by Ursula Bloom
‘Oh, there you are!’ said the pleasanter of the two. ‘I suppose you know you’re late?’
‘I’m not. I’m three minutes early,’ said Frances in a cold manner, consulting her watch, for she prided herself on her punctuality.
‘Rot! Your watch is slow,’ said the girl, who was in a temper. She had had a flare-up with Sister during lunch. It was always happening. The patients tried to tickle her fingers under the vegetable dishes when she handed the potatoes round; it was their idea of fun, and she was a pretty girl. Sister, seeing it, blamed her for leading the men on. In Sister’s eyes the men could do no wrong, for she had a weakness for anything in a pair of trousers, and all the staff knew it. The V.A.D. flounced off in a huff. Utterly dismayed, Frances stared at the crocks and the dripping tap, and the two very soiled tea towels flung down on the draining board.
‘This is awful,’ she said.
‘Oh, come now, it’s no good looking; you wipe and I’ll wash,’ said the practical Hilda Stevens, rolling up her sleeves, and turning on the tap with such vigour that it splashed violently all over Frances, marking the apron that she had borrowed from Mrs. Parkin.
It was extraordinary that Frances did not argue. She had come here to get social uplift, she intended to get to know Lady Epsom really intimately, and so obtain a permanent standing on the local social ladder. Instead of this, she was frankly horrified to find herself surrounded by crockery, and very dirty crockery too, for it was Irish stew day, in a sordid little butler’s pantry, not one whit as comfortable as her own at Thornhill. Not that she ever went into her own pantry, she would have thought that to be most demeaning. She gave it a wide berth. She wiped the plates meticulously, carrying them into the kitchen where an imposing dresser received them. A couple of orderlies grinned at her, in between intervals of whistling ‘Roses of Picardy’; a third went on picking his teeth with a fork, staring stolidly at her with apparently no interest whatsoever. Frances was so bewildered that for a moment she was pulverized into inaction. She returned to the pantry.
‘Now we go and make our number with Sister, and report that lunch is all put away,’ said Hilda, who knew the routine.
They trooped out side by side into the front of the house, which was spacious. Hilda led Frances to a small room off the side of the hall and she tapped timidly on the door.
‘Come in,’ said a voice with very dubious welcome in its tone.
Frances felt like a small child again, and she loathed it. She had almost forgotten this ghastly feeling of enforced humility which had possessed her in her black stocking and serge bloomer days. Sister was sitting at a desk, and having just broken the side arm of her spectacles was annoyed, and vented it on them as though it were their fault. She was of Mrs. Parkin’s age, that was to say you could class her as being advanced well into the fifties, of unprepossessing appearance, a little podge and not unlike the late Queen. She suspected all V.A.D.s of slackness, and looked interrogatively at Frances.
‘I have reported for duty,’ said Frances primly. After all, it was stupid to be afraid. Sister couldn’t do anything to her.
‘You were late,’ said Sister.
‘I was three minutes early. I looked at my watch.’
‘Don’t answer back,’ snapped Sister, in such a withering tone that nobody would ever want to answer back again. Then to Hilda, ‘Instruct her in her duties. You’ve finished doing the washing-up?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Then show her round, and remember that I allow no shirking. Even if you are a voluntary helper, I expect you to give of your best as does every nurse who comes under my authority. Only the best is good enough, you understand? By the by, what’s your name?’
‘I’m Mrs. Lester,’ said Frances who was feeling considerably uncomfortable.
‘You’re Nurse to me.’ That was dismissal. The door shut on them, and Frances was furious that her knees should feel like jelly, and that her throat had gone dry. Hilda tried to explain.
‘She’s an awful old bitch really, but not so bad when you get to know her better,’ apologized Hilda.
Frances didn’t like Hilda; she would never care for any girl who talked about ‘awful old bitches’, even if referring to dogs. It was a word that was for ever outside Frances’s vocabulary. When she could recover herself, she looked round her with some horror.
