The Angels of Lovely Lane (49 page)

‘Thank you, Matron.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper.

‘But there are conditions. Look, sit down, for goodness’ sake.’ Sister Antrobus pulled out the chair and flopped down as relief washed over her. ‘I think we all need to be a little nicer to each other round here and you more than most. When new probationary nurses come on to your ward, try to be a little more encouraging and helpful. I am quite sure that without the influence of Mr Scriven and his unreasonable requests, it may be possible. Do you think you can manage that?’

Sister Antrobus nodded, and sniffed back the tears which threatened to overwhelm her.

‘Good, but for heaven’s sake don’t start being nice to the charge nurses on ward eight. I may be turning soft, but not that soft.’ She smiled, and Sister Antrobus smiled back.

‘You quoted the Florence Nightingale pledge at me, Sister. I am sure I don’t need to remind you of the line in it regarding administering a harmful substance? After today, I think we need to establish a protocol. It is becoming very difficult to keep up with the flood of new drugs, and the BNF is only updated once every three years. I am going to propose to the board that we set up a committee to review and evaluate the procedures used in St Angelus. No nurse should ever be in such a precarious situation again. Doctors are not God, despite the Hippocratic oath. We are also bound by our own code, and yesterday, that code was undermined. I won’t have that again. Not in this hospital. Now, return to your ward. Nurse your patient as though she were your own daughter. Make her well again. Tell no one what has occurred. We have a reputation to maintain and the police involvement will be difficult enough to deal with. There is nothing to be done for that poor baby, but we must do what we can for Martha. And, please, make Nurse Tanner welcome. Sister Haycock will be arriving soon and I shall tell her the good news.’

As a relieved Sister Antrobus reached the office door, Matron fired her parting shot.

‘Oh, and by the way, Sister, I have no intention of retiring. Not for another ten years at least.’

*

Sister Haycock decided to call in to the nursing-school kitchen before she made her way over to Lovely Lane. As she suspected, Biddy had all the news. She guessed she would never know how it was that Biddy knew everything before she did.

‘Well, you will never guess what. Nurse Tanner is off the hook and Mrs Duffy has just called to tell me that she’s running up to the hospital right now, as though she had the devil himself chasing her. Matron rang Mrs Duffy and spoke to Nurse Tanner herself. Couldn’t keep the smile from her face she couldn’t. You were right about that Nurse Tanner. She really does have a guardian angel looking after her.’

There wasn’t a detail Biddy didn’t know and Emily just sat there dumbfounded and listened. Biddy failed to tell her that Elsie had stood behind the door in Matron’s kitchen and heard every word, and Sister Haycock knew better than to ask how Biddy knew. The details of knowledge-gathering were the preserve of the domestics and therein lay their power.

On the walk over to Matron’s office, Emily had already decided on her next battle. It would be to ask Matron to agree to removing the unmarried-nurses-only rule. It might be much easier now than she had thought at first.

She grinned as she walked and was almost talking to herself while she planned how to strike while the iron was hot and catch Matron on a weak day. She was pleased that Matron had already spoken to Pammy. It must have had far more impact than if Emily had been the one to break the news.

She was spotted by Dessie and Jake from the porters’ lodge.

‘Well, what do you know,’ said Jake, as he gazed out of the window and removed a stump of a cigarette from behind his ear. ‘That’s the first time I think I have ever seen Sister Haycock smile.’

‘God bless her,’ said Dessie. ‘She has a lot to put up with that one, what with her da in that home.’

‘What home?’ said Jake.

‘Oh, never mind. She doesn’t think anyone knows, but we all do. How’s your Martha?’ Dessie wanted to change the subject. He was cross with himself for even mentioning Alf. Sister Haycock had her own reasons for keeping secrets.

‘Thank God you recognized her on the trolley, Des. We would never have known otherwise. Elsie was scouring every bingo hall in Liverpool yesterday, thinking she might have been trying to win a bit of money for the wedding. She noticed money had gone out of her drawer.’

‘Look after her, lad,’ said Dessie, who was looking forward to being given chapter and verse in Biddy’s kitchen over six bottles of stout.

‘I will, Dessie. We’ll be married soon enough, but first she has to get better. That bastard has gone, which is just as well, because if he hadn’t I would not be responsible for what I would have done.’ Jake had rolled and passed Dessie a ciggie as he spoke.

