Eva Moves the Furniture

by Margot Livesey

  Daphne, who was three months ahead of me, insisted that the work got easier, that everyone made mistakes, but that did not seem to be true of my classmates. In the few minutes each night before I fell asleep, I racked my brain for alternatives. Might I be qualified to work in a library like Mrs. Nicholson? Or perhaps there was something I could do in a hotel? I was seriously contemplating giving notice when, after several days of shivering and coughing, I fainted during anatomy. The sister had paused in listing the bones of the wrist to reprimand my cardigan; even on the coldest days, nurses were forbidden to wear anything over their short-sleeved uniforms. As I reached to remove the garment, I slid to the floor.

  I came round in the women’s ward of the infirmary. The nurse who held a glass of water to my lips told me I had bronchitis. “Don’t go,” I begged as she made to leave.

  “Quiet, dear,” she said, and whisked away.

  She was busy, not unkind, but later when patients made the same appeal to me, I would remember the searing loneliness of those hours, my bed like an island of one, and try to find an extra minute to stay and talk to them. Meanwhile, when Lily came to visit, only pride prevented me from begging her to take me home; I scarcely heard the strange story she told of how, only a few months old, I had escaped my crib and nearly fallen down the stairs.

  As my strength returned, day by day, I drifted closer to shore. Watching the nurses, I could see that the apparently petty rules made sense: knowing how to do the simple things—plump a pillow, take a pulse—made it possible to do the complicated ones—stop a haemorrhage, save a life. By the time I recovered, I had missed so many weeks I had to start the training over again, but everything was different; now I actually wanted to be a nurse.

  Any lingering doubts were swept away by the prospect of war. Almost from one day to the next, the hazy rumours from Europe clarified into dark ferocious facts; Chamberlain’s umbrella became a joke. Blackout blinds were hung in the infirmary and the hostel. Gas masks and ration books were issued. Signs pointed the way to air raid shelters. David wrote that he was trying to get into the Home Guard. Ian enlisted in the Royal Scots, and Isobel joined the WRAC. Like the other probationers, I complained bitterly about not being qualified in time.

  In January 1940, the air raids started. Night after night we woke to the sound of the sirens, and at the infirmary a memo was posted: What to do in the event of an air raid. At the first warning, all patients were to be conducted to the cellars. In practise, however, with only two nurses to a ward, this proved impossible. Less than half the patients had been carried down when the all-clear sounded. The memo was revised. Ambulatory patients should make their own way to the cellar; everyone else was to be placed beneath their beds. Even this proved impractical and more dangerous to some patients than the raids themselves. Finally the night nurses settled for sing-alongs.

  At the hostel the drill was simpler. We were to make our way promptly, with our gas masks, to the boiler room, where old benches from the dining hall had been set up. Sometimes we had sing-alongs there too; the sister in charge of probationers turned out to have a surprisingly good voice. Or sometimes Daphne and I played Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral. But that sort of fun only happened when the raids began early. Usually the heat of the boiler room and the dim light—reading or sewing were impossible, though some nurses knitted—lulled us into a stupour from which the all-clear roused us. On the worst nights we were barely back in bed before the sirens started again.

  We grew pale and short-tempered. The nurses who were on night duty became objects of envy; at least they could rest, undisturbed, during the day. But when my turn came, it was harder than I expected, even with blackout blinds, to fall asleep. I lay in bed, listening to the maid sweeping the corridor, and thought of Ballintyre and the birds singing in the apple tree outside my window. At last I nodded off to dreams filled with missed trains and lost objects. I arrived on duty at 9 P.M., heavy-headed, and was sent to men’s surgical. “Just my luck,” muttered the staff nurse, on hearing that this was my first night. The two of us had twenty-seven men in our care.

