Promise the Doctor (14 page)

But it was late when Sam’s big car delivered her at the gate of Fernbank. The household was almost in darkness, and as she fitted her key into the lock, signalled to him as he waited at the gate that she was all right, and let herself into the house, Aileen knew she had failed in what she had set out to do. Sam had talked of his ‘holiday village’, that was true, but nothing would move him from the conviction that Fernbank was needed to complete his plans.

‘I’ve had another part of the bay offered to me,’ he had said over dinner. ‘Well, not to me exactly, but to a member of the Trust. I don’t think you’ll know where I mean, but it’s the part known locally as Sandside, just beyond the pier. There’s a fair-sized hotel with it. Place hasn’t been let this year. Its last owners couldn’t make it pay, and we could get it at our figure. But ...’ he had banged the table with a large, emphatic hand, ‘I’ve set my heart on Fernbank and that corner. And when Sam Bainbridge sets his heart on anything, he usually gets it!’

Aileen had been about to say something, but there was a gleam in his eye which told her instinctively that if she were not careful he was prepared to make the matter more personal, and she was by no means ready for that as yet. ‘She had turned the conversation skilfully into other channels, but throughout the evening Sam had hinted in one form or another that he always got what or whom he wanted in the end.

She felt tired as she went into the kitchen. There was a small tray set with her customary glass of milk and three biscuits, and in the wide rocking chair, which Jenny had told them had been in the Barnes family for generations, Joy lay asleep, her head pillowed in her arm as it rested on the table.

Quietly Aileen got a second glass of milk from the fridge and heated them both up, adding more biscuits before she wakened her daughter. Joy lifted her head, shaking herself awake.

‘Come along, baby,’ Aileen suggested. ‘You ought to have been in bed ages ago ... another time, when you know where I’ve gone, don’t wait up. I’ve a key, remember, and if I needed you I can always ring now we have a phone of our own!’

Joy was too tired to argue or to protest. They went upstairs side by side and parted at their respective doors, but it was only when she had asked Aileen if she had enjoyed her evening and been told it was a wonderful change ... yes, thank you ... did her earlier words really appear to mean anything.

‘Another time...’ her mother had said, Joy recalled as she undressed swiftly, set her alarm clock and got into bed. That meant thus might become a regular thing, this ‘wooing’ as Emma referred to it, of her mother by the man who seemed determined to get them out of their home!

‘I hope she’s strong enough to stand up to him,’ Joy thought as she composed herself for sleep. ‘He’s not an easy man to get along with, and Mother isn’t used to having anyone bully her ... but somehow she seems to like him.’ And with a prayer on her lips that in some way not revealed to her at present everything would work out for the best for each of them in the end, Joy fell asleep and did not waken, despite her alarm clock, until Jenny knocked on the bedroom door and brought in a cup of tea, telling her she would have to hurry or she was going to be late on duty.

CHAPTER XIV

The days which followed were some of the busiest Joy had known in her nursing career. Emergency distribution centres were set up in and around the town, and there were so many nurses from the General and from St Lucy’s who went along to help cope with the rush of people who suddenly realized they should have taken the advised precaution some time ago.

In the ward there were four new suspects, but only one of them proved to become a confirmed case and was whisked away to the town’s isolation hospital, the new centre opened only a year or so ago, on Maryhill, just outside the town.

‘Used to be known as the Fever Hospital, the old building they knocked down there before they built the new one,’ Jenny told them one morning as she whisked round the house with the fly-killing spray, convinced as she was that flies were amongst the main carriers of all such germs and virus. ‘Used to take all chickenpox and such-like up there when I was a girl,’ she went on. ‘Very seldom we hear of things like we used to have being serious enough to be hospital cases. Lots of those old diseases appear to have been wiped out.’

‘They
could
come back, you know,’ Joy warned, ‘if people don’t take the precautions against disease which science has made available. There are inoculations, vaccines, all sorts of preventatives nowadays that were unheard-of when you were a girl.’

‘Took a couple of wars, no doubt, to bring some of these wonders about.’ Jenny put away her Aerosol and began to polish with vigour. ‘There’s a great deal more emphasis laid on hygiene and cleanliness in general now, as well,’ she went on. ‘I don’t just mean in people themselves, but where public health’s concerned, all these food inspectors, all these public washing places ... everything’s giving people a better chance these days, I can’t understand why it isn’t made a compulsory thing to have everyone vaccinated with all the different things as they’re discovered ... that would surely help to fight disease?’

‘Of course it would,’ Joy agreed, ‘and to a certain extent I couldn’t agree with you more. But one doesn’t do that sort of thing in this country.’

‘Folks have to have all sorts of inoculations and vaccinations when they go on a holiday abroad or to a job in almost every other country in the world!’ Jenny refused to discard her point. ‘I don’t see why it couldn’t be done.’

