Liz laughed and sketched Adam a salute. ‘Very well, Dr Zharkov. Let us rendezvous later.’
She meant at Aldo Rossi’s café. Conveniently near the hospital and the University, it was a favourite meeting place for students. Liz had discovered that Eddie knew it well. She teased him when he started appearing there on Saturday afternoons.
‘How kind of you to come and escort me home after my shift, brother dear.’
In fact, it had proved to be an ideal place for him and Helen to meet after she finished her work on a Saturday, well away from the danger of either set of parents bumping into them. The café was particularly popular with medical students and nurses: patients too, sometimes. A week ago Liz and another girl, searching for a female post-operative patient, had found her in there. It wasn’t the first time such an incident had occurred.
Less than a fortnight after having her appendix out, the woman had quietly put her dressing gown over her nightie, walked down the stairs from the surgical ward, along the corridor and out of the door, shuffling up the road in her slippers. The girls caught her red-handed, happily tucking into a cheese beano and declaring defiantly that she’d had enough baked cod - ‘that doesnae taste o’ anything at all’ - to last her a lifetime.
Mr Rossi maintained that he would have escorted the lady back down the road in due course, but only after she had finished her meal. Liz put her hands on her hips.
‘Mr Rossi, really! She’s supposed to be on a special diet.’
He shrugged. ‘But Elisabetta, can I help it if the poor woman was starving to death? How come you not feed your patients in that place?’ He struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘How come a
bella ragazza
like you is so cruel to poor sick people?’
She tried to look severe, but she was as susceptible to the charm as anyone else. It was completely indiscriminate. Any woman from nine to ninety was a
bella ragazza
- a beautiful girl. Any woman with a pulse, Cordelia Maclntyre said.
Liz took the continental courtesy and accepted it for what it was - a novelty, at any rate. As a rule, the male population of Clydebank didn’t go around paying extravagant compliments to their female counterparts. Most of them, thought Liz wryly, wouldn’t know a compliment if it came up and hit them in the face.
How she felt about Aldo Rossi’s son was a different matter entirely. As she got to know him better, she could see there was a lot more to him than good looks and a winning smile. And she liked him. She liked him a lot.
She admired the way he chose to see humour in almost every situation. She was touched by how protective he was towards his father. That was nice to watch.
He
was nice to watch, moving efficiently about the café, cheerfully serving meals and snacks and coffees.
He was unfailingly charming to Liz. Whether that charm was as indiscriminate as his father’s was another question. No new girlfriend had appeared. Liz didn’t flatter herself that he was waiting for her to change her mind, but she wondered, all the same. Sometimes there was an odd little look or a sideways smile or an enquiring tilt of the head. Was she imagining what the question might be?
She had to keep reminding herself that he was as out of bounds as he’d ever been. Although she also wondered how long she could go on believing that.
“The thing is,’ Adam was saying, ‘people go down the road there expecting to be cured of whatever ails them.’ He waved an elegant hand in the direction of the Infirmary. ‘But when it comes down to it, what an awful lot of people actually need is a prescription for fresh air, good food and better housing.’
Liz listened attentively. Sometimes the café was better than a lecture theatre. She had learned a lot from these sorts of conversations. Very occasionally, it got embarrassing, like when she and Cordelia had come in to find a discussion going on about the mechanics of menstruation. It had taken the boys a good five minutes to realize they were there. There had been a lot of coughing and shifting of position and red faces when they did.
‘What we need is an improvement in living conditions all round,’ said Jim Barclay, another of the medical students.
‘And better-equipped hospitals,’ chipped in Mario. Finance was a perennial problem. The voluntary hospital system, dependent on donations, wasn’t an ideal one. Discussion often centred on the pressing need to create some sort of national health care provision - for rich and poor alike.
‘But Adam,’ Cordelia broke in, ‘you say that the doctor’s bag of tricks isn’t very large, but what about this new wonder drug that we hear about? Surely that will make a huge difference in the treatment of infection?’
‘Penicillin will save lives,’ said Jim Barclay solemnly. ‘No question about it’
‘When we finally get it,’ said Adam in disgust. ‘The problem is that Professor Fleming hasn’t been given the research resources he should have had. It’s damnable. He made the breakthrough discovery in nineteen-twenty-eight.
Nineteen-twenty-eight
,’ he repeated, ‘and we’re still waiting.’
‘At least we’ve seen the development of sulphonamides in the last year,’ put in Jim. “They’re proving effective against some infections.’
‘That’s true,’ conceded Adam thoughtfully.
‘Sulphonamides?’ asked Cordelia.
‘I think they’re also called M and Bs,’ Liz told her. ‘They come in tablet form. Who developed them?’ she asked.
‘Various people,’ said Jim Barclay. ‘I believe it was a German chemist who did a lot of the pioneering work.’
‘You mean not everything coming out of Germany is bad?’ It was Cordelia who had spoken. Liz looked at her in surprise. Her voice had been more than dry: almost bitter. She saw a look pass between the Honourable Miss Maclntyre and Adam and wondered briefly what that was all about.
