Nurse Errant Read online

  It was for me. The caller was Janet Elseworth, the nurse in a neighbouring village who was relieving my day off. ‘I’ve had two of your babies, Lesley. Masters Brown and Seymour. Both babies and mums doing well. How about you? Nice day?’

  ‘Very, thanks.’ As I was glad of an excuse to keep out of the sitting-room for a spell, and knew Janet enjoyed a natter, I told her Mike was from Hilary’s.

  ‘My dear, how exciting.’

  ‘Not the only exciting thing that’s happened to me to-day.’ And I explained Paddy Larraby’s fall.

  ‘Poor old Paddy.’ Janet was a local girl who had returned to work in her own village after training. ‘He always was stubborn as a mule.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘God, yes. Everyone knows Paddy. He’s been visiting Mary Graves since he and his brothers were small boys. They were all educated in England. He stayed on when the other two went back to join their father’s practice.’

  ‘What does he do for a living? Boxing?’

  She laughed. ‘He might, at that. No. He’s an architect. He’s in some London firm. I forget the name. I suppose that’s why he was on the roof. He must know about roofs.’

  I remembered the very uncertain manner in which he had scrambled about that roof. ‘He didn’t look as if he did.’

  ‘Well, he should have. He’s meant to be doing pretty well ‒ junior partner or something. He was always bright and superb at drawing. Paints, too. You know those water-colours of the marsh in Mary Graves’s sitting-room? He did ’em.’

  ‘He did?’ I echoed incredulously. Those water-colours were really exquisite. ‘I should have thought him far too ham-handed to produce such a delicate touch.’

  ‘He’s got a light touch all right ‒ on everything ‒ including life. I’ve known him ‒ God ‒ twenty years. He was twelve when I was eleven. I’ve only known him serious once all that time.’

  I was mildly curious, and very glad for this opportunity to let Ann and Mike work things out in the sitting-room. ‘When and why was that?’

  She hesitated. ‘Actually, five years ago when my brother Peter killed himself on his motor-bike. He and Peter weren’t special friends, but they used to play together in the school holidays when they were kids. Paddy was very decent to us after the crash. I wasn’t married then, and living at home. He came round a lot and talked to us about Peter when everyone was avoiding his name. You know how people do that.’

  ‘Yes. After our parents’ death the world was full of people who acted as if they had never existed. The “ignore-the-pain-and-it’ll-cease-to exist” theory.’

  ‘A fine theory,’ agreed Janet drily, ‘for the sympathiser; hell for the sympathisee. Underlines the hideous finality. Paddy had the insight to know it. He still calls on the parents from time to time. Bill thinks a lot of him.’

  Bill Elseworth, her husband, was a farm manager. A grim-faced young man and devout Methodist, he reminded me of my mental picture of John Knox. I would have thought him the last person to think a lot of Paddy Larraby. I would have liked to ask more about this, and about Paddy’s wedding, when someone her end needed her attention. ‘I’ll have to ring off, Lesley ‒ Mother’s come for me to do her wrist. Remember, I told you she scalded it? Yes ‒ doing fine, thanks ‒ oh, no! I knew there was something else I should tell you. Grandpa Hassell.’

  Grandpa Hassell lived in my village.

  ‘Bronchitis again?’

  ‘Not yet, though I expect he’ll have another go unless his luck holds. He fell down this morning and cracked three ribs, poor old boy. He was livid! Your locum pal strapped him up, and I had a ghastly time with him, as he was on the warpath about his daughter-in-law calling in a fussing female woman! He really gave me hell. I’m afraid you’ll get the same in the morning.’

  ‘Poor you ‒ and poor old Grandpa. He so loathes being ill.’

  Ann and Mike came out of the sitting-room as she rang off. ‘Going already, Mike?’ I asked, surprised. The Grimmonds’ house was quite close, and it was nowhere near eight.

  He said he thought he had better, as he did not want to be late for a meal on his first night.

  I glanced at Ann’s silent face and stopped feeling surprised. ‘You must come again.’

  ‘I’d like to.’ He looked at Ann and spoke to me. And Ann looked at the floor.

  I expected her to relax and discuss him after he had gone. Instead she closed up on me each time I mentioned his name. She was clearly harbouring a whole posse of disturbing ideas about him and me, and I tried to persuade her they were wrong. As that only served to make matters worse, I gave up and left it all to time.

