by Abbie Taylor
‘Where were you thinking of going?’ Dawn asked.
‘The North Downs. Or further. East Sussex, maybe.’
‘Oh.’ Dawn was surprised. She had assumed one of the local parks. Tooting Bec Common maybe, or Wandsworth. ‘That sounds nice. I don’t think Milly’s been down there in years.’
Will jammed his hands into his pockets, so deep that his knuckles made a knobbly rim around the hem of his jacket.
‘Come with us,’ he said.
‘Oh, no. No. It sounds lovely, but I’ve got too much to do.’ Half days didn’t come Dawn’s way very often and she’d been planning this one for ages. The first thing she was going to do was make a large, hot mug of tea and have it in her kitchen with the salad roll she had bought specially in Waitrose, luxuriating in the fact that there would be no pagers going off, no managers flustering up to her and saying, ‘Matron, when you have a moment …’ Afterwards she would tackle the mound of paperwork that had been building up over the past few days. Off-duty rotas. An appraisal of the new portable cardiac Resus kit. Her Disaster Plan. There was enough to keep her going for a week.
The sun beat down on her head. The air shimmered above the tarmac. Francine’s voice: You need some perspective …
‘How long would we be?’ she asked.
Will squinted at the sky. ‘As long as you like. We could be back in three hours.’
Dawn thought.
‘I’ll just grab a sandwich and change out of my uniform.’
The red Honda had seen better days. Piles of papers lay everywhere, printed with rows of numbers and brackets and semicolons. The seats were matted with dog hairs.
‘Sorry about this.’ Will had his arms full of computer magazines, looking around for somewhere to put them. His glasses were slipping down his nose again. ‘I’ll put some newspaper on that seat for you.’
‘No. Really. These are the clothes I usually walk Milly in.’ It was fascinating, the way people’s cars often fit with their personalities. Will’s car, messy as it was, matched what she had seen of him so far. Not flashy or trendy but … useful. That sounded like an insult, as if she was saying he was boring, but she didn’t mean it like that. There was nothing wrong with being useful. Dawn understood useful people. She felt at ease with them. They weren’t as easy to find as you might think.
She patted the back seat. ‘Come on, Milly.’ Gently, she shoved at Milly’s rear to give her stiff hip some leverage. Milly squeezed into the space between the seats and settled down with her muzzle on a magazine called Linux Pro which had a picture of some kind of microchip on the front.
Will drove around the edges of Croydon, skirting the giant new shopping centres and office blocks. At Purley they joined the A23, heading south to the motorway. Gradually, the towers and housing estates gave way to individual houses, then to fields on either side of the road.
‘This is a great idea,’ Dawn said. Now that they were leaving London behind, she had a feeling of relaxation, of letting go. The mounds of paperwork would still be there when she got back but in the meantime there was nothing she could do about them. Will was quiet, concentrating on the road. Having gone to the trouble of asking her to join them, he seemed to have retreated again into his usual tongue-tied silence. Well, that was OK. She was quite happy just to sit back and enjoy the journey. She had never got around to buying a car. Hardly anyone she knew in London owned one. There seemed little point in forking out for insurance and parking and congestion charges when the trains and buses could take you anywhere you wanted to go. But on a day like this it was lovely to be able to escape the noise and grime of the city.
At a junction, Will took a slip road that climbed to a roundabout surrounded by trees. Now they were definitely in the countryside. Green and yellow fields sloped between the gaps in the hedgerow. They took the second exit and came to a village, all timbered houses and high, red-bricked walls covered with creeper. The village seemed utterly deserted, yet it was beautifully kept and cared-for. The ancient church at one end, all leaded panes and steep roof, surrounded by crooked, lichen-covered headstones, looked like something from a fairy tale. Will turned right at a crossroads and the road climbed again, narrowing to a single lane with grass growing in the centre. Twigs and leaves brushed the sides of the car. Finally, little more than an hour after they had left London, Will steered the car into a lay-by and turned off the engine.
