Bertie looked confused. ‘Really, what’s the point of that? I mean, if you buy her a rose she will want to put it in her own garden at home, won’t she? She can’t be that far from retiring surely?’
Dessie was measuring out a line on the plans, using his pencil. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he replied. ‘I am at the beck and call of two women, Matron and my wife. I learnt a long time ago that the path to an easy life is just to do as they say, not to question why. I know nothing.’
Bertie, who was afflicted with nosiness possibly to a greater degree than his wife, was not going to allow Dessie to shrug off his questions quite that easily. ‘Your wife, she’s one of the bigwigs up at the hospital now, isn’t she? My mother-in-law knew her mam.’
Dessie looked up from the plans. His wife, Emily, had lost her mother and her two small brothers in the war when their house had taken a direct hit as Emily had run to the shop for her sick mother. Mavis Tanner had been in the butcher’s queue with her as they heard the sickening sound of the bomb falling. Emily’s mam had been a patient of Dr Gaskell’s and he would sometimes, when Emily least expected it, remind her of that and, unintentionally, bring her mother into her day. The flimsy bonds of belonging wrapped around the community and held them together, each one aware, knowing and understanding another’s loss, pain and happiness too.
Dessie sighed as Bertie continued, ‘Aren’t you the ones who adopted that baby who was in the Echo, the one who had been left for dead in an empty garage last Christmas?’
Dessie felt his skin prickle. He and Emily had had no luck trying for their own child and had both fallen in love with baby Louis when he had been admitted to the hospital as a very thin, neglected and abandoned baby almost a year ago. The thought of him being transferred to Strawberry Fields children’s home had broken everyone’s heart in the hospital and the children’s services department at Liverpool Corporation had been only too delighted to oblige by allowing a senior sister like Emily to foster Louis while they went through the adoption process.
‘Aye, that’s us.’ Dessie and Emily had hated the fact that children’s services had insisted the story of Louis be placed in the Echo. Mrs Casey, the head of children’s services, had been insistent. ‘We have to demonstrate that we have made every effort to locate his actual mother,’ she had said. ‘Honestly, you will thank us in the long run when we can prove beyond all reasonable doubt that we have done our best. It will work in your favour.’
Thanking Mrs Casey was not at the front of Dessie’s mind right now. It was almost a year since he and Emily had brought little Louis home with them and there was one more round of interviews followed by an assessment until the papers could be signed and, just in time for Christmas, he could officially become their son and they could register his name as such. Dessie already had the forms ready to take to the town hall and hand over to the registrar the first moment possible. Bertie pulled out a cigarette from behind his ear and waiting patiently for his answer from Dessie, lit up. There was more Rizla than tobacco and glowing red flecks of paper and tobacco floated down onto the plans. Irritated, Dessie flicked them away with the side of his hand. The studied silence did not deter the foreman.
‘They said you’ve had to wait while they try to trace the mother; that must be tough on you. I saw the little lad in the pram outside on the front steps yesterday when your missus called in? He doesn’t look like he had been half-starved. Looked fine to me. Most of them types go straight to the children’s home, don’t they?’
Dessie lifted his head and forced a smile. ‘Yes, he’s bouncing fit now, thank you for noticing.’ There was an edge to Dessie’s voice which Bertie appeared not to have picked up on. ‘Very soon he will be legally ours – and when he is, everyone can stop commenting on his development as though he is a museum piece.’ Dessie wanted the conversation to end right there and then, but Bertie had other ideas.
‘Oh, well, not sure that’s quite right is it, matey?’ Matey? Dessie’s back stiffened as he slowly lifted his head from where he was trying, without success, to make sense of the plans Matron had shoved in his hand as she told him to oversee the building works at the Lovely Lane home. Bertie ploughed on. ‘Not according to the paper anyway. You had to wait a full twelve months to give them time to find the mother. Is it nearly that now? I’m sure that’s what I read that the judge had said. Hang on, I might have it wrong mind, yeah, you could be right. Doesn’t time fly?’
Dessie took a deep breath. ‘Do you remember everything you read in the papers?’ he asked.
