The two men, away from the comfort of their own familiar patches, stood and stared. Even the grass had taken on a marmalade hue under the sulphur light.

  ‘It does feel creepy. You can’t hear a thing. What is the desk sergeant on about sending us out here? I can’t hear anything, can you?’

  They both stood still and strained to hear whatever the offending noise was meant to be.

  ‘Would you believe it? He’s sent us all the way up here and almost killed me in the process, for absolutely nothing,’ said Norman. ‘I can’t hear a peep. Can you?’

  Freddie scanned the houses and from the corner of the one window he could just about see came the twinkle of Christmas-tree lights. The night was dark and nearly moonless and they were almost entirely dependent on the street light to see anything at all. ‘Come on,’ he said as he headed to the gate at the end of the first drive. ‘I can’t hear anything either, but let’s just find the empty house and check it and then we can say we did what we were asked to do. At least the ride home will be a lot easier, eh, Norm – downhill all the way.’

  Norman didn’t appreciate Freddie taking the lead. He liked to be the one who made the decisions and gave the orders. He had applied for the station sergeant’s job on the last two occasions it had become available and both times he had been passed over. The resentment, a slow burn in his belly, manifested itself in the occasional barbed comment fired in Freddie’s direction. ‘I think, as the senior one out of the two of us, I will make that decision,’ he said.