Bittersweet (14 page)

But when an awesomely angry Rector put his foot down, Maude had no choice other than to obey; in her future dealings with Grace, she was informed icily, she would actively discourage the spending of money. Otherwise her own allowance would suffer.

Edda had a more difficult time persuading her father that he must not replace Bear’s £900 and Grace’s £500.

“Please, Daddy, don’t,” she begged. “Bear is too soft with Grace to hide the return of the money from her, so, knowing it’s there, she’ll spend it all over again. To be spendthrift is in Grace’s nature, so leave her husband to deal with it. If you want to help the Olsen family, then pay for their children to be well educated at a decent school. Look at what it did for us.”

And so the matter had been left.

A part of her disgusted that Grace had utterly ruined her relationship with Jack Thurlow, Edda visited Grace less and less as her pregnancy drew toward full term. Though, truth to tell, the fault lay with Jack, not with Grace. In succumbing to Grace’s wiles Jack was baring a secret self whom Edda found soft and weak; he was not at all the kind of man Edda had always thought him. Grr!

When Grace went into labour at the beginning of April 1928, she was huge and, according to obstetrical calculations, overdue. Trying to time his arrival to that of the baby, Bear was already in Corunda; it was the baby ignoring human schedules.

Because Maternity wasn’t busy, nor expected to be busy, Dr. Ned Mason had brought Grace in before her labour pangs even began. Her admission to Maternity acted like a cattle goad: no sooner had Grace unpacked her little suitcase and sat experimentally on the edge of her bed to test its comfort than her water broke. Aware of her identity and aware too that all her sisters were on duty elsewhere, Maternity Sister soothed Grace’s injured feelings as tenderly as competently. The water was cleaned up, a pretty nightgown found, and the company of a sweet West Ender nurse was designated to help her walk around.

“But I don’t want to walk, I want to go to bed!” she protested to Edda when Edda appeared in Theatre travelling scrubs, two masks around her neck. “Why won’t they let me go to bed?”

“Dr. Mason thinks you’re in for a long labour, Grace, which means hours and hours in bed. Now, while you still can,
walk
!”

Kitty and Tufts came in to hug, kiss, explain the walking all over again because Grace was being recalcitrant and refused to believe it helped. Edda muffled a sigh.

“Grace, you were a nurse yourself,” Kitty pointed out.

“Yes, but never on Maternity! Ow, ow, ow, it hurts!”

“Of course it hurts,” Tufts said, pushing Grace inexorably ahead of her. “You did do some anatomy and physiology, Grace, so you must remember Dr. Finucan’s explaining how a woman’s whole pelvis has to open up to let something as huge as a baby out — it’s amazing how much you open up, so yes, it hurts badly. You have to do a day’s work, darling, in really beastly circumstances, before you can expel a baby. Just remember that it’s the best work you’ll ever do because the end result is so wonderful — a healthy, full-term baby.”

“It’s got to be a boy!” Grace panted to Kitty hours later.

“Rubbish,” Kitty crooned, wiping Grace’s face. “What’s so special about having a boy?”

“All men want a son. Girls are a let-down.”

“Don’t wives’ wishes count? After all, they do the hard part.”

Grace made a contemptuous noise. “Who in her right mind would want a girl? Restrained, confined, sat on? If Edda had been a boy, Daddy would have beggared himself to send her up to university and let her do Medicine. But Edda was a girl, so …”

“Yes, well, unfortunately we don’t have any choice in the sex matter, darling. Whatever emerges, boy or girl, is yours. Here, have a sip of water. You need more fluid.”

Bear had driven Grace to the hospital, and was allowed to see his weeping, tormented wife briefly once she was settled in. Then
he was exiled to the father’s waiting room, where a prospective father paced, chain-smoked, tried to think of something other than the fate of his wife and child. If he had had company it would have been easier, but Grace’s baby came long after the September rush of babies conceived during the end/beginning of the year, when too much alcohol was drunk and too few precautions taken. Bear had to wait alone save for flying visits from Grace’s father and sisters.

Twenty-seven hours after labour had started, Bear learned that he was the proud father of a nine-pound baby boy in the absolute pink of health.

Grace was exhausted, but none the worse for her travail apart from stitches in a torn perineum. A boy! A boy with snow-white hair, brows and lashes, and a long, strong body.

“Well, Grace, that’s the hardest day’s work you’ll ever do,” said Aunt Tufts, expertly holding the baby. “A very nice little chap too! What are you going to call him, Bear?”

“Brian,” said Bear so quickly that Grace’s opinion was lost.

