A Nightingale Christmas Wish (40 page)

He straightened up. ‘Well, you’re right, it is quite bad. But I think we can get away with a collodion dressing to hold it together. Fetch the bottle, will you, Sister?’

Still bewildered by this turn of events, Helen hurried off to find it. Behind her, she was aware of Dr McKay scrubbing his hands under the running tap.

‘Shall I cleanse the wound a second time, Doctor?’ she asked. ‘It’s starting to bleed again.’

‘Yes, please, Sister. It will need to be quite dry to set the dressing.’

They worked closely together, he pinching the edges of the wound together while Helen dabbed away the blood. Then she carefully painted on the dressing.

‘That’s it. Now all we have to do is hold it together until it dries.’ Dr McKay looked up suddenly, his face only inches from Helen’s. His eyes were dark and fathomless and unexpectedly warm, and for a second their gazes held. Then, as if released from a magnet’s pull, they jerked apart.

After Dr McKay had finished dressing the wound, he ordered Helen to make ready one of the Sick Bay beds.

‘I’ll give you something for the pain, and sign you off for a couple of days,’ he told Penny. ‘That should give enough time for the swelling to go down. Although you’ll still have quite a shiner,’ he warned.

‘That’s all right, I can hide it under make-up,’ she said cheerfully. ‘No one will ever know.’ Helen and Dr McKay exchanged looks, but neither of them said anything.

‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ Penny whispered to Helen who was putting her to bed later. ‘I didn’t think he’d be so sweet about it, did you?’

‘No,’ Helen murmured back. Although she had the feeling Dr McKay was still going to take her to task once it was all over.

Sure enough, he was waiting for her in the consulting room when she returned a few minutes later.

‘You really should have called me, you know,’ he said, a note of reproach in his voice. ‘What if she’d cracked her eye socket?’

‘I know – I’m sorry.’ Now the panic was over, Helen realised how foolish she’d been. ‘As I said, I take full responsibility for it.’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘I assume you’ll be reporting me to Matron?’ she said stiffly.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Helen. Is that really what you think of me?’ He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘I meant I could have helped you, that’s all. You can trust me, you know.’

They looked at each other across the room, and something seemed to shift in the air between them.

‘I don’t suppose you’d like a medicinal brandy?’ he offered.

It was nearly midnight. The last place she should have been was drinking in the Sick Bay with a doctor. But it had been an evening of high emotion, and Helen was exhausted.

‘Yes, please,’ she said.

They sat in silence, Helen perched on the couch, Dr McKay behind the desk, sipping their brandy from china cups. But it wasn’t a tense or awkward silence. It was companionable, almost comfortable, each of them lost in their own thoughts.

‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that this might finally make her see the light where her boyfriend is concerned?’ Dr McKay said at last.

So he knew what Joe Armstrong was like, too. Helen wasn’t surprised Dr McKay had seen right through him. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘She was more worried about whether her face would be scarred for the wedding.’

‘Good God.’ David McKay shook his head. ‘Silly girl. What does she see in him, I wonder?’

‘I don’t think it’s him particularly. It could be anyone who shows her attention. She just doesn’t want to be alone.’

‘I can understand that,’ he said.

Helen regarded him in surprise. ‘I didn’t realise you were in the same position,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m not talking about myself,’ he dismissed this. ‘My father married again, shortly after my mother died, for the same reason. He was terrified at the prospect of being on his own, so he married the first woman who came along.’

‘What happened?’ Helen asked.

He sighed. ‘Unfortunately, like Nurse Willard’s fiancé, she turned out to be a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work. Led him a dog’s life, and bullied my sister and me. My father spent the rest of his life trying to please her, until she finally sent him to an early grave. It taught me a lesson, I can tell you. As far as I’m concerned, it’s far better to be lonely than with the wrong person.’

‘Then you’ve obviously never been lonely.’ Helen hadn’t meant to say it out loud, didn’t even realise she’d said the words until she looked up and caught Dr McKay watching her closely over the rim of his cup.

‘Oh, I’ve been lonely,’ he said softly. ‘I hadn’t realised just how lonely I was until someone special came into my life.’