Bertie beamed from ear to ear. ‘I do,’ he said proudly. ‘I read the Daily Post from front to back in my break at work and then I start on the Echo when I get home. Pride myself on never forgetting the detail, I do. You need an eye for detail to be a good builder, I always say.’
Dessie laid the plans on top of the bricks that were sitting on a wooden pallet in the middle of what had been the large garden, but was now effectively a building site. ‘Do you know, Bertie, I am very sure Matron would rather you were getting on with building these new rooms for her new nurses coming over from Ireland and Mrs Duffy’s accommodation than reading the paper. I mean, I am very sure that’s not what she thinks she’s paying you for.’
Bertie looked offended. ‘Hang on, you’re joking, aren’t you? I’m allowed to do what the ’ell I want on me break.’
‘Which break is that?’ Dessie asked. ‘Because I asked Matron could I have a look at your contract and in there it says one morning tea break at ten thirty for thirty minutes.’
Bertie adjusted his cap and furrowed his brow. ‘Aye, that’s right. That’s when we have our break, at ten thirty, so it is.’
Just then one of the workmen called out from what had been the old wash house in the garden, ‘Bertie, your brew is ready and the lad is back from the shop with your paper.’
Bertie had the good grace to blush and look embarrassed. It was still before nine.
‘If you don’t mind,’ Dessie said in a voice loaded with the upper hand, ‘we will just take a look at these plans first.’
‘Aye, of course we will, boss,’ said Bertie, red-faced and flustered as he ground his heel down on the last of his cigarette stub and, lowering his head, matched Dessie’s interest in the sketches, all conversation about Louis thankfully forgotten. But the process until the day Louis became officially theirs was ingrained on Dessie’s brain and was counted down, day by day. Only Dessie knew he would never truly breathe freely again until the fully signed-off adoption papers were in their hands. They loved Louis as if he was their own flesh and blood, more even, and surely if anyone was going to step forward to claim him, they would have done so by now. The prospect of police involvement, for having so badly neglected him, would have provided a deterrent.
‘No mother who left her baby strapped in a pram, alone, starved, in a dark garage is ever going to show her face,’ Dessie often said to Emily to comfort her when, in the small hours, she woke, checked on Louis and then had one of her panic attacks. ‘If she ever turns up, she will end up in jail for abandoning him. He could have died. No one is going to let her take the little lad from us.’
‘Is that true, though? I’ve heard so many stories,’ Emily would say into his chest as he held her tight. ‘Mothers who come back just days before the papers are due to be signed having changed their minds.’ She would look up to Dessie’s face and scan his eyes, looking to find the same fears and doubts that she harboured, always relieved to see none.
‘Emily, those are the healthy babies, born in the mother and baby homes. Whoever gave birth to Louis, and I refuse to call her a mother, she is long gone and very soon he will officially be our little lad.’ There would be a silence while they both thought on his words. A cock might crow from a yard down near the docks, a tug hoot on its way out to the bar to collect a ship and guide it in on the morning bore and a lone cow might be lowing in the dairy shed at the end of Admiral Street. ‘I love it when he calls me da,’ Dessie would say, pulling his wife
closer into his chest. ‘Makes my heart burst it does.’
He would look at Emily, already fast asleep in his arms, and there she would stay until they were woken by the noises they were still unused to, the noises that drowned out the tugs and the seagulls – the shouts and demands for attention coming from little Louis’ room.
Chapter 8
Teddy leant on the hatch in outpatients chatting to the outpatients’ clerk, Doreen.
‘Do you prefer it over here to Accident and Emergency?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yeah, I do. A change is as good as a rest, isn’t it?’ Doreen smiled up at him. ‘Tilly, who took my job, she’s loving it over there. She’s so ambitious. I reckon she will be running the place soon – next stop, Matron’s office. How are you now? I’ve got to say, you look much better these past few weeks, it’s like you are back to your old self.’
