Edinburgh Excursion Page 4

  ‘Love is a beautiful thing, and I need a bath. Coming up?’

  ‘Can’t. I’m dressing for a date. Do you think I’ll need a pantie-girdle as well as tights?’

  Gemmie had come up the stairs. ‘Tights, pantie-girdle, and bloomers, love. Give the lad a good run for it.’

  Sandra said it was all very well for Gemmie to be coarse, but frankly she thought a girl couldn’t be too careful, as she knew what men were.

  Gemmie nodded gravely. ‘Randy lot, these Scots lads.’

  Sandra looked put out. Her date was Welsh.

  Gemmie and I went on up. I asked, ‘You find ’em randy?’

  ‘No more so than the lads back home. Sometimes less. You?’

  ‘Same.’

  It was Catriona’s cooking evening. She was in the kitchen when I joined Gemmie to dry my hair in front of the sitting-room fire. Gemmie was reading the National Health Act and knitting a sweater for Wilf. As we always pooled information acquired independently, I told her about my lift and Josephine Astley’s ring. She told me Catriona would be twenty-four on Thursday week. ‘But when Miss Bruce asked her if she wanted the day off she said not as she’s nowt special on. Imagine? With that face!’

  Catriona had become our favourite enigma. She was easily the prettiest district-student, and ours was not the only set; she was the only girl amongst us to start our course with the ready-made social advantages of an aunt on the spot and her training hospital an easy car- and train-ride away. Yet so far she had not had one date and the only person to ring her at the flat was the Mrs Ferguson who was her aunt. And she was a very nice girl.

  We decided she needed a birthday-party. When she came in to say the macaroni cheese was ready we were working on the stuffed olives.

  Catriona mangled her hands. ‘It’s sweet of you, girls, but I couldn’t ‒ I mean, Miss Bruce mightn’t approve ‒ anyway, who’d come?’

  ‘Wilf, if he can get up. Bassy’ll give him floor-room and provide more men than we can possibly accommodate. The girls below, their dates, Robbie Ross ‒ anyone you say.’

  ‘I ‒ I can’t think of anyone.’

  Gemmie lowered her knitting. ‘Let’s have it straight, love. You just don’t fancy it?’

  ‘It’s not that, but …’

  ‘So you do? Right! That’s fixed! Where’s this macaroni cheese, then?’

  At the weekend I asked Robbie.

  ‘Thursday? Catriona Ferguson’s birthday? I doubt I can get off, Alix.’

  ‘Fair enough. I warned her you’d probably have to work.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘ “What a pity”. So you can’t make it?’

  He flushed faintly and fingered his tie. ‘Do you want me to come?’

  ‘Don’t be thick, duckie. Why else would I ask you?’

  ‘Don’t expect a poor bloody accoucheur to fathom the workings of the female mind.’ His ‘r’s spat out like bullets. ‘When did any girl mean what she says?’

  I looked at him curiously. Till now our date had been going nice and smoothly. ‘Does this corn mean you don’t like parties? That your feet are hurting too much after all our sightseeing? Or that you want me to spell out if my invitation includes bed without board?’

  He stopped looking peeved. ‘Going to spell it out?’

  ‘Sorry, no. Just one jolly party that, we’ve promised Miss Bruce, will end at eleven-thirty, won’t disturb the neighbours, and will avoid ribaldry on the stairs. Kids’ stuff.’

  ‘By Thursday night, my level. I’ll make it if I can.’ He kissed me then as it was the right moment for that. He kissed well, even if his mind was not wholly on the job. Nor was mine, so I noticed.

  Having a driving licence, I sometimes worked on my own in a car. I had one most of that week. Mrs Duncan’s escort was now more the exception than the rule during the day, but most mornings after the early briefing the whole staff had from Miss Bruce, Mrs Duncan took a look at my call-list. ‘Who’ve you new today? Ah, Mackenzie, MacNabs, Brown ‒ all the same building. Remember those lands we did your first day?’

  ‘I thought I’d heard those were being demolished?’

  ‘Not these. The lands opposite. Once that’s done, they’ll do this lot. They’ll be re-housed in that new estate going up beyond Mrs MacRae’s.’

  ‘Those cute little houses? Very nice for them!’

