Nurse in Waiting (4 page)

“—And proceeded to make quite sure that I should!” put in
Joanna
imperturbably. “It doesn’t matter about me. I can take care of myself. But you knew Miss Ferrall would be hurt at the suggestion that I
—”

“Oh, call her Shuan, for goodness’ sake!” It was his first sign of ordinary irritation since the scene with his mother. Joanna wondered whether it was a healthy sign or not, but felt that she would rather deal with plain irritability than an oblique kind of hostility which it was difficult to pin down.

“Well, ‘Shuan’, then,” she said. “You knew that she wouldn’t like the idea. So
w
hy did you do it?”

He looked at her oddly. “Shock tactics—for you!” he said unexpectedly. “I was having a small bet with myself as to whether, being put to it, you would go all briskly professional and show the courage of your conviction that all that dog was too much of a good thing, or whether you would back down. You backed down, of course. I was disappointed in you.”

“Indeed!” Joanna did not know whether to be annoyed or amused as he went on calmly:

“Yes. And you needn’t suppose Shuan would have been really hurt. She would merely have enjoyed a fight. We all do. Haven’t you heard of that as being a characteristic of our race?”

“Yes, I have. But I didn’t know you indulged it in your private lives. Nor that it would be considered quite fair to involve a stranger who couldn’t be expected to know the rules of the game!” retorted Joanna.

The blue eyes flashed mockingly. “But my dear Joanna, in an Irish fight there are no ‘rules of the game’! The only concern of anybody is whether it is a private affair, or whether anyone can join in! Your own cartoonists have been telling you that for years!”

Baffled as to how far to take him seriously, Joanna gave it up and was saved from further argument by the appearance at the door of the fat cook who had shown her to her room.

Together they worked at the task of making her patient comfortable for the night, and then Joanna went to her room to change for dinner.

While she dressed she remembered her cavalier of Tulleen station—Justin McKiley—and his suggestion that she might want to seek at the Dower House some light relief from her job at Carrieghmere.

She smiled to herself. Was it possible that he guessed some of the difficulties she was going to encounter at what he called “The House” before she became used to its
c
asual, unconventional atmos
p
here and to the moods of her patient? Perhaps that
h
ad been his method of holding out a friendly hand to a stranger; perhaps, too, she would be glad to take advantage of it one day even though at first she had not been sure that she liked him.

Remembering the chilly atmosphere of the dining
-
room, she put on a warm dark frock and went downstairs to find that Shuan was there, wearing a grey woollen dress which was too colourless for her and In which she looked gauche and slightly uncomfortable. Mrs. Carnehill had merely discarded the check apron and had the appearance of having powdered her nose too hastily.

She seemed to have recovered her spirits, and at sight of Joanna she smiled warmly.

“D’you see now,” she asked rhetorically, “what a help you have been to me already! I’ve been able to catch up on work which should have been done days ago, and when I looked in on Roger before I came in to dinner he seemed quite cheerful!”

“I’m glad of that,” said Joanna, not without irony. Cheerful—at
my
expense! was what she was thinking.

“Yes. You know, I ought to be frank with you and tell you that when the suggestion of having a nurse for Roger was first m
ention
ed by Dr. Beltane and backed up by Colonel Kimstone, I didn’t like the idea at all. Maybe I was even a bit jealous at the thought of anyone else—a stranger—helping to look after him! But now I believe it will be good for him to have him someone as fresh and young as you are.”

Shuan’s head, which had been bent over her soup, came up sharply. Mrs. Carnehill looked at her questioningly and then, with a smile, reached over to give the girl’s cheek a gentle pinch.

“There, alannah!” she said. “We know Roger has you too! But between us, we haven’t got him to the point where he is able to get about again and so be free of the lot of us. Maybe now, with Joanna to help us, we’ll see him improve beyond recognition!”

It was clear to Joanna that Mrs. Carnehill was courageously trying to convince herself that a hope she had cherished for a long time was about to be fulfilled. And she began to wish, both for the older woman’s sake and her own, that Roger Carnehill’s illness was an acute one, instead of one over which hung, like an ominous warning, that suggestion of his doctor’s that his trouble was ‘psychological as much as physical’. That might mean anything. And as Joanna knew only too well, a sick mind could hinder a sick body indefinitely.

