A Daughter's Duty (30 page)

Her meandering thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice.

‘Here we are again then, Rose Sharpe.’

Rose opened her eyes. Bob Morris was standing there, looking grim. ‘What did you think you were doing, girl?’

She looked at him, weak tears pricking her eyelids. He had been her only friend since she came to Hartlepool, for that last afternoon in the sewing room had shown her that she had no friends there. A tear squeezed out of the corner of her eye and she dashed it away angrily.

‘Come on now, none of that,’ he said, his voice softening. He went over to the screens at the end of the ward and pulled a couple over, placing them round the bed. Sister appeared, popping her head through the screens, looking disapproving.

‘Can I help you, Dr Morris?’

He smiled apologetically. After all, he was technically a visitor to the ward and should have asked her permission, but she had been out of sight when he came in and he had been so relieved to see Rose awake.

‘No, thank you, I’m not examining the patient, I can manage on my own,’ he replied smoothly, and Sister ducked out of sight again.

‘Did something happen, something to make you take off like that?’ he asked. ‘You might as well tell me, Rose.’

‘Lily,’ she protested but Bob shook his head irritably.

‘We’ll have no more playing silly buggers, Rose. That’s your name, there’s not a thing wrong with your memory.’

‘Are you doctor on this ward?’ she asked. That was something else she’d learned since working in a hospital, that doctors had their own areas.

‘No, you know that,’ he replied. ‘I just came in to see how you were. What did you think you were doing, out at Crimdon that night? I came to pick you up, you know, take you out to supper, and when the landlady said you hadn’t been home, well …’

Oh, yes, thought Rose, he had said he would do that. But it had been driven out of her head along with everything else after the encounter with Alice. The animosity, not just from Alice, she’d felt from the others in the sewing room. What had she done to deserve it?

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and looked up at him with great dark tragic eyes which were further accentuated by the translucent white of her skin. He was moved to compunction for badgering her. How could he have done? But he had been so worried about her. If she’d lain undiscovered in that caravan down by the shore for much longer, not even the wonder drug, penicillin, could have saved her.

He coughed behind his hand to mask his emotion. ‘Well, never mind now,’ he said, taking her hand, feeling the fragile bones of her wrist. Dear God, she was so painfully thin. What on earth was it that haunted her so?

‘Dr Morris, the rounds are about to begin.’ Sister poked her head through the screens yet again and he withdrew his hand from Rose’s quickly.

‘Yes, Sister. I’m going now.’ He began to push the screens back from the bed but she waved a hand imperiously. ‘We’ll do that, thank you, Doctor.’

Bob cast a wry smile at Rose. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said in an undertone. He passed Dr Wray, the medical consultant, as he went out of the door and exchanged greetings with him. The other doctor looked slightly puzzled, but he was a mannerly man and asked no questions.

Walking over to the doctors’ rest room, for he had been called out in the middle of the night to yet another poor woman who had been bleeding heavily after a botched back-street abortion, Bob pondered on his own mixed feelings for Rose. He had truly thought he was only interested in her history but there was something about the girl which he couldn’t get out of his mind. Her love for her young brother and sister, her parent anxiety for them … yet when he’d gone to see them they had shown no signs of being anything but healthy. He would also say they were happy with their aunt. But he wondered about the father, brooded over it in his spare moments, hating to think the problem was what he suspected it to be in his darker moments.

Bob longed to chase away the shadows which were so evident on Rose’s face. He was falling in love with her, he realised it now. She had crept inside his heart. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot keeping warm on the hotplate, added sugar and took it to a worn leather armchair. He sat down, leaning his head into the hollow in its back made by generations of young doctors before him. Rose, he thought. How shocked he had been when she had been brought in unconscious. What a relief it was now she had come out of her coma. Of course it would be weeks before she was fully well again, but at least the first step had been taken.

He drank his coffee. It was strong and sweet yet left a bitter taste on his tongue. But he needed it, had a ward round with his consultant in half an hour. And then, if the woman brought in during the night should have a relapse …

‘Damn those back-street butchers to hell,’ he said savagely to the empty room. ‘With their knitting needles and crochet hooks, their slippery elm bark. A filthy trade altogether.’ The clock on the mantel above the gas fire ticked away, the only answer to his tirade.

