Nurse in Waiting (5 page)

She poised her pen once more over the paper.

“Dear Dale,

“This is just to let you know that I arrived safely.
I will tell you all about everything in a day or
two. I am just going to bed! Good night.

Affectionately,

Joanna.”

She had never written so briefly to Dale before
!

CHAPTER
T
HREE

It
was barely
light when she awoke next day to wonder what Carrieghmere’s early-morning routine was. In a similar house in England she would expect to be called by the housemaid with early morning tea and to have her bath run in readiness for her. But here no one had suggested overnight that this would be so, and somehow she hardly expected that Shuan, who would be taking Roger Carnehill’s tea, would be gracious enough to perform the same office for her!

She had just decided that she would get up when there was a knock at the door, and a girl in a pink print dress, over which she wore a green cardigan and an apron of doubtful whiteness, came in.

Roseen, yesterday’s absent housemaid, decided Joanna, as the tea-tray was brought to her bedside.

She smiled as she sat up. “Thank you. I didn’t expect this. I wonder if you would draw the curtains before you go?”

But Roseen was staring at her, apparently entranced. When she moved over to the window she did so by backing away from the bed, still gazing dumbly at Joanna.

At last she said in a rich Connemara brogue: “I said to Cook, ‘Give me a cup of tea now, for Mr. Roger’s new nurse that’ll be lying in her bed, looking to be waited on hand and foot as the English do.’ But I wasn’t expecting to see anyone of the likes of you! ‘Tis middle-aged and crabby I thought you’d be. And you with the fair looks of one of them fil
u
m stars—what’s this her name is now?—the way she’s always wearing her golden hair over her shoulders, just like yours!”

Amused and slightly embarrassed by this outburst, Joanna shook back her hair and looked up at the girl with a twinkle in her eye.

“You’re Roseen, aren’t you? You wouldn’t have been kissing your famous blarney stone, by any chance?”

Roseen took the accusation without humor. “I have not, so!” she declared indignantly. “ ‘Twas surprise alone that took my manner away from me for the moment.” She put her head on one side as she continued to eye Joanna speculatively. “How it is now, that you’d be let to come out nursing on your own, when you wouldn’t be much more than the age of meself?”

“I’m ‘let’ because I’m fully trained, I suppose,” smiled Joanna. “And I dare say I’m sever
al
years older than you are, really.”

“I’m twenty,” said Roseen gloomily. “ ‘Tis my deep ambition to be a nurse, but I’m not let to go to England alone.”

“What about Dublin?” put in Joanna.

“Nor to Dublin, till the day I’ll be twenty-one. My
mother says
—
But you’ll be wanting your tea
,
Miss! I’ll leave you now
—”

She began to back towards the door, but Joanna stopped her to ask:

“What about Mr. Roger’s tea? Has Miss Shuan taken it to him yet?”

Roseen looked faintly astonished. “Mr. Roger’s tea, is it? Miss Shuan won’t be at that for an hour or more!”

Joanna glanced at her travelling clock. “But I understood Mr. Roger to say that she took it to him at about seven?”

“Arrah, no. ‘Tis nearer eight and oftener nine when Miss Shuan does be getting it for him! What for would he be wanting it earlier, and him lying there all day, the way time would be nothing to him at all?”

This was an argument into which Joanna was not prepared to enter. So she said briefly: “All right, Roseen. Perhaps I’ll take it to him myself. I’m getting up straight away as soon as I’ve drunk my tea.”

The girl went out, and Joanna leaned over to pour a well-stewed brew into a cup of equally exquisite fineness as the
china from which she had lunched and dined yesterday. What a very odd household this was, to be sure, she thought as she swallowed the black liquid with a grimace at its bitterness.

Then she bathed and dressed and twisted her ‘filum-star’ hair into its familiar neat knot beneath the cap of her uniform. She was thinking as she did so that even if time was indeed “nothing” to her patient, at least it was her duty to show his doctor that it meant something to her! How could she be expected to have Roger ready for a morning call when he might not have had his morning tea until nine!

She went briskly down to the kitchen to find that she was expected to use for her patient the contents of a large earthenware teapot standing on the hearth before the peat fire.

“I think,” said Joanna with the firm gentleness with which she usually got her way, “that it would be better if we made some fresh tea.”

At this the fat woman known as Cook looked truculent, and Roseen ventured:

“Mr. Roger likes his tea strong.”

“Maybe. But I’d still like him to have it newly made. Do you mind
—
?”

The cool confidence in her voice sent Cook, muttering slightly, to fill another kettle while Roseen prepared a tray. When it was ready she took it to Roger Carnehill’s room, to find that he was already awake.

