by Rebecca Lang
When he paused, the silence in the room was complete. ‘Make rules for your own safety, based on your own common sense and experience, your gut feelings about a given situation and the rules that have been laid down for you by others in the field,’ he said.
Signy swallowed, thinking back to her time in Somalia. She had not always followed that advice…
‘Never break your own rules for safety,’ Dan went on. ‘That one time when you break those rules may be your last, and that applies anywhere in the world that you may live, not just in the field work that we do. It applies to even the most seemingly benign place. Very often the most dangerous predators in a place are the human ones. In any given place, at any given time, a certain percentage of the population are psychopaths, just waiting for the opportunity to do their thing.’
Again Signy swallowed a nervous lump in her throat. At the medical station in Somalia she’d refused to leave when the evacuation truck had arrived unexpectedly to take them out. She’d stated that she wouldn’t leave without Dominic. Had he been foolish to go? Naïve? It was easy to judge now. She refused to think of him that way when she knew him to be a courageous, intelligent man, very good at his job and dedicated to the work of World Aid Doctors.
Again Dan looked around the small group, making eye contact with each one of them. Signy was aware that she had a self-conscious flush on her face, that the pupils of her eyes had grown large with a certain apprehension that perhaps he could somehow divine her thoughts, or perhaps knew more about her than she suspected.
‘As far as you possibly can,’ he said succinctly, articulating each word carefully for emphasis, ‘never give them that opportunity.’
A creeping respect for this man was reluctantly imposing itself on her awareness.
‘Never take short cuts, never cut corners,’ Dan was saying. ‘Sometimes you have seconds only in which to decide on a course of action. Always plan ahead so that you can, as far as possible, be ready.’
While Signy felt that he might be speaking just to her, she knew that each nurse in the room had reason to feel the same.
‘When dealing with people in unfamiliar cultures especially, as well as in those you are familiar with, learn the difference between trust and naïvety,’ he went on. ‘There is a difference. It is one thing to feel you can trust someone, another thing to behave naïvely with that person. Again, that one act of naïvety—not appropriate to an adult—could be your last. We will, of course, be talking about safety in great detail, in many types of situations, throughout this course. What I’m saying now is by way of an introduction. Any questions so far?’
Signy stood up, declining to put up her hand like a child at school. ‘What about earthquakes here?’ she challenged him, having had the idea that he hadn’t wanted to dwell on that earlier. There was a surprised turning of heads from some of the other nurses, so at least some of them hadn’t known about the possibility.
‘This whole area is an earthquake zone,’ he said slowly, fixing her with an enigmatic stare, ‘the same as parts of California. So we have to have an idea of what to do in the event of an earthquake. That will be something we shall talk about over the next weeks. However, the likelihood is rather remote. Anything else?’
A few other people asked questions, then coffee was served, and the meeting turned into more of a social event in which people exchanged stories of their work experiences.
Signy felt a touch on her arm as she was talking to Connie.
‘Excuse me. You’re Signy Clover, if I remember correctly?’ Max Seaton stood there, looking down at her from his superior height, while she found herself looking up into a pair of the bluest eyes she had ever seen.
‘Um…yes,’ she said.
‘Call me Max,’ he said.
Connie excused herself, leaving Signy feeling a disturbing dissonance that Dr Seaton hadn’t included the other woman in his greeting. Yet he had a charm that seemed to excuse such minor infractions of what Signy termed manners. She reminded herself that she was in a different culture, that she was the one who had to adapt, so that she glanced at the other woman with a mute apology. Connie smiled slightly and moved away.
‘I never pass up an opportunity to talk to an English woman,’ he said. ‘I spent some time in London and in Oxford.’
‘I know London well, because I lived and worked there…did my nursing training there,’ she said, feeling herself melting emotionally under his concentrated interest, in spite of her underlying resistance and her sharp awareness of his apparent lack of sensitivity. ‘Although I grew up in Kent.’
‘Tell me where you’ve worked there,’ he asked, making her feel as though he really wanted to know, concentrating his whole attention on her. It was nice, she had to admit, to have such attention. ‘Tell me all about London, what it’s like now.’
‘That will be easy,’ she said. ‘It’s a city I love. I never get tired of it.’
The minutes went by while they talked, until Signy noticed that the others were leaving the room and the two of them were among the few left. Others were looking at her as they left.
‘I’ve rather monopolized you, Dr Seaton,’ she apologized, whereas it had been the other way round really.
As she looked around her she saw Dan leaving. For a moment their eyes met, and she detected a veiled question in his regard. Perhaps he thought she was flirting with his very attractive colleague, but nothing was further from her mind, although it was nice to be in a semi-social setting for a short while with an attractive man, no strings attached. Perhaps getting involved with someone on this course was a no-no, although one wouldn’t think it from Dr Seaton’s relaxed attitude, she thought.
‘Call me Max…please,’ he murmured to her. ‘No, I was monopolizing you. The pleasure has been all mine.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d better go and do a little more exploring of the camp so that I won’t get lost if I have to go somewhere, especially if all that mist or fog comes down that Dr Blake was talking about.’
