Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 17

Thick black stockings, blue dress with a starched collar and a maddening row of eighteen tiny buttons, heavy black shoes, bib-fronted apron crackling with starch from the brown paper package delivered to her room every Monday, the bow at the back to be tied just so, cap the same, set exactly straight and pinned over her tightly coiled hair …

Feverishly counting the seconds remaining, Amy peered at herself in the tiny square of mirror over the shelf that doubled as work desk and dressing table, judged that her appearance would be acceptable even to Sister Blaine, the head nurse of the ward, and ran for her life.

Seven minutes to six a.m. and she was due to present herself on the ward, correct to the last button, at six o’clock precisely. She was aching in every limb and joint from twelve hours on her feet yesterday, twelve the day before and the day before that, and her eyes were heavy with sitting over textbooks late into the night. Of all the things she had learned to do since arriving at the Lambeth, Amy found waking up at five in the morning the hardest.

The stairs and corridors of the nurses’ hostel seemed ominously deserted, and then Amy heard the sound of pounding feet behind her.

‘Glory, Lovell, we’ll be late again. Sister Blaine will kill me, that’s for sure.’

Student nurse Moira O’Hara was pinning her cap on as she ran, hopelessly tucking the wiry strands of hair in at one side as they escaped on the other.

‘Come on, Moira. We can make it.’

They chased down the stairs into the narrow, dirty street, ducked down an alleyway lined with dustbins, and came round a corner to the nurses’ entrance to the hospital. Once inside, hospital discipline made them slow their pace to a brisk walk and Amy couldn’t help laughing at the anguished glances Moira shot back at her as they climbed the scrubbed stairs. They reached the ward door, with seconds to spare, and found Sister Blaine waiting inside them.

‘I was wondering if prize nurses Lovell and O’Hara were planning to grace the ward this morning. O’Hara, go and fix your cap and don’t ever appear on my floor improperly dressed again. After that you will attend to the sluice room. The night staff have left it looking like a battlefield. If you are quite ready, Lovell, you can begin with Mrs Marks.’

Amy marched away down the ward. She wasn’t exactly afraid of Blaine, although most of the other juniors found her terrifying. The sister’s cruel tongue was her chief weapon against the generally fumbling inadequacy of her new recruits, and her vitriolic criticism simply made Amy try harder in order to show the old witch just what she could do.

‘Hello, Mrs Marks. How is it this morning?’

‘Murder, bleedin’ murder. Me legs is like red ‘ot bolsters.’

Her first patient of the morning was a cheerful Cockney grandmother whose arms and legs were grotesquely swollen, taut and tender to the touch. She was the salty commentator on everything that happened in Blaine’s ward, and Amy liked her very much.

‘Come on, then. I’ll give you a cool wash, and then we’ll see if we can make your bed more comfortable.’

There were five more patients to attend to before seven-thirty, when Amy and Moira had a ten-minute break during which they made toast and gulped tea in the tiny staff kitchen off the ward.

‘God forgive me, but I hate her,’ Moira murmured as Sister Blaine’s ramrod figure passed the door.

‘She sounds worse than she is.’

‘She just likes you, Lovell, because you’re grand. She’s a bloody old snob, as well.’

They grinned at each other over the last mouthfuls of toast, brushed away the invisible crumbs and scurried back to the ward.

There were forty-five minutes for lunch, which according to the rota organized by seniority often didn’t come around for the juniors until three p.m. After that, depending on their workload, another ten-minute tea break might be squeezed in before the shift ended at six.

All through the rest of the day, Amy went to and fro under the orders of the sister and staff nurses. The juniors did the dirtiest and least rewarding jobs. All the bedpans, the cleaning and scouring that didn’t fall into the ward maids’ duties, the lifting and washing of inert patients, were delegated to the newcomers. Amy was perpetually exhausted, but she had never felt more alive in her life. She liked and admired the stoicism of the Lambeth’s mostly working-class patients, and the proper nursing duties that were the province of the staffs and senior students fascinated her. She watched everything she could, and remembered how it was done. She resented all the wearying scrubbing and polishing and mindless routine as much as every junior but when she was given something more interesting to do she found it so absorbing that she forgot all the drawbacks of the work.

To her pleased surprise, Amy discovered that the theoretical and written work came easily to her. She could remember the lists of procedures for care of septicaemia, the treatment of infantile diphtheria, and the bones of the leg and foot almost effortlessly. She was physically clumsy and uncoordinated and would never be as quick and deft as little Dorothy Hewitt, a clerk’s daughter from Clapham who was destined to carry off all the prizes of their year. But she was streets ahead of the unlucky Irish girl, Moira O’Hara, who had become her closest friend. Moira was always late, dropped things, and could never remember a list of five classic symptoms for more than half an hour at a time. The other nurses would cover for her surreptitiously, and coach her for tests in their short dinner breaks.

The sense of companionship and solidarity among the girls of her intake was like nothing Amy had ever experienced before.

When she had first arrived, in the bewildering early days when life had seemed reduced to exhaustion, confusion and the fear of doing the wrong thing, the other girls had treated her with suspicious reserve. They would sit with their heads together at hostel canteen meals, and when Amy joined them they eyed her wanly. In the rare free hours they looked curiously at her clothes and Amy was suddenly acutely conscious of her glove-soft handmade shoes, her cashmere sweaters and silk scarves. She had felt isolated and awkward, but instead of trying to compensate by being over-friendly Amy had simply behaved as naturally as she could, and slowly the reserve had been broken down.

Dorothy Hewitt had obligingly shown her how to fold and tuck in the bedclothes at the end of a hospital bed in exactly the way that Sister Blaine favoured. Amy had never made a bed or polished a floor in her life, and it was the simple household tasks, so familiar to most of the other girls that their tutors didn’t bother to explain them, that were her major pitfalls.

In her turn, Amy had told Sister Blaine that Moira O’Hara had taken a pail to the sluice room when really she was late back up the stairs from dinner.

‘You said that?’ Moira gasped when Amy slipped out of the ward doors to greet her with an empty pail.

‘Ssshh. Quickly.’

‘Oh God, but you are a friend in need. I could not have lived through another roasting.’

