Bittersweet (10 page)

“Me too,” said Tufts. “Bear is exactly right for Grace. I mean, they met in the shunting yards oohing and aahing over steam engines. How odd is that?” She giggled. “Their babies will dine on coal rather than milk, and hoot rather than cry.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” demanded Grace, entering.

“Nothing, dear, nothing,” said Kitty. “How are we going to prise a wedding out of Mama?”

“I don’t want a wedding,” Grace said flatly. “I don’t mean I won’t wear a white dress and carry a bouquet of flowers, just no fusses like breakfasts and speeches. Bear doesn’t have any family or close friends to fill one side of a church, and I’ll not have him embarrassed. So I want Daddy to marry us quietly, then I’ll go on his circuit with Bear instead of a formal honeymoon.”

Her cup was full to overflowing; not even the prospect of Maude Latimer’s umbrage had the power to dent Grace’s happiness.

The four agreed that it would be Edda to broach the subject of Grace’s marriage to the Reverend Thomas Latimer and his wife, and that she would do it at the start of her next days off.

If Maude and the Rector were surprised to see their senior daughter, they put a good face on it and asked her to lunch.

“I fail to understand what the fascination of nursing is,” said Maude, whose sense of self-preservation was keen enough to tell her that Edda nowadays was impervious to the slights and sarcastic comments of other times. A self-possessed young woman with an unshakable knowledge of her own worth; Maude felt a trifle shrivelled as she realised the girls, in going nursing, had somehow outstripped her in character, resolution, admirability. All sensations Maude didn’t like.

“Nursing endows those who like it with real purpose,” said Edda, thoroughly enjoying Rectory cooking after the nurses’
dining room. “How does Cook manage to make her shepherd’s pie so tasty, Stepmama? The hospital cooks ruin it.”

“I have no idea,” said Maude loftily. “All I have to do with it is set the menus each week.”

“That’s all Home Sister does too, but the results are far different.” Edda’s strange eyes sought her father’s, and pinned them. “Grace, however, hasn’t taken to nursing.”

Maude snorted. “Huh! Why doesn’t that astonish me? Your twin sister, Edda, is a genuine no-hoper.”

Edda laughed. “That shaft went wide of the mark, if its mark was me. It certainly indicates that you won’t mind if Grace resigns from nursing to marry another no-hoper.”

Maude went rigid. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me, Stepmama. Grace is about to marry a Perkins Man — a nice young chap, very much in love with her. They are ideally suited, Daddy.”

“Grace will do no such thing!” Maude turned to the Rector, who thus far had made no comment on Grace’s conduct, nor indeed given his private thoughts away on his face. “Tom, you can’t just sit there without a word! Grace is
not
marrying a no-hoper!”

“I rather gathered that from what Edda has told us,” said the Rector placidly, wiping his lips with his napkin. “You are too hard on people, especially those nearest and dearest to you, Maude, and I confess it perturbs me. I am quite sure that a Perkins Man is not a no-hoper — your own pantry is full of Perkins Products, including that new face cream you’re so enthusiastic about.” He smiled at Edda, openly grinning. “You, of course, are the advance guard, Edda?”

“Yes, Daddy. Grace’s fiancé is properly named Björn Olsen, but we call him Bear. Money in the bank, Perkins’s top salesman, and quite besotted over Grace. He wants to meet you as soon as possible because they don’t want a long engagement.”

“She’s expecting!” cried Maude, grinding her teeth.

“No, she isn’t! What a foul mind you have, Stepmama!”

Down went the Rector’s knife and fork on his plate with a loud clatter; the mild grey eyes flashed. “Cease and desist, Maude! If you can’t say something kind, then say nothing! Why must you be so uncharitable?”

Fascinated, Edda looked from her father to her stepmother and back again. The sharpness in Daddy’s voice was utterly new to her — was living alone with Maude such a trial, then?

“I’ll see my prospective son-in-law at noon tomorrow,” the Rector said to Edda, “and Grace can come to the Rectory at half past. Maude, I want a special lunch.”

“She isn’t expecting, Daddy, but I predict there will be grandchildren to hold in respectable swiftness,” Edda said, eyes dancing. “I’m happy for her because Bear will never let her down and always look after her.”

Hardly able to credit the Rector’s snub — in front of Edda! — Maude Latimer sat through the rest of lunch in silence, resolved of one thing: Grace would pay. In fact, they’d all pay.

Nurse Grace Faulding-Latimer had lasted fifteen months as a new-style trainee, and left in order to marry.

