To Have and To Hold. Anne Bennett

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      The weeks rolled by and turned into months. Carmel finished her first year and when her holidays were due, she went to stay with the sisters at St Chad’s Hospital. It was rather a busman’s holiday because she helped out on the wards, but she was quite happy about that.

      She began her second year with no change in her attitude towards men, and was surprised and a little dismayed when she learned that Paul was working at the hospital with a fair few other student doctors.

      ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ she asked Lois.

      ‘There seemed little point,’ Lois said with a shrug. ‘I knew that you would find out eventually. He likes the situation even less than you do. None of them has had any choice about where they were sent.’

      Carmel knew that was true. To give the probationer nurses the maximum exposure to a variety of medical conditions, each one spent a minimum of nine weeks and a maximum of twelve on a different ward. Carmel valued the experience this was giving her and she imagined that it would help the budding doctors to learn in different places too. As the General and Queen’s were the only two teaching hospitals in the city, it was inevitable that some medical students should be sent there. She knew she wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing Paul, but Lois had assured her that Paul had been told and understood how Carmel felt. She was glad about this for it meant she would be able to treat him in a respectful and professional manner, as she did the other doctors she came into contact with.

      ‘Has anyone else see that gorgeous doctor?’ Aileen Roberts said at breakfast one day at the beginning of October.

      No one had apparently, so Aileen went on, ‘He is wonderful, terrific. He has blond hair and the deepest blue eyes.’

      Carmel and her room-mates weren’t there, or Lois would have said the man was probably her cousin Paul. Everyone was used to Aileen and her ways, anyway, and liked to tease her.

      ‘I thought you liked them tall, dark and handsome like Dr Durston,’ another girl, Maggie, said. ‘Weren’t you madly in love with him just a few weeks ago?’

      ‘Yeah, and then it was that surgeon—what’s his name, Adams—Mr Adams that you said had smouldering eyes that turned you weak at the knees,’ Susan, another young probationer, added.

      There was a ripple of laughter and then Maggie said, ‘You even had a thing going for Jimmy, that cheeky young porter, as I remember.’

      ‘Face it, Aileen,’ put in Susan, ‘with men you are a right pushover and you fall in love more often than I have hot dinners.’

      ‘This is different,’ Aileen maintained. ‘They were just mere mortals, but this man is a god, a true god. You’ll know when you see him yourself.’

      ‘Has he a name, this man?’ Maggie asked with a wry smile. ‘Just in case there is more than one god trailing about the hospital?’

      Aileen cast her a withering look. ‘Connolly, that’s what he’s called. Dr P. Connolly.’

      ‘Haven’t you found out what the P stands for yet?’ Maggie cried. ‘God, Aileen, you’re slipping.’

      ‘Give me time,’ Aileen said. ‘I have only just spotted him. It could be Peter.’

      ‘Or Philip or Paul,’ Susan said.

      ‘Or Patrick,’ said Maggie, and went on mockingly, ‘But surely these are such ordinary, mortal names for such a superior being?’

      ‘You wait till you see him,’ Aileen said, getting in a huff at all the teasing. ‘And when you do, remember that I saw him first and that makes him mine.’

      ‘Haven’t you heard the expression that all’s fair in love and war?’ Maggie asked.

      ‘I don’t know about fair in love and war,’ said Susan. ‘But I do know no one will be fair on us if we don’t head on to the wards, and mightily quickly too.’

      There was a resigned groan as the girls, realising that Susan was right, got to their feet. The matter of Aileen and the dashing doctor was shelved for the moment.

      It soon filtered around the hospital that the Adonis that Aileen had described was Lois’s cousin Paul. Aileen was delighted that one of the girls was related to him.

      ‘That’s wonderful. Maybe she can put in a word for me,’ she said at breakfast one morning.

      ‘Why should she?’ said Jane with a laugh.

      ‘Anyway, I’d say a man like that will make up his own mind,’ Sylvia said. ‘And from what I remember from the night we met him down the Bull Ring that one time, it was Carmel he was showing an interest in.’

      ‘Carmel!’

      ‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ Sylvia said. ‘She’s very pretty.’

      There was no denying that. Aileen thought it a shame that such beauty should go to waste, for Carmel seemed to have no interest in men. ‘I bet she didn’t take no notice,’ she said.

      ‘No, she didn’t.’

      ‘I don’t understand her,’ Aileen said. ‘I don’t know why she don’t go the whole hog and be a nun if she ain’t a bit interested in men. Anyway, it don’t matter, she has had her chance and if she don’t want Paul, plenty will—like me, for instance.’

      ‘You’ll have to get in the queue for that then,’ another girl said from further down the table. ‘’Cos I will hand it to you this time, Aileen, he is very dishy, this Paul Connolly, and I intend to be СКАЧАТЬ