  Next morning I had an extra long list of calls on my list. It was the weekly injection morning for my various cardiac, anaemic, and diabetic patients. My area covered roughly fifteen miles, and for once I had calls all over the area and not, as often happened for no good reason, mainly grouped in one village or another.

  The Romans had once lived on our marsh. They had not built our main marsh road. It wound over dykes, round dykes, reeled in hairpin bends for mile after mile.

  I drove from village to village; from a freshly painted farmhouse with a smart, swinging fox hoisted high as a wind vane, to a small stone cottage that seemed to have grown out of the land; from a row of new brick red council-houses that jarred until you saw the supreme comfort of the interiors, and content on their proud owners’ faces, to a converted oast-house where my patient was lying in an ultra-modern divan bed in an entrancing and perfectly circular little room.

  My last call was at a tiny, weather-boarded cottage that stood isolated from the road by a dyke and wide stretch of marsh. I left the car, and walked carefully over the slippery narrow stone bridge across the dyke. I looked down at the brown velvet water and thought back to the quiet orderliness of the medical wards at Hilary’s.

  I was a very long way from those silent rows of white beds, yet I was doing a medical nursing round, even though the wind from the sea was trying to haul off my uniform hat, my lips tasted salt, and a cloud of black and white plovers flapped overhead.

  There was one even bigger difference. In hospital, the patients were the guests, the nurses the hostesses. On the district, the situation was reversed. Consequently, each time I knocked on a door, it was a challenge. Every guest runs the risk of being privately considered an intruder.

  Normally, I was back home by one-thirty. From two to four was my official free time; at four I went out on my evening round. That evening I had nearly as many calls to make as in the morning.

  Ann came out to the garage. ‘Darling, you are late! What kept you? Another baby?’

  ‘You could call him that even though he’s eighty-four.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  I smiled. ‘You haven’t met him yet. His name is Mr Percy Hassell, alias Grandpa Hassell. He’s a honey, but he doesn’t approve of women. He says we fuss something wicked. He’s been a widower over forty years, has managed splendidly on his own, and, I quote, says he “can’t be doing with all them female women a-fussing and a-carrying on about washing and tidying up”.’

  ‘The poor darling,’ said Ann. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Coaxed and went on coaxing, until he actually let me wash him, make his bed, tidy generally, and settle him for the night. And he gave me permission to look in tomorrow ‒ if I must. That mayn’t seem much to you, Annie, but it’s flowery talk from Grandpa.’

  She laughed. ‘Lesley, you’re amazing me! For a quiet girl you really are a one with the boys.’

  ‘Me?’ My voice cracked.

  ‘You, darling! How do you do it? Tell me your technique. I could use it.’

  ‘Annie, don’t be daft!’

  ‘I’m not being daft! Look at the success you’ve had in the last twenty-four hours alone. Your friend Mike Ellis fell on your neck with glad cries ‒ Grandpa Hassell is apparently eating out of your hand ‒ and that man Patrick Whatsit you patched up yesterday has wired you a positive roomful of roses.’


  ‘He’s done WHAT?’

  She pushed me into our sitting-room. ‘Four dozen beauties. Get that ‒ four dozen at this time of the year!’ The room was heavy with the scent of roses. She danced round me waving a florist’s card. ‘See.’

  The card bore the name of an international organisation. On it was written, ‘For Nurse Sanders, with very many thanks from Patrick Larraby’.

  I looked at the card, the roses, then back to the card. ‘It’s good of him. But ‒ Annie ‒ to-day’s his wedding day.’

  She stopped dancing. ‘I’d forgotten.’ She frowned. ‘Of course, it’s kind of him to take time off to send you flowers. I’m not sure I’d be all that thrilled if I was his bride. Now, if he had sent them from Mr and Mrs ‒ that would have been fine.’

  ‘Yes.’ I touched one flower. ‘Sending flowers to young women is probably just a reflex action with him.’

  We exchanged glances. She was my friend as well as my sister, so I did not have to explain getting them was not a reflex action to me. They were, in fact, the first flowers any man had given me. Which was why we both felt it was a pity they had come on that particular day.

  ‘Will you write and thank him?’

  I thought this over. ‘Might be more tactful to be bad-mannered.’ I smiled faintly. ‘He can just think me an ungrateful nurse who doesn’t deserve a grateful patient.’

