The Bad Penny (25 page)

He did not meet her eyes as he spoke but stared over her left shoulder as though there were someone more interesting behind her. Patty, taking her property, began to try to thank him but he cut her short.

‘It’s all right,’ he said gruffly, angrily almost, Patty felt. ‘Only next time you go out of an evening, you’d best choose your company a bit more carefully. Next time there might be no one about to—’

Patty felt her cheeks go hot and cut across his words without compunction. ‘Just
what
do you mean by that?’ she asked furiously. ‘I didn’t choose to be so much as spoken to, let alone hauled off up that jigger! I was making my way home as quietly as I could – why I even crossed the road when I saw those men come bursting on to the pavement – and the next thing I knew, one of them had grabbed me! And what do you mean,
when I first saw you
? You’re not trying to tell me you stood by and watched whilst I was – I was molested?’

She was staring furiously into Darky’s face and saw the flush creep up from his neck; saw, too, that he was beginning to look angry. She would have liked to retreat, but held her ground. ‘Well? Just what
were
you doing in St Anne Street last evening, Mr Knight?’

‘I don’t see that it’s any of your business, Nurse Peel,’ Darky said coldly. ‘I’d – I’d been round to a friend’s place and I didn’t recognise you, as it happens. I saw a feller put his arm round your waist and thought no more of it … well, I could see you were willing …’

It was too much. ‘I was
not
willing and you may go to the devil, Mr Knight,’ Patty said. She saw him beginning to open his mouth and slammed the door in his face, turning the key in the lock as she did so. Then she rushed across the kitchen, threw herself into one of the fireside chairs and indulged in a hearty fit of weeping.

It was a good thing, she reflected later, that Mrs Knight had kept the children rather longer than usual. By the time Maggie and Merrell returned, Patty was in command of herself once more. She had brushed her gaberdine coat and it was hanging on the back door; Mrs Clarke’s beautiful dress hung beside it, washed, dried and ironed. Supper was on the table and Patty herself was calmly pouring milk into Merrell’s little mug and cutting her bread and margarine into fingers. Maggie’s first remark, as she hung her own thin jacket on the back of the door, was: ‘You’ve got your coat back! Oh, Patty, I’m ever so glad! And we’ve had just about the best day ever. Mrs Knight let us take off our clothes, except for our knickers, and we bathed in the sea! We dug in the sand and made sand pies and lovely castles and Merrell and me collected shells to decorate the castles with. Then Mrs Knight’s sister, Mrs Widnes, gave us a lovely tea with home-made scones and jam, and a plateful of little pink shrimps. It were lovely, honest it was.’

‘I’m glad you had a good day and yes, I got my coat back,’ Patty said guardedly. ‘There’s salad for supper with hard-boiled eggs, and a dippy egg for Merrell. I’m just going to put it on now.’ She suited action to her words and presently the three of them took their places and began to eat.

‘Where did you find the coat?’ Maggie asked, reaching for her mug of tea. ‘Was it at the police station after all?’

‘No. Mr – Mr Knight found it lying in the road. He brought it round on his way home from work,’ Patty said briefly. She began to spoon the white of the egg into Merrell’s eager mouth. ‘This young lady may have had a good tea, but she’s still very hungry, I see.’

She half expected Maggie to continue to question her over the recovery of her coat but Maggie shot a shrewd glance at her, opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again. And then the business of the evening, which was to get everyone first fed and then washed and changed and into bed, took over, and the affair of the coat was forgotten, or so Patty hoped.

Merrell was not talking very much yet though she was beginning to make a big effort to be understood, and as Patty washed and changed her she chattered constantly about her lovely day, though most of what she said might have been in a foreign language for all the sense Patty could make of it. She said as much to Maggie as the two of them made their hot drinks later and prepared to go to bed, but Maggie said, wisely, that children did things at their own pace. ‘My little brother Freddie scarce said a word until he was three,’ she told Patty. ‘And Harold was chattering like a magpie when he were no more than eighteen months. But now Freddie’s top of his class and Harold’s just run of the mill. So it don’t do to worry yourself over Merrell not saying a lot, ’cos it don’t mean a thing.’

Much heartened by this matter of fact approach, Patty went to bed and eventually to sleep, though all the cutting remarks which she could have said – should have said – to Darky Knight kept her awake for a good hour.

