The Lonely One Read online

  Recent Titles by Claire Rayner

  CHILDREN’S WARD

  COTTAGE HOSPITAL

  THE DOCTORS OF DOWNLANDS

  THE FINAL YEAR

  THE LONELY ONE

  NURSE IN THE SUN

  THE PRIVATE WING

  THE LONELY ONE

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-052-3

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  M P Publishing Limited

  Copyright © 1965, 1995, 2010 by Claire Rayner

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  e-ISBN 978 1 84982 052 3

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Chapter 1

  Bridget sat at the desk at the very end of the back row, staring round the big classroom with miserable eyes. The letter from Matron had told her to arrive at the Preliminary Training School at 2 p.m., and she had decided then that she would try to be the first to arrive. She had a confused notion that the other new girls would arrive accompanied by loving parents, and she wanted to make sure that this time at least she would not have to face the pitying eyes of people who realised she had no parents. All through her schooldays she had shrunk from that all too familiar look on the faces of other girls and their parents, and although she knew quite well that it was no fault in her to be without a mother and father of her own, she felt an obscure sense of shame about it. So she had decided to arrive early, letting later arrivals think her parents had already left.

  But, as always seemed to happen to Bridget, her plans had been almost too well laid. She had arrived at just after one, and the little maid who answered the door to her had led her into the classroom and told her to wait there for Sister Tutor.

  ‘You’re too early,’ the maid had said, somewhat crossly, humping Bridget’s big suitcase into the classroom and dropping it with a clatter on to the polished floor. ‘Sister’s having her lunch, and I better not disturb her – she’ll be flaming mad if I do –’ and Bridget, stumbling over her words, had begged the girl to please not disturb Sister Tutor, she was fine, really she was, please do not bother about her – And the maid had looked at her with ill-disguised contempt in her eyes, or so Bridget had thought, and gone off with a shrug to finish the illicit cup of tea she had been drinking in the kitchen.

  And now Bridget sat and looked about her, frightened as always by the newness of things, for Bridget was not a girl to find strange surroundings exciting. For her, newness was menacing, something to be faced with screwed-up courage, not pleasure. In one way, the room had a school-like familiarity – the rows of desks, the teachers’ dais backed by a blackboard, the smell of chalk and ink, and faint overtones of human bodies that had spent long hours here.

  But there were other things in the room that made it utterly strange. The three hospital beds against one wall; the cupboards, glass fronted, white enamelled and chromed, showing rows of instruments, bowls, piles of wound dressings; the charts on the walls depicting very unhuman-looking men and women, with their muscles and organs all too faithfully drawn in ugly blues and reds, and the articulated skeleton that dangled from the little hook in its skull from a big metal stand.

  Bridget giggled aloud, a little hysterically, at him, and said softly, ‘I wish I were you –’ but the skeleton just hung and grinned mockingly at her.

  There was silence, not even a faint clatter of human movement coming from the rest of the building behind the closed door of the classroom. With an effort, Bridget got to her feet, and started to prowl about the room, looking at the strange things, running her fingers over the desks she passed, trying to gain a sense of security from touching these calm inanimate objects.

  She stopped in front of one of the glass-fronted cabinets, peering at its contents with a sort of fascinated horror. There were gleaming scalpels, dangling rows of artery forceps, big metal loops that were retractors, though Bridget had not the faintest idea what they were for, let alone what they were called. Tentatively, she put her hand on the fastening of the glass door, and it swung open on well-oiled hinges. With one slightly shaking finger she touched one of the rows of artery forceps that hung from below one of the shelves, and as she did so, the big door of the classroom opened with a sharp click, and someone came in.

  Bridget whirled to see who it was, and her convulsive movement made her finger curl and hook into the first forcep in the row. The whole lot slid out of the cupboard to fall clattering to the floor in a cascade of gleaming chrome.

  ‘My good girl, what on earth are you doing?’ A tall woman in a dark-blue dress, with a frosting of white at the collar and cuffs, swept forward crossly, and bent to pick up the fallen instruments just as Bridget, with really shaking hands now, bent to do the same. She scrabbled among the forceps, trying to collect as many as she could, and only succeeded in dropping all those she picked up, so that the tall woman, with a cluck of impatience said sharply, ‘Do leave them – I’ll pick them up,’ which she proceeded to do with deft fingers. Then she hung them back in place and turned to Bridget, who was now standing in dejection behind her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Bridget muttered. ‘So sorry. I was too early – I thought I’d look about – so sorry – I didn’t mean to –’

  ‘Well, no harm done,’ the tall woman said briskly. ‘Just remember in future that these are valuable pieces of equipment and need to be handled with respect. Clumsy nurses are bad nurses – we must teach you to be more careful, mustn’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bridget said miserably.

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ the tall woman said. ‘In hospital, we address people with a particular courtesy.’

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ Bridget said again, now very near to tears, wishing she could turn and run.

  The tall woman seemed to sense her misery, and smiled, a smile that lifted her rather craggy face into softer lines.