Helen thought of the glamorous dark-haired woman waiting for him in reception, and the way he’d greeted her, and felt a strange pang. ‘I’m happy for you,’ she said quietly.

‘The wretched thing is, she’s with someone else.’

Helen looked up sharply to find him staring straight back at her. She felt a jolt, a shock of recognition. She suddenly realised that this was inevitable, that everything she had known and experienced had led her to this moment.

The realisation that, without a single shadow of a doubt, she loved him.

And he loved her, too. She could see it in the kindling warmth of his brown eyes.

‘Helen?’ He murmured her name softly. Too softly. It sounded dangerously like a caress.

She put down her cup with a clatter and jumped up. ‘I – I have to go.’

‘Helen, wait—’ But she was already gone, putting as much space as she could between herself and a situation which she knew would be her certain fate, and her undoing.

THEY LOST ANOTHER
two patients on Female Chronics during the warm August night.

‘That’s five just in the week we’ve been here,’ Effie said to Jess after they had finished performing last offices on poor Aggie Harman. It was always a sad job, and Sister Hyde insisted on its being done in absolute silence out of respect for the patient. ‘It’s almost as if they know something’s happening, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t be silly. They’re just old, that’s all,’ Jess, ever practical, said as she loaded the washing things on to the trolley. ‘Death is to be expected on a ward like this. Sister Hyde said so.’

‘You’re right, I suppose. Besides, most of them are too doolally to know what’s going on.’

‘Shhh!’ Jess glanced around guiltily. ‘Don’t let Sister hear you say that. You know she’s most particular about the way we treat the patients.’

‘“Nurses, you must go about your duties diligently and remember to smile and remain cheerful at all times,”’ Effie quoted back to her in Sister Hyde’s gravelly, upper-crust tones. They heard the same thing every morning when the ward sister was handing out the work lists. ‘She’s continually telling us to smile, but I’ve never seen her do it. She always looks boot-faced to me.’

‘I suppose it must be hard for her at the moment, knowing she’s got to send all the patients away,’ Jess said. ‘Staff was saying she’s nursed some of them for years. They must be like family to her.’

Some family, Effie thought. She couldn’t see why Sister was so worried about a bunch of dribbling, rambling women who had to sleep in cots to stop them wandering off or falling out of bed. Most of them couldn’t even ask for a bedpan, either. After a week of constantly stripping and remaking beds, scrubbing mackintoshes and soaking sheets, she’d had enough to last her a lifetime. She certainly didn’t think she would ever become attached to these patients.

The poor women on Hyde might be unaware of their own bodily functions, but even they must have sensed the cloud of gloom that had descended over the hospital. The Trustees’ plans had become more official since the government had issued an order that only acute patients should be admitted for medical care, and that they should be ready to send other patients home at a moment’s notice should it become necessary.

But it wasn’t just the patients who faced an uncertain future.

‘I don’t know how she expects us to stay cheerful when we don’t even know what’s going to happen to us,’ Effie complained, as they headed for the sluice with the trolley.

‘The latest I heard, they were evacuating us all to the country,’ Jess said.

‘How can they do that? Who’s going to look after the patients?’

‘I shouldn’t think there’ll be many patients left once they’ve finished sending everyone home. And if they do need extra help they’ll just transfer all the staff nurses from the wards that have closed, I suppose. Those that haven’t joined up,’ she added.

‘My mother is still on at me to go back to Ireland,’ Effie said. ‘She’s been reading in the papers about the prospect of thousands of people being bombed in London, and it’s scared her stiff. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about with our Bridget going off and joining the Red Cross. She’s convinced her daughters are all going to be killed if she’s not there to keep an eye on them.’

‘Do you think you’ll go?’ Jess asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Effie sighed. ‘I don’t want to. But if I don’t, I’ll probably just be sent off to some funny little corner of the country where I don’t know anyone. If I can’t stay in London I might as well be back in Killarney. At least I’ll have my family around me. But I’d much rather stay in London, if I could. Just in case—’

Just in case Adam Campbell ever tries to find me again. She didn’t want to say the words out loud, because she knew what Jess’s reaction would be. Her friend had made it very clear that she thought Effie was foolish still to be pining for him. In her opinion, Adam Campbell didn’t deserve such devotion.

