by Sheila Burns
The Village Nurse
Sheila Burns
Copyright © The Estate of Sheila Burns 2019
This edition first published by Wyndham Books 2019
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
www.wyndhambooks.com/sheila-burns
First published in Great Britain in 1967 under the name Rachel Harvey
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork: images © Ian Woolcock / Pavel Ryabushkin (Shutterstock) and izuske (istockphoto)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Preview: Doctors and Nurses 3-in-1 box set by Sheila Burns
Preview: Heartbreak Surgeon by Sheila Burns
Preview: The Flying Nurse by Sheila Burns
Chapter One
‘It’s a boy!’ said Claire, and in some triumph, as she scooped him into the receiving blanket and her own arms. ‘A lovely boy!’ for to her every baby was lovely.
She fastened the blue band with his number on it to his wrist as he shrieked defiance at her, then handed him to the student nurse who bore him off to Sister in the nurseries. Then Claire turned again to the mother, who had had a bad time.
‘All over, dear,’ she said, ‘nothing more to do save get well quickly, and be a credit to your son.’
‘I wanted a boy.’
‘Of course you did, and he’s a grand little chap. You should be proud of him.’
The girl looked at her in a state of daze; she had of course known very little for the past half-hour, for Chris, the surgeon on duty, was a kind man. ‘I ‒ I don’t remember anything.’
‘Don’t worry. That’s fine!’
‘I’m all right?’
‘Of course. You’re absolutely all right, and there is no need for you to worry at all, because it’s done, and everything is over. Here’s Doctor.’
Chris had come to her. He was good-looking, one of those very dark men who, far away in the family, must have had a Spanish ancestor. His deep brown eyes were heavily lashed, and he had thick dark hair which waved. The nurses’ hostel had it that Chris was flirtatious, that he adored women (maybe that was why he had taken up gynaecology), and a girl should watch out with him. But Claire loved him! She had done so from the first, maybe beginning the day when he had a violent headache, and had face-presentation twins to cope with. He had said, ‘You’re a wonderful girl!’ Maybe that had been the hour. She was in love with him, she hid it from the world but not from herself, because Chris mattered so much to her.
She brought the final injection, the syringe lying in a kidney-shaped bowl. ‘The injection, sir?’
‘Thanks, Sister.’
To hear him snap out the title was in order with the best rulings of St. Julian’s Hospital; one would never have believed that off duty he called her ‘Claire’, ‘Darling’, and ‘My own sweet!’ He did, of course! Those deep brown eyes of his had grown warm with emotion for her, and his kisses were unforgettable. She had read of that kind of kiss in romantic novels, and once had thought them to be the invention of romantic novelists, something quite unreal. But Chris was real enough. He was adorable.
‘You’re fine, Mother, and you’ve got a grand son,’ he said to the patient.
The porters wheeled her away, her ordeal over, and Chris’s work done for the day. He went to the far basins, and Claire turned on the taps, for a surgeon can do nothing for himself. She undid his gown, slipped it away and into the bin with the rest of the soiled linen. She gave him a towel, he treating her just as he would have treated any other Sister on duty, not as his love, his own darling, the girl he adored. She went on clearing up as he washed, his back to her.
She took the card to fill in.
Patient’s name: Lydia Thorpe
Age: Twenty-four
Sex of child: Male
Weight: 7 lbs. 4 ozs.
Condition: Normal
She brought it to Chris to sign.
They were alone in the labour room, and for the first time, for the case had taken four hours. It had been fairly ordinary, but the girl was scared; she could not respond easily to instructions, and had required solicitous handling. Chris had always been marvellous at this. His methods with the frightened patient were the admiration of all St. Julian’s.
Now little Cissy Vane had gone off duty, and Charge Sister was along the corridor and would not be back. Chris flung down the linen cap, and he turned to Claire. He was in a hurry.
‘That took too long,’ he said.
‘It hurried at the end.’
‘Yes, for I was in a hurry, and had to get away.’ Then in another voice, gaily to her, ‘You’re enchanting, Claire. Did you know?’ and he had gone.
She paused, aware of that deep bodily tiredness which comes after working on a difficult case. She had had to help the girl, comfort her, guide her, and persuade her to help them. Now, when it was over, she was aware of the strain it had been. She went on tidying up, for at any moment news might come that the room was wanted for a new patient, and another small life would weep its first wail here, and come into life on its own. In a maternity wing, this is how it goes.
She finished scrupulously, then slipped into the ante-room beyond. It was fresher here, for the lights had not been so strong; in the theatre one had to have those mercilessly burning lamps. Perhaps she had never really grown used to their force; the tireless glare, and the heat they gave out.
Sister Stevens was in the ante-room.