“Brian? I like it, Bear, but you’ve never mentioned it.”

“He was my favourite brother. Died in a pub brawl.”

If Aunt Tufts, the only family present, thought it macabre to name a child after someone killed in a pub brawl, she gave no indication of it. Smiling, she handed the bundle to Bear. “It is a fine name, manly and not open to playground persecution.”

“Exactly,” said Bear, gazing down at his progeny with awe and humility. “Grace’s names were all airy-fairy, but I’ll not have my boy saddled with a sissy name. Brian Olsen sounds good.”

“Oh, Bear!” cried Grace reproachfully. “I wanted something that sounds right with a knighthood. Sir Maximilian Olsen!”

“Maximilian is sissy,” said Edda, entering. “Brian? Ideal! Thank God there’s one member of the Olsen family with sense.”

To be the grandfather of a male child delighted the Rector, who had worked out how to help Grace without putting money in her purse. He paid for a scrub woman to clean the house on Trelawney Way once a week, and come three times a week to do the worst job of all — wash the dozens and dozens of big terry-cloth “nappies”, as baby napkins or diapers were called. All Grace did was hose the solids from the dirty nappies, then dump them in the copper. The scrub woman boiled them, rinsed them, and hung them out to dry on the clothes-lines that now criss-crossed the backyard and turned it into a flapping jungle. The laundry was now a shed in proximity to the back door; what had been the laundry was a nappy-soak area.

Bear, Edda noticed now, was less eager to go out on the road than of yore. Part of that was due to his enchantment with his son, but a larger part of it was rooted in worry for Grace, who, despite so much house and laundering help, couldn’t seem to cope with her son’s advent. She was so well endowed with milk that she leaked it, and within a week of Brian’s birth was so revolted that she put him on a bottle, enduring milk withdrawal as the lesser evil. Dr. Mason roared in outrage, so did District Nurse, but Grace turned deaf ears. Changing his nappies revolted her too, so she did it less often than she should
have; the result was nappy rash so severe that all three of her sisters were forced to bully and badger her into the proper care. And in the end Grace got what she wanted from the Rector: full-time nursery help.

“Somehow,” said Edda wrathfully to Kitty and Tufts one day when baby Brian was three months old, “our artful sister has managed to wriggle out of every task she finds unpalatable. But this is the bitter end! It’s daylight robbery, I tell you! A full-time maid to make sure that Brian is clean and dry enough not to break out in not rashes, but sores! I am ropeable!”

“It just goes to show how much Grace must have hated nursing the sick,” said Kitty, eyes bright with tears. “Maude likes a dainty house, and passed that on to us. She’s not a nice person, but she never really treated any of us like a Cinderella. Maude’s tortures were all of the mind. And she got to Grace.”

“What Grace’s maternal conduct proves,” said Tufts firmly, “is that she hates messes, and that was there in her nursing too. That she never neglected her patients the way she’s neglecting Brian was due to her fear of the ward sisters — she was more afraid of them than of cleaning up the messes. Now she has a baby incapable of producing anything but messes, and no one to terrorise her into cleaning them up.”

“Don’t forget the confusion,” Kitty said. “We’ve always known that Grace couldn’t organise a booze-up in a brewery, but with Mama and we three for sisters, she never had to organise anything. Now she’s responsible for running a home and a baby, and she’s too confused to know how to go about it. Father has stepped up to the breach, which was the worst thing could have
happened — what about later on, when she has no father or sisters to help her?”

“Disaster,” Edda said hollowly.

“Too pessimistic,” said Tufts. “Someone will always step up to the breach to save Grace.”

“Why should they?” Edda asked, unable to see it.

“She’s every man’s dream woman — incapable of existing without a man to lean on.” Tufts snorted. “Come on, Edda, you know what I mean! Grace transforms herself into property that has to be managed by a superior being — a man. Everything she does tells men that she can’t look after herself. And they love that! Or a certain kind of man does, anyway. The Bears of this world.”

“Well, rather Bear than me!” said Edda savagely. “Why can’t she understand how comfortable her life would be if she organised it better? No one likes cleaning shit off baby wraps, but as it has to be done,
just bloody do it
! All that expensive furniture, yet her house smells like a cesspit!”

“Why so violent, Edda?” Kitty asked.

“Grace is pregnant again. When the new one is born, they’ll be fourteen months apart.”

Lavender-blue eyes collided with amber-gold ones: Kitty and Tufts exchanged a look of silent commiseration. Of course it hurt Edda more! She was Grace’s full twin. And, greatest misfortune of all, as controlled as Grace was disorganised. The flaws of a Grace lay very far from Edda’s heart.

