Full Tide

by Celine Conway

  “She’d hardly wear gold bracelets on horseback.”

  “I suppose not.” Nancy was meditative. “She says if you dislike the thought of doing any particular thing you should wade right in and do it—that means I ought to ask Daddy for a pony and jolly well ride it.”

  “It’s a sound idea,” supplied Lisa.

  “Yes, but I don’t think I’ll do it. Did you know she didn’t want to go to South Africa?”

  “Since her husband died I expect the country has painful associations for her.”

  Nancy nodded in her grown-up manner. “She made herself book a passage and now she’s glad. D’you know,” her tone was thoughtful and surprised, “she’s not half bad!”

  Lisa laughed. “I told you so. Her advice isn’t half bad, either; you could apply it to other things besides horses. Think it over, darling.”

  Nancy yawned, took off her shoes and placed them neatly beside the wardrobe, undressed down to one garment and climbed the chromium-plated ladder to her bunk. “I’m going to eat an apple and read,” she said, “and if I’m asleep when you come back from dinner please don’t tuck me in, or I shall ooze pints.”

  “As soon as it’s cooler,” said Lisa firmly, “you’re only going to read for one hour a day. And in the mornings, beginning tomorrow, you and I are going to do some arithmetic.”

  Nancy groaned her unbelief, Lisa climbed up to give her a smiling kiss and went to her dinner.

  There was to be a cinema show that evening in the main lounge, and Lisa, who had seldom seen a film in recent years, looked forward to it. She was pleasantly tired from the day’s exertions and a wee bit elated because Mark had been on his way to his own table when she arrived for dinner, and he had pulled out her chair with the murmur, “So you’re in the sports finals, Miss Maxwell. Well done.”

  A jeer from Mark was worth so much more than a compliment from any other man.

  After leaving the saloon she took a turn on deck, and then went below to make sure that Nancy was covered by a sheet, if nothing else. Everything in the cabin appeared to be in order, so she came out and quietly fixed the door hook to let in the maximum amount of air. Halfway down the corridor she met Mrs. Herst, who should have been off duty.

  “I was wondering how I could find you,” said the stewardess. “The doctor sent for you while you were at dinner. Seems there’s an appendicitis case and one of suspected fever, and he’d like you to help till midnight.” Lisa felt uplifted. To be sent for by the doctor was to be needed in a special way. “I’ll change and go straight to the surgery,” she said.

  Swiftly and quietly the black frock was replaced by a blue linen, and Lisa walked from her own corridor into the next. She knocked at the surgery door and was told to enter.

  Dr. Barty, still in his theatre overall, was washing his hands at the basin. As he straightened and. reached for a towel Lisa began to untie the tapes at the back of his neck and at his waist.

  “Good girl,” he said in his blunt, doggy way. “This is very irregular, but you did offer, and I learned during the war to take even a woman at her word. You won’t have much to do, but I’ll have to keep the other young woman watching the boy with a temperature. I don’t think it’s infectious, but I can’t allow her near the rest till I’m sure. Get into a cap and apron and come with me.”

  From his vague wave at an inner door Lisa gathered that there lay the linen room. She buttoned on an apron, pulled a cop over her hair so that only a curl or two at the front was visible and automatically washed her hands.

  The doctor’s thick grey brows beetled at her. “Don’t look so happy about it,” he growled. “You’re here because you said you’d had some recent experience in a hospital. Can’t say as much for the stewardess—she doesn’t know one end of a thermometer from the other. Nurse Bridge had put in ten hours so I sent her off to bed. Another stewardess comes on at twelve to relieve you.”

  This being an inordinately long speech for the doctor, he finished with another wave of his fingers and Lisa smartly followed him out.

  Five of the six hospital cabins were occupied. Lisa was led into four and given instructions; it was all written down in the book which lay open on the nurses’ table, and she should fill in her report before handing over. She indicated that she understood.

  “You’re in charge,” he warned her. “You’ve very little to do so don’t make any errors. I hope I’m right in trusting you.”