She was the senior of all the Sisters, a woman nearing fifty, trained here, and a fine example of good training. Everybody knew how hard she could work, one could always rely on her fountain of knowledge and turn to her in an emergency. She was a woman from the North, she still spoke with a trace of Tyneside accent, blunt in the extreme, with her gaunt firm face, now lined, and her searching eyes.
This was the woman who
had never been pretty, and perhaps had fretted for good looks, though she staunchly vowed that beauty was a disadvantage to a good nurse. The other girls said that she had the words ‘St. Julian’s’ engraved across her heart, but sometimes Claire wondered what lay behind those calm eyes, and what was her real story, apart from St. Julian’s. Fancy giving all one’s life to nursing! Claire thought, for although she loved it, there were other things in this hard world, and love was one of them. Again she recalled Chris.
They said Sister Stevens had never had a love affair in all her life, and to the girl it seemed inexplicable that one could work in midwifery and the immense joy of the hour when the child of love comes to cement the tie, without ever having been in love oneself. The students said, ‘Old Stevens has never been kissed.’ Maybe that was true. But she’s missed a lot, Claire thought.
For love lay at the end of her road, she was in love with Chris. Flirtatious, oh yes, Quick to love, but oh, what charm! The affair had begun on the spur of one dazzling moment, when she had been cleaning up, in fact, and he had returned because he had dropped his handkerchief. A handkerchief with a rolled edge, and his initials in the corner; an expensive one.
‘So you’ve got it!’ he had said, and in that moment the relationship of nurse and surgeon changed to that of two people who were in love. She had never thought that it could be so dashingly quick.
Sister Stevens smiled at her. ‘Another case done?’ she asked. ‘Boy or girl?’
‘It’s a boy.’
The ageing face with the lines smiled a little, just recently Sister had lined much more and looked tired. ‘This is a boy week; there hasn’t been one single girl since last Saturday, and this is Thursday.’
‘It does run that way, Sister.’
She nodded. ‘A fortnight back and we couldn’t get a boy for love or money, all of them were girls.’
‘This was a seven-pound boy, a nice baby, and she had wanted a son.’
‘They always do.’ Then Sister said, ‘It’s your long night off, isn’t it? You go off duty right now?’
She nodded. Her long night, meeting Chris, supping at Prestwick’s, and being together.
‘Going out?’ Sister Stevens asked, but of course she knew; she kept a good eye on the other nurses.
‘Yes, yes, I am,’ and the grey eyes danced.
‘It’s a good thing to get away.’ Every time that you looked at Sister Stevens now, another little cobweb of lines had come about her eyes or her chin, and she was thinner. She half wondered if Sister was sickening for something and said nothing because she knew that they were understaffed at St. Julian’s, and St. Julian’s life was more to her than her own. Or was she finding the life tiring? With no personal loves, no outings, none of those treats which gave a girl the courage to go on. She’s so alone, Claire thought, and tenderly.
Sister would never be a matron, that opportunity had come and gone, and maybe she felt that the goal at the end of the hard life was not there at all. It would not materialise for her, and perhaps this had saddened her with the dry rot of despair. Suddenly Claire was tempted into a confidence.
‘I’m going out with Mr. Long. To Prestwick’s,’ for she wanted to tell Sister.
There was a faint pause. ‘He’s our most good-looking surgeon.’ Sister spoke very slowly, almost as though it was something against Chris to be so handsome, not a thing he could not help.
‘Yes, he is.’
‘You ‒ you’re in love?’
She coloured, that was something one could not control. ‘Just a bit. Not too much.’
‘You’re a clever girl, and you’d go far in the hospital world, much farther than I have ever done.’ She was not jealous, just resigned, and there was something sad about her. ‘You could easily become the matron, though perhaps you would not like that. It does cut out nursing and attach one to the administrative side, of course, and I’d have hated it. A girl becomes a nurse to help sick folk who can’t help themselves.’
‘Yes. I should not care for the administrative side, though somebody has to do it.’
Sister Stevens drew in a long deep breath. She said, ‘You have everything before you, you know, a whole world of success,’ then hurriedly in a softer voice which was almost a guarded half-whisper, ‘Don’t let a good-looking surgeon throw all those chances away for you. Remember that.’
‘He is so nice.’
‘They always are. That is hospital life, I suppose. Every one of us has had the affair, we learn by it, but the lesson can be bitter.’
So once there had been … Claire felt herself prickle with surprise. She said impulsively, ‘You don’t trust him, Sister.’
‘No, it isn’t that. Maybe it is I have seen it happen too often, and know that it hurts too much. Maybe it is that I am a nasty old maid and have become bitter myself, though somehow I do not think that is true.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t true.’
