Eva Moves the Furniture

by Margot Livesey

  Working in the operating theatre was part of every nurse’s training and I had duly put in my time there before I met Samuel, but I never did grow comfortable with this aspect of nursing; my job was to tend the body and I hated to watch someone take a knife to the flesh I had bathed and bandaged and fed. Samuel’s feelings, however, were the exact opposite. Ordinary doctoring struck him as vague, almost mystical. The patient has a pain; the doctor makes an informed guess and prescribes medicine which may or may not help. But in surgery you could see the problem—a tumour, a broken bone, a malfunctioning joint or organ—and, hopefully, you could fix it.

  “I’m like doubting Thomas,” he said. “I want to touch the wounds. I know it’s a limitation, Eva. When I was training I met certain doctors, nurses too, who had a real gift for diagnosis. But my gift is in my hands; I’m more of an engineer than a doctor.”

  He underestimated himself—he was unusually generous in talking to his patients—still, when I saw him at work at the operating table, making jokes, pausing to figure out the next cut, deciding just which piece of skin or bone to graft, I recognised that he was in his element. And that no amount of skillful nursing could give a man a new jaw or remove the keloid scars which paralysed his hands.

  When I broke the news about Mr. Laing, David laughed and said, Never mind, we can’t all be good at office work. Lily was the one who took umbrage. How could they treat me like that? They were meant to be training me. The next day, though, she remarked how glad she was to have my help again. I nodded grimly. I won’t be here for long, I wanted to say, but I had no idea what to do next. Working in a shop was out of the question, and no one I knew in Troon needed a nanny.

  A week after my dismissal, a letter came from Shona Pyper. In September she and Flo, still inseparable, had gone to Edinburgh to study nursing.

  We have all kinds of high jinks in the hostel. The other girls are grand. Mind you, it’s not all fun and games. The sisters are terribly strict, and there are classes from eight until one every day.

  Looking at Shona’s neat handwriting, I remembered those long afternoons at Miss MacGregor’s, making As and Bs and Cs. And now here she was fifty miles away, living the life of Riley.

  “What does Shona have to say for herself?” Lily was checking the cupboards, making the shopping list.

  I told her. “It sounds smashing.”

  Lily squinted into the flour bin. “If I were Mrs. Pyper, I wouldn’t let a girl Shona’s age go off to Edinburgh alone.”

  “She’s not alone. She’s with Flo, in a hostel.”

  “A hostel. She’s what—eighteen, nineteen?”

  “You went to Glasgow, and you had your own rooms.”

  “I was thirty-one. Besides, there was a war on.”

  Watching her purse her lips and add another item to the list, I realised that as far as Lily was concerned we could all three go on living at Ballintyre happily ever after. When she announced she was ready to leave, I said I would stay home. “Are you feeling poorly?” she asked solicitously, code for my monthly visitor.

  “No, I’m fine. There’s just no need for the two of us when you’re not doing a big shop.” I seized the newspaper from the table, as if reading it were suddenly a matter of urgency.

  “Oh, well, Miss Contrary, keep an eye on the fire.”

  A few months later my new friend, Daphne, and I would laugh over my tiny rebellion, but at the time I could hardly contain myself. I paced, I put away the breakfast dishes, I filled the coal scuttle. I owe Lily everything, I thought, yet I cannot bear to live this way. When I heard her steps on the path I rushed to the door. “Let me take those,” I said, reaching for the groceries.

  Usually after a trip into town Lily was full of gossip; today she put away the baking powder and sugar without a word.

  “Sit down,” I said. “I’ll clean the tatties. Have some tea.”

  Lily sat. She sipped her tea. Silence hung between us like a wet sheet.

  “Who did you see in town?” I asked at last.

  “I was at the post office.” She studied the ivy pattern on her saucer. “Mrs. Hogg told me she’d seen you at the forge.”

  “Yes, I stopped to say hello to Ian on my way back from the library.” The postmistress’s arrival to pick up a poker had reminded me I was late for lunch, and I had hurried away. Perhaps she’d thought me rude?

