A Daughter's Gift

by Maggie Hope

  ‘I must get you home and into bed,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Who is your doctor?’ A fever was not something to be trifled with, it could be anything and the thought of what it might be filled Elizabeth with dread.

  ‘No, no doctor,’ said Mrs Anderson. ‘Just let me rest awhile. I’ll be right as rain after, you’ll see. I’m never ill, never had a day off work in my life. I’m just tired.’

  She was still protesting in a weak, fretful sort of way when the shop bell tinkled.

  ‘Oh, blow!’ said Elizabeth. ‘A minute more and I’d have had the closed sign up.’

  ‘Go and see whoever it is, I’ll be perfectly all right,’ insisted Mrs Anderson.

  ‘Sure?’ Elizabeth didn’t like leaving her.

  ‘Go on.’

  It was a woman who’d come to pick material for one of the new skirts. She hovered over them, choosing first one design and then another. ‘What do you think?’ she twittered, and Elizabeth forced herself to apply her mind to the choice though she felt like screaming at her to get on with it or go away. Her ears were attuned to the back room, listening for any sound from her employer.

  She unrolled a fine tweed, picked off the shelf at random. ‘What do you think of this?’ she asked, her fingers smoothing the cloth. ‘I can have it made up by next Monday, madam,’ she said, when suddenly there was a crash from the back room, a smothered scream and then silence. Leaving the customer in the shop Elizabeth ran through the doorway, brushing past her chair with the half-hemmed skirt, knocking it heedlessly to the floor.

  ‘Mrs Anderson! Mrs Anderson!’

  The figure on the floor was still and steam was rising from her skirt and one leg, which was sticking out where the skirt had ridden up as she fell. Elizabeth knelt by her side and lifted her head. Her eyes were closed, she was white as a sheet. Elizabeth bent her ear to her mouth. Mrs Anderson was breathing; barely, but breathing. Thank God she wasn’t dead.

  ‘Can I help?’

  The customer was in the doorway, craning her head forward, avid with curiosity.

  ‘Get a doctor, now!’ shouted Elizabeth and the woman scuttled away, the shop door opening and closing behind her. Elizabeth turned back to her employer. She glanced at her leg. Mrs Anderson had been wearing cotton stockings under her long skirt but still she had scalded her shins. The kettle was lying on its side on the floor in a pool of still steaming water. When it boiled Mrs Anderson must have felt well enough to make the tea. The pot was still clasped in her hand, the spout broken where it had hit the floor. Gently, Elizabeth removed it. She found a cushion and put it under the unconscious woman’s head. She was never so pleased to see anyone in her life as the bustling figure of the doctor with his black bag as he came through the door.

  ‘Come away, come away, give me room to look at the patient,’ he snapped, barely looking at Elizabeth. He took only a few minutes over his examination then folded his stethoscope into his bag.

  ‘I thought as much. You’ll have to keep her warm. Plenty of fluids to drink, no solids. Keep her in bed. Get her regular doctor to call on her.’ He was almost to the door, Elizabeth watching open-mouthed when he turned. ‘The burn is only first-degree. A cold boracic lotion dressing should do the trick. Should I send the bill to the shop?’

  ‘But, Doctor, what is it?’

  ‘Influenza of course! People are going down like ninepins. You should engage a nurse, she’ll need proper barrier nursing. But her own doctor will see to that, I have enough to do with my own patients.’

  Elizabeth was left staring after him as he rushed through the shop and banged the door behind him. She stood for a moment, trying to organise her whirling thoughts, then she went outside and called a cab, getting the driver to wait outside for a moment as she wrapped Mrs Anderson in a roll of warm cloth from the shop. She got the driver to help her out with the sick woman who was now recovered enough to totter to the cab, her weight supported by Elizabeth and the driver.

  ‘What’s wrong with her, lass?’ he asked. ‘She looks drunk to me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ lied Elizabeth. ‘Been working too hard, I expect.’

  The next few days were hectic for her. She found it was impossible to hire a nurse, they were all engaged as the strange fever which was so much stronger than any flu Elizabeth had ever known raged through the town and, according to the papers, through the country and most of the world as well. ‘A plague to equal the Black Death!’ the headlines screeched from every news board.