  ‘Think Grandpa Hassell’ll give you flowers?’

  ‘If he does, Annie ‒ that will be the day!’

  Grandpa Hassell did make a very good recovery from his fall. He did not give me any flowers. I visited him twice daily for the next two weeks, and he had a wonderful time living up to his reputation as a misogynist.

  One morning he was fiercer than ever. ‘What, you again, Nurse?’ He scowled hideously. ‘I dunno. Ain’t you got nothing more to do than to come round here a-fiddling and a-fussing a poor old chap what only wants a bit of quiet? You females is all the same: Fuss! Fuss! Fuss!’

  ‘Never mind, Grandpa.’ I stripped his bed. ‘I won’t have to disturb you after to-day. You’ve done so well, and helped yourself so much by keeping going that you won’t need me any more.’

  He was sitting by the fire in an aged rocking-chair that no longer rocked, because he had fixed blocks of wood in front of the rockers. He looked exactly like an old Red Indian chief without the feather headdress. His fine, drawn face was tanned by years of sun and wind; he had a magnificent head of thick white hair; and one of the multi-coloured shawls his oldest daughter-in-law had knitted him was draped elegantly round his still straight shoulders.

  He stood up stiffly. ‘So you’re not going to come calling on me no more, Nurse?’

  I shook out a pillow. ‘The doctor doesn’t think it necessary. He’s very pleased with you. He says you’re right as rain.’

  His scowl altered to a veritable glower of indignation. ‘Are you going to leave a poor old man to fend for hisself all on his own, without so much as stopping by of a morning for a cup of tea now and then?’

  I was quite incredibly touched. ‘Why, Grandpa, I would love to drop in and have a cup of tea with you any time ‒ if you’d like that?’

  His face creased into the first real smile I had seen him give. ‘Reckon I would, Nurse. Not that you’re not a fusser! A cruel fusser you are, what with all this washing and tidying! But ‒ well ‒ I got used to you. Having you come in ‒ with that smile of yours ‒ has given me something to look forward to of a morning. Always got a smile you have, even when I carries on at you. You’re not like some,’ he added darkly, ‘you’ve got spirit! Always did like a woman with spirit. Now, my missus, she had real spirit.’ His voice softened unrecognisably. ‘Fetched me one, she would have, if I carried on at her. But I never. Not at my Gilly.’ He nodded to himself. ‘That were her name, Nurse. Gilly.’

  He had never mentioned his wife to me before. I finished the bed and drew a chair by his. ‘Sit down, Grandpa. Tell me about her.’

  He eased himself back into the rocker and let me re-drape his shawl without protest. He sat staring at the fire, frowning slightly, the way very old people do when the curtain of memory lifts.

  ‘Reckon that’s why I took to you, Nurse. Your smile always puts me in mind of my Gilly. When she’d smile’ ‒ he paused, frowned again ‒ ‘it were like when the sun come up on the marsh on a misty morning, lambing time. Three, four of a morning, maybe. A man’s got to get up real early for lambing. And I mind well how the cold of that mist’d get into a man’s bones. Then the sun’d come up slow. First the mist’d hang on before it, like them veils the women used to wear Sundays when I were a lad. Then the mist’d be gone sudden, and the sun’d warm a man and make him feel real good. And that’s how my Gilly made me feel when she smiled. Aye,’ he murmured to himself, ‘that was the way of it.’

  I touched his hand, he gripped mine, and we sat in silence watching the flickering of the carefully measured coal. A little later, I made tea for us both.

  ‘I’ll have to get on now, Grandpa,’ I said, when I had washed up. ‘I’ll look in at the same time tomorrow. And you have a kettle boiling.’

  His eyes lit up. ‘So you’re going to keep on a-fussing over me?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I’m much obliged, Nurse,’ he said brusquely. He walked carefully to the front door and opened it for me. Previously, I had used the back door and let myself in and out. ‘I’ll have that kettle a-boiling.’

  Mike’s car passed mine on the road over the disused rifle range when I was on my way back home for lunch that morning. He hooted, and signalled me to stop.

  ‘You’re a long way from home, Lesley,’ he said with a smile as he walked over to me.

  ‘My boundary’s half a mile beyond the coastguard cottages. Mrs. Croxley, one of the coastguard wives, is one of my ante-natals. Who’s brought you out this way?’