  I started to explain but Lily interrupted. “Mrs. Hogg’s neither here nor there. The point is, Eva, you’re nearly nineteen, too old to run around like a little girl. I asked for a dozen stamps, and Mrs. Hogg said she’d heard Ian had good prospects. In front of the whole queue. I nearly died.”

  In an instant I understood. “I can’t stop talking to my friends because of some old busybody. Ian and I were—”

  Lily raised a hand. “I know there’s nothing in it, but you’re not to go to the forge. Do you hear?”

  I bit my lip and nodded.

  In bed that night I thought about people linking my name with Ian’s. The idea plunged me into a tumult, of pleasure or distress I couldn’t tell. The previous week I had run into my first deskmate, Jessie, at the Co-op. Married, with two children already, she asked if I had a beau. I shook my head. “Och, you will soon enough,” said Jessie, looking me up and down. “You’ve turned out bonnier than I expected. What a scrawny wee thing you were at Miss MacGregor’s.”

  Now I gazed at the ceiling, wondering if Jessie was right. David would occasionally remark that I was the image of Barbara, but I had no sense of likeness to the misty woman in the picture over my bed. When I looked in the mirror, I saw only my own face: the dark eyebrows, the straight nose. My hair was the plain brown of beech mast, although Samuel claimed the colour was the same as that of Mary, Queen of Scots. As for Lily, she sometimes praised my teeth. “Thank goodness they came in straight,” she would say. But who besides Lily cared about teeth?

  For the rest of the week it rained solidly. On Saturday when I woke to find the sky clear, staying indoors seemed impossible. As soon as breakfast was over I set out for the river. I had intended to take my usual path through the woods. Instead, I crossed the humpbacked bridge and turned down into the fields. Since Lily’s scolding I had been gloomy but now, watching the orange-legged oyster-catchers peck the sodden grass, my mood lightened. Then I saw a figure coming towards me with such steady purpose it was as if we had an assignation.

  “Eva,” Ian called. Within a minute we were face-to-face. “It’s a grand day.”

  He was freshly shaven and his eyes, often bloodshot from the furnace, were clear. We began to walk downstream in the direction of my willow tree. Ian talked about his brother Ted, newly enlisted in the Black Watch. “I told him he’s daft, but he says we’ll all be there soon enough so why not get a head start?”

  He could have discussed carburettors or cauliflowers, and I would have been content. Opposite the tree was a gravel spit. Ian picked up a stone and skipped it over the water. It bounced four times. My own effort sank immediately. “I’m hopeless at throwing,” I said.

  “You just don’t know how.” He found a flat stone and demonstrated. Then he handed it to me and guided my wrist through the movements. My first throw was no better; the next bounced twice. “There,” said Ian. “All you needed was a lesson.” We walked on.

  I arrived home, flushed and breathless, glad to find David already back from his office. As Lily ladled out the scotch broth, he asked whether she’d gone into town that morning.

  “No, I took Mrs. Fisher some soup. Her lumbago’s so bad with all the rain she can’t even tie her shoes, poor thing.”

  Mrs. Fisher lived in a cottage across the river. To visit her Lily had followed in my footsteps—from the bridge the gravel spit was in full view. I stared down at the barley floating in my broth, waiting for reproaches, but when she spoke again it was only to ask for the salt. After lunch I did the dishes as quickly as possible and escaped to visit Isobel; we had arranged to hem our winter skirts that afternoon. On the doorstep, howev
er, she greeted me with a change of plan. It was criminal to stay indoors on such a day. How about a round of golf?

  She played first, blowing back her fringe and swinging her club hard.

  “Good shot,” I said.

  “No.” She grimaced. “It’s going in the bunker.” Then she turned to me, eyes gleaming. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  “Gordon and I are engaged.”

  “Gordon?” I echoed. “Engaged?”

  From beneath her blouse she produced a length of wool holding a ring. I praised the small circle of amethysts and asked why it was a secret. Everything about her announcement struck me as romantic except the object. I had met Gordon when Isobel’s brother brought him home from university and had not warmed to his damp handshake or his Latin jokes.

  “You know Dad,” she said. “He’d blow a gasket if I told him I was marrying a student.” Being Isobel, though, she was undaunted. She had found an advertisment in the Ladies’ Home Journal for a nanny in Edinburgh. Last Thursday she had gone for an interview and been hired on the spot. “I’m not mad about children, but these two seemed okay.”