‘Now! If you’ve got your balance, if you’re quite sure, then I’ll give you a shove and you can see if you can stay on the bike for a few yards without coming face to face with the cobbles,’ Patty said breathlessly, trying to hold the bicycle upright whilst Ellen sat on the seat, clutching the handlebars and wobbling wildly from side to side. ‘All right? Say “go” when you’re ready.’

Patty was teaching Ellen to ride a bicycle. For the first week, Ellen had hurried after her on foot, but this was frustrating for Patty and exhausting for Ellen so, on Sunday, the two of them had gone round to Nurse Gundry’s neat little house to ask her if she might consider hiring her bicycle to them for a few weeks.

Nurse Gundry had been on the district for all her working life, and had retired three years ago. However, she still used her bicycle, pedalling furiously along the most crowded thoroughfares and padlocking the machine whilst she went shopping, bargaining fiercely for any goods which had taken her fancy. Patty knew that the older woman was considered eccentric but, nevertheless, she liked her. Whenever illness struck and the district found itself suddenly shorn of nurses, the authorities knew they could always rely on Gundry to step into the breach. She had been a little doubtful about asking the older woman for the loan of her bicycle, but to her pleasure Nurse Gundry had not hesitated. ‘You’re welcome to have a borrow of it weekdays, ’cos at this time of year I reckon walking is a nice change from bicycling,’ she had said. ‘But come the weekend I like to cycle into the country, wi’ me little tent strapped to me back and me grub in the carrier. So can you have it back here by, say, eight o’clock of a Friday evening? As for payin’ me, I wouldn’t take money from a nurse, not if I were ever so. And as soon as Purbright here decides to stay wi’ the district, we’ll all go down to Paddy’s market and I’ll choose a good sturdy machine for her to buy. How’s that?’

Patty and Ellen had been delighted, but Patty had not reckoned on the extreme difficulty of teaching a grown woman to ride a bicycle. Ellen had never ridden one in her life and was frankly scared at the idea of having to brave the traffic. Patty pooh-poohed this, assuring her friend that she would soon grow accustomed, but that had been before she had actually seen Ellen and bicycle together. Ellen had no natural sense of balance and though, so far, they had only practised in Ashfield Place, Patty was beginning to dread their first foray into proper streets. Maggie, who had never ridden a bicycle until she had come to Ashfield Place, had told Ellen that she had mastered the art in two days, but Maggie was not afraid of falling whereas Ellen was terrified of it, and frequently fell off because she forgot to pedal and kept screaming and closing her eyes in anticipation of disaster.

Today, however, Ellen was determined to learn and was concentrating on what she did and refusing to panic. As a result, she actually managed to ride the full length of Ashfield Place, though turning at the bottom was beyond her as yet. In fact, as soon as she put on the brakes, she fell off, saving the bicycle from a tumble with some difficulty and then turning to beam at Patty. ‘Not bad, eh?’ she said breathlessly. ‘I’m goin’ to get it right this evening if it kills me! You wait and see, Peel. When you set off for work on Monday, I’ll be cycling alongside you.’

‘Not if you can’t turn corners, you won’t,’ Patty said. ‘Still, you’re getting on pretty well. And you must learn to stop properly; pull on the brakes slowly and then lean sideways, so that one foot goes on to the ground. Are you ready to have another go?’

By the end of the evening, when it was growing dusk, Patty wheeled Nurse Gundry’s bicycle up the steps and padlocked it to the balcony rail. Then she and Ellen went into the house to join Maggie. Merrell was in bed but Maggie had just brewed the tea and was pouring it into three mugs. She looked up and smiled as the girls came in. ‘How did it go?’ she enquired. ‘There weren’t nearly as many screams and bumps as usual!’

‘No, because tonight I had an audience,’ Ellen said mysteriously. ‘There were this feller … he were keepin’ well back so it were difficult to see his face at first, but later he came downstairs and crossed the Place and went off somewhere. My, but he’s good-lookin’! The best-lookin’ feller I’ve seen since I left the hospital. He must live somewhere on our landing, but I don’t reckon I’ve seen him before.’ She sighed deeply. ‘He’s lovely when he smiles. He’s got the whitest teeth and he’s ever so tanned. But you wouldn’t have seen him, Patty, because you were watching me and you had your back to him. I reckon he must be a neighbour, though, unless he were just visiting.’