  ‘You may think so,’ said Mrs Duncan, ‘but not as many as you’d imagine’ll agree with you. Folk grow attached to the cramped wee homes and neighbours they’ve known and maybe fought with for years ‒ and particularly the older folk. So don’t you be thinking to put in a wise word on the advantages of moving. Folk need time to think these things out for themselves without being bothered by unwelcome advice from guests. You’ve not forgotten what I said about always remembering you’re a guest?’

  ‘No.’ I did not add Miss Bruce stressed this as often as herself, since Mrs Duncan already knew it.

  ‘Another thing you must remember is never to pass adverse comments on domestic matters such as the arrangement of the furniture. If it inconveniences you and you’ve to climb over a chest to get at your patient, well, a wee climb doesn’t hurt a healthy lassie. Unless some alteration is essential for the patient’s welfare, but not to make the nursing easier, leave things be. Oddly,’ she added, ‘if you think only from the patient’s angle, it’s amazing what a nurse can get used to without harm to patient ‒ or nurse.’

  The row of high, narrow, nineteenth-century apartment houses lay at the end of a long, shabby street, made shabbier by the dust from the buildings being demolished. A little group of infants watched me through the iron stair-railings. My ‘Hallo!’ made them laugh immoderately.

  A young woman in hair-curlers and a floral wrapover apron came out of a doorway. ‘Old Mr Mackenzie? Aye, I heard he’d the doctor after taking a fall. He’s away round the other side. Through the arch, up the stairs, right, third door second floor, left.’

  Mrs Mackenzie was at her door. She had been married forty-seven years, and her husband had been blinded in the First World War and never seen her face. Once she had been beautiful. Now she was old, tired, and anxious, but neat and clean. She carried herself with pride. ‘He will take his wee stroll whatever the weather, and yesterday the ground was awful slippery after the rain. His back’s that stiff and black and blue.’

  Mr Mackenzie had a splendid head of white hair and a strong, serene face. He was delighted to hear I was from London. He said he’d a great affection for London. He minded well the grand time he’d had in London when he went for a soldier. ‘I wasna married then, ye’ll ken, Nurse, and I was a bit of a laddie ‒’

  ‘Hush, Davie! The nurse is but a slip of a lassie!’

  The smile on the old man’s closed face was like a smile in sleep. ‘There was that laddie fra London that time we’d that trip to Perth. You mind him, Bella? You mind the way he’d take me walking when he got home to the house from his work in the evening? He’d a way of describing everything ‒ aye, I mind him well ‒ he’d the right touch had that young laddie.’

  I asked when they had made this trip to Perth. They had to think. ‘It would be forty years back,’ said Mrs Mackenzie.

  ‘Forty-two, Bella. Forty-two. I mind it well, just now.’ Their small apartment was crammed with heavy, worn furniture and smelt of furniture polish and stove blacking. The MacNab flat, directly above, had a different smell.

  Mr MacNab was in bed. ‘I’d the terrible stomach complaint again this morning, Nurse. I couldna be away to my work. It’ll be best when I’m out the way for good.’ He was in the forties, thin and dark-haired, and his face and voice were querulous. ‘I’m nothing but a burden,’ he said, over and over again, as burdensome people do. ‘Best out the way.’ He pulled the bedclothes over his shoulders. The flannel sheets and blankets were so grey with dirt that it was impossible to guess their original colour. ‘The tablets the doctor left have settled my stomach, but the discomfort’ll be back. The way I suf
fer ‒ terrible.’

  His wife was forty-two. She could have been sixty-two. She was past everything but resignation. She needed an injection for her anaemia.

  I gave this in the kitchen. ‘Mrs MacNab, can you get a bit of rest today? Just put your feet up for a while? You do look a little tired.’

  She said simply, ‘If I sit he’ll have me up. Maybe he’ll drop off. Maybe, then.’

  Mr MacNab’s medical history was on his card. There was nothing organically wrong with his stomach or anything else. Mrs MacNab had medical reasons for looking ready to drop. There was so much I wanted to say, my unspoken words stifled me nearly as much as the smell. When I left their flat I walked to the nearest fire-escape opening and stood ostensibly admiring the view as I breathed out. The air was clean, but that smell hung on at the back of my nose and throat.

  Mr Brown had been sent home from hospital yesterday. He was thirty-three, and his great blue eyes stared out of a yellowing skeleton’s face. It was two years since he had been able to work regularly, and his wife was breadwinner. She was twenty-seven, small and very fair. She was a waitress. ‘I’m lucky,’ she said, ‘as shift work lets me see so much more of Archie.’ They had no children.

