Sail Upon the Land (15 page)

There was a scream, a crack and a splash. He glanced up and she’d vanished. The rotten wood sagged under his feet, and he lowered himself to his knees, crawling towards the gaping hole where she had disappeared. He told himself he wasn’t too worried, convinced she would simply pop up smiling having swum the five or so feet to the side of the pontoon. When she didn’t instantly reappear, he stared down through the hole into the shadowed water, his heart hammering. As it became still in the breathless morning air, it revealed her green face looking up at him, eyes wide open, mouth clamped shut. The rest of her was invisible in the dark. He realised with a sense of dread that he had no idea how deep the lake was and quickly lowered himself full length on to the slats, plunging his arm into the water to grab at her, but she was out of his reach.

He shuffled to the edge of the pontoon, lowered himself into the freezing water and swimming under the slats tried to find her in the shadows. Then he saw an arm like a pale fish in the green light and grabbed at it throwing himself backwards. She shifted towards him but something appeared to be trapping her legs. He wrenched at her until she jerked free then kicked out dragging her by the arm. Daylight appeared and her head was above the surface. Air whooshed out of her. Eyes wide with shock she stared at him. It could only have been seconds but it felt like hours.

‘Melissa! What happened? Are you OK?’

He cupped her chin in his hand and swam with her to where he could gain a foothold. Lifting her in his arms, oblivious of the broken mussel shells that slashed at his feet and the slimy mud, he carried her up the bank and over to the blanket. She lay quiet in his arms. Then she turned her head away and retched out the lake water in a thin stream. She began to cry.

‘What happened, Melissa? Do you know?’

Hugging herself tightly and turning away, she ignored him.

‘You’re OK now, darling. It must have been a shock.’ He trailed off looking at her white back goose-pimpled now. He tried to wrap the blanket over her and take her in his arms. She shrugged him off, wiping her face. He sat not knowing what to do or say. It had happened so fast. One minute bliss, the next disaster.

‘Why didn’t you tell me it was rotten?’ she muttered.

‘I didn’t know. I did tell you to be careful. What exactly happened? Why didn’t you swim out from under the pontoon?’

‘It collapsed under me and I just went in,’ she snuffled into the blanket. ‘Something grabbed my legs, maybe plants or weeds. I tried kicking but I couldn’t get out. I was so frightened.’

She opened her mouth and to his horror began to howl. Her face went red, her eyes were screwed up. He stopped himself from recoiling.

‘You’re OK now though. I got you out.’

‘My arm hurts. You pulled the skin.’

She rolled herself further into the old tartan blanket and lay there saying nothing. He sat letting the sun warm him and his heart slow down. In the quiet he was sure all would be well, that they could reach back and grab what had been there before.

She spoke in a grumbling monotone.

‘I shouldn’t be here.’

‘What?’

‘I lied to my parents. I shouldn’t be here and that was the punishment. I should have been more careful. It was a stupid idea sneaking away with some man I don’t even know. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Dirty and wrong.’

Munty was crushed. Some man? She seemed to be talking to herself. Five minutes beforehand he had been ready to throw his whole life into the air for her, now he was repelled.

‘It’s my punishment and I deserved it. For lying, and buying this stupid bathing suit, and not doing what I was meant to be doing. I want to go home. Now.’

‘OK, look, let’s go up to the house and get ourselves sorted out. There’s some food left.’

‘No, I want to go now.’

‘You’ll need to get dressed, and then I’ll drive you.’

‘They mustn’t see you. They mustn’t know.’

‘OK, I’ll drop you nearby and you can say you were on the train.’

She stood up, pulling the blanket around her, and stumbled away over the rough ground, wriggling white partings in her short wet hair. He watched her wincing progress across the overgrown gravel sweep, and then followed her, defeated. The one time he’d tried to do something different, that was just for him, the first time he’d tried to approach the house as an equal, it had caused damage. Frightened the only girl he had ever liked. Been so flawed and rotten that it had nearly killed her. Better just to do what she wanted now. He would drive her to Dorking, and take the hire car back to London. Then what? He was chilled and sad.

