The Lonely One Read online

  And then sister came up behind her – Nanny? thought Bridget wryly, still with her nursery simile – then banished the thought as sister said crisply, ‘Now, Nurse Preston, I’m going to start the morning’s dressing round, and you are going to come with me. I will do the dressings, and you will help me, and learn. Listen to what I say, store the things I will tell you in a tidy corner of your mind, and you will be glad of it when your final exams come round. We’ll set the trolleys now, and then start.’

  Together, Sister and Bridget put masks over their mouths and noses – Sister lecturing Bridget severely on the technique of using masks meanwhile – and Bridget stood in awe and admiration as Sister deftly removed steaming bowls and instruments from the huge steriliser in the sterilising room at the end of the ward, using long forceps, moving the things about on the trolleys with the ease of long practice.

  And then they began. From bed to bed, removing stitches, shortening drainage tubes, cleaning infected incisions – the tasks were many, often extremely unpleasant, sometimes decidedly smelly. Bridget was sent scuttling from bedside to sterilising room, clearing used trolleys, emptying receivers of their dirty dressings with averted eyes – they really were so very unpleasant, some of them, particularly the colostomy one. Bridget told herself with heartfelt certainty that she would never again have to ask what a colostomy was. And then Sister would arrive like a young tornado behind her chivvying her to hurry, sending clouds of steam bellying through the room as she laid her next trolley, shooing the now almost exhausted Bridget in front of her.

  The dressings began to get nastier and dirtier. As Sister explained, surgically clean dressings were done first – others, the kind that showed infection quickly, like prostatectomy incisions, were done later. As she stood beside the beds, Bridget began to feel decidedly queasy. Some of the wounds they were dressing really did-look very nasty, some of the smells – of the lotions on the trolleys as much as those of the dressings – so unfamiliar and pungent that her head swam and she wished with all her being that she had been able to eat something at breakfast that morning. Somehow, she told herself hazily, it would have been better if I didn’t feel so horribly empty.

  It was while they were doing a complicated dressing that involved Bridget having to hold a pair of forceps to keep part of the original dressing out of the way while Sister clipped stitches and shortened the red rubber drainage tube in the wound, that the screen behind Bridget parted. She could not look round, even had she wanted to. It was taking all her will power to keep her swimming head up, to keep her shaking hands holding the forceps, to just keep on her feet, so wobbly and sick was she feeling now.

  ‘Morning, Sister! How’s my favourite Sister this morning?’ said a cheerful voice. ‘As beautiful as ever?’

  Sister bridled and her eyes crinkled above her mask as she smiled, and the patient grinned too, relieved at the interruption. He wasn’t really enjoying her ministrations very much.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Simpson,’ he said, equally cheer-fully, as Josh came round from behind Bridget, still bending over her forceps. He peered interestedly at her, above her mask, for Josh was a man who looked at every girl he ever came across as a matter of course, and the clefts in his cheeks deepened suddenly as he grinned at her.

  ‘Well, blow me, if it isn’t the Tiddler!’ he said. ‘First day in the slaughterhouse, is it?’ and he winked at the patient, who winked back, and laughed hoarsely. This was his fifth operation in two years, and he had been in and out of this ward so often that he felt a proprietary interest in the lives of all the people who worked in it.

  ‘Ain’t she a quiet little mouse, Mr Simpson?’ the patient said, grinning at Bridget. ‘Never said a word yet, she ‘asn’t.’

  Bridget felt rather than saw Sister’s displeasure, and the faint frown that appeared between her smooth eyebrows. But Bridget was feeling much too ill to care now, her head whirling as the people and things around her seemed to swirl and dip in sickening waves.

  And then, another nurse put her head round the screens, and said urgently to Sister, ‘Matron’s on the ‘phone, Sister – wants to speak to you at once –’

  And Sister, muttering slightly at the interruption, said, ‘I’ll have to go – Nurse Preston, just hold those forceps like that, and I’ll be right back – sorry, Mr Simpson – and you, Mr Jeffcoate, mind you keep your inquisitive fingers away from that dressing while I’m gone –’ and she slid away between the screen to go purposefully up the ward to the telephone. Josh perched himself on the side of the bed, and with a wink at Mr Jeffcoate, said to Bridget, ‘Well, Tiddler? How goes it?

