Nurse Kelsey Abroad (2 page)

“Ann Palmer,” Dudley announced. “I remember her. And,” he swung off at a tangent, “naturally Angela thought of you
!
Don’t you see, Jane, this is a perfect way for her to put distance between us? She knows perfectly well if you went back to the General—and you said last evening you were thinking of doing exactly that—I could and would see almost as much of you as I do now! If you’d allow me to, that is. It’s Angie’s way of separating us, that’s all. You don’t
have
to go, you know. There are
more nurses required in this country than there are people trained to fill the demand. If you don’t want to tell her,” he offered, and Jane knew this was a tremendous thing for him to say, since Angela had practically guided his life since adolescence, “I’ll tell her for you. You could get back to the General like a shot, and you wouldn’t be so much under Angie’s thumb then. She’s all right,” he conceded with brotherly candour, “but she gets bees in her bonnet about one thing or another, and unfortunately the ones that buzz loudest and most persistently have always something to do with me and my affairs
!
”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Jane managed at last to stem the flow of words. “I always said I’d like to take a position abroad once I was qualified. That was one of the reasons I took my midwifery as well. You have to have that for W.H.O., you know, and for most of the countries where nurses are badly needed.”

“You still don’t have to go, Janie.” Dudley was almost pleading, and for some reason or another that irritated Jane, suddenly strung to top pitch by the unexpectedness of the opportunity offered and the strangeness of her possible destination. “When does she want your decision?”

“She’s telephoned Mum to say I’m coming home on a granted forty-eight-hour pass,” Jane told him a little unhappily as she anticipated his next words. “I was just going to pack my weekend case and go for the four
-
fifteen bus.”

“Ga and pack,” Dudley said in a quite unexpected authoritative manner. “I’ll run you home. I’ll just pop these accounts on Angie’s desk. Don’t worry,” he grinned in a suddenly boyish manner—for normally there wasn’t much boyishness where Dudley was concerned—“I shall only pop in and out. She won’t even know we met, not until we’ve had more opportunity to talk things over.”

Jane knew it would be useless to argue. When he chose Dudley could be as stubborn as the proverbial mule, and she had grown to recognise the signs! She merely nodded and smiled her thanks and hurried off to pack her small case and to arrange with the junior staff nurse about the unexpected change in rota. She would have to convince Dudley later that she really wanted to accept this chance, even though she was by no means convinced herself that she did ... at least it would solve the Dudley problem, and by the time she returned he would, in all probability, have teamed up with someone else.

Jane was too kind-hearted a person to do more than show Dudley she was not over-enthusiastic for his attentions. It was quite beyond her to turn round and tell him with any degree of definiteness that his presence was not welcome, nor did she want to be thought of as “Dudley Power’s girl-friend”, yet the way in which he hung about her ever since she had arrived at the nursing home was sufficient to make anyone believe they were next-door to being engaged!

“It’s got to stop,” Jane vowed to herself as she snapped the lock on her small case. “I know Angela’s against it. She doesn’t seem to realise
I’
m
not keen, and Dudley’s the last person i
n the world to take a hint if h
e doesn’t want to! Altogether this may well be the simple way out, and even though I can’t say it’s exactly the kind of avenue I’d have chosen, given the choice, I won’t quarrel with it, if Mum doesn’t appear to mind too much.”

There lay her biggest problem. Jane adored her parents, both of them—her quiet, thoughtful father, who worked as accountant in one of the largest firms in Rawbridge, and her merry-eyed, laughing mother who did not look by any means old enough to have a grown-up, almost independent family.

“She’ll say ‘go’, of course,” Jane reasoned. “She wouldn’t put out a finger to prevent any of us doing anything we think we want to do, let alone something she knows one of us has always been keen about. I must say, though,” she reflected as she hurried to say good-bye to Matron and then back to where Dudley waited just round the corner from the nursing home’s portals, “I’d rather be going
anywhere
under W.H.O. than to some place I’ve never even heard of, whether it’s an important or attractive place or not
!”

Dudley wasted no time in getting the car away from the vicinity of the nursing home, and Jane suppressed a desire to giggle as it struck her that he was extremely anxious to avoid being noticed by his sister.

She made no comment, however, and he turned the nose of the
little
saloon towards Wetherlay Crescent where Jane’s people lived, changing direction abruptly at the top of the hill. She still made no comment when he halted the car, as she had expected he would do, just round the first bend in Honkers Lane, a small, leafy lane along whose paths so many of the local young people walked when discussing their problems. Jane had never walked there since she had used the lane as a short cut home from school, years before. Now she sat quietly, her hands resting in her lap, and waited for him to begin.

“Cigarette?” Dudley proffered his case, knowing she seldom smoked, but just now she felt the feel of a little white tube of tobacco in her fingers might ease something of the nervous tension which seemed to have been mounting within her ever since Angela Power’s news, and, judging by Dudley’s face, was about to reach its peak any minute now.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, surprising him.

She bent her head and inhaled as he lit it for her, and then she relapsed again into her old position, hands clasped, waiting.

“Jane,” Dudley’s voice, she felt abstractedly, was so different from her father’s. Her father’s was at once businesslike and in some strange fashion reassuring. Dudley’s tone always sounded as though he were on the edge of something momentous, yet never quite reaching whatever it was. “What do you really feel about this
...
this
talk
of Angela’s? You say you’ve always wanted to travel, there’s the rest of your life to do
that
in, and not working your way, either. I shall be junior partner before much longer, and while that isn’t the world, I know, it’s a good step towards achieving what we want.”

