other girls seemed very friendly, and she would be free for a few hours each day, and she could go home each week. She allowed her thoughts to wander. What was the doctor doing? she wondered. Had he missed her at all? She thought it unlikely. I must forget him, she told herself firmly. Something which should be easy, for she would have more than enough to think about.
Molly came presently and, since it wasn’t time for supper, took her on a tour of the home, explaining where the different wards were and explaining the off duty. ‘You’ll get a couple of evenings off each week. Trouble is, you’re too tired to do much. Otherwise it’s a couple of hours in the morning or in the afternoon. Days off are a question of luck. We come bottom of the list, though if you’ve got a decent sister she’ll listen if you want special days.’
The canteen was full and very noisy at suppertime. Araminta ate her corned beef and salad and the stewed apple and custard which followed it, drank a cup of strong tea and presently went to the sitting room for the more junior nursing staff. Molly had gone out for the rest of her free evening and she couldn’t see any of the other girls she had met at tea. She slipped away and went to her room, had a bath and got into bed.
She told herself that it would be all right in the morning, that it was just the sudden drastic change in her lifestyle which was making her feel unhappy. She lay thinking about the doctor, telling herself that once she started her training she wouldn’t let herself think of him again.
Marcus van der Breugh, dining with friends, bent an apparently attentive ear to his dinner companion while he wondered what Mintie was doing. He had told her that he didn’t think she would make a good nurse and he very much feared that he was right. Possibly it was this opinion which caused his thoughts to return to her far too frequently.
LYING in bed at the end of her first day at St Jules’, Araminta tried not to remember all the things which had gone wrong and reminded herself that this was the career she had wished for. Now that she had started upon it, nothing was going to deter her from completing it.
Of course, she had started off on the wrong foot. The hospital was large, and had been built in the days when long corridors and unexpected staircases were the norm. Presumably the nurses then had found nothing unusual in traipsing their length, but to Araminta, who had never encountered anything like them before, they’d spelt disaster. She had gone the wrong way, up the wrong staircase and presented herself at Sister’s office only to be told that she had come to Stewart’s ward; Baxter’s was at the other end of the hospital and up another flight of stairs.
So she had arrived late, to encounter Sister Spicer’s basilisk stare.
‘You’re late,’ she was told. ‘Why?’
‘I got lost,’ said Araminta.
‘A ridiculous excuse. Punctuality is something I insist upon on my ward. Have you done any nursing before coming here?’
Araminta explained about the children’s convalescent home, but decided against mentioning her work for the doctor.
Sister Spicer sighed. ‘You will have to catch up with the other students as best you can. I suppose Sister Tutor will do what she can with you. I have no time to mollycoddle you, so you had better learn pretty fast.’
Araminta nodded her head.
‘If you don’t you might as well leave.’
Once upon a time Sister Spicer had probably been a nice person, reflected Araminta. Perhaps she had been crossed in love. Although she could see little to love in the cold handsome face. Poor soul, thought Araminta, and then jumped at Sister Spicer’s voice. ‘Well, go and find staff nurse.’
The ward was in the oldest part of the hospital, long, and lighted by a row of windows along one side, with the beds facing each other down its length occupied by women of all ages. There were two nurses making beds, who took no notice of her. At the far end Staff Nurse, identified by her light blue uniform, was bending over a trolley with another nurse beside her.
She was greeted briefly, told to go and make beds with the nurse, and thrown, as it were, to the lions.
Araminta didn’t like remembering that rest of the morning. She had made beds, carried bedpans, handed round dinners and helped any number of patients in and out of bed, but never, it seemed, quite quickly enough.
‘New, are yer, ducks?’ one old lady had asked, with an alarming wheeze and a tendency to go purple in the face when she coughed. ‘Don’t you mind no one. Always in an ’urry and never no time ter tell yer anything.’
Her dinner hour had been a respite. She had sat at the table with Molly and the other students and they had been sympathetic.
‘It’s because you’re new and no one has had the time to tell you anything. You’re off at six o’clock, aren’t you? And you’ll come to the lectures this afternoon. Two o’clock, mind. Even Sister Spicer can’t stop you.’
She had enjoyed the lectures, although she’d discovered that there was a good deal of catching up to do.
‘You must borrow one of the other students’ books and copy out the lectures I’ve already given,’ Sister Tutor had said. This was an exercise which would take up several days off duty.
‘But it’s what I wanted,’ said Araminta to herself now.
She had to admit by the end of the week that things weren’t quite as she had expected them to be. According to Sister Spicer, she was lazy, slow and wasted far too much time with the patients. There was plenty of work, she had been told, without stopping to find their curlers and carry magazines to and fro, fill water jugs and pause to admire the photos sent from home of children and grandchildren. It was all rather unsatisfactory, and it seemed that she would be on Baxter’s ward for three months…
She longed for her days off, and when they came she was up early and out of the hospital, on her way home as quickly as she could manage. She scooted across the forecourt as fast as her legs could carry her, watched, if she had but known, by Dr van der Breugh, who had been called in early and was now enjoying a cup of coffee before he went back home.
The sight of her small scurrying figure sent the thought of her tumbling back into his head and he frowned. He had managed for almost a whole week to think of her only occasionally. Well, perhaps rather more than occasionally! She would be going home for her days off and he toyed with the idea of driving to Hambledon to find out if she had settled in. He squashed the idea and instead, when he encountered one of the medical consultants on his way out of the hospital, asked casually how the new student nurses were shaping.
‘I borrowed one of them for a few weeks and she’s been accepted late.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember hearing about that. They’re quite a good bunch, but of course she has to catch up. She’s on Baxter’s and Sister Spicer is a bit of a martinet. Don’t see much of the nurses, though, do we? If I remember she was being told off for getting the wrong patient out of bed when I saw her, something like that. Rather quiet, I thought, but Sister Spicer can take the stuffing out of anyone. Terrifies me occasionally.’
They both laughed and went on their way.
Araminta, home by mid-morning, found her cousin and Cherub to welcome her. Over coffee she made light