‘It would be something like compulsory military service in the last war,’ Joy offered, racking her brains to remember what she had been told or had read on the subject. ‘There were all sorts of exemptions and exceptions, all sorts of loopholes ... and I suppose there would have to be to please everybody in a scheme of this sort. And if there are loopholes of any kind then the thing can never be a complete success story, at least that’s my opinion. But we’re a free-speaking nation, and to compel any such thing would be classed as an infringement of liberty or something, I’m sure. Anyhow,’ she laughed, smothered a yawn, ‘I’m tired. I feel guilty taking my half day this week, when everything’s at sixes and sevens, so to speak, but Matron’s insisting that those people who are working split turns on duty take all the time off due to them.’

‘Quite right, too,’ Jenny opined. ‘You all deserve a medal the way everyone’s worked this week, whatever part they play in the whole of the Health Service. I take my hat off to all of you, but I wish you’d have a word with your mother, Miss Joy. She’s not looking too well herself these days, and she’s working far too hard, keeping up with all this work everyone seems to want in too much of a hurry. Then she’s going out night after night with that Sam Bainbridge. I don’t know whether he’s trying to get her on to his side in this house affair or whether he’s given up the idea, but she’s as full of cold as she can be. That’s too many nights in too hot rooms and coming out into the cool night air; that’s my opinion, anyhow,’ she added virtuously. ‘Whether it’s of any value or not I’ll leave it.’

Joy managed to soothe Jenny down, but she smiled as she did so, knowing that Mrs. Wrenshaw’s words were only a means of expressing the concern she felt about each and every one of them. In some strange way, since the Benyons had come to Fernbank, their joys had become those of the Wrenshaws, and their troubles and worries were shouldered or shared as much as possible by the devoted couple. Aileen especially had a warm corner in Jenny’s heart. ‘Reminds me so much of dear Miss Laura,’ she said so often that, over the time they had been in Vanmouth, Joy had begun to feel she knew the other two Miss Barnes as well as she had come to know Miss Muriel.

Jenny was right, however, she thought now as she returned from the little room which was Aileen’s office and where the girl she had engaged to help her cope with the unanticipated mound of work which arrived almost daily told her that Aileen had gone to see a man who wanted a special typescript doing of an historical work on which he had been engaged for some time.

Aileen
was
working too hard. She was enjoying herself too, just as Jenny had remarked, and Joy was not at all sure her mother was able to cope with all this extra activity. As if that were not enough, Pete was to return to the fold, as he put it, the following Monday. He had been to see them two or three times since his first visit, and somehow Beryl had always managed to be there. That was all as it should be, so far as Pete and Beryl were concerned, and now they had the Wrenshaws as well as Cousin Emma to help, things domestically were not so hectic. The fact of more space was a help also, but if extra space dispensed with some of the clutter of Cranberry Terrace, it also meant there were more rooms to dust, more furniture and so on to keep tidy, and when Pete came to stay that would mean an additional room which would require care.

The rent and rates being catered for were an undoubted help, but with their transfer—as they hoped if their exam results, due any time now, were satisfactory to the new Technical College, both Rex and Sylvia would require new clothes which, not being uniforms, tended to be somewhat more expensive. There were additional lighting costs, and, she reflected ruefully, in the winter months they would have fuel bills for Fernbank which would make their modest ones at Cranberry Terrace look nothing at all. There was the insurance and licensing of the little car which Joy had just cashed some of her savings certificates to buy, and cars, she realized, cost petrol, oil and maintenance, even for someone like Pete who always coped with minor repairs himself.

The answer, then, did not lie in trying to persuade Aileen to curtail her business activities, especially when the bureau held every indication of successful further development, but in trying to persuade her to take on someone else to help in addition to the girl she already had. In that way, Joy reasoned, her mother would not have quite the amount of work for herself which she was tackling at present, and would be more able to cope with the sudden social whirl into which she appeared to be indulging with Samuel Bainbridge.

Joy fully intended to talk to her mother along these lines when Aileen came back, but as usual she was in a rush to get work off to the post, to organize her morning and to somehow be ready to leave with Sam when he stationed his car at the end of the Shore Road at seven o’clock that evening.

‘Tell me what it is you think I ought to do when I get home, love,’ Aileen put her off now by saying. ‘Whatever it is I know your advice will be sound enough, it’s just that I’m ... sort of living again as
myself,
after too many years forgetting I was anything but a weekly pay cheque!’

She laughed as she said it, but although there was a smile on Joy’s lips there was no laughter in her eyes. She knew only too well what her mother meant, and she knew too that, secretly, she was pleased Aileen had found a suitable male companion in her middle years, someone who was obviously fond of her, able to support her and who was, she was certain, when he had not set his heart on something, a man of personal charm. Otherwise his two children would not be such lovely people! But just now, with his determination to drive her family from the house he coveted, she felt she would have preferred Aileen’s choice to have been anyone else save Sam Bainbridge, suitable though he might be in every other way.

She saw Aileen off, then toyed with the idea of taking herself to the cinema. Michael was sitting in his accustomed place beside Lana’s couch. The twins had gone to supper with some new friends they had made, and Quentin had already paid his visit for the day. The wave of influenza, due no doubt to the unstable weather which had swept the town, was causing extra work for all the medical population of Vanmouth, but so far, although two more people had been detained as suspected cases, there were no further confirmed cases of the dreaded poliomyelitis which might have led them to believe they were about to experience an epidemic.