She was glad when her hostess changed the subject by asking her ward how she had fared at Naas market.

“Well enough,” returned the girl listlessly. “I think I remembered everything I went for. And I’ve sold Bambino’s next litter.”

“You have, so? That’s grand news. And how much did you spend with Mikey Mo on the strength of it?” teased Mrs. Carnehill.

“Not too much. But I didn’t get anything.” From Shuan’s eyes flashed a note of warning which
J
oanna took to mean that the elusive powder-bowl was not to be mentioned, and
J
oanna reflected that the girl was as vulnerable and as single-minded as a child. Her reaction to Roger’s ill-timed piece of mischief had been a childishly defensive one, and so too had been her sharp lift of the head at Mrs. Carnehill’s innocent suggestion that Roger needed someone ‘fresh and young’ about him. And now even the gift which had not materialized was to be kept a secret.

“I believe we can like each other, she and I,” thought Joanna. “After all, it isn’t
her
fault that we stepped off on the wrong foot almost as soon as we met!”

Mrs. Carnehill was teasing: “I can’t think why you bother with that black thief of a Mikey! Couldn’t you buy in a shop, for the price of one of his quoit
-
rings, all the rubbish on his stall?”

“Not in Naas,” objected Shuan quickly. “Nor in Tulleen. Now and then he has
lovely
things!”

“Well, in Dublin then?”

“But I hardly ever get to Dublin! I haven’t been
since
—”
Shuan stopped and threw a swift glance
in Joanna’s direction.

“You mean—since you chose the furnishing for Joanna’s room? Why, neither you have.” Mrs. Carnehill turned to Joanna. “Did you like your room? Do you know, Shuan arranged it all herself?”

“I thought it charming,” said Joanna quietly. And again found herself puzzled by this new facet to Shuan. She could consider a trinket on a quoits-stall “lovely”, and yet she had maturity enough to furnish a room in quiet good taste. What an odd mixture the girl was!

“You’ll have to go to Dublin,” Mrs. Carnehill went on, turning to
Joanna
. “Justin would take you both in his c
a
r one day. I wonder what you’ll think of the city?” she added. “We love it, of course. But people from England usually consider it dirty and slovenly, compared with English cities or even with Belfast. I admit that its slums are rather in evidence
—”

“Are they?” asked Joanna interestedly.

“I’m afraid so. Streets of fine Georgian mansions have become slums, and only within a hundred yards or so of O’Connell Street, bless its heart!”

They compared cities during the rest of the meal. Then Mrs. Carnehill announced that she was going to spend an hour with Roger.

When she had gone Shuan said ungraciously:

“You didn’t say anything about the powder-bowl to Mums?”

“No. I didn’t think you wanted me to
,”
said Joanna gently. “You didn’t, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.” Then, as if ashamed of having entered into alliance with Joanna even by so much as a glance, she added with assumed carelessness: “Not particularly, that is. But it didn’t matter really. If it’s still there, I dare say I can get it for her next week.”

“I hope you will,” Joanna assured her. But to that there was no reply, so after a minute or two’s silence she tried again.

“Do you know, I admired my room directly I saw it? I remember wondering who had arranged it for me. That particular shade of green is awfully restful.”

There was a pause. Then Shuan said sullenly: “You don’t
have
to be polite about it, you know.”

Taken aback, Joanna still managed to reply gently: “You mean—you didn’t do it for me personally, so that there’s no need for me to pretend I like it if I don’t? But that seems to make you all the more clever—to have arranged a room as tasteful and as pleasing as mine, for someone you had never seen!”

Shuan, however, would not come even half-way to friendship. She muttered: “I didn’t do it for anyone but Mums—because she wanted me to, and she gave me a free hand. Whatever she may say about being ‘jealous’ of a nurse, once Beltie and Colonel Kimstone had talked her into it she
clutched
at the idea. But I never wanted you, and neither did Roger really. For her own sake Mums pretends that he did, but Roger hates being interfered with and ‘managed’.
We
didn’t need you; Roger would have got well without you!”