Moira, from a village in County Cork, had dreamed of nursing at a great London hospital ever since she was old enough to dream of anything. But as soon as she arrived, she was crippled by homesickness which made it hard for her to keep up the demanding pace. Amy, who was also homesick and as much at a loss in Lambeth as Moira, warmed to her at once, and after the sluice-pail episode they became friends. The unlikely pairing attracted the attention of the other girls, and they stopped assuming that Amy was a stuck-up snob because her father was a lord and she had crystal scent bottles on her bedroom shelf.

By the end of the first month they were saving a place for her at the draughty corner table next to the canteen service hatch that belonged to the newest intake. The hostel corridor became a friendly place where girls tapped on her door in search of a stamp, or to borrow one of her scarves or blouses for a special evening, or to invite her to feast on buttered toast and cocoa whilst perched in a row on somebody’s bed.

Hospital food was sparse and tasteless, and they were all perpetually starving. Amy had never been so hungry; she had never thought about food before except as something that happened automatically, and on her days off at Bruton Street the size and sheer splendour of the meals was newly surprising. She ate ravenously, enjoying the subtle flavours and the freshness of the ingredients.

‘Darling, are you sure you won’t get fat?’ Adeline asked faintly.

Amy smiled cheerfully at her. ‘Not a chance. I’ve never worked so hard, and I’m getting thinner and thinner.’ It was true. The waistbands of her uniform dresses were hanging loose. Before going back to the hostel she would take a basket down to see Cook, and fill it with hothouse fruit, cold chicken, cheese and cakes. When she returned, Moira and the others who lived too far away for regular home visits would fall on the basket with cries of delight.

When their studentships were confirmed after the first month, Moira’s with a stern warning from Matron that she must do better, Amy felt as if she had known her companions for the whole of her life, and that some of them were almost as close to her as Isabel.

There were only one or two exceptions to the rule of friendship and mutual support. Mary Morrow, a doctor’s daughter from Hampstead and consciously a social cut above the rest of the group, took an instant dislike to Amy. Usually she took the trouble to disguise it, and Amy was irresistibly reminded of acquaintanceships struck during her debutante years when girls would appear to be friendly whilst actually checking the pedigrees of her dress, her jewellery, and Amy herself, as well as the number and quality of her partners in the course of the evening. It wasn’t Amy’s fault that Mary chose to measure herself against her in some kind of battle of social standing and found herself losing on every count. But she discovered herself beginning to meet dislike with dislike, and the two girls tried to keep as far apart as possible in the claustrophobic world of the wards and hostel.

Amy was opening one of the first Bruton Street baskets when Mary’s narrow, watchful face appeared in the doorway. Her eyes went straight to the crested white linen napkins that had covered the impromptu picnic.

‘What has Lady Bountiful brought back for the deserving poor today?’

Amy went bright scarlet. She looked down at the basket at her feet and suddenly saw how her well-meant gesture might be interpreted.

Moira looked up from the cheerful scramble around the food. Deliberately, she recited, ‘Chicken with a sauce straight from Heaven itself. Pineapples and strawberries, and a real cake thick with cream and chocolate that I’m sure won’t taste of hospital bandages like every other thing I’ve eaten today. Now, I’m deserving enough, and I’m glad Amy took the trouble to bring the stuff back to us. What’s more, I’m going to eat it and enjoy it without you staring down on me like a squinty old sheep. Sit down and share, will you, or get away with yourself.’

‘I’m going home myself tomorrow, thank you very much,’ Mary said stiffly. She turned away from the doorway and disappeared. Amy was still standing, rooted by the basket, wishing she had never even thought of bringing the food.

‘I didn’t mean …’ she began, but Moira put her arm briskly around her shoulders.

‘No, you didn’t, and we all know that. Sure, she’s an old cow that one, and you’re not to take any notice of her.’

‘Sheep or cow, which?’ Amy said, laughing with Moira in spite of herself.

‘Auch, who cares. Pass me that chicken, now, will you?’

‘Moira’s right,’ quiet little Dorothy Hewitt said. ‘You shouldn’t pay any attention.’

Amy took their advice, but Mary’s covert hostility remained a wrinkle in the days which grew smoother as her confidence increased.

As she grew more adept at the tasks set for her, Amy found brief intervals in between them during which she could stop and breathe, and talk to the patients. She began to distinguish between them as individuals instead of thinking of them as so many beds to be made, so many blanket baths to be given or so many cupfuls of hospital food to be spooned into slack mouths. It was especially true of night duty.

Sometimes, the twelve-hour darkness shifts were terrifying. Often, because of staffing shortages, a whole ward might be left under the supervision of a third-year student nurse with only Amy and one other junior student to assist her. When these nights were busy with new admissions from the accident department, or when there was more than one dangerously ill patient, Amy was too rushed to be frightened at the time, but afterwards, retrospective fear of the responsibility would make her feel almost faint.

It was on one of the busy nights that her first patient had died.

‘Nurse! Nurse!’ a woman had called her urgently from one bed as she passed. ‘You’d best take a look at the old gel over there.’ Amy whirled round to the opposite bed. It was an old woman who had only been admitted that afternoon. She had been dozing quietly only a few minutes before. Now her head had lolled inertly forward and her arms were slack over the bedcovers. Amy lifted one of the ancient, fragile wrists and felt a single flutter. Then she heard a faint sigh, almost politely regretful, and the pulse was gone. Amy dropped the arm and opened the nightgown on the thin, yellowish chest. She put her head to the old woman’s heart, but there was nothing. Desperately she turned and ran, against all the hospital rules, up the ward to the senior nurse. The senior was busy at another bedside where a younger woman was moaning softy and rolling her head against the pillows.

‘Bed eight,’ Amy gasped. ‘She’s … dead.’

The other nurse glanced at her.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, I’m certain.’

The nurse turned back to her own patient. There was a kidney bowl waiting beside her with a syringe and she was swabbing the flesh in the crook of the patient’s arm with antiseptic. Calmly she picked up the syringe and checked the volume of the contents.

‘Would you hold her steady, Lovell, while I administer this.’

‘But …’

‘There is nothing we can do for Mrs Hughes now. When you have finished helping me here you can draw the curtains round her and ring down for the mortuary porter. Now hold, please.’

The needle slid smoothly into the vein and within seconds the patient was quieter.