  “I’ll follow your directions exactly.”

  “I believe you will. Knock me up if you have to. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, doctor.”

  The alley went quiet. For a while Lisa sat at the nurses’ table, which was in the largest cabin near the open door. The appendicitis patient lay in the white bed, apparently sleeping. He was a boy of about seventeen, with a mop of fair hair which looked extraordinarily dark, compared with the pallor of his face. She wondered about him and thought what a pity it was that his trip should be spoiled. Then she smiled at herself. Anthea had always said that Lisa would never make a first-class nurse because she was too interested in the patients’ private affairs and sympathetic with their hopes and fears, too sensitive to their suffering. But perhaps that sensitiveness mellowed into a practical compassion, thought Lisa, and surely it did no harm to speculate about those who were unfortunate enough to be laid low.

  The next-door patient gave the deep dry cough which, accompanied by a severe chill, had brought him down as they crossed the Equator. Lisa took the flashlight and softly made her inspection. The only one awake was the middle-aged woman who had a septic rash about her waist. She asked for water and Lisa moistened her lips.

  “Mustn’t have you perspiring,” she whispered, “or all the doctor’s good work will be undone.”

  “I can’t sleep. Will you give me a draught?”

  “You’re due to take your tablets in half an hour.”

  “Stay and talk to me, then.”

  Lisa listened for a while to the low monotone, and presently the woman swallowed her medicine and settled for sleep. A little later Lisa knew that the film show was over, because passengers were coming down to bed. There were laughter and chatter as groups broke up, hurried footsteps and all the small noises of many people preparing for bed in cabins whose doors were open.

  Sounds diminished and died away. The night hush came down. The youth who had lost his appendix stirred and whispered plaintively in his sleep and the quietude was punctuated by the cough from next door. Lisa wrote out her report and waited for the stewardess who was to relieve her.

  She felt a trifle sad because she had been able to do so little. The doctor had known she would not be called upon to do any real nursing; he had merely wanted her there because she had recently seen the inside of a hospital, whereas most of the stewardesses had only their ship training and they were short-handed, anyway.

  Lisa paced the corridor. The stewardess came out from the cabin of the suspected fever case and yawned enormously.

  “I didn’t bargain for this,” she grumbled. “I gave up nursing because I couldn’t stand night duty.”

  Lisa remembered the doctor’s disparaging comment. “Were you at a London hospital?” she asked.

  _ “Yes, but only for eight months. After that I got a job in a dress shop. This is my first trip as a stewardess and I don’t mind telling you it’ll be my last!”

  She was of the type that never becomes properly established anywhere. The shipping company had no doubt engaged her on the strength of her nursing experience; these days it was so difficult to get the fight sort of staff that they were likely to give almost anyone a trial under supervision, but it was improbable that she would be taken for a second trip.

  “I’m going for some tea,” she said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to avoid all contacts till you go off duty?” asked Lisa.

  “I’m sick of sitting in there and I’m sick of red tape. Old Doc Barty makes sure we’re not comfortable enough to get a spot of sleep.”
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  “I shall be finishing any minute now. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”

  “Thanks.” It was drawled as the other looked her over resentfully. “Beats me why a passenger should let herself in for this.”

  “Being idle isn’t fun for long,” said Lisa lightly. She nodded towards the end cabin. “Your patient is moving.”

  The stewardess slouched away and Lisa looked at her watch. It was twelve-twenty. Well, she didn’t mind hanging on. Her four patients were sleeping and no more medicines had to be given before two. She might as well leaf through a magazine.

  An hour passed. Lisa was again in the corridor, listening intently to the noises of discomfort from the end cabin. She had an uncanny but instinctive knowledge that the boy with a temperature was alone, and she couldn’t bear to think of him struggling without the solace of a cold wet cloth across his brow and soothing words from a nurse.

  She went to the door of the cabin and called quietly, “Nurse!”