  ‘I don’t know what the Black Death was, Jenny hasn’t done it yet in history,’ she said to Laura at the door of Mrs Anderson’s house in West Auckland Road. Elizabeth had got a letter to Laura by a passing urchin. Now her landlady stood outside the house, handkerchief over her mouth and nose at Elizabeth’s insistence.

  ‘For the love of God, don’t let Jenny come here,’ begged Elizabeth. ‘You’ll look after her, won’t you? But I can’t abandon Mrs Anderson now, poor soul.’

  ‘’Course I will. You mind yourself, though. What would the lass do if you caught it … if anything happened to you, like?’

  ‘Make Jenny eat up her vegetables, get her an orange every day. I’ll pay you, I will, Laura. I don’t want you to be out of pocket.’

  ‘Don’t be so soft!’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll call round most days if I can, see how you’re getting on.’

  What would she do without her friend? Elizabeth asked herself every day. Her thoughts were clouded with worry all the time as she tended to Mrs Anderson, trying to get her to take barley water with a lemon squeezed in it and some sugar, sponging her down when her temperature threatened to burst through the top of the thermometer. She dressed her scalded leg; poulticed her chest with hot linseed when the infection caused congestion of the lungs; listened through the long hours of the night as she talked brightly to her dead son in her delirium; wept for her.

  Most mornings there was a knock at the door and when she opened it there was Laura, stepping two paces back from the basket she’d left on the top step, anxious eyes showing her relief when Elizabeth answered the door.

  ‘You’ll make yourself ill next,’ she said. ‘Is the old woman no better then?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Elizabeth would reply. ‘How’s Jenny?’

  ‘Ah, she’s fine, don’t worry about the lass,’ Laura said. ‘She’s helping me now. Mona’s caught it, you know. She’s badly, poor bairn. They’ve closed the school for the time being, did you know?’

  ‘No. A good thing, though. Give Jenny my love and tell her I said she should be good and help all she can. I’ll see her soon.’

  ‘Aye, I’d best be off. Ta-ra.’

  The doctor came in some days. A dapper little man, this one, though with a permanent expression of anxiety. ‘You’re doing a fine job, Miss Nelson,’ he said. ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a nurse? You’d make a good one, I’m sure.’

  Elizabeth gave a noncommittal answer but when he had gone, depression settled on her. ‘Oh, yes, I have thought of having a career in nursing,’ she said aloud as she minced beef to make beef tea for Mrs Anderson and a cottage pie for herself. ‘I have indeed. Once it was a bright future for me.’

  Mrs Anderson was showing signs of recovering. When Elizabeth took the tray up to her room, with the beef tea and a couple of pieces of toast and a rose from the garden in a bud vase, Mrs Anderson was awake, pale and wan-looking but with her eyes open and properly focused. Her temperature had broken.

  ‘Oh! You’re better,’ Elizabeth cried. ‘Isn’t that grand?’

  Mrs Anderson smiled. ‘I feel like a wrung out dishcloth,’ she confided. ‘But, yes, I can think now without bringing on a migraine.’

  Elizabeth put an arm under her shoulders and helped her to sit up, propping her up with pillows. ‘Come on then, you’ll have to eat some of this, that’s the only way to get your strength back.’

  Mrs Anderson started well enough but after a few mouthfuls fell back on her pillows. ‘I’m as weak as a kitten,’ she confided. Elizabeth per
suaded her to take a little more but then gave up. Her employer was going to be all right now, time would heal her, she reckoned.

  ‘What about the shop?’

  Elizabeth smiled at the question. It was a sure sign that recovery had set in.

  ‘Closed. I had the shutters put up and a notice on the door. There was nothing else I could do. It’s not the only business in Darlington that’s closed because of this flu. Quite a lot are. All over the country too, apparently.’

  But Mrs Anderson seemed to have lost interest. She had slumped down on her pillows and her eyelids were drooping. After a moment, Elizabeth quietly left the room.

  ‘I might be coming home shortly,’ she said the next time Laura called. ‘Mrs Anderson is a lot better, she’s going to get over it.’

  ‘Just as well,’ her friend answered. ‘Jenny is beginning to fret for you. Moping around the place, she is, since the school closed.’

  ‘I think she could probably come here with me for now. I’ll ask if that’s all right.’

