After the Storm (41 page)

It was grand that the boys have sorted themselves out and that Don is back with you all. Who’d have thought that Bob was Sarah’s flappy ears in Wassingham but I’m right glad he’s keeping an eye on the lad. He needs a bit of controlling, you know.

I’ll write again, my darling. I’m hoping to go to Kashmir because I’m told that it’s beautiful, but before that we’re off on exercises which will mean marches of ten or fifteen miles a day, so we’ll both have sore feet.

I’ll love you forever, want you forever, your soft skin, your beautiful face; my dearest darling, I miss you so.

Georgie.

Annie looked up at Julie. ‘He still loves me.’

Julie smiled and took their cups to the sink. ‘Sister won’t love you if you don’t get back, you know. It’s the nit-round after the doctors.’

The medical students were crowding round the small man in a dark suit as he walked swiftly down the corridor and Annie pushed the letter into her pocket and slipped into the ward ahead of them and took up her place beside the senior nurse at Sister’s desk. Mr Morton, the small physician, marched past, three of the medical students with him but the fourth stopped to tie his shoe lace in front of her. His blond hair was cut short and his neck bristled with shaved hair. He turned and winked and she blushed; his shoelace had not needed tying, she could see that now.

‘Such nice legs, nurse,’ he murmured, his wide mouth barely moving but his voice carrying beyond Annie to the senior nurse.

Annie flushed and he grinned, walking away now to catch up, his white coat flapping, a stethoscope dangling round his neck. Senior Nurse Wilson, her lips pulled into a thin line, pointed to the screens around the bed at the top of the ward near Sister’s table.

‘Try and leave your love-life outside the ward, nurse. There’s a septicaemia case just come in. Doctor’s already seen her so get on and delouse her and better stay with her for a bit. She’s very poorly.’

Annie felt her hands grow damp. How poorly was poorly, she wondered.

The woman was lying still when Annie moved the screen gently, slipping through and pulling it closed behind her. She was yellow and thin, her face ravaged by illness, her eyes bright but not with health, with fever. Annie longed for the day when she would be able to take pulses and temperatures, give medication instead of dragging a steel comb through nit-infested hair.

She smiled at the woman. ‘Hallo,’ she whispered. ‘I’m Nurse Manon, I have to check your hair, I’m afraid.’ She wanted to think of Georgie’s letter but knew that it must wait until tonight.

She hated it, hated the humiliation that they must feel. The
lice she found were big and black and full of blood and Annie touched the woman’s hand.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked and had to lean forward to catch the faint words.

‘Well, Mrs Turner, you’re fine here, nothing at all on your hair, but I’ll just run me comb through and put a bit of this stuff on just as a precaution.’ She held up the brown bottle. ‘We don’t want you picking up anything while you’re in here, do we?’ It was a very small lie, she thought.

Mrs Turner’s hair was dry and split, shot through with grey. She moaned as the comb pulled through.

Annie stroked her face with one hand. ‘There now,’ she soothed. ‘This won’t take long.’ She squashed the lice between the bowl and her fingernail, hating them, wanting them to die for sucking what little blood this woman had and for forcing her to do this to an already ill patient. At last it was done and Annie smoothed back Mrs Turner’s hair, wiping the tears from her cheeks where they had smeared as she had tried to brush them away before Annie saw.

‘Oh, lass,’ she whispered ‘It’s no job for a young girl. I’m right ashamed, you know.’ She turned her face away from Annie, towards the tiled wall but the glare was too bright and she shut her eyes.

‘There was nothing there, I promise, Mrs Turner. Nothing.’ She put the bowl on the locker, covered with a cloth.

‘Let’s get you comfortable now.’ She smoothed the sheets down and gently plumped the pillows, then sat. The woman was hot, very hot and Annie remembered that when she had been feverish with a heavy cold every touch had felt like a needle on her skin, so what must this woman have gone through just now.

‘You’ll soon begin to feel better you know, now you’re here.’

Mrs Turner turned, her eyes were sunken and the lines around them were so deep it was as though they were coloured in with soot.