The childish show of petulance left Joanna almost speechless. But she said coolly: “Aren’t you making a lo
t
of difficulties where they don’t exist?
And
magnifying my importance? Of course Mr. Carnehill’s recovery doesn’t depend on whether I’m here or not! But isn’t it—his recovery, I mean—something we can
all
work for and share in when it happens?
I
should like to think it would be so
—”

“But it won’t! It can’t be the same any more!” broke in the girl passionately. “It will be you who will take Beltie’s orders about Roger; it will be you who will try to rearrange everything about him. Look at the dogs, this afternoon! You must have said something—Roger wouldn’t have made it up! I’ve always heard that about nurses—they never can leave things as they find them. But it won’t work with Roger—he hates change, and if you try to force it on him you’ll only make an enemy of him in the end!”

“My dear Shuan—I may call you Shuan, mayn’t I?—do realize that if I made a habit of making ‘enemies’ out of my patients, soon I shouldn’t have the chance of attending anyone. After all, one of your own friends. Colonel Kimstone, did suggest to Mrs. Carnehill that I might be of help to her with Mr. Carnehill. And that’s all I can be—a help, another pair of hands, perhaps a bit more skilled than yours or his mother’s. But I
can’t
take your place with him—or hers. She realizes that—so why can’t you? Why, you’ve known him since you were a little girl, Mrs. Carnehill tells me. You’ve grown up beside him, and he must be like a brother to you now. Between you there must be a hundred links which
,
however interfering I tried to be, I could never hope to break
—”

She stopped at sight of the girl’s widely staring eyes and rapidly blinking lashes. Shuan said
quickly: “You—oh, you don’t understand
—
!”

Then, as if afraid of betraying that she was near to tears, she turned and ran out of the room.

Puzzled and dismayed, Joanna sat on alone by the fire until Mrs. Carnehill returned. Soon afterwards she excused herself, saying that she would go to bed. But before she went she said quietly:

“Mr. Carnehill tells me that Shuan usually takes his early tea to him in the mornings. Do you think she would like to go on doing that?”

“Why, yes, I think the child would. If that’s all right with you?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll leave it to her.” Joanna hesitated, wondering whether she ought to tell Mrs. Carnehill of the hostility which her own arrival had aroused in Shuan. But she decided to say nothing. For all the girl’s rudeness, Joanna had a certain sympathy for her; she was, after all, no more than a child who thought herself supplanted. And Joanna believed that she had tact enough to deal with a situation of that sort.

She said good night and went to her room. She undressed quickly, put on a warm house-gown and unpinned the shining knot of her hair. It tumbled slowly in a golden cascade over her shoulders and she began the leisurely ritual of its nightly brushing in long, rhythmical strokes.

When she had finished she took from a compartment in her dressing-case writing materials and the fountain-pen which Dale Woodward had given her for her last birthday.

She began to write:

“My dear Dale
—”
but there she stopped.

She remembered that this had been going to be a funny letter. That she had been making mental notes all day, meaning, when she wrote it, to recount all the oddities of her first day in Ireland.

But somehow, tonight, none of it seemed very laughable. Overlaid upon it now was a depressing sense of conflict, of difficult situations lying ahead. And she knew that, tonight at any rate, she could not write of Carrieghmere without betraying to Dale that she had misgivings as to her dealings with the people in it.

And Dale had no use or misunderstanding of what he called “Whimsy-whamsies.” As a scientist, he had the scientist’s precision of mind. For Dale, in his work of research chemistry, disease was a matter of a germ, a microscope and the intriguing “isolation” to follow. And he would not try to understand, as Joanna herself must, that strange tempers and incalculable moods were the things which made patients into
people,
and that to be granted a revealing dawn of hope in a sick man’s eyes was worth to her all the microscopic slides in the world!

No, Dale would not understand
...
“If you don’t think you can cope, throw up the case and come home”—that was how he would reply bluntly to any doubts she might voice. So, until she could be funny and confident and casual about Carrieghmere, about Roger Carnehill and Shuan Ferrall,
s
he would not write at all.