‘This place,’ said Frances, ‘is disgusting.’
That afternoon was an eye-opener and she knew it. She had been jarred out of her usual serenity, which, in itself, was a very trying experience. She did not know when she had been more disturbed about anything. She told herself that she would never come here again, not even to please that odious Lady Epsom, who ought to have known better than to ask her here at all.
Then the mental pricking of conscience set in. She had accepted the work for two months, and she could not very well leave it in that period of time, unless she was justifiably sick. She told herself that she would find another way out. Perhaps she could write a cold letter to the Sister-in-charge, and a hot one to Lady Epsom, who had no right to have brought her here. She did not care if a rumpus entailed social ostracism. She didn’t care about anything but getting away from a place where everybody was so intolerable. Wearily she went to the pantry with Hilda Stevens.
‘Now what do we do?’
‘We take the patients’ milk round. Come on.’
The orderly was still singing ‘Roses of Picardy’ as he poured the milk into innumerable glasses all clustering on large tin trays. ‘You’ll have a job in finding them, sunny day like this, and not ’arf,’ said he, meaning to be encouraging, but irritating Frances even more, ‘but good luck to you, girls.’
This is frightful, thought Frances. She took up her tray. Hilda directed her to ‘do’ the south terrace and rose garden, whilst she did the other side of the house. The tray was heavy and the milk spilt easily. Crossing to the empty lounge which led on to the terrace itself, Frances ran into Sister just as one glass slopped into a white puddle on the tray.
‘That’s not a good beginning, Nurse,’ reproved Sister, who ‒ like Frances herself ‒ missed no chance to find fault with others.
‘I’m new to this. I’ll get used to it.’
‘You’ll have to,’ with some severity.
On went Sister, her arms folded on her stomach, and her pert little cape swinging to her elbows. She walked like Queen Victoria when she carried the orb and sceptre. She carried her arms just as if they held an orb and sceptre, and Frances ached to slap her. She did not know when she had been angrier. She wasn’t herself this afternoon, and she knew it.
She went out on to the terrace.
The patients were sitting about and she got rid of the milk on to six of them; four others asked if it had got anything else in it, anything to make it worth drinking, and when told no, refused it. Much later, when she got back to the pantry with the tray, Frances discovered that it was against rules that anyone should say no-thank-you, and Sister wished to see her about it.
She went into the rose garden, hoping that it would be deserted, but caught a glimpse of the Royal Flying Corps blue in the summer house. She walked towards it. It was a palatial summer house, with a thatched roof and lead lights in the windows. It was furnished also, with upholstered furniture covered in a bright cretonne, and at the far end there were love birds in a cage. It looked very pleasant with the rush mats, and a single officer was sitting there reading. He was well-built, with a very tanned skin and almost black hair brushed back. He pushed the book aside and looked up at her amusedly from the chaise-longue.
‘Well, well, well!’ said he.
‘Now don’t you start. I’m new, as you can see, and everybody has been saying “Well, well, well” to me, and snapping at me and driving me stark staring mad.’
‘So Sister’s got you down? She prides herself on it, of course, the wicked little martinet! But under it all her heart’s as tender as a spring chicken.’
‘A pre-war spring.’
‘Not at all! This spring, and you’ll find it out one of these days. Hello, so somebody’s left their milk? That means trouble.’
‘This is yours.’
‘Anything in it?’
‘They all ask me that.’
She was so exasperated that she could have screamed. When she was in the almoner’s office, she doled out the rules; she was the law, and nobody dared to question her. With the Girl Guides she was the great madam oracle. She enjoyed having authority. She was queen of Thornhill; Aubrey was afraid of her and she knew it, her mother-in-law would not care to cross swords with her, and she knew that too. In the village nobody would ever have challenged her right to do what she wanted when she wanted and as she wanted. But here she had no rights. She was the lowest form of humanity, the junior V.A.D. She could have screamed over it, she told herself again and again. Why couldn’t the officers accept their stupid milk if it was given them instead of going through all these foolish remarks about it? He watched her.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you sit down for a breather for a moment, nobody’ll catch you out here.’
