The Orphans of Halfpenny Street. Cathy Sharp

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      ‘Well, I must not take any more of your time.’ Angela rose to her feet. His gaze took in the grace of her movement as she uncrossed her legs, the smooth whisper-thin nylon stockings and sensible Cuban-heeled black shoes. Mark stood too and they shook hands.

      ‘Good luck. I imagine you will get a letter quite soon asking you to go up for an interview.’

      ‘I can’t wait,’ she said and went out.

      Mark turned to stare out of the window at his very beautiful and extensive gardens. He was comfortably off, able to live much as he pleased these days. Indeed, he had no need to work all the time, and certainly the unpaid work he did at St Saviour’s was unnecessary to his career, but he too had known the urge to do something useful, to give back a little of what hard graft and Fortune had brought him. Perhaps it was merely a salve to his conscience, because he knew that many of the middle-class and rich women who patronised his clinics were not truly ill – at least their symptoms were real enough, but the mischief lay in the idleness of their comfortable lives. If more of them had Angela’s strength he would soon be out of a job, he thought with a wry smile.

      Mark was thirty-eight, and had an unhappy marriage behind him. It had ended because his wife died in a diabetic coma, brought on by her total lack of discipline. She had disregarded her diet, eaten foods that were too sugary, and forgotten her insulin, often leading to an emergency dash to the hospital. He suspected that these frequent crises were cries for help, which had sometimes been ignored because he was working too hard to think about her unhappiness. In fact he suspected that she had deliberately taken her own life, because she’d known what her reckless behaviour would lead to, and it was her way of paying him back for neglecting her. He blamed himself for not recognising the signs of depression that ought to have been plain; his only excuse was that the pressure of work with men who were suffering terrible trauma had led him to imagine that Edine was happy enough in her comfortable home.

      Mark knew that he had neglected her. It hadn’t been his fault that their son was born deformed, but he knew that in some peculiar way his wife felt it was. Unable to accept what had happened, she accused him of paying more attention to his patients, as if that had somehow caused the child’s death. He blamed himself on both counts, though he knew it was ridiculous. Had Edine’s misery and depression contributed to his son’s tragic condition? Or was it partly her illness that had starved the boy of the oxygen he’d needed at birth?

      The child had died only a few days later in the hospital. Mark had been told the hole in little Michael’s heart had never closed and by the time the doctors realised what was wrong, it was too late. Considering his other deformities, it was perhaps a merciful release. The pity of it was that Edine could never have another child, because the boy’s birth had damaged her inside.

      It had all gone wrong after that.

      Nursing his own disappointment and grief, Mark had buried himself in his work and neglected his wife without realising what he was doing. She’d turned away from him and he’d believed she blamed him for what had gone wrong, but he should have tried harder to reach her. Edine’s miserable death would lie forever on his conscience. He did not deserve another chance. Why should he be alive and able to love again when both his wife and their child were buried in their graves? It must have been his fault somehow. Because he’d been too selfish or too busy to realise how unhappy Edine was, to take more care of her, something had gone wrong inside her. He did not deserve to be happy again or to be loved by Angela. Besides, he was not even sure she saw him as a man, but rather as a friend of the man she still adored.

      Angela’s perfume still lingered, haunting him, making him wish for something he knew was beyond his reach, for the moment anyway.

      Sighing, Mark went back to his desk and pulled out the folder he’d been dealing with earlier. In this case the woman was suffering from a mental condition that might result in her having to be shut away for the sake of her family and her own safety. He was reminded of Edine and the way she’d brooded towards the end and the guilt was hard to bear. Sometimes he could see her resentful, sullen face, blaming him for her unhappiness. Why hadn’t he realised that her frequent illnesses were a cry for help? Yet this was a different case, and he must not allow personal feelings to come into it. It was rather a sad matter, and he didn’t want to make the decision himself. Mark would ask a trusted colleague to examine his patient and give him his thoughts.

      Walking back to her parents’ house, a modern red-brick building set some distance from the village, Angela was feeling more cheerful than she had for weeks. Of course Mark Adderbury couldn’t promise that St Saviour’s would take her on, but he obviously had some influence with the Board, having been a member since it was opened just four years earlier to deal with an influx of orphans created by the war. So many lives had been lost in the terrible bombings, both during the Blitz and from the terrifying V2 rockets in the last year of the war. Sometimes whole families had been killed, but at others children lost mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. In the worst cases their fathers were also killed while away fighting for King and Country and they had no one to take them in. Angela knew from something that her father had once told her in confidence, that the first matron employed to run the children’s home had been sacked after two years for various misdemeanours, including embezzling the funds. Mark had been very angry at the time and they had been more careful in their choice of the nursing sister who replaced her.

      Her father had told her that Mark had been the one who pushed for Sister Beatrice and therefore if he recommended Angela for the post of Administrator, surely his word would carry some weight? Her mother would be horrified at the idea of her daughter working at a place like St Saviour’s, but her father would understand.

      Angela had never doubted that her parents loved her. Daddy was wonderful, always trying to understand yet doing everything wrong, petting her as though she was still his little girl. What no one understood was that she’d lost her soul mate, the only man she’d ever loved.

      For a moment the pain of her grief caught her off guard and she had to fight to get her breath. She must not let her grief overpower her. She must face what had happened to her, face the fact that the man she’d adored was never coming back to her … face the knowledge that his body had been so badly mutilated that it was only his identity tags that convinced his CO it actually was John. Of course Angela should never have known the truth of his death. Her official letter had been brief, merely telling her that he had died in action and was a brave soldier.

      Angela should have accepted that but in her despair she’d cajoled her father into discovering more. He hadn’t wanted to tell her the truth, believing it would make her grief worse, but she’d wanted to know even though it had caused her unbearable pain. For some time she’d felt numb, and that had helped her to carry on at work as if nothing had happened. Perhaps she would have gone on like that if she hadn’t come home after the war ended, but her father had telephoned her, telling her that her mother had flu and was very depressed. She’d come home on a short visit and stayed on because her mother cried and begged her not to go back, and since the war was over there had seemed no reason to return. Angela had promised to stay for a while, and at first it hadn’t been too bad, but now that her mother had recovered she wouldn’t stop plotting and planning to get her married again.

      Mrs Hendry was determined that her daughter was going to enter the circles she had only ever watched from the edge. John’s family was landed gentry, and Mrs Hendry thought that Angela should use his parents to launch herself into society and make a second marriage. She would have had a brilliant social life if John had returned from the war, of course, because he was set to enter politics. They would have lived in London most of the time, enjoying a full life of children, a loving relationship, and entertaining their friends, but his death had left her with nothing and she felt so empty – and the one thing she didn’t want was the kind of marriage her mother craved for her.

      Angela СКАЧАТЬ