  There was no answer. The stewardess had wearied of waiting for her tea and gone off to prepare it herself. Cautiously, Lisa looked into the cabin. The boy, who might be a year or two older than Nancy, had a high flush, and even at a distance his eyes appeared glassy and sightless. Distressed little grunts came from his throat as his head twisted from one side to the other; his loneliness, in such a condition, wrenched at Lisa’s heart.

  She tried to remember what she had heard about fevers, how the infection was carried. She recalled Anthea’s, saying that nurses in isolation hospitals almost never caught diseases, probably because they scoured their hands so frequently and thoroughly, and she recalled also Dr. Barty’s remark that he didn’t think the boy’s fever infectious. So many illnesses caused a high temperature in the early stages.

  Still, she had to think of Nancy. She couldn’t risk passing on a fever. Then the boy in the bed said lucidly, “Water, please. Can I ... have some water?”

  Lisa ran quickly back to the large cabin, took a pair of rubber gloves from a drawer in the nurses’ table and worked them swiftly down over her fingers.

  Back in the boy’s cabin, she approached the bed and saw, on the bedside table, the two large tablets which he should have been given earlier in the night. Without pausing to question her right to interfere, she snapped the tablets down their centre division and half-filled a glass with water. Her arm went under the boy and she lifted him.

  “Swallow this,” she coaxed him. “It will do you good.” Persuading him took a long time but the whole of the medicine was eventually swallowed. She was so absorbed in the task that when a step was audible in the doorway she did not look up but said quickly:

  “You forgot his tablets, nurse. They’re terribly important—the only thing that will reduce the temperature. Has the relief turned up?”

  She was lowering the boy to his pillows, straightening the bedclothes and professionally tucking the ends under the mattress. The lack of a reply brought her upright to face the door. She stared, and her blood chilled.

  Mark stood there; Mark in white slacks and an open shirt, his features taut, his eyes so. hot and angry that they were no longer blue.

  In modulated, deadly tones, he said, “What the devil do you think you’re doing? Come away from that bed!”

  For a; second she was completely unnerved. The efficient nursing assistant of a minute or two ago had miraculously dissolved and re-crystallized into someone brittle and obedient. She came to the door and passed him, hesitated in the corridor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said tonelessly. “I know it wasn’t my business.”

  “You’re right—it wasn’t!” he exclaimed savagely. “Go and have a bath with plenty of antiseptic in the water, and don’t touch those Clothes you’ve got on once you’ve had it; they’ll have to be sterilized. I’ll deal with you in the morning.”

  “I can’t leave the corridor without a nurse.”

  “Will you do as I say! Do you suppose we want the ship full of fever?”

  “But Doctor Barty doesn’t really think it’s infectious. He believes it’s a relapse after undulant fever.”

  A moment ago Mark had been angry; now, he positively blazed. “The patient is isolated because there’s a risk—however slight—and I won’t have you, a passenger, running into that kind of danger. The doctor must have been crazy to allow you in this corridor. Now get going.”

  There’s no nurse,” she protested weakly.

  “I’ll knock up Barty and he’ll find one,” he said grimly.

  She had, perforce, to turn about, but had only taken a few paces before Mark added, “On second thoughts you’d better report back to the surgery when you’ve had the bath, and the doctor will give you a preventive injection.”

  She swung about, “Really, Captain...”

  “That’s all,” he bit out. “And don’t be long about it.”

  By the time' Lisa had prepared the bath and wrapped the clothes she had worn ready for whoever, did the hospital laundry, she was beginning to realize that Marie’s reaction to finding her in “Hospital Row” had been nearly barbaric. She remembered how her sinews had contracted, half with fear and half with delight and defiance. She remembered his eyes, narrow and glittering, the quiet way in which he had spoken, though it had been easy to see he was in a rage. The look in his face had made her feel completely helpless.

  She towelled, put on clean pyjamas and a tailored silk wrap. She was sleek after the bath but thought it prudent to do as she had been told. So, after a cursory glance at her pale, tousled hair and clear, fair skin in the bathroom mirror, she walked back to the surgery.

