For King and Country (14 page)

Crump rolled her eyes in a way that asked, ‘What did I tell you?’

Sally chuckled, pleased to see that Raynor was well enough to enjoy making a nuisance of himself. He was painfully thin, though. ‘Away and get them for him then,’ she urged.

Crump scraped her chair back and stood up, but she was too late. Maxfield was out of bed, retrieving the magazine. He lifted the water jug and walked towards them with it, not stopping to give
it to Crump as Sally had anticipated, but going on up the ward.

‘Lieutenant Maxfield, you’re not supposed to go into the kitchen. You’ll get wrong from Sister!’ she called, but couldn’t drag herself up to chase after him.

Crump shrugged, and sat down again. ‘She probably won’t see him. Let him fetch it if he wants. Save my legs.’

‘He still needs his port,’ Sally said, but Crump appeared not to have heard. So, neither willing to move, they cut and folded their squares until Maxfield came down the ward with the
full water jug. He placed it on top of Raynor’s locker, and then found the bottle of port inside, and began to pour it into Raynor’s feeding cup. Raynor drank it, and then Maxfield lit
a cigarette, and held it to his lips. Nursing duties finished, he joined them at the table and began to throw the swabs into the autoclave drum.

‘You shouldn’t be doing that, Lieutenant Maxfield,’ Sally protested. His only reply to that was to pull up a chair, and sit down to the task.

‘Tch!’ Crump’s eyes rotated in their sockets again, by which Sally understood that she could have done without the intrusion.

But the lieutenant showed no inclination to move and, bone tired, Sally took the line of least resistance. ‘Well, if you’re going to join the production line, Lieutenant,
you’ll have to do the job properly. You count the swabs into piles of ten, and you put them in one of the cotton bags, and it’s important you count them right. Then you put the bag in
the drum,’ she said, ‘but it’ll not be easy, with just one hand.’ She felt Crump’s eyes on her, and dropped her voice. ‘Don’t worry. If Sister sees him,
we’ll call it therapy.’

Maxfield put a hand in his dressing gown pocket, and out came the notebook. ‘Bossy. Officer material,’ he wrote, with a nod in Sally’s direction.

They worked in silence for a while, their conversation inhibited somewhat by this overwhelming masculine presence. Maxfield sat clamping the bags to the table with the elbow of his broken arm
while stuffing swabs inside and then pulling the drawstrings, before tossing the bags into the drum.

As he concentrated on the task, Sally saw the uninjured side of his face in perfect profile, and caught her breath. ‘He’s got a . . . a look of a family that come from my village.
You’d take him for one of their brothers! Ooh, and they were a bonny set of lads. Funny, him an Australian, from all that way off.’

‘There must be plenty of Australians look the same as people in England, seeing as they all came from England in the first place,’ Crump said, increasing the pace of her folding to
keep up with Maxfield, who was now waiting for supplies. He looked up, and nodding his agreement took up his pencil.

‘My cousin went to Australia when he was on the merchant ships,’ Crump continued, ‘and he wrote to me Aunt Clara to say he was never coming back.’

‘Did he join up?’ Sally asked.

‘Oh, aye, he joined up in Australia after the war started, like, and he went to Gosforth to see them all when he was on leave. But he says he’s going back when the war’s over.
He’ll never live in England again.’

Maxfield pushed the notebook under Sally’s nose. ‘My uncle said you couldn’t take a bad photograph of me if you tried. I was a looker, handsome enough to be in the
films.’

What’s that got to do with anything? Sally wondered, glancing at his face. There wasn’t much trace of the ‘looker’ there now. He was a fraction less tense around the jaw,
a little less hollow around his eye, not as haggard as before – but still gaunt, with skin of an unhealthy cast, and all that ugliness lurking under the dressing. Get that off, and you could
certainly take a bad picture. Was he trying to court her? The idea of it caused a fluttering in her stomach, and she left off her cutting to turn from him, and remove the guard from the fire.
Better change the subject.

‘I’ve got two brothers in France,’ she said, slowly picking up the tongs to put a few lumps of coal on the blaze. ‘Poor lads, when I get comfortable beside a nice fire
like this, it makes me wonder where they are, and what they’re doing. I sometimes slip into the chapel after supper, and say a prayer for them.’

‘Fancy,’ said Crump, ‘I’m not one for chapels and churches myself, but I suppose I don’t need to be. Our family’s all girls.’

‘Either wounded?’ Maxfield wrote to Sally. His writing was a lot clearer, and accomplished with rather less effort, and it was on the tip of her tongue to comment on it; but
he’d probably take offence at the suggestion that it had been bad before. She kept her observation to herself.

