A Mother's Gift Page 9

  ‘Don’t worry we’ll get there. It is not usually too bad nearer the coast,’ he reassured her. The car lurched and Katie was thrown against him and he put out a hand to steady her, holding her arm. She looked down at his hand, it wasn’t at all as she would have thought the hand of a gentleman to be. Though the nails were well shaped and manicured, there were calluses on the insides of his fingers and his palms as though he were used to working manually. She could feel the rough parts against the back of her hand. She looked at the hand and then up at his face. Matthew smiled and let go of her.

  Katie looked out at the snow, feeling confused. It was all so unreal, especially after spending her day off at Winton Colliery. He was simply grateful to the nursing staff at the hospital, she told herself. Trying to pay something back. That was it.

  They were through Darlington now and out on the road to Stockton. The snow was thicker and the car slid sideways but kept going.

  ‘Lawson?’

  ‘I’m sorry sir.’

  He was very much the boss, Katie thought. Authority radiated from him. She wondered what her grandfather would think when she told him who had given her a lift. If she told him, that is. The car slid again and Katie gasped.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Matthew. ‘We won’t turn over or anything.’ As if to prove him wrong, the car suddenly skidded into the side of the road, its nose deep in snow. ‘Wait here, keep warm,’ said Matthew. The two men got out, the chauffeur and the master surveying the situation. Then Lawson got a shovel from the boot and began shovelling snow away from the car. There was no other traffic on the road at all. They’ve got more sense, Katie told herself.

  The front of the car was free now and Lawson got back in his seat and tried the engine. It started all right but the wheels whirred and stuck. Surprising Katie, it was Mr Hamilton who bent his shoulder to the car and pushed, and after a moment or two, succeeded in getting the car back on the road. He straightened and brushed off his coat and stamped the snow from his shoes before getting back in the car.

  ‘We’ll be in Stockton shortly and the snow will be wetter there,’ he said as though continuing the previous conversation but he was panting a little.

  Katie had had visions of them being marooned in the snowdrift miles from anywhere, just her and the two men; now she told herself not to be so silly. For sure enough within a minute or two they were entering Stockton-on-Tees and the road was practically bare.

  It was ten past eleven when they drew up before the main gates of the hospital. The porter on duty peered out from the lodge, watching as the first-year probationer got out of the Bentley. His face was expressionless but even so Katie could imagine what he was thinking and went pink.

  ‘We should go somewhere for a hot drink,’ said Matthew. He was reluctant to let her go, like a young boy on his first date, he chided himself.

  ‘No. Oh, I’m sorry but I have to get to my class,’ Katie apologised for her abrupt reply. She began edging away.

  ‘But surely you’re too late for it now. You need something hot, it was a bad journey.’

  ‘No, really, I’m fine. It wasn’t cold in the car. Goodbye, Mr Hamilton. I’m really grateful for the lift. Really.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Matthew, admitting defeat and Katie sped away to change for her class. The paths around the hospital were clear of snow and it didn’t take long for Katie to change into her uniform and, with her cloak wrapped around her, make her way to the Nursing School.

  ‘Heat the upper half of the urine until it boils,’ Sister Tutor was saying but she paused in her demonstration of how to test a specimen of urine and glared at Katie. ‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Very late.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ said Katie. ‘It was the snow, I had to get in from Winton—’

  ‘Please!’ said Sister. ‘I want no excuses. What good are excuses if you can’t get to a patient in time? But perhaps you’ve already studied the subject? Come here and demonstrate to the class how to test a specimen of urine. From the beginning if you please.’

  Katie picked up the holder with the test tube of urine and stared at it. She had done this, she had.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘First note the colour,’ said Katie. ‘Second take the specific gravity.’ She paused, seeing the page in her text book in her mind’s eye. What came next?

  ‘I’m waiting, Nurse Benfield.’

  ‘Note the reaction. Blue litmus turns red—’ Thank good ness it came back to her.