Silence pulsed through the windows. It was as if the wide, empty sky was trying to push its way right into the car with them. The only sound was the distant plaintive oo-oo of a wood pigeon.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Dawn said. She opened her door. Below the car spread the long valley, thickly buttered with bright yellow oil-seed rape. A swarm of midges blurred the air under the hedgerow. Several feet away, a wooden stile led into a field.
Will said, ‘If we follow the path through that stile, it’ll bring us right around in a circuit and back to the car. About four miles or so. Will Milly manage that?’
Milly had leaped from the car and was in the field already, sniffing under the hedgerow with just her rear sticking out. At the sound of her name she came backing out, covered in twigs, one ear bent over her eye. Dawn laughed. ‘I think she’ll be OK.’
They followed the dirt track around the edge of the field. The sun was hot on Dawn’s face. She took her jumper off and tied it around her waist. Around them sloped more fields and low hills, criss-crossing into a haze. This was farming country, lush and fertile, the grass a dark blue-green. Milly trotted ahead of them, occasionally stopping to eat some grass or sniff at a tree. Beside Dawn, Will’s heavy brown boots tramped along, flattening the grass. Thud. Thud.
‘Did you say you lived in Streatham?’ Dawn asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Telford Road.’
‘Oh, I know it. Some lovely houses up there.’
‘Yes.’
Thud. He really was hard to talk to. In the next field, a flock of lambs came crowding to check out their visitors. They shouldered each other out of the way, their woolly bodies splodged with bright red ink, some of them with soot-black faces and eyes like shiny buttons in the wool. Dawn clipped Milly’s lead on to her collar. Her chasing days were long over but in the past half an hour she seemed to have dropped five years. The lambs’ mothers kept their distance, lying down or chomping on the grass, but keeping an eye on what their offspring were up to; calling them in their bass voices to come away if they got too close to the strangers.
‘They sound so funny,’ Dawn said. ‘Like Pavarotti.’
Forest Ward and St Iberius seemed a million miles away. Dawn said, ‘I remember years ago, on our farm in Cumbria, seeing two sets of twin lambs playing in a hollow tree. They were pushing and shoving each other, fighting for the best spot. The twins who got pushed out ran back across the field to their mum, bawling all the way, as if they were telling tales. It was so sweet. Exactly as if they were children.’
Will’s feet continued to thud on the grass. Dawn sighed to herself. This had been a mistake. Will was making no effort at all; hadn’t, in fact, since they had climbed into the car and begun their journey here. He didn’t seem the least bit interested in her or Milly. Probably he had never expected her to take him up on his offer and had only come to meet her today out of politeness. Well, at least she had tried. It was so lovely here, she didn’t regret coming, but once today was over she would find some other way of keeping Milly entertained.
They had reached the road again. Two little girls ran giggling along the path towards a group of cars parked under some trees. Behind them puffed a smaller child, struggling to keep up.
‘Wait,’ the child shouted. ‘Wait for me.’
His chubby face was red and cross and anxious. His cheeks turned purple with the effort not to be left behind. The girls glanced behind them, giggled again, ran faster.
‘Wait! Wait!’ The child’s voice rose in a wail.
Will’s voice, somewhere over
Dawn’s left ear. ‘About the same age, aren’t they?’
‘Sorry?’ Dawn looked at him. ‘As who?’
‘The boy on Saturday. In the café.’
‘Oh. Yes, so they are.’
The cross little boy tripped and plopped forward to the ground. He didn’t bother to get up but lay face down in the mud and howled. A woman appeared from somewhere between the parked cars and came to pick him up. He clung to her, still howling, pointing at the two girls. The woman stroked his hair and murmured to him. Then she took all three children away with her. The child’s wails faded behind the trees until there was silence.
‘Look,’ Dawn said, ‘it’s getting late. I think maybe we’d better—’
‘That was so incredible,’ Will said. ‘What you did that day.’
