Flowers on the Grass (35 page)

The Press arrived in mackintoshes, although it was a fine day, and took up strategic crouching positions. The chaplain arrived calmly, as if this was like any other wedding. Barnes and Potter held hands and their breath, Sonny began to giggle, and then, with the doors held back by two porters in white coats and theatre caps, came Nelly, overpowered by her headdress and looking as if she wished she were the least instead of the most important person.

It was all over too quickly. Old Fergie dropped a tear; Barnes and Potter didn’t miss that, and then everyone was
breaking into noise and kisses and the flash bulbs were going tike a film premiére. The nurses had to come forward and be photographed with the married pair, who should have looked somehow different, but didn’t. Jacky was there, with circles under her eyes. She had stayed out of bed for the wedding, “just to get her picture in the paper”, said Nurse Fitt, shoving her own head well in front of the cameras, and oh, joy! That one never appeared in print. Potter and Barnes were in the paper, however, and although Barnes was all teeth and Potter had her apron hitched up, their mothers sent for copies and had them framed to stand on their mantelpieces, where they may be seen to this day.

That night the ward was very difficult to settle. The wedding had gone to their heads, and they were laughing and calling out ludicrous jokes about Sonny’s wedding night long after Jacky had turned out all the lights except the desk lamp and the shaded light over Daddy Ledward’s bed. The noise did not disturb the old man, for he was miles away from them already, fighting out the last battle between body and spirit.

Jacky went out to the kitchen to set the breakfast-trolley, for she was always in a mad rush in the morning. While she was stacking the plates, Winnie arrived in a long brown coat, a green dog hairslide and orange lipstick overrunning the edges of her mouth like the colour in a badly printed comic paper. Jackie was not surprised to see her, for Winnie often came back after the day staff had gone, with fish and chips or sausage rolls for the men to eat in bed. Tonight, however, she had brought nothing, for she reckoned that everyone had had enough to eat today. She had certainly cut enough sandwiches to bring up a callous on her finger.

She had come for a cup of tea. “Got a bit of time to fill in, because I can’t meet my boy till half-past ten. He’s on the late run now, on the seventy-sevens.”

“Useful for you when you want a free ride.”

“Not bad. It was better when he was a dustman. All kinds of things he used to bring me. You wouldn’t believe what people throw away. How’s your fellow, Nurse, by the same token? We don’t hear so much of him these days.”

“Nor do I,” said Jacky. “I think he’s given me the chuck,
because I can’t be bothered about nail varnish any more. He didn’t like me going on night duty, anyway.”

“Ah no, that you can understand in a man, when he’s on days,” said Winnie, who led a full sex life in spite of her appearance.

Jacky had not seen Paul since they met for a drink one evening before she went on duty. She had been tired and vague from having got up too early. It was six a.m. for her, and that was what she felt like, not yet come to life, remote from the crowd in the bar to whom it was six p.m. Paul was irritatingly lively. He had finished his work, while hers was still before her.

“It seems terrible,” she said, “to be drinking gin and French before breakfast.”

“It’s a terrible life you lead altogether,” Paul said. “You should just be starting out for an evening with me now, not going back to that mausoleum to put on those black stockings.” She had told him about those and he could never forget it. The black stockings came into every argument they had about the hospital. “What am I supposed to do with the rest of my evening? “he asked. “You put that place before me. It’s damned unfair.”

“Nonsense, Paul. You’ve got plenty of friends. You don’t need me, and there are lots of people in the mausoleum who do. That’s why I like it.”

“I don’t want you to like it,” he said sulkily. “It’s ruining you. Drop it and marry me, Jacky. You’ll have much more fun.”

When he could have had her he had never asked her. She would have married him once. Now she knew that she would never give up nursing for him. Or anybody. This loving need that drove her could never be satisfied anywhere else.

“You must have done something awful in your past life,” Paul said, “so you have to half kill yourself in that place to expiate it, or something.” He always said “Or something” when he had made a serious remark, to leaven it. “Still, I’ll say one thing for you being a nurse. It saved you wanting to be a nun. Or something.”