  Mr Brown opened the door to me. He lay on his bed whilst I did his dressing. He called it ‘my abscess’. The pink candlewick bedspreads were soft with washing, the white curtains crisp, and despite the open windows and demolition across the road the flat was dustless.

  Mrs Brown sat with her hands in her lap. ‘Being English, do you know Cornwall, Nurse?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. You do?’

  Mr Brown was face downwards. He twisted his head over one shoulder. ‘We borrowed the wife’s brother’s van to go there for our honeymoon four years back. It was spring and all the flowers were out.’

  Mrs Brown said, ‘It was just the way it looks in a travel poster. The daffodils, the violets, the rocks black, and the sun on the sea. Two whole weeks we’d there, and every day the sun shone. Can you believe that!’ She was trying not to watch the dressing. ‘I’ve told my brother, directly Archie’s better, we’ll be having his van.’

  ‘No doubt of that,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Much coming away today, Nurse?’

  ‘Not much, Mr Brown. How’s that feel now?’

  ‘Grand, thanks. I’m doing fine.’

  We were all lying, and we all knew it. They hadn’t been lying about Cornwall. I asked more about their visit. Their faces lit up as they told me. I remembered my father saying once in every lifetime everyone should reach Samarkand. I was very, very glad they had.

  By Catriona’s birthday Mr Mackenzie had returned to his daily stroll, Mr MacNab, reluctantly, to his job, and Mr Brown remained one of my regular, twice-daily calls. The infants on the stairs greeted me. ‘Hallo, Nurrrsie!’ and introduced themselves. ‘Meggy, Fiona, Alistair, Donal, Mary, Stevie, Tommy, and here’ ‒ a fat toddler was thrust forward ‒ ‘is wee Jaimie, and he’s but two though he talks fine! Say hallo to the Nurrrsie fra England, Jaimie!’

  The first post arrived at the flat after we had left in the morning. On Thursday as we were leaving a florist’s vanman delivered two dozen long-stemmed roses for Catriona.

  ‘Hey, those cost a bomb!’ Gemmie hastily filled our largest jug with water. ‘Who’re they from?’

  Catriona was puce. ‘Just ‒ er ‒ an old chum.’

  Gemmie and I exchanged glances, but waited till we met at lunch. ‘Chummy saying it with a few quids’-worth of early roses explains why no local lad’s got to first base, eh, Alix?’

  ‘Why stop at roses? Why not date her?’

  ‘Like he’s married?’ she murmured as Catriona joined us.

  The last patient on my list that afternoon was a Miss Lees. She was a retired schoolmistress living in her own semi-detached at the southern end of the very long road that was the boundary between my own and Mrs Duncan’s areas. It was Mrs Duncan’s day off. Miss Lees had a phone. I was with her when Miss Bruce rang me.

  ‘You appear anxious, Miss Hurst. Urgent call?’

  ‘Fairly, Miss Lees. I’m afraid I must go now.’

  ‘You’ll take a cup of tea first? No? Oh, dear! Have you far to go?’

  ‘Just the other end of this road.’

  ‘The flats?’ She pressed her pale lips together. ‘You’ll not credit this now, Miss Hurst, but when my late father purchased this house thirty odd years ago this was a very good residential area.’ She patted the corrugated grey waves of her old-fashioned set. ‘The rot started with those flats. Not that I allow such matters to disturb me. As I used to say to my girls, when a particular aspect displeases turn your eyes in another direction.’

  From what Miss Bruce had said it seemed as well one Mrs Baker had never been Miss Lees’s pupil.

  Mrs Baker was a stout woman with dyed black hair, red dangling earrings, and a tough, sensible face. She detached herself from the little group of women outside the main entrance. ‘What could a body do but call the doctor, Nurse?’ She panted up the stairs with me. ‘Seeing she’d not taken in her milk and I’ve never known her leave it out, not in the fifteen years I’ve bided here. And when there was no answer to my knock, or ringing her bell, or my wee shout ‒ what could I do but walk in to see for myself? And when I saw her there lying in her bed that white and still, I’m telling you, Nurse, I thought she’d gone! Aye, the turn I took! I was that sure she’d gone. The doctor said I did right to call him! Is it right she’s refused to be away to the hospital?’

  It was, though I evaded saying so. ‘I’ve not yet seen Dr MacDonald. Thank you very much, Mrs Baker. You’ve been a great help.’