‘No, we’ve been lucky, although some think it lucky if they get a blighty wound to get out of it,’ Sally replied, lifting her chin. ‘Neither of my brothers have.
They’ve never been wounded, and they’ve never shirked.’ Her voice held a touch of pride.

After a long hesitation Maxfield wrote, ‘Has anybody been killed in your village?’

‘Why, yes,’ Sally said. ‘There’s the manager at the Co-op, his lad’s gone, and the drayman that used to take the beer to our Ginny’s pub, and some of the lads
that used to work at the pit. Between the two of them, our little villages sent more than a hundred men to help the country, and there’s over thirty will never come home again. Last time I
went back I heard one poor lad had his leg off just below the hip, and another had an artificial foot. One’s lost an arm and four of them had wounds in the leg and another was shell-shocked.
And they’re not the only ones; you see a lot of men with wound stripes.’

Maxfield nodded, staring intently at her, waiting for more.

‘They’re not downhearted, most of them though. You can see them laughing together sometimes; they manage to keep cheerful. Aye, the men in our two villages have done their level best
for their country, all told. There’s one poor woman in Annsdale Colliery lost all her sons. It doesn’t seem fair, does it – although I hope and pray my brothers get through the
war all right – it doesn’t seem fair that she should lose all hers, and other people none of theirs.’ She leaned back in her chair, and met his gaze. ‘I’ve wondered
now and then who you put me in mind of, and it’s them. Just a look round the eyes, you know, and the way you lift your chin a bit when you’re listening. Have you any relations called
Burdett?’

The lieutenant shook his head, fingers playing on his moustache.

‘Hibbs, then?’ she asked, remembering the grandfather’s name.

Another shake, and after a long silence, ‘Migrated from Staffordshire,’ he wrote.

Sally nodded, and glanced at the ward clock. Five past nine already. ‘Time we were off duty, Nurse Crump,’ she said, ‘and I’m not sorry, either. I’m worn out
today.’ She re-rolled the gauze and went to put it back in the cupboard with the scissors, while Crump and the lieutenant put all the remaining bags in the drum. After wishing him a good
night Sally took the drum into the treatment room and opened it.

‘What for are you doing that?’ asked Crump, watching her pull all the bags out.

‘Because that man’s had a bad head injury, and I think it’s affected his brain, so I’m not letting this lot go for sterilizing before I make sure there really is ten
swabs in every bag. It’ll be a bad job if they’re taken out for somebody’s operation and there’s not. They might get the count wrong. No need for you to stop, though. Just
report to Sister, and she’ll let you go.’

Crump was off like a shot, and Sally systematically counted the all the swabs in every bag before replacing them in the drum. She needn’t have; the count was right. She closed the drum,
and almost jumped out of her skin at Maxfield’s sudden appearance behind her.

‘Oh, oh,’ she pressed a hand to her starched bib. ‘I nearly had heart failure.’

The melancholy expression on his face, and the sadness she saw in his hazel eye calmed her fright. He shrugged and spread his hands apologetically, then showed her another note: ‘How is
the woman whose sons were killed?’

She felt a rush of sympathy for him. Not many men would show such concern about a poor soul they’d never even seen. ‘Why, just like anybody would be,’ she said. ‘She was
such a canny soul but she’s gone as thin as a rail, the weight she’s lost. It’s just dropped off her. She’ll go home herself before long I think, or end up in the asylum,
poor woman. But Lieutenant Maxfield, you’ll have to stop wandering about in places you’re not supposed to go. I’ll get wrong off Sister if you carry on.’

She switched the light off and following him out of the treatment room almost bumped into Sister and Dr Campbell. He hailed Maxfield. ‘Here’s the man I want!’

Sister’s eyes narrowed and she drew her greying brows together in a frown. ‘Time you were off duty, Nurse Wilde,’ she said, ‘instead of fraternizing with the officers.
Come along, Lieutenant Maxfield.’ She waved her arm in the direction of the ward, ordering him in.

With a reluctant look at Sally, he obeyed. Before he followed, Campbell raised his eyebrows at her, and winked. ‘Oh, you’re in trouble, Nurse Wilde,’ he whispered. ‘Wilde
by name and wild by nature, eh?’

M
axfield lay unconscious on the trolley, his left arm freshly dressed and splinted. The dressing on his face had also been changed; it was smaller,
and fastened with strapping rather than bandages.

‘They’ve done his facial wound an’ all,’ Sally commented to a theatre nurse she recognized from the nurses’ home.

‘Thought they might as well, while they had him on the table, I suppose.’

