A Nurse's Duty Read online

  ‘I lost the bairn,’ Kezia said weakly, as though she was confessing to wrong-doing, and Karen rushed the last few steps and took her hand. It felt cold and limp and not at all like Kezia’s capable hand.

  ‘I know, pet.’

  There was a short silence. Karen stopped herself saying the obvious phrases like ‘You’ve time yet’ or ‘You’ll have another’. She was aware that for the moment Kezia couldn’t think like that. She was in mourning for the child she had just lost.

  ‘I’m that sorry.’

  Kezia blew her nose on a man’s handkerchief she drew from under the pillow. ‘I know I’m a fool, making such a fuss. And it’s too much for Mam to run up and down the stairs after me. I’m going to pull myself together and go back to my own house.’

  ‘Gran’s here,’ said Karen, ‘there’s no need for you to do anything. And Mam looks well, doesn’t she? Do you think she’s beginning to improve?’

  Kezia brightened for a minute. ‘She does look well, doesn’t she? She likes to be needed same as us all, I suppose. I just hope she doesn’t try doing over much. You know what she’s like, when she’s well. She thinks she’s better altogether, she thinks she’s had a miracle cure.’

  ‘Well, Gran’s here. She’ll keep us all straight.’

  The sisters smiled at each other, remembering other times when Gran had come to the house and taken over, organizing the three girls and giving them their own lists of chores to do when they came in from school. Only Jemima had grumbled.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Jemima?’ asked Karen.

  ‘A letter last week. It was the first since Christmas.’

  The front door opened below and the sound of pit boots clumping through resounded up the stairs, ringing out as they did on the stone floor. Kezia’s face crumpled.

  ‘That’ll be Luke, he’s been on fore shift. He doesn’t know about me losing the baby yet.’

  Karen rose to her feet and patted Kezia’s hand. She felt like weeping with her sister’s pain.

  ‘I’ll go down now. I’m sure you want to see him on your own,’ she said awkwardly.

  In the kitchen Kezia’s man was sitting on Da’s chair by the fire and taking off his boots. Rachel and her mother were standing by the table setting out his food. Having told him the news they were giving him a few minutes, not looking at him, allowing him the only privacy these tiny cottages could afford.

  Luke was a quiet man. He rarely had much to say at any time. He glanced up at Karen as she came into the room and nodded a greeting, his face a mask of sweat and coal dust yet strangely white above the line of his forehead where his pit helmet had come to. Stiffly, he stood up and took off his jacket, dropping it on to the newspaper in the corner which was there for the purpose of protecting the floor from the coal dust.

  ‘Go on up now, Kezia wants to see you,’ said Karen.

  Luke looked down at his clothes, so permeated with the dirt from the pit that his body and clothes were the same uniform black.

  ‘I thought mebbe I’d better have a bath first, like.’

  ‘Nay, lad,’ Gran interposed. ‘Go on up. Your meal will keep till you come down and I’ll have the bath tin in an’ all. But the lass’ll be waiting for you, man.’

  In his stockinged feet and pit dirt, Luke climbed the stairs.

  In the kitchen below, the three women heard him groan and the thud as he fell to his knees by the bed and pulled Kezia into his arms.

  ‘Nay, lass,’ he cried, ‘don’t take on so. It’s me that’s sorry.’

  Gran looked across the table at Karen, a look which she interpreted correctly for she took up Luke’s meal which had been placed on the table and put it back in the oven to keep warm. Karen’s heart ached for her sister’s misery. It must be a terrible thing to lose a baby, she thought bleakly.

  ‘There’ll be coal dust on the sheets, it’ll take a deal of getting out,’ observed Mam in a detached kind of voice, but no one was worried about that. She coughed and changed the subject. ‘There’s a letter from Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s on the mantelpiece if you want to read it, Karen.’

  She felt a small thrill of excitement as she jumped up and stretched up to the high wooden shelf with the embroidered linen cover along it. A letter from Joe. He would probably say something about Dave. Maybe there was even a letter from Dave waiting for her in the office of the Nurses Home.

