Nurse in the Sun Read online

  “Señora? He’s married, then?”

  “Oh, no - not Señor Garcia! He is like me - a man alone - a bachelor.” He leered cheerfully at her. “No, the Señora is the mother of Señor Garcia. Such a woman - they say in France, une femme formidable! You see, in my job I must be a speaker of many languages!”

  “Indeed, you are a remarkable linguist,” Isabel said solemnly and he nodded at her in great good humour, and at last stood back to let her into her room as the porter appeared at the end of the corridor, humping her luggage on a small trolley.

  “You like this, yes?” Mendoza said, sweeping the door open, and she walked past him to stand delightedly looking around. A square room, with cool yellow curtains drawn against the afternoon sunshine, a carpet of a deeper yellow, a wide low bed with a counterpane in yet another shade of the golden colour, and walls of very soft cream. There were fitted wardrobes which she opened and exclaimed over, so well equipped were they with drawers and mirrors and lights, and a charming little bathroom with a shower and bath and bidet - “And a loo all to myself - that’s almost indecent luxury!” she murmured, and laughed at his expression of surprise.

  “It’s a lovely room, Señor Mendoza - ”

  “Jaime!”

  “I’m sorry - Jaime. Delightful. Thank you, and thank Señor Garcia for arranging such excellent accommodation. I - er - ” another of her painfully learned Spanish phrases was dredged up, “ - er - le estoy muy agradecido - is that right? I am much obliged to you.”

  “Excellent, excellent! Soon you will be a linguist like myself, yes? Now, if you require anything, you ring for la criada - the maid - and she provides. I must return to the office - soon the guests come out from lunch and then - qué aburrido!” - he raised his right hand and shook it limply from the wrist in a very characteristic Spanish fashion - “They torment me, they want this, they want that, they are impossible! So, when you are ready, you come down, and I arrange for you a cup of English tea, and then we discuss your duties, and I show you the clinic we have prepared for you, yes? Hasta la vista, señorita!” and he bowed rather comically, and went away leaving her to unpack and arrange the room that was to be her home for the next six months.

  She took a shower as soon as she had finished and after a little thought, put on the uniform she had provided for herself; the girl in the agency had been very vague about uniform too, so Isabel had thought it prudent to provide her own, to be on the safe side. Now, as she looked at herself in the crisp white nylon dress she had chosen, and the white tights and shoes the uniform shop had recommended (“so much better for tropical climes, Sister,” the little elderly assistant had cooed so she had taken them) and the neat white “Sister Dora” cap firmly clipped to her crisp red hair, she knew she looked every inch the nurse, if rather like one of the American variety.

  Which reminded her of Biff, and she smiled a little as she tidied away the odds and ends of makeup and her bathroom gear, ready to go downstairs. Bruised and miserable though she felt about Jason, and determined though she still was to avoid any further emotional entanglements, there was a certain comfort to be found in having a date with a new man, to know he’d found her interesting enough to want to see her again.

  She drew the curtains before she left, meaning to open the window wide, for the room seemed too warm and to her delight found there was a balcony outside, and that it overlooked the sea side of the hotel. Eagerly she stepped out to peer over the edge, and caught her breath in a moment of terror.

  She was on the eleventh floor of the building, only a glassed-in dome on the roof behind her being higher than she was, and the hotel itself was perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped sharply down to the waters of the Bay beneath. Below her, series of balconies just like her own were repeated in a dizzying pattern, all the way down to the glass roof of the restaurant, below which she could see the foreshortened figures of a few late lunchers and the white jacketed waiters clearing tables.

  Beyond that, and thrusting forward from the terrace which she could see ran round the edge of the restaurant was a shelf of garden, in the middle of which lay a very blue, very still swimming pool, a curving sinuous thing shaped like an elongated kidney. It was surrounded by long lounging chairs with gay red and blue and yellow canopies over them, and a few mattresses with brightly striped covers lay about on the paving stones with people lying on them, browning gently in the sun, which felt to Isabel as warm as an English May afternoon.

