Call Nurse Jenny (26 page)

‘If you go into your father’s practice I shall end up in Bristol,’ she argued obstinately and saw his lips tighten a fraction. ‘There’s my mother to think of. I can’t leave her all on her own.’

She could have suggested he find some other practice around here, but some quiet little voice said it would be tempting fate – he might agree and she would then have no option but to say yes to his expectations of their marrying.

He had fallen quiet, had sat away from her, his brow furrowed. She too had sat silent over her mild ale and the evening during which they would normally have chattered away like a couple of monkeys had become long and tense until it was she who said she ought to be going to catch the last bus home. He had nodded, got up, got her coat for her and helped her on with it and had said, ‘See you tomorrow then. I’ll see you to the bus stop.’

This week, during another quick drink in the pub opposite the hospital, the row that had been simmering, exploded. Quietly, but it exploded just the same.

‘I’ve had enough of this, Jenny.’ Ronald’s voice was harsher than she had ever heard it. ‘What the hell do I have to do to show you how much I love you?’

She had to say it now. ‘I don’t want to go to live in Bristol all that way away.’

‘I can’t go without you.’

And now she must add: ‘Then can’t you try for a practice somewhere local, around here?’ There, she had said it, had burned her last bridge.

Ronald looked at her, his brows meeting in anger at her selfishness. ‘You want me to scratch around here looking for some half-baked practice that’ll take me years to get anywhere with when I’ve an already made place with my father? You must be mad, Jenny. Don’t you want to see me get on?’

‘Of course I do.’ She felt lame.

‘Don’t you love me?’

‘Yes, Ronald.’ She wished he wouldn’t keep pushing that question.

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like it to me.’

A group of American servicemen with smooth smart uniforms and girls on their arms, bustling past, filling the pub with their loud easy twang and high spirits, put paid to the couple’s quiet argument. Ronald threw them a frown, and repeated his statement a little more audibly. ‘It doesn’t sound like it to me.’

‘Because I don’t want to go traipsing all the way to Bristol, leaving my mother? What is this, Ronald – a demand for self-sacrifice?’

‘In a way, yes.’

‘But you’re not prepared to sacrifice yourself when it comes to you.’

‘Look, I shall be the breadwinner. I’ve got to consider what’s best for our future. Can’t you see that? If you really loved me, Jenny, it wouldn’t seem to you like self-sacrifice – as you call it.’

There came screams of laughter from the GIs’ girls. Jenny felt tears come into her eyes. ‘If that’s what you think of me, Ronald, the little lamb ready to follow its shepherd up hill and down dale, I’ve got a career too. I’ve studied hard, and I’ve still got a lot of studying to do, and I want to get somewhere, not just be a GP’s wife, sitting at home, joining nice little ladies’ clubs and doing your book work. Eventually I’d have liked to go into the QAs.’

This was the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve. She hadn’t really thought about going into the QAs before, but she thought of it now, more out of anger than ambition.

Ronald was staring at her. The ruckus from the GIs and their girls was getting worse, but they had good money to spend and the landlord would suffer them. The look on Ronald’s face tore at Jenny’s whole being.

‘I had no idea that was all you cared for me, Jenny. You’d sooner join up than marry me.’

‘No, darling, that’s not what I meant. I want to marry you.’ Now, suddenly, she did, seeing herself throwing away the chance of a lifetime. Did she really think she wanted to go on nursing for the rest of her life, to go off and be a Queen Alexandra’s nurse, to take orders when she could live in comfort with a man who loved her? ‘Ronald, I really do love you.’

He sat looking at her for a long while, as she watched him, visualising what was going on in his mind, her protestations fallen short. Then he stood up, and got her coat, as always helping her on with it, for he was a caring man even when hurt and angry. Wordlessly, she let him guide her from the now noisy pub. Outside, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘Perhaps I have been rushing things,’ he said in the quiet night, the sounds from inside muffled by the closure of the pub door. ‘What I wanted to tell you, darling, is that I got my results today. I’ve passed.’

She leaned back from his embrace. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I don’t know. I was going to, but somehow we ended up discussing something else instead.’ He wouldn’t say row. Easier to call it discussing. But he wasn’t finished yet.

‘Jenny, darling, I know now that you’re not yet ready to commit yourself – not to me or to anyone. But I love you. And I think, deep down, you love me, but there’s something in the way. Maybe it’s your mother. But you must break away from the hole you’re stuck in. So I think it best I let you consider things before you make up your mind what you want to do. In a week or two I’ll be leaving to go home to start up in my father’s practice. I’ll write to you and if you do change your mind about coming to Bristol, I’ll be waiting. I’ll keep on loving you, Jenny. I won’t give up hope. I just want you to think about everything and what we are throwing away.’

