coughing fits stopped almost completely. She slept a great deal but she was always awake and waiting when Amy came in.
‘Look,’ she said one evening, ‘I’ve had a postcard.’
It was propped up beside the photograph, a bright blue sea under a bright blue sky. Dear Helen, haveing a fine time here and hopeing you are getting better. Your loving Freda and Jim.
On the quieter nights, Amy made certain of odd half-hours when she could sit and talk to Helen. She listened to her wryly funny stories of the people in the crowded blocks and neighbourly Lambeth streets. She had lived there all her life and had only rarely gone further afield, but she had still acquired a level of maturity that reached far beyond her circumstances. Quite often she made Amy feel that her own attitudes were naïve and ill-informed.
In turn, once she realized that Helen wasn’t remotely critical, Amy told her about Chance and Bruton Street and her life outside the hospital.
‘My God,’ Helen breathed. ‘A real butler? I thought they were only in films. Will you take me home with you some time?’
‘Of course I will.’
On the last night before her days off, the ward was busy and Amy hardly had time to talk. Just before she left she leant over Helen’s bed.
‘Have you got to go?’ Helen asked abruptly, startling her.
‘I don’t want to, but I must. I want to see my mother, and my sister who isn’t very well. I’ll be back on the ward in two days.’
‘Promise?’
‘Cross my heart.’
Suddenly Helen reached up and hugged her. ‘It’s only you coming in that’s kept me alive in this place. I’ve never had a friend like you before.’
Amy looked down into the pale face with its sharp, premature lines. ‘Neither have I.’ She hugged her back and then let her go, afraid that the coughing might start up again. ‘I’ll see you in two days,’ she repeated. She knew that Helen’s eyes followed her around the corner, and that she was listening as her footsteps receded up the ward.
‘Well,’ Tony said, ‘I have to hand it to you, Amy my love. I thought you’d hate it, and that it would disturb you. But here you are, prettier and happier-looking than I’ve ever seen you, and coping perfectly.’
‘It does disturb me,’ Amy told him, thinking of Helen again. ‘I haven’t learnt professional detachment yet. I’m not sure that I want to. And it’s bloody hard work, like nothing I’d ever imagined. Sometimes at the end of the day my arms and back ache so much that I can’t eat because the knife and fork seem too heavy to lift. But yes, I am happy. Doing it makes everything else, everything outside, look quite different. I don’t feel so guilty any more.’ She faced Tony squarely as she said it. Since Helen had identified her luxury so clearly Amy was admitting it as openly as she could.
‘Nor should you.’ Tony smiled at her and lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Amy.’
She sighed with pleasure and leaned back in her chair. They were having dinner together in the little Italian restaurant in Soho that Amy always enjoyed and begged to be taken back to again. The waiters in their striped aprons and the noisy, vociferous diners were exactly the same, and now she felt that she wasn’t just a sightseer but a part of the cosmopolitan bustle herself. She had her own work to do, just like Tony and the girls in his office, all the people in the restaurant crowded around the checked tablecloths, and like Jake Silverman, and Kay and Angel.
Amy had found her way back to Appleyard Street once or twice on her evenings off. If Tony wasn’t going to take her, she decided, she would go on her own. Usually she made the long bus journey in her black stockings and navy nurse’s cape. If any newspaper columnist might be remotely interested in Peer’s Daughter at Communist Meeting, no one would cast a second glance at Lambeth Nurse in the same place.
On her first visit she had been apprehensive, not even sure whether she would be recognized or allowed into the upstairs meeting room. But as soon as she arrived at the top of the dimly lit stairs she saw Jake’s huge, bear-like shape and immediately he bellowed, ‘Amy Lovell! So you’ve turned up again so that I can say thank you!’
He was wearing the same red and black checked shirt, and as he hugged her she remembered the bulkiness of the body she had tried to drag away from the horses and the trampling feet.
‘I know I do have something to thank you for. I don’t remember a damned thing, but I’m told that you plunged in when I went down, and then stuck with me all the way to the hospital. I’m grateful, Amy.’
‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know how to. It was the miner who carried you out, Nick Penry.’
‘I know Nick was there.’
It was odd to hear someone else saying his name when she hadn’t spoken it herself since he had left Bruton Street. She had thought about him and isolated him into a private experience of her own, and now she felt a quiver of something that might almost have been jealousy. She wondered too how much he might have told Jake about where she lived. Amy felt the importance of preserving her anonymity at Appleyard Street.
‘He’s a friend of mine,’ Jake went on. ‘He wrote, and said you found him a bed for the night as well.’
If that was all he had said, Amy thought with relief, then Nick Penry knew how to be discreet despite having disapproved so sharply of everything she stood for.
‘Kay, look who’s here.’
Kay came up behind him. ‘Why haven’t you come before this?’ she demanded fiercely, but her smile was full of warmth. ‘We tried to find out where you live from Tony, but he was very cagey about you.’
‘I’m a student nurse now,’ Amy said quickly, gesturing at her cape. ‘I don’t have very much spare time.’
Kay put her arm through hers. Jake was greeting someone else at the top of the stairs. ‘Thank you for looking after him. He’s as strong as a horse and he got better very quickly, but he could have died there in the bloody square.’
‘Why did it happen?’ Amy asked.
‘Oh, it probably wasn’t completely deliberate. They’re frightened of Communists. They think we’re going to crush the capitalist machine. We are, of course.’
Kay was laughing and shaking her head so that her huge brass earrings jangled. Amy liked her infectious enthusiasm and good humour. Kay pulled her into the room, and across it Amy saw Angel Mack, her eyes extravagantly made up in glittering green, waving a greeting at her.
‘Come and sit down. It’s “Europe and the Threat of International Fascism” tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’
As at the other meetings she attended, Amy sat quietly and listened to the fervent discussion. As always, she was impressed most of all by the compelling force of Jake Silverman’s convictions. When he spoke, she believed every word he said. Otherwise she tried hard to understand the theories and counter-theories that flew over her head, and accepted the pamphlets and poorly printed booklets that were handed out. She took them back with her to the hostel and read them scrupulously when she could find a spare moment. She also thought carefully about what she had heard and read for herself, usually when she was buffing