  The letter had been posted in Sydney. They had got there all right then. She pulled out the three pages of Joe’s neat, masculine script and read swiftly through them. They detailed all that had happened on the journey and told about the boarding house he was staying in for a few days before journeying up to the gold-fields.

  The landlady is from Newcastle, Mam, and she cooks like it and all. So you see, I’m not like for starving, not yet at any rate. It feels really odd, the weather being so hot at this time of year, but you know me, I like it hot. My room has a balcony right along the length of it and the whole house is built out of wood. I suppose I must make the most of it for we’ll be on our way up-country next week. I’ll write again when I get settled …

  Karen read the letter through, scanning it quickly. It was written in Joe’s usual bright, optimistic tone. He wrote about Tot Wilson and Jos Smith, two others of the group which had emigrated from the village, but there was no mention of Dave. Had they had an argument, her brother and her husband? She sat back in her chair and looked up from the letter and saw Mam watching her closely.

  ‘Have you had word from Dave, then?’ asked Mam bluntly.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure there’ll be a letter waiting for me when I go back,’ Karen answered rather too quickly.

  Mam looked unhappy, her forehead creased in a frown.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right. Anyway, why don’t you go along to Mrs Mitchell’s? She might have a letter.’

  Karen looked at the envelope which had contained the letter. The postmark was weeks ago. But then, it wasn’t surprising if there was some variation in how long it took for letters to arrive all the way from Australia. Dave could have written at the same time. She forebore to ask when this letter had arrived.

  ‘I think I will, Mam,’ she said, glancing at the oak-framed clock hanging on the wall. ‘I have another two hours before I have to go for the train back to Newcastle.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’

  Mrs Mitchell stood back from her front door, grudgingly allowing Karen room to pass her and walk through to the kitchen.

  ‘How are you, Mother Mitchell?’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m managing fine on my widow’s pension and I have a bit put by. The Union’s good.’ She closed the door and followed Karen through. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  ‘No thanks, Mother Mitchell, I’ve just had some. I haven’t got much time, I have to be back at the hospital. I just came to see how you were and to ask if you’d heard from Dave.’

  Mrs Mitchell sat down by the fire and motioned Karen to sit opposite. Her thin face broke into a smile as she delved inside her apron top and took out a letter, one with Australian stamps.

  ‘Aye, I did. He’s getting along fine. Reckons he might not go to the mines, he can find better chances in the city. He’s got a good job, he says.’ Mrs Mitchell held out the letter grudgingly. ‘You can read it if you like.’

  Karen felt cold. She forced her lips into a stiff smile.

  ‘No, I expect my letter’s coming. I haven’t heard from him yet. I expect there’s a letter waiting for me back at the Home now, though. I’ll get it when I go back.’

  ‘Well, lass, I got this about ten days ago. I’m amazed he didn’t write to you at the same time.’ But Karen saw the little smile of satisfaction which the older woman couldn’t quite hide as she pushed the letter back inside the top of her apron.

  Karen got away as soon as she decently could, pleading the need to get back to Newcastle, but as she walked back along the rows to her parents’ home she couldn’t get out of her mind the look of triumph on her mother-in-law�
�s face. Mrs Mitchell cherished the notion that Dave had written to her first. And why shouldn’t she? Karen told herself. Dave was her only son, all the family she had left now, and he was on the other side of the world. But no matter how hard Karen tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, she was humiliated.

  She said her goodbyes to Kezia and the others and went off for the train to Newcastle with a feeling of anticipation. Today there would be a letter from Dave.

  Back at the Nurses Home, Sister assured her there was no post for her. It will come tomorrow, Karen told herself firmly, and threw herself into work. She was on night duty now, the junior probationer on Men’s Surgical.

  The ward was full; thirty-three beds with only two nurses to see to their occupants. Night Sister popped in at odd intervals during the night to cast gimlet eyes over everything but things went smoothly enough.