‘Come with me, Nurse Lovell.’ On their way up the ward they took the pillows from the old lady’s back and laid her flat, and then pulled the curtains across to shield her. Amy thought that she would never forget the open, sightless eyes, but the older nurse had closed them with perfect composure.

In the privacy of the ward office the senior said with brisk sympathy, ‘Was that your first?’ When Amy nodded miserably she touched her shoulder. ‘It’s part of the job, you know that. And remember that once a patient is dead, your immediate responsibility is to those who are not. Go down and make yourself a cup of tea now, we can spare you for a few minutes. You can bring one up for me, too.’

But not all the nights were busy.

Sometimes there were long, quiet hours when there was nothing to do at all except the routine chores that would assist the day staff. If any of the patients were awake and well enough to talk, the nurses were not exactly encouraged to do so but it was allowed, provided that every bowl and jar in the sluice room already shone like the sun.

It was on just such a quiet night that Amy first talked to Helen Pearce.

‘Nurse–Patient Demeanour’ was the title of one lecture in the introductory series attended by Amy and the rest of her group. From it, as her notes reminded her, she had learned that ‘a nurse must at all times be cheerful, reassuring and encouraging to her patients. She must be sympathetic and approachable, but she must remember always that it is a professional relationship and she must never, under any circumstances whatsoever, allow it to progress beyond that. Over-familiarity with any one patient is ultimately as detrimental to that patient as to the others under the nurse’s care.’

‘I am sure,’ Amy recalled the sister adding darkly, ‘that I do not need to caution you girls further, except to say that particular vigilance is necessary in the case of male patients.’

At least Helen was female, but Amy broke all the other rules as soon as she met her.

Helen Pearce was lying in one of the six beds in the corner of the L-shaped ward. She must have been admitted or moved in from elsewhere during the day because the bed had been empty the night before. Amy went to the foot-rail and glanced at the chart clipped to it. She read the girl’s name and saw that she was nineteen, born in the same month as herself. Under the bare statements of name and status were the scribbled clinical notes, still almost unintelligible to Amy, and beneath those the temperature graph dipped and soared again.

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 given them their tea at night. But –’ Helen shrugged ‘–I’ve been doing it for a long time, and the supervisor’s good to me. She sees I get time off if Jim’s ill, or they need me at home. I might not be so lucky somewhere else.’

Helen’s hands lying loosely on the sheet looked grey with work against the whiteness. Amy thought of the endless mop-buckets and scrubbing brushes they must have carried, and her own recent experience of them heightened her sympathy.

‘Will the supervisor cover for you if you stay in here for a few days?’

‘I suppose so. It’s Jim and Freda I’m worrying about. I’d never have gone to see that doctor downstairs if I’d known he was going to make me stay.’

‘Try not to worry,’ Amy said with all the authority of health and strength. ‘There must be something the hospital can do to help.’

‘What about you?’ Helen asked, as if she was bored with the topic of herself. ‘Got a boyfriend, have you?’

Amy found herself going faintly pink. ‘Not really. There’s someone I like, but not a boyfriend. His name’s Tony Hardy.’

‘That’s nice. Sounds like a film-star.’

‘He doesn’t look much like one,’ Amy said, and they laughed. ‘Have you?’

‘Nah. They’re all like stupid kids. If someone a bit older and a bit richer were to come along, that’d be different, but they’re a bit thin on the ground round our way. Where does this Tony Hardy who isn’t your boyfriend take you? I can tell you’re not from round here. You belong up West, I should think, don’t you?’

‘I did,’ Amy said shortly, ‘but I’m a nurse now, and I live in the hostel round the corner. Tony takes me to political meetings, sometimes to concerts or poetry readings.’

‘Doesn’t sound all that much fun,’ Helen said, sniffing. ‘Why did you want to be a nurse?’

‘Because before this I wasn’t doing anything much, and I started wanting to be of use to somebody.’

Helen’s glance flickered. ‘Bit of a luxury, then, is it? If you don’t have to do it?’

Amy stiffened defensively, but she knew that Helen was right. Nursing was a kind of luxury for her because she was using it to assuage her prosperous, privileged guilt. Helen was unusually clever, she thought. No one else at the Royal Lambeth had put a finger so quickly on the truth. She hadn’t even admitted it as clearly to herself.

‘Yes, you’re quite right.’

Helen smiled. ‘Don’t look so worried. You’re a good nurse, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t think the sister would necessarily agree.’

They were laughing again, pleased and a little surprised by the intimacy that had sprung up between them in the darkened ward.

Amy sat beside Helen for a little longer, talking quietly, until Helen closed her eyes. ‘I think I could almost go to sleep now,’ she said.

There was one more terrifying coughing fit during the night, but when Amy went off duty at six Helen was asleep, with the skin around her eyes and over her cheekbones so tightly stretched that it looked almost translucent.

Amy thought about her all through the two lectures that followed breakfast, and while she tried to write up her notes afterwards until her head nodded over the desk and the handwriting blurred in front of her eyes. Even while she was asleep she dreamed that she was nursing not only Helen but little Jim and Freda too, and the three of them were crammed into the hospital bed while Amy tried to hide them all from Sister Blaine.

When she went back on duty Helen was propped up against her pillows. She looked noticeably less exhausted, and a glance at the chart told Amy that her high temperature had dropped a little.

‘I’ve been asleep half the day,’ Helen greeted her. ‘When I’m not asleep they’re bringing me meal after meal.’

‘That’s the treatment. Food and rest.’

‘Do you know what that Sister has arranged? The one with more frills on her hat than anyone else and a face like a brass poker?’

‘Sister Blaine?’

‘There’s a holiday place by the sea near Bournemouth, for kids whose parents are ill or who can’t look after them for a bit. It’s a charity, did you know?’

‘I thought there must be something like it.’ Amy remembered now that Princess Mary Holiday Homes for Children was on Adeline’s list of favoured charities. There had been a ball for it a year or so ago, and Adeline had gone in a cloud of gold tissue with gold butterflies in her hair. The outfit had started a minor craze for butterfly ornaments. Under duress from Adeline, Amy had done a dull stint of selling tombola tickets. It was nice to think of the money going to pay for Freda and Jim’s seaside holiday.

‘They’re going there for two weeks. They came in to see me with Aunt Mag this afternoon, just after I’d heard from the sister, and I told them. They were both so excited that they couldn’t sit still. They’ve never been to the sea. Neither have I, come to that. It seems a shame to be stuck in here.’

