‘I’m not interested in slaughtering small animals for the fun of it,’ he had insisted, white-faced against his father’s scorn.
‘Well, Amy, what is it?’ Gerald demanded. He disliked the telephone, and avoided it wherever possible. Amy sensed him listening impatiently as she explained. She had barely finished before he cut in.
‘Sick-nursing is a servant’s job. It’s not a suitable occupation for a girl of your sort.’ The tone of his voice was final. Amy was glad of the distance separating them as she took a deep breath and prepared for battle.
‘People of our sort have done it in the past. Lady Trent was a VAD in the War. They used the ballroom at their London house as an orthopaedic ward and hung the walls with bolts of material to protect the gilding. She often talks about it even now.’
‘That was wartime,’ Gerald said sharply. ‘That will never come again.’
‘War or peace, does it matter? I feel that now I’m grown up I would like to contribute something. If I have got anything to offer, don’t you think I should be allowed to do it?’
From the silence that followed Amy knew that she had struck a chord.
In a different voice Gerald answered at last, ‘Perhaps you’re more of a Lovell than I give you credit for. More than Richard will ever be. Airlie is the one you take after. He had something to offer, and he did it without stopping to think. He was a fine boy, Amy. I only wish you could have been older and known him better.’
Amy closed her eyes, ashamed that even unconsciously she had adopted a stratagem that touched on Airlie.
‘I remember him,’ she said quiedy. ‘I’m not brave like Airlie was. I just want to do a job that might be some use to somebody. I don’t even know why I’m so sure, but I know that job should be nursing.’
‘What does your mother say?’
‘Umm, she agrees that I can try it with your consent.’
‘Is she there? I’d better speak to her.’
‘No, she isn’t here now. She’s away for a Saturday-to-Monday.’
‘With?’
‘I think … the Earl and Countess of Carlisle.’
The silence was longer this time and Amy waited, feeling the weight of distance and formality and failures of understanding that separated them.
‘Very well, Amy. If you want to be a nurse, and God knows why you should, you have my permission. Now, let me get on with what I’m doing here in peace, will you?’
Amy replaced the receiver and stood for a long moment thinking. She had felt it before Isabel’s wedding, and again now. She had almost reached her father, almost seen him as he really was, and then at the last moment he had put up the angry, impervious screen again and shut her out.
‘Good,’ said the matron. ‘Now. Educational background. Adequate, I’m sure.’ She was filling in a form in very fast, spiky handwriting.
Amy told her about the governesses, and Miss Abbott’s school, and she nodded.
‘You will have to work hard, like all our probationers, to keep up with lectures and clinical studies in your off-duty hours. Do you understand that?’
Amy said yes, she understood, and the matron capped her pen with a decisive snap. ‘Your age and level of education are suitable, Miss Lovell, and you look more than strong enough for the work. Your background is a disadvantage to you, because there are not many girls of your class amongst our students. I won’t make a secret of the fact that it’s an advantage to us, because we are trying to attract more girls from better families into the profession. But I must make it clear from the start that you can expect no special treatment or privileges because of who you are. You will be treated exactly as the other girls, and you will be expected to obey the same rules.’
‘I understand, Matron.’
Rapidly the matron began to outline the conditions of Amy’s entry. She seemed to do everything at top speed, as if there was not a second to be wasted. Amy felt intimidated and energized by her in equal proportions.
‘You will be enrolled as a nursing student of this hospital for three years, after an initial trial period of one month. You will receive free board and lodging, and you will live in the nurses’ hostel like the other girls. You will work a one-hundred-and-ten-hour fortnight, which will include full day shifts, split day shifts and night shifts in accordance with the rota system. Lectures and study will be in addition to those hours, and you will be permitted three weeks’ holiday per annum. Your salary in the first year will be twenty-five pounds, thirty in the second and thirty-five thereafter. You will be provided with free uniform dresses, aprons and caps but you will be required to provide your own regulation stockings and shoes. Laundry bills will be deducted from your salary. The next intake is in four weeks’ time, Miss Lovell. There is a waiting list for studentships at this hospital, but for the reason I explained I am prepared to waive it in your case and offer you a place at once. Do you wish to accept it, under the conditions I have outlined?’
Amy remembered the red and cream corridors she had been hustled through to reach the matron’s office and the glimpses of long wards with straight, white rows of beds. She smelt the reek of disinfectant and heard the squeak of hurrying rubber-soled shoes, the crackle of starched skirts and the clang of mop-buckets in cupboards stacked with harsh soap and hospital towels. This would be her world for fifty-five hours a week, one hundred and ten hours a fortnight, and with three weeks’ holiday a year.
She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I accept. And I would welcome the chance to start as soon as possible.’
The matron almost smiled, the first glimmer of cordiality that Amy had glimpsed in her. ‘Welcome to the Royal Lambeth, Miss Lovell.’
As she retraced her steps towards the outside world, Amy saw the hospital quite differently. Passing the wards, she peered in and saw the people in the beds, old men and children and one room lined with babies’ cots, all different and all needing different things. She looked at the nurses’ preoccupied faces under the stiff white pleats of their caps, and wondered if any of them would become a friend. A senior doctor with a flotilla of juniors behind him brushed past her, and one or two of the young men glanced back curiously at Amy.
The hospital wasn’t just a grim Victorian pile smelling of illness. It was a world in itself, occupied with the realities that she knew she was missing at Bruton Street. In four weeks’ time she would be joining it.
Outside there was a single circular flowerbed crammed with egg-yolk yellow wallflowers in the macadamized strip that separated the hospital from the busy main road. Amy beamed at the hideous flowers and then up at the building’s red-brick height towering above.
‘I’ll be seeing you soon,’ she said aloud and then she turned and almost danced out of the gates into the traffic.
The hospital was across the river, in a part of London she hardly knew. No one she knew had ever had any connection with the hospital or the area it served, and it was for those reasons she had chosen it, although Matron must never know that, Amy reminded herself. Matron, of course, believed it was the Lambeth’s distinguished reputation that had attracted her.
A cab, heading back to the West End and civilization, accelerated towards her. Amy almost hailed it, and then she stopped herself.
‘Begin as you intend to continue,’ she ordered. She let the cab sweep past, and then with her hands in her pockets she began to walk towards Westminster Bridge. The sun, with the first heat of summer in it, shone on her head, like a blessing.
*
On the evening of Amy’s interview at the Royal Lambeth, Isabel was sitting alone in her drawing room at Ebury Street.
She looked up