The second time I saw him, and the first time we really met, I was sat reading on a bench in the garden of the crypt behind the hospital. Two well-polished shoes came into view, and when I looked up it was the young man with too many teeth, which he was flashing at me, though at least his hands were out of his pockets.
‘I feel I must give my apologies,’ he said and offered his hand.
I stood up to take it, caught off-guard, and glanced around, worried it might be meant for someone behind me.
His black whiskers were groomed with surgical precision, but it was his voice that felled me. Something clicked into place when I heard it; the sound of it cleared my vision, or blurred it, perhaps. Low and smooth, it had the resonance and authority of an older man’s; I can only describe it as gravel and honey.
‘Oh, what you are apologising for?’ I gave him my hand briefly, and snatched it back as fast as I could.
‘For offending you. That was never my intention. You were commanding a group of probationers as if about to go into battle, and Dr Davenport said that you had a reputation—’
‘Oh! A reputation? What reputation?’ This worried me. With hindsight I can see I was strolling too easily into his little trap.
‘In fact, he said he’d put money on you being the next matron.’
‘Really?’
It was like shooting fish in a barrel, and I was a big clumsy stupid fish who’d never held a boy’s hand. I was sweating under his flattery, and not just a gentle glow that brought colour to my cheeks – the skin of my face was wet. He must have noticed.
He had the longest black lashes I had ever seen, even on a woman. How wasted they were on a man like that, I thought, curling up and fluttering when by rights they belonged on a baby deer.
Thomas Lancaster came from a village near Bristol, had worked for two years in Edinburgh after completing his studies, and was now a surgeon at the London Hospital. As he was telling me this, I noticed that two young doctors had stopped at the gates to watch us. They were sniggering and whispering to each other and I sensed I was the victim of a cruel trick. Only much later did I realise that one of them was Richard Lovett, who would be Thomas’s best man at our wedding.
‘Wager, is it?’ I said.
‘I’m sorry?’
I gestured towards the gentlemen, and he turned to look at them, then back at me, and rolled his eyes.
‘Again, let me apologise. I’m afraid they thought me bold for approaching you. Truth be told, I think they are frightened of women, especially nurses. I told them I was going to ask your name.’
‘My name is Chapman.’
‘Right. My name is—’
‘You’ve told me your name. And you’ve already apologised, in case you’ve forgotten that too.’
‘Yes, I have, haven’t I? Do you know, Chapman, I think you are making me nervous.’ He put a palm to his chest. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. May I ask your Christian name?’
The cheek of it. Hands in pockets and asking for Christian names. He tried to make my eyes meet his, and in response mine rolled around like marbles. His were intense, as if they were boring holes in my body out of which my secret thoughts would fly like paper messages that he would catch and read. I was not familiar with men socially. I only knew how to be shy or rude.
‘Sister. My name to you will always be “Sister Chapman”.’ I chose rude. I walked past him with my chin in the air, my book clasped to my chest, and didn’t say goodbye. I don’t think I exhaled for at least five minutes after our encounter.
After that, he was everywhere. He made a point of seeking me out and talking to me as if we were on familiar terms. I wasn’t sure how I had given him this impression. He wouldn’t let me walk past him without him saying something, however inane.
‘Good morning, Sister Chapman.’ Or, ‘Good afternoon, Sister Chapman.’ Or, ‘Weather’s a bit gloomy, don’t you agree?’
It was hugely embarrassing because the other nurses would watch, open-mouthed, wondering how on earth we knew each other. Everywhere I went, there he was, popping up or leaping into view with those ridiculous lashes.