‘Better for you,’ Amy said firmly. The change that simple relief had made in Helen was striking. Her eyes had lost some of their staring intensity, and her body no longer looked as if it was strung on taut wires that hurt when she moved. But when she reached out to grasp Amy’s wrist her fingers felt dry and hot.

‘Will you be on every night? They’re so busy during the day they don’t have time to look round, let alone talk. I’ll never see you.’

‘Nurse. Nurse Lovell?’ The staff nurse was calling. Amy knew that she had already spent longer than she should at Helen’s bedside.

‘I’ll be on for five more nights,’ she whispered. ‘Two days off after that, then back on day shift. Don’t worry, we’ll see each other somehow.’

‘Nurse!’

Helen’s fingers released her, and Amy scurried away.

‘There are other patients on the ward, Lovell,’ the staff nurse reminded her tartly.

Over the next nights, Helen continued to improve dramatically. Her face seemed to fill out and the coughing fits stopped almost completely. She slept a great deal but she was always awake and waiting when Amy came in.

‘Look,’ she said one evening, ‘I’ve had a postcard.’

It was propped up beside the photograph, a bright blue sea under a bright blue sky. Dear Helen, haveing a fine time here and hopeing you are getting better. Your loving Freda and Jim.

On the quieter nights, Amy made certain of odd half-hours when she could sit and talk to Helen. She listened to her wryly funny stories of the people in the crowded blocks and neighbourly Lambeth streets. She had lived there all her life and had only rarely gone further afield, but she had still acquired a level of maturity that reached far beyond her circumstances. Quite often she made Amy feel that her own attitudes were naïve and ill-informed.

In turn, once she realized that Helen wasn’t remotely critical, Amy told her about Chance and Bruton Street and her life outside the hospital.

‘My God,’ Helen breathed. ‘A real butler? I thought they were only in films. Will you take me home with you some time?’

‘Of course I will.’

On the last night before her days off, the ward was busy and Amy hardly had time to talk. Just before she left she leant over Helen’s bed.

‘Have you got to go?’ Helen asked abruptly, startling her.

‘I don’t want to, but I must. I want to see my mother, and my sister who isn’t very well. I’ll be back on the ward in two days.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart.’

Suddenly Helen reached up and hugged her. ‘It’s only you coming in that’s kept me alive in this place. I’ve never had a friend like you before.’

Amy looked down into the pale face with its sharp, premature lines. ‘Neither have I.’ She hugged her back and then let her go, afraid that the coughing might start up again. ‘I’ll see you in two days,’ she repeated. She knew that Helen’s eyes followed her around the corner, and that she was listening as her footsteps receded up the ward.

‘Well,’ Tony said, ‘I have to hand it to you, Amy my love. I thought you’d hate it, and that it would disturb you. But here you are, prettier and happier-looking than I’ve ever seen you, and coping perfectly.’

‘It does disturb me,’ Amy told him, thinking of Helen again. ‘I haven’t learnt professional detachment yet. I’m not sure that I want to. And it’s bloody hard work, like nothing I’d ever imagined. Sometimes at the end of the day my arms and back ache so much that I can’t eat because the knife and fork seem too heavy to lift. But yes, I am happy. Doing it makes everything else, everything outside, look quite different. I don’t feel so guilty any more.’ She faced Tony squarely as she said it. Since Helen had identified her luxury so clearly Amy was admitting it as openly as she could.

‘Nor should you.’ Tony smiled at her and lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Amy.’

She sighed with pleasure and leaned back in her chair. They were having dinner together in the little Italian restaurant in Soho that Amy always enjoyed and begged to be taken back to again. The waiters in their striped aprons and the noisy, vociferous diners were exactly the same, and now she felt that she wasn’t just a sightseer but a part of the cosmopolitan bustle herself. She had her own work to do, just like Tony and the girls in his office, all the people in the restaurant crowded around the checked tablecloths, and like Jake Silverman, and Kay and Angel.

Amy had found her way back to Appleyard Street once or twice on her evenings off. If Tony wasn’t going to take her, she decided, she would go on her own. Usually she made the long bus journey in her black stockings and navy nurse’s cape. If any newspaper columnist might be remotely interested in Peer’s Daughter at Communist Meeting, no one would cast a second glance at Lambeth Nurse in the same place.

On her first visit she had been apprehensive, not even sure whether she would be recognized or allowed into the upstairs meeting room. But as soon as she arrived at the top of the dimly lit stairs she saw Jake’s huge, bear-like shape and immediately he bellowed, ‘Amy Lovell! So you’ve turned up again so that I can say thank you!’

He was wearing the same red and black checked shirt, and as he hugged her she remembered the bulkiness of the body she had tried to drag away from the horses and the trampling feet.

‘I know I do have something to thank you for. I don’t remember a damned thing, but I’m told that you plunged in when I went down, and then stuck with me all the way to the hospital. I’m grateful, Amy.’

‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know how to. It was the miner who carried you out, Nick Penry.’

‘I know Nick was there.’

It was odd to hear someone else saying his name when she hadn’t spoken it herself since he had left Bruton Street. She had thought about him and isolated him into a private experience of her own, and now she felt a quiver of something that might almost have been jealousy. She wondered too how much he might have told Jake about where she lived. Amy felt the importance of preserving her anonymity at Appleyard Street.

‘He’s a friend of mine,’ Jake went on. ‘He wrote, and said you found him a bed for the night as well.’

If that was all he had said, Amy thought with relief, then Nick Penry knew how to be discreet despite having disapproved so sharply of everything she stood for.

‘Kay, look who’s here.’

Kay came up behind him. ‘Why haven’t you come before this?’ she demanded fiercely, but her smile was full of warmth. ‘We tried to find out where you live from Tony, but he was very cagey about you.’

‘I’m a student nurse now,’ Amy said quickly, gesturing at her cape. ‘I don’t have very much spare time.’

Kay put her arm through hers. Jake was greeting someone else at the top of the stairs. ‘Thank you for looking after him. He’s as strong as a horse and he got better very quickly, but he could have died there in the bloody square.’

‘Why did it happen?’ Amy asked.

‘Oh, it probably wasn’t completely deliberate. They’re frightened of Communists. They think we’re going to crush the capitalist machine. We are, of course.’

