by Marie Joseph
‘Nasty mind you’ve got underneath that apology for a cap, Sister,’ he’d told her when she had ticked him off for winking at a buxom ward maid. ‘You ought to know better than most that I haven’t got the strength at the moment for more than a bloody wink.’
Uttering a sound somewhere between a pshaw and a snort of disgust, Sister Fletcher had flounced around and slapped her flat-footed way back between the rows of beds and out of the ward.
But he had seen the woman through the open door into the small side-ward. He had seen her lying back on high-banked pillows, her long hair lying in two never-ending plaits over the sheet. White as chalk her face with the freckles standing out like spots of undissolved Horlicks on the top of a glass of hot milk. And even in that quick glance he had seen the way the half-moon curve of her surprisingly dark eyelashes lay on her cheeks. He almost risked a whistle, just to cheer her up, because the baby was still inside her then. He had seen the rounded mound pushing the bedclothes up as if somebody had clamped half a barrel on her stomach.
‘What is she doing up this end in Women’s Surgical if she is in here to have a baby?’ Joe had asked little Nurse Gallagher when she came on duty.
‘She’s going to have her baby by caesarian section,’ the nurse had told him, full of importance because she was going to be allowed to watch as part of her training. ‘The surgeon, Mr Cardwell, is coming in specially to do it, because there is something wrong with the mother’s heart and she can’t be allowed to go on and have her baby normally.’ Nurse Gallagher’s blue button eyes had sparkled with anticipation, then she had gone on to tell Joe that caesar babies were beautiful babies as a rule.
‘Their heads aren’t pointed like normally born babies, because they haven’t had to struggle to be born,’ she’d said, then scuttled away before Sister Fletcher caught her gossiping with the patients again.
Joe glanced down at the perfect curve of the rounded head nestling in the crook of his arm. Nurse Gallagher had been quite right. This little head certainly came to no point. Tenderly he traced its shape, feeling the silky hair whisper through his touch.
Poor little Nurse Gallagher, with her pale piggy eyes, and her big red conk of a nose, and her bare arms as mottled as a slab of potted meat.
It would have upset her proper seeing the young woman die on the operating slab, if that was the way it had been. The little Irish girl hadn’t been nursing long enough to get used to patients dying. Not young and lovely women like the beauty in the side ward. Joe doubted if Nurse Gallagher would ever consider it all a part of her day’s work, as he was sure po-faced Sister Fletcher did.
They could have done with her at the hospital at Boulogne, what with soldiers dying right, left and centre. Or better still, they could have sent her up the line. One look at her horrible miserable face, and even a German minen-werfer would have changed direction – may even have turned back and blown some of its own side up. . . .
‘Well, Mr Barton? Tired of holding the baby, are you? I’ve come to take her away now, thank you very much.’
‘What’s going to happen to it?’
Joe had never thought Sister Fletcher would answer him, but she did:
‘We’re keeping her in for a few days, but there’s a grandmother going to take her. She’s just arrived with her husband and they want to see their grand-daughter.’
Swiftly she removed the bundle from his grasp.
‘Now don’t forget it is your morning for helping with the teas; the night staff have been run off their feet what with everything happening unexpectedly.’
And before Joe could say even as much as a ‘damn’ Sister Fletcher had been and gone, taking the baby with her.
His left arm was still curved round the empty warm space in the bed. It had all been as quick as a trench raid, target reached, mission completed. Yes, sir, please sir, three bags full sir. . . .
But oh, bloody hell, it was terrible this emptiness he felt. He could still smell the new-born smell of the baby, a sweet soft scent, far different from the stink in his nostrils every time they changed the dressing on his leg.
He would never forget that dreadful smell . . . but that was when they had thought his leg would have to come off.
Joe buried his head in the place where the baby had been. By the left, but he had told that still wet round the ears apology of a doctor in France where he’d got off. He had told the bloody lot of them that if they cut off his leg he would do himself in at the first opportunity.