He thought again of last evening when he had spoken to Dr Wray in the office in Outpatients, asking his opinion on Rose and why she had taken so long to respond to the antibiotic.

‘She was a patient of mine,’ he’d explained. ‘So I’m interested in her condition.’

‘Rose Sharpe? Coming along. I’m sure the penicillin will do its work. Just as well, she would have stood a poor chance –’

‘Rose Sharpe?’

The question had interrupted the two doctors and Dr Wray, a physician of the old school, had been outraged. Bob himself had been taken aback too, but only for a second or so. The question had come from one of the group of miners injured in a mine accident or maybe it was his friend. As was always the case, doctors in the hospital not busy at the time had been called into Outpatients to deal with the influx expected when they were warned a mine accident had happened. But there had only been a few miners, their injuries slight, thank God.

Bob could kick himself for not catching the two miners and the girl before they left the hospital. There had been an opportunity there to solve the puzzle and he had let it go. Too slow by half, he’d been. Impatiently, he pulled himself up out of the armchair and, running a hand over his hair, straightening his tie and checking his white coat in the mirror, for his consultant was a stickler for the niceties, went back to the wards.

It occurred to him as he strode along the corridor that of course the miners had come from Easington Colliery, and the addresses of those injured would be on record in Outpatients. He might be able to find out something there. Though he would have to be very, very careful. He didn’t want to distress Rose further. Not for the world.

‘What a foolish young woman you are,’ observed Dr Wray. ‘You almost died, did you know that?’

Rose lowered her eyes to her clasped hands, lying on a white sheet turned over the regulation ten inches on to the green cotton counterpane. Her straight black hair, longer than she normally kept it, was combed back from her face and tied at the nape of her neck with a piece of ribbon one of the nurses had found in the odds and ends box in the linen cupboard. Her black lashes fanned out over her cheeks, which were stained a delicate pink now as she blushed slightly at his mild reproof.

‘I’m sorry to put everyone to such trouble,’ she mumbled.

Dr Wray softened. This girl was just about the age of his own daughter, now at Newcastle Medical School, studying to be a doctor like her father. Crossed in love, he supposed. Ah, the agony of being young. He sincerely hoped his Janet didn’t get into a state over some young fool, or at least not before she finished her training. But then, Janet was a level-headed sort of a girl. Her great passion was medicine and he was very proud of her progress. He turned his attention back to the girl in the bed. She’d do, he reckoned.

‘Ah, well, let it be a lesson to you,’ he droned, and even to himself sounded like an old fogey. He looked at Sister Macpherson, standing respectfully beside him with the pile of case notes. He took up Rose’s file and wrote something in it, then nodded and prepared to go on his way.

‘When will I be able to go home, Doctor?’ Rose asked, though her small bare room down by the docks could hardly be called a home, she thought.

‘Don’t be in such a hurry, young lady,’ he admonished, hardly pausing in his stride, so well used was he to that particular cry from patients. ‘You’ve been seriously ill, remember.’

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to go, Rose thought to herself as she watched his stately progress up the ward amidst his little court of junior doctors and Sister. She fingered a neat machine-done darn in the sheet under her hands, one of her own stitching very likely. But neither did she want to see Alice or any of the other women in the sewing room, not yet, not until she felt stronger. And Mrs Timms was bound to find out where she was. No doubt she had been informed already.

At the moment Rose felt like nothing so much as crawling off into a hole and not seeing anyone, anyone at all. Not even Dr Morris. All she wanted was a bit of peace, as her mother used to say. And almost immediately her peace was shattered by Sister’s voice.

‘Now then, Miss Sharpe.’

Rose sighed and opened her eyes. Sister had drawn a chair up to the bed; she took a pen out of her breast pocket and held it poised over a paper in Rose’s file.

‘I see you didn’t give the name of your next of kin the last time you were in the hospital. I’ll have it now, please. It’s essential we have it, one of our rules.’