‘You know what, lad,’ said Dessie, ‘everyone in this life has secrets. You and Martha have yours now and if there is one bit of advice I can give you, it’s this. If you don’t want people to talk about yours, you don’t talk about anyone else’s. I’ve always found that’s the best way.’

Jake looked up sharply and his eyes met Dessie’s, searching for a hidden meaning in his words, but finding none he struck his match and lit up.

The only footsteps to be heard pounding the wet tarmac were her own. Aware of the noise echoing in the dead of night, Dana looked up nervously towards the dimly lit windows of ward eight, the male surgical ward, hoping not to wake post-operative patients, sleeping away the combined effects of an anaesthetic and the pain of surgery, or be seen by any nurse who knew her personally. They would wonder where on earth she was going at such a late hour and why she wasn’t tucked up in bed in the Lovely Lane home, where her friends and colleagues were fast asleep. She had been a nurse long enough to know that, as she slipped across the hospital grounds, someone, busy or sleepless, curious or just plain nosy, could easily observe her flight as she attempted to slip away into the night unnoticed.

Half an hour earlier, she had crept down the stairs from her first-floor room in the nurses’ home and headed towards the back door, one gentle step at a time. She had hesitated outside Pammy’s room, half expecting her to cry out, ‘Who is it? What time is it?’ Pammy was the lightest sleeper of them all and was due back on duty on ward two the following morning.

It had tested Dana’s strength to the very limit when only hours earlier Pammy, Victoria, newly returned from Lancashire, and even Beth had bounced up and down on her bed while she feigned toothache as an excuse not to join them that evening.

‘Are you sure you aren’t coming down to supper?’ Pammy had asked, concerned. Dana had hardly been known to miss a meal.

Pammy was one of life’s eternal optimists and Dana had known she would not simply accept a toothache as a reason for not wanting to spend her evening with the rest of the girls downstairs.

‘Let’s get you to Dr Mackintosh right now,’ Pammy had continued. ‘He will give you some painkillers at the very least. Dana, are you sure you’re all right?’

Pammy’s words almost brought a smile to Dana’s face. But she must not let herself down. She had to keep up the act.

Pammy would not give in. Being the daughter of Maisie and Stan, part of a docker family who had struggled their entire life to make ends meet, Pammy was a fighter who never gave up.

Beth was almost as bad.

‘Look here, I’ve brought you some supplies,’ she said, bursting into the room, still wearing her uniform. She slipped a bottle out of her apron pocket. ‘Here it is, and there’s a couple of aspirin and a gallipot floating around in here, too. My patient didn’t want them. Plug your tooth with this.’ She tipped the clove tincture on to a cotton wool plug. ‘And swallow those,’ as she scooped the wayward tablets back together and handed the small glass pot to Dana. ‘You’ll be as right as rain in no time at all, and you can have a nice bath while they work their magic. No need to bother Dr Mackintosh.’

Dana lay back on her pillows, trying her hardest to look as though she were in pain. The only person who knew her secret was Victoria and she wanted it to stay that way. She had thought she could get this over and done with before the split shift came home from duty, so she would not have to face the indomitable force that was Beth. Tonight was the night. The night of her life. The night when she knew everything would change. Tomorrow could be the day when her life began and she could not wait a moment longer.

She looked at Beth with a woeful expression and tears welled up in her eyes. They were genuine. From the moment Beth had discovered Dana’s letter in Celia’s room, she had become the group’s staunchest ally. They discovered that she had arrived at St Angelus from Germany, where she was based with her army family, and had spent her entire life moving from pillar to post. She claimed that if necessary she could pack up her room and be out of the door in ten minutes. Dana didn’t doubt it. Even Beth’s cosmetics were lined up like soldiers in a row on her dressing table. The maids knew that there was little to do in her room. Her bed was made so tight each morning, you couldn’t have slipped a flat hand between the sheets without ripping off a fingernail, and her clothes were colour coded and stacked as if she were a prisoner, not a student nurse. But as Beth sometimes said, ‘What’s the difference?’