I had made a few observations, mainly so that I could reason with myself when I found that I kept thinking of the toothy young man. He talked far too loudly and had a habit of making himself the centre of attention, wherever he was. His eyes were too pale and too feline, and they were overly large; he didn’t blink often enough, to the point where more than once I worried how dry his eyes must be. Even his walk irked me: he was a strutting peacock of a man, with his chest puffed up and his head tilted. Whenever I saw him with nurses, which was often, I thought him a creep; he stood too close to them, making them blush or act coy, and that in itself caused me to wince. I thought him a tart and expected him to plough through the younger nurses like a donkey at harvest time. I was sure Nurse Mullens and he would seek each other out. She was exceptionally fair and seemed to be in nursing solely to find herself a suitable husband. I overheard girls talking about him in the lounge and couldn’t understand why my insides did a loop when I heard his name. They discussed how charming he was, how elegant, how tall, and wasn’t he kind and softly spoken. When he asked for assistance, didn’t he ask sweetly! Another said she’d heard he was the son of a baronet.
That he had fluttered those lashes in my direction did flatter me, but I was not a girl who was commonly described as fair. I had to assume he was this way with all girls, and I was no girl, for by then I was thirty.
*
One night at the end of April, a fire broke out in a storeroom behind the hospital pharmacy. Thomas and his friend, Richard Lovett, were still trapped inside when the fire engines arrived. The receiving room had to be evacuated, causing chaos on Whitechapel Road, but the fire itself was put out quickly enough. Dr Lovett had somehow been knocked unconscious – they assumed by a falling object – so Thomas had thrown him over his shoulder and tried to flee. But one of Thomas’s trouser legs had caught fire. He was admitted to one of the men’s wards and I heard that his leg was swollen and blistered but would recover with some scarring. He was considered quite the hero for carrying his friend out. Dr Lovett suffered no meaningful injuries. He said that one minute he’d been discussing something with Thomas and the next he was unconscious, with no idea of what could have fallen on him.
I struggled to know what I should do. I wanted to go and see Thomas, since ignoring someone who had made such an effort to be friendly seemed indifferent and cruel, but I was too shy. Instead, I took to walking past his ward pretending I was heading somewhere else. It took me three days of these engineered laps to build up the confidence to go and see him. I waited until my evening shift had finished. It was quiet in the ward and dark. I nodded at the ward sister on night duty, who smiled knowingly, nodded back and then carried on working at her desk.
Thomas looked the picture of tranquillity lying there, and with no obnoxious teeth on show. He seemed very young like that, and I felt embarrassed at being there, so I went to sneak away.
‘The lengths a man will go to simply to discover a nurse’s name,’ he said.
When I turned back, his eyes were wide open and he had that broad smile again, the one that said he had rarely been told ‘no’.
‘That was a joke, of course,’ he said, leaning up on one elbow. ‘Only a madman would set himself on fire to gain a woman’s attention. You may be intriguing, but you’re not Helen of Troy.’
I found this funny habit he had of insulting me most charming in the beginning. It made me laugh, and certainly caught my attention, but he would use this in the months to come to confuse me and deny that he had been cruel.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
‘Well, you can tell that witches were women! All that fuss about being burned at the stake – it’s really not half as bad as they made out.’
He was in obvious agony; he was sweating and the ward was cool.
‘At least with your strange idea of humour you can amuse yourself,’ I said.
‘My father was a collector: antiques, mementoes, art, anything he could bring back from his travels. At home in the main hall there’s an old cracked vase from Ancient Greece, and on it there’s a chorus-line of girls, for lack of a better description. There’s a girl at the back, taller than the rest, with long black hair and dark eyes, and she’s carrying a water jug on her shoulder. The others are smiling, ambling gaily among the reeds, happy in their mundane work, but my girl is serious, as if she’s annoyed at finding herself stuck at the back, tripping over the others who are in her way. I could swear it’s you, Sister Chapman – an exact likeness. I wish I could show you. My father said he would thrash me if I broke it, but I’ve always been drawn to it, ever since I was a boy, and now I know why.’
Not knowing what to say or do, I smiled back, an imbecilic smile, awkward and clumsy, but I needn’t have worried, because Thomas knew how to steer an empty vessel.
‘Come sit with me, will you, Sister Chapman?’ he said. ‘I would be most grateful, because I don’t think I’ll be sleeping any time soon.’