  She let her eyes wander further, trying to take in the extent of this huge hotel, and saw there was another swimming pool to the far side of the kidney shaped one, but this was obviously for children for she could see gay pictures of dolphins and octopuses and cheeky lobsters patterned on the tiled floor under the blue green water; and a small brown figure wearing a diminutive swimsuit was paddling at one end.

  And there were still more chair bedecked terraces, more gardens gleaming with red and purple flowers, and mimosa trees, and orange and lemon trees, and glossy dark green foliage lying spread about under this great slab of a building with its balconies looking rather like rows of eyelashes - at which simile, Isabel went into her room again, and firmly closed the window.

  “I’m getting fanciful, and that’ll never do,” she told herself tartly. “You’re here to work, not to get a taste for the high and expensive jet-set life - and don’t you forget it.”

  But all the same, it was going to be an interesting summer, and a very comfortable one, she thought as she hurried along the quiet corridor towards the lift. “I’ve done the right thing coming here - it will be all right for me, now. I know it will. It’s got to be!”

  3

  Jaime Mendoza was so patently waiting for her at the desk in the main hall, and so patently trying to pretend that he wasn’t that she wanted to laugh, especially as at the sight of her emerging from the lift he immediately began to scold the little dark haired girl sitting at a desk in the corner behind him.

  “Señor Mendoza!” she interrupted him without compunction, feeling very sorry for the little typist who was obviously being made to suffer simply to provide Mendoza with a chance to show off. “You told me to come to you as soon as I was unpacked - ”

  “Ah, Isabella! It is all comfortable with you, yes?” he beamed at her and came hurrying round the desk to stand close beside her. “Now, I arrange for you some tea, and show you the clinic we have prepare for you - ”

  “Thank you,” she said equably, and then moving away from his rather oppressive closeness added, “And Señor Garcia? When do I see him? I understood I was to report to him when I arrived, so - ”

  “Ah, yes. Señor Garcia. I arrange very soon. He does not like to be interrupted too early in the afternoon - the desk work, you understand - ”

  “Hey, Manager!”

  Isabel turned her head to see a tall woman in very tight pale blue pants and a white silk sweater bearing down on them. Her hair was very golden, even in the gentle light of the foyer, and piled on top of her head in carefully arranged casual confusion. Half her suntanned face was hidden by huge square dark glasses.

  “Manager, what the devil is the matter with that stupid creature who is supposed to be the head waiter here? Three times - three, no less - I had to send back a dish, and when I complained to him about it and about the stupid table waiter all that man did was shrug at me in a very ill mannered fashion and disappear! And I won’t have it, do you understand? At the price this hotel charges I do not expect to be treated with such impudence. If it happens once more, I promise you I won’t be nearly so lenient. This time I’m telling you - next time I tell Mr. Garcia. Now, you go and talk to that man and see to it that he apologizes to me when I go in to dinner - ”

  “Felipe was impudent? Surely not, Señora - ”

  She took her glasses off with a flick of her wrist that showed very clearly the large diamond ring that adorned one finger and stared at him with her eyebrows raised and her eyes slightly narrowed.

  “Are you calling me a
liar, Manager? I - ”

  “But, Señora, of course not! I am merely surprised - very surprised that Felipe, who is, I assure you, an excellent head waiter, should behave in any way that was not - ” he shrugged “and to so - so happy a guest! You must agree, he is always of the most correct? Usually?”

  “But not today. So are you going to deal with the matter or must I discuss it with Mr. Garcia - ”

  “I see at once, Señora - excuse me, please. I return soon - ” And he bustled away leaving Isabel still standing beside the tall woman.

  “And who might you be?” the woman said, flicking her eyes across the crisp uniform and back to Isabel’s face. “You aren’t Spanish.”

  “No, I’m not Spanish,” Isabel said quietly.