He was staring straight ahead as if deep in thought, and as she entered he turned abstracted eyes upon her.

“Good morning,” said Joanna.

“Good morning.” He frowned slightly. “Where’s Shuan?” he demanded.

“I don’t think she is up yet.” Joanna’s voice was equable as she set down the tray. “So, as you said you usually waked at seven or so, I brought your tea myself.”

He regarded her with the rather inscrutable amusement to which she told herself she must get used. It was evidently one of his mannerisms.

“Yesterday,” he remarked dispassionately, “you were ready to accuse me of deliberately creating difficulties between you and Shuan. Aren’t you beginning to wield a very pretty new broom in the child’s face yourself? She’s awfully jealous of her ‘privileges’. And she regards the bringing of my tea as one of the most important of them.”

“I guessed that,” returned Joanna patiently. “And Mrs. Carnehill thought she would like to go on doing it. But they tell me in the kitchen that often you don’t get it until between eight and nine
—”

“Well, what of it? One day you’ll learn that our country’s whole philosophy turns upon the phrase ‘Arrah, sure there’s time enough’ And there usually is, you know.”

“Not,” retorted Joanna crisply, “on a morning when I am expecting my first visit from your
doctor
—
Do you mind ?” Again it was the cool

assurance that she would be obeyed which constrained Roger to take from her the preferred teacup.

He gulped its contents and looked up with a grimace. “What have they made this from? Last night’s washing-up water?”

“I had it freshly made. I thought you would prefer it.”

“But we
like
our tea with a bit of body to it! You’re not going to anglicize that! Take it away.

I can’t drink it.”

He set down the cup petulantly. After a second’s hesitation Joanna, her fair skin flushed with annoyance at his rudeness, picked up the tray and moved towards the door. But before she reached it a voice from the bed said:

“I’m sorry. You couldn’t know. I’ll have a stab at it if you like.” He was thinking as she turned about, smiling now, that he had been wrong when he had decided that in uniform she would look utterly inhuman. All that stiff,
immaculate
whiteness, which you would expect to drain color from anyone so fair, seemed to serve this girl by its very severity and simplicity. And fractiousness had been worth it, to bring that sort of morning flush to her cheeks!

She was saying: “It doesn’t matter. I’ll see that it’s as you like it another morning.” But he beckoned rather imperiously towards the tray, and so she brought it back to him.

She had left his room and was crossing the hall when the baize door leading to the kitchen regions was flung open as three lumbering golden bodies jostled each other for place. They were followed by Shuan, who held their leashes gathered into one hand, while she held her dressing gown from her feet with the other.

Her lovely eyes were bright with the hurt indignation of a child as, at sight of
J
oanna, she accused:

“You’ve taken Roger’s tea! I
always
do it! And Mums told you that she wanted me to go on. I know she did, because I asked her after you’d gone to bed. You haven’t any right to interfere like this!”

Rather pointedly—perhaps even a little cruelly, she thought afterwards
—Joanna
glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“
I
asked Mrs. Carnehill whether you would like to go on as before. But Dr. Beltane is coming this morning, and it is getting late
—”

“Late! As though Beltie cares, so long as he can get asked to lunch! Why, it isn’t half-past eight! And Roger hates being dragged out of sleep just for
tea
!”

“He was already awake,” Joanna pointed out dryly. Then she went on more gently: “But does it really matter who takes his tea? He is still drinking it. Why don’t you take the dogs in and talk to him as you usually do, until I am ready to give him his blanket bath?”

Shuan stared, hostility mixed with incredulity in her eyes. “You don’t really want the dogs in Roger’s room. He said you didn’t.”

“It’s a matter of entire indifference to me, until I’ve had the doctor’s orders to the contrary.” Joanna felt suddenly that, given a little more provocation, she might smack Shuan—quite pleasurably.

“Well, you won’t get those. Beltie doesn’t care what we do so long as we keep Roger happy.” And Shuan swept on across the hall towards Roger’s room, the dogs dragging tautly on the leash and her head held very high in an absurdly childish attempt at dignity.

As Joanna went about her work her feeling alternated between extreme irritation and an odd sympathy for Shuan. She felt irritated when she remembered that Mrs. Carnehill had told her she was eighteen, so that was fully old enough to control her manners, and she felt sympathetic when, from her own superior heights of twenty-five, she looked back and realized how pitifully easy it was to be hurt—at eighteen!

