He eyed her gravely. ‘If I remember rightly, you ordered me to stop in no uncertain terms, although I can promise you that I would have done so even if you hadn’t said a word.’
She smiled at him; she had a sweet smile, which just for a moment made her fleetingly pretty, although she was unaware of that. ‘I shall hear how he goes on from Joyce,’ she told him guilelessly.
Someone had brought her case in from the car and she picked it up as she went through Casualty, already filling up with minor cuts and burns, occasional fractures and dislocations; all the day-to-day cases. She glanced round her as she went; she wasn’t likely to get anything sent up to the ward as far as she could see, although probably the Accident Room would keep her busy. She hoped so, for there was nothing like work for blotting out one’s own thoughts and worries, and her head was full of both.
She climbed the stairs to her room in the Nurses’ Home feeling alone and sad and sorry for herself, and cross too that she had allowed herself to give way to self-pity. As she unlocked the door and went into the pleasant little room she had made home for some years now, she bade herself stop behaving like a fool; she wasn’t likely to see the doctor again and she would start, as from that very moment, to forget him.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE saw him exactly two hours later, for he accompanied Mr Burnett on his bi-weekly round, towering head and shoulders over everyone else. He wished her good morning with cool affability, remarked that they seemed to be seeing a good deal of each other that morning and added, ‘The little dog is doing very nicely.’
‘Oh, good.’ Laura spoke warmly and then became a well-trained Sister again, leading the way to the first bed, very neat in her blue uniform with the quaint muslin cap perched on top of her neat head.
She handed Mr Burnett the first set of notes and advised him in her clear, pleasant voice: ‘Mr Arthur True, facial injuries, concussion and severe lacerations of the upper right arm—admitted at eleven o’clock last night.’
Mr Burnett rumbled and mumbled to himself as he always did, cleared his throat and said, ‘Ah, yes,’ and turned to his registrar. ‘You saw him, George? Anything out of the way?’
George White was earnest, painstaking and thoroughly reliable, both as a person and as a surgeon, and he was quite unexciting too. He gave his report with maddening slowness despite Mr Burnett’s obvious desire for him to get on with it, so that Laura, aware of her chief’s irritation, wasted no time in getting the patient ready for examination; no easy matter, for he was still semi-conscious and belligerent with it. But she coped with him quietly with a student nurse to help, and presently, when Mr Burnett had had a good look and muttered to Doctor van Meerum, his registrar and Laura, they moved on.
‘Mr Alfred Trim,’ Laura enlightened her audience, ‘double inguinal hernia, stitches out yesterday.’ She lifted the bedclothes and Mr Burnett stood studying his handiwork, apparently lost in admiration of it until he said finally: ‘Well, we’ll think about getting him home, Sister, shall we?’ and swept on his way.
The next bed’s occupant looked ill. ‘Penetrating wound of chest,’ stated Laura. ‘I took the drain out an hour ago…’ She added a few concise and rather bloodthirsty details and Mr Burnett frowned and said, ‘Is that so?—we’ll have a look.’ He invited Doctor van Meerum to have a look too and they poked and prodded gently and murmured together with George agreeing earnestly with everything they said until Mr Burnett announced, ‘We’ll have him in theatre, Sister—five o’clock this afternoon.’
His gaze swept those around him, gathering agreement.
Five o’clock was a wretched time to send a case to theatre; Laura exchanged a speaking glance with her right hand. She was due off duty at that hour herself, and now it would be a good deal later than that, for Pat wouldn’t be back from her afternoon until then and there would be a lengthy report to give. She checked a sigh and looking up, found Doctor van Meerum’s dark eyes on her. He looked so severe that she felt guilty although she had no reason to be, and this made her frown quite fiercely, and when he smiled faintly, just as though he had know exactly what she had been thinking, she frowned even harder.
A tiresome man, she told herself strongly, walking into her life and turning it topsy-turvy, and whoever had made that silly remark about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all needed his head examined. She had been jogging along, not quite content, it was true, but at least resigned, and now she felt as though she had been hit by a hurricane which was blowing her somewhere she didn’t want to go…
She swept past the next bed, empty for the moment, and raised an eyebrow at the hovering nurse to draw the curtains around the next one in line. Old Mr Tyler, who had had a laparotomy two days previously—Mr Burnett had found what he had expected and worse besides, and Mr Tyler wasn’t going to do. Laura looked at the tired old face with compassion and hoped, as she always did in like cases, that he would die in his sleep, and waited quietly while the surgeon chatted quietly with a convincing but quite false optimism. He drew Doctor van Meerum into the conversation too, and she listened to the big man saying just the right thing in his faultless English and liked him for it. She supposed she would have loved him whatever he was or did, but liking him was an extra bonus.
The next three patients were quickly dealt with; young men with appendices which had needed prompt removal and who, the moment they were fully conscious, set up a game of poker. Laura had obliged them with playing cards, extracted a promise from them not to gamble with anything more valuable than matches and propped them up in their chairs the moment they were pronounced fit to leave their beds. And here they sat for the greater part of their day, a little wan, but nicely diverted from worrying about their insides.
They greeted Mr Burnett in a cheerful chorus, assured him that they had never felt better, that Sister was an angel, and that they couldn’t wait for the pleasure of having her remove their stitches. All of which remarks Laura took with motherly good nature, merely begging them to refrain from tiring themselves out before steering her party forward to the neighbouring bed. Its occupant, Mr Blake, was thin and middle-aged, and although his operation had been a minor one, a continuous string of complaints passed his lips all day and far into the night.
Mr Burnett, his entourage ranged behind him, stood by the bed and listened with an impassive face to details of uneatable porridge for breakfast, the callous behaviour of the house doctors and nurses, and Sister’s cruelty in insisting that he should actually get up and walk to the bathroom. He shot her a look of great dislike as he spoke and Mr Burnett said quite sharply that since he was making such excellent progress he would do better to convalesce at home, where he would doubtless find nothing to grumble about. ‘Though I doubt if you will find a better nurse or kinder person than Sister Standish,’ he concluded severely.
He stalked away, muttering to himself, and Laura hastened to soothe him by pointing out the excellent progress the next patient was making.
‘I don’t know how you put up with it, Laura,’ said Mr Burnett, half an hour later, when they were all squashed into her office drinking their coffee. ‘For heaven’s sake get married, girl, before you lose your wits. That Blake—I’ll have him home tomorrow; he’s fit enough, and besides taking up a bed he must be driving you all mad.’
‘Well, that would be nice,’ conceded Laura mildly, ‘for he does wear one down, you know. But they’re not all like that, you know, sir.’
He passed his cup for more coffee and snorted: ‘If I wasn’t a married man