Tears were streaming down Jenny’s cheeks. Now was the time to burst out that she did love him, that she wanted to go with him. But she didn’t. For the most futile of reasons. And the moment vanished.

A bleak spring had followed a bleak new year, that first elation at the United States coming into the war dissipating; everywhere Jenny saw set faces that spoke of grim determination to believe things must only get better.

In the Middle East, Rommel, seemingly invincible, had struck back and recaptured Benghazi. At sea the German battleships
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
slipped their hide-out at Brest under the very noses of the British Navy and in attempting to sink them the RAF lost forty planes. Ceylon was raided by the Japanese, the British Eastern Fleet withdrew to Kenya; Britain had abandoned the Far East.

The London Hospital’s outpatient department seemed to be full of women showing the strain of trying not to dwell on loved ones away. Women with drawn faces, complaining of backache, neuralgia, stomach pains, stiff necks, strange agitation, trembling hands, ‘I c’n ’ardly keep meself still in the mornin’, doctor’; ‘I’m fair sick of this bloody back of mine’; ‘I’ve got these legs, doctor, wot keeps on swellin’’; and usually as he examined whatever complaint presented itself, came the inevitable self-diagnosis: ‘Wiv’art me ole man at ’ome I feel lorst.’

Jenny, helping in outpatients, knew how they felt thinking of those absent faces. Too often she thought of one absent face in particular. Since the fall of Rangoon in Burma, Susan Ward said she’d not had any letters from her husband and the Wards were growing anxious. Lots of wives and mothers were going through that strain, added to which was the constant worry of eking out the rations for those still at home. Shoppers needed to be ever more watchful for opportunities to present themselves in the food line.

It wasn’t unusual to see whole streets come to life with hurrying women. Coats, aprons, scarves billowing like schooners in full sail as they converged on some butcher’s shop from which whispers had emanated: ‘’E’s got offal!’ Jenny’s mother and even the proud Mrs Ward joined in the hasty advance. Jenny would pass a growing queue of women now waiting patiently and not leaving until every last scap of off-ration meat had gone. Nothing stopped the unending search for something nutritious to fill a plate: horse meat, goat, stringy fishy-tasting whale meat being tried out.

‘I got a little bit of goat meat,’ Jenny’s mum told her on one occasion – succulent, tender meat it was too, except, unused to such rich fare, they were both sick. Jenny stayed off duty all next day much to the displeasure of the ward sister. Otherwise, things went on as normal, the tip-and-run daylight raids on country towns like York and Bath and Exeter (Jenny thought of Jean Summerfield whose family had left London to escape all that) virtually ignored by Londoners, who had suffered the Blitz.

The evening she came home from the hospital, still a little queasy from the enjoyable meal of goat meat, she met Susan wandering along by herself, her coat tight about her stomach. The early March evening was still light, summer time’s extra hour still prevailing. Susan looked wan, and hardly smiled as she saw Jenny coming towards her from the bus stop.

‘Have you heard from Matthew yet?’ was the first question out of her mouth. Susan shook her head.

‘Nothing yet. I hope he’s all right.’

‘He’s bound to be. Otherwise they’d have said. You’d have heard.’

‘It’s been nearly three weeks. I’ve not been out of the house in ages. I’m so fed up. I’d like to go to the pictures or something, but his parents don’t go. I can’t go on my own, so I’m stuck.’

Jenny found herself amazed at how easily the girl had slipped from concern at not hearing anything from Matthew to talking at far greater length of her own boredom. She would have thought the former worry would oust everything else from her mind.

‘If you like,’ she offered, giving Susan the benefit of any doubts, ‘we could go to the pictures together. I’m off next weekend.
Casablanca
is on at the Regent in Mare Street. There are bound to be long queues, but we could go early on Saturday afternoon, if you can stand lining up.’

Susan’s face was a picture of eagerness. ‘Oh, that’s ever so nice of you. I’d love to do that, I really would.’

‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’

In her bedroom Susan stared into the mirror at the hardly noticeable lump. It would get larger and larger and she’d never be able to escape. Going to the Regent with Jenny Ross looked like being her last trip out, with Mrs Ward getting ever more attentive.