  But it wasn’t to be, though the doctor agreed the danger of infection was past and Mrs Anderson said she would be delighted to have the girl. The news that Elizabeth had been dreading came by messenger, a neighbour’s lad. Both Laura and Jenny were down with the dreaded plague.

  She had to go, of course. Now that the epidemic was almost over the doctor managed to procure a nurse for Mrs Anderson and Elizabeth was free to go back to Albert Hill. She ran all the way. The next bus wasn’t due for an hour and her nerves couldn’t bear the wait. Her heart beat painfully against her ribs, she had a stitch in her side by the time she got to North Road and had to lean against a wall, gasping for breath.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to Jenny, nothing. She never gets a cold, never mind anything worse. It’s a mistake. By the time I get there she’ll be fine.’ Elizabeth repeated it over and over to herself like a litany. Then she began to pray. ‘Dear Lord, Jenny hasn’t lived yet, you wouldn’t be so cruel – no, don’t let anything happen to Jenny.’ The bells of St Cuthbert’s sounded in the distance, faint and muted but nevertheless Elizabeth recognised the tolling for the departed and despair descended on her like a cloud. It was like an omen, she thought. It was an omen.

  Her hand trembled as she turned the brass handle on the front door of the boarding house. There was a red mist of fear before her eyes, she was so terrified of what she might find inside. She rushed up to the bedroom under the eaves which she shared with Jenny, opened the door to see the still figure on the bed. A very still figure. Elizabeth’s heart dropped, she felt all her fears were realised.

  ‘Laura? Laura, is that you?’

  The voice from the figure was weak and fretful but very much alive. Elizabeth rushed to the bed and gathered her sister in her arms, rocking her, crying over her.

  Oh, thank God, thank God!’ she sobbed and Jenny struggled to be free. But the tensions of the last days, combined with the shock of the news that morning, had strung Elizabeth’s nerves to breaking point.

  ‘Let go, let go, Elizabeth! What’s the matter with you?’ Jenny at last succeeded in freeing herself and Elizabeth sat back and laughed and laughed.

  ‘I thought … I thought you were … I thought you had this awful influenza,’ she managed to say in between hiccuping with laughter. ‘That’s what he said. You know, the boy from next door.’

  ‘Billy? He’s daft that lad. No, I had a bilious attack, me and Laura. It was the pies we had for supper last night – they were bought from the shop because Laura hadn’t had time to bake. I was sick. I hate being sick, Elizabeth, it leaves a funny taste in your mouth.’ Jenny pulled a face to show her disgust.

  ‘You don’t feel sick now?’ she asked anxiously, unable to believe that her fears, her headlong dash across the town, had all been unnecessary. She was staring into Jenny’s face for signs of illness.

  ‘No. I’ve had a sleep and I want to get up now but Laura said I should stay in bed. I don’t have to, do I, Elizabeth?’

  ‘We’ll see. Maybe this evening it will be all right. I’d better go and see how Laura is now.’

  ‘That Billy, he always gets things wrong,’ Laura said. She too was in her bedroom but in the process of dressing, buttoning up her frock. ‘I’ll tell that woman in the pie shop next time I see her,’ she vowed. ‘Me and the bairn were as sick as dogs, we were. But now I think I could just do with a nice cup of tea.’

  ‘I’ll make it,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I can stay here now, Mrs Anderson is over the worst and has a nurse in to see to her. I’ll call back in the morning, see if I’m needed.’

  Next morning, Elizabeth woke after sleeping deeply for twelve hours with a feeling of happy well-being. She lay on her back and stretched her arms above her head, yawning widely. Everything would get back to normal now.

  She was in the kitchen cooking scrambled eggs for breakfast when the postman came. There was a letter for her from Morton Main in Mrs Wearmouth’s spidery handwriting. Elizabeth gazed at it a moment, wondering if it was a mistake. Mrs Wearmouth did keep in touch but usually through her niece.

  ‘You’ll never know what it says unless you open it,’ Laura advised. She was back to her old self today, happy because her husband was expected back at the weekend.

  Elizabeth opened the letter, her eyes skimming over the words. Then she put it down on the kitchen table.

  ‘Well?’ asked Laura.