  Her strong Glasgow accent was not unlike Daphne’s but she herself showed no trace of Daphne’s kindness and humour. During the next few hours, as she chivvied me from task to task, her forehead never once unfurrowed, even when a drunk brought in at closing time with a broken ankle burst into a lusty version of “Donald, where’s y’er troosers?” Finally at one o’clock, with everything more or less under control, she announced she was going to dinner. “Watch the drip on number eleven,” she said, handing me the keys to the dangerous drugs cupboard. “Bed number four is in trouble.”

  She marched away and in the wake of her departure one of those odd silences fell when, for a few minutes, no one was snoring or groaning or crying out, and from behind the drawn screens of number four, which I had passed a hundred times that evening, I heard tiny mouselike gasps. In all my thoughts of nursing, strange to say, it had never once occurred to me that some patients failed to recover. Even performing last offices on the pink-and-white dummy we used for bandages and injections had failed to prepare me.

  Now I stood beside the flimsy screens, listening intently, until some mixture of pride and compassion forced me inside. In the glow of the night-light a slender man lay propped on several pillows, head lolling, eyes closed. I was struck by the ordinariness of his striped pyjamas, similar to David’s, and then by how youthful his face was in spite of grey hair. (Later I encountered other patients in whom pain had lessened, not deepened, the marks of age.) As he stammered from one breath to the next, I clasped my hands and counted like I used to do between the flash of lightning and the peal of thunder, as if the interval would reveal some crucial distance. I was reaching hesitantly for his pulse, a wholly useless gesture I was terrified to make, when from a nearby bed a voice whispered, “Bedpan, nurse.”

  By the time I returned, he was gone. I don’t know for how long I remained, counting into the hundreds, hoping for one more gasp, before I heard the staff nurse’s footsteps.

  “He died,” I told her. “Number four. I couldn’t stop him.”

  At my babble, her frown intensified. She held out her hand, not in comfort but for the keys. “Pull yourself together, Nurse McEwen. Off you go to dinner, and pick up a shroud on your way back.”

  A shroud, I thought. Where on earth would I find that in the middle of the night? But when I asked, the porter took me to a room lined floor to ceiling with neatly folded garments. “Adult?” he demanded. “Small, medium, or large?”

  And suddenly I understood that the other great business of the infirmary, besides helping the sick to return to the world, was helping them to leave it. Yet how seldom anyone spoke of this. Only Father Wishart and Samuel acknowledged our role as watchers at that perilous threshold. Samuel told me that the first time a patient died on the operating table, he had sliced into the chest cavity and begun to massage the heart by hand, shouting for the man to come back. “I couldn’t believe there was nothing to be done,” he said. “The anaesthetist had to pull me away.”

  Walking back to the ward, carrying the flimsy shroud through the darkened corridors, I thought of Barbara. I was glad she had died at home with people who knew her name, who were not afraid to take her hand.

  I could not write of this to David or Lily, but some of it made its way into my letters to Ian. He turned out to be a surprisingly eloquent correspondent, who outwitted the censors to let me know he was in Algeria. I was glad to hear from him, both for his news and for the kudos of having a friend on active service. I wrote back promptly—after all he was fighting for king and country—but when Daphne invited me to join her and Arthur and Arthur’s mate, Roy, for an evening, I accepted without a qualm. Over fish and chips, she and I took turns telling stories about the infirmary; by this time I had learned from her how to transform even my worst adventures into comic episodes. The men shook their heads and blinked with laughter. Then we made our way to the Odeon.

  Although Roy
and I went out on three or four occasions, I can barely recall his face, perhaps because we were almost always in the darkness, of either the cinema or the blackout. I do remember that first time, walking back to the hostel, when he slipped his arm around my waist and I leaned towards him. Suddenly someone was tugging at my sleeve. I leapt back, but it was only Daphne. “Two minutes till curfew,” she whispered.

  Between the patients and the nurses, my life in Glasgow was the exact opposite of what it had been at Ballintyre: Every hour was filled with people. It was a rare event when, after an especially arduous day—I had just started as a scrub nurse in the theatre—I found myself walking back to the hostel alone. I was enjoying my brief solitude, pondering whether to stop at the pie shop, when the sirens broke out.