From the first step she took in her regulation shoes, adapted to support her foot, Melissa knew she had made a mistake. The smell of the wards sickened her, she had no sympathy for the patients and she hated the supercilious doctors. So different from Daddy.

Her fellow nurses seemed to be from a much better, braver species than her own. She cringed at their forthright manner with the patients and their unflinching compassion in the face of gangrenous bed sores, dirty bedpans, obscene demented old men and all the rest of it. She was so terribly tired after only three months that she moved through a fog, haunted by a putrid odour that never left her nostrils.

She was on night duty yet again. She never seemed to be off it, and now it was Christmas at St Saviour’s and everyone else was having fun.

She was dozing when she started awake to hear suppressed laughter in the corridor, and then exaggerated hushing. A little light came through the porthole in the ward door. It opened slightly, and a houseman she didn’t know looked in at her. With him were two of her off-duty fellow probationers.

‘Hello, Melissa? We just came up from the first-years’ party to see if you wanted a drink.’

The houseman waved a hip flask at her. For a moment she was tempted to take a swig of brandy, to inject a bit of life into her weary carcass. But she was terrified of the night sister, who roamed the corridors like a ravening beast seeking out slacking nurses to devour.

‘Go away!’ she hissed. ‘It’s time I did my round.’

She was on geriatrics again, and heartily sick of the old and decrepit. Handling their false teeth and getting them on and off the commode made her retch. She still managed laboriously to summon up the necessary wall of numb indifference, but it was getting harder and harder. The stink and misery were breaking it down. Things within her were disintegrating. She was frightened that everyone would begin to notice the gaping hole where she used to be.

Her compromised vocation vanished as her foot swelled, and it became so painful by the end of every day that she never went out any more. She crept back to her cell-like room in the Nurses’ Home and lay on her bed, often waking up hours later still dressed, sweating and headachy.

She heard the nurses and doctor retreating down the corridor, and switched on her torch to check the ward.

At the back of her mind, she knew her parents had been anxious about her taking up nursing. They had worried about her club foot. The unusual cure that her parents had organised in America had been a success. The deformity was not extreme, so a few months of splints and plaster had meant she was toddling before her second birthday. The day Sarah had brought her home was still celebrated in the family with a cake, as her new birthday. But her left foot was probably not strong enough to sustain her chosen career. Was she too proud to confess her mistake?

Her parents had never found out exactly where she had been that disastrous weekend. They appeared to be worried about her when she could hardly be bothered to go back to London afterwards and continue with her Season. She spent a lot of time in bed sleeping until it was time to move to St Saviour’s and start her training in September.

She mopped at her face with her crumpled apron but then realised with horror that she couldn’t stop crying. The tears flowed down her face in a stream and she had to fight hard with herself to prevent her mouth dropping open. The next thing she knew she was on the floor and the night sister was shaking her.

‘Nurse Reeves? What’s going on? What’s the matter?’

She sat up groggily, the chair she had been sitting on beside her on the floor. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I think I must have fainted.’

‘Well, we can’t have that.’ Sister groped in her apron pocket and brought out a small bottle which she thrust under Melissa’s nose.

‘Come on, sit up on the chair, you should have your head between your knees. Now, I’m just going to check the ward. We don’t know how long you’ve been out.’

Melissa realised in that moment that this had to stop. She could not be a nurse, she was not a nurse, she hated every moment of it and her body had rebelled. She wasn’t strong enough mentally or physically to do what her mother had done before her, and she was ashamed.

Sister was coming back: ‘There’s only an hour to the end of your shift. I’ll take over here. Go and get some rest, and report to Matron tomorrow.’

Melissa hauled herself to her feet, and limped along the endless corridors, down in the lift and across the road to the Home. In her narrow room she collapsed on to the bed, kicking off her shoes and pulling the sheet and blankets over herself, grateful for the non-regulation eiderdown that Mummy had insisted she take with her, falling into sleep as down a mine shaft.