Rose stared at her. The Sister’s determined expression made it plain she intended to receive answers to her questions. Dad was her next of kin, thought Rose. Her dad, and he had left her to die. She hadn’t realised it at first but she did now. She would never give his name, never. Nor Aunt Elsie’s. She had helped him, hadn’t she? That nightmare scene in the bedroom flashed through her mind, making her tremble.

‘Miss Sharpe? Rose?’

The Sister’s voice was softer. She had seen that fear, and was almost ready to admit defeat before she had begun. Her questions could wait for a few days, she reasoned. Rose Sharpe was still very weak. Sister got to her feet and hovered over the girl in the bed, putting one hand to her brow. It was clammy.

Rose looked up at her. ‘Marina Morland,’ she murmured. ‘Marina Morland. She lives in Jordan, near Bishop Auckland. She’s … she’s my cousin.’

They only needed it in case she should become seriously ill or die. They wouldn’t get in touch otherwise, she was sure. But even if they did, Marina wouldn’t tell Alf Sharpe where Rose was, of course she wouldn’t. She was perfectly safe.

It was another two weeks before Dr Wray decided that Rose might go home. By that time she had progressed from sitting out of bed in an armchair to being able to go to the bathroom by herself, to walking shakily round the ward on the arm of a nurse until her legs no longer felt as though they belonged to someone else and she could manage by herself.

‘You must have at least a month away from work,’ he told her. ‘Are you sure you have someone to care for you?’

‘Oh, yes, Doctor,’ she replied, crossing her fingers behind her back. Well, her landlady was there, wasn’t she? In any case, she was better now. All she needed was a quiet rest, something which was impossible on the busy ward. She would be fine.

Jeff cared for her, she thought. All she needed was him. Oh, Jeff! If only she could see him. She thought of going to him anyway, for surely he still loved her? Of course he did, she’d never doubted it. He loved her as she loved him, for their lifetime. In her weakness she was tempted to go to Easington and find him. He would keep her safe from her dad. But he would hate her, despise her if she told him the truth, wouldn’t he? And she couldn’t bear that. Oh, Lord, why couldn’t she stop thinking of him all the time?

The one thought that didn’t occur to her was the contradiction inherent in being so sure of his love yet sure also that love would turn to hatred if he knew about her and her dad.

Dr Morris came to see her just before she left the ward. But she was guarded with him, remembering how he had so innocently provoked jealousy among her workmates. She couldn’t help feeling a sense of relief that she had not to go back to the sewing room. Not at least until she was stronger.

It was a few weeks later, when Bob Morris happened to be in the hospital records office, that he thought of asking to see her file and there, in the next-of-kin slot, was a name. One which evidently Rose was not afraid to give.

Kate was excited as she dressed in her best black costume and combed her hair, now more grey than brown, into a roll around her head, fixing it in place with kirby grips. She glanced in the mirror above the fireplace. Though she said it herself she still looked handsome and the white frilly blouse she wore to lighten the mourning outfit looked very pleasing. She fixed a tiny hat over the roll, securing it with a pearl hatpin at the back. There, she was almost ready to go.

She smiled at her reflection. Marina had said there was a nice surprise waiting for her when she last wrote, and Kate had a fair idea what it was. Her daughter and son-in-law had been talking of buying a house ever since they were married and when they did, she, Kate, was invited to live there with them. By, she would be glad to be shot of Jordan! All the heartache she’d had here. She looked around the room. To her it was full of ghosts. A new house, with no associations with the past, that was just the ticket, she told herself. And she would never interfere with the young couple, never be a burden either.

A knock at the door made her frown in irritation. Who the heck was that? She’d paid the milkman only five minutes ago and the insurance man had been the night before for his money. She couldn’t afford to miss her bus, she thought, as she went to open the door.

‘I’m so sorry for disturbing you,’ the stranger standing on the step said politely. ‘But I wonder, is it possible for me to speak to Miss Morland? Miss Marina Morland?’

He was well dressed in a gabardine coat open over a good wool suit. Quite young, Kate saw, and mannerly. He held his trilby hat in his hand before him, a spotlessly clean hand, the nails well tended and cut short. All this registered in the first few seconds as she stared at him, unsmiling. What was he doing chasing after their Marina and her a respectable married woman? But the young man was looking at her enquiringly.