  ‘Dear me, but this is an unfortunate beginning for you! But don’t worry about it – we all had to start once, and we were all just as nervous as you are!’ And Bridget, managing a shaky smile in response, tried to imagine this very masterful woman being as nervous as she was now, and couldn’t.

  ‘Well, since you are here early, we’ll make the most of the time, and get you sorted out before the others arrive. Come along to my office, now – and you’d better bring your case and leave it in the hall until Margaret shows you your room.’

  Bridget picked up the big case and hurried after the tall woman, who was leading the way out across the hall towards a door on the other side of it.

  ‘Have you lunched?’

  ‘Yes, thank you – Sister,’ Bridget lied. She hadn’t been able to eat for the last two days, so nervous about it all had she been.

  ‘Good – now, leave your luggage there, and come along in.’

  Bridget obediently followed her into the office, and sat down in the chair the other woman indicated with a nod of her head, and clasping her hands on her lap, to hide their shaking, waited for what was to come next.

  ‘Now, my dear, let us introduce ourselves to each other. I am Sister Chessman, yo
ur Sister Tutor. I will be looking after your tuition here at the Royal for the next three years, and I hope we will be able to be of help to each other. I will do all I can to make a nurse of you, someone of whom the Royal and the profession can be proud, and with interest and intelligent co-operation from you, we should have a very successful and happy three years together.’ She leafed through a pile of papers on the desk between them. ‘Now, what is your name?’

  ‘Bridget Preston, Sister.’

  ‘Preston – Preston – ah, yes. Here we are.’ She pulled one of the sheets of paper out and peered at it. ‘I see that you did not come to the Royal for a preliminary interview, because your home is in the North – so we know very little about you. Let me see. You are nineteen?’

  Bridget nodded.

  ‘And you have no parents, I see. I’m sorry about that, my dear,’ and the all too familiar and hateful look of pity appeared on the craggy face.

  ‘They died when I was a baby,’ Bridget began the usual explanation with a spurious ease born of long practice. ‘My grandmother brought me up.’ She began to stumble a little then. ‘She – she died last month – I have a guardian now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sister Chessman said again.

  ‘Well, to tell the truth, she was very old, and I didn’t see a lot of her,’ Bridget said with a rush of honesty. ‘I’ve been at boarding-school most of my life – I only lived with Grandmother these last two years, and she was pretty much of an invalid – I can’t pretend to miss her very much.’

  Sister Chessman nodded, looking at the girl in front of her with shrewd but friendly eyes. ‘You have had rather a lonely time lately, then?’

  Bridget thought of the last two years, the interminable hours in the dingy, big house in the depths of Yorkshire, the hours spent doing such small household tasks as her grandmother’s dour housekeeper had allowed her to do, the hours of reading through the ancient collection of dreary books, of solitary walks across the bleak moors, the emptiness that had been her life. But she made no attempt to explain all this. She just nodded.

  ‘Why did you decide to be a nurse, Miss Preston? What attracted you to the profession?’

  Bridget bit her lip momentarily. How could she explain that to this severe, self-assured woman? Explain the look of rather impatient benevolence on the face of Mr Lessiter, the solicitor her grandmother had appointed as her guardian, when he had come to collect her from her grandmother’s house the day after the funeral?

  ‘Well, Bridget, my dear,’ he had said briskly, as they sat in the train that carried them both towards the Lessiter home in Edinburgh. ‘And what are you going to do now? I’m afraid you’ll have to take some sort of job, you know. Your grandmother’s income died with her – it was an annuity – and the sale of the house will just about cover the expenses of her illness and funeral and the legacy she left to her housekeeper. Much as Mrs Lessiter and I would like to support you, we aren’t in any position to do so unless you make some contribution yourself –’

  Bridget had understood the situation at the Lessiter’s very quickly, almost before she had been in the house an hour. Mr Lessiter was a busy man, much too occupied with his work to care to have a girl like Bridget cluttering up his life, and Mrs Lessiter, childless as the couple were, had filled her life with her job as an advertising executive, and had no more relish for her unwanted task as joint guardian to Bridget than had her husband.

  It had been Bridget herself who had solved the problem. She had remembered the rather nice girl who had come to the house to nurse her grandmother during the last week of her life, the little she had heard from her about being a nurse, and had decided, on the basis of this flimsy knowledge that she, too, would be a nurse.

  She had said to the Lessiters, with some diffidence, that she would like to work in a hospital, and the patent relief on their faces, the warm pleasure with which they had greeted this suggestion, had made it clear to her that she had been right.

  ‘An excellent plan,’ Mr Lessiter had said, almost with gaiety. ‘Excellent; you’ll be far more comfortable living in a Nurses’ Home with a lot of girls your own age than with a pair of old fogies like us, eh Elizabeth?’ and his wife had smiled back at him and agreed heartily.

  Now, Bridget tried to answer Sister Chessman’s question with some honesty.

  ‘I – it seemed the best thing to do,’ was all she managed.