He wasn’t going back to Blighty with one trouser leg flapping. He wasn’t ‘one of our gallant defenders’ as a sickening headline in a newspaper had described him and his like. He wasn’t cut out to be a cripple, not Joe Barton. Not even Joe Barton, son of a drunken whore, father unknown. Always he had had to fend for himself, just as that poor little sod of a baby would have to.
And that bonny little lass with her gypsy colouring, never knowing that she had a perfect baby with a face as round as a miniature full moon.
It wasn’t fair. Nothing in the whole bloody rotten world was fair. . . .
Joe turned his face into his pillow and wept. Quietly at first, with subdued sobs, then with an abandonment to grief that left him without even the semblance of control. Shaking with unmanly sobs, crying his terrors of what had passed away, crying as he had never cried before, not even as a child.
When the night nurse, going off duty, told Sister Fletcher about it, she nodded with satisfaction, her eyes starting from her head with exhaustion.
‘So it worked then,’ she said, her plain dedicated face flushing with an emotion which should have made her look beautiful in its compassion, but because of the unfortunate set of her features, made her look merely blotchy and ugly.
‘Mr Barton will start to improve from now on. That leg wound of his is only half his trouble. I’m sure you realize that. He just needed to crack, that was all. That swearing and carrying on is all part of his loneliness.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose as if she would smooth her exhaustion away. ‘Finding out there is always someone worse off than yourself is often the best medicine, human nature being what it is.’ She straightened her already straight cap, pushing back a strand of mousy hair.
‘Everybody has to crack sometimes, even the toughest nut of all.’
Then, having worked a full night on top of a full day, she went off duty for a few hours, her back ramrod straight, and her feet slapping the polished floor in their quarter to three position.
‘She actually looked part way to being human,’ the night nurse told her friend as they ate stringy sausages flanked by watery cabbage downstairs in the nurses’ dining-room. ‘I even dared to ask her what would be happening to the baby, and she said we would be keeping it in for a few days before the grandmother took it home.’
‘The mother’s mother?’
‘There never was a father, if you know what I mean. Seems the girl, Rose Carmichael, insisted on staying on too long at one of the mills, when she should have been resting with a heart condition brought on by her pregnancy.’
She shovelled her food in from force of habit. ‘It won’t be easy rearing a baby that size.’
‘Especially for a grandma.’
‘Oh, she’s not in the least old. Not white-haired and doddering,’ she said, yawning as she stirred sugar into a thick white mug of tea.
It did not occur to Maggie that there was anything extraordinary in the fact that she was walking alone the three miles from Foundry Street to the Infirmary, wheeling an empty pram.
Kit had accepted that they would bring up Rose’s baby as a matter of course, had taken two hours off from the shop for the funeral, and had agreed with Maggie on the inscription for the wreath of white and red chrysanthemums:
‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.’
‘Though I’m not too sure I believe that literally,’ she said. ‘Not if I set me mind to it. Rose died because she was stubborn, right to the end. I don’t feel the Lord had much part in anything t
hat happened to Rose. . . .’
She levered the heavy pram down off a kerb, across a street and up on to the opposite pavement, stopping now and again to feel the blanket covers to make sure they were still dry.
They had been airing over the fire-guard and on the string across the fireplace since six o’clock that morning, and still felt warm to her touch.
She adjusted the storm apron, frowning at the frayed elastic holding it in place. The half-crown she had paid for it had been more than enough for a third-hand pram, she decided.
Guiding the pram across the tram-lines, Maggie turned into a side street leading to a short cut underneath a railway arch. A sudden gust of wind lifted the brim of her hat a little, and she stopped to pierce it more firmly to her upswept hair with a long pearl-ended hat pin. Then, for the second worrying time, she pushed a hand inside the pram to feel the blankets.
‘And there’s nobody going to feel sorry for you, little love,’ she told the empty interior. ‘I’ll see you go nothing short somehow or other. You’re going to have your own little kit of milk every day from Mr Ainsworth’s best cow. I’ve arranged that. There’s not going to be any of that skimmed condensed muck for you. You are going to grow up just the same as if everything was as it should be. Your grandma will see to that.’