‘Aye, lass, maybe I will. I lost the bairn see, lost the wee thing and now I’ve got the poisoning.’ She coughed slightly and Annie held a glass of barley-water to her lips, holding her as she took a sip.

‘I’m sorry about the baby, Mrs Turner.’

The woman smiled weakly. ‘Thank God, you should say, lass. One less to worry about.’ Annie laid her back on the
pillow. She did not try to argue with the woman because she had not forgotten Wassingham; the cold, the hunger, the men on street corners.

Mrs Turner died at the end of her shift.

‘Died just like that,’ Annie told Julie as they ate their supper in the dining-room. ‘There was this funny breath outwards; it went on and on and then she was dead.’

The cabbage was soggy and the fish dry and tough. It had been left too long in the oven again.

‘No talking shop,’ called a senior nurse from the other side.

Annie stood up and walked out of the dining-room, out of the hospital to stand by the grass. There was a rich smell of grass cuttings; it must be the last cut of the season she thought. For God’s sake, it’s the end of October already. She walked on past Queen Victoria who had her nose in the air. Well, it can’t be the lobelia, they’re not here any more, it’s got to be me feet and she looked up at the plump shape and out through the gate over the town where the lights made the sky seem black above it. She stood with her arms crossed. That woman was starved before she came in, she thought. She died because she was poor, not because she had septicaemia. You don’t die from septicaemia without a fight unless you take bloody poison or are starved. She said it again, challenging herself to shrink from the thought of her mother. She walked up and down and she felt the tears come down her cheeks and the heat of Mrs Turner as she had held her hand, the moan as she had torn the metal comb through her hair. There shouldn’t be bloody nits, she shouldn’t have had to go through that. She breathed in deeply and looked up at the sky wondering if she would be able to take the suffering that she was going to have to see over the next few years, but knew that she would. Above the glow of the town the sky was black and the stars were vivid. She wiped her cheeks and shook her head, angry now. These women needed work, needed money and one day she would do something about that, she and Tom together would make it a little better between them but not now because Tom had other things to do and so had she.

Annie caught the train to Sarah’s on her first day off. The walk from the station was cold but the sky was a bright blue and the
light seemed to fill the streets again, just as it had done when she had first come here from Wassingham.

She walked up the path, breaking off a leaf from the privet hedge, bending it over, hearing it crack clean, free from sap. Sarah held her close in her arms and Val hugged her and she took the bowl of corn that Sarah gave her and walked down the garden past the pruned roses, opened the wire gate and threw the corn to the hens, watching as they jerked, watching as the cock strutted.

The shed door opened easily and the smell of creosote was slight without the hot sun and she edged in past the bike, past the worn rubber grips to the window. She rubbed the glass, looking out into the open sky and leaned against the wooden frame. She loved it, she loved nursing. Loved the work, the girls, the being on her own, but she was glad to be back.

Lunch was calm until the doorbell rang and there were Tom and Grace, Don with a girl. Tom held her close, looked at her feet and said they were like bloody battleships. Grace kissed her and said how she’d grown. Don hugged her and gave her a bag of victory drops to keep away the germs and introduced Maud who was little with very curly hair and had Don right under her thumb.

Val laid more places at the table and Sarah laughed. They ate well and laughed and talked, then sat in front of the fire and Tom told them about Bob; how he had met him, how he was teaching him all about the unions and Sarah and Annie did not look at one another but at him and acted surprised. Don held Maud’s hand and Tom winked at Annie. Grace asked about her work, about the food and they all laughed, Don too.

She told them about the Sister Tutor who had dragged them over the coals for the first six weeks, about the doctors who thought they were God but not about the blond medical student, William. She told them about the boy who had come into casualty with his head stuck in the potty but not about the child who had died of a congenital deformity and who she had carried in her arms, wrapped in a cloak, to the mortuary; you did not let the little ones take that last cold journey on their own, on a trolley. She told them about the woman who had produced a bairn when she thought she was suffering from indigestion, but not about Mrs Turner.