She began to wonder, too, what sort of an ally this ‘Beltie’—Dr. Beltane—would prove to be. On the telephone she had liked the sound of his voice, but Shuan seemed to set such store by his authority that she had already begun to feel prejudiced against him.

At breakfast Mrs. Carnehill announced that she must go to Dublin, but that ‘Beltie’ was to be duly invited to lunch if he wanted to stay.

“He’ll want to,” interposed Shuan.

“Yes. He usually does,” relied Mrs. Carnehill placidly. “Though I’ve never known, really, how he has the time—”

“What time may I expect him?” asked Joanna.

“Oh, say about eleven. Maybe later. Shuan dear, Justin is coming to dinner tonight—did I tell you? I forgot I was going to Dublin, but I dare say I shall be back.”

“Is
René
coming too?” inquired Shuan.

“Well, I didn’t ask him particularly, but if he does, be nice to him, there’s a good girl.” Mrs. Carnehill toned to Joanna. “You’ve met Justin McKiley;
René
Menden is a young Belgian who is studying
farming
on the estate,” she explained. “He is living with Mr. McKiley at the Dower House
—”

“
—When he isn’t living here” put in Shuan pertly.

“Shuan, that’s not fair! He very rarely comes here
unless he is asked. And his manners are charm
ing.”

“He
goggles
so! He clicks his heels when he bows, and he wanted to kiss my hand!” objected Shuan.

“Well, you can hardly measure his behaviour alongside that of the corner-boys of Tulleen!” was Mrs. Ca
rn
ehill’s dry comment. “He is a stranger to our country, and it’s for us to try to understand that his ways are different. But you’re not very tolerant, are you, alannah?” she added more indulgently as she saw from the girl’s face that the rebuke had been taken.

It was a little later,
when
she was searching
—
rather hopelessly
—
through the papers on her desk for some details of Roger’s hospital treatment required by Joanna that Mrs. Carnehill said reflectively:

“
D
’you know, I think young Menden believes he is in love with Shuan.”

“In love?” echoed Joanna. “But
—
she’s only a child!”

Mrs. Carnehill looked over her shoulder to give her gentle smile. “She is eighteen. And wasn’t I married myself within a year of the selfsame age!”

“She doesn’t love him?” Joanna put the question while she tried to assimilate this new idea about
Shuan. Certainly she found it difficult to associate with her any emotion as mature as
—
love!

“No. I’m sure not. And I don’t think it has occurred to her that his ‘goggling,’ as she calls it, is part of his complaint. I can only hope that she won’t hurt him too much, unwittingly.”

Joanna said carefully: “She is very devoted to Mr. Carnehill, isn’t she?”

“Why, yes. And I’ve been so grateful for it. For the brother
—
and
—
sister relationship between them that made it possible, I mean. Until you came, I don’t know what I’d have done without her. Now you are here. I’m glad she can be relieved of some of the duties which I should have expected her to tire of, long since. But now she ought to get out and about more. I confess I’d like to see her considering the possibilities of
René
as a companio
n—”

“She doesn’t seem anxious for freedom. She is very single-minded,” murmured Joanna.

“Single-minded—in her devotion to Roger, you mean? Yes, I know.” Mrs. Carnehill smiled a little sadly. “Why—she sometimes finds it necessary to protect him even from me!”

“From you? I don’t understand?”

“Well—you’ve heard for yourself how Roger feels about—about all this?” She waved an expressive hand over the littered desk. “And sometimes Shuan takes sides with him against me. As if she didn’t understand—even if he can’t be expected to!”

Her bright eyes clouded as they had done yesterday and Joanna, herself ‘unders
tan
ding’ very little of the cause of the conflict between her patient and his mother, thought it best to make no direct comment. Instead she held out her hand to take the medical notes which her employer had just unearthed, as she said gently:

“Shuan is very young. And as intolerant as youth itself. Perhaps one ought to remember that
—al
l the while!”

Mrs. Carnehill smiled. “You talk as if your own youth weren’t still in a cloud about
you, my dear!”
she chided. “And you at the very age to be my own daughter, if I had one!”

Then, tacitly, the subject was dismissed. From then on, until Mrs. Carnehill’s final departure by car for Tulleen station, the preparations for the journey took on a kind of crescendo of flurry, shared by every active member of the household, including Joanna.

As the car disappeared down the weedy drive Shuan turned away, saying ungraciously: “I’m going to exercise the dogs.”

Joanna watched her go, thinking that she must take her own advice by being as tolerant as possible of the girl’s gaucherie. She remembered Shuan’s passionate exclamation of last night. What was it, Joanna wondered, that she did not ‘understand’?