  “Then who are you? I’ve been staying here months and I haven’t seen you before. You’re a nurse aren’t you? Someone ill here? Because if there’s any infection in the place, you can be sure I - ”

  “Nobody is ill,” Isabel said in the same quiet voice, but feeling her irritation rising. She’d met people like this before; bad tempered, spoiled, and rich. The Royal’s Private Patients’ wing had more than its fair share of such difficult people to deal with. “I am a nurse, yes, but no one is ill. Señor Garcia decided to provide health services for his guests, so - ”

  “Well, well! We are getting up-to-date, aren’t we? I must tell him I approve! Where will you be if you’re wanted? There are one or two things I daresay I could get you to deal with for me - do I just ring the desk when I want you?”

  “I really don’t know yet. I’ve only just arrived and I haven’t yet seen the clinic room I’ll be using. But if you should be ill then of course, a call to the desk will be the best way of finding me. I hope you won’t need me, however. One wouldn’t want to think of people’s holidays being spoiled by genuine ill health - ”

  The woman raised her eyebrows again, and the suntanned skin of her cheeks creased into sharp lines; “she’s a lot older than she looks,”

  Isabel thought, looking at the other woman with her own face set in carefully noncommittal lines. “Older and very, very difficult. I’ll have to watch this one - ”

  But the woman contented herself with a sharp sniff, and said only, “Yes, it would. But I’m not on holiday. I’m spending the whole season here. My name is Connaught - Mrs. Vanda Connaught. You’ll know who I am now, when I send for you, won’t you?” and she thrust her glasses back on to her nose and went hipping away towards the lift, moving with a studied languorousness that Isabel found rather embarrassing on a woman who was obviously nearer fifty than forty.

  Jaime Mendoza came hurrying back from the dining room, his face creased with anxiety. “That woman!” he said breathlessly. “She is so much trouble, always trouble, trouble, trouble! Felipe in a rage, half the waiters shouting and swearing in the kitchen - she spends every meal time upsetting everybody - qué fastidio! - such a nuisance of a woman! But what can you do? She is rich, she spends much in the bar, and Señor Garcia - ” he shrugged very expressively. “Well, you will see - you will see! Now, the tea, and I show you the clinic!”

  He showed a disposition to linger over the tea, which they had at a table in the corner of the vast restaurant, but she did her best to be businesslike and crisp with him, drinking the tea - which was thin and lemon scented and very refreshing - and eating the soft and very delicious sweet biscuits that came with it as quickly as she decently could. He also showed a disposition to try to talk to her in rather personal terms, asking her about life at home, about the sort of city London was, and - a little slyly - about her boyfriends. But she parried his questions adroitly by asking him her own about the hotel.

  “This restaurant is very magnificent,” she said, looking up at the vast sweep of glass above their heads, through which she could see the sheer side of the hotel rising hugely above them. “But very hot, I should think when the sun is strong? Today is pleasant and bright, but in the high summer, surely? - ”

  “Ah, this is a very special roof!” he said proudly, and lifting one hand imperiously signalled the young white jacketed waiter who was hovering at the serving table nearby. “We demonstrate - ”

  The waiter had moved away to the far corner of the great room, and was fiddling with some switches, and suddenly, as she stared upwards, the whole roof changed as sheets of green canvas crept up the panes like some immense umbrella operating in reverse. Within seconds the whole area was plunged into a cool shimmering under-sea sort of greenness, and she shivered a little as a waft of cool air moved across her shoulders and cheeks.

  “You see? We have this unique - quite unique - system of sunblinds, and they operate in this special way - at the same time as the blinds come, so comes the cool air - you feel it, all the breathing of ice? It is scented like the air of the mountains, and even on the hottest days of August in here our guests sit in ease and comfort and feel no heaviness of the sun. It is remarkable, yes?”

  “Remarkable very much yes!” she said, as the blinds began to creep silently down the panes again, so that the restaurant was again flooded with the light of the afternoon sun. “Indeed, this is a very comfortable hotel - and very thoughtful for its guests. Even providing a nurse for them - almost as special as the blinds, that!”

