Britannia All at Sea. Betty Neels

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Mack, never the sunniest of persons, was in a quite nasty mood. She had an evening’s work before her and instead of being refreshed by a free afternoon, she had been hard at it doing dressings, medicine rounds and writing the beginnings of the day report, while Britannia, as she put it, had been idling in theatre. Britannia hadn’t been idling at all, but she knew better than to protest. She had rushed back to the ward while the patient was in the Recovery Room and broken the news to her superior that ICU was up to its neck with a bad car crash and the patient would be coming straight back to his own bed. So she was engrossed in a variety of urgent tasks to do with the well-being of the patient when Mr Hyde and the professor arrived at the bedside. They were still in their theatre gear; shapeless white smocks and trousers; the professor, being the size he was, looking as though he might burst every seam although his dignity remained unimpaired. He barely nodded at Britannia before bending over the young man. She handed Mr Hyde the observation sheets she had been keeping, answered his questions with brief clarity, and stood silently until the two men had made their examination. Everything was just as it should be, they told her, she was to continue the treatment which had been ordered—and what, she was asked, were the arrangements for the night?

      ‘There will be a special on at nine o’clock, sir,’ said Britannia, and thought longingly of that hour, still some time ahead—tea, and her shoes off and her feet up…

      It was disconcerting to her when the professor asked: ‘You have been off duty?’ because unless he was blind and deaf, which he wasn’t, he would have seen her and heard her during the course of the afternoon; indeed, he had stared at her in theatre so intently that she had felt twelve feet tall and outsize to boot.

      She handed Mr Hyde her pen so that he could add something to his notes and said composedly: ‘No. I can make it up later in the week.’

      ‘No tea?’ And when she shook her head: ‘A paragon among nurses, Miss Britannia Smith. Let us hope that you will get your just reward.’ His voice was bland and the smile she didn’t like was back again. She wondered what his real smile was like and wished lovingly that he wasn’t quite so difficult. She said a little severely: ‘You have no need to turn me into a martyr, Professor. I shall do very well.’

      The two surgeons went presently; the professor’s casual nod seemed positively churlish compared with Mr Hyde’s courteous thanks and genial good evening. Britannia, fiddling expertly with tubes, mused sadly on her day. Surely when one met the man of one’s dreams, it should be the happiest day of one’s life? If that were so, then hers had fallen sadly short of that.

      Sister went to supper at seven o’clock, leaving a student nurse in charge of the ward with the remark that Staff Nurse Smith was there and able to cope with anything which might turn up; she was still bad-tempered at the loss of her off-duty, and the fact that Britannia couldn’t leave her patient didn’t seem to have struck her, nor did it strike her that Britannia might like her supper too, for when she returned from her meal she finished the report, gave it to the night staff when they came on, and pausing only long enough to tell Britannia that she was worn out with her day’s work, hurried off duty. The special wasn’t coming on duty for another hour; Britannia, dealing with the dozens of necessary chores for her patient, hardly noticed where that hour went. Fred had been down earlier, he came again now, expressed his satisfaction as to the patient’s condition, told Britannia with the casual concern of an old friend that her hair was coming down, and went away.

      She still had no time to have done anything to her hair when she at last got off duty. Men’s Surgical was on the first floor and she wandered down the staircase to the front hall, listening vaguely to the subdued sounds around her; the faint tinkle of china as the junior night nurses collected up bedtime drinks, the sudden distant wail of some small creature up on the children’s unit above her, the creak of trolleys and the muffled to-ing and fro-ing of the night staff. She yawned hugely, gained the last stair and turned, her eyes on the ground, to go down the narrow passage which would take her to the Nurses’ Home. She was brought up short by something large and solid—Professor Luitingh van Thien.

      ‘Put on that cloak,’ he advised her in a no-nonsense voice. ‘We are going out.’

      Britannia, aware of the intense pleasure of seeing him again, opened her mouth, closed it and then opened it again to say: ‘I can’t—my hair!’

      He gave her a considered look. ‘A mess. Why do women always worry about their hair? No one is going to look at you.’

      She was forced to agree silently and with regret; not that she minded about that but because he didn’t consider her worth looking at.

      He had taken her hospital cape from her arm and flung it around her shoulders.

      ‘And you have no need to look like that; you are a handsome creature who can manage very well without elaborate hairstyles or other such nonsense.’

      She was torn between pleasure at being called a handsome creature—even though it put her strongly in mind of some outsized horse—and annoyance at his casual dismissal of her appearance. ‘I don’t think I want to go out,’ she told him calmly.

      ‘Tea? Hot buttered toast? Sandwiches? Are you not famished?’

      Her mouth watered, but: ‘I can make myself a pot of tea…’

      She could have saved her breath; she was swept across the hall and out into the cold November night and walked briskly down a back lane or two and into Ned’s Café, a small, brightly lit place much frequented by the hospital staff in need of a hasty snack or cup of coffee.

      Britannia, seated willy-nilly at a small plastic table in the middle of the crowded place, put up a hand to tuck in her hair. ‘How did you know about this place?’ she enquired, and thought how like a man to choose to sit where everyone could see them, and her with her hair streaming around her head like a witch.

      ‘The Surgical Registrar was kind enough to tell me.’

      ‘Oh—haven’t you had your supper either?’

      His fine mouth twitched at its corners. ‘Er—no.’ He lifted a finger and Ned came over, his cheerful, round face beaming.

      ‘’Ullo, Staff—’ad a bad day? and I bet they didn’t give yer time to eat. What’s it ter be? A nice bacon sandwich or a nice bit o’ cheese on toast? And a pot of tea?’

      Britannia’s nose twitched with anticipation. ‘Oh, Ned, I’d love a bacon sandwich—and tea, please.’

      They both glanced at the professor, who said at once: ‘A generous supply of bacon sandwiches, please, and the cheese on toast sounds nice—we’ll have that too—and the tea, of course.’

      The tea was hot and strong, the bacon sandwiches delicious. Britannia sank her splendid teeth into one of them before asking: ‘Why are you buying me my supper, Professor? It’s very kind of you, of course, you have no idea how hungry I am—but I’m surprised. You see, I sent you all the way back to the ward this morning, didn’t I, and I haven’t apologised for it yet. I’m sorry, really I am—if you had said who you were…’ She eyed him thoughtfully. ‘I expect people mostly know who you are…’

      Her companion smiled faintly. ‘Mostly.’ He watched her with interest as she daintily wolfed her sandwich. ‘When did you last eat, Miss Smith?’

      She licked a finger. ‘Well, I should have gone to second dinner, but Sister was a little late and we had this emergency in… I had coffee on the ward, though, and some rice pudding left over from the patients’ dinner.’

      The СКАЧАТЬ