  ‘Do you know anything about nursing?’

  ‘Well – no, not very much. But I liked science at school – I got quite good O levels in it – though I got A levels in English –’

  ‘Your educational qualifications are quite satisfactory – we have a record of all that here on your application form. No, I want to know why you chose nursing. Do you like people? Want to help them?’

  ‘I – I think so, Sister.’ Bridget tried again. ‘I – I haven’t seen much of people, really, not since I left school, and even then, it was a very small school – I didn’t get about much. I just worked.’

  Somehow, at school, she had never been very good at making friends. The other girls had been so full of their home doings, chatter about their parents, their brothers and sisters, their friends with whom they spent their holidays, that Bridget, lacking these subjects of conversation, had retreated into a quiet, bookish world of her own, a safe world, free from any emotional tangles of the sort other girls seemed to get into. No boy-friends, no violent crushes on other girls at school had ever disturbed the even tenor of her life.

  Mercifully, Sister Chessman seemed to understand some of her difficulty in explaining, and said no more about the matter. She busied herself with asking rather more practical questions, about her health, explaining that she would be having a general physical examination by one of the hospital physicians, to make sure she was physically fit for the arduous job of nursing, telling her that she would spend the next three months in the Preliminary Training School, visiting the hospital’s wards one day a week, and that if she studied hard, and passed the examination that would be set at the end of that three months, she would be admitted to the Royal as a full student nurse.

  ‘And looking at your scholastic record, I would say you should have little difficulty in coping with your studies, as long as you work hard and don’t slack the weeks away. Now, I rather think I hear some of the other girls arriving. If you go to the hall, Margaret, the maid, will show you to your room, and you can unpack. You will have to share a room with other girls while you are here in the Preliminary Training School, I’m afraid – we are very short of single rooms in this building, but later, when you move to the Nurses’ Home proper, you will, of course, have a room to yourself. Off you go now, and ask Margaret to send the next arrival in five minutes – I must sort these papers out first.’

  Obediently, Bridget turned to go, and was called back just as she reached the door.

  ‘I hope you will be happy with us, Nurse Preston. It will all seem very strange at first, I know, and probably frightening. But we at the Royal understand that, and we want to help. Don’t be afraid to come to me if you have any problems. I don’t bite – and I do care a great deal about the happiness of every girl in the training school. An unhappy girl makes a bad nurse, and we want you to be a good nurse, as well as a happy person. Remember that, won’t you?’ She smiled her transforming smile again. ‘Welcome to the Royal, Nurse Preston. We are happy to have you with us.’

  And with a sudden uprush of emotion Bridget could only smile shakily and nod, before escaping to the hall outside.

  There were about half a dozen girls in the hall, none of them with parents accompanying them, yet Bridget felt her heart fail her for a moment. She was so bad at making friends, so unable to chatter easily to strangers, as these girls clearly could. They were talking together as though they had known each other all their lives, heads together, leaning against the radiators in the hall in relaxed attitudes that Bridget envied heartily.

  The maid came across the hall as Bridget closed the office door b
ehind her.

  ‘Please, Margaret,’ she said. ‘Sister Chessman said would you send the next one in to her in five minutes?’

  The maid nodded, and one of the girls leaning against the radiator detached herself from the group and came over to Bridget, who was standing a little helplessly next to her suitcase.

  ‘What’s she like?’ the girl asked.

  Bridget looked up at her, a girl taller than herself by a couple of inches, with thick fair hair that curled becomingly into a springing bob round a pointed face, large blue eyes, well made up to show the thick brown lashes to advantage. She had a smooth skin, clear of any blemish, and a neat figure that was perhaps a little too well displayed in a tightly fitting jersey suit. Her legs were long and beautiful, and she wore high-heeled, very fashionable shoes that made Bridget painfully aware of her own sensible Yorkshire brogues.

  ‘I – I beg your pardon?’ she said awkwardly.

  ‘What’s she like?’ the girl said again. ‘The old shedragon in there? Is she a real old battle-axe, or one of those nice motherly types you can push around?’

  ‘She’s very – nice, I think,’ Bridget said. ‘I mean, I hardly know – I’ve only been with her a little while – She’s a bit – a bit scary, really, I suppose.’

  The girl nodded, resignedly. ‘I get you. Battle-axe.’ She turned to the others.

  ‘We’re out of luck,’ she announced to them. ‘She seems to have scared the pants off this one, anyway.’ She turned back to Bridget. ‘Who’re you? I’m Roberta Aston – Bobby to my friends. And this is Judith Mayer – that tall one with the red hair over there, and this dolly face with all the black hair is Liz Cooper, and that’s Dorothy – Jackson, isn’t it?’ – a quiet-looking girl in a blue coat nodded shortly – ‘and this is Mary Byrne, and this is Jean McDonald. I gather from the maid there’re four more to come yet. Not exactly a big class, is it? Who’re you?’

  ‘Bridget Preston – er, how do you do?’