  There were miners with broken limbs from pit accidents and men from the shipyards and docks. And one young lad in particular, Peter, small and vulnerable for his fourteen years for all his attempts to be a man among the men of the ward. He had lost a foot in a fall of stone, or rather it had had to be removed surgically after being squashed flat. The stump was healing nicely now but he whimpered in his drugged sleep and often woke up with a quickly stifled cry of distress.

  Karen usually tried to give Peter a little extra attention when she could, though she had no real time to spare. But she would save him little treats: a jam tart from her own tea, a few sweets she had bought on her day off. She was well liked by the young boys on the ward, her air of practical sympathy attracting them to her.

  Tonight, as Karen walked round the ward to the usual accompaniment of snores and groans, a beam of moonlight came in through the high window and illumined Peter’s head, lighting it up where the night lamp failed. His eyes were open. He was following her movements, his head turning with her. She walked over to him.

  ‘You can’t sleep, Peter?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m all right though, Nurse. I was just thinking, like.’

  ‘Would you like a drink of cocoa?’

  ‘Nay,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going home tomorrow, Nurse, the doctor says I’m better.’

  ‘Going home?’ Karen was surprised. It seemed such a short time since the surgeons had cut off his mangled foot. What would he do now? she wondered.

  ‘Aye, I’m going to get a wooden foot, the doctor says. In a month or two, when it’s healed, like, I’ll be able to walk then.’

  ‘By, that’ll be grand, lad,’ said Karen softly. ‘It’s not going to be so bad, then, is it?’

  Peter shook his head, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

  ‘Me da’s going to ask the boss if I can get a job in the lamp cabin. I’ll still be earning then.’

  Peter’s voice had grown louder, he was altogether more confident than he had been last time she saw him. The man in the next bed woke up and shushed him fiercely so that he subsided on to his pillows, chastened. But Karen saw him smile for the first time.

  ‘Nurse!’

  Karen jumped as she heard her senior’s hiss from the desk in the middle of the ward. The door from the corridor had opened and Night Sister came striding in. Hurriedly, she straightened Peter’s top sheet and carried on round the ward. It was almost dawn. Through the high windows she could see streaks of red in the sky. It was going to be a clear day.

  There was no letter from Dave in that day’s post, or the next, or on any of the days following. The year turned to spring and Karen was back on day duty and still no letter came. She immersed herself in her work and before she knew it the first-year examinations were looming. She didn’t get home to Morton Main for a while; all her spare time was taken up in studying for she was determined to pass.

  Some days Karen even forgot to look for a letter from Dave, some times she didn’t think of him at all. Inevitably, the image of her husband was fading from her mind. He had been gone almost a year.

  But there were letters from Joe, short and scrappy, and the occasional picture postcard with views of Sydney and pictures of solemn-faced Aborigines.

  Joe did not mention Dave. He talked about the heat and the dust, and how different gold mining was from coal mining, and how he was being promoted to foreman, and about Tot Wilson and Jos Smith, both of whom were working for the same company as Joe. Not a word about Dave.

  Karen was too proud and embarrassed to ask Joe about him in her letters. She stopped going to see Mrs Mitchell when she was in the village but she knew Dave’s mother had had another letter from him; Mrs Mitchell told everyone she saw. Karen couldn’t bear to see the fresh triumph in her mother-in-law’s eyes.

  Chapter Five

  ONE MORNING KAREN picked up her post from the office in the Nurses Home and took it out into the garden to read as she still had fifteen minutes before she needed to report for duty. She was working in Outpatients and finding the work very different from ward work, but still, she was enjoying the change. And now the coveted Nursing Certificate was almost hers. Only a few weeks to go, she told herself happily as she waited for Home Sister to search through the post.

  There were three letters, Karen saw with a tiny thrill of antici pation. She loved to get post. This time there was one in Gran’s copper-plate hand and one in Kezia’s. And the other bore an Australian stamp. It had been posted three months before. Karen gazed at it. She knew it wasn’t from Dave. No, this one bore the unmistakable handwriting of her brother. It must be in answer to her request for news of Dave.