  “Bloody nuisance,” Daphne always said at such moments, and I had joined in her grumbling as if the raids were indeed a minor irritation. But in the dark street, I was afraid. One of the day’s patients had been a casualty of last night’s bombing; most of his stomach was missing. The nearest shelter was several streets away. I took refuge in the doorway of a haberdasher’s where Daphne and I had tried in vain to buy elastic the week before.

  Almost immediately came the crash of an explosion, followed by the barking of air-raid guns and another much louder bang. A scorched, acrid smell filled the air. I reached for my gas mask, but the thought of the clammy rubber against my face was repulsive. Trembling, I began to recite:

  “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin,’ tim’rous beastie,

  O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

  Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

  Wi’ bickering brattle!”

  On the word brattle a bomb fell. For a few seconds the light and noise blew everything away, including fear. The sounds of glass breaking, beams cracking, masonry falling filled the night.

  When at last the noise stopped, I raised my head to discover that the dark sky and darker buildings had disappeared. The doorway was completely blocked. I groped my way forward and tugged at whatever my hand encountered. A brick shifted and rubble tumbled down. No one knew I was here; I would never be found. “Help,” I cried. “Help.” But it was hard to believe that anything, even sound, could escape this prison.

  I was starting on the poem again when from nearby came a scraping sound. “Hello,” I called. “Is someone there?”

  No answer. The scraping continued. To the fear of being buried alive was added a new fear. In the infirmary, rumours circulated about gangs of men who looted during the raids and, it was whispered, interfered with women.

  I was wondering whether to risk crying out again, when something grazed my cheek. I screamed. An eerie silence descended.

  At last someone spoke. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Years before, the same voice had said, “What a cosy house.” Now the girl started on the poem’s second verse.

  “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,

  Has broken nature’s social union … .”

  Somehow there was an opening in the doorway, just large enough for me to squeeze out. In the street two familiar figures were waiting. The light of the fires glinted off the woman’s hair. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I nodded, speechless.

  The girl began to dust my cape, slapping vigourously at the fabric. I had not seen her since the night she spied on Ian and me beside the river; even in the darkness, I sensed her glee. As she moved on to my skirt the all-clear sounded. I found my voice and announced I was going back to the hostel.

  “We’ll walk with you,” said the woman.

  “There’s no need,” I said. “Really.”

  But she stepped forward and took one arm, the girl the other. Even through my uniform their hands seemed colder than I remembered. Without a word we headed down the street. At the corner neighbours were passing pails of water towards a blazing shop. A man at the end of the chain spotted me. Our white caps were unmistakable. “Good night, nurse,” he called.

  On either side, the companions tightened their grip.

  8

  I marked off the stages of my training like the stages in high jumping, and almost in spite of myself I grew competent. Soon I knew what to do in the case of a ruptured ulcer or an asthma attack; I could change a dressing or give a transfusion or hold the hand of a dying man. The air raids had dwindled, horses became common in the city streets, and almost everything was rationed or unavailable. Penicillin, the new miracle drug, appeared. Back in Troon, David and Lily were both absorbed in war work. Too old for uniform, David helped plan manoeuvres for the Home Guard and gave lectures on German strategy. Lily worked at the Station Hotel, now a convalescents’ home, as a bookkeeper and tea lady. On one of my monthly visits she had me show her how to tie a sling. The beaches where I had played with the Nicholson children were once more as Barbara had known them, lined with coils of wire. Only the companions were exempt from the tasks of war.

  Since the night of the air raid, I had often met the woman in her old-fashioned clothes, walking down the busy pavements, or the girl loitering outside the hostel. Perhaps I should have been grateful to them, but I soon convinced myself I would have been discovered shortly—the rescue squads were amazingly efficient—and I found their reappearance hard to bear. I had been certain that in coming to Glasgow I was leaving them behind. Now it seemed that all along they had planned to accompany me.