‘I don’t care if they do catch me. I’ll do what I like.’ She slapped down the tray and collapsed in a fury into a basket chair.
‘Why did you ever come here?’
‘Lady Epsom persuaded me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was a fool. I shall walk out this afternoon and never come back. Nothing will induce me to do another shift in this home, and be bullied and chi-iked and pushed about. It’s an abominable place, and putting it vulgarly, I’m throwing up the sponge.’
He said after a prolonged pause, ‘So that’s the spirit that won the war for England! What a girl!’
Then, of course, she knew that she couldn’t do it, and that made it almost worse. The women of England didn’t walk out on their duty because they were hot and bothered and angry. She had got to stay. Tradition barred her way, and Frances had always depended on tradition. She wanted to cry, she had not felt so childishly near to tears since she was small. She pulled herself together.
He said, ‘Now don’t be a silly little fool! You’re only letting the side down, and we can’t have that. You get on with the job, like everyone else has had to do. A few snubs from Sister have never really hurt anybody, and she’s not a bad old stick when it comes to it. Besides, you’re far too nice to make a little idiot of yourself.’
Nobody had ever talked to Frances that way before, least of all a stranger. She wished that she could say something to snub him, but all she could think of, was, ‘Do you realize that I’m a married woman?’
‘I happen to have noticed that you’re wearing a wedding ring. I’m rather an observant person, you know.’
‘I’m the lady almoner from Mainwaring hospital.’
‘Good gracious!’
‘My husband is fighting in India, and I do a lot of work locally. I’m a captain in the Girl Guides.’ That, she told herself, would impress him. But it didn’t. He laughed so immoderately that she was ashamed. She sat there staring at him, going red, and feeling like some foolish child.
He pulled himself together. ‘Sorry, but there isn’t any fighting in India, and I can well imagine that you are in the Girl Guides, and a lady almoner and all the rest of it. You know you’re a little prude who is trying to find her feet. I’d say it’d do you a lot of good to be here. You’ll learn something about the world, and quite a lot about yourself.’
Frances got up, and she walked over to the doorway of the summer house, reaching for the tray with fingers that shook. For a moment she was so dithering with rage that she could not speak, then she said in an unreal voice, ‘Thank Heaven, I have never met your kind of person before, and I hope that I never meet one again.’
In a flash he was between her and the tray. His hand closed over hers.
‘You’re going to like me a lot, and the extraordinary thing is that I am going to like you. There is no accounting for taste, is there?’
‘Try not to be more impolite than you can help.’
‘I can’t help it. I’m made that way. I say what I think and as I think it. But one day you’ll like it. That’s the point.’
He was close to her, and she could see how tan his skin was, and how dark his eyes; the strange thing was that she had a feeling that what he said was true, but she pulled herself together and spoke sharply to him. ‘Please let me go.’
‘Only if you promise that you’ll come back.’
‘I shall promise nothing of the sort.’
‘But you will come back. I know you will. You know you will, too.’
As she went across the lawn with the tray in her hand, the frightful part of it was that she knew she would return, because in the last few minutes something had happened to her. As she reached the terrace she met Sister with those folded arms and about her face the look of extreme virtue.
‘And why,’ asked Sister, ‘have some of the patients been allowed to refuse their milk?’
The new Frances found herself almost saying, ‘God alone knows’, but the old Frances came to her rescue quickly, and she mumbled something incoherent, received the reprimand dully and went on to the south terrace to collect the remaining glasses. She hardly knew what had happened to her.
His name was Michael Carey.