Her expression was very fierce, the well-defined eyebrows drawn together, and the small chin jutting out, as Maggie continued on her way. It looked like rain and she lifted her face to the sky and dared it to do any such thing.
‘You can just wait till I get the baby safely back home,’ she told a lowering cloud, then as a tram clattered past, rocking along its rails, she bent her full weight over the pram handle, pushing it up the long steep slope leading to the Infirmary.
The baby was ready, dressed in the long feather-stitched petticoats, one of flannel and two of cotton underneath the pin-tucked nightdress, the hand-knitted jacket made by Maggie during Rose’s waiting months.
Everything was too big, she noticed; even the bonnet she had sworn would have been too small for a doll when she stitched it up.
She watched silently as Sister Fletcher wrapped the baby in the grey shawl with darns worked in wool pulled from its fringes, the shawl Rose had been wrapped in as a baby.
Maggie swallowed hard. She had no intention of showing herself up in front of this hatchet-faced nurse, so she blinked and stared at the far wall with its top half painted a sickly green and the bottom a bilious yellow.
‘It looks a bit like rain,’ she said in a casual-sounding voice.
‘Yes it does.’
Sister Fletcher tied the bonnet strings with a ferocious bow, and Maggie winced.
She would throttle the little thing if she wasn’t careful, then to take her mind off the lump in her throat she narrowed her eyes and gave the Sister what Kit would have called one of her ‘summing-up’ looks.
By gum, but she looked a hard one all right. She would not fancy getting the wrong side of her, Maggie decided. A bad enemy the Sister would make. She stared at the nurse’s ringless left hand. Yes, Sister Fletcher would likely be one of the women who would claim to have lost a sweetheart in France, and God only knew, there would be plenty of them about now. . . .
She held out her arms as the Sister passed the bundle over to her, and marvelled how any woman could look so forbidding when they were handling a baby. Why, even Clara would have smiled if she had looked down at this tiny round-faced scrap with her tuft of black hair showing where the bonnet wasn’t pulled down far enough.
Maggie adjusted the frill until it almost covered the baby’s eyebrows.
Sister Fletcher was feeling as grim as she looked. Personally she did not give this particular baby much of a chance. She had sent far too many babies out into the world, only to see them return as undernourished infants, bowed with rickets, heads alive with nits, middle-aged before they had even gone off to school.
‘She’ll have to be fed every two hours I’m afraid, Mrs Carmichael,’ she said, ‘and that includes during the night for the first few weeks. She’s not sucking strongly enough to get all she needs at one feed. You’ll find that she gets exhausted then falls asleep.’
The deep resigned sigh showed Maggie that the nurse considered what she was going to say next was possibly a waste of time, but she waited patiently, ready to give as good as she got.
‘She will also have to be kept very warm, Mrs Carmichael, and that means keeping her in a heated room all the time. Are you all right for coal, because if not I might be able to put you in touch with an organization. . . .’
Maggie nodded quickly, her dignity at stake.
‘The coal shed’s that full it’s spilling out into the backyard, thank you very much all the same, Sister. I’ve been stocking up for weeks.’
She felt the hardening of the lump in her throat. The time for crying was not here. If there was such a time it was when you were alone, shut away behind a closed door so that nobody could see you giving in.
Giving in was a waste of time; she had decided that a long long time ago.
‘Thank you for all you and the other nurses have done for my daughter, and for the baby, especially for keeping Rosie here till we got things sorted out an’ . . . an’ the funeral over with. It’s been very good of you, it really has. . . .’
Sister Fletcher waved the thanks away, walking to the door of the little side-ward with her starched apron crackling as she went.
‘You know your way out, Mrs Carmichael?’ she asked over a disappearing shoulder.