‘He likes to scare you a bit…’ Max smiled ‘…so that you take notice.’
‘Well, he wasn’t so forthcoming about earthquakes,’ she ventured.
‘Oh, the chances of that are fairly remote, so we don’t want to dwell on it more than is necessary. There are a lot of little quakes, but they are so small that we don’t actually feel them. Quakes that are below three on the Richter scale. They happen out at sea, most of them, and are just picked up by seismologists at monitoring stations.’
‘I see,’ Signy said, not finding his words particularly reassuring, although she suspected that if she’d heard the same information in her past, before she had started work with World Aid Nurses, she would have been more or less blithely unconcerned. There was something about having been in danger that made you more aware of it everywhere. Or perhaps it was just that she had grown up a bit.
‘Hey, Signy!’ Terri was by her side, flashing a brilliant smile at Max. ‘I was wondering if you would like to join me on a little exploratory walk of the camp. With all the sitting on planes that I’ve been doing, I could use a bit of time putting one foot in front of the other.’
‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Signy said, feeling relieved that she could extricate herself from the slightly predatory Max.
She and Terri walked briskly away from the mess hall. ‘I bet he generally gets what he wants where women are concerned,’ Terri said, a cynical note in her voice, and they both laughed.
Back in the pleasant yellow and pink room in Moose Head hut, Signy went through her luggage to get out a pair of loose cotton trousers, a T-shirt and light sweater, to change out of the blouse and skirt that she was wearing. From another holdall she took out lightweight hiking boots and socks. Quickly she took a shower in the tiny en suite bathroom, then dressed again. She found herself wondering what Dan was doing. There was a certain relief to be away from what she felt was his supervision.
There was a knock on her door. ‘May I come in?’ It was Terri.
Signy let her in. ‘Almost ready,’ she said, towelling her hair vigorously. ‘I just had to have a shower—couldn’t wait.’
‘Same here.’ Terri smiled. ‘You know, I’m really glad we met at that air terminus in Vancouver, Signy. I was rather apprehensive about coming here. I thought maybe I wouldn’t have a lot in common with other people here. I’ve only been on one assignment abroad, and I thought maybe most of the others would be really seasoned people, maybe a bit hard-bitten.’
‘I’ve only been on one assignment, too,’ Signy said. ‘Although it was so horrendous that I feel as though I’ve been on half a dozen. From talking to some of the other nurses, I think they’re a rather humble lot, even though they’ve done some pretty brave things, I suspect, sort of going where angels fear to tread.’
‘Yeah,’ Terri said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it’s more of a case of where angels tread. We’re really in the minority, you know. Not very many people would go where we’re prepared to go, I came to learn that. Perhaps we are what that guy Dan Blake said…naïve. I thought it was ironic really, that he was saying we need to know the difference between trust and naïvety.’
‘It’s a calculated risk, Terri,’ Signy said, knowing that she was going to have a good rapport with this nurse. ‘That’s what we’re doing. We have a good training and we have our common sense. The rest is up to fate. That’s basically what life is all about, I suppose.’
Together they left the hut, heading for the path that went around the periphery of the camp. As they passed the reception building they saw Max again, talking to one of the other nurses.
‘He’s rather gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Terri said in a muted voice, before they were within earshot of the doctor. ‘Makes you wonder what someone like him is doing here, or in the medical profession, come to that. He ought to be in films.’
‘Good looks don’t necessarily get you where you want to go, although maybe they give you a head start.’ Signy laughed.
‘You mean like the old saying, “Looks don’t last, cooking do”?’
‘I thought it was, “Kissing don’t last, cooking do”,’ Signy said. They laughed together as they went past Max. He turned and looked at Signy with a quick, appraising glance from head to foot and back again.
Most of the time these days it came as a surprise to Signy when a man found her attractive, or appeared to do so. She had got used to taking that interest with the proverbial pinch of salt. That was what breaking up with Simon had done for her—it had battered her first flush of youthful confidence and self-esteem.
‘I wonder what assignments Dr Seaton has been on with World Aid Doctors,’ Terri murmured, her tone implying that perhaps he hadn’t been on too many that could have been called remotely dangerous.
As they walked under the shade of tall, cool trees, breathing in fresh, unpolluted air, Signy recalled the offer that Dan had made to show her the beaches, and how quick she had been to rebuff him. Now she felt an odd regret, in spite of her shock and antipathy when she thought of him and what he had done, perhaps inadvertently. There was a brooding quality about him that seemed to go with the dark wildness of this place. Strange that she should be thinking that way…
At that moment she felt close to both Simon and Dominic, as though she could meet them at any moment, which was odd, as though her past and her present were coming together.
‘This is great…absolutely great,’ Terri breathed, looking up at the trees that towered above them. ‘I’ll feel safe here, I can tell.’
When they were back again at Moose Head hut and Signy was in the sanctuary of her delightful small room, she found herself pleasantly tired and relaxed by the exertion of the hike. The remainder of the day was her own until suppertime in the mess. They could also make tea in the kitchenette off the sitting room in the hut.