  ‘The head keeper at the light.’ He looked across the range to the land lighthouse that stood on a narrow peninsula of rock and scrub. ‘He’s damned lucky that light isn’t at sea. His chest isn’t too good. I shot some penicillin into him, and it should clear up. I doubt if I could have got to him by boat to-day. Those waves are nearly as high as the sea-wall. The spray’s getting close over into the road.’

  The sea-wall was solid concrete newly strengthened by thick battens. There were great piles of sandbags at intervals all along the land side, ready for use in any emergency, as most of the marsh was well under sea-level.

  ‘The tide’s on the turn.’ We listened to the thunder of the waves against the wall. ‘It should calm down as it goes out.’

  He smiled again. ‘I’m getting vastly impressed by your knowledge of the elements, Lesley. I always thought you a big-city girl.’

  ‘I was. I’m now converted to country life, and like all converts am only too anxious to convert others.’

  He laughed. ‘Fine. Go ahead and convert me. I think I’d like that. But ‒ back to work.’ He took out his visiting-book. ‘There’s another batch of measles. Any of these kids in your area?’

  I looked the names over. ‘Those four. Poor infants. How are they?’

  ‘As measles goes ‒ and these days it goes badly ‒ they’ve got nasty attacks.’

  I made a note of the names. ‘I think, apart from the new babies, all my children have now had it. Anything else you can tell me?’

  ‘’Flu’s starting up. These any of yours?’

  ‘Let’s see ‒ Mrs Paul Withers ‒ yes ‒ and Mrs Apted. I don’t know the others.’

  ‘That’s about the lot. You’ll look in on the keeper?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thanks. Glad I saw you. It’ll save you answering yet another phone-call from me.’

  We waved at each other and drove our separate ways. Mike often stopped his car to talk in that fashion. He called on us almost daily as well, despite Ann’s still frigid receptions. He always came ostensibly about work, and never stayed long.

  The wind did go out with the
tide. Autumn was vanishing fast, and that evening it was really cold. When I closed the garage doors after locking the car for the night I had my first experience of a real marsh mist.

  It arrived amazingly swiftly. While I stood for a few minutes at our front gate, it swallowed the village as I watched. It did not come down as I expected, it came up from the land, silently, steadily.

  There was an old oak-tree in the field opposite, standing on a small incline. At first it seemed impervious to the cotton-wool cloud round its roots, then it was gone, too.

  A shadow loomed out of the mist and towered over our gate. ‘Would you not say this must be the ghost of the lost sea returning, Nurse Sanders?’

  I gaped at the speaker. That dark-brown voice was unmistakable. ‘Mr Larraby! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Angel, I thought we agreed the name was Paddy? And why wouldn’t I be here? It’s Friday night, and I often spend the weekend with my Aunt Mary.’

  I did not like to say I thought his wife might have other views, so I asked about his head.

  ‘That crack? Cured, thanks. My old man hauled me off to hospital for a couple of X-rays, but there was not one thing wrong. I’m here because I’ve been delivering a message at the vicarage for my aunt. I saw a wraith at your gate, and came over to say thanks again. You did me a good turn that morning, angel. And led a poor defenceless stranger up the garden path. Seriously, why did you not tell me you were the village nurse.’

  ‘You never asked me.’ I smiled. ‘I’m very glad about your X-rays.’ And I thanked him for the roses. ‘Wedding a success?’ I added, wondering why his wife was not with him. They must surely only just have finished their honeymoon. It was not much of a night for walking, but that should not have mattered at their present stage.

  ‘It was a grand wedding. You must hear my Aunt Mary on the women’s clothes. Angel, she’ll go on for hours.’ He leaned on the gate. ‘Tell me, have you a minute to spare?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve finished work. Something I can do for Mrs Graves?’

  ‘Not her. For yourself. Take a look at that moon that’s rising out of the mist.’ He opened the gate. ‘And come over with me to that oak that’s vanished.’ He took my arm without waiting for an answer, and walked me over the road and up the field. ‘From here you can see over your cottage and away towards the marsh. When the moon gets higher, as it will in a few minutes, it’ll make the swirls of mist look like slow waves. The whole will seem like the great sea that was once there. Did you know the land on which your cottage stands was once under water?’ There was something uncanny about the mist. I felt as if I was walking in a dream, yet his hold on my arm was tangible enough. I forgot the questions I would have wanted answered about himself in my interest at what he was saying.