  Before she could knock the door swung back and Mark stood there; he appeared to have a sixth sense about people hesitating outside doors.

  “Come in,” he said brusquely. “I’ll give you the injection. Barty’s up the corridor but he left the syringe ready.”

  He closed the door behind her and crossed to a table against the wall, above which flowered a single lamp. He damped a wad of cotton wool with ether, pushed up the wide sleeve of her dressing gown and went through the routine of dabbing her skin, pinching the flesh while the needle sank in and passing a soothing thumb over the mark. Lisa looked at his bent head, the unmistakable dark wave across the top, the deep tanned brow. His temple was less than six inches from her lips. She shivered.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  “No, a goose walked over my grave.”

  He was adjusting her sleeve, wiping his hands on a huckaback towel. “Why should it do that?”

  “Maybe because it’s past midnight. All sorts of queer things are supposed to happen in the small hours.”

  “Don’t you believe it. In my time I’ve spent a good many nights at work and found them infinitely peaceful. On a passenger ship the queer things happen in broad daylight.”

  The tiny trace of humor in his tone brought a faint smile to Lisa’s lips. She looked at him. “Am I forgiven?”

  “For inserting the tip of your pretty nose where it did not belong? You’re only forgiven so long as you’ve taken no harm. It scared me pink to see you at that bedside with your arm under the boy’s shoulders.”

  “I did wear gloves.”

  “That wasn’t apparent at first. In any case, they didn’t reach to your elbows. If you took a fever I wouldn’t forgive either you or myself.” He let himself down on to the arm of a chair. “D’you know, I’ve never before had so much trouble with a single passenger as I’ve had with you. First there was the Nancy business, and now you’re kicking around forbidden quarters in the middle of the night, pretending you’re on the ship’s staff.”

  “I did have the doctor’s permission!”

  “But he didn’t have mine.” A pause. “I wonder what your third crime will be?”

  “I don’t somehow think there’ll be a third. You look so ferocious and you sound so frightening when you’re angry.”

  He gave her a small grin but there was hardness in him when he replied, “I felt ferocious. It was b
ad enough...” He cut off the sentence suddenly and jerked his head at the doctor’s desk. “Have some tea? Or would it keep you awake?”

  “No, I’d like some. I’m a healthy sleeper.” Mostly, she told her conscience.

  “I’ll bet you are,” he said acidly. “You calmly close up your petals till the sun rises. One of these days you’ll grow out of that.”

  In the dimness she watched him pouring tea and hoped he wouldn’t find it necessary to switch on the main light. It was snug here in the easy chair; one forgot that this was a ship’s surgery. She took her cup and dipped one knob of sugar from the bowl he held. He twisted the leather-seated chair from the desk and sat in it, stirring his own tea and regarding her coolly, critically.

  “Curled up there you could be anything between twelve and sixteen,” he said. And then, more deliberately, “Life has hardly touched you, has it?”

  “That’s a little unfair. My father was killed in the war ten years ago.”

  “You were a child like Nancy, and you recovered as quickly and completely as she would from a blow. Children do. Did you know your mother?”

  “Not to remember very clearly. She had an accident when I was four and died soon after. I lived with my grandmother till I was seventeen.”

  “And she doted upon you,” he said with a mocking nod. “You were probably so sweet and busy that she couldn’t help it.”

  “I don’t think I could have got along without being, loved by someone,” she said honestly, gazing at him from well-deep grey eyes. “After my grandmother’s house in the country the hostel seemed cold and unfriendly. Most of the girls were happy enough but I didn’t fit in. When I go back I’ll try to fix up privately, with a family.”

  “So you’re going back? Is Jeremy aware of it?”

  “Is that necessary?” she said pleadingly. These were moments to treasure but he was bound to spoil them, if he could.

  He shrugged. “If you succeed in getting your way with him, he’ll propose to you; surely you’re prepared for that? In addition, Natal has a penetrating charm. You won’t be able to withstand the combined onslaught.”