She took off her outer clothing and got into bed under the duvet. The temperature was pleasantly cool now, a good time to sleep. She lay there with her arms behind her head, looking up at the ceiling. How strange it was that she was in this remote place, on the edge of an ocean, with others who had the same purpose. There was a slight feeling of dissonance, yet at the same time a feeling of sanctuary. She was safe here…
Here were new people again, among whom there was the possibility that she would make some lifetime friends. With eyes closed, she thought of other situations in which she had encountered new people who had mattered…There had been Simon, never far from her thoughts—Dr Simon Heathcote, a young surgeon who had come to work in the London teaching hospital where she had been a staff nurse in the operating theatres. One day he hadn’t been in her life, she hadn’t known he existed, then the next morning there he’d been, and everything had changed for ever.
‘Hello, you must be Signy Clover,’ a masculine voice had said early on a Monday morning when she’d been intent on opening packs for the first case in her operating theatre where she’d been assigned to work for the day. ‘Sister Granger told me that you would tell me where things are. I have to scrub to assist for the first case.’
She had turned round from her task, feeling under stress because time had been tight, with only minutes to get ready for the case, already feeling irritable with the owner of the voice. Then from the moment she’d encountered the blue-eyed, blond good looks of Simon Heathcote as he’d looked round the edge of the door, she’d been smitten, had known by some sort of precognition that they were to mean something to each other.
‘Oh…’ she’d said, pointing. ‘First, get yourself a cap and mask through there, by the scrub sinks.’
They had worked together regularly from that day on. Even so, it had seemed like a fairy-tale to her that they’d been mutually attracted, had fallen in love, then a few months later had decided to live together.
Signy stirred restlessly now, turning on her side and pulling the duvet up around her ears. There was no sound discernible to her from the rest of the camp, all was peaceful. How wonderful it had been to live with Simon, to make a cosy home for them in a tiny, rather scruffy flat above a grocer’s shop in the East End of London. The area had started to become trendy, but not so much so that they hadn’t been able to afford to live there. They had cleaned the place up very thoroughly, had painted the walls and woodwork, working on weekends and evenings, whenever they’d had time off. She had bought pretty fabric to make curtains cheaply to make the place feel and look like a home. It had all seemed so permanent.
Nine months later Simon had told her that he was in love with someone else, a doctor with whom he’d been working over the past four weeks. Both she and Simon had been working long hours. He had been on call a lot so that when they’d started to spend less and less time together she had put it down to pressure of work.
She stayed on alone in the flat for a while, her self-esteem at its lowest point ever, then found working in the same hospital impossible, seeing Simon and his new woman every day. You didn’t stop loving someone because they no longer wanted to be with you. On the contrary, in some perverse way you dwelt obsessively on their image, idealized them, longed for them every minute of the day, as well as in those moments during the night when you woke up in a panic because they were no longer there.
Looking back, she saw that she’d been complacent at first, had taken to the cosy domesticity like the proverbial duck to water, without a certain necessary cynicism, or maybe realism. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Then she read an advertisement in a nursing journal for World Aid Nurses…
Don’t think about it now, she told herself. Put it out of your mind, it’s all water under the bridge. Go to sleep…go to sleep.
As she drifted into sleep, the face before her inner vision wasn’t that of Simon Heathcote, but the darker features of Max Seaton…and finally the angular, clean-cut features and characteristic nose of Dan Blake. No, that was R.D.H. Blake, she reminded herself. She tried to picture him as a sixteen-year-old, as his words came back to her— ‘fell out of a tree’. Those words had disarmed her
at the time, yet now she couldn’t picture him as a teenager, frightened to have surgery on his nose. He seemed completely adult. That in itself was something rare. If he was as responsible as he seemed, he wouldn’t shirk from answering her questions about Africa…
It was Connie Lenz, the nurse in her forties, who knocked on Signy’s door half an hour before suppertime. ‘Hello, Signy,’ she said with a welcoming yet tentative smile. ‘The others here are having a glass of white wine before supper. Would you like to join us? It’s in the kitchen.’
‘Love to,’ Signy said, blinking the sleep out of her eyes. ‘Give me a few seconds to wake up and get dressed.’
Connie was a Canadian of mixed ancestry, so she’d explained earlier. The fourth occupant of the Moose Head hut was a West Indian nurse named Pearl James. What an interesting mixture they were. Signy smiled to herself as she dressed in a clean skirt and blouse, and eased her feet into slip-on shoes. It took her seconds only to brush her hair and put on a dash of make-up.
‘Whose idea was this?’ she said, as she accepted a glass of cold white wine out in the small kitchen, where the others were standing about talking and sipping.
‘Connie brought the wine,’ Terri said. ‘One of several.’ They all laughed together.
‘To us,’ said Pearl, raising her glass. ‘May we regain our sanity in this place, and the courage to go on, to do what we have to do.’ Pearl was colourfully dressed in a flowing pink, orange and purple caftan, with a light wool shawl around her shoulders in a pale grey.