  ‘Very well. You may sit down. Now as I was saying when I was interrupted—’

  Was Mr Hamilton interested in her? Katie asked herself uneasily as she went back to her room to get ready for dinner and going on duty at one. No, not as a man was interested in a woman, he couldn’t be, he was too old; he must be in his thirties or even forties. It was just coincidence that they had bumped into each other a few times and he remembered her. He was just being kind; he was a kind man. Though that was not how the miners thought of him, or the ironworkers either, at least not the ones who came into F Ward to see their wives. Some of them had seen him going into the side ward, talking loudly to the doctors as though he was their gaffer.

  ‘Mean old bugger, tight as a drum,’ was what one puddler had said of him and the man at the next bed had nodded his head in agreement. ‘Wouldn’t give a starving bairn the skin off his rice pudding.’

  There was something about him though, thought Katie. He must have been good-looking when he was younger. Anyway, he was a married man and his wife was a nice woman, she was imagining things. And, she reminded herself, she had Billy and she loved him. She fingered Billy’s ring beneath the starched linen of her uniform dress. It always gave her a warm feeling to touch it. Her future was planned; she would marry Billy. In a few years time when she was ready.

  ‘The works, Lawson, if you please.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lawson sighed as the car pulled away from the hospital entrance. He had thought the boss would want to go home since he had been away twenty-four hours already but no, the damn man was like a robot, he just went on and on tirelessly. It had been freezing cold waiting in the pit yard at Winton half the night before finally being offered a bed at the manager’s house. He was resentful of that too, the bed he had been offered was in the attic, partitioned off from the maid’s room. He had barely warmed up before the boss was shouting for him and he had got up and shrugged into his damp uniform and gone out into a snow storm. And now it looked as though he wasn’t even to get a break before lunch. Why the boss had spent so much time at the colliery he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. His job was simply to carry him around.

  Matthew sat back in his seat and went over in his mind the happenings of the previous evening. He smiled slightly with some satisfaction as he remembered Thompson’s surprise when he turned up at the pit-head offices and without Parsons, his agent. It seemed to him that Parsons had been too easily swayed by the manager, after all, it was his job to make sure the pit was economic, apart from supplying the ironworks’ fuel. Not that the ironworks was going full blast in these depressed times but Eden Hope was lying idle again and it would be too much a strain on the resources to open it again unless the order book expanded a great deal more. No, it was better to run Winton to capacity. And he was not going to allow Thompson to close down a face in order to install new safety equipment, not yet. Next year perhaps, when the order book was full, he would consider it. Now there was time to make up, not to mention income. Parsons could be a proper old woman at times and besides, he was becoming too friendly by far with Thompson.

  Was Parsons getting too old for the agent’s job? He would have to look into it, Matthew decided. But they were turning in through the gates of the ironworks; he had an orderly mind, compartmented, and mentally he closed the compartment concerning the mines, just as earlier he had closed the one concerning the girl. Now it was time to consider the problems of the works.

  ‘Put the car away, Lawson, said Matthew. ‘
You can have the rest of the evening off, I won’t be going out again tonight.’ As it was eight o’clock in the evening by the time they had arrived home Lawson’s ‘Yes sir, thank you, sir,’ was slightly ironic though Matthew didn’t notice. He got out of the car, opened the door for his employer and then got back in and drove round to the back of the house to what had once been the stables and was now a roomy garage.

  His flat was above and there was a light shining from the window. Lawson smiled. She was here then. Forgetting his weariness he ran up the stone steps and into the warm room. Catching hold of Daisy he swung her off her feet and kissed her soundly on the lips. She felt warm and soft and smelled of warm pastry and rich meat.

  ‘I brought your supper over,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Put me down, do and I’ll fetch it. I’ve kept it nice and hot.’

  ‘I hope that’s not the only thing you’ve kept hot,’ he said and she blushed and giggled.

  ‘Give over now, Eddie Lawson!’

  ‘You don’t really want me to, do you?’

  He carried her to the old settee she had drawn up before the fire. The feel of her breasts against him had warmed him considerably.