The ward settled to sleep at last. Only Daniel was awake. Jacky could hear him fidgeting and muttering as she sat at the desk filling in charts, the corner of her eye irked by the
vast pile of mending that Sister had left out for her. She was clumsy and slow at sewing and Sister always complained that the pile looked no smaller in the morning, so Jacky had taken to hiding bits of it in odd cupboards, banking on being off night duty before Sister discovered them.

Daniel lit a cigarette and she went to him. “Look out. Night Sister hasn’t been round yet.”

“What the hell. I can’t sleep. Got any dope?” He lay with his hand behind his head, looking at her with wakeful eyes that were black in the dimness of the ward.

“Nothing for you. You’re supposed to be convalescent. You’re going home soon, aren’t you?” She realised that she would miss him. Odd how your life was made up of little bits of other people. You were close for a time, but it was touch and then away, like flies on a ceiling. In hospital you got to know people so intimately, and then never saw them again. For a few weeks you were the most important person in their world, but soon afterwards they would have difficulty in remembering your name.

She would miss Daniel, but there would be others, and after them others, so many people to whom you mattered, who mattered desperately to you.

“You can have Mr. Price’s Veganin, if you like,” she said. “He’s sleeping like the dead.”

When she had brought it, he said: “Don’t go,” and caught her apron. “Stay and talk to me.”

“I can’t. I’ve got a million things to do. That old man-”

“How is he?”

“Not too good, but there’s nothing one can do. He’s so old.” She looked down the ward to where Daddy Ledward was propped high on his pillows, his chest moving at long intervals, the light sharp on the pale ridge of his nose. She looked across the ward to where the bridegroom slept in his coffin of plaster with his arms flung out and his fists clenched like a child.

“Look at him,” she said. “And that poor girl going back to that rabbit warren in Camden Town and taking off that dress in a room she shares with three other people.”

“Seems so pointless getting married.”

“Don’t you know why he did it?”

“Bit of sensationalism, I suppose.”

“No. Remember that American surgeon that came up that day Sister was so wild with me about moving the beds? He’s going to try something a bit drastic, and there’s a chance Sonny won’t come through it.”

“Oh God!” said Daniel. “Poor kids. I wish there was something one could do to help. But I haven’t got any money. What could I do? I haven’t got the habit of being any use to anyone. It’s easy for you, because you do it all the time. Comes naturally, like breathing.”

“That’s a nice thing to say.” Jacky was touched. “You have got much nicer, you know, since you’ve been here.”

“Oh me. I’m lovely.”

“What about saving that child, anyway? That wasn’t so useless.”

“First disinterested thing I’ve ever done for anyone in my life, and look what it got me.” He kicked his leg under the bedclothes. “Oh Lord,” he said, as the swing door sighed, “here comes Lady Macbeth.”

“I suggest, Nurse,” said Night Sister, picking up Daddy Ledward’s little claw to try to find a pulse, “that instead of hanging round young men who are quite well you pay a little attention to old men who are very ill.”

“But, Sister, I-! What can I do for him, anyway?”

“Nothing,” said Night Sister unreasonably.

“Jacky,” Daniel called softly, as she passed his bed early next morning. “I want to tell you something.”

“Tell me later,” she said. “I can’t stop now. Daddy Ledward is dying.”

He died just before the day staff came on, but none of them would help her to lay him out. “My nurses have their own work to do,” said Nurse Fitt. “Anything that happens before eight o’clock is your affair.”

When she got to her room, late and very tired and past caring that Sister had discovered the concealed mending and was going to speak to Matron about deceitfulness, Jacky remembered that she had never been back to hear what Daniel wanted to tell her.

Nellie had made such plans. For a month now, ever since Sonny had told her, she had been giving her mind to it all the time, and she saw it all, exactly as it was going to be. She had even cooked meals in her imagination and argued with herself whether to have potatoes baked or fried.

When Sonny had first told her, squeezing her hand so hard that she could almost have cried out if it had not been for all the Other people in the ward, Nellie could not believe it for a long time. Things like that just did not happen to people like them.