  She gave a grim nod at the door we had now reached. ‘I’ll get no thanks there. I ken well Mrs Thompson’ll be out for my blood. She’s aye been that anxious to preserve her privacy. It’s no use your ringing, Nurse. There’s none but her to answer.’

  According to Miss Bruce, the Home-help should have arrived by now. ‘The Home-help hasn’t come, yet?’

  ‘Aye. And been sent packing.’ Mrs Baker stepped back a foot or two, folded her arms, and waited.

  I took a long mental breath and opened the door. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Thompson. I’m Nurse Hurst. Please may I come in?’

  The silence was first broken by a rustle of paper. Then, ‘If you must, but you’ll be wasting your time, Nurse.’ The voice was old, tight, and breathless. ‘Mind you shut my door after you! I’ve no use for peepers!’

  Mrs Baker smiled dourly. ‘What’d I tell ye?’

  It was a cool afternoon, but the tiny flat had the clammy chill of a building unheated for months. It was as clean as the Browns’, and the flannel sheets and blankets on Mrs Thompson’s bed were so worn with age and scrubbing they had no warmth left. The newspapers she had removed from between her blankets were just visible under the bed.

  She was a widow of seventy-one and roughly five foot six. She now weighed about five stones.

  Miss Bruce had said, ‘I’ve seldom heard Dr MacDonald so distressed. Acute malnutrition, plus angina. But though she requires instant hospitalization for both, since she’s refused his advice, he’s convinced to force matters at this stage will bring on another, and possibly fatal, attack. In his opinion that can happen at any time. He’s ordered oxygen and all the essentials for home-nursing, but says she may well refuse them. She insists she’s treated these attacks successfully on her own and that all she requires is a little rest. Do whatever she will let you to help her and, if you can, try and persuade her to change her mind about hospitalization. Dr MacDonald’ll return to her shortly, and if she insists on remaining at home tonight, the night duty-sister will call and arrange for her to have a special nurse all night.’

  Mrs Thompson refused to let me make her bed, wash her face and hands, re-do her long, neatly plaited, thinning white hair. ‘I’ve aye preferred to fend for myself, Nurse. I can manage well.’ Her hooded, sunken eyes were cold as her bedroom air. ‘No doubt you’ve others to attend to.’

  ‘Not
today. You’re my last call.’ I rubbed my back. It was not aching. ‘Been a long day. May I sit down?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I smiled at her. ‘Though I think your city the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, Mrs Thompson, it does have a lot of steps and stairs. Being a stranger, my feet aren’t used to them yet.’

  As I hoped, that roused her sense of hospitality to strangers, whether welcome or otherwise. I had noticed that particular characteristic was shared by the overwhelming majority of my Edinburgh patients. ‘You’re welcome to rest your feet. You’ll be from England?’

  ‘London. Ever been there?’

  She had not, but she seemed faintly interested. I talked of London for a good half-hour before I risked suggesting tea. I knew Dr MacDonald had done some immediate shopping. ‘May I use your kitchen and make us both a cup? I don’t know about you, Mrs Thompson, but I’m parched!’

  She hesitated, then took a purse from under her pillow. ‘You’ll need this coin for the meter. I’ll not have it said I turned an English lassie from my door empty-handed. If you wish’ ‒ she had to stop for breath ‒ ‘a wee bit bread and marge, help yourself.’

  ‘Just tea, thanks. I’m only thirsty.’

  I put her shilling in a saucer on the kitchen dresser and used one of mine. The G.P.’s shopping was on the table. I put the tea, sugar, eggs, and milk in a larder that took me by the throat. One could have eaten off the shelves and floor, but the total original contents might just have made an elevenses snack, if one was not hungry.

  Over tea I chatted on.

  Mrs Thompson’s smile was stiff and unused. ‘You’re an awful lassie for blethering, but I’ll say this, Nurse’ ‒ another pause for another gasping breath ‒ ‘you make good tea.’

  The medical equipment arrived. She began by ordering the lot out of her flat. I plugged my greatest assets. ‘Please, Mrs Thompson, don’t, for my sake! I’m so new to this job and Edinburgh. It’ll do me, personally, a packet of harm,’ I lied. ‘It’ll look as if I’m not nursing you properly. If not the oxygen just yet, these blankets? Bless you! How about a hot-water bottle? Nothing like a hottie to keep one’s feet warm ‒ and isn’t it freezing, today? Or is that just because I haven’t yet got used to your bracing northern climate?’