Then she took out her jumbled feelings on the first nurse she met, a young probationer who was doing nothing more revolutionary than carrying a bed-pan to the sluice.
Joe Barton, trespassing yet again as he swung his way along the stone-flagged corridor on his crutches, saw the soberly clad back of a small slim woman carrying a baby in her arms.
She did not need to turn round for him to recognize her. He would have recognized that walk anywhere, that straight back, that brown hair slipping its bun and wisping down her neck.
‘Maggie!’ His heart was beating so fast, beating right up in his throat so that his voice came out as no more than a croak. ‘Maggie . . . oh, Maggie!’
The more he tried to hurry after her, the more the crutches got in his way, and when Maggie turned a corner and disappeared from his sight Joe slumped against the wall, drained and exhausted.
He stood there, head bowed, saying her name over and over to himself. . . Maggie Craig . . . his Maggie. So that was the grandma little Nurse Gallagher had spoken about. His Maggie, his own love, and they had been within yards of each other, and because of this blasted leg he couldn’t even get her to turn round.
Joe raised his head, suddenly filled with an elation he didn’t know how to control. Bugger the man she had married, and bugger the fact that she hadn’t answered any of his letters. That one glimpse of her had told him something he had known all along. All those terrible months and years in France, she was the only woman he had dreamed of, still was the only woman he dreamed of.
And that baby had been put in his arms because it belonged to him. That baby was a part of Maggie, and he had cuddled it and kept it warm right after it was born. No wonder he had felt like he did . . . it was fate, it was a miracle, and the sooner he got out of this damned Infirmary the better. To see Maggie again, that was all that mattered now.
16
WILL HARGREAVES, BELLE’S husband and Joe’s brother-in-law, viewed Joe’s impending release from the Royal Infirmary with the gravest trepidation.
‘Don’t commit yourself as to how long he can stay, that’s all I’m trying to say,’ he warned, walking on his bent legs down the stone corridor in time for the Sunday hour of visiting at three o’clock.
‘Tell him he can stop for a bit when he comes out next week, but have the sense to emphasize the bit. If you don’t, then I will.’
His size seven shoes, tipped with heel protectors, made ringing noises on the floor as he bounced alo
ng, narrow shoulders hunched, and small fists buried deep in the pockets of his Sunday jacket.
‘We might find ourselves landed with him for good.’
‘He is my brother,’ Belle said weakly, ‘and anyway, our Joe will be off back to London as soon as he can. He’s much too independent to be beholden to anyone, least of all to you. He’s not short of a bob or two remember, and he’ll want to get his affairs sorted out once he’s found his feet.’
‘But he never is going to find his feet, is he? From what that Sister told me he’ll always have to walk with a stick.’
‘That doesn’t make him a cripple,’ Belle said faintly. Arguments always had that effect on her. She sighed as they turned right into another long bare corridor.
‘Please, Will, try and talk to him just a little this time.’
Then Belle walked on, the worriting nature of her thoughts wrinkling her forehead. Because it wasn’t merely Joe’s leg that was bothering him. It was his nerves. Sister had said so.
And Will had no patience at all with nerves. Belle had tried to make him see, but it was no use.
‘Oh, aye? Your Joe might have been in the trenches, but tell me summat? How could our lads have even begun to fight in France if it hadn’t been for folk like me providing them with munitions? Tell me that to be going on with.’
‘I wasn’t getting at you, Will,’ Belle said gently, but it was no good.
There was no besting Will. . . .
To get to Joe’s bed they had to walk past a bed with a red screen round it. Belle averted her eyes, and closed her ears against the sound of a hollow groan.
‘He’s just coming round from the chloroform, missus,’ a soldier in hospital blue told her, trying to reassure. ‘He’ll make more noise than that when he finds they’ve taken another chunk from his leg.’
Belle felt the colour drain from her face, but Will took her by the arm and moved her on quickly. They found Joe sitting on a bed playing cards with a man with large sad eyes set in a long drooping face. He struggled to his feet when he saw them, and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.