Mr. Brett had asked them to come and live with him in his cottage when Sonny was out of hospital. Mr. Brett had asked them…. She made Sonny say it over and over. She was always slow to take things in. Often she did not see Sonny’s jokes until he explained them, but he did not mind. Once she got hold of a thing she never lost it. He was proud of that in her.

Once she had got hold of the idea that they were really going to live with Mr. Brett the thought was never out of her mind. She saw it all. He had never had a home, poor Mr. Brett, since his wife died, but Nellie was going to make it just like home for him again. Not pushing herself. She and Sonny would never get in his way, but Nellie would cook and work all day long and Sonny would do odd jobs, and there they would be, the three of them, as happy as birds.

“I’ll pay him back,” Sonny said. “You’ll see. As soon as I can get about a bit I’ll get my job back, or a better one. I’ll earn good money, and I’ll not forget. I’ll pay him back.”

But Nellie knew that she could pay him back long before that, right from today when she was going to start making things nice for him.

He must have the say-so about everything, of course, since it was his house; but in the cottage, Nellie had decided, no one was going to dictate to anyone else, because people could not be happy except in their own way. She had had enough, first with her own parents, and these last two years with Sonny’s people, of everyone prying on everyone else and taking you up if you didn’t go exactly their way. At Camden Town, where there had been such a noise all the time, and everyone trying to live everyone else’s lives for them, Nellie had kept herself to herself, and she knew that Sonny’s family thought her a dull nothing. Even Sonny did not know that she was really a person on her own, because she had made herself a part of him. That was what she wanted.

He knew so much more than she did. He had had more schooling, and had read books there in the hospital that were nothing like the magazines that Nellie liked to read. Sonny was clever. He had ideas about every subject you could name, but sometimes Nellie felt that there were ways in which she knew more than he. She was not always worrying away at the thoughts of what life was all about. The ideas she had of it were so few that they were all the clearer for being on their own, not crowded up by other notions coming in all the time.

At the cottage, if Sonny and Mr. Brett got talking cleverly, as she had heard them going at it there in the hospital, Nellie might get ideas of things to say, but she would keep them to herself. When you tried to voice your thoughts, they always came out differently from what you meant, and people took you up wrong.

She had not yet been down to see the cottage, because she wanted to see it first with Sonny. She did not quite know what to expect. The word cottage in her mind conjured up the only cottage she had ever known, her aunt’s tumbledown brick box near Dorking, with a slipping tiled roof, hens on a rubbish heap, and tin sheds stuck all over the place.

When the station taxi stopped at the white gate and Nellie got out and looked over, she could not believe that they had come to the right house. It was like a fairy tale, the sort of house you might see from the road, cycling, or from a train. You were not envious, because it was the kind of house other people lived in, not you. But this—this! If Sunny had built it for her with his own hands it could not have been more perfectly right.

Mr. Brett had said that it looked like a cross between a calendar and a tea cosy, so Nellie was prepared for it to have a thatched roof and lattice windows. But she was not prepared for it to look one with the earth, as if it had stood there from the beginning of time, to have walls the indescribable colour of sunlight, geraniums all along the window sills and a cobbled path that led straight to the front door between borders of crowding blue primroses. Behind them were daffodils, a rose arbour, and then a lawn on each side with a bent old fruit tree, and beyond that more daffodils, all along the thick hedge that folded in the garden like a sanctuary.

She was going to live here. She couldn’t take it in, couldn’t see herself coming down that path as casually as coming home. But—well! She lifted her chin from the gate and brisked herself up. Couldn’t stand there goggling all day. Whatever would Mr. Brett think?

She turned back to the car, where Sonny was craning from the window. “Sonny, Sonny—oh, it’s lovely! It’s ever so— oh, come and see!”

“How can I till you get me out?” he grumbled practically.

With the help of the driver, she got out the collapsible chair, helped Sonny into it and wheeled him down the path. He was as staggered as she was. Sonny usually had plenty to say for himself, but all he could do now was give little whistles and murmur: “I say, Nell, I
say”
as she took him slowly, trying not to bump him on the cobbles.