‘What’s it look like?’ Sally asked, surveying the lustrous sweep of rich brown lashes that lay against the gaunt cheek of Maxfield’s uninjured side, and the dark
moustache hiding his upper lip.

‘Why, it’s no oil painting, but it might not be too bad, after it’s healed properly.’

‘How’s his arm?’

The theatre nurse pulled a face. ‘They pulled a few splinters of dead bone out and bipped it. They might be picking them out for a year if he’s unlucky, but it’ll never heal
while there’s any left.’

‘Sequestrum,’ said Sally.

‘Fancy word,’ said the theatre nurse. ‘Dead bone to the ignorant. That’ll do for me.’

Sally laughed. ‘Me an’ all, but I like to know what the doctors are talking about. Do you like working in theatre?’

‘Aye, I do,’ she said, glancing down at Maxfield, who lay without stirring. ‘They never complain, never want bedpans, and they’re in no position to give us any trouble,
are they?’

Still in his white theatre gown Dr Campbell appeared, and taking hold of the lobe of Maxfield’s ear gave it a ferocious nip. Maxfield groaned, and Campbell nodded. ‘He’ll come
round soon. Where’s that bally porter? Go and find him, will you?’

The theatre nurse went, and glancing again at his patient, Dr Campbell said, ‘You can take your friend back to the ward as soon as he gets here.’

‘He’s not my friend, he’s a patient,’ Sally contradicted, and glancing up flushed slightly at Dr Campbell’s sly smile.

‘Your would-be friend, then. Still following you all over the ward, I’ve no doubt. And do you know, I think I begin to see the fascination. It’s that virginal
butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth look that’s so irresistible.’ So close that she felt his breath on her ear, he whispered: ‘I wonder if you do it deliberately? I wonder what
fires smoulder under that starched bib you wear?’

She moved away, too uncomfortable and taken aback to reply.

He gave a mocking little smile, and continued his appraisal through half-closed eyes. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, the desire to attract a mate. It’s a primitive instinct,
after all. And everybody knows that the sexual impulse is heightened in wartime, in both men
and
women.’

She took another step back, her eyes widening and her narrow brows rising. How dare he say a thing like that to her?

He looked at her steadily, still smiling. ‘Yes,’ he emphasized, ‘the sexual impulse is heightened, even in sheltered girls from good families.’

‘Good families like Nurse Dunkley’s, do you mean?’ It was out before she could stop it.

‘Naturally like Nurse Dunkley’s. She’s a widow, after all, and still young; but I mean girls like you as well. All girls feel that longing, and feel it all the more at times
like these. It’s logical, isn’t it – all this death; we’re driven to compensate.’

‘Yes, you’ve done your share of compensating, Dr Campbell,’ she said, her voice tense and high. ‘You got one young nurse the sack, by all accounts.’ Really, what
was she thinking of? Talking to a doctor like that, with such disrespect, was likely to get her the sack. But he’d started it.

‘What makes you think that?’

More guarded now, she muttered, ‘Same thing that makes you think Lieutenant Maxfield follows me about. Common gossip.’

‘Whose gossip? A certain sister, for example?’

‘Common gossip,’ Sally said, and thought: good old quart’-to-three feet. She put me wise to you, at any rate.

‘Never mind,’ Dr Campbell said, quite undeterred. ‘I can guess, and in return give you another example of gossip, and tell you that Maxfield’s not the first admirer
you’ve had. There were some questionable goings-on in the Lowery household, while you were there.’

Her shock turned to confusion, and her cheeks flamed.

Dr Campbell glanced again at Maxfield and then gave her a speculative look, seeming to enjoy her discomfiture. ‘I imagine he must have been quite a good-looking chap before his injury. He
might have had more success if you’d known him then.’

She clamped her mouth tight shut, and turned away from him. Sexual impulses and primitive instincts, indeed. What decent man would talk like that to an unmarried girl?

But it was true. She’d felt those strange urges when with Will Burdett, and in the Lowery house. She felt them sometimes still, at night, lying in her narrow little bed. She felt them now,
staring down at her patient’s face, and also a growing dislike of Campbell, because however true it might be, such things should never be spoken of –
were
never spoken of by
decent people. For a girl in her shoes there was only one thing to do with the sexual impulse, as he called it, and that was squash it down, right down, until she squashed it out of existence.
Entirely
, as Curran would have said. And really, when you were exhausted after a day on the wards, you hardly thought about such things at all – and if you did, your aching feet and
your breaking back took your mind off them, more often than not. She gave a sardonic little smile. Primitive instincts and sexual impulses might as well go hang themselves for all the good they
were ever likely to be to Sally Wilde.