The Nurse's War. Merryn Allingham

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СКАЧАТЬ and, on the balls of his feet, he tiptoed up the remaining stairs.

      The two small rooms he rented were airless, worse than airless, for the smell of thick dirt was overwhelming and so intense it seemed alive. He could hardly breathe the atmosphere and had to force himself to swallow it in great slabs. The two small windows were glued shut and muslin curtains drooped undisturbed against grimy panes, their colour an elephant grey. Several more flies had buzzed their last since he’d left that morning and now lay shrivelled on the uncovered floor. The room was as dark as it was airless, and through the gloom only the dim outlines of a few pieces of broken furniture were visible.

      He flung himself down on to the iron bedstead, pushing aside a tousled heap of clothes. For a long time he lay there, sprawled across the questionable mattress, and trying not to think. His eyes travelled around the brown-papered walls, blotchy and peeling from the damp, and upwards to the pitted ceiling, tracing, as he had done so many times these past few weeks, the cracks that disfigured it. He no longer saw its ugliness but instead had created a map of his own devising. This was him, here on the left, in the centre of that large, brown stain. The mass of small, thin lines stretching westwards were the waves of the ocean he would soon be crossing, and there on the other side of the ceiling, a solid splurge of colour—old paint, he thought, working its way to the surface—was surely the New World beckoning him to its shore. He lay there, looking upwards, for as long as his eyes would stay open.

      ‘Are you going then?’

      Connie punctuated each of her words with a particularly vicious scrub. The urine testing had been done for the day and now they were in the sluice room, grinding their way through the cleaning of bedpans. It was a messy undertaking, mops and Lysol everywhere.

      ‘I have to. I promised.’ Daisy’s voice trailed miserably beneath the thunder of water. She didn’t want to seek out Grayson, didn’t want to see him again, to see his slow smile and lose herself in those deep blue eyes.

      She felt Willa Jenkins looking at them from the opposite line of sinks. ‘Take care, Willa,’ she called across at the girl, ‘there’s another heap of pans just behind you.’

      It had amazed them when Willa had managed against all the odds to pass her probation on the third attempt. She was slow at her work, constantly getting things wrong, and very clumsy.

      Broken china, smashed thermometers, bent syringes, followed her wherever she went. Daisy had often come to her rescue, helping to hide the wreckage before Sister caught a glimpse. Their fellow nurses had gradually lost patience with such an awkward colleague and were not above joining in a communal teasing that at times verged on unkindness. The girl was an outsider like herself, Daisy thought, but, unlike her, she hadn’t learned to blend in, to stay unobtrusive. She’d done what she could to protect Willa, remembering her own isolation as a servant and the scourging meted out by the shop girls at Bridges. But it wasn’t always easy to intervene and she was aware of how very unhappy the girl must be. And lately she’d become even more withdrawn, ever since the news had circulated that her brother had been killed on his last training flight. Willa’s interest in their conversation today was the first she’d shown for weeks and, at any other time, Daisy would have tried hard to include her. But this was such a very personal matter.

      Connie was still speaking, her voice lowered. ‘Cheer up, Daisy. It’s a good thing, surely. Get the papers Gerald wants and you’re a free woman. Once he’s in America, he won’t come back. You can file for a divorce or an annulment or whatever it is.’

      Her mind stuttered at the thought. ‘There’s a host of things to sort out before I get there. That’s the stuff you deal with at the very end of a marriage.’

      Or when you’ve come to terms with the end, she thought. The truth was that she had no real idea how she felt about Gerald. When he’d accosted her outside the Nurses’ Home, he’d simply been a figure in the dark. He’d sounded like Gerald and, in the brief flare of the match, he’d even looked like Gerald. But somehow his resurgence had seemed fantasy, as though he were a mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes. Today though, in the sunlight of a London park, she’d had to accept that he really had come back to life and was not going away.

      Connie stopped scrubbing and fixed her with an unwavering look. ‘Don’t say you still have feelings for him.’

      She swallowed hard. ‘I found it upsetting today, that’s all. Sitting by his side, hearing him speak, seeing him smile even. It brought back the man I married, the man I loved once.’

      And brought back all the anguish. She’d hidden it well, camouflaged beneath her nurse’s uniform, beneath the harsh training and the relentless routine. But she was still hurting.

      ‘You do still want him out of your life, I take it?’ The bedpans were neatly stacked to one side and Connie had thrown her a towel.

      Daisy nodded.

      ‘So when are you going to see Grayson Harte?’

      ‘As soon as possible. I need to get it over with.’

      She felt a whoosh of air as Sister Elton bustled into the room. ‘No time for talking, nurses. You have patients to prepare for theatre.’

      The ward sister allowed nothing to escape her. Daisy saw her glance towards Willa, still labouring through her pile of bedpans, but the older woman said nothing. From the days of initial training, Willa had constantly been at the rough end of Sister Elton’s tongue, but since the news of her brother’s death had percolated, Daisy had noticed a distinct softening towards her. There was a rumour that two of the brother’s friends, also pilots, had been lost and everyone knew that Willa had a picture of one of them on her bedside table.

      ‘From what you’ve said, Grayson seems a gentleman,’ Connie continued to urge, as they made their way onto the ward. ‘He’s not likely to make you feel uncomfortable, is he?’

      ‘No, I don’t think he will, and that makes me feel worse. When we said goodbye … it was, well, difficult.’

      ‘You didn’t tell me it ended badly. I thought you’d both agreed it was best to part.’

      ‘We did—sort of. It was more that he didn’t understand why I couldn’t make a new start. He tried to understand, but it just didn’t work.’

      ‘I can’t see why not.’

      ‘Neither could he. For him the Indian episode was over. The bad people had been punished and my ne’er-do-well husband was dead, so what was stopping me?’

      ‘He had a point,’ her friend said judiciously. ‘But in any case he won’t remember much of how you parted. It’s not as if he’s still pining for you, is it? You said he looked perfectly happy when you last saw him.’

       CHAPTER 4

      She’d glimpsed Grayson one Saturday afternoon in Regent Street just before Christmas. Nurses had each been given a precious few hours to shop for presents, not that there was much to buy or money to pay for what there was. And there he’d been, strolling along the pavement outside Liberty, with a laughing girl on his arm. She could still feel the fierce jealousy that had taken a sudden grip on her. She’d darted down a side street to get out of their way. And to recover. It was a shock that she could feel so passionately when months ago she’d sent him away, knowing she could never give him the closeness he craved.

      ‘I’m СКАЧАТЬ