‘Oh I see,’ Mr Glossop said disapprovingly, ‘All the Catholic doings, smells and bells and that carry on, is it?’
‘Not at all, Father O’Sullivan is an Anglican priest,’ Matron replied, attempting to squash his interest with the look that had her young nurses quaking and, to her chagrin, appeared to further encourage Mr Glossop.
‘Right you are, Matron, I’m sure you’ll tell me when I’m over-stepping bounds. I like a woman who knows her own business.’
Matron decided to ignore him. ‘It’s just gone eight-thirty, Mr Brown’s grandson is coming in on the nine o’clock transport. I hope he makes it in time. You’ll have to excuse me now, Mr Glossop, I’ve work to do.’
Glossop looked at the desk in front of him and realized that the papers he’d been fiddling with had been tidied out of his reach and that he himself was in Matron’s seat.
‘Yes, yes of course. You don’t want a spot of company? Someone to help you go through all those figures? Tricky stuff, numbers, and I’ve a good eye for accuracy, that’s why they gave me the job, of course. You’ve got to have a trusted man on the pay round.’
‘Thank you, but no,’ she cut him off. ‘If you head next door to the Records Office, the young nurse there will take care of you. She knows where the cots are kept and where you’re to sleep and I dare say she’ll be happy to show you to the kitchen. You’ll have to fend for yourself, mind you, our kitchen staff are daily and they left on the last transport back to town. Goodnight, Mr Glossop.’
Knowing himself dismissed, Glossop reluctantly left Matron’s office and went out into the darkening night. And it was still too damn hot by half.
At nine o’clock Red Cross Transport Driver Sarah Warne swung the Mount Seager bus round Gold’s Corner into the last stretch of the route, known locally as the Long Leg. From Gold’s Corner to the bridge the Long Leg ran straight for fifteen miles across the plains towards the foothills. Before the blackout she used to be able to see the hospital lights for the whole way but since Japan came in the front windows had gone blank. In the aftermath of twilight Sarah could just make out a black mass of buildings against the royal texture of the hills. Behind the hills, the main range, touched on its pinnacles with perpetual snow, awaited the night against a luminous sky. Although the sun was now below the horizon the cusp of Mount Seager was tinctured miraculously with clear rose. The windscreen of the bus framed a vast landscape quite free of human interest, unscarred by human occupation, moving because of its remoteness.
The road was unsealed and from time to time pieces of shingle flew up and banged against the floor of the bus. Sarah knew where the worst pot-holes lay but could not always avoid them. Every time they bumped across a gap or skidded in loose shingle the VADs screamed cheerfully, if a little less loudly than usual because of the young man who sat beside Sarah in the front seat. This was Mr Sydney Brown and they all knew that he was going up to the hospital because his grandfather had been asking for him for weeks and now the old man was nearing the end. Sarah spoke to him once or twice but whatever her observation his replies could be guessed before they were uttered. ‘It is, too,’ ‘I couldn’t say,’ ‘That’s right,’ he said in offended undertones. Sarah thought that perhaps, unlike her, he had not yet seen death at first hand and was sorry for him.
The mountains assumed an incredible depth of blue and the foothills turned more darkly purple. Their margins, folded together in a pattern of firm curves, were faintly haloed with light. The road ran forward into nothingness. The plains on either side of the road and stretching out behind them had taken on a bleached look, seeming to fade rather than to darken as night fell, turning the whole scene into an other-worldly monochrome. Sarah watched the road and her petrol gauge. With one layer of her mind she attended to her job, with another she saw that the landscape was quite beautiful, and with yet another she hunted for things to say to Mr Sydney Brown, or shout to the VADs. Further back, in a hinterland of half-conscious thoughts she wondered if Dr Luke Hughes would come into the Transport Office for his letters that night when she had sorted the mail she carried in addition to her passengers. This last conjecture gradually took precedence in her mind so that when unexpectedly Mr Sydney Brown spoke of his own accord, it was a second or two before she realized that he was joining in conversation with the VADs.
‘Lordly Stride,’ said Sydney Brown.
‘I beg your pardon?’ cried Sarah.
‘Lordly Stride came in and paid a record price,’ said Sydney. ‘I heard it on the air while I was waiting for the bus. Rank outsider.’
An instant babble broke out in the bus.
‘She’s done it! That’s Farquharson’s horse. That’s right, it’s her horse!’ And then the attenuated inevitable coda to most of the VADs’ dialogues: ‘Thass raht.’
‘What are you all talking about?’ Sarah demanded. She was answered immediately by each of her eight passengers. Miss Rosamund Farquharson, the Records Office clerk who usually worked days, had swapped her duty for the overnight shift, and had gone to the races down-country. She had travelled into town on the morning bus and told everybody she was going to back Lordly Stride in the last race. ‘We all said she was mad,’ the VADs explained, but the truth was Rosamund Farquharson was in a mess and needed the money, so much so that what might have felt like a steep gamble to her colleagues had seemed a genuine lifeline when she laid the bet, fingers crossed and whistling hope.
‘You are a lot of gossips,’ Sarah said mildly.
‘It’s not gossip, Transport,’ shouted one of the VADs. ‘She tells everybody about it. She’s not fussy, she doesn’t care who knows. That dress she bought for the races—well, bought! She said herself there was only one shop left where they’d give her credit.’
‘She’s mad,’ said a small nurse profoundly.
‘I’ll say.’
‘Did you hear about her and old Comfort?’ asked a solo voice.
‘Eee—yes!’ the chorus chanted.
‘No. What?’ the nurse demanded.
‘She caught Rosie kissing one of the boys when she brought the mail round.’
‘She’s mad.’
‘Comfort or Rosie?’
‘Both.’
‘I’ll say.’
‘But Roz is being a fool to herself.’
‘No need to ask which of the lads it was.’
Mr Sydney Brown cleared his throat. The voices faltered and were obliterated by the grind of tyres on shingle, body rattles from the bus, and by the not inconsiderable racket of the engine. Sarah began to wonder uneasily on the subject of their discussion. She was surprised to discover in herself a violent distaste for this gossip about Rosamund Farquharson; surprised, because their friendship was a casual affair based on a similarity of experience rather than of taste. They had met properly in the Mount Seager Records Office. Each of them had returned to New Zealand after a long absence in England but while Miss Farquharson perpetually bewailed the lost gaieties of her glorious existence in the London of art school and galleries, Sarah tried very hard to avoid such lamentations. Since the outbreak of war she too had suffered from a painful nostalgia for the old days. Where Rosamund had attended art school, Sarah had three years at Oxford and one at a dramatic school under her belt, in addition to another two years spent struggling to find small pickings in indifferent companies. While Rosamund’s memories were constantly invoked in a rose mist of past bliss, Sarah’s were solid and genuine. After exhausting months in weekly rep, in the farthest flung corners of what her parents’ generation of New Zealanders still referred to as ‘Home’, Sarah eventually