‘I imagine you probably saw Mr Knight,’ Patty said indifferently. ‘But don’t waste your time making sheep’s eyes at him, Ellen. He doesn’t like nurses.’

Ellen giggled. ‘I thought all men liked nurses,’ she objected. ‘They’ve got some weird idea that we’re more – more cooperative than girls in other professions. Anyway, you can’t dislike someone ’cos of the work they do, surely?’

‘Mr Knight can,’ Patty said, sitting down thankfully and beginning to sip her tea. ‘It seems unreasonable – well, it
is
unreasonable – but he blames midwives for his wife’s death.’

‘Oh, he’s married, is he?’ Ellen said, then took in the full meaning of Patty’s words. She brightened. ‘D’you mean he’s a widow?’

It was Patty’s turn to giggle. ‘A widow is a woman, you fool,’ she said. ‘But yes, he’s a widower, if that’s what you mean. I don’t think he’s interested in girls, though. His wife died four years ago and his mam told Mrs Clarke – she lives further along our balcony – that he’s not taken a girl out since.’

‘You’d better keep your voice down, Ellen, ’cos he lives next door,’ Maggie advised, speaking for the first time. ‘He often goes out of an evening, but Mrs Knight’s always there and the wall between the flats ain’t all that thick.’ She eyed Ellen curiously. ‘Don’t you have a boyfriend, Ellen?’

‘I have hundreds of men eager to spend their money on me,’ Ellen said airily, then leaned across the table and chucked Maggie under the chin. ‘You are daft, young Maggie! I’m a nurse; doesn’t that mean anything to you? Nurses are lucky if they get one evening off a week and then we’re often too tired to go out and have a gay old time. Why, Patty here only came to the dance hall once and that took some arranging. Still, if I had a handsome feller like Mr Knight living next door to me, I’d make him change his mind about nurses, see if I wouldn’t.’

‘You do live next door to Mr Knight,’ Maggie observed, ‘and you’ll go on living next to him until you decide you want to go back to the hospital, I suppose.’

‘I’m not sure that I do want to go back to the hospital,’ Ellen said thoughtfully. ‘I know I’ve only been on the district a short while but I really like it, honest to God I do. And although we work ever so hard, at least you are your own boss,’ she added, addressing Patty. ‘If you decide to do all your revisits in the morning and have an hour off in the afternoon for your messages, provided you keep up with the work that’s fine. The authorities don’t care how you arrange your day as long as the job gets done.’ This time she turned to Maggie. ‘It’s so different on the ward, you wouldn’t believe. Even when there’s nothing to do, which isn’t often, a senior staff nurse, or Sister, will tell you to count blankets or draw sheets or they’ll decide the walls need washing down or the floor could do with an extra polish. Then there’s the ward kitchen and the sluice and the patients’ lavatories – oh aye, Sister would invent a job rather than think of you being idle for ten minutes. No, give me the district any time.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Patty said. ‘I was talking to Mrs Ruskin a couple of weeks ago – telling her that you were coming to stay with me, Ellen – and she said she’d had dozens of nurses doing their midder training with her and only four of them had actually stayed on the district. She said lots of nurses, though they grumble like anything, prefer the regulated regime of the wards to the more informal approach on the district. So I shall count myself really lucky if you decide to join us.’

Despite Patty’s fears, by the following Monday Ellen insisted that she could ride well enough to accompany Patty on Nurse Gundry’s bike, so the two of them set off. As they made their way to their first call, Patty warned Ellen that they were about to visit a very unhygienic house. ‘You’ll soon get to know which patients can’t cope and which can,’ Patty said. ‘Mrs O’Connor has eight children and a husband who drinks more than he should. Consequently, money is scarce and Mrs O’Connor has to work away from the house. That means she’s often too tired to do much more than feed the kids and drag herself to bed, so bugs have a fairly easy time of it.’

‘Oh, I know all about bugs,’ Ellen said cheerfully. ‘When we delivered that baby last Thursday night and there were all those little red things hopping around in the orange box Mrs Allen was using for a cot, I nearly died, but you just shook the blanket over the fire – and there were lots of little crackling sounds and neither of us said a word. Afterwards, you told me they were fleas. So that was me baptism of fire.’