If Kitty and Tufts had known the significance of one Jack Thurlow, what Edda was suffering would have made even more sense.

I
n April 1929, the three years of nurse training finished. Edda Latimer, Heather Scobie-Latimer and Katherine Treadby-Latimer found themselves certificated junior sisters. Edda had won several prizes, and all three qualified with distinction.

By this time there was nothing about Corunda Base Hospital they didn’t know, nowhere in Corunda Base Hospital they hadn’t worked. The mental hospital was a nightmare best forgotten, mostly because there was nothing could be done for the poor creatures save to shut them up in padded cells or a dormitory — the asylum was a place of screams, raves, drifting ghosts, murderous maniacs.

No new trainees had appeared in 1927 or 1928, but this year, 1929, would see eight trainees, all matriculated, and all from the West End. With Edda in the lead, the three had talked, argued, pushed, shoved and campaigned to convince the West Enders that they must, must,
must
take advantage of the new system, that the old one was dead. The future of nursing lay with training and registration; those nursing unregistered would
be reduced to poorly paid skivvies stripped of every atom of interesting work: there to wash, clean up messes, lift and turn patients, serve the meals — all under the supervision of a formal trainee. Lena Corrigan, always leader of the West Enders and at first an obdurate enemy, had come around first too, and added her voice to the three. With 1929’s eight trainees the result, plus a grant from the Department of Health to build a proper nurses’ home incorporating flats for sisters. To Edda, Tufts and Kitty, that battle was the one most worth winning, for it offered girls from underprivileged backgrounds the chance to espouse a proper career without the masculine complications that schoolteaching brought with it, or the servility of secretarying. Nurses had a certain power; anyone thrust into the live-or-die maw of a hospital came out with a profound respect for them, whether they roared like dragons or floated like exquisite angels above the sickbed. Real or imagined, nurses were
remembered
.

Three new sisters meant difficulties, of course. How could a district hospital employ all three? That the task was easier than it had been in 1926 was purely due to attrition: seven of the most experienced West End nurses from the old system had retired. Unfortunately their wages were not the equal of registered nurses’ salaries. The hospital was, besides, thrown into an instantaneous chaos early in June — an utterly unexpected, unpredictable cataclysm.

The General Medical Superintendent, Dr. Francis Campbell, had been superintendent for twenty-five years when 1929 arrived,
and fully anticipated continuing in his post for another decade. Then, at precisely the same moment as the three junior sisters received their certificates by mail, Frank Campbell died of a heart attack while seated at his desk, an item of furniture to which hospital people firmly believed he was welded, since he was never seen anywhere else on hospital territory. For Frank Campbell, Corunda Base Hospital
was
his desk. The horrors his kind of superintending generated took place elsewhere, so he didn’t see them. No one knew whether he had felt his heart attack, as he had been alone when it came on, and there was no system of internal communication that he might have used to summon help. He had refused to install one as too expensive. For him, it certainly was.

Hospitals existed under the umbrella of the particular state’s Department of Health, but to most intents and purposes they ruled themselves, especially the non-teaching rural ones. The Hospital Board was empowered to decide things, including fill its staff vacancies from highest to lowest, set its policies, and administer its funds. Corunda Base Hospital had a huge endowment, safely banked under the control of its Board — moneys that had come from three-quarters of a century of bequests plus astonishing savings.

Decisions about what to do with three junior sisters were deferred until after a new superintendent was appointed, leaving the Latimers in a temporary stasis, entitled to wear the starched organdie veil but not yet permitted to doff their nurse’s aprons. Edda stayed as close to Theatre as she could, working Casualty or Men’s; Kitty stayed on Children’s; and Tufts oscillated between Maternity and Night Sister, the latter wandering the ramps and
wards armed with a hurricane lamp. Frank Campbell was too mean to buy batteries!

Then, most unexpectedly, Matron sent for Tufts, who appeared wearing both her sister’s veil and her nurse’s apron.

“I think the apron can go, Sister Scobie.”

“Not yet, ma’am. It can come in handy. Our duties aren’t so defined that we can be sure we won’t encounter a mess.”

“As you wish.” The smooth, rather bland face wore its usual air of unemotional interest. “Though your future careers cannot be decided as yet, Sister Scobie, I feel confident enough of the direction yours should take to be able to speak to you about it even at this distressing time.”

“Yes, Matron.”