Twenty minutes later, on her feet and ready to depart, Liz was watching her friends with an indulgent eye. It was like Adam had said. People couldn’t seem to simply say goodbye and go. As soon as they thought about taking their leave of each other, they seemed to find several fascinating new topics of conversation.
Standing waiting for the log jam at the door to clear, she glanced up at the photograph of Mrs Rossi.
‘She was my mother,’ came a voice.
Embarrassed, Liz turned and smiled shyly at him. He stretched up for the picture and handed it down to her. ‘There. Now you can see her properly.’
Touched that he had taken the trouble, Liz studied the photograph. ‘She was fair-haired?’
‘Yes. I get my colouring from my father. Most of my looks, in fact. I don’t think I look at all like her.’
‘Och, I don’t know,’ Liz said, examining the face in the photograph and then glancing up at him. ‘There’s something about the mouth that you’ve got too.’
‘D’you really think so?’ He came to stand behind her, looking down at the picture.
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Is this how you remember her?’
‘Yes, except that she looks a bit serious. I remember her as being funny, always laughing and telling Carlo and me stories. She never made a difference between him and me. And she didn’t have her troubles to seek, as they say, but she always chose to see the funny side of life.’
‘Like her son,’ said Liz softly, tilting her head back and looking at him over her shoulder. She seemed to be staring straight at his mouth. She hadn’t realized how close together they were standing.
His voice was as soft as her own. ‘And here was me thinking you didn’t appreciate any of my good qualities.’
Their eyes met and locked.
‘Liz...’
She thrust the picture into his hands.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said breathlessly, and headed for the door.
The University and the Infirmary couldn’t have been more convenient for each other. There was an internal gate between the grounds of the two institutions and a path which led from the Uni up on Gilmorehill down to the hospital.
The gate was a handy short cut for the medical students. Some of the senior professors, doctors and nursing staff thought it was a bit too handy, especially for the nurses’ home, situated with the Preliminary Training School on the University Avenue side of the Infirmary.
However much their elders disapproved, remembering perhaps the hot blood of their own youth, human nature was human nature. Liz smiled as she listened to the story of an escapade which had occurred earlier in the week. After an illicit late-night date with her boyfriend, one of the probationers had got back into the nurses’ home by climbing through a window she’d asked her friends to leave open for her.
So far, so good. However, the window was in a small scullery at the back of the building, above a deep sink used for soaking clothes. The friends of the pupil nurse had thought it a brilliant idea to fill it full of cold water...
‘I’d have killed them,’ said Cordelia solemnly.
‘She very nearly did,’ said Naomi Richardson, the student nurse who was relating the story to a mixed group of probationers and volunteer nurses sitting around a table in the nurses’ dining room. As individuals got to know each other, the barriers between the two factions were gradually breaking down. ‘They tried to convince her they were only trying to cool her down after her date, but she’s still gunning for them apparently!’
‘Well, I suppose they might have had a point,’ said one of the volunteers. ‘I imagine a girl would need some cooling off after a date with certain people. Like Mario Rossi, for example. Don’t you think so, MacMillan?’
Somebody giggled. The rest of them were grinning at her like idiots.
‘I’m afraid I’m not in any position to comment,’ said Liz loftily. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting back to the sewing room?’
‘Tell it to the marines, MacMillan,’ said Naomi drily.
Four of the volunteers had been dispatched to the sewing room that morning to make up what seemed to Liz like several hundred yards of blackout material into curtains and screens. The Infirmary had a lot of windows.
A depressing task in itself, the stiffness of the cloth they were sewing made it a tiresome one too. Having spent all morning doing it, it was only half an hour after lunch when everyone began complaining that their fingers were aching again - just as Sister MacLean arrived to see how they were getting on.
The permanent seamstresses weren’t in on a Saturday, and the four sewing machines in the room were sitting idle. The volunteers had been told at the start of their stint that they weren’t to touch them. That didn’t make any sense to Liz.
‘Why can’t we do this on the sewing machines? Isn’t it a waste of effort doing it by hand?’
‘It keeps you well out of our way, MacMillan,’ came the lilting, if unforgiving, reply, ‘so that we can get on with the business of looking after the patients. Added to which, I don’t want any complaints on Monday morning from the sewing room staff that they’ve had amateurs playing with their machines. You might break something.’
There was silence for a minute or two after Sister MacLean left. Then, with a groan, one of the girls threw her needle and thread down in disgust.
‘My fingers are like pin cushions! Hey, MacMillan, see when you storm the barricades, can I come with you?’
There were murmurs of assent. Cordelia Maclntyre’s voice rang out.
‘You can count me in too. This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever had to do in my entire life. Especially with four perfectly serviceable sewing machines sitting there.’
Liz gave her a polite smile. She was still thinking about the teasing comments the other girls had made about Mario and her, and she remembered what Eddie had said when she had first told him she knew how he felt about Helen.
Is it that obvious?
Twenty-one
Eddie was devastated, so upset their grandfather didn’t have the heart to say
I told you so
. It was the beginning of the last week in August and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact had just been announced. Hitler and Stalin, arch enemies ideologically and in every other way, had agreed not to go to war with each other.