For King and Country (35 page)

Poor little Crump, she was feeling sorry for Maxfield. She was as good as gold under that crust of dry cynicism. At the memory of the good times they’d all had, Sally’s face fell,
too. It would be awful when it came to it, to part with them all – like a little death to separate herself from all these good lasses she’d been happy among, knowing they were carrying
on the great business of healing without her, and she no longer part of it, or them. And what would her mother say when she told her she’d left nursing, Sally wondered? I told you so? She
wouldn’t put it past her. But maybe it would be better not to tell them anything at home, and then she’d be free to come and go as she pleased, without any explanations to anybody. A
few strides further on she was filled again with elation, a bubbling excitement at something new and unexpected in her life, a tingling apprehension at the thought of the dangers confronting her,
of fresh tests of her new-found capacity for deception, of such tests of wit and courage as she’d never imagined having to face in her life.

D
r Campbell appeared when she was halfway through her evening’s work, to check on a patient, he said. Sally led him to the bed.

‘It looks as if he’s asleep,’ she murmured. ‘Shall I wake him up?’

‘No. Sleep will do him good. I’ll see him tomorrow morning. I’ll have a word with you in the office, though, if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all, Doctor,’ she said, thinking there was hardly any point coming to see the man at all if it could wait until tomorrow morning; the patient was just an excuse.

He closed the door behind her and, making himself comfortable in Sister’s chair, motioned her to sit down. She did so, and found herself subjected to a full minute of silent scrutiny.
Crump would probably have asked him if he was sure he’d got an eyeful, and a faint smile played around Sally’s lips at the thought, but fully determined to withstand it all and give
nothing away, she kept her own counsel.

In the end he said, ‘I have the solution.’

‘The what?’

‘The solution. To the enigma of Nurse Wilde, I mean. You gave it away the night you were taken ill. I wondered what you meant, and now I know.’

‘What I meant?’

‘Yes. But perhaps I should say
who
you meant. The Will you spoke to the last time we sat in this office together.’

Her eyes held a glint alarm for a fleeting second, then dulled into blank incomprehension.

‘That night you sank into delirium, Nurse Wilde, just before I had to send you off to the sick room,’ he prompted. ‘I remember it vividly. Lieutenant Maxfield appeared in the
doorway, and you said, “Will, oh, Will.” And I was wondering, who the devil’s Will? Is the girl having hallucinations? But since I’ve heard Mrs Lowery’s version of
events, since we had the visitation from the police, I’ve realized you weren’t.’

She rolled her eyes upwards, frantically casting her mind back to that point before her collapse. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I remember now, I had a terrible headache. The last
thing I remember is asking for an aspirin. I was saying,
will
you get me an aspirin.’

He gave her a disbelieving smile. ‘My aunt thinks otherwise, and our Lieutenant Maxfield’s reaction to your illness seems to support her theory. The chap was distraught. All
together, Nurse Wilde, there’s as little doubt in my mind about his identity as there is in Mrs Lowery’s. He’s your young man. Your sweetheart. Admit it.’

She assumed a brusque, no-nonsense attitude. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. But I
have
got a ward full of
patients waiting for their medicines, and then I’ve all the obs to do. Can I go, now?’

‘Give it up, Nurse Wilde,’ he urged her, with a look of a man cheated of a prize. ‘The game’s up! It’s solved at last, that riddle of Maxfield’s attachment to
you, if not Dr Lowery’s.’

She repeated, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr Campbell.’

‘You’re in no danger from me, Nurse Wilde, and neither is your Will. I’ve nothing to gain from meddling in your intrigues. My interest’s purely academic, but I’d
like to have my hypothesis confirmed.’

She looked at him, and it must have been something in her eyes that prompted him to say, ‘I told Dr Lowery there was no point in informing the police, you know. Maxfield – or Will,
as you know him – will never be any use to the army again. I don’t know why Lowery didn’t let well alone.’