  She stood up, and smoothed her uniform tidily. “And now, perhaps you’ll take me to the clinic? I really feel I ought to see it and get myself organized as soon as possible. If one of the guests needed me and I wasn’t ready for them, I’d not feel too happy about the situation! Er - thank you for my tea - ”

  “You eat in this dining room always, yes? You are a special member of the staff, so you do not eat in staff rooms, but like myself and like Señor Garcia, here in the restaurant where are the guests. It is a privilege for us who are the most important people of the hotel - ”

  The clinic was on the lower ground floor of the hotel beneath the foyer area, and reached through the magnificent library, a room so full of leather bound books, deep armchairs and writing desks that it almost defied use. To sit at one of these desks under one of those beautiful paintings would, Isabel was sure, paralyse her so that she couldn’t think a word, let alone write one.

  For a moment she was afraid that the clinic also would be on too magnificent a scale, but she need not have worried. There were three small rooms. One was a waiting area, with chairs and table and magazines, and a small plant-entwined balcony of its own. Beyond that was a surgical room, and she gazed at it in delight, so fully equipped and gleaming was it.

  Cabinets of chrome and glass lined the walls, all of them filled with rows of gleaming instruments, or bottles of lotions and antiseptics and drugs. There was a reclining chair with a head rest, rather like a dentist’s chair - “for care of the eyes, the ears and such matters, yes?” Jaime said - as well as an operating table in the centre.

  He gave her a bunch of keys with another of his little bows and she took them with a murmured “thank you” and began to look through the cabinets and was amazed to discover that not a single item she could imagine for the sort of emergencies or treatment she might have to give was missing.

  “Who arranged all this?” she asked curiously, closing the last cabinet door and carefully pinning the small bunch of keys to her belt, in time-honoured chatelaine fashion. “Obviously it was someone who knew what it was all about - ”

  “Oh, yes. We sent to Madrid for advice, for all the equipment, and they arrange it specially. When Señor Garcia does a thing, he does it very well, I promise this!”

  “Like the restaurant roof,” she murmured, and went across to look into the last room in the clinic complex. This was a recovery room, with a comfortable couch, a couple of armchairs, and a desk in the corner on which lay charts and note folders. “So you can keep all necessary records,” Jaime said. “And here, you see, we provide a bag of equipment for you, in case you must see guests in their rooms. It is suitable for you?”

  “Very suitable. Splendidly suitable! I’m near breathle
ss with it. There’re doctors at home who’d give their eyeteeth for such a setup!”

  “Eyeteeth?” he wrinkled his face in puzzlement.

  “It’s no matter,” she said. “Just a phrase - now, if it’s all right with you, Señor - sorry Jaime - I’ll stay here for a bit and get used to the set-up. You’ll be able to contact me if you need me - ” she indicated the phone on the desk, “So I’ll not waste any more of your time. I daresay you’ve a great deal to do up there. Thank you again for your very kind welcome to me - ”

  He was away and out of the door almost before he realized she had made him go, and she breathed a sigh of relief once the door closed behind him; she was going to have to use a good deal of such skill as she had to keep this eager little man at arms’ length. But she smiled a little as she went back to the surgical room; for all his bustle and absurdity there was something very endearing about him. He liked her, that was the main thing; starting a new job in a new country was never easy, and to have someone to turn to for help if she needed it was no bad thing.

  She moved around the rooms for a while, arranging her splendid equipment in an order that more easily fitted her own working patterns, and covering the operating table with a sheet which she found in a well stocked linen cupboard in the recovery room. The table looked rather alarming in its clinical perfection and thinking of the susceptibilities of possibly nervous hotel guests, she felt it looked better decently shrouded.

  Then, she sat down at the desk and taking one of the empty notebooks began to rule it out to make it ready to receive information about such patients as she might get. She was enjoying herself; naturally an orderly person, she found much satisfaction in establishing a brand new clinic with a brand new system - her own - and she whistled softly between her teeth as she worked.

  There was a faint clatter from the surgical room, and she raised her head and listened carefully. Someone was moving about in there, and she moved swiftly, remembering that the cabinets contained several potentially dangerous drugs, and that she had left them all unlocked after investigating them.