Kay was laughing and shaking her head so that her huge brass earrings jangled. Amy liked her infectious enthusiasm and good humour. Kay pulled her into the room, and across it Amy saw Angel Mack, her eyes extravagantly made up in glittering green, waving a greeting at her.

‘Come and sit down. It’s “Europe and the Threat of International Fascism” tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’

As at the other meetings she attended, Amy sat quietly and listened to the fervent discussion. As always, she was impressed most of all by the compelling force of Jake Silverman’s convictions. When he spoke, she believed every word he said. Otherwise she tried hard to understand the theories and counter-theories that flew over her head, and accepted the pamphlets and poorly printed booklets that were handed out. She took them back with her to the hostel and read them scrupulously when she could find a spare moment. She also thought carefully about what she had heard and read for herself, usually when she was buffing brass sink taps to a blinding shine or folding and counting linen supplies in one of the store cupboards. Amy was still far from believing with the Appleyard Streeters that the only way ahead lay in the complete destruction of capitalism and the restructuring of life along rigidly Soviet lines. She was too caught up in her new-found satisfaction, and the way of life that she knew and understood was too deeply and unconsciously ingrained in her for that. But the things she saw and heard every day on the wards made her ever more sharply aware of the separation between herself and her family and friends on one side, and the patients of the Royal Lambeth and all those who were like them on the other. It must, Amy thought, be possible to devise some system by which all the wealth and comfort and privilege need not be bestowed just on a handful of people who happened to be born to it. The Appleyard Street doctrines were much harsher than Amy’s own tentative ideas, but still something drew her back there yet again and compelled her to sit listening quietly as she struggled to understand what their revolution might mean.

‘Grazie, bella mia.’ The waiter with the most luxuriant moustache put Amy’s plate in front of her with a flourish. She was ravenously hungry and the glistening heaped-up spaghetti alla vongole smelled exquisite. She sighed again at the sheer pleasure of being waited on, and there was silence as she attacked the first mouthfuls. When she looked up again Tony was watching her.

‘You’re rather a sensual person, aren’t you?’

‘Whatever do you mean? I’ve never had a chance to find out.’

Tony laughed. ‘Not necessarily in the sexual sense. Although I’m sure you’ll enjoy that too.’

Amy hadn’t drunk quite enough Chianti to have the courage to say Why don’t we try it then? although she was longing to. She was thinking how attractive he was as she sat across the table from him trying to twirl her spaghetti like an expert. She liked the downward curl of his mouth. It would have been nice to lean across and kiss it, tasting the wine on his lips as well as her own.

But whenever Tony kissed her he did it ironically, as if kissing at all was faintly ridiculous.

‘No,’ he was saying. ‘I was thinking of the way you enjoy everything. You like tasting and touching and smelling things. Ve-ery uninhibited. Almost pagan. You were the same even when you were quite a little girl. I remember the summer I was tutoring Richard, seeing you at Chance kneeling by the lavender border with your face buried among the flower spikes. And then at Biarritz, standing with your eyes closed taking tiny cat-licks at a pistachio ice-cream from that place on the promenade.’

‘Fendi’s.’

‘Isabel was quite different. She thought more, and enjoyed things less.’ Seeing Amy’s face, Tony asked, ‘How is she?’

‘I don’t know, exactly.’

As soon as she had arrived home the day before, Amy had telephoned Ebury Street. A maid had told her that Mr and Mrs Jaspert had just left for the country. It was perfectly natural and a good thing, Amy thought, that Peter should have taken Isabel away from the lifeless heat of London in August. It would be quiet at the Jasperts’ family home in Wiltshire, and Isabel would be able to rest. Peter would be with her too, instead of pursuing his complicated business and political affairs and leaving her alone at Ebury Street. But when she had tried to telephone her sister at West Talbot, Amy’s uneasiness stirred again. Although she told the butler quite clearly that she wished to speak to Mrs Jaspert, after a long wait it was Peter who came to the telephone.

‘How is she?’ Amy asked, anxiety sharpening her voice.

‘Perfectly well,’ Peter said smoothly. ‘Tired, of course, but quite in order physically.’

‘I wanted to speak to her, particularly.’

‘I rather think that she’s asleep. Shall I give her a message for you? Or you could speak to Mama, perhaps?’

Amy had the sudden sense that Isabel had been captured by Jasperts. ‘I’d like to speak to Isabel,’ she said distinctly. ‘When will she be awake, do you think?’

At last, after two more calls, Amy was successful. Isabel’s voice sounded thin and distant, as if she was only half-attending to Amy’s questions.

‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m supposed to be resting.’

‘Did Mr Hardwicke say so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Bethan with you?’

‘Yes.’

At least that was something. Bethan would take care of her, however cut off they were by Jasperts.

‘Can I talk to her?’ Bethan could also be relied upon to tell the plain truth about Isabel. The response Amy heard might have been a laugh, but it wasn’t like Isabel’s old laughter.

‘Of course not. Do you remember when the King and Queen came to Chance?’

Amy remembered. There had been a retinue of thirty-seven attendants, and a rigid formality had descended on the house that made the sisters wonder how anyone managed to breathe at Court, let alone to live.

‘Well, it’s like that here. Except that there’s only family in the house. One spends one’s whole life changing.’

And so Bethan would be firmly placed below stairs, and definitely not available for talk on the telephone.

Isabel had stayed at West Talbot before her marriage, and she and Amy had laughed gently at the pomposities of Lady Jaspert’s household. But now the whole pitch of Isabel’s voice had changed. Amy was frightened for her.

‘Bel? I wish I could come down and be with you. But I can’t. If I hadn’t enrolled until after the baby …’

Isabel cut her short. ‘There’s nothing you could do. I’m well looked after. In any case we may be back in town soon. I don’t know what’s going on, Peter doesn’t tell me much, but he spends half his day on the telephone here and the rest sitting over papers in the library. It’s some crisis. Something to do with lending money to Germany, and the run on the pound. Do you understand that? Peter says the Government may collapse.’ Amy had been thinking how vague and remote her sister sounded, but now Isabel added with sudden vehemence, ‘It looks as if he’s waiting to pounce. You can almost see him licking his lips.’

Amy frowned into the black bakelite mouthpiece, trying to conjure up Isabel’s face. She sounded, suddenly, as if she hated Peter.