  ‘Cook will be looking for me,’ she protested feebly.

  ‘Well, this won’t take long,’ he replied and laid her down on the settee.

  In the house, Matthew handed his coat and hat to John, his manservant. The hall was a little chilly as was the drawing-room when he walked in to greet Mary Anne. The room was much too big for the one fireplace, big though it was, he thought irritably. He would have to think about having radiators installed before next winter. After all, they were almost a third of the way into the twentieth century now.

  ‘Matthew, you’re back,’ said Mary Anne and he felt a twinge of his usual annoyance at her habit of stating the obvious. She looked pale and even more colourless than usual and her hair looked lifeless. He walked over to her and kissed her forehead dutifully and was irritated anew as he felt her slight and quickly suppressed withdrawal. He gave her no reason for his absence of the night before, he didn’t even think of it.

  ‘For goodness sake, get John to bring in more logs and fill the coal scuttle,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody cold in here.’

  Mary Anne winced at the swear word and wished she had the courage to reprove him as her mother would most certainly have done. But she had not.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said and pulled the bell rope to summon the servant. She sat down and made an effort to show an interest in his work. After all, it seemed to be the major part of his life, meaning more to him than his family. Not like Robert – no she wasn’t going to think of Robert. On the odd occasions when she had mentioned him to her second husband, Matthew had accused her of being morbid.

  It wasn’t true really. Thinking of Robert made her heart lighten and lift, not fall into the desperate melancholy she so often felt these days. Young Robert was like his father too, in temperament at least. She thanked God for it. Mary Anne made an effort to concentrate on Matthew.

  ‘How was your day, dear?’ she asked. ‘Is everything all right at the works?’

  Matthew stared at her in surprise. Mary Anne had never shown the slightest bit of interest in his work before now. And what could he say, anyway? Nothing that she could comprehend, she knew not a thing about any of it in spite of being married to two ironmasters.

  ‘Mmmh,’ he grunted in reply. Sitting down he picked up the evening paper. Hitler and his gang of posturing fascists were marching in Munich, looking for trouble. At home yet another shipyard had closed down on the Tyne. He threw the paper down on the occasional table beside him. ‘I’m going into my study for a while,’ he informed Mary Anne. I’ll have my dinner in there. I don’t want to be disturbed so make sure the children are kept quiet.’

  Mary Anne stared at the door after he had gone, rebellion bubbling in her. She had never let the children disturb him, ever. The fact was he couldn’t bear to see them; he would have liked to banish them from the house if he could. Maybe if they had one of their own it would be different. But then Robert and Maisie would really have their noses pushed out.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE SUN SHONE in through the high windows of the ward, the rays picking out hidden corners and causing dust motes to hover in the air. The women in the beds, those who were on the mend from acute surgery or even those older ones with chronic conditions were feeling bright and cheerful and basking in the warmth of the early spring. They chatted and laughed and pestered Mr Caine with demands to go home whenever they saw him. Yet it was still only early March, Katie reflected as she handed out bedpans from the trolley, then took them back to the sluice and emptied them and scrubbed them clean and put them on the racks along the walls.

  ‘We will start extra cleaning today,’ Sister had announced when the day nurses were gathered in the office to hear the night nurses’ report. ‘So all your normal duties will be finished by ten o’clock. Mr Hobson won’t be doing any rounds this morning; he has an outpatient clinic so he won’t be here until late this afternoon or maybe not at all. We have no acute patients at the moment. So come on staff. Let’s go to it. Cleanliness is the only way to keep bacteria at bay.’

  The nurses looked at each other as they filed out of the office. Their mornings were frantically busy on a normal day so how they were supposed to do extra cleaning, Katie had no idea.

  Yet somehow, they managed it. At ten the beds were all pulled into the middle of the ward, the orderly was up a ladder washing the upper half of the dull khaki-coloured paintwork and the ward maid leaning over precariously on another as she washed the high windows. And Katie and the other probationers were washing the lower half of the walls or the floors or the bedsteads.