It was a small, very hospitalish wedding, for the groom’s contingent, all Perkins Men, numbered but three, and the bride’s was kept to family and a very few friends. Married at the beginning of July 1927, which was mid-winter, the happy couple had an odd but educational honeymoon; Grace accompanied Bear on his Perkins circuit in south-western New South Wales. By the end of it, she did not envy Bear his lot. Thrilled at being in a home of her own, she moved into the house Bear had bought in the Trelawneys. Though only Bear knew it, she was pregnant.

N
ever having been parted from Grace in all their twenty-two years, Edda had no premonition how much separation from her sister was going to hurt. Leaving their physical similarities out of it, they were not alike temperamentally or spiritually, nor indeed in any other way commonly attributed to identical twins. Many and many were the times, Edda reflected now, when she had cursed Grace for tagging along — for not being, it had seemed to a busy, pushy child like Edda, more fun, more joy, a better team-mate. No, it was always Edda obliged to lead, Grace compelled to follow. And now that Grace was gone, Edda found herself unreasonably devastated.

“I hope I’ve never thought of Grace as an inoperable and malignant tumour,” she said to Tufts, to whom she related better than to Kitty, “but I can’t deny that in many ways being Grace’s twin felt like hosting a tumour. Now Hymen Goddess of Marriage has separated me from my tumour like the most ruthless surgeon.”

“Well, dear, you’re rudderless,” said Tufts tenderly. “It will take a long time to get used to being without Grace.”

“You don’t understand!” Edda cried. “I always thought I’d be ecstatic at losing Grace.”

“Yes, the way I’m sure I’ll feel when I shed Kitty, except that common sense says I’ll mourn her going dreadfully. Like me, Edda, you have common sense. How could it not be a colossal wrench to lose one’s other half?”

Edda heaved a sigh. “How, indeed?”

“At least Kitty and I understand, remember that.”

Edda tried to, but witnessing their united front every day only served to emphasise her own loss. Not that there weren’t compensations. The most important to Edda was her father’s sudden spurt of independence from Maude, so noticeable that all sorts of people were a little startled. Not that he treated his second wife with less respect, just that the hen-pecked deference was missing. Too superficial to search her own conduct, Maude blamed the Rector’s new attitude on her fading looks and promptly went to spend three months in a sanatorium on the Blue Mountains, there to diet, exercise, and pour her heart out to people known as “alienists”. She couldn’t have made a worse move, for it took her out of the Rector’s life just at the moment when the first daughter’s marriage reminded him that he too was growing old. Life without Maude, he discovered, was very pleasant: he could have whatever he wanted for breakfast, pick his own hymns for the choir, compose his own sermons, and visit his impoverished and therefore unimportant parishioners as often as he liked. Habits that, when Maude returned from her health treatment, he refused to give up; his ears, it seemed, had grown awfully deaf.

“It serves my stepmother right,” said Edda jubilantly to Jack Thurlow when they met on the bridle path and dismounted to “have a decent yarn” as Jack put it.

They didn’t meet very often; nursing had cut a huge swathe through the old freedoms of leisure, when the four girls had done little for their keep beyond housework for Maude, a flexible business. Nursing meant a physical exhaustion that made going to the pictures or, in Edda’s case, riding, too much an effort.

Amused by the discovery, Edda learned that Jack Thurlow did not appreciate his demotion to, as he put it:

“A convenience you stick in a cupboard and only bring out when the fancy takes you. I don’t know why I oblige you.”

Internal mirth became open laughter; Edda roared with it. “Oh, Jack, grow up! You’re eleven years older than me, but you act like a little boy whose big sister has pinched your favourite toy. I work for a living these days, and ‘work’ is the significant word. Nothing pleases me more than a ride with you, but I don’t have the time or the energy often — is that clear enough?”

“When you started to nurse you were full of the idea that regular rides would help you cope, but you’ve been nursing now for an eternity and the rides keep dwindling. Your father uses Fatima in a pony-cart for Maude, just to give the poor creature exercise.”

Her face fell, but she nodded. “Daddy’s right, but I know you don’t approve of hacks being harnessed, and I’m sorry.” Her face assumed its most seductive look. “The trouble is that I love to ride her when I have the chance, and if she goes back to you, all my chances will vanish. Is it really so damaging for
Fatima to tow Maude around in a lightweight cart? I know why you gave me Fatima — she’s a very stupid but simultaneously placid horse. Maude’s even trained her to pull the clippings to the compost heap.”

His grin was reluctant, but gradually broadened. “A pity you’re a woman, Edda. There’s a master politician inside you.”