‘Will you come back with him?’

‘I suppose so. Nothing could be worse than staying here alone.’

‘Come back. Then I can see you and make sure that you’re all right. West Talbot is too far away. Isabel?’

‘Yes?’ The thin, listless voice was back again.

‘If there was anything, anything wrong, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘There’s nothing wrong.’

At a loss for anything more to say, Amy had hung up after repeating her warnings that Isabel was to rest, to take care of herself and not to worry. When her sister was back in London, perhaps she would be able to probe deeper. But if it was Peter who was the trouble, and she was increasingly afraid that it was indeed Peter, then what could she possibly do?

Amy looked back at Tony across the restaurant table. ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I think well enough, as far as the baby goes. But she sounds unhappy. She … said something to me on the telephone, something about Peter. She sounded as if she didn’t like him at all.’

They had finished their meal, and the waiter had brought them coffee in thick white cups. Tony was stirring his, first one way and then the other, waiting to see if Amy wanted to talk about what was worrying her.

‘She said he was licking his lips, waiting to pounce. She made him sound like a predator.’

Tony put his spoon down with a tiny clink. ‘How much do you know about Peter Jaspert?’

Amy shrugged, puzzled. ‘I know who he is in the family sense. Vaguely what his political interests are, even more vaguely his business ones. Why?’

‘I know a little bit more than that. I hear things, here and there. You pointed out once that I’m too fond of gossip.’ Tony smiled sardonically. ‘Jaspert’s a clever man. He uses that pink bluffness as a mask. He’s a director of Massey & Dart who have made considerable investments and loans to Germany over the past few years, some of it raised in France. Now, the French don’t like their money being used to help Germany and they’ve called in the loans. There’s a financial collapse in Germany and the London bankers’ money is frozen there. To meet their obligations Jaspert and his friends have persuaded the Bank of England to let them draw on gold reserves, and those have run out now. So they’ve turned elsewhere, notably to the United States. But foreign governments won’t lend unless the house is tidy. The bankers and the big money men in the City are insisting that the Government sweep up and tidy away the balance of payments deficit to help them out.’

‘How?’ Amy asked, aware of her blithe ignorance.

‘You’ve read about the May report?’

Amy nodded, vaguely remembering, although the only reading she had done in the last week was textbooks of anatomy.

‘Five rich men who recommended that a national deficit of nearly a hundred million pounds be met in the simplest and most painless way. Not by increasing taxation, because that hurts rich men. No, by putting a stop to government waste. That’s prudent housekeeping, isn’t it? And the biggest waste of all, of course, is unemployment benefit. So they want to cut that by twenty per cent. A nice, round figure. What could be simpler?’

Amy could hear another voice, rising and falling with Tony’s. It was Nick Penry, up in the old schoolroom at Bruton Street, talking about Nantlas. There was no chapel singing on Sundays now, because there was no minister. There was none on Saturday nights in the Miners’ Rests any more, because no one could afford the beer that fuelled dry throats. There was no warmth, no medicine, and precious little food because the benefit didn’t stretch to it. And now they wanted to cut that by twenty per cent.

‘It’s cleverer than that, even,’ Tony went on. His thin, quizzical face was stiff. ‘The City men know that they can win MacDonald round because he can’t do anything else. He’ll carry half the Cabinet with him. They’ll get the benefit cut, even if not by twenty per cent. But the rest of the Labour Cabinet, the Party and Bevin and the TUC, they won’t support it. So there’ll be a split, and a collapse of the Government. My guess is that they’ll opt for a coalition for the duration of the “National Crisis”. It will be the end of MacDonald in real political terms, and at the next general election, when everyone is tired of the crisis, why, a Conservative victory. It’s neat for Jaspert, isn’t it? I’m sure he is licking his lips. It’s financial salvation and political expediency all in one package. I hear that he can expect to be a junior minister in the next government.’

‘You hate him, don’t you?’ Amy said quietly and Tony’s stiff mask dissolved. He put his hand over hers.

‘I hate what he stands for, and so would most of the people I call my friends.’

Jake, Amy thought. And Angel, and Kay. And Nick.

‘So long as there are men like Jaspert entrusted with the running of it, this country will always be as bitterly class-divided as it is now.’ Tony’s fingers tightened. ‘Do you believe that, Amy? Do you believe that there is a war between people like us, sitting here, and him?’

Amy followed his stare past the looped curtains at the plateglass restaurant window. Outside in the street a man was standing at the kerb. He was wearing a cloth cap and a torn coat, and he was playing a whistle. At his feet stood an empty tin cup. The passers-by streamed past him, on their way from Shaftesbury Avenue in search of dinner, and they never heard the whistling. Behind him in the street a taxi roared past, and then a low open tourer driven by a man in evening dress.

Amy looked away, back to Tony’s fingers covering her own. She thought of Helen lying in the Royal Lambeth, and then of Nick and his handicapped son. Her thoughts always came back to Nick.

‘I believe it,’ she said heavily. Tony’s thumb was stroking the side of her hand, very gently, to and fro. ‘I just don’t know how I’m supposed to fight in it.’

Tony didn’t answer that, nor did she expect him to. As they sat, preoccupied with their own thoughts, a little silence beat between them.

After a moment Tony sat upright again and lifted a finger to the waiter to refill their coffee cups.

‘Anyway, to answer your question properly, no, I don’t hate Jaspert himself. How could I? I don’t even know him. All I do know is that there are dozens of other men just like him, and quite a lot of them are happily married to girls like Isabel. His business and political lives may be one thing and his personal self quite another. He’s probably a model husband and father, and kind to animals and his old mother as well.’

‘Or he may be just as predatory at home as elsewhere.’

Tony looked sharply at her over the rim of his cup. ‘You shouldn’t assume that.’

‘Why not? I know that something is making my sister unhappy, and I think it’s him.’

‘Oh, Amy. You may be right. But when two people are married they are accountable to each other. It’s a contract between consenting adults. By definition. If I were you I’d leave them alone, unless Isabel comes to you.’

Tony was the one who was right, of course. Isabel was a Jaspert herself now. It was absurd to think that she was trapped by them.

Suddenly, Amy felt that she was on the verge of tears. She was worried, and tired from the incessant work. And the insistent, hopeless whistling from the street was filling her head. The cheerful restaurant bustle and clatter was grating.