  Do you think you’ll last the next three years?’

  But his voice came to Bridget from miles away, seeming to echo in her ears, as waves of blackness and speckles seemed to wash over her. She just heard Mr Jeffcoate say indignantly, ‘’ere, watch out will yer –’ before she passed clean out.

  She came round almost immediately, to find Josh holding on to her, gently pulling her away from the bedside, while the indignant Mr Jeffcoate held protective hands across his abdomen. He had only just prevented Bridget from falling heavily on to it, and was still shaking with reaction from the fright she had given him.

  ‘Silly Tiddler – why didn’t you say you’d come over all queer like? It happens to all of us some time or another – didn’t eat any breakfast this morning, I’ll bet you.’

  Bridget leaned against him gratefully, feeling his broad shoulders behind her, his hands on her arms, holding her firm, and managed a watery smile. ‘No –’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t, I am afraid – and then all the dressings –’

  He nodded sympathetically, but she could feel the laughter bubbling in him. ‘I do wish you could have seen Mr Jeffcoate’s face,’ he said, still holding her firm. ‘Thought you were going to squash him flat, he did, didn’t you, Mr J?’ and the patient, now reassured he was safe from any such accident, grinned back.

  At this point, Sister reappeared behind the screens, to look at the little scene that met her eyes with a very definite frown on her face.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ she asked icily. ‘Nurse Preston, I told you to keep that dressing out of the way, and now look what’s happened.’

  ‘Not to worry, Sister,’ Josh said soothingly. ‘No harm done – and the poor little scrap couldn’t help it – fainted she did! No breakfast, and then a lot of dressings – too much for a novice, especially one as tender as this.’

  At the implied rebuke, Sister coloured up hotly under her mask. ‘They have to learn, Mr Simpson, and the sooner the better. We can’t cater to adolescent squeamishness, you know. I’m running a ward, not a girls’ boarding-school, and these nurses must be trained and the patients looked after –’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Josh said, soothingly again. ‘And this girl is a silly little goose – still, I’m sure you’ll make a nurse of her in time, Sister – look, I’ll take her to the office, and get someone to give her a cup of hot milk and a biscuit or something, and then I’ll do the round with you – all right?’ and before she could answer, he pushed Bridget ahead of him and led her shaky steps down the ward towards the office and a chair.

  As Kitty went scurrying off at his command to get Bridget something to eat, he plonked her down in a chair and stood looking down on her bent head.

  ‘Poor old thing,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve had a horrible morning, haven’t you?’

  She nodded wordlessly, and then he squatted on his haunches in front of her and took her chin in his square, warm hand, and Bridget was aware of the faint scent of antiseptic and tobacco on it.

  ‘Tell you what, Tiddler – I’ll buy you a slap-up supper tonight to make sure you’re well stoked up against tomorrow’s horrors – pick you up at the home at nine – you’ll be off at half past eight – and don’t bother to dress up. I can only afford the local fish restaurant, anyway. OK? Take care of yourself till then – ’

  And with a last, friendly grin, he disappeared back into the
ward, leaving Bridget mortified with shame, delighted and excited because he had asked her out, dreading facing Sister again, and wondering what on earth to do about Josh. After all, Bobby had said she’d ‘seen him first’ and so she had. What on earth was she to do?

  Chapter 5

  She got through the rest of the day somehow, dreadfully aware of Sister’s displeasure, more and more aware of the fact that her feet ached with a steady, nagging insistence, worried yet happy when she remembered Josh’s invitation to supper. Had she heard Sister discussing her in the Sister’s dining-room that lunch-time, she would have been even more unhappy.