*
I was beyond caring about anything when Thomas intruded into my life. I had let my heart take the lead in a fit of optimism, and look where that had found me: I was near broken. I had been raised to believe that hard work and good behaviour would be rewarded, but I had learned that being kind, forgiving and well behaved, living in denial of one’s desires and impulses so as not to offend came with no reward at all, except for martyrs who subscribed to their pain. I would not wait until I died to find out if blind obedience would earn me a place in heaven. I had wasted enough time, now I would do what I wanted – within reason, of course. This new rule applied to Thomas, and we did what we wanted indecently quickly. I even shocked him with my newfound eagerness.
It all started while he was still in hospital, when I had gone to sit with him again. He pulled me towards him and kissed me and I let him. It might not have happened if he’d chosen a different time or day. I might have screamed or pulled back and run away, but I didn’t. I would be lying if I said I felt passion when his wet squirming tongue forced its way into my mouth, but I didn’t stop him. Soon, I did everything but lie under him – I had no intention of repeating my mother’s mistakes. Not that he didn’t try, with the frenzied begging of a spoiled schoolboy who wanted to open his presents on Christmas Eve. He would sneak me into his house in Chelsea and hide me in his bedroom, where we drank brandy. The first time he offered me laudanum I refused, but next time I tried it and made a good friend. It would help me relax, he said. It did more than that. It made me forget, stopped me thinking with such clear edges; it was like breathing in a dream.
I asked him how many nurses he had spirited away to his bedroom before me.
‘None,’ he replied.
‘I don’t believe you. You think me a fool.’
‘All right… None to this house, from this hospital… Does that answer suit you better?’
‘That’s more like it,’ I said. ‘You needn’t furnish me with the details, but please don’t presume me an idiot. I’ve seen too much to pretend men are not painfully predictable when it comes to their urges.’
‘You shouldn’t base your expectations of men on what you’ve seen at the hospital, Chapman. You’re seeing only animals there; animals at their most desperate, injured or dying. Try not to think of them as people – the ones at the London barely are – but as a mass, a means to an end. I do. As far as I’m concerned, they exist purely to help me become an accomplished surgeon. These people actually seem to have purpose when you think of them as an entity of sorts.’
But what motivation did I have to become an accomplished nurse? There would be no additional money or glory, only martyrdom. I could work and hope to take on more responsibility in my future years, receive better accommodation, become more senior but the gains would be immaterial. A nurse could work herself to death, and often did being so close to infection and disease, and she could still die poor. I would have to trust that I would reap my rewards in the next life, but I had trouble believing I would be invited upstairs. It was different for surgeons. They could become rich, be admired, and they were respected, which was a reward in itself. Rare women like Matron Luckes and Florence Nightingale were already upper-middle class when they chose their professions, so they would never have to worry about affording food for the table or coal for the fireplace if their career failed them; they could simply retreat to their family estates.
Thomas was fun, brash, playful and confident – all useful antidotes to the state of gloomy self-punishment that was then consuming me. The old Susannah would have spurned his cocky advances; she would have squealed and run, forever destined to be the prig, and Thomas would have moved on to the next nurse, but I wanted to keep him, like a pet. He adored me. Even when I was his shameful little secret and he’d tug at my clothes with what seemed like so many hands and beg me to let them wander, I didn’t give in, much though I wanted to. I never got to meet Mrs Wiggs at that point, though she would pester us by knocking at the door, and I would giggle and wince as he shouted at her to go away.
‘What can she think of you, hiding nurses in your bedroom?’ I asked him once.
‘Nothing! She worships me – I can do no wrong. It will be you who is cast as the temptress,’ he replied, laughing. ‘You must be a very wicked woman indeed, to seduce a young man so unused to the big city.’ He used to say that sort of thing in between trying to get his tongue past the boundaries of my clothes. It was like being attacked by an eel.