  “You mean you’re leaving?”

  “In a fortnight. Why don’t you come? There are plenty of jobs, and you even have experience.”

  Why didn’t I? Isobel made it sound so simple. Briefly I pictured a life filled with new people, independence, fun. “Aunt Lily,” I muttered, and bent to set my ball on the tee. Isobel strolled off down the fairway. I gripped my club, made a couple of practise swings. Soon I would be all alone, living with David and Lily until I was an old maid, older than Barbara, older than the woman, older than—

  “Come on,” Isobel called. “After all the shilly-shallying, this had better be a hole in one.”

  But even as I railed the tide had turned. On Sunday, after church, Lily and David sat me down and asked whether I might want to consider nursing, like Shona and Flo. By next weekend I had filled out an application for Glasgow Infirmary.

  “So what made them change their tune?” asked Isobel.

  “I think Lily saw me with Ian Hunter.”

  “Ian,” whooped Isobel. “You sly minx.”

  I could not tell her my real guess, that the companions had engineered the whole thing: Shona’s letter, my meeting with Ian, Lily’s witnessing thereof. Although I was delighted at the results, their intervention troubled me. After Mr. Laing’s, I no longer trusted them. Then one afternoon when Lily and I were sewing name tags on my probationer’s uniform and she was talking about the botanical gardens in Glasgow, it suddenly came to me: At long last, I would be rid of the companions. There I would be, smelling the beautiful flowers, going to the cinema, and they would be stuck here, moping around as usual.

  “And the orchid house,” said Lily. “You feel like you’re in Spain.”

  “Grand,” I exclaimed, plying my needle so exuberantly that Lily had to remind me I was not making a fishing net.

  After the initial hullabaloo died down, I found ways to keep meeting with Ian but I did not mention Glasgow to him. When I passed the forge, he would often walk a few hundred yards with me. He even attended Saint Cuthbert’s and, three pews behind us, belted out the hymns. At the end of the service he came over to say how do you do. David asked whether he’d shoed Mr. Wright’s horses this year; Lily asked after his mother. As for me, later Ian claimed I was red as a pillar box.

  By early December I was bold enough to agree to a rendezvous by the river. Dusk was falling as I cycled to the bridge, and I could barely make out Ian waiting at the same spot where, years before, Barbara had glimpsed Agnes, the dairymaid who drowned. “Shall we go for a wee stroll?” he said, taking my arm.

  At the river’s edge he spread a blanket on the grass. We sat down side by side. “Look,” I said, “the evening star.”

  “Venus.” He put his arms around me. “Come on. Give me a kiss.”

  At first Ian’s kisses were not so different from those I had been giving and receiving all my life. Then, as he pressed closer, I felt a strange tingling. “No,” I said, even as my arms tightened around him.

  “Sweetheart,” he murmured.

  I closed my eyes in a drift of pleasure. When I opened them, a face was watching us over his shoulder. The gypsies, I thought. I pushed Ian away and jumped to my feet. Out of the reeds rose the girl. Her mouth opened, soundlessly, before she turned and ran into the darkness.

  “Eva,” said Ian, “I’m sorry. Sit down. I’ll be good.”

  As he described the Indian motorcycle his mother was helping him buy for Christmas, I gradually recovered my composure, and by the time we parted my fears were focused on Lily. I told her I’d been at the library all afternoon and, when she believed me, felt so wretched that I vowed to give Ian up. A few days later I was once again making excuses to pass the forge.

  At last, on Christmas Eve, I confessed about the infirmary. “Jesus,” he said, his face crumpling, “I’ll never see you again.”

  “Of course you will. Glasgow isn’t far, and I’ll be home for weekends and holidays.”

  “It won’t be the same. You’ll be full of fancy city ways. You won’t want to be bothered with me.”

  I argued, even though I guessed he spoke the truth.

  We met on New Year’s Day at the willow tree to say goodbye. Both our eyes were watery, and as I leaned against him I thought Lily had been right to worry. I could easily have been one of those girls, like Jessie, who married in early haste.

