The Nightingale Sisters (4 page)

‘Oh, it was.’ Millie smiled at the memory. She and her fiancé Seb had gone to the Savoy Hotel with their friends. They’d sipped Martinis in Harry’s Bar, then danced in the ballroom under a vast hourglass suspended above their heads. As the last grains of sand trickled through, trumpeters from the Life Guards had played a rousing fanfare. Then there had been more cocktails, more dancing, and the hours just slipped by, until the next thing Millie knew she was in a taxi with Seb, kissing him a passionate goodnight outside the hospital gates.

She shuddered. How on earth Hopkins the head porter hadn’t seen her she didn’t know. It was sheer luck she wasn’t explaining herself to Matron yet again this morning.

‘We had so much fun,’ she told Helen. ‘And we drank the most marvellous new cocktail. It’s called a Silent Third. I think it’s lemon juice, Cointreau and Scotch. Have you tried it? Oh, you should, it’s wonderful. The Prince of Wales drinks nothing else, so I’m told—’

‘The Prince of Wales doesn’t have to be ready to make beds and care for patients at seven in the morning, does he?’

Millie scrambled to her feet. Sister Hyde stood in the doorway. She was an imposing figure, tall and spare in her severe grey uniform. Her hair was drawn back under her starched bonnet, the jaunty bow under her chin a stark contrast to her gaunt face, etched with rigid lines that spoke of self-control and discipline.

‘Perhaps if you devoted half as much time to your nursing as you do to your social life, Benedict, you might not be such a liability,’ she said. ‘May I remind you that Mrs Church is still awaiting your attention?’

‘Yes, Sister. Sorry, Sister.’

‘It’s not me you should be apologising to, Benedict. It’s poor Mrs Church.’

‘She probably hasn’t even noticed.’ Millie didn’t realise she’d muttered the words aloud until she saw the thunderous look on Sister Hyde’s face.

‘All the more reason why she needs us to take care of her!’ she snapped. Her eyes were the hard, cold grey of flint.

‘Yes, Sister.’ Millie stared humbly down at her shoes, wishing the ground would open up beneath them.

‘Well, don’t just stand there, girl. Hurry up!’

Millie could feel Sister Hyde’s disapproving gaze on her as she gathered soap, brush and comb, methylated spirits and dusting powder on her trolley, then filled the basin at the hot tap.

‘Is that the correct temperature?’

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘Are you sure? You mustn’t scald the patient.’

‘No, Sister.’

‘And don’t leave the soap in the water while you’re washing her, as you did yesterday,’ Sister Hyde reminded her. ‘It’s a scandalous waste.’

‘No, Sister.’

‘And for heaven’s sake, girl, try to look cheerful!’ Sister’s final words rang out after her.

She hates me, Millie thought as she pushed the trolley back up the ward.

She and Sister Hyde had got off to a bad start the previous year, when Millie had accidentally soaked her with soap enema solution during her Preliminary Training examination. The image of Sister Hyde standing there, her cap limp, soapy water dripping off the end of her long nose, had haunted Millie ever since.

And Sister Hyde clearly hadn’t forgotten it either, because she never missed an opportunity to make her suffer. Millie had been dreading her assignment to Female Chronics.

Every day Sister Hyde took her to task for something. She was far harder on Millie than she was on any of the other nurses.

‘It should take you less than three minutes to make an empty bed, Nurse,’ she would say, standing behind her with watch poised. Or, ‘Why are you shaking those sheets? For heaven’s sake, girl, you’re not putting out the flags.’ She would follow Millie as she cleaned, running her finger along the locker tops and around the bathtubs, until she finally found something to complain about.

Millie tried to stay cheerful and to see the good in everything and everyone, but she was beginning to think there wasn’t any in Sister Hyde.

Female Chronics, like most of the other wards at the Nightingale Hospital, was as cavernous as a cathedral, with twenty beds arranged down the two longer sides, each separated by a tile-topped locker. In the centre of the ward stood the Sister’s desk and the fireplace, which crackled with a roaring fire throughout the winter months. Tall windows offered a view out over the courtyard, with its cluster of London plane trees in the centre where patients sometimes sat if they were well enough.

But none of the patients on Female Chronics ever ventured out into the courtyard. Few even got as far as admiring the view from the windows. They had come to the Nightingale not to get better, but to die.