Then he would put me in a cab and I’d ride back to the hospital still squirming from the state he’d put me in, desperate to let him in, my blood thick like oil, my veins swollen, my skin hot. Was this the badness my grandmother had claimed to see inside me? Why was it a bad thing to feel pleasure? Why should I be obliged to remain lonely and miserable?
I did worry he would lose patience, but Thomas was from a class of men so unused to rejection that the effect this had was to drive him insane. Even on the wards he would sniff round me like a dog, desperate to crawl up my legs.
The gossip spread like wildfire and I was on borrowed time before it finally got to Matron. The other nurses whispered and I caught sly looks, but I didn’t care. I had become a terrible nurse: distracted, indifferent and uncaring, never doing more than the absolute minimum, for what was the point?
Thomas talked a lot about himself, his favourite subject, but I never had much to say, so it worked rather well. I thought him sweet and myself clever. I believed I was letting him do all the talking, which meant I rarely had to disclose anything about myself. He asked about my family, and I told him the old scarlet fever story, that my grandparents had raised me and now everyone was dead. I had no one. Poor, vulnerable little me. I never lied and he didn’t ask again.
He told me all about growing up in a house called Abbingdale Hall, a large Georgian mansion in the village of Wraxham, a few miles outside Bristol. To me he may as well have been describing a palace. It had a small farm, an orangery and an aviary. He mentioned once that there were twenty servants and my head almost snapped off. Twenty! I struggled to imagine what on earth these people could be doing all day. There were arable fields where crops were grown, pastures on which cattle grazed, and tenants that maintained hedgerows, so they had to employ a farmer and his family to look after the land. He talked of formal gardens, terraces, rose gardens, ornamental flowerbeds, and there was even an arboretum. I worried he would sense my newfound lust was more than a little influenced by his wealth.
‘My father called it paradise,’ he said. ‘Wild garlic grows under the trees. It’s quite beautiful.’
It certainly sounded like paradise to me. Thomas’s childhood was a world away from mine.
One evening in his bedroom, he said, ‘When we are married and I have established myself as England’s greatest surgeon, we can retire and live there. You know, I will inherit the lot once my mother dies. There is Helen, my twin sister, a
nd she’ll have to be well looked after, of course. I consider myself a forward-thinking man. I’ll give her enough to keep her happy – she does like to order and organise. Little Helen! She has always been such a busy little hen and she’s really rather good at it. However, I am the male heir, and nothing can change that.’
He was saying everything I wanted to hear, but I was sure he was teasing me. Of course he had no intention of marrying me. Why would he?
‘And we shall have Queen Victoria to tea, and I will grow angel wings. As if someone like you would marry someone like me! It makes no sense. While I’m grateful for your flattery, it doesn’t mean I will let you insult me.’
I felt a twinge of guilt when I saw how crushed he was by my reaction. ‘I take it you have other plans?’ he said.
‘You think I am desperate for a husband? That I’m an old maid of thirty? Well, I have ambitions of my own. When I am finally released from the hospital after my mandatory four years are done, I will work in the colonies. You are not the only one who seeks adventure and success. Africa, or India, I think… I have always wanted to live in sunnier climes.’
I had no such plans, of course. It had been Aisling who had talked of these things; these were her ideas I heard coming from my lips.
‘Don’t go to India, Chapman. It may sound charming, but, trust me, there’s nothing romantic about a bout of dysentery. And then there’s the malaria.’
‘Is that your idea of a proposal? Marry me – it’s better than dysentery?’
He burst out laughing, which only made me angry. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘I’m imagining you in a village full of lepers. I’m not sure it’s for you, Chapman, considering your feelings on nursing the natives at the London. You know, you should stop getting in your own way and avoiding the inevitable for no good reason other than pride. Marry me! Despite our origins, we are too similar a breed to stay apart.’
‘I’m glad you think my ideas amusing. I may look like a desperate spinster to you, Dr Lancaster, but even I would demand a better proposal than that.’
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