Sally grimaced, for how could a man of Dr Lowery’s temperament be expected to let well alone when presented with a golden opportunity to make himself the centre of a juicy little drama?
‘But if he thought Lieutenant Maxfield was a deserter, it was his public duty to inform the authorities, wasn’t it?’ she said, with mock approval. ‘It’s a bad job for
Private Burdett’s mother, though, having the police going to see her, getting everything raked up again when the poor lad’s been dead for the past four months. It’s a bad job for
the police an’ all, running about on a wild goose chase. It’s all been a sheer waste of everybody’s time, as it turns out, but Dr Lowery wasn’t to know that.’

‘All right, Nurse Wilde. I won’t argue any further. I can see it’ll get me nowhere. I give up.’

‘Well, in that case, Doctor, I’ll go and get on with what I’m supposed to be doing, and then all the patients can settle down for a night’s sleep.’

So, by his own account Dr Campbell had tried to put Dr Lowery off going to the police. She believed him, and would have thanked him, had she dared. But she was resolved that no
word would escape her mouth that might incriminate either her or Will. She got through all the work and managed to get the fluid balance charts totted up before Night Sister came, ready to be hung
quietly back on the wall by each patient’s bed as they did the round. After Night Sister had gone the ward was as quiet as the grave, and Sally sat down for five minutes and stared into the
glowing coals of the ward fire. It was almost three o’clock, that time of night when the night nurse’s eyelids droop and sleep seems irresistible, but she was wide awake, much too keyed
up for slumber. She went to the ward cupboard and groped inside for lint and a roll of gauze, but instead of cutting dressings she put them in the pocket of her dress, and felt for the jar of BIPP
ointment. She found it, and opened it by the light of the fire. It was empty.

She felt winded, as if she’d fallen from a great height and had all the breath knocked out of her. If she couldn’t get the ointment it would spell disaster, because they
wouldn’t dare ask any doctor or hospital for help, and she had only two more nights to go before she lost the chance altogether. She racked her brains for a solution. There would be no hope
of getting any from the dispensary at this time of night. It would be locked, and she could hardly ask the night superintendent for the key. She’d have to wait until tomorrow night. But what
if there were no fresh jars tomorrow night? Or the night after? She might never have another chance to get any.

Unless. Unless she went to theatre, where they kept plenty of the stuff. But to get caught there, that would be the end of everything. Unable to sit or settle to anything she got up and flitted
silent as a ghost round the darkened ward, checking the gentle breathing of every patient. They were all sound asleep, for once. She looked towards the ward door, wondering how long it might take.
None of the patients were critically ill, and she could be there and back in ten minutes, surely? Ten minutes at the outside. She hesitated, but remembering that he who hesitates is lost she left
the ward and went to look up and down the main corridor – silent, still, and empty.

It’s one thing in a place you’re familiar with, but to grope for things in the dark in a place you’ve only visited occasionally is a different proposition.
Turning the light on was out of the question, and so she had no alternative but to feel her way round the walls of the anaesthetic room until she came to the cupboard. Thank heaven the key was in
the lock. She turned it, cringing at the sound it made, and the squeak of the hinges when she opened the door. Glass shelving, too, everything she touched made a scrape or a rattle, the sound
magnified in her mind by her fear and the stillness of the night. At last she put her hand on the jar of BIPP on the bottom shelf. There was just enough light from the corridor to make it out as
her eyes became adjusted to the darkness. She knelt to unscrew the lid and fished in her dress pocket for the little container she’d brought and the wooden tongue depressor she would use to
scoop the BIPP out.

The lights went on. Like a startled rabbit she looked up, jar in hand, and met the tired blue eyes of Dr Campbell. ‘What
are
you doing down there, Nurse Wilde?’ he mocked.
‘Saying your prayers –
again
?

She looked at the jar under her hand, and then back at him, and blanched. A thousand excuses rushed through her brain, and every one of them hopeless.

He tut-tutted at her, and shook his head. ‘You mistook the anaesthetic room for the chapel,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘Is that it? No, of course not. But whatever can you
want with
that
in the middle of the night, when none of your patients need dressings done, Nurse Wilde?’

I saw the ward had none when I was tidying the cupboard, so I decided to get some, sprang to mind, but it wouldn’t have washed. There were proper channels for obtaining supplies, and
abandoning a ward full of patients to raid the cupboards of other departments in the middle of the night was not among them. At a loss for any other answer, Nurse Wilde kept her mouth tight
shut.