  At twelve there was a short break while the patients were given their dinner though how they could eat it with the heavy smell of carbolic overhanging everything and getting up the nose and hitting the back of the throat, Katie couldn’t imagine.

  The women, however, were full of interest, they watched in comparative ease as the staff toiled, pointing out any spot they thought had been missed.

  ‘There’s a piece of fluff on that bed wheel, Nurse,’ Doris Teasdale advised Katie as she stood up after wiping the legs of a bed with disinfectant she had made up herself in the prescribed manner, one part Phenol to twenty parts water. Katie sighed and bent down to look; there was indeed a minuscule piece of fluff on the bottom right-hand wheel of the bed. Though how Doris could have seen it she couldn’t think, it being on the opposite side of the ward.

  ‘I thought I’d just tell you,’ said Doris, catching Katie’s eye as she frowned at her. ‘You wouldn’t have liked Sister to find it, would you?’

  ‘No. Thank you Mrs Teasdale,’ said Katie as she removed the offending fluff. She glanced at the ward clock. Only two o’clock, the afternoon was dragging. She was warm and sweaty from the hard work. Though the sun had moved away from the windows the heat still lingered and, it being still considered to be winter, the porters had built up the fires in the central stoves. Katie moved on to the next bed. Only three more to go and then she was finished. Of course the beds were to be put back against the walls and the floor was to be polished and buffed up until the shine, removed by the disinfectant wash, returned. Katie sighed.

  She lifted her bucket and went off to the sluice to empty and refill it. She measured out the Phenol carefully and added the hot water. While it was running she gazed ruefully at her hands, red and puffy from being immersed in the solution for most of the day. They were also numb; she remembered the lecture in which Sister Tutor had told them carbolic could have a slight analgesic effect. Tonight she would rub them with olive oil and sugar, her grandmother’s remedy rather than the lanolin offered by the hospital.

  ‘Don’t stand there dreaming, Nurse!’

  The voice from the doorway made her start. She hurriedly turned off the tap before the water reached the level prescribed and turned to face the voice of authority.

/>   ‘You are very untidy, Nurse, your hair is coming down out of your cap. Go and see to it at once,’ said Matron. She advanced into the sluice and looked around critically. The enamel bedpans in their rows gleamed and the wooden benches were scrubbed and bare. Matron, however, did not look pleased or even satisfied. She looked at the rubber apron, which Katie wore over her uniform; the way her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows and the roll covered with white elastic cuffs and sniffed.

  ‘Go and tidy yourself, Nurse,’ she repeated and swept out into the ward.

  Katie, in the little room with row of cloaks hanging along one wall, stood by the mirror on the opposite wall and took off her cap. She combed her hair up and twisted it into a roll and pinned it securely with hairgrips and replaced her cap. Then she sighed and looked at her reflection, taking a few seconds for herself. Her cap was a bit too big for her face, she thought, it did nothing for her looks at all. Her face was pale and there were shadows under her eyes, dear God, she was tired.

  Outside she could hear Matron talking, her voice loud and commanding. Sister was answering, sounding so different from when she was talking to her nurses. Chain of command thought Katie and smiled at herself in the mirror. She wouldn’t always be on the lowest rung. One day, she would be at the top. Squaring her shoulders she went out to the sluice and picked up her bucket.

  ‘Mrs Jones needs a bedpan, Nurse,’ said Sister as the main door of the ward closed after Matron. ‘What do you think you’re doing, wasting your time in the cloakroom?’

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ Katie mumbled and put down the bucket and brought a bedpan, suitably covered with a lavatory cloth. In the ward the sun had disappeared and the sky through the newly shined windows was grey and menacing. Suddenly they were glad of the heat from the stoves and Doris Teasdale was calling for a hot-water bottle. By four o’clock the ward was restored to a gleaming, pristine condition and waiting for Mr Hobson to fling open the door and sweep in, followed by Mr Caine and the houseman.