He had stopped walking and turned to look at her. The sun had moved off his glasses; for the first time she could see his face clearly. The frank admiration in his eyes was unmistakable. Dawn realized suddenly that it wasn’t lack of interest that was making him so quiet. It was shyness.
‘You were so calm,’ he said. ‘Everyone else froze or panicked. But you … you just got on with it.’
The awe in his tone. Such openness and earnestness in such a large man made him seem vulnerable. It struck Dawn suddenly that he fancied her. Will was exactly the sort of man who would have a thing about nurses. Her nursing friends had often joked about men like him. Men who liked being looked after and had a fixation about mothers and breasts and thermometers. Not her type at all. Not anyone’s type, surely! Despite that, his shyness touched her. She always felt a sympathy, a protectiveness, towards people who were in some way vulnerable, especially if they weren’t shrewd or streetwise enough to have learned how to hide it.
She said, ‘Well, you could always do a first aid course. What I did was much more to do with that really than with nursing.’
‘I’d like that,’ Will said eagerly. ‘It’s only when something like this happens that you realize how much you don’t know.’
‘I could look up the details of a good course in your area if you’d like.’
‘Would you? That would be great.’
They had started walking again, a little easier now with each other. Ahead of them was a pub, low and white, with a beamed doorway and black-painted shutters. The garden to the side was scattered with wooden trestle tables and barrels filled with flowers. Above the door was an iron bracket holding a sign with a painting of a stag. The words underneath the painting read, The Black Hart.
‘Would you mind if we stopped here for a minute?’ Dawn asked. ‘I want to get Milly a drink.’
The doorway of the pub was so low that Will had to bend his head to go through. Inside, the room was all dark wood and black beams, the only illumination a sharp slash of sunlight on the patterned carpet. Behind the bar, a teenage girl was reading a magazine.
‘Excuse me,’ Dawn said. ‘Could we have some water for my dog?’
‘Sure.’ The girl slid off her high stool. ‘Anything else?’
Will looked at Dawn.
‘I’ll have a glass of white wine,’ she said. Why not? She had just done a four mile walk. Will ordered a shandy for himself. They took the drinks outside to one of the wooden tables under the trees. They were the only people there. Milly stood in the shade and slurped from her bowl of water. Will sat across the table from Dawn. He had taken off his jacket. His legs were stretched out, his fine, straight hair messy from the breeze. He looked much more relaxed and at home than he had in the cramped café in Tooting.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Dawn leaned forward on her elbows. ‘What exactly do IT people do?’
The reflection of the trees moved over Will’s glasses as he turned his head. He grinned. ‘Do you really want to know? I’m a systems engineer.’
Dawn said knowledgeably, ‘You design websites.’
‘No. That’s the trendy end of things. I’m more of a back-room person. People hire me, say, when their company has just installed a new type of program and it doesn’t work or crashes their system.’
‘Do you enjoy it?’
‘Yes, I do. I like being able to choose where I go, what pace to work at.’
He liked not having to talk too much to people was what he meant. Dawn could see now that a career in IT probably suited him very well. It was like farming in that way – good for loners.
‘How long have you lived in London?’ she asked. ‘Two years.’
‘But you’d like to go back.’
‘Yes.’ The corner of Will’s mouth twisted. ‘I’m not really a city person, as you can probably tell. I applied for a job up there recently.’
‘Only recently?’
‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I couldn’t before. Because of my girlfriend.’
‘Oh.’ A girlfriend. There was a surprise! Dawn would have sworn that he was on his own.
‘Well,’ Will said, ‘my fiancée, really. She was from Keswick, and … I had to leave for a while. I couldn’t stay. It’s just that she … well, she …’
Dawn, understanding, said, ‘She finished things.’
A stab of sympathy. She pictured a brisk, efficient young woman, finally reaching the end of her patience with this shy, bespectacled, lumbering man.
‘No. Actually, she died.’