‘Tony, do you mind if we go now? Perhaps we could walk a little way.’

‘Of course.’

He paid the bill and steered her out into the street. At the kerb Amy fumbled in her bag but Tony was quicker. He dropped a coin into the tin cup and then took her arm in his.

‘Let’s walk up to the square.’

It was a warm, still night and through the pall of soot and smoke came the scent of moist earth and leaves. Amy had never spent August in London before, and she realized as she sniffed the air how much she was missing the wide green spread of Chance.

As they came into Soho Square a burst of dance music and laughter drifted into the quiet, and was swallowed by the netted black leaves of the plane trees against the indigo sky. They walked slowly, arm in arm, with the lights of an occasional car picking them up and then letting them fall back into the dark. Through the trees and over the rooftops was the faint acid glow of light from Oxford Street where the late buses were still clanking past. It was soothing to think of London spreading all round, for miles and miles in every direction, full of separate lives that would never touch on hers, full of people settling down for the short summer night. It wasn’t all men whistling hungrily in a gutter, any more than it was all dances in Berkeley Square. Amy smiled at the thought that her own particular London, Society London, was scattered abroad and to the depths of the country, and yet the city hummed on unnoticing. In the stillness Amy felt her anxiety dropping away. Instead she felt a kind of languid fatalism. She could do nothing more than she was doing now, and it was pointless to try to drive herself beyond it. And if going on just as she was meant walking on beside Tony Hardy, then she was happy with that too. They were almost the same height and they moved perfectly in step, hip to hip. Tony’s arm and hand felt warm against hers, and she saw the quick turn of his profile as he looked away across her at the mottled columns of the trees.

‘Tony?’ she heard herself asking, ‘why aren’t you married?’

Without letting the smoothness of their steps falter, he said, ‘Because I don’t, personally, believe in it.’

‘Why?’ she asked, and then he did stop and turn to stand squarely in front of her. In the shadow of the trees it was almost completely dark. Out of the corner of her eye Amy caught the movement of a blacker shadow still, and then saw it was a cat prowling across the fenced-in grass.

‘I couldn’t make it work,’ Tony whispered. Then with the tip of his finger he turned her face so that she had to stop watching the cat, and counting the beats of her own heart, and look full at him instead. His eyes were almond-shaped, she noticed, and there was an expression in them she had never seen before. He moved again, and his face was so close to hers that she felt, rather than heard, him say, ‘Although there are times when I could almost believe it might work.’ The tip of his finger traced the curve of her cheek and then the corner of his mouth touched hers.

Amy closed her eyes. They were standing very close. Very slowly Tony put his arms around her and she felt him touching her, as if he was gauging the weight of her against him. His mouth moved over hers, exploring, stiff at first and then softening.

At last, she thought, and there was a moment of relief as Soho Square stood utterly silent and dark, and Tony kissed her as she had longed for him to do. His hand slid from the small of her back up the length of her spine, then to the bare nape of her neck, and his fingers touched the thick waves of her hair, pinned up with tortoiseshell combs. He touched one of the combs experimentally and then pulled it out. The waves of hair fell loose at one side. Amy laughed and shook it back over her shoulder but Tony was still touching it, lifting the thickness of it almost unbelievingly.

‘Amy,’ he said in an odd voice. ‘Why are we doing this? We were good enough friends already, weren’t we?’

The shock was like a splash of icy-cold water.

Because I love you. Don’t you love me?

She almost said it, and then heard the bewildered plaintiveness that the words would have held, like a little girl denied a promised treat. The soothing darkness had turned hot and threatening, and full of invisible pitfalls.

Tony was tucking her hair back into place, and pulling her wrap around her bare shoulders again.

He didn’t love her, she understood that. He wasn’t going to love her either, however long she waited and watched the beguiling curl of his mouth. Humiliation and a fierce longing to be by herself almost choked her.

‘Of course we’re good friends.’ She forced the lightness into her voice, hearing the words coming through her clenched teeth. She kept them bitten shut to stop the other things from spilling out, so that at least he would never know how she was feeling now.

‘Shall we walk up and look for a taxi?’ Amy said pleasantly. ‘I should get back home. I have to be on duty by noon tomorrow.’

Tony took her arm again and they strolled on under the spreading branches as if nothing had happened at all.

*

Amy was glad to be going back to the Lambeth. Neither Gerald nor Adeline was at Bruton Street, Richard was staying with Eton friends and the big house felt empty and hollow. With Isabel immured at West Talbot, and after last night, there was nothing to be at home for. Amy decided as she put her things back into her bag that the bleak hostel would be friendly and welcoming by comparison.

At the bus stop she bought a newspaper. She scanned the tall, black banner headlines and saw that Tony’s prediction had been correct. The Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald had divided and collapsed over the question of reducing unemployment benefits. A coalition National Government was being formed under the Prime Minister’s leadership, with a Cabinet composed of four Labour members, four Conservative and two Liberal.

From the paragraphs of close type under the heading Amy learned that one of the new Conservative Cabinet ministers was Peter’s friend Archer Cole.

‘Dear God,’ Helen Pearce greeted her on her return to the ward. ‘You look about as cheerful as a wet Monday morning at the hock-shop. Didn’t you enjoy your leave? Had a fall-out with Tony, did you?’

‘Not really.’ Amy smiled at her in spite of herself. ‘Everything with Tony is just the same as it always is. You look a hundred times better than you did.’

It was true. Helen’s face was rounder, there was a glow of natural colour in it instead of the unnatural flush of fever, and she was sitting confidently up in bed with none of the old, strained immobility.

‘I feel it,’ she said proudly. ‘The doctor says I can go home for when Freda and Jim get back from Bournemouth.’

‘I’m glad. But I’ll miss you on the ward.’

Helen looked away and said casually ‘Well, p’raps you’ll come and see us at our place? It’s only round the corner, you know. And the little ones would like it.’

Amy beamed at her, delighted. ‘Of course I will. I’ll come and make absolutely sure that you’re taking care of yourself. And we’ll be able to talk without Sister watching to make sure we don’t get too friendly.’

‘Nurse Lovell.’ It was Sister Blaine, like a starched battleship.

‘See what I mean?’ Amy mouthed over her shoulder as she scurried away to do what she was told.