“Then I’ll marry a master politician,” she said lightly.

“Ride up to the house with me, have a cuppa and a scone,” he wheedled. “More comfortable than the river bank.”

She rose to her feet at once. “And less public,” she said, mounting Fatima, which really was a perfect horse-of-all-trades, yet contrived to master all of them. Stupidity was a help.

“Any news of the Burdum heir?” she asked over buttered cheese scones still hot from the oven — a superb scone baker, Jack!

“The Pommy bloke? Old Tom doesn’t say much, but I don’t think the new heir has any plans to come to Australia any time soon. He has lots of irons in Pommy fires, especially London.”

“Why do we call the English Pommies?”

“I never met anybody who knows,” said Jack, shrugging. “The new heir won’t even know he’s a Pommy until he gets here. Old Tom says he’s a doctor.”

“Maude said that, but I confess we took no notice of her.” Edda pulled a face. “According to her, he’s a tycoon as well.”

“Impossible. They’re opposites — altruistic
and
exploitative. Like being a saint and a demon rolled in one,” said Jack.

“Oh, I know dozens of people just like that.” Edda smirked. “Look at those with knees shiny from praying — awful villains!”

“That’s why I like you. You see what’s hidden.”

“My profession helps. You can’t learn much about human nature from fat lambs, Jack, but you can from sick people.”

“Maybe that’s why the Burdum heir became a doctor. Money is no teacher of what makes human beings tick either.” Jack took her cup and plate. “Come on, I’ll drive you back to the hospital.”

Heart singing as it had not since the loss of Grace, Edda returned to the hospital in Jack’s battered old utility truck. Why has it come as such a shock to realise that Jack Thurlow is the man for me? I’ve always been drawn to him, and the intimacy of our friendship says what I feel. And yet it was the two hours of easy talk in his kitchen, drinking tea and eating scones, that it had dawned on me:
a part of me loves him!
How had that happened? Why had it happened? I don’t want to marry him, and I pray he doesn’t want to marry me, but the bond is there, and it’s strong, very strong.

I want to travel, I want to shake free of Corunda once I’ve completed my nursing, but Jack shows me how lovely it would be to travel in the company of a beloved someone else. There to cover each other’s exposed weaknesses, while there is still enough freedom left to feel at liberty. I have the right amount of love for Jack, but has he the right amount of love for me? And that, I do not know. He hasn’t transmitted the right signals yet. So I keep holding back, and he keeps holding back. Trust? Oh, trust! It doesn’t exist.

Kitty noticed her happiness when she walked in. “You’re getting over Grace at last, Edda.”

“Yes, I am,” said Edda, pulling off boots and jodhpurs. It was on the tip of her tongue to mention Jack, but she didn’t — leave well enough alone. “Did you listen to Maude prattling about the Burdum heir?” she asked instead.

“Only that he’s a doctor. Where does he consult, I wonder?”

“I have no idea,” Edda answered. “Just that he’s a Burdum heir who outranks Jack Thurlow.”

Tufts erupted into the common room. “Edda, the duty roster has been changed. You’re to have your days off, but then you’re going to the operating theatre.” Her pretty face twisted. “Half your luck! I was hoping I’d be the first.”

“Dr. Finucan won’t let you go until you’ve finished whatever it is you’re doing for him,” Kitty said unsympathetically. “You can’t have all the treats, Tufts.”

“I know, just as I know that my turn will come.”

But why did I say nothing to them about Jack? Edda asked herself as she headed for the bathroom, there to eliminate the aroma of horse. They are my
sisters
! But he’s made no overture to me beyond friendship, and what if he should fall in love with Kitty? No, I won’t let that happen! Great though my love for Kitty is, I won’t stand by and let her ruin my life.

A thought that, one day later, Edda found uncanny; by sheer accident she and Jack chanced upon Kitty walking the bridle path. Jack made all the correct responses, so did Kitty, but the horses were in a mood to canter, and Kitty, afoot, disliked being in such close proximity to huge animals.

“Pretty girl,” said Jack after they sat on their log.

“The prettiest in the world,” Edda said sincerely.

Jack grinned. “If you like the type, I daresay. But dumpy azalea bushes don’t thrill me. I like sophisticated poplars.”

Her turn to laugh. “Do you know what sophisticated means?”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” he said enigmatically.