It was another reason why Millie had been dreading her placement here. The women on Female Chronics were so sad. Many of them had been abandoned by their families, left to die alone and forgotten. Some of them had been sent here from the workhouse. No visitors ever came to this ward, bringing flowers, laughter or good cheer.

Not that it really mattered. Many of the patients were too old, sick or mad to know where they were. They would thrash and scream, rattling the bars of their cots and lashing out at the nurses. Or they would talk to themselves, carrying on conversations with unseen friends and family. And then there were the ones who lay staring at the ceiling, their faces devoid of hope. Those were the ones who tore most at Millie’s heart.

Perhaps that was why Sister Hyde was so bitter and bad-tempered all the time, she thought. She would probably be the same herself if she had spent the last thirty years in such a depressing place.

Mrs Church gave her a wide, toothless grin through the bars of her cot as Millie manoeuvred her trolley through the gap between the screens. She was no bigger than a child. Pearly skin stretched over the bones of her face, which was surrounded by a fluffy halo of sparse white hair. She didn’t seem to notice the stinking mess that smeared her wrinkled hands and white nightgown. If anything she seemed to delight in it, much to the horror of the nurses. Messy Bessie had certainly earned her nickname.

Millie’s stomach lurched violently as the stench hit her, but she fought against it, forcing a smile as she lowered the side of the cot. ‘Right, Mrs Church, let’s get you cleaned up, shall we?’ she said bracingly, pulling on her rubber gloves.

‘No!’ Bessie Church galvanised herself, snatching at the bedclothes and yanking them up to her chin, her eyes round with terror.

Millie winced to see the palm prints smeared all over the blankets. ‘Come along now, you can’t stay in this mess, can you?’ she encouraged. ‘You’ll feel so much better when you’re all nice and fresh.’

But Bessie Church clung on, her fingernails rimed with filth.

‘Nooo!’ An unearthly wail of fear emerged from the gaping, toothless hole of her mouth.

‘For heaven’s sake, can you please shut that woman up?’

Maud Mortimer’s voice rose imperiously from the other side of the ward. She was a grand lady in her seventies, and one of the few patients on the ward with all her mental faculties intact. Only her body let her down; she was bedbound, suffering from progressive muscular atrophy. But it seemed as if she had decided to devote her remaining time on earth to making everyone else as miserable as she possibly could.

Millie heard Staff Nurse Willis approach Mrs Mortimer’s bed. She was a softly spoken woman, and Millie could barely make out her whispering voice. But she heard Mrs Mortimer’s ringing answer, loud and clear.

‘What do you mean, I’m disturbing the patients? Good heavens, you stupid woman, haven’t you heard that dreadful racket going on? I have no idea what the idiotic nurse is doing behind those screens, but I sincerely hope she’s putting that woman out of her misery with an elephant gun!’ More murmuring from Staff Nurse Willis, then Mrs Mortimer said in outrage, ‘I will spare a thought for the other patients when they spare a thought for me. Gracious, one can’t even die in peace, it seems.’

Millie couldn’t help smiling. Maud Mortimer reminded her of her own grandmother, the redoubtable Dowager Countess Rettingham, a woman so convinced of the rightness of her own opinions she saw absolutely no point in listening to anyone else’s.

But then Millie turned around and saw what Bessie Church had just done, and her smile disappeared.

‘Oh, no! Look at me!’ She stared down in horror at her apron. She’d been so busy listening to Maud Mortimer, she hadn’t noticed that Messy Bessie had released her hold on the bedclothes and was pawing at Millie instead.

Bessie Church just clapped her hands and leered proudly back at her. Seizing her chance, Millie whipped off the bedclothes. Bessie’s crowing laughter turned to a scream of outrage. She made a grab for the bedclothes and, when that didn’t work, she made a grab for Millie instead.

‘Ow! Let me go!’ For such a tiny woman Mrs Church was surprisingly strong. Her dirty claws fixed on a handful of Millie’s hair through her cap, pulling her off balance so that she pitched forward headlong on to the bed.

‘What on earth is going on here?’

Sister Hyde rattled back the screens. Millie wrenched herself free and struggled off the bed, trying to straighten her cap. She didn’t dare look down at herself, but she knew she was almost as messy as Bessie.

Sister Hyde’s gaze raked her up and down. ‘Go and get changed, Benedict,’ she said at last through thin, almost unmoving lips. ‘I will find someone competent to clean up Mrs Church.’