Just over four months pregnant, and being slightly built, even that tiniest bulge made her look dreadful. There was no one to reassure her that she still looked beautiful, no one to lay a loving hand on her stomach or to gaze on her with pride in her and himself at what they had achieved, no one to tell her she was a clever girl and that he adored her. When this baby was born there’d be no one there to hold it and gaze down on it in wonder. Only God could say when Matthew would return home. As yet she’d not heard a thing from him since that last letter at the end of February. It was March now. Early March, it was true, but waiting made it seem longer. She trembled for him, dared not think of his never coming back. Whatever would she do without him? The thought made her feel sick.

Hastily, she turned from the mirror, trying to push such dreadful thoughts from her, and feverishly got dressed. They’d get his letter soon. Military mail from that part of the world was a bugger, the time it took.

A ring on the front doorbell swept away all her dismal anxiety. Maybe it was the postman. Hurrying from her room she leaned over the banister in time to see her father-in-law closing the door. Aware of her standing there, he looked up, his eyes wide as though with guilt, but she knew it was fear for she had seen the telegram he held. Even from here the blurred bold black letters ohms leapt out at her, searing through her brain, sending her rushing headlong down the stairs. ‘Matthew! It’s about Matthew.’

Leonard caught her as she reached him, took her arm and guided her into the lounge through which the early March sunlight was slanting.

‘Lilian,’ he called as he sat Susan down in one of the armchairs; she felt struck dumb with growing terror. ‘Lilian, come here, dear. It’s important.’

As Mrs Ward came hurrying in, Susan found her voice. ‘It’s Matthew! Oh, God, it’s Matthew!’

Neither took any notice of her or seemed to hear her as Leonard tore open the envelope, extracting the buff paper to read. He looked up bleakly.

‘It says Matthew’s missing.’

‘No!’ Susan’s voice rose to a scream. She leapt up, tore the telegram from his hands, but the words blurred, her brain seemed to be exploding and the scream that came from her lips seemed not to be her own, a hollow screaming that went on and on: ‘He’s dead … Matthew’s dead …’

The telegram fell from her fingers and she felt herself taken on a blind, headlong rush from the room, though where she was going she had no idea; she found herself clinging on to the newel post of the stairs, unable to let go of it. And still the hollow, terrible screaming continued, consuming her.

What happened next was a vague blur of being picked up, of being carried, of being laid down, then shaken until her head felt it would fall off her shoulders. That irrational fear was what brought her to her senses and she found herself looking into the stern face of her mother-in-law.

‘Get a hold of yourself, Susan. You must remember the baby – his baby.’

Damn the baby! Tears squeezed between her eyelids as she screwed them tight. ‘Matthew’s dead …’

The hands holding hers were like stiff, dry claws giving no comfort at all. ‘He’s not dead, Susan. It says he’s missing. They will trace him soon. We must cling to that hope. You must cling to it. For his sake. For the sake of his baby.’

‘That’s all you care about,’ she burst out in her grief.
‘His
baby – a baby to take
his
place. You don’t care about me at all, how I feel.’

‘We do, Susan.’ They didn’t, but she had no strength left to argue.

‘The pain’s still there in my stomach,’ she complained from her bed. She’d been in bed for two days, ever since the dull ache had started. Now she saw Mrs Ward’s expression of sympathetic concern change to one of apprehension.

‘The doctor said it isn’t what we thought it might be, but that you are upset and probably strained yourself when you lost control of yourself, and that we must just keep an eye on you. But doctors can be wrong and I really think we ought to get you to a hospital if this doesn’t improve.’

‘No!’ Susan’s voice rose in terror. She had a naked fear of hospitals; it dated from when she had been a child and had had her tonsils out. It had been an awful experience. The smell of the place, a mixture of antiseptic and ether, its green and cream tiled walls and age-yellowed ceilings, all pressed in on her, and the hush of the ward as night had come down emphasised the feeling of being alone away from her parents, shut away from the cosy world outside as though it was a different place – as hell might be, or death. She’d cried for her mother and a stern-faced nurse had told her to be quiet. Taken on a hard, rumbling trolley along corridors and into a stark white room with horrid glittering steel instruments hanging from the ceilings, an evil-smelling rubber mask had been put over her face until her mind seemed to swirl away into a roaring blackness. The next day her throat had hurt terribly and she wasn’t allowed to eat and when she cried another nurse had told her off. And all the time that peculiar rustling hush and muted voices and that horrible disinfectant smell. She’d never been near a hospital since, unable even to bring herself to visit anyone in there. The mere thought of going into one brought back the memories of its smell. It must have done something to her because to this day her whole body would cringe from anything savouring of it, from those with a hacking cough to someone with a cut finger. Even an unsightly scar could make her body tingle with revulsion. How Jenny Ross or anyone could bring herself to be a nurse was beyond her.