Campbell gave her a wry smile. ‘You must want it very badly. How badly, exactly? What’s a jar of BIPP worth to you, Nurse Wilde?’

She returned the jar to its cupboard and shut the door, then glanced up at him. A strange half smile was playing on his lips, and she thought she saw derision in those eyes that fixed hers.

‘Oh, this is a difficult one to extricate yourself from,
n’est-ce pas
?’ he taunted. ‘I think the riddle of the little sphinx is solved at last! Finally, and
without a shadow of a doubt. What other explanation can there be?’

She froze, as helpless as a butterfly on a pin. He walked towards her, his smile broadening and his eyebrows lifting as he looked into her eyes and answered for her. ‘None. There is no
other explanation. Which brings me back to the first question,’ he said, stooping to catch her by the wrist and haul her to her feet. ‘What’s a jar of BIPP worth, Sally? A kiss,
at least, I should say.’

He ran his fingers very gently down her cheek to the point of her chin and lifted her face to his. ‘More than a kiss? I fancy I might ask for more than a kiss, under the
circumstances.’

Images of ruin and disgrace raced through her mind, of nurses sacked and sent down the drive with their suitcases, of unmarried mothers shut away in the workhouse, of girls who’d tried to
hide their shame dying grey-faced of stinking, septic abortions, and of mad, disgusting old women in the last stages of syphilis. Those were the results of giving men ‘more than a
kiss’; the warnings were everywhere you looked, and they horrified her. She’d steeled herself for lies and deceit, and even theft, but not that! Not prostituting herself. She blushed,
felt her nose going red and her eyes filling with tears.

That expression of mockery left his eyes. He let her go, and stepped back a pace. ‘Dear me,’ he sighed. ‘Dear me! Is the thought so distressing? Just a kiss, then. Here.’
He turned his cheek towards her, tapped the middle of it with his forefinger, and waited.

She was leaning forward with lips puckered when Dunkley’s voice rang out, clear and peremptory: ‘What’s going on here exactly, might I ask?’

‘Thank you for looking after him,’ Sally said with barefaced coolness when Sunday morning came and, her nursing career at an end, she put her suitcase down in Miss
Brewster’s hallway. She’d had an odd feeling that she was being followed all the way from the hospital, but there was no time to think about that now. There was Miss Brewster to deal
with, and her manner was icy.

‘You’ve put me in a very bad position.’

‘I know,’ said Sally, with no apology in her tone. ‘I had nowhere else to go. There was nothing else I could have done.’

Never in her life before would she have put anybody in a ‘bad position’, especially not a person who had done her a kindness, but after Mrs Lowery’s visit to the ward
she’d sent Will to the deserted laundry and there he’d stayed, safe enough and warm enough all day Sunday, until it got dark. Then she’d spirited him to Miss Brewster’s
house and left him there, returning to the hospital without a qualm to start her night shift. And when before leaving she’d looked Miss Brewster straight in the eye and said, ‘You
won’t give him away, will you?’ her words had been a threat as much as a plea.

Now she discovered within herself a core of steel, a ruthlessness, a determination to bend this woman to her own purpose, and Miss Brewster seemed to sense it, to understand Sally’s veiled
threat without the need for words. Resentment burned in the eyes that met Sally’s impassive gaze, but the older woman was the first to look away. Sally knew too much about Miss Brewster, and
now Miss Brewster knew too much about her and Will. It would be better for all concerned if nobody said anything about anybody. If Miss Brewster stayed quiet and played the game, she would have
nothing to fear, and neither would they.

‘I’ll make sure you’re not out of pocket, Miss Brewster,’ she said. ‘I’ll be getting a decent wage soon. And I’ll be able to help in the
house.’

An angry colour rose to Miss Brewster’s cheeks. She hesitated, drew in her breath as if to protest at this presumption that Will would be staying any longer and that Sally would be staying
too, but after a second’s consideration, merely said, ‘The daily woman will do the housework, and he’s lucky she didn’t see his shaving tackle lying on the bathroom window
sill. Lucky for him I spotted it and moved it before she went in, wasn’t it? All right. You’d better take your case upstairs, and get some sleep. It’s ten o’clock
already.’