There was a pause. A steriliser spat in the corner, a trolley rumbled down the corridor beyond the door. ‘I should have loved children,’ she said, quietly, almost humbly. ‘If I had had money, I should have adopted a child, a boy, I think, somehow most of us want boys. You know that unmarried girl the other day? The one who had that lovely son, a very beautiful son, four months after her fiancé's death?’
‘Yes, he was a very fine child.’
‘The fiancé died of leukaemia, and I would have adopted the boy if I could. Lack of money is a horrid barrier.’ Then, ‘You are in love with Mr. Long?’
Claire spoke the truth when she said, ‘In a way.’ Chris had a flirtatious reputation. Perhaps every girl had been in love with Chris at some time or another. Once a sour E.N.T. man had said that he was the hospital’s pin-up boy, and maybe he was right. ‘In a way,’ she repeated.
‘Be careful, my dear. Love seems to be such a sweetly tender emotion, such a thrilling time, something so different from anything that has happened before, but it can bite like a sword.’
‘You don’t like him, Sister?’
‘I am not here to like, or to dislike, the personal lives of our surgeons and doctors. They come and go. Mr. Long is a very fine surgeon, a great gynaecologist, and someone of whom St. Julian’s is proud. He is a young man, good-looking, and these points go with flirtatiousness perhaps. But I must warn you that nothing can hurt quite so much as the treachery of love, when you yourself are in love.’
For the first time Claire realised that at some time this woman must have suffered truly bitterly. St. Julian’s might think that she had never had a love affair in her life, but they did not know the truth. They said that Sister was impervious to love, but that was not true. At some time there had been a man in her life, a man for whom she had suffered, a man she had loved deeply, and the wound was still raw.
Sympathy filled Claire, herself in the happiness of first love. The springtime emotion, vitally warm, exciting, and fond. The joy when every day the sun shines, and every mood is sweet. She put out her hand.
‘I trust Chris,’ she said very simply.
‘I know. That is the cruel part of falling in love, for the girl always trusts him. I wish love was not so deceitful.’
‘But some affairs live happily ever after.’
‘Yes.’ Sister changed the subject with that rather brusque way of hers. ‘Are you going on as I have done, or going elsewhere? Specialising perhaps? On the district might be an idea. Or what?’
‘I ‒ I don’t know.’ Just the last few weeks’ work here with the midwifery cases had changed her, it seemed, or maybe it was that Chris had come into her life and done this.
‘Your contract is nearing its end, and you ought to have plans.’ Sister paused. ‘District nursing teaches you a lot. I always wish I had done something in that line, but I didn’t. I clung to St. Julian’s. Perhaps my first love’s name was Julian,’ and she smiled. Claire found that she could look quite pretty.
She drew a sudden picture of a small cottage of one’s own, a little car provided. Of co
urse one was out at all hours, day or night, and the irritating thing was that babies arriving unexpectedly usually chose to come at night. But the idea of the cottage was enchanting, the car a delight, and the experience tremendous.
A glance at the clock told Claire that she was going to be late at Prestwick’s, late with Chris, which would never do, he was intolerant of time lags, and she moved to the door. ‘I must go, I’m late already,’ but she took with her a dream picture of a country village. The little cottage might have few modern conveniences, but at the same time one did not get London fogs there, no crowds, just kindly happy people.
She went off duty, and along to her own little room, and changed at panic speed. It was later than she had thought. It was curious that as she got into the new dress (she was at the stage when she skimped to buy new dresses in order to impress Chris), she thought again of Lucille Gray. Lucille was the new student nurse not yet qualified in midwifery, but learning. She was small and fair, with hair that could have been almost grey in some lights. She probably did something to help the hair look so attractive, and it must be a blow having to hide it under her cap.
Today she had watched Lucille at work. She was such a pale girl that one almost wondered if she had anaemia, and once she had seen Chris’s eyes wander in Lucille’s direction. That had hurt. Ridiculous, because of course he had the right, and anyway he may have meant nothing, but … He had made a challenging remark about Lucille, and that had disturbed Claire.
‘Lovely coloured hair!’ he had said when they went to the side for fresh instruments; then, perhaps because he saw that Claire did not like it, ‘Anaemia can be quite becoming.’
She herself had the fresh wild-rose colouring which ran in her family, the golden hair and the shy grey eyes. She had come back to the table inwardly alarmed about it, angry with herself for being jealous of Lucille, and somehow angry with Chris. She must curb this silly emotion, for it was ridiculous, but already she had found how love changed characteristics; she had never been jealous before. She wished that Chris had not noticed the softness of Lucille’s pale eyes, the too fair hair, and that she herself had not changed colour, for he would have recognised the jealousy.