“What
you
want, Dudley,” Jane surprised herself by saying, but having got so much said she was in no hurry to withdraw from the slight advantage she thought was hers, to judge by his look of utter astonishment. “I still want to travel, I still want to use all I’ve been taught as a nurse, for those who need it, wherever they are and whoever they may be. Maybe that’s not the end of the line either, but I feel it’s a worth-while job, and your sister’s friend seems to have come through all right,” she smiled.

“But what about
...
us?” Dudley said abruptly. “You’ll be changed when you come back, and I don’t know whether the change will be a good one or not, do I
?
I’ll be changed too. We shall not be the same people any more, and all we’ve gained in knowledge of one another will be forgotten, gone as though it had never been.”

“In that case I don’t think it’s been very important, then, do you?” she questioned gently. “We’ve had a good friendship. My Aunt Ruth always said a real friendship was one where people could part, not see one another or even correspond for years and then meet and carry on as though they had only just parted. That, she used to say, was
real
friendship
...
and I think I know what she means. If a few thousand miles, a few years of parting are going to mean death to the friendship, then it couldn’t have been so very much alive in the first place, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Jane, I really don’t.” He looked suddenly so abjectly miserable that she was suddenly afraid he was about to immerse himself in one of the sulky moods he affected when he badly wanted to gain his own way about something.

“Let’s talk about it after I’ve told Mum and Dad,” she suggested brightly, drawing deeply on her cigarette. “I shouldn’t go if they felt I ought not to, you know. I’d rather not discuss it any more until we’ve chatted with them about it. All right?”

She smiled and, after a moment’s hesitation, he nodded.

“All right,” he agreed, and switched on the engine, but although for the moment a crisis had been averted Jane wasn’t comfortable about him. She knew without his saying one word that he was definitely against her leaving the nursing home at all, let alone going to the other side of the world where he could not simply pick up a telephone and speak to her whenever he so desired for the mere expenditure of a few pence.

Mrs. Kelsey, forewarned by Angela’s telephone call, had prepared a sumptuous high tea, always insistent that, no matter how good and nutritious the food at any hospital might be, it always lacked what she thought of as “the individual touch.”

It was useless for Jane to explain that in a small nursing home such as the Mowberry, so many people had their own
individual
likes and dislikes and, where their illnesses permitted, these were catered for as they would have been in any small, well-run hotel. Because of this, as s
h
e repeatedly assured her anxious mum, the meals of the nursing staff were a little more varied than the meals at the General had been, where emphasis was laid upon energy-supplying foods rather than on those likely to tempt the palate.

Mary Kelsey enjoyed cooking. Nothing pleased her more than to have her family pass up their plates for second helpings, and when one of them came home unexpectedly, as Jane had done tod
a
y, she always put herself out to do something special. After Angela’s phone call she had studied the contents of her larder, fridge and cupboard, and the result had ended triumphantly with a luscious-looking glazed bacon loaf, a mocha trifle
,
a good idea, Mary thought, as it disposed of the half sponge cake she had despaired
of ever being eaten,
and a selection of home-made biscuits, a speciality of hers, and a well-filled apple pie, always a family favourite.

She was putting the finishing touches to the table as
Dudley drove into the small, curved driveway. At the sound of the car she switched on the light b
el
ow the kettle. Jane always liked a “good cup of tea” the moment she came in.

It was at that moment the phone rang again
and this time it was Angela once more, but telling her briefly just what she had offered to Jane.

“She’ll hesitate, of course, Mrs. Kelsey,” Angela’s brisk tones came clearly over the wire, “but that’s only because she wants to make quite certain her going so far away won’t leave
you
so bereft now that Betty’s gone from home.
Of course, as I pointed out to he
r, you’ll still have Susan and the boys, and Mr. Kelsey, of course.
I don’t think, from what I know of you, you’re likely to allow missing Jane for a time to stand in the way of something I know that, in her heart of hearts, she would really like to do.”

“Of course I wouldn’t stand in her way,” Mary said, a little bewildered by the suddenness of the statement.
“But
w
here
is
this place? Sounds to me it may well be behind the Iron Curtain.”

“I think it may well be,” Angela said vaguely, “but that hasn’t prevented my friend from enjoying every minute of her stay there, and I do know Jane has always longed to travel and to nurse at the same time. The hospital is quite a well reputed one, you know. I met the doctor in charge, a Doctor James Lowth, when Ann went out there. He’s English. His people come from somewhere in Surrey, I believe. He has an assistant who is also English, Irish or something like that, and there are two qualified English nurses on the staff as well as the girls who’ve been recruited and trained in the hospital itself. I really think Jane would enjoy the whole thing tremendously. She can always have an agreement for so long, and then it will give the authorities an opportunity to look out for someone else to take her place if she decided her first engagement was long enough. Ann signed to stay six months at first, then re-signed for another two years. She ought not be leaving for another three months or so, but her
fiancé
will lose the position open to him in Australia if they leave matters so long, and that would hardly be fair to him or to Ann herself
.
That was why she wrote to me to see if
he
could recommend someone to take her place immediately. Of course I thought of Jane first and foremost.”

Mary Kelsey, who didn’t much care for Angela Power but who respected her for her nursing capabilities as well as for her businesslike approach to life in general, merely made a sound which might or might not have signified agreement, but it was an extremely thoughtful woman who soon replaced the receiver and turned to greet the two young people who had just entered.

“Hello, darling,” she greeted her daughter with an affectionate kiss which was returned with unexpected fervour. Jane was normally an affectionate although not