Corunda Base Hospital’s Casualty department held a small operating theatre adequate for stemming a haemorrhage or immobilising broken bones until the patient could be transferred for more major procedures to the hospital’s one full-sized and fully equipped theatre, which lay down-ramp from the junction of the Men’s and Women’s wards. Two surgeons attended the hospital, both also having private practices in rooms nearby: Dr. Ian Gordon was the general and abdominal man, Dr. Erich Herzen the orthopaedic man, and both were considered good surgeons. The anaesthetist was Dr. Tony Watson, skilled in the administration of chloroform, ether, nitrous oxide, and local injections; he also had a good instinct for when it was necessary to give the patient a whiff of oxygen to lighten the gas-induced coma up a little.

When Edda stepped through the double doors she found herself at the start of a series of chambers, only one of which was the operating theatre proper: there was a scrub room, a gassing room, a sterilising room where all the instruments were stored as well as sterilised, a changing room for the men and another for the women, a room for storing bulky things that might be needed, and six single rooms where the recovering patients were put until the surgeons considered them fit to go back to their
wards. Maternity, she had discovered long ago, was pursued elsewhere — unless the expectant mother needed a Caesarean section, which was done in this main theatre. The obstetrician, Dr. Ned Mason, was a Corunda institution; anyone under forty born in Corunda had been delivered by Ned Mason, who had no intention of retiring.

Theatre Sister was a martinet named Dorothy Marshall; under her command she had ten nurses and two junior sisters. All the nurses were West Enders permanently seconded to Theatre, but Edda’s arrival heralded the beginning of a change that would steadily grow in size as the years went on. Consequently Theatre Sister was not pleased to see her. However, she understood that her ability to transmit her knowledge to a passing parade of trainee nurses would radically affect her own future welfare. Therefore she was determined to make a good theatre nurse out of Latimer.

Edda would commence, she learned, in Theatre itself, working as the “dirty nurse” — a clean and scrubbed but not sterile servant to those whose sterility had to be maintained. She was there to remove the used instruments, scrub and wash them clear of every particle of tissue and blood, then put them into the steriliser to boil for twenty minutes before removing them with sterile forceps and laying them out on sterile, cloth-covered trays that went then to a steam autoclave. It was dangerous and uncomfortable work, between the burns, scalds and heat that dogged every phase of antisepsis. Because of its perils, the job of dirty nurse was a rigidly fixed length of time. Before fatigue set in, a nurse came off dirty nursing and was given sedentary duties for the rest of her shift.

Theatre Sister herself acted as chief surgical assistant and often closed the incision; if the procedure were extremely taxing, another qualified doctor would join the surgeon, who was prone to grumble because Theatre Sister knew more and operated better. She did not, unfortunately, have a medical degree, so the rich, having the knowledge and ability to sue, were actually worse off than the poor, who got Theatre Sister no matter what. Many the chuckles Edda enjoyed as her nursing career went on and she saw for herself that the privileges of rank and wealth did not always guarantee the best medical care. Nor did it pay to be an obnoxious patient; a nurse made to suffer by a patient for no reason beyond malice had all kinds of revenges at her fingertips, from frightful laxatives to itching rashes. Nurses too were human!

Instrument nurse, Edda learned, passed the sterile instruments either to the surgeon or to Theatre Sister, and dropped the used ones in a dish for the dirty nurse to collect and clean. One of the several around the table, usually Swab Sister in Sister Marshall’s establishment, was responsible for counting the number of swabs placed inside an incision. If it were an abdominal operation, swabs might be the size of women’s handkerchiefs, and be stuffed into the cavity by what seemed like the dozen. Yet every swab had to be recovered before a gaping abdominal incision could be closed. Did a swab remain inside, death could ensue.

One nurse hovered by the anaesthetist’s shoulder to assist him, and had no other duty than whatever he demanded of her. In fact, each gowned and masked body clustered around the
operating table had specific duties and could be pardoned nothing. Theatre Sister, a junior Sister and five nurses made up the team, with a second team ready to take over the moment Theatre Sister ordered it. That was usually at the end of an operation, but if the procedure were very long and difficult, the team might change in mid-stream. Not that the second team sat idly by; there were recovering patients to nurse, many things to do.

To her intense gratification, Edda found that watching an operation held neither nausea nor revulsion for her; it was just too interesting. The steady gloved hands sopping up beads of blood, applying a metal tube to suck up a stronger bleed, the deft snapping shut of a pair of artery forceps on a stubborn bleeder, the neat way a whole group of these haemostats, as they were called, was gathered together and confined with a tie to keep them out of the way — fascinating! Admittedly the crunch of cutters through thick bone came as a shock — so much for that romantic twaddle about the delicate hands of a surgeon! Surgeons needed hands like engine mechanics.