“With no less than eight trainees due to begin nursing in about another ten weeks, it behooves me as head of the nursing staff to take immediate steps about their education. The plans Dr. Campbell had formulated I considered wrong in all respects, and make no bones about telling you, Sister, that with his death I have scrapped them to start again. After three years in this establishment, I imagine that I don’t need to tell you my reasons for scrapping his plans?”

“No, Matron, you don’t. I understand, and am delighted.”

“Good!” Matron eased a little in her chair. “Would you be interested in the position of Sister Tutor?”

Tufts swallowed. “That would depend, ma’am.”

“Upon what?” The voice was icy.

“Upon the amount of authority the position carries. If I can carve out a training system that satisfies the Nursing Council yet
incorporates various aspects that stem from my own deductions, then I am interested. I would also block out an entirely new educational syllabus that goes beyond Nursing Council ideas of what a nurse needs to know. Naturally I would present all my work to you and the new superintendent before submitting it to Sydney, but what I couldn’t undertake is to be an automaton who obeys someone else’s schemes.” The wide gold eyes held an obdurate look. “You see, ma’am, I have my own schemes.”

For a moment Matron Newdigate didn’t answer, the starch of her dress creaking a little more than usual — a sign that she was breathing hard. Finally the words came, measured and detached. “I think, Sister Scobie, that if you didn’t have your own ideas, I would not be offering you this position. It is a senior one carrying a deputy matron’s rank, so I could justify the importation of a Sister Tutor from Sydney or Melbourne. However, a person from Corunda is preferable if a suitable one can be found, and I believe you are eminently suitable. I agree to your terms.”

“Then I accept the post.” Tufts rose to her feet smoothly. “Thank you, Matron. Er — there is one other thing.”

“Pray enlighten me, Sister.”

“I will need to confer privately with Dr. Liam Finucan a very great deal. Unless, of course, you plan to use a different medical man to give the lectures and do some teaching?”

“It will be Dr. Finucan, and I have no objection whatsoever to your being closeted alone with him. These days he’s a perfectly respectable single man — and your colleague,” said Matron, secretly loving this clever, slightly dangerous young woman.

“Good,” said Tufts, and departed.

She found the other two junior sisters in the cottage, drinking tea with Lena Corrigan. Though Sister Marjorie Bainbridge had been given the title of Home Sister and moved into a flat in the newly building nurses’ home, no one from Matron down had bothered to move the Latimers out of their original housing. They now possessed the whole of it, and a degree of comfort that the denizens of the new nurses’ home would never know. The reward of the pioneers.

“I have a definite new job,” Tufts said, accepting a cup.

They all looked interested, but Kitty got in first. “What?”

“Sister Tutor, with deputy matron’s status.”

“Stiffen the snakes!” Lena said on a gasp. “That’s the absolute and utter grouse, Tufts. Glorious!”

Amid hugs and choruses of congratulations, Tufts told the tale of her interview, with a smiling Edda the quietest — oh, not from anger or disappointment, they all knew; it came from an extra joy. Rank and importance for women meant much to Edda.

“Lena, I know the Rectory Anzacs are tastier than arrowroot bikkies, but you’re not drinking tea with us just to dunk an Anzac or see what colour Edda’s lipstick is today — you have news too,” Tufts said, on her second cup of tea and third Anzac biscuit.

“Correct as always, Miss Myrna Loy. She’s the film star Men’s has decided you resemble, Edda, by the way. Kitty is always Marion Davies, but you wobble around a bit —”

“Get on with your news, Lena,” said Tufts with a growl.

Lena’s hands flew up in surrender. “All right, all right! I saw Matron too, and I’ve got a promotion too. After nearly twenty years classified as nursing help —”

“I hope Frank Campbell is burning in Hell!” Kitty snarled.

“— Matron has managed to what she called ‘grandfather me in’ as an officially registered nurse. I’m Sister Corrigan, and I’m going where my heart lies — the asylum, as deputy matron in charge.”

That provoked a fresh outburst of triumphant joy; yet one more victory for women, and so well deserved! This time, however, their descent from the heights was tempered with dismay, though all of the Latimers knew their concern was wasted.

“Lena, after three years I
know
how much you love nursing in the asylum, but now you’re officially registered, and with your fund of knowledge, you can pick your kind of patient,” Edda said, eyes gone dark grey with anxiety. “Are you sure that being there a thousand per cent of your time won’t drive you around the bend too? There’s nothing can be done for mental cases, and psychiatrists are no help. All they do is observe and catalogue the forms dementia takes. Mental nursing is physically dangerous, but it’s far more dangerous to the spirit. Think of the frustration!”