Dawn recoiled, pulling her elbows off the table. ‘How? Oh God, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘That’s all right,’ Will said. ‘It was three years ago. She had … breast cancer.’ The hesitancy before he said the words told her it was still difficult for him to talk about.
‘I’m sorry.’ Dawn was still horrified at her crassness. And to think she’d wondered if he fancied her!
‘It’s all right. Like I said, I’m ready to move back there now.’ Will took a mouthful of his shandy. Then he planted the glass firmly back on the table and looked up. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what about you? What kind of nursing do you do?’
Dawn took the hint.
‘I’m the Surgical Matron,’ she said, ‘at St Iberius Hospital in Battersea.’
‘The Matron!’ Will made a whistle shape with his mouth to show that he was impressed. ‘So you don’t deal with actual patients any more?’
‘Oh no, I do. That’s the most important part of it for me.’
‘What does it involve? What’s a typical day for you?’
‘Well …’ Clearly he was determined to move on from talk about his fiancée. Dawn thought for a moment. She had plenty of stories from the ward; every nurse did. She began to sketch out an average day for Will, making sure to steer clear of any deaths and tragedies, concentrating instead on the stories that were funny, brave, tender. Conscious of not wanting to bore him, she kept an eye out for the ballooning double chin that had always signified that Kevin was stifling a yawn. But no yawn came. Will seemed genuinely interested, watching her as she spoke, nodding and crinkling his eyes up at all the funny bits. Unlike with most lay people, Dawn noticed, she didn’t keep having to stop and explain things to him. Even though he mightn’t initially know what she meant by terms like TPN or infusion pump, he seemed to work out what she meant soon enough from the context. His technical background, she supposed. This quickness was a new side of him she hadn’t seen before. Will, she was beginning to suspect, was one of those people who knew things, but unless you asked him directly you would never find out. There was a core of intelligence to him, hidden but definitely there. The light moved off his glasses. For the first time she noticed how grey his eyes were. Like hers.
‘Northern eyes,’ her Cumbrian grandfather had once said. ‘Adapted to our long, dark winters. We can see further in the mountains than other people.’
‘You really love it, don’t you?’ Will was watching her. ‘What you do.’
‘Most of the time.’ Dawn picked up her wineglass and took a sip. ‘There can be bad days, some difficult decisions. You don’t always get it right.’
‘But the
way you feel about it.’ Will was leaning forward, the most animated she had ever seen him. ‘So many people are bored with their jobs, just doing it for the money. But you … You must never wake up at night and think, What have I done with my life? What is the point of me?’
‘That’s true,’ Dawn said, surprised.
If a touch idealistic. The public could be funny about nurses. Some thought that all nurses did was make beds and clean up vomit. Others, just as unrealistically, viewed them as martyred beings, one wing’s-breadth below the angels, devoting themselves to the care of others for the sheer love of humankind. ‘Don’t you find it very sad?’ these people would say. Or: ‘I couldn’t do nursing myself. I’m very sensitive about blood.’ As if they lived on some higher plane. What did they think would happen if they were ill or injured and everyone was too sensitive to deal with their blood?
The truth was that nursing was like any other job. It had its dramatic moments but most of it was routine. Common sense. Still, it was nice to see herself through Will’s eyes. Who could resist being thought of as a heroine?
‘The nurses at the hospital were excellent with Kate,’ Will said. ‘I always remember that. So kind to her, even though they were so busy. They always seemed to be under-staffed. It’s such a worthwhile job. I don’t know why more people don’t do it.’
‘Well, it’s not for those who like a luxury lifestyle,’ Dawn said lightly. ‘Try living in London on a nurse’s salary.’
‘The lack of money doesn’t bother you though, does it?’ He was still looking at her. ‘Why did you decide to do it?’
People often asked her that. Usually she said something like, ‘I wanted to help people,’ or, ‘I enjoy the variety.’
She heard the words come out of her mouth. ‘My parents were killed. In a car accident, the day after Boxing Day. A drunk driver slammed into them on the Honister Pass.’