Teddy flicked open the front of a set of case notes. ‘I am. I am back to my old self, Doreen.’ He closed the cover and sighed. ‘I don’t know what happened to me. I mean, I know I had a car accident and lost the use of my leg, but I think I lost my mind too.’
‘What did Mr Mabbutt say?’ Doreen asked.
‘Oh, you know what Mabbutt is like. You have to pick between the bloodies and then search around under the bad temper. He’s a top surgeon, but it’s a good job his patients, of whom I am regretfully one, are asleep when he operates and they can’t hear him and the way he carries on. The new maid in the consultants’ waiting room was so scared of him she apparently walked out yesterday.’
Doreen laughed. ‘The rumour is flying around that she became so upset she burst into tears, flung her pinny in his face and ran out – but not before she threw his crab sandwich on the floor and stood on it. He was distraught, apparently; not that she had run out, but that the crab, which he had brought in himself in a tin from Lyons, was ruined. And Dr Gaskell was even more upset because everyone had to make their own tea.’
Mr Mabbutt’s temper was legendary in St Angelus. ‘It’s a shame,’ Teddy said. ‘People really don’t understand him. He’s just a man who is a surgical perfectionist and he wages this constant fight against infection which he takes personally. I sometimes wonder if paranoia is creeping in. I caught him telling Matron that he wanted the theatre walls – and all the grouting in the tiles – washed down before every single operation and he wants the mops and buckets throwing out every time they are used. Matron looked at him as though he was mad. He shouts at his patients too, those who don’t do as he says and I should know. Anyway, he was very sympathetic when it came to my actual physical injuries, but it was Oliver Gaskell who really helped me.’
‘Really?’ said Doreen, surprised. ‘Dr Gaskell junior, the ladies’ man?’ Unlike his father, Oliver Gaskell was not taken terrible seriously.
‘Yes, he put me on the straight and narrow. He said I had not adjusted and he thought I had suffered a kind of mini breakdown as a result. And you know, talking to him about it, well, it kind of transformed everything. I don’t think we pay enough attention to how injury affects people’s minds as well as their bodies. I know I hadn’t and I was putting myself under such pressure to return back to work on the wards that I was in a panic. I kept having nightmares and reliving the accident. The thing with an accident, Doreen, is that everything is out of your control and it’s so frustrating, so hard to adjust to; and I reckon the people who cope worst with accidents must be doctors and nurses. There is truth in the saying that we do make the worst patients.’
Doreen grinned. ‘You don’t say? Who would have ever guessed that!’ Her irony was lost on him as he closed the case notes he had been studying with a flourish.
‘This one is a DNA, it’s half past now.’ He flicked the buff-coloured case notes into the red plastic-coated wire tray on Doreen’s desk.
‘Oi, you,’ she said as she picked up the folder, opened it onto the right page and wrote, DID NOT ATTEND, in capital letters on the page that had been allocated and slipped it into the notes for the appointment and then placed it back in the tray. She was so busy chatting she failed to notice the name on the front cover or that the notes belonged to baby Louis.
‘I don’t suppose you have seen Nurse Brogan around, have you?’ Teddy’s face was pleading, his manner desperate.
Doreen gave him an apologetic half-smile. ‘I haven’t,’ she said. ‘But Sister Horton is starting the rehearsal with the nuns for the ward singing. Matron wants the carol singers to go round the wards between the seven to eight visiting each night for the full seven-night countdown before Christmas and I know Pammy Tanner and some of the others are going so Nurse Brogan might well come along too. She has a lovely singing voice so I don’t think she will be allowed to skive off because you know what Sister Horton is like; she loves her carols and the nuns, they make the hairs on my arms stand up and put tears in my eyes, they sing so beautifully.’
Teddy looked hopeful. ‘Shall I join them when are they rehearsing? I can croon a note or two.’