  ‘Our Jimmy’s dead,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He died of the influenza.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  THERE WAS NO funeral in the chapel at Morton Main for Jimmy Nelson. How could there be? Elizabeth asked herself. Midshipman James Nelson had died at sea, Mrs Wearmouth had said.

  ‘But he was too young to go to sea,’ Elizabeth protested to Laura. ‘How could he die at sea? He was only sixteen.’

  There were many questions she wanted answers to, her mind was awhirl with them. She wrote to the Officers’ Training College at Dartmouth; that was the only address she had for there had been no letters from Jimmy in her time at Darlington. She supposed if he had written it would have been to Stand Alone Farm. No, Jimmy was ashamed of her over that scandal at the Hall, she was aware of that, he had a puritan streak in him. Jimmy was dead. She had to remind herself of the fact over and over again.

  In the meantime, Elizabeth was kept pretty busy with Mrs Anderson and the shop. She had opened up again and was struggling to get through the full order book of bespoke costumes which were evidently all the rage in the more prosperous circles of Darlington society after the austerity of the war.

  But Mrs Anderson was slow to get her strength back. She seemed to have lost interest in the shop and almost never called in. When Elizabeth took the books to show her she skimmed through them, her lack of interest obvious.

  ‘You do the banking, Elizabeth,’ she would say. Or, ‘You can go to the wholesalers yourself, can’t you, Elizabeth? You have better taste than I do in any case. I have every confidence in you.’

  Sometimes Elizabeth felt like screaming at her that she had a life of her own, she had her own grieving to do, her own affairs to sort out. But she didn’t. Mrs Anderson had been good enough to give her an opportunity to make something of herself and Elizabeth was grateful. She was not prepared however for what her employer had to say to her one day when she went to West Auckland Road to report on the business and there was another visitor, Mrs Anderson’s solicitor, Mr Kennedy. For once there was a tinge of colour in the older woman’s face, a sparkle of interest in her eyes.

  ‘Come in, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘You know Mr Kennedy, don’t you?’

  Elizabeth nodded and took the solicitor’s outstretched hand. ‘Yes, of course, how are you?’ she murmured.

  ‘I have invited him here today, Elizabeth, because I asked him to draw up the papers and now he needs both our signatures.’

  ‘Papers?’ Elizabeth was mystified.

  ‘Yes. For a partnership. I have decided to make you a full partner in recognition of your good w
ork and all you did for me in my recent illness. I will always be grateful to you for that. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

  Elizabeth sat down suddenly. She couldn’t believe it. ‘Thank you,’ she said as though she were accepting a cup of tea or a biscuit. But she didn’t know what else to say. She listened in a daze as Mr Kennedy explained the legal phrases in the partnership document, taking very little in. When at last he came to the end she signed her name where he indicated and watched as Mrs Anderson did the same.

  ‘There now, my dear,’ Mrs Anderson said as she put down the pen. ‘I hope you’ll be very happy as a partner in Anderson’s. I’m sure you will be – you deserve to be at any rate. Now, the first thing I would like you to do,’ she smiled, ‘if you agree, of course, is to look out for an assistant. I will not be coming in to the shop on a fulltime basis again, I think, and you will need more help.’

  ‘Oh, but surely, when you feel better—’

  ‘No. I have decided to go into a sort of semi-retirement. I know the shop is in good hands now, I can afford to relax a little.’

  Elizabeth nodded in understanding. Mrs Anderson had worked hard for years to build up the business, she knew.

  ‘Congratulations, Miss Nelson,’ Mr Kennedy broke into the conversation. He shook her hand again. ‘Now don’t worry, everything is arranged at the bank. All business cheques will require both your signatures, it’s perfectly normal.’ Now that the main business was over he was brusque, putting papers away in his attaché case and rising to his feet.

  Elizabeth was still in a state of mild shock, she simply smiled and nodded.

  When eventually she found herself back on the street she walked back to the shop feeling unsure what her reaction to it all was. But once there, after taking off her hat and coat and hanging them up in the back room, she paused and gazed around her. She was a property owner now, a businesswoman, she realised. Her hard work would now be for her own benefit as much as Mrs Anderson’s. Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, she thought suddenly. If you could see me now! And she sat down suddenly on the chair where she did all her hand-sewing and wept, hard bitter sobs which racked her body, deep, gulping breaths which hurt her lungs.