He had that much Irish in him, and a certain enchantment which made women forgive his sins in a way that was little short of miraculous. The other patients assured her that he could manage any woman under the sun, and Frances would reply coldly that anyway he couldn’t manage her. But he could, and in her heart she knew that he could.
If it hadn’t been for Michael Carey she would never have stayed on in that convalescent home, but because of him, she did. After the Mainwaring hospital had turned back to peacetime, and the authentic lady almoner returned from Rouen, where she had done wartime work, Frances relinquished her job. She continued as a V.A.D. because she would have been at a loss with only the Girl Guides left, for the Y.M.C.A. hut was closed, and now she needed something to occupy her time.
It was quite true, what Michael had said about Sister’s heart being tender as a spring chicken’s. When she got past that brusque exterior, Frances found the tenderness, and was quite surprised by it. In fact the tender interior was even more of a shock than the rough exterior had been.
During those first months, Frances had found herself very unsure of her foothold. So far in her life no one save her mother had ever mastered her. She was one of those people who need controlling; she had either to be ridden over roughshod, or do the riding herself, and when she came to look at it from far off, she wasn’t so sure that she liked always doing the riding herself. She needed Sister to keep her just where she ought to be kept; she could have done without the familiarity of the orderlies, and the cook, and Hilda Stevens, who habitually shared the shift and made coarse remarks (leastways Frances thought that they were coarse remarks), but in the main the home was making a new woman of her. She almost forgot the bogey of Alice and that boy of hers at the grammar school. Almost, but never quite.
The patients treated her as some sort of joke, and although it hurt, she stuck it out bravely. But Michael never treated her as a joke, just as a silly child who, having lost its way, is struggling in the darkness. She knew now that in some things she was a child, and she was in the dark, but the groping hands were beginning to feel the dim shape of things to come, and she was afraid.
There was the afternoon when she took Michael his tea in the garden, an afternoon when the rest of the home had gone to a village fête in a charabanc, but he had stayed behind. That was an afternoon when Sister could not catch her, for Sister had gone off sitting in front of the charabanc, looking absurdly smug over sceptre and orb arms, whilst the men sang ‘M’lle from Armentieres’ (the unexpurgated edition), and Sister with a face like granite pretending that she did not hear.
Frances sat on the garden seat with the June roses climbing up the pergola in a tumbl
e of red, and the lily pool beyond the fountain tinkling and the birds dipping their wings in the spray. It was a lovely day; one of those dream days that come about twice in a summer to England, and form the whole summer when one looks back later.
Michael was telling Frances about his home in Donegal. They had a ghost, and fierce draughts in winter, and battlements that blew down in the gales. There was something ignominious about battlements that blew down, and he laughed about them, but for all that he would not have been born anywhere else than in the old country, that green island of leprechauns and ghosties.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘I was born not six miles from here, and have lived here all my life, barring the time I was away at school.’
‘I might have guessed it. Oh well!’ and he laughed. ‘And you love this place?’
‘I don’t know, never having known any other, I ‒ well, I just don’t know.’
‘The husband fighting a noble war in India?’
‘He’s returning.’
‘And the little wife is quite enchanted, I’m sure?’
(He knows, she thought, he’s guessed something, and I’ve got to hide it.) ‘Naturally, but then I’m not a very emotional person, I never show my feelings very much.’
‘I think you are emotional, very emotional, and to me you do show your feelings.’ He had sat down beside her, and she knew that she was on the edge of a precipice. She wished she did not feel this particular way for this particular man, because it was entirely wrong, and she detested herself for it. ‘You know how I feel about you?’ he asked her.
‘I know that you’re a shocking flirt.’
‘Nonsense! For every man there is one woman, and one woman only. That isn’t flirting. I knew we were bound to meet, knew it all my life. Well, now we’ve met.’
‘Please, don’t be foolish.’
He had hold of her hand, and he held it authoritatively. ‘Now, schoolmarm, you can’t put that one over me. You know, Frances, I’ve rumbled you.’