  Part II

  GLASGOW

  7

  I left Ballintyre the Monday after New Year’s, wearing a navy-blue coat David had given me for Christmas and carrying the suitcase Lily had taken to Glasgow in 1915; it contained my two sets of uniform and my clothes. The nurses’ hostel had sent a list, even including the underwear, which Lily insisted on following. I had sneaked in only a couple of items: my favourite green blouse and a pair of shoes. The taxi came on the stroke of eleven and the three of us rode to the station. While David bought my ticket, the first single to Glasgow I had ever purchased, Lily rattled off advice: Don’t talk to strangers. Ask a policeman if you need help. Don’t skip meals. Always carry a clean handkerchief.

  I was relieved when the train wheezed into the station, but as I leaned out of the window to wave goodbye two strangers appeared before me. In place of my beloved ageless father and my aggravating aunt stood an elderly man, stiffer and stouter by the month, and a leaf-thin woman whom the merest breeze could blow away. My girlhood was gone, and its passing had brought David and Lily to the far side of middle age. How had I failed to notice?

  But I was eighteen, and the train soon rocked away my sadness. At Glasgow Central when the taxi driver suggested a wee tour of the town, the knowledge that this was just what Lily had warned against added a special piquancy to our trip down Buchanan Street. I stared longingly at the lighted shops and bustling pavements. Soon I would be among this glamourous crowd. The nurses’ hostel bore a strong resemblance to the grammar school in Troon, and as I stepped inside the same combination of floor wax, disinfectant, and cabbage smells greeted me. I gave my name, and the porter said, “Good afternoon, Nurse McEwen. Nasty weather.”

  I was still marvelling at my title as he led me upstairs to my room and pointed out the rules on the back of the door. “The bathroom is down the hall. Supper is at six-thirty.”

  The room was small and spartan: a single bed, a chest of drawers, a desk and chair, a wardrobe, an easy chair. The walls were a greenish grey, the curtains a greyish green. The sole decoration was a calendar. That this was to be my new home seemed impossible. I opened the suitcase and began to unpack, but after only a couple of skirts, I faltered. The sight of the neatly folded clothes which Lily had ironed and packed the day before made me sink down on the edge of the bed. In my entire life I had not spent a single night away from Ballintyre. Of course David and Lily would write and I would go back for holidays, but never again would I have the certainty of bein
g in their company day after day.

  I might have spent the rest of the evening sitting beside my half-empty suitcase, save for a knock at the door. “Come in,” I called, standing to meet a stranger.

  A dark, curly-haired girl peered round the door in comical fashion and introduced herself. Daphne lived next door and had come to take me to supper. As she led the way downstairs, she told me that the previous occupant of my room had quit just before Christmas. “Some sort of breakdown. Poor girl.”

  I nodded, my attention fixed on the hem of her uniform, considerably shorter than my own. Mine had been measured by Lily to be exactly the regulation three inches below the knee. In the dining room, amid the din of cutlery and conversation, I asked questions and listened to Daphne’s advice. “Avoid Sister McTavish. She’ll have your guts for garters. Graham is a good egg. Volunteer for the dispensary. It’s painless and gets you a gold star.”

  Back in my room, as I laid my clothes in the chest of drawers, I recalled Daphne jumping up to fetch me another cup of tea. How much easier it was to embark on a friendship without having to look over my shoulder.

  The next day I found myself plunged into ceaseless work. In my daydreams I had imagined myself taking the pulse of pale men, holding my cool hand to the foreheads of feverish children, but mostly I had been preoccupied with living in Glasgow. I had paid little attention to the fact that student nurses worked sixty hours a week and had to study as well. When was there time for Shona’s high jinks?

  Within a few weeks I felt much as I had at Mr. Laing’s. I did not seem able to do anything right, either during lectures or on the wards, and it was small consolation to know that this time the errors were my own. My first day on the ward, Sister caught me accepting a peppermint from a patient, and it was downhill from there. I could not keep all the do’s and don’ts straight. I understood there was a correct way to give an injection or treat a disease; why did it matter, though, how I rolled a bandage or made a bed? Worse than all this, I was afraid of pain, of wounds. I closed my eyes even when injecting the dummy.