  ‘I’ve been landed with a right little monkey,’ Sister Youngs confided to the Theatre Sister, with whom she shared a table. ‘One of those quiet, demure ones who looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And do you know what she did? I turn my back for one moment, and she promptly faints in Josh Simpson’s arms!’

  ‘She shows good taste, then,’ Theatre Sister drawled. ‘He’s one of the best-looking men we’ve had here for years.’

  Sister Youngs sniffed. ‘Precisely! If she’d fainted while I’d been there, I’d not have given it another thought – I mean, first day on the wards is a bit of a so-and-so – I know that – but the neat way she waited for someone interesting to faint on! Too smooth by half.’

  Theatre Sister laughed. ‘I’m damned grateful I don’t get ’em fresh from PTS like you ward wallahs do. At least, by the time they’re sent to theatre, the worst of the corners are rubbed off.’

  ‘I’ll rub a few corners off this one, that I will,’ Sister Youngs said grimly, and put a third lump of sugar in her coffee. Sister Youngs was beginning to get decidedly fat, Theatre Sister thought smugly, and passed her a jug of cream, just to help her along. Even at Sister level there were rivalries at the Royal, and Theatre Sister and Sister Youngs had had their respective eyes on the same consultant for the past year now, and it was Sister Youngs who was making most progress with him. Hence the cream.

  Bridget almost fell off duty that night. Even the three hours afternoon off-duty that she had spent in the sitting-room with her shoes off and her feet propped high on a stool, had not relieved her fatigue. Now, at half past eight, she was exhausted.

  The four girls had adjacent rooms in the main Nurses’ Home, and when Bridget toiled her weary way to hers, she found the others were already there, Liz and Judith sprawled on her bed, Bobby sitting at her dressing-table peering at her face in the little mirror.

  ‘I think I am going to die, right here and now,’ Judith said dramatically, lying with arms outstretched.

  ‘Well, have the decency to do it on your own bed,’ Liz said, pushing her away irritably. ‘Why do you have to lie around on Bridget’s bed?’

  ‘Same reason you do,’ Judith said. ‘My room looks like Paddy’s market – I haven’t even made my bed yet.’

  ‘You’ll have Home Sister on to you like a ton of bricks, if she spots that,’ Bobby said from the mirror. ‘My God, just look at my hands! They’ll be like a washerwoman’s after another day like today. I’ve done nothing but scrub and clean and mop floors and generally act like a char – ’ Then she grinned reminiscently. ‘Not that Casualty doesn’t have its compensations. There’re some very nice men about – ’

  Bridget, sitting on the only remaining chair in her room, easing her shoes off, took a deep breath at this.

  ‘Josh Simpson turned up on my ward this morning,’ she said, her head down, apparently absorbed in undoing her shoes. ‘Asked me out for supper tonight – coming here at nine, he said.’

  There was a brief silence, then Liz said, ‘Well, get our mouse! First day on the wards and she gets herself a date! I must study your technique, sweetie!’

  Bridget looked up miserably at Bobby. She didn’t know whether to apologise, or say she wouldn’t meet Josh – though she felt that would be discourteous in the extreme, apart from her own inclinations – and was relieved and rather surprised to see that Bobby was smiling with a cat-like satisfaction.

  ‘Well, now, there’s a coincidence!’ she drawled. ‘David – you remember David, Bridget? – he asked me out to supper. Picking me up here at nine o’clock as ever is. We’ll have to make up a foursome, eh, Bridie, my love?’

  And Bridget smiled in relief. She had been so afraid that Bobby would be cross, would withdraw the warmth and friendship that Bridget treasured so much, also afraid she would not be able to see Josh, which she wanted to do very much indeed. And now Bobby wasn’t a bit cross, and she could still see Josh. Even her feet seemed to ache less, suddenly, so happy was she.