  The one saving grace was that they never visited the infirmary. Nonetheless, I worried Daphne might notice the change in me, but, like Isobel, she remained oblivious. What she did notice was my lack of a beau. Arthur and Roy had moved on but the wards were thronged with military personnel, both patients and doctors, and Daphne flitted happily from one romance to the next. After an evening out she would come to my room, cheeks flushed, clothes awry, for cocoa. “Och, we had a grand time,” she would say. When she reproached me for being standoffish, I argued that people were always being transferred. All the more fun, she said.

  How could I tell her that I longed to follow her example but, after my evening with Bernard, feared disaster. A senior medical student, Bernard had been assigned to the women’s ward soon after I moved there. Tall, with blue eyes and dark hair, he had grown up in Oban and, at moments of excitement, lapsed endearingly into Gaelic. On the ward we started calling out “Ceud mile fáilte,” whenever he appeared. I asked about the Highlands, the setting of so many of David’s stories, and he told me about a cave on the shores of Loch Fyne where Bonnie Prince Charlie had waited for a boat to carry him over to France. “He was a brave man,” Bernard said, “to hide in a wee dark hole with a price on his head and nothing but hills and heather for miles around.” Only later when I saw Glenaird, the valley where Barbara had grown up, did I fully appreciate his descriptions of the lonely landscape.

  One evening, when we both finished early, Bernard invited me to the cinema. In the Empire the usher led us unhesitatingly to the third back row. Roy had once slipped her a shilling to get seats there; now it seemed she knew already that Bernard and I were a couple. I felt a little knot of excitement. For the last fortnight I’d been noticing his earnest smile. After a decent interval, halfway through a Pathé news report on land girls, Bernard slid his arm around me. And after another, I put my head on his shoulder. Would he take my hand, I wondered.

  Within a few minutes, however, I felt an odd prickling sensation, a scratching between my shoulder blades, not unlike what I sometimes felt on the wards when a patient needed me but was too shy to call. Cautiously I raised my head to glance around. The light of the screen showed me only strangers, rows of men and women, their eyes fastened on the pictures or each other. I turned back to Bernard but the prickling persisted; it was hard even to sit still. For a second time I scanned the audience, and only then did I realise who I was looking for. I could not help pulling away, as if the screen demanded my urgent attention.

  Bernard was a nice young man. He pretended to cough and released me. The news finished and we both concentrated on the film
, something American, the men with short ties and funny accents. Afterwards, walking back to the hostel, I was very animated, commenting on the picture, asking about Bernard’s family. His replies were courteous but brief. “Well, Nurse McEwen,” he said, at the gate of the hostel, “this has been a pleasure.”

  “Bernard,” I protested.

  From the darkness around us came the muffled sounds of other nurses and their beaux, making the most of the few minutes before curfew. Of course he could not see my expression, but I stared up at Bernard, silent, pleading, until he bent down and, whether by accident or design, planted a kiss on my ear.

  In bed that night I berated myself—why let my stupid imagination ruin everything?—and next day on the ward I continued in my emphatic cheerfulness, joking with the patients and the ward maid. A couple of times I caught Bernard eyeing me, but he kept his distance. I was not entirely sorry when a few weeks later he was transferred to Aberdeen.

  Other outings followed a similar pattern, and I never knew whether to blame the companions or myself. They did not appear but instead sent themselves into my mind. My sense returned of a hidden deformity which must, at all costs, be concealed; I dreaded that the young men who slid their hands under my coat would somehow discover my shame.

  In the midst of these difficulties, my second stint of night duty came as a relief. Daphne claimed the nights were dull, now that the raids had slackened, but I liked the long slow hours. By day the infirmary buzzed with efficiency: birth, life, death—everything kept in its proper place. Whereas under cover of darkness, anything seemed possible. Patients confided in me and I listened, doing my best to offer comfort and conceal amazement. How tangled people’s lives were and how many, besides myself, had problems they could hint at only to a stranger.