Amy looked up and saw the girl watching her. She had been lying so still that Amy had imagined she was asleep but now saw that she was wide awake. She had very dark eyes, unnaturally large in her hollow face. The cupboard beside her bed was empty, with no personal possessions except for a snapshot with curled edges propped up against the hospital water jug so that she could see it clearly.
‘I’m Helen Pearce,’ the girl said.
‘Nurse Lovell,’ Amy said automatically, and thought how distant it sounded. ‘Amy,’ she added.
‘When can I go home?’ The question was level, but Helen’s eyes were fixed on Amy’s face. ‘When?’ she repeated, when Amy didn’t answer.
‘I’ve only just come on duty. I don’t know about you, but I’ll go and find out and come straight back.’
The night’s senior nurse on duty was a staff nurse Amy had never worked with before.
‘Helen Pearce, the new patient in the side wing, is asking when she may go home.’
The staff sighed. ‘Dear me, she’s only just got here. She has a tubercular left lung, she needs rest and a good diet. More than that only Dr Davis and God can tell her. Ask her if she would like a sleeping draught to help her settle.’
Amy went back. Helen hadn’t moved even a fraction.
‘You need to rest,’ she told her reassuringly as she moved to plump up her pillows. But something in Helen’s stillness stopped her. She caught sight of the photograph again and saw that it was of two children, sitting side by side on some steps outside an open door.
‘Rest?’ the girl repeated unbelievingly. ‘I only came in to see the doctor in the Free Clinic for some medicine for the cough. I wanted to go home straight after.’ Amy knew that the people in the streets immediately surrounding the hospital came to the voluntary accident department when they couldn’t afford any other medical treatment. ‘I’ve had some medicine now,’ the girl added.
‘One dose won’t help much, you know,’ Amy said gently.
Helen turned her penetrating stare on her at once. ‘I know that, don’t I? I could’ve taken it with me in a bottle. I’m not a baby, am I?’
No, you’re not a baby, Amy thought. It seemed to be part of the Royal Lambeth’s policy to try to turn you back into one for as long as you lay in one of its beds. She glanced over her shoulder. Here in the corner of the ward she was out of sight of the senior nurses as long as one of them didn’t choose to come down on a tour of inspection. She sat down on the edge of Helen’s bed.
‘You know that you’re ill, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘Of course I know. I wouldn’t have come in for the medicine otherwise, would I?’ For the first time Helen’s gaze left Amy’s face as she looked sideways at the photograph. ‘TB, is it?’
‘Yes. They can cure it nowadays, you know. Or at least control it. But you have to do exactly what the doctors tell you.’
‘And how long does that go on for?’
‘I haven’t been a nurse for very long. I’m not much of an authority. But I think it can be quite a long time. Months, or perhaps even longer.’
Suddenly Helen laughed, a spontaneous bubble that made her thin shoulders twitch. ‘They want me to lie here for months?’
Then Amy understood why she had been lying so still. The laugh changed into a cough, a terrible, almost silent cough that doubled her over so that her dark hair fell over her face and her fists clenched and unclenched convulsively on the sheet. Amy put her arm around her shoulders and held her until the spasm subsided. Helen leant back again and reached for the enamel sputum bowl on the cupboard top. She spat into it, and Amy saw that the greenish blob was streaked with blood. She took the bowl away from Helen at once and covered it up, then went down the ward to the sink and brought back another bowl of cool water to sponge her face.
‘Better?’ she asked at last and Helen nodded, exhausted.
When she had made her as comfortable as she could she asked her, ‘Why is it so important for you to go home?’
Warily Helen inclined her head towards the snapshot. ‘I’ve got our Aunt Mag to look after them tonight. Well, she’s not an aunt really. But she’s got enough of her own to think about. I can’t leave them for any longer than that.’
‘May I?’ Amy picked up the photograph. The children were clearly Helen’s younger brother and sister, with the same dark eyes and hair. She judged that they were about eight and ten. The two of them looked as if their faces had been hurriedly wiped and their hair straightened for the photographer, but their clothes were the same assortment of mended hand-me-downs that all the children in the nearby streets wore.
‘Not a bad picture, is it? The photographer came down our way with his camera on one of those stands and a black cloth to go over his head and all. A shilling, he charged. Some of the women down our street made their kids change into their Sunday best. All stiff, they were, done up like twopenny hambones.’ The two girls looked at each other and smiled, and through Helen’s eyes Amy suddenly saw the street and the travelling photographer and the groups of stiffly posed children in their Sunday suits. ‘But I thought our two looked more themselves just in the things they stood up in.’
‘You were right, too,’ Amy said as she replaced the photograph. ‘And I can see that you must be worried about them. Is there … no one else in the family to help?’
‘Not really. Mum died four years ago, and Dad had done a runner years before that.’
Amy thought that the street slang came out of Helen’s mouth in faint inverted commas. She sounded as if she was practised at using it to make herself fit in, but knew all along that she didn’t. Then Amy heard the purposeful squeak of regulation nursing shoes coming down the main ward. She jumped up hastily and began to straighten the covers.
‘You should stay here as long as you possibly can, for their sake, then. There is a hospital almoner, you know, who might be able to help. I’ll ask the staff to leave a message for the day sister.’
‘Thank you,’ Helen said simply. ‘I mean for telling me the truth.’
‘I probably shouldn’t have done.’ Out of the corner of her eye Amy saw the starched peaks of the staff nurse’s cap progressing towards them. In a louder voice she asked, ‘Would you like something to help you to go to sleep?’
‘No.’ Helen Pearce would be mutinous when she didn’t want something, Amy saw. ‘But I’d like it if you would come back and talk to me later.’
‘I’ll try,’ Amy whispered, and was whisking away with the used sputum bowl just as the senior nurse said majestically, ‘Thank you, Lovell. I will attend to Miss Pearce now. Take a bedpan down to Mrs Marks, would you?’
Later, after she had done everything that could possibly be expected of her and all the other patients were asleep or at least comfortable, Amy went back. Helen was still lying in the same position.
‘Would you like me to turn you over?’
‘No, thanks. Just sit and talk, if you’re allowed. Can I call you Amy?’
‘Of course. What are their names?’ Amy nodded at the picture.
‘Freda and Jim. They’re very good. Jim wasn’t much more than a baby when Ma died, but Freda helped me with him right from the beginning. She looks after him now when I’m working.’
‘Do you have to support all three of you?’
Helen grinned. ‘Who else d’you think would do it? I go cleaning offices over the river. You have to be there early in the morning, and then back in the evening to do others. It means I’m out when the kids go off to school, and I have to go straight back after I’ve