The train ride back was quiet after the talking and the
laughing and the hugs and kisses. They had asked after Georgie and she had told them about Lahore, about the heat, the fighting. She had not told them that he had said she was to live her life until he was back. The train pulled into the station. It was dark and the sparks flew up until they died and disappeared. She took the eggs and cakes that Val had made, the toffee that she and the others had boiled up in pans, then rolled and thrown at a nail Don had hammered into the door. Again and again they had taken the slack and thrown it and stretched it until it was ready. They had left it to harden while they had taken a last look at the hens, at the garden, then Tom had hammered it into pieces and they had taken some home with them but the rest was here, in this white box, for her patients in the morning.

The platform was empty by the time she had collected her parcels and climbed down from the step. She walked to the domed exit, through the dim lighting and the smell and huff of the trains and there was William, as he had said he would be.

He took her parcels but she kept one so that they each had a hand free to hold loosely. The night was fine and papers flew about their feet. Taxis waited in the ranks and they saw the glow of cigarettes in the cabs.

They walked back to the nurses’ home and now everything was close to her after a day of distance, of waiting. They stopped at the pork stall on the corner and William ate a dripping sandwich which oozed and ran down his chin and Annie wiped it with her handkerchief. His laugh was light and easy and that was what she wanted. He took a piece of his bread and put it in her mouth, his hands were small and pale; he was going to be a surgeon.

He kissed her lips at the gates, away from the lights and she could taste the pork as his lips opened over hers. The parcels were in the way and she laughed and pushed him away knowing that she would see him again when they were on nights next week.

She was on duty at Christmas and sang carols round the tree and kept her hand in her pocket clutched tightly round Georgie’s letter, the one that she had received in October. She smiled across at Julie, at William and knew that Georgie was safe deep inside her, quite safe from William or any other man.

Night duty was tiring because they had to work at lectures as and when they could during the day. As winter turned to
spring, Annie took pulses, gave enemas, read temperature charts and spent two months in theatre. She took the severed legs to the chutes, mopped the surgeon’s brows, watched William watching the specialists.

Tom and Don came to Newcastle with the girls and they went to the Empire, to the pantomime. Julie and Trevor, another medical student, came too, and William. The lights were still the same shell-pink, the curtains the same rich red. The binoculars were released from their stand on the back of the seat for the same sixpence. The seat prickled and Annie sat back and tried to forget her da. Tom pressed his arm to hers.

‘All right, bonny lass?’ he whispered and she nodded and most of her was, but still there lurked that dark hate that would not leave her in peace.

Tom wrote to her that week, wrote and asked her if she was all right now, asked about Georgie, about William, and she smiled and replied that she loved Georgie, she liked William because he made her laugh. She said that she wanted Tom to behave himself, keep out of trouble and sent him love for Grace and Don and Maud; for Don was still with this pale small girl.

Every other day off, she went to Sarah’s but the others were for her and William. They walked in the parks, went to the cinema and sat on seats which flicked up the minute they were left. She screamed at King Kong and laughed at the silent movies that were still being shown.

In the summer, they went on holiday with Julie and Trevor to the Lake District and she shared a room with William. It was a small private hotel which lay on the banks of Windermere and had chalets which lay some distance from the hotel.

The hills across the lakes were not as high as the hills that Georgie wrote of and were seldom hidden by cloud. She was shy when William had locked the door, it was the afternoon of their arrival and the sun was hot. He turned to her, his hands stroking her face and she could feel the tremble in them.

He had blue eyes not brown like Georgie and soft hands, not hard like Georgie’s and then she stopped herself. This was William and Annie and was quite different, quite separate from Georgie. He kissed her then, his lips soft, his eyes shut, his eyelashes casting a shadow on his cheeks. He was a good boy, Annie thought, as her lips pressed into his, from the South and different, but a good boy.

He undid her blouse and stroked her breasts as her nipples hardened: his breath was quicker now and he picked her up and took her to the bed.

‘I’m a virgin,’ she said as he sat down on the bed. He looked at her, traced the line of her cheek then her throat and her breasts and promised to be gentle. And he was, and afterwards she lay on the bed, wet with his sweat and her legs overlaid with his, looking out through the window at the water. There was a boat which seemed to be barely moving, the curtains were flowered and puffed out in the breeze. She turned and stroked his face and he kissed her hand.