At about noon Dr. Beltane arrived. He drove a battered-looking car up the drive and walked without ceremony into the house and into his patient’s room.

Joanna’s first impression of him was one of
r
oundness
—
a sort of Picwickian ro
u
ndness of face and body and legs. His bedside manner was of a hearty variety,
and she thought that Roger Carnehill did not respond very graciously to it. But she herself liked him and felt reassured that she would be able to work under his authority.

He examined and questioned Roger and said at last:

“Well, I saw your surgeon the other day, and we shall be trying the light treatment again soon.”

“That means Dublin again, I suppose?” asked Roger wearily. “It didn’t do any good last time.”

“Well, last time isn’t this time,” retorted Dr. Beltane rather obviously. “Why approach it in that spirit? You try a bit of co-operation for a change,
Roger me lad. You’d be surprised at the good it’d do you
.
You
surely don’t want Nurse Merivale here to go back to England, saying that we have no surgery that’s worth the blade of a scalpel in Eire?
You’d not put us to that shame!”

Roger shrugged indifferently. He watched the doctor pack his instruments and then asked: “How’s the car?”

Dr. Beltane gave a start of feigned surprise. “Well, now isn’t it the odd thing that you should ask! It went fine after your Michael passed his hand over it, the last time I was out. But it’s not running so well now—
”

Roger regarded the ceiling.

“You mean—you might bring yourself to stay to lunch while Michael had another look at it?”

Dr. Beltane beamed rosily. “That’d b
e
putting
Mrs. Carnehill to too much trouble
—”
he began.

But Roger interposed:

“You old wretch, you know you hoped to be asked! Besides, Mother is in Dublin. You’ll lunch with Shuan and
—
Joanna.”

The doctor glanced quickly in Joanna’s direction as he beckoned to her to leave the room with him.

Outside he said conversationally: “Michael is a stable lad here—with his heart in mechanics, though his job is with horses. He understands my car far better than my own man does. Now, Nurse, I’d like a word with you.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Joanna hesitated. “Perhaps I ought to explain about Mr. Carnehill’s using my Christian name. If you don’t approve
—”

“Ah, think nothing of it. The lad won’t respond to starchiness. There’s no reason why he should, in his own home. You’ve got to get his confidence
—
that’s main thing. I’ll leave you free to use your own methods. We’ve got to cut across this barrier of apathy that he is setting up increasingly as we don’t see much progress in the lifting of this partial paralysis of his lower spine. We’ll get at it yet. But he won’t believe that. He needs a bit of jollying out of the moods—the self-pity—that he gets into.”

Joanna smiled demurely. “Do you recommend that
I
try ‘jollying’?”

“
Well, you saw me, Nurse. A bit o
f
healthy ridicule will do no harm. Part of his trouble is that he is fairly
cluttered
by devotion
—”

“You mean Mrs. Carnehill and—Miss Ferrall?”

“His mother and Shuan—yes. It was high time we infused some fresh blood into the nursing of him. Hence
—
you. I look to you, Nurse, to act as a sort of buffer state for him.”

Joanna glanced down at her hands. “That won’t be easy,” she said.

Dr. Beltane gave her a shrewd look. “You mean that you’ve already had some difficulty? It’s a personal issue, I know. Maybe you feel you oughtn’t to have to concern yourself with that sort of thing?”

“It isn’t that,” said Joanna quickly. “In private nursing there are bound to be personal issues of one kind or another. This one is that Mrs. Carnehill’s ward is peculiarly sensitive about my being here. She feels that I’m trying to assert an authority which I haven’t got—except through you, Doctor.”

His round face crinkled reassuringly. “She was bound to feel like that, the poor gossoon. She’ll get over it in time. And, anyway, she should not be troubling her pretty head about a sickroom and a patient who’ll get well in the end without her. So I leave that with you, Nurse. I know you’ll be as tactful as you can about it?”

Easier said than done! thought Joanna wryly. But Dr. Beltane went on: “About his mother—that’s more difficult, I admit. Frankly, I don’t understand her treatment of the boy lately. He lies there, pining for news of the estate—how it is going and so forth, market prices and all that—and she pursues a policy of keeping everything from him—
‘
in case he worries’!”

“That’s not very wise, surely?” suggested Joanna.

“So I tell her. But the
g
ood woman is as obstinate as—as a Carnehill. And that’s saying something, for of course she wasn’t born one. She shuts up like an oyster and says she won’t take things to h
i
m until he’s better
—
much better. She won’t accept my
word that she is slowly starving him of something which was once his whole life’s interest. Perhaps you could watch your chance, Nurse, and say a word about that too?”