  Judith grinned across at them, and said admiringly, ‘I don’t know how you do it, so help me I don’t. I could no more keep a date tonight than fly to the moon. Me for a hot, hot bath and blissful bed – ’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Liz, and slipped off the bed to stretch and yawn hugely before padding away to her own room. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a date with Ken for the day after tomorrow – he asked me this afternoon when I met him in the corridor on the way to dispensary – there’s a lot to be said for errand running – at least you meet people and get away from those God-awful women in the ward – ’ night, you lot. See you at breakfast,’ and she went, followed by Judith yawning even more widely than Liz, if that were possible.

  ‘I’ll change fast,’ Bobby said cheerfully, grinning at Bridget. ‘Put a move on, Bridie, my love, and we’ll go down together to meet the men – ’

  Bridget felt suddenly very shy indeed as the two of them came down the stairs twenty minutes later to see Josh and the tall, lean David leaning against the radiator waiting for them. It was Bobby, looking particularly feminine, as only she could, in tight black ski pants and a heavy red-and-yellow sweater, who ran gaily down the stairs towards them, smiling and sparkling in a way that made Bridget almost ache with envy. If only she had Bobby’s gay insouciance, and her social ability, she told herself miserably, following her. Even her choice of clothes was so good, Bridget thought, painfully aware of her own sedate green skirt and matching twin set. But Josh grinned at her and said, ‘You two look charming – much nicer than you do in uniform, and that’s saying a lot, because you both look very nice in all that starch and those sexy black stockings.’ And Bridget felt better, grateful to him for the ready understanding in him that was only slightly masked by his easy charm.

  Almost without discussion, they went out of the building together, taking it for granted they would be a foursome. It was unfortunate for Bridget that Sister Youngs met them on the steps outside, as she came late off duty, and noticed with her sharp eye for such things that it was Josh who appeared to be squiring Bridget. The meeting only confirmed her belief that Bridget was a sly-boots who knew just how to set about getting what she wanted.

  They spent an hilarious evening. Bobby and Josh were both in fine form, capping each other’s jokes and sallies with ever more outrageous comments, sparkling at each other in a way that made Bridget giggle helplessly, even made the silent David smile. Bridget soon realised that David was not a man to talk much – his moroseness at the party had not been entirely due to the fact that he was drunk. He was just a man who talked little, who sat in smooth silence, observing, missing little of what went on about him. As the evening progressed, and they ate fish and chips and huge pickled onions – which Bobby and Josh both seemed to adore, even spending a noisy five minutes trying to see which of them could get the most of one particularly large onion, stuck up on a fork between them – David and Bridget became more and more like an audience, rather than participants in the evening’s entertainment.

  Bridget didn’t mind this a bit. She was more than happy to sit in a bemused and fatigued silence, picking at her meal, watching the others – particularly Josh. She watched the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed – which was often – the way the light reflected off the fine hair on the back of his hands, the shape of the square, well-kept nails, the way his cheeks deepened into clefts when he smiled or spoke. And
almost without realising it, she began to feel that this attractive man was the sort of man she liked more than any other sort. She stole a glance at the silent David, at his deep-set eyes, his narrow mouth, unsmiling and shut as tight as a trap, at the faint blue shadows under his eyes and on his temples, and thought confusedly. ‘How can two men be so unlike? I wish I could be like Bobby, and talk and giggle with Josh like she does – ’ But she was content just to sit and watch.

  When it was time to get back to the hospital – and it was more than the curfew that decided this, for even Bobby was beginning to wilt at the end of her very long, hard day – they all walked back together. But it was Bobby who put her hand companionably into the crook of Josh’s arm, and Bridget who found herself walking beside David.

  And when they stood on the steps of the Home, there was a silent, slightly embarrassed moment, until Bobby, moving very imperceptibly nearer to Josh, put her face up towards his and said softly, ‘I must reek of pickled onions. Is it very bad – or can’t you tell, because you’re in the same state yourself?’ And Josh, finding this very pretty face so conveniently near to his, and being a man of very friendly tendencies, accepted the clearly implied invitation, and kissed Bobby very thoroughly. And Bridget, seeing Bobby’s arms go up round his neck, seeing the dark head she had come to like so much so near to Bobby’s fair one, felt a stab of almost physical pain and unhappiness.