Millie slunk off, aware of the other nurses watching her with amusement as she made her way down the length of the ward. Even the pros, the lowest of the low, who spent their whole time up to their elbows in bedpans, were grinning.

When she got to the sluice she realised why. She pulled off her cap and apron in disgust.

Suddenly those cocktails at the Savoy seemed like a lifetime ago.

THE WEEKLY WARD
visit by Mr Cooper the Chief Consultant always made Sister Wren nervous. She wasn’t worried he might find fault with the way the patients on Gynae were cared for; her ward was far too well run for that. It was more the fluttery kind of nerves, like the girls in
Peg’s Paper
felt every time they set eyes on their lover.

Yes, she loved him, even though she could only whisper it in her heart. She loved everything about him. His voice, so deep and thrilling. The way his mouth curved upwards at one corner when he smiled. His compelling blue eyes, and the sheen of his sleek black hair. His clever surgeon’s hands that held the gift of life itself. How the sight of those long, sensitive fingers mesmerised her. Sometimes she had to force herself not to stare at them, imagining them caressing her face, or unbuttoning her blouse . . .

But like the girls in
Peg’s Paper
, Sister Wren knew that her love was doomed. James Cooper was married. And even though she doubted very much if he could be happy, married as he was to a woman who dressed like a bohemian, sulked at public functions and, worst of all, was French, she also knew he was far too honourable to do anything that might sully his reputation or hers.

She gave herself a mental shake as she teased her ash-brown curls before the mirror in her sitting room. He was married, she reminded herself firmly. And no matter how much she – and he, for all she knew – might lament that state of affairs, she had to be practical.

Because Sister Wren had needs. And since those needs could never be met by the man she loved – unless a terrible accident befell Mrs Cooper – she had to find someone else.

She eyed that morning’s edition of
The Times
, which lay across the arm of her chair, folded open at the Personal columns. There, among the births, marriages and appeals for missing people to come forward to ‘hear something to their advantage’, were the Lonely Hearts advertisements.

Sister Wren went through them every morning when the maid brought her breakfast, circling any likely prospects. Then, while having her midday meal in her sitting room, she would write letters to be posted discreetly at the Porters’ Lodge that afternoon.

Rather discouragingly, most of her letters went unanswered. But every so often she would find herself taking tea with a gentleman. Unfortunately, the ones she met seldom bore any resemblance to James Cooper.

There was a soft knock on the door. ‘Enter,’ said Sister Wren, stuffing the newspaper out of sight behind a cushion. The door opened a fraction, and Ann Cuthbert, her staff nurse, peered through the crack.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Sister, but they’ve just rung to say the new admission’s on her way up.’

Sister Wren sighed with annoyance. She hated new patients arriving on the day of the consultant’s visit. They took a long time to settle in and made her ward look messy. They had to be washed and prepared, there were charts to fill in, and then usually one or other of the nosy women in the nearby beds would want to start chatting, all adding to the general disorder.

‘Thank you, Cuthbert. I’ll be with you shortly.’

As soon as the nurse had gone Sister Wren placed her cap back on her head and tied the bow under her chin, being careful not to ruffle her artfully teased curls. She added a dab of rouge to colour her sallow cheeks and smudged on some pink lipstick – even though make-up was forbidden on the wards, she couldn’t countenance meeting Mr Cooper looking anything but her best – then stepped out of her sitting room and back on to the adjoining ward, to find out which of her nurses needed the sternest reprimand.

Frustratingly, they seemed to have been hard at work in her absence. The ward was swept, dusted and scrubbed; the floors shone and a satisfying aroma of carbolic hung in the air. Even the leaves of her prize aspidistra gleamed like polished leather. The beds were neatly made and every patient was sitting propped up, hair brushed and wearing a fresh nightgown in honour of the consultant’s visit.

The student nurses all stopped what they were doing and looked at her expectantly, waiting for her nod of approval. All except one.

Doyle was chatting to one of the patients again. Sister Wren felt her hackles rise as she watched them laughing together. Hadn’t she warned her nurses not to be too familiar with the patients? Most of them were coarse East End types with rough manners and loud voices – not the kind of women decent young girls should associate with, in her opinion. It made her shudder sometimes to see them in their shabby nightgowns, yelling to each other across the ward as if they were in Petticoat Lane, not a hospital. And as for their jokes . . . no respectable woman should have to listen to some of the things they said.