  Karen’s heart beat uncomfortably. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see what Joe had written. But time was getting on. If she didn’t open the letter before starting the busy round on Outpatients it would have to wait until dinnertime and she wouldn’t be able to get it off her mind all morning. With trembling fingers she slit the top of the envelope with the small scissors chained to her uniform pocket and drew out the single sheet, her pulse racing so that she could feel the beat of it in her throat above the stiff white collar of her uniform.

  She stared at the page, her face flushed. She knew her brother, she could read between the stilted phrases he had written. Joe was embarrassed to have to tell her about losing touch with Dave, she could see that.

  Why had Dave gone off from his friends? They had all been assured of work with the gold mining company. But then she remembered his mother saying Dave had got work in the city; it had slipped her mind before. Karen bit her lip. It was as though Dave had cut himself from his old life altogether. She didn’t even know if he still wrote to his mother. Her family carefully avoided mentioning him on her visits home and Karen herself had long since given up visiting Mrs Mitchell. She went on staring at the letter as though concentrating on it would give her the answer.

  Dave loved me, she thought, he wanted me. Why did he change? Why did he marry me and then desert me like this? What did I do? A shadow fell across her bent head and she looked up quickly, forcing herself to smile and cover up her distress.

  ‘Good morning, Nurse Knight, how nice to see you here. We can walk across to Outpatients together, can we not?’

  Hastily pushing the letter under the bib of her apron, Karen rose to her feet. It was Robert Richardson, her childhood friend. She felt a surge of pleasure to see him. She had known he was a houseman now, working under the chief surgeon. It was a surgical clinic this morning, she remembered, orthopaedic cases, so Doctor Richardson would be working on it.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor,’ she said, smiling though her lips were stiff and she felt more ready to fall on his shoulder and howl than to smile and make polite conversation. They fell into step together along the path which skirted the side of the main building.

  ‘Not bad news in your post, I hope?’ said Robert, surprising Karen with his perception.

  ‘No, not really,’ she said, though in truth she didn’t know whether it was or not, she was so confused. She would read the letter again when she had the time, she thought, and brightened her smile as she looked u
p at him. She remembered him so well from years ago when they were both children and his good looks had turned the heads of all the girls in the top class in the Sunday School. Robert was intending to become a medical missionary in Africa, she remembered his father saying.

  Warming to her friendliness, he smiled back at her and as the smile softened his features he looked incredibly handsome though in a strange, detached way. He was tall and dark-haired with strong, even features. Karen moved her eyes away quickly in case he should think she was leading him on. She remembered him as a boy, coltish and gangling; pictured him sitting in the front pew at Chapel, his eyes tightly closed when they were supposed to be, his expression intense. Robert had been a lonely boy, always known by his full name whereas all the other Roberts were Bobs or Robbies.

  ‘You weren’t in Chapel on Sunday morning,’ he commented, breaking into her thoughts.

  ‘No,’ answered Karen, feeling immediately guilty for she hadn’t been on duty either and her companion knew it. And the Chapel was not far away from the hospital. But did it mean he had remembered she was at the hospital and had looked for her? The idea made her feel warm.

  ‘You weren’t feeling unwell?’

  ‘No.’

  Karen was saved the need for further explanation as they entered the Outpatients department. There was the usual crowd of people waiting to be seen, those on return visits and a sprinkling of new casualties. Karen murmured something and turned to go into the nurses’ cloakroom to remove her cloak when Robert spoke to her again, surprising her.

  ‘Can I see you as you come off duty this evening, Nurse?’

  Karen gazed at him, startled. Any social encounter between medical and nursing staff was definitely frowned upon, surely he knew that? If she agreed and Matron ever found out about it, she would be thrown off the course.

  But he saw her hesitation and was quick to offer a way. ‘I meant, we could go to the Chapel fellowship together. It’s Bible study tonight.’