In the past month, much to Celia Forsyth’s chagrin, Beth had planned, made lists and organized the group’s daily life. They all wondered how someone so small, with her dark brown hair and upswept glasses, could be as forceful as she was. They all had their orders. Acute short-sightedness was no handicap to Beth. In fact, her spectacles added to the look of bossiness. Not a single patient had ever complained when given an instruction from Beth.

Lovely Beth. So earnest. So indefatigable. She had an answer to every problem. Beth would be cross when she found out what Dana was doing. She would take it personally. She would regard it as her failing not to have been the one Dana confided in or to have seen what was coming, seeing how it was Beth who had played a major role in the whole business by handing over the letter she had found in Celia’s room.

‘I have news, girls,’ said Victoria, unhooking the button on her cape and flinging it over the chair as she flounced down on Dana’s bed and blew her a kiss. ‘The very young and handsome Oliver Gaskell came on to my ward today to speak to our consultant and I heard him say to the houseman that he was going to pop into the social club dance, to make sure they were all behaving, but he was only joking. I actually heard him say... are you all listening?’ The girls gave Victoria their full attention, Dana forgotten.

‘Go on,’ said Pammy, ‘quick, what?’

Victoria almost laughed out loud at the sight of Pammy, waiting with bated breath and open mouth. She had almost never stopped talking about her hero, Oliver Gaskell. The new god on ward two. ‘I heard him say that he was hoping to bag a dance with a particular nurse he had his eye on, and he winked at the houseman.’

Pammy lowered herself onto the edge of Dana’s bed. ‘Oh, my giddy aunt. Do you think that could be me? Do yer?’

‘Who else would it be?’ said Beth. ‘You virtually followed him around ward two and he spoke to you every chance he got. There isn’t a nurse in the hospital who doesn’t think you have made an impression on Mr Gaskell.’

Pammy dashed over to the dressing table, sat herself on the stool and began rifling through Dana’s make-up bag and hair slides. Then she caught sight of Dana in the mirror.

‘Oh no, what’s the matter? You have such a funny look on yer face, Dana. Is the toothache that bad?’

Dana’s look had actually been one of despair. She had realized that her friends were settling in for the night, when she wanted them as far away as possible.

‘Get them tablets down her, Beth,’ said Pammy, rushing to the sink. Tipping Dana’s toothbrush into the basin she filled the glass and handed the warm, disgusting water to Dana. Pammy was as practical as she was unflappable. She often cut corners and didn’t always think things through. It wouldn’t have taken a second to run the water until it was cold, but that wouldn’t have been ‘our Pammy’, as everyone called her.

‘Go on, swallow. Get them down you now. They will kill the pain.’

‘That water’s almost hot,’ said Beth. Pammy drove Beth mad, but in a funny sort of way, although total opposites, they now enjoyed each other’s company most of the time.

‘So what? Who cares? She just needs to get them tablets down and anyway, some people like hot water.’

Dana took the tablets, and shifting the hot water bottle from the side of her face whispered, ‘Could you just leave me now? I really want to sleep. You all go and have a lovely time watching the TV, and tell Mrs Duffy I am fine.’

‘Of course you do,’ said Victoria, smoothing out the eiderdown. ‘Come along, nurses, we must leave our patient to sleep.’

At last, thought Dana as they all began to make for the door.

‘All right then, we’ll let yer off,’ said Pammy, begrudgingly. ‘But if you’re no better in the morning, mind, we’ll take you in to Dr Mackintosh ourselves. Or Mr Finch has a dental clinic in the morning. If he doesn’t know what to do, no one will.’

‘Mr Finch is an oral surgeon. This is well below what he is used to dealing with,’ said Dana, realizing she was becoming wrapped up in her own tableau of deceit.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Pammy. ‘We all look after our own at St Angelus.’

She was the last to leave. ‘If you need me in the night, if the pain gets too unbearable, wake me. Promise.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Dana. ‘You have a full day tomorrow. I won’t wake you.’

Both girls smiled for a second too long and held each other’s eyes. Dana wondered if Pammy was suspicious.

‘You sure you are OK?’ Pammy asked again, in a tone which could only be described as meaningful.

Dana could hear the fading voices of Victoria and Beth as they moved away down the corridor to their own rooms, already planning what clothes to swap with each other and whose room they would get ready in before the forthcoming doctors’ dance on Saturday. Dana heard Victoria, with her lovely, choral-trained singing voice, break into a Doris Day number.