The next day she woke up in a kind of dreary peace. It wasn’t going to be easy extricating herself, she had no idea what she was going to do next, but she knew that when she went to see Matron she would be resigning. Glancing at her alarm clock, she saw it was already two in the afternoon. Matron saw the night shift nurses between twelve o’clock and two thirty. She had to hurry. She stripped off the crumpled dress she was still wearing from the day before, brushed her hair, washed her face in the little basin in the room, and changed quickly into a fresh uniform. She pinned her cap to her head with white Kirby grips, thinking with guilty joy that this might be the last time she ever had to wear it.

‘Come in,’ Matron called out.

Melissa opened the door and went in, filled with a sense of release instead of the usual dread. Matron had the ability to make her feel like a worm, but not today.

‘Ah, Nurse Reeves, sit down. I hear you fainted on night duty. Everything all right now?’

‘Well, no, Matron.’

‘What’s the trouble?’

Melissa looked down at her reddened hands.

‘I’m sorry, Matron, but I’ve changed my mind about nursing.’

‘You’ve changed your mind? How long have you been with us? Can’t be much more than three months. It’s always tough to begin with while you get used to the hard work and the discipline. Like the Army. But you’ll soon get into the swing of it.’

‘I don’t think I will. You see my talipes is playing up and I think I’ll have to withdraw for that reason.’

‘Ah,’ said Matron, her cap bobbing as she looked at Melissa’s notes, which she had removed from a file. ‘It says here you passed all the tests and the doctors made the decision that you were fit for nursing in spite of your limited talipes. Are both your feet sore?’

‘Well, yes.’

Matron seized on this. ‘All nurses have sore feet to begin with. You soon get used to it.’

Melissa wanted to cry, she had been so sure her talipes, which she had never used as an excuse before for anything, would be her ticket out of this hell.

‘My left foot is worse than my right. In fact at the end of day shifts it’s agony, and it still hurts when I start in the mornings as well.’

Matron looked grave. ‘You realise that if you withdraw now you’ll have wasted precious limited National Health resources that would have gone towards training another girl with more backbone, don’t you?’

Melissa was ashamed, but stuck to her guns. She could not go back into the ward. She wasn’t sure what would happen, whether she would be sick or faint if she smelt that sweetish rotting old-people smell again. If necessary she would go AWOL.

‘Matron, I’m simply not fit to be a nurse. It was a mistake, I believed I could be like my mother, but I can’t. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to hand in my resignation as of today.’

‘Well, Miss Reeves, this is poor behaviour in my opinion. You can give a month’s notice if you like, but I am not going to allow you to leave immediately.’

Desperation flooding her, Melissa stopped looking at her hands, and stared into Matron’s face. She saw red skin, a fuzz of fur on the cheeks and chin, round tortoiseshell glasses and a large starched cap. The small mouth puckered with disapproval like a cat’s bottom. She hated what she saw, for what it represented to her. Pain and disgust and suffering. She had no vocation to be a nurse, needed to go home that afternoon if she wasn’t to collapse. The desperation gave her courage.

‘Matron, I’m sorry but I have to leave today. I can’t take any more. I need to go home and rest.’

‘Look, I know it’s tough to begin with. And you have had a longer stint than usual on geriatrics, which can test anyone’s vocation. But it will be surgical next, and I’m sure you’ll find that more to your taste.’

Melissa remembered her experience so far of wounds and dressings, and her stomach heaved.

‘I don’t think so, Matron. I just don’t think I have the right kind of character for nursing.’

‘What will your parents think? They may have to pay a fine for you, I’m afraid. Your father is a doctor? They will be very shocked, Miss Reeves, as am I.’

She waited. Melissa said nothing.

Matron gave up abruptly.

‘I can’t waste any more time on this. If you are determined, you had better go now. Pack up your room, leave the key with the Porter. Please leave my office, I’ll need to organise cover for your shifts. I’m very disappointed, Miss Reeves. You are dismissed. I’m afraid this will go on your permanent record.’

Melissa stood up slowly. Her ‘permanent record’ meant nothing as it occurred to her that she was free. At once the pain and gloom dropped from her. She stretched her hand across the desk to Matron, who ignored it.