‘There’s an awful lot of this influenza about, though,’ Quentin had said. ‘Anyone a little below par ... you know the drill. No violent exercise or exertion. Just advise them to keep out of crowded places, just for a while. And keep out of them yourself, Joy! I get worried about you sometimes. Why not pop up and see Mother this evening? She’d be delighted, and we shall not be in until late. I can run you home.’

She hadn’t said either that she would or would not, she remembered now. There were times when she would have loved to talk with Celia Moyser, for a strong friendship had flared between the two women, although Joy’s visits to the large, pleasant house had been so infrequent. But tonight she did not want to talk to anyone. She wanted to lose herself instead in something utterly different from her own worries and those of other people. She glanced at the local paper and saw there was the latest Norman Wisdom comedy showing at one of the cinemas in town. She would go along there and forget everything else until the show ended, then she would walk along the front, call at one of the small cafes and have coffee and walk slowly home. She would be in long before her mother, and during her walk she would think out how best to explain that she was only trying to help, not to interfere, in this new life Aileen had made for herself.

She was just ready to leave the house and had told Jenny where she was going in the event of her being needed for any reason, when Beryl arrived. Joy wondered, for a moment, if the girl had chosen the wrong evening, and as she greeted her she pointed out that Pete was not coming to stay until the weekend.

‘I know,’ Beryl smiled, ‘but I’ve brought someone to see you. She’s asked her brother to bring her, but Michael said you must be sick of the Bainbridge family as it is, and told her to write. I’ve brought Cara,’ she opened the door and beckoned to the girl Joy recognized immediately as the one who had been in the wooden site office on the occasion of her second visit.

‘We’ve already met,’ she said cordially, opening the door to its fullest extent. ‘I seem to remember I invited you round at the time,’ she added.

‘You did.’ Cara followed them into the hall, smiling. She had the same attractive good looks as her brother, Joy reflected, and once more wondered just how much of their father lay behind each pleasant exterior. ‘I was coming, too. I’ve heard such a lot about you all, especially about your sister, Lana, and it was that which helped me make up my mind.’

‘She’s through in the little room we’ve turned over to her exclusive use.’ Joy was about to show the two girls in, but Cara held up a detaining finger.

‘Just a moment, please, Sister Benyon,’ she said with an impish grin which told Joy this was the girl who defied her father to join the youth workers overseas, just because she wanted ‘to help other people’. ‘It’s you I’ve really come to see. I’d like your advice.’

‘I’ll help if I can,’ Joy told her. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘I want to be a nurse,’ Cara answered simply. ‘I want to be able to help people like your sister. To care for those like Miss Barnes, the way
you
did. To cope with an accident if I see one, as Doctor Quentin told us you helped that night you first came to Vanmouth. How do I set about it, please, Sister? And how long will it take?’

‘Have you any G.C.E. certificates?’ Joy enquired. ‘It is by no means impossible if you haven’t, but they do help.’

‘Two English and one maths, all O level, I’m afraid,’ Cara said. ‘They haven’t been enough to do anything for me in any direction which might have appealed,’ she ended.

‘They’ll get you in ... if you pass a few more things,’ Joy said, ‘and the first will be your medical examination.’

‘I’ll be all right there,’ Cara was certain on that point. ‘I’m absolutely fit, thank heaven. What else?’

‘Just a few other little things they’ll explain as you go,’ Joy told her, ‘nothing to worry about. The first thing to do is to get into a hospital. Any thoughts as to where you want to be? Lots of them have their own training schools, or there are larger hospitals where one can do the full course, some even include midwifery, but one generally goes to other hospitals for other courses. I did my midwifery in the north. I did my paediatric and psychiatric in the Midlands. It all depends on what you eventually want to do.’

‘I think I’ll settle for whatever comprises a good general qualified nurse first and then see,’ Cara laughed. ‘I hadn’t thought any further than that. Really because I didn’t know enough about it, I suppose. Where do I go from there?’

‘If you want to be local, and want to start as soon as possible, I should write to the Matron at St Lucy’s,’ Joy advised. ‘If you go straight ahead, your training should take three years... Excuse me asking, dear, but how old are you?’

‘Nineteen in October,’ Cara said promptly. ‘That means, if I work and I’m lucky, I should be able to qualify or whatever you call it by the time I’m twenty-one?’

‘You should,’ Joy told her. ‘And I’d like to congratulate you on your choice of career. It’s a wonderful job, and very rewarding. Not, perhaps, as financially rewarding as some jobs we might mention, but there are other things.’

‘There are indeed,’ Cara agreed. ‘Thank you very much, Sister. And now’—she smiled again, and Joy smiled with her—‘if I
could
meet your sister? Or are you tired of having the Bainbridge family round your neck? Father seems determined to?’ . . push his own interests, in all directions’—the impish smile flashed out again—‘and Michael almost lives here these days. If you feel you’re getting too much of us, just say so, and I’ll understand.’