Doreen didn’t look convinced. ‘I don’t think that will be a good idea, not after what you did. I don’t think if you were Father Christmas himself Dana would ever forgive you, Teddy.’ Her voice was gentle, her eyes kind. She felt sorry for him, but knew there was no point in letting him get his hopes up. ‘If you are looking for a girlfriend, I think you had better look elsewhere because there is no way Dana will ever take you back. She had to come back to finish her training and I think she’s very brave. You are so lucky Matron didn’t tear the skin off you, treating one of her nurses like that.’ Doreen, standing, began to tie her bundle of case notes together. ‘You are done here, now,’ she said. ‘That was your last on this afternoon’s list. You start on Dr Gaskell’s chest ward tomorrow, don’t you?’
‘I do, and I start on his wife’s cooking tonight. They’ve invited me for dinner – or rather, Oliver has.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Doreen. ‘I’m going home to me mam and da and, as it’s a Wednesday, it’ll be sausage, mash and onion gravy for us. I imagine if you are going to Dr Gaskell’s you’ll be having something fancier than that. They say his wife is lovely, if a little left behind.’
Teddy thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘Left behind? What do you mean by that?’
Doreen took her red coat down from the peg, slipped her arms in and shuffled it up over her shoulders. ‘Oh, you know, she’s like a ghost. No one ever really sees her – and when they do, she never really speaks. Mrs Tanner has apparently got her making cakes down on Lovely Lane with Mrs Duffy. It’s a Christmas miracle that she agreed, but you know Mavis, she can get anyone to do anything.’
Hope sprang into Teddy’s eyes. ‘Fabulous, I’m glad I’m going for supper tonight. She makes the best bread-and-butter pudding. I wonder… should I ask Pammy to help me with Dana? Do you think she takes after her mother?’
‘Dr Davenport, do you ever give up?’ Doreen pulled the belt on the mac tight across her slim waist. ‘Have you even been listening to a word I said? Move on. It is never going to happen.’ And then, with a note of distraction, she said, ‘I need a new winter coat. They say the temperatures are going to drop like a stone from tomorrow. I mean, I put this on for the rain, but it’s not really warm enough…’
Teddy wasn’t listening, his mind on another thought. ‘Doreen, why haven’t you got a fella, a lovely young woman like you?’
Everyone knew Doreen’s story. Attacked and raped, she had been admitted into casualty, the department she had worked in and Teddy had been one of the admitting doctors who had looked after her. When he had been run over, she had spent the day and night looking after his brother, Roland, not leaving outpatients until she was no longer needed and they could cope. She had run as fast as her legs would carry her, around the back of the hospital to the path lab to fetch the blood that was needed to save Teddy’s life. As a result, there was a familiarity a doctor wouldn’t normally have with a clerk. If it hadn’t been for Doreen, her quickness of mind and fast legs, he might n
ot be here now. They had their own unique bonds of attachment and they knew it.
‘You know my story,’ she said. ‘You were there, and thank God you were. No man wants soiled good, does he?’ She raised her eyebrows and lifted the wooden hatch to walk out over to medical records.
‘Doreen, don’t be daft. It wasn’t your fault and none of that stuff matters any more. No one cares.’
Doreen let the hatch fall for the last inch so as not to catch her fingers and then slid the bolt across before she turned to him. ‘The priest does… and anyway, who is there? I’m twenty-five already. On the shelf, that’s me. I’m not pretty like Pammy Tanner or your Nurse Brogan with her blue Irish eyes. I’m just plain old Doreen and I’m used to it now. Now shift – you’re keeping me from my sausages and mash with onion gravy, and who needs a man when I’ve got that waiting at home for me? You’ve never tasted onion gravy until you’ve had our mam’s. She puts a drop of the Golden Knight in it, her secret recipe. Now, I’m off to the school to see if Biddy Kennedy wants to walk down with me. A good friend to natter with and me mam’s cooking is better than any man and that’s a fact.’
Teddy roared with laughter. ‘Well, if you put it like that, Doreen… I’m partial to a bit of onion gravy myself, so any chance of an invite? Tell you what, tell your mam I’ll have a listen to her heart while I’m there. She loves the attention and it always beats a bit faster when I’m around.’ He stood aside to let her past and Doreen laughed at his audacity.
Snow Angels: An emotional Christmas read from the Sunday Times bestseller (The Lovely Lane Series Book 5) Page 10