But Effie longed to see him again. Ever since they had parted, she had thrown herself into self-improvement. Before she went to sleep every night, she made herself read and memorise one of the poems in her book. And whenever she had any time off, she took herself off to a museum or an art gallery. She had even foregone a night out dancing with the other girls so she could sit through another poetry reading in the hope that she might bump into Adam there.

She kept waiting to enjoy staring at paintings and old pots in glass cabinets, but so far it had all been deathly dull. But one day, she promised herself, one day she would be able to impress Adam, and her efforts would be worthwhile.

‘I’m going to ask permission to stay on here,’ she came back to the present to hear Jess saying. ‘It’s my home, after all. I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

Effie eyed her friend sympathetically as she stood at the sink, washing the bowls. The Nightingale was Jess’s only real home. She came from a rough part of the East End, a real den of thieves by all accounts. Her father was in prison and her stepmother had all but thrown Jess out on the streets. Becoming a nurse had changed her fortunes completely, so Effie could understand why she didn’t want to give it up.

‘Do you think they’ll let you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. But if they don’t, I’ll come back and volunteer as a VAD. They’re bound to be able to make some use of me, with my training,’ said Jess.

Effie gazed at her admiringly. As usual, Jess had it all worked out. She liked to think and plan, unlike Effie, who generally preferred to tackle life’s problems as they were thrown at her.

But it was time for her to start making some plans now, she decided. ‘I would like to stay and finish my training,’ she said wistfully. ‘Mammy says I can do it in Ireland, but it won’t be the same.’ For one thing, there would be no fun to be had with her mother watching her like a hawk.

Then another thought occurred to her. ‘But what if there isn’t a nurses’ home here for us to live in?’

‘I’m sure there’ll be something, even if it’s not what we’re used to,’ Jess said. ‘Or if not, they might let us live out.’

‘Live out?’ A glimmer of hope began to flicker inside Effie. ‘Oh, do you think so? Imagine if we could all get a flat together – you, me and Kowalski. Wouldn’t that be grand?’

She was already making plans, wondering how she could somehow entice Adam to her sophisticated new abode, when Jess ruined it all by saying, ‘But surely if your mother says you’ve got to go home, then you won’t have any choice? Not until you’re twenty-one.’

‘That’s true.’ Effie sighed heavily, seeing her wonderful dream of independence slipping away from her. She felt sorry for Jess, with no family to rely on. But sometimes having a loving mammy and a bunch of interfering sisters did have its drawbacks.

ON THE MORNING
of Friday 1 September Germany had invaded Poland, and everyone knew that war was inevitable.

But no one could have guessed it from the atmosphere in the Prospect of Whitby pub on Wapping Wall that night. There was a typical East End knees-up going on, and the Dawsons were in the thick of it as usual. One of the uncles thumped out a tune on the pub piano while another played the accordion. The beer flowed against a background of laughter, singing and dancing.

The merry sounds drifted out of the door towards Helen as she stood waiting for Chris.

The man she loved.

She said the words determinedly in her head, as if by repeating them often enough she could make herself believe them.

She did love Christopher, she was sure of that. But she also knew now that she wasn’t in love with him.

She hadn’t even realised there was a difference until that fateful night in the Sick Bay with Dr McKay. But that jolt of recognition when she’d looked at him, as if she had finally found the other half of herself, had made her all too painfully aware that there was.

It had also made her determined to stay away from him at all costs. Because the idea of being so consumed with love, of needing someone so badly, terrified Helen. She had been through that with Charlie, and losing him had nearly killed her. She couldn’t risk her heart twice over.

And besides, she couldn’t let Christopher down. He loved her and he wanted to marry her, and she had made a promise to him that she couldn’t break. And she loved him, too, enough to know that they would make each other happy. Or as happy as she needed to be.

The night air was still and stiflingly warm. It was the hottest summer anyone had known, so the newspapers said. But there were no more stars to be seen, only endless grey barrage balloons floating silently in the sky above them. How quickly she’d got used to seeing them there! She hardly seemed to notice them these days.