Helen shrugged with exhaustion. ‘There isn’t any milk.’
Amy went out to the dark, cramped and pungent-smelling shop at the corner and bought a basket of supplies. When she came back she made Helen a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk, just as she liked it, and a piece of bread and butter that her friend didn’t even touch. Amy said nothing, but, remembering what Helen had done once before when she was there, put a hambone with some chopped carrots and onions in a pan and left it on the ring to simmer for soup. There would be something for Freda and Jim when they came in again, and perhaps the savoury smell would tempt Helen.
‘Where have they gone?’ Amy asked, and Helen smiled lopsidedly.
‘Mag’s, I should think. Oh, they won’t be huddled in a doorway somewhere, if that’s what you’re thinking. They can take care of themselves, if they have to. Don’t worry.’
‘It isn’t Jim and Freda I’m worrying about.’
‘Thanks.’ Helen didn’t even have the energy to smile.
When the time came Amy had to force herself to leave and make her way up the deserted street once more. It was snowing again, wet flakes driven cruelly by the wind. She would have to come much more often, every day if possible, and at least she could bring food. Helen had accepted the first basket, that was something.
If pride was all you had, you’d know better than to say that.
The words dinned in Amy’s head as she put on her starched uniform again.
The exams came, almost an anticlimax after the build-up that the students had given them. Amy wrote her papers, ruthlessly clearing her head of everything else before each one. She went through her practical tests under the granite stares of Blaine and the sister tutor, never confusing a pressure dressing with a burn dressing and bandaging crooked legs in perfect overlapping layers.
The results appeared with surprising speed. The sister pinned up a typewritten list on the faded green baize-covered board in the study hall ante-room. Dorothy Hewitt’s name headed it, to nobody’s surprise, but Amy’s was immediately beneath.
‘Well done, Lovell,’ breathed Moira O’Hara in awed admiration.
Mary Morrow was standing nearby, looking at her own name halfway down the list. She turned sharply towards them. ‘Are congratulations really in order? If they’ve got themselves a precious candidate like Lovell, they’re not going to let her come bottom, are they now?’
‘I would have thought so, just to prove their egalitarian principles,’ Moira retorted. ‘Lovell doesn’t get any privileges. She’s scrubbed as many sluice-rooms as you.’
Amy put her hand on Moira’s arm and dragged her away still protesting over her shoulder at Morrow.
‘Why didn’t you speak up for yourself?’ Moira demanded indignantly. ‘I’ve never heard anything like the old cow.’
Amy shrugged, pretending indifference. ‘Why bother?’ But she had seen the naked resentment in Mary Morrow’s face and it had shocked her. It was hard, Amy thought, to be hated just for being in the place you had been born in, and not for anything to do with yourself at all.
Amy was given a silver pin for her apron, and Dorothy Hewitt received the gold one from Sister Tutor herself. New student intakes were already coming up behind their set, and the drudgery of hours spent carbolizing bedsteads and brushing mattresses passed to them. There was more proper nursing, and less numbing exhaustion from sheer physical overwork. Even Moira O’Hara could begin to believe that she might, after all, reach the dizzy grandeur of State Registered Nurse.
Not very many nights after receiving her silver pin, Amy woke up to someone knocking on the door of her room. It was an insistent tapping, not loud enough to wake anyone else, and although she ached to plunge her head back under the pillows, Amy was already awake enough to know that it wouldn’t stop or go away until she answered it.
‘Moira?’ she mumbled. ‘Sa’matter?’
The tapping went on. She would have to get out of bed and open the door. Amy stumbled to it and jerked it open, ready to hiss a protest at whoever it was. Standing outside was a girl from her set, fully dressed in uniform and with her cape wrapped around her. She glanced up and down the corridor as if she was afraid that she might have been followed and then gasped, breathless with running, ‘I’m on nights on Talbot. I’ve come over in my break. There’s a friend of yours been brought in and she’s calling for you.’
The corridor went cold, and the blackness seemed to thicken around them.
‘Helen,’ Amy said mechanically. ‘Is it Helen?’ In her head she was already planning what she would have to do. Dress in her uniform, pull her cap on. Duck across and into the hospital as if she was on duty, and up to Talbot on the sixth floor. Talbot was the isolation and fever ward. Why was Helen there, instead of down on the chest ward?
‘Pearce, her name is,’ the other nurse told her. ‘She’s bad. I thought I’d better come. Lovell, I’ve got to get back now I’ve told you …’
‘Wait. Who’s the staff on Talbot tonight?’
‘Corcoran.’
That wasn’t so bad. Corcoran was slow-moving, and kind-hearted. Amy had worked with her and earned her approval.
‘Tell Helen I’m coming.’ The other nurse was already running, skidding out of sight around the angle of the corridor. ‘Thanks,’ Amy whispered after her. Her heart was thudding as she pulled on her uniform and her breath was tangling in her chest as she wrestled with the ridiculous buttons. She’s bad. She’s bad.
The hostel night porter was asleep in his cubicle. Amy ran through the icy wind and reached the hospital nurses’ entrance, and then made herself slow down as she reached the second porter in his box. She put her fingers up to the starched wings of her cap and then breathed in to steady her voice. The porter glanced up at her curiously, knowing that no one came on or off duty at two in the morning.
‘Two short on Talbot tonight,’ Amy said. ‘So they’ve pulled me in. And I’ve already done eight today.’ The man nodded, commiserating, and turned back to his folded newspaper. Amy walked briskly past him, and once out of sight she ran at the stairs counting the steps blankly in her head. Sixth floor. Which way? Her friend was hovering at the double doors, a box of fresh dressings in her hand.
‘Isolation four,’ she directed her. ‘Corcoran’s down the main ward. I’m supposed to be watching your friend.’
Amy glided past the grim isolation cubicles until she came to number four. Inside the bare box Helen was lying on her side, her thin hand hooked like a claw over the white sheet. She didn’t speak or move her head. Amy knelt at the side of the bed so that their eyes were level and they looked at each other. Helen’s eyes were like dark holes and the blood had sunk out of her face to leave her lips as white as the sheets. Gently Amy touched her hand. She realized at the touch that Helen was going to die, here in this bare cream room, without even the photograph of Freda and Jim beside her.
Impotent fury flared in Amy as she looked wildly around. There was nothing on the locker except a covered sputum bowl. She snatched up the chart from the foot of the bed and read off the height of Helen’s fever. Dr Davis had been in at eleven-thirty and had gone away again, almost certainly to bed. There was nothing they could do for Helen, and so they had left her out of the way here, alone. But for a junior nurse who had broken the rules to run for Amy, Helen would have died as isolated as she had lived. Amy knelt again and looked into the white face. Helen’s eyes were filmed, and she couldn’t be sure that she even knew Amy had come at last.
‘Helen,’ she whispered, ‘it’s Amy. Don’t go.’ The eyes didn’t even flicker.
Cold anger made Amy feel stiff and dry. She knelt in silence, her back rigid, listening to the night noises of the hospital and thinking