A wiry woman in her mid-thirties, Lena Corrigan had a mop of dark red, curly hair, and eyes of much the same colour; she was the widow of a man who had been fonder of the bottle than his wife, and had no children. More than that bare outline
the Latimers did not know; she was proud and embittered, Lena Corrigan.

“Lord bless you, Edda, I know the pitfalls,” Lena said, her patience intact because she knew Edda’s protest was genuinely felt. “Loonies fascinate me, I suppose that’s the crux of it, and now Frank Campbell’s gone, the asylum stands a chance of a psychiatrist and some treatment. Mental nursing won’t always be a lost cause. I know it attracts some people who are definitely loonier than the patients, but it’s not an irrefutable law. If I can’t do anything else, I’m going to keep detailed notes on every single case — one day observations like mine will be seen as important.” The fiery eyes glowed redly. “I’m in on the ground floor, just as I have been as a nurse who scraped an education. And I thank you for the help, especially from Edda and Tufts. You girls can
teach
.”

“Deputy matron in charge,” said Kitty. “Many congratulations, Lena, and at least you’ll be paid well at last.” Suddenly she jumped. “Oh! Listen, girls! Mama told me a rumour yesterday.”

“About what?” Edda asked, sounding bored.

“Our new superintendent.”

“Of course! Daddy’s on the Hospital Board!” Tufts cried.

“Who? What? Where? When? Why? And how?” Lena asked.

“I knew you’d all prick up your ears at that!” Kitty said on a chuckle. “No, he’s not Jack Thurlow, Edda.”

“Take a running jump, Kits.
Who?
”

“Maude says he bears a famous Corunda name, and it is not Treadby. His name is Dr. Charles Henry Burdum, he’s thirty-three years old, and until this job came up he was the
superintendent of a large sector of the Manchester Royal Infirmary,” said Kitty.

“Stone the bloody crows!” said Edda on a gasp, then frowned. “That’s rot, Kitty. ‘Superintendent of a large sector’ indeed! You mean he was one of half a dozen deputy supers swanning around one of Europe’s most prestigious hospitals.” She gurgled in her throat. “Superintendent of bed pans and urine bottles!”

“Mama said he was ‘high up’ — whatever that means.”

Lena waved her hands about. “Oh, Edda, shut up! What I want to know is, which Burdum is he? A Corunda Burdum, or some ring-in from the Old Country with the same name? As far as I know, old Tom Burdum has no heirs except Grace’s Good Samaritan and Edda’s riding companion, Jack Thurlow.” She emphasised “riding”.

Kitty gave a shiver of delicious anticipation and settled to tell the rest of her tale secure in the knowledge that she had hooked her audience completely. “He’s the son of old Tom’s son, would you believe? I mean, the whole of Corunda knows Tom and son Henry had a shocking quarrel sixty years ago, and that Henry left not only Corunda, but also New South Wales, as it was then — no Commonwealth of Australia sixty years ago! Henry went to England, and never communicated with old Tom. About twenty years ago old Tom was notified that Henry had been killed when two trains collided in Scotland — dozens of people died, it seems. The letter to old Tom said Henry was a bachelor with no issue.”

“Yes, and all Corunda knows that was what soured old Tom on the world, especially after Jack Thurlow let him down,” Lena said.

“Well,” said Kitty triumphantly, “the letter from Scotland was wrong! Not long after he had arrived in England, Henry married a well-off widow and didn’t need old Tom’s money. He founded a successful insurance underwriting company, while his wife’s family made big bikkies milling cotton textiles. A son, Charles, was born thirty-three years ago. The wife died in labour with him, and Henry went quite crazy in a harmless way. It was left to the mother’s family to care for the boy, Charles.”

“But surely old Tom wouldn’t have been misled about Henry’s death? That’s ridiculous,” Edda said.

“I gather the train accident was a shambles, and while the authorities found identification on Henry’s body, they found no evidence of a wife or son. With the wife dead and her family estranged from Henry, no one suspected he was on the train. The boy’s name of Burdum didn’t arise during his minority, at least in a way that was noticed. Simply, after some stipulated waiting period produced no answers about Henry, the authorities assumed that old Tom in Corunda was his next-of-kin, and notified him. In the meantime, Henry’s son, Charles, lived and prospered in Lancashire. He went to Eton and Balliol College at Oxford, then took a medical degree at Guy’s.” Kitty looked rather naughty. “It turns out that Mama already knew most of the story — she did quite a lot of research on Dr. Charles Burdum when she first heard of him a couple of years ago.”