In the week after her evening with Tony, Amy discovered that the easiest way to cope was to absorb herself in hospital life. She fixed her attention firmly on the wards and on her classes, and even earned a word of commendation from Sister Tutor.

Isabel remained at West Talbot, and in her few free hours Amy went once to the cinema with Moira to see a new Laurel and Hardy film, and spent the rest of the time in the hostel. It was easier, in the enclosed atmosphere where the hospital was the sole topic of conversation, not to allow herself to worry about Isabel or to relive the humiliation of Tony turning away from her. If they really had been such good friends, she reasoned with herself, then Tony didn’t want them to be more than that because he didn’t find her attractive enough. She knew it was her vanity that was suffering, but that didn’t make the hurt any less.

There was something more, too. She hadn’t seen Tony particularly often, but she had always looked eagerly forward to their few times together. Now that there was no daily anticipation of seeing him, and imagining what might happen, there was a small, black void in the centre of her life. Amy began to fill the void with work, and with her deepening friendship with Helen Pearce.

As he had promised, Helen’s doctor allowed her to go home on the day that Freda and Jim came back from Bournemouth. Two days after that, on her free afternoon, Amy set out to visit her with the scrap of paper on which Helen had carefully written the address folded in her pocket.

It was the very beginning of September, and the first smoky tang of autumn was in the air. Although the streets were still hot and dusty, the leaves of the single spindly tree at the corner of Helen’s street were crinkle-edged with yellow. As Amy walked down past the houses, searching for the numbers on the peeling doors, a horse pulling the water-cart clopped slowly past her. The man up on his seat in front of the big brass-bound barrel sat lazily with his hands loose over the reins. The horse must know every street and where to stop in each one. Two women carrying pails that slopped dark patches in the dust came past and stared curiously at Amy.

‘Looking for someone?’ the younger of them asked.

‘Number seventeen. Helen Pearce.’

More friendly now, the woman jerked her head. ‘That one. Green door.’

Outside No. 17 a dozen children were skipping and singing a complicated rhyme. As Amy slipped past one of them detached herself and stared up at her. Amy saw Helen’s pointed chin and dark, wide-set eyes.

‘You must be Freda.’

‘Yes, miss.’ The child bobbed awkwardly.

‘I’m Amy. Helen’s friend, from the hospital.’

‘She’s waiting for you indoors. There’s been a bigger fuss than if the Queen was coming. Jimmy!’ A very dirty little boy scuffled towards them. ‘This is our kid.’

Their skin was tanned and glowing from their weeks at the sea, making them stand out from the pale faces hopping around them. Amy held out her hand and Jim shook it gingerly. Watching approvingly, Freda took a deep breath.

‘We wanted to thank you, miss. For looking after Helen when she was bad.’

Amy smiled, but her throat was stiff. ‘We were glad to. Everyone in the hospital. Your sister is someone special.’

But having done their duty, the children’s eyes were already turning back to the game. Amy said, ‘I’ll go in and find her, shall I?’

Helen must have been waiting inside the basement door. As soon as Amy knocked she flung it open and said formally, ‘I’m so pleased you could manage it. Won’t you come inside?’

The formality persisted as Helen showed her from the cramped, pitch-dark lobby into the low, square room.

‘This is it,’ Helen said abruptly, gesturing around her. Amy moved at the same time and they bumped awkwardly together. Stepping back in embarrassment, Amy saw a table covered with an oilcloth, three upright chairs and an armchair beside the small, empty grate. There was a truckle-bed against one wall, covered with a bright knitted blanket. Over the mantelpiece a piece of red plush was draped, and in the centre was a sepia wedding photograph which was probably Helen’s parents with the picture of Freda and Jim propped up beside it. A flowered screen stood in one corner and Helen pulled it aside to show a little gas ring and a tiny, scoured sink with buckets of fresh water standing beneath it. The kettle was already filled and Helen lit the popping gas.

Except for the photographs the room was bare of any kind of decoration, but it was the cleanest place Amy had ever seen. Every surface shone as if it had been individually polished, from the glass shade of the single light to the faded linoleum.

‘Me and Freda sleep in there,’ Helen said. Through the doorway Amy glimpsed a double bed that almost filled the cupboard-sized room. ‘And Jim in here.’ She pointed to the truckle-bed. ‘Well, now you’ve seen it,’ she said defiantly. ‘Except the privy. That’s out the back.’

Amy looked at her and saw that her friend’s face was stiff. Something mattered to her very much, although she didn’t want to show it. It was important that Amy should see where she lived and belonged, but she didn’t want the poverty of it seen against the imagined splendours of Bruton Street to make any difference to their friendship.

Amy opened her mouth to say something, anything, to show that it wouldn’t. But the words didn’t come. Instead she felt her eyes go hot and sudden tears prickled in the sockets.

Everything was wrong with the world. It was all, all of it, wrong and iniquitous.

‘I don’t know what you’re crying about,’ Helen said. ‘It isn’t you who lives here.’

Stupid shame flooded through Amy. Helen was right, as always. They looked at each other for a moment and then Amy shook her head helplessly. Helen put her hand out and Amy took it, and then they were hugging each other, half-crying and half-laughing.

‘God help us,’ Helen said at last. ‘Let’s have this tea, now you’re here. There’s penny buns as well, if you want.’

Helen insisted that as she was the guest Amy should have the armchair. She sat down in one of the upright ones herself, poured out the tea, and they began to talk.

They were still talking at six o’clock, with the teapot cold between them. Amy thought that she had never talked as easily or openly to anyone, even to Isabel.

When Freda and Jim came in at last, Amy knew that she had found a friend for life.

‘Where’s our tea, Helen?’ the little boy said plaintively.

The two girls blinked at each other, and laughed.

‘That’s never the time, is it?’ They stood up, together.

‘I’ve got to get back,’ Amy said reluctantly. ‘But I’ll be back. When can I come?’

‘Whenever,’ Helen said simply.

The three of them came with her to the top of the area steps, and then stood waving until she reached the end of the street.

Looking back from the corner, she saw the thin girl with the little, healthy replicas of herself on either side of her. Suddenly Helen looked fragile and too small against the gaunt height of the old houses.

Biting her lip, Amy made herself smile and wave one more time.

Then she turned the corner and walked slowly back to the hostel.