halfway down the list. She turned sharply towards them. ‘Are congratulations really in order? If they’ve got themselves a precious candidate like Lovell, they’re not going to let her come bottom, are they now?’
‘I would have thought so, just to prove their egalitarian principles,’ Moira retorted. ‘Lovell doesn’t get any privileges. She’s scrubbed as many sluice-rooms as you.’
Amy put her hand on Moira’s arm and dragged her away still protesting over her shoulder at Morrow.
‘Why didn’t you speak up for yourself?’ Moira demanded indignantly. ‘I’ve never heard anything like the old cow.’
Amy shrugged, pretending indifference. ‘Why bother?’ But she had seen the naked resentment in Mary Morrow’s face and it had shocked her. It was hard, Amy thought, to be hated just for being in the place you had been born in, and not for anything to do with yourself at all.
Amy was given a silver pin for her apron, and Dorothy Hewitt received the gold one from Sister Tutor herself. New student intakes were already coming up behind their set, and the drudgery of hours spent carbolizing bedsteads and brushing mattresses passed to them. There was more proper nursing, and less numbing exhaustion from sheer physical overwork. Even Moira O’Hara could begin to believe that she might, after all, reach the dizzy grandeur of State Registered Nurse.
Not very many nights after receiving her silver pin, Amy woke up to someone knocking on the door of her room. It was an insistent tapping, not loud enough to wake anyone else, and although she ached to plunge her head back under the pillows, Amy was already awake enough to know that it wouldn’t stop or go away until she answered it.
‘Moira?’ she mumbled. ‘Sa’matter?’
The tapping went on. She would have to get out of bed and open the door. Amy stumbled to it and jerked it open, ready to hiss a protest at whoever it was. Standing outside was a girl from her set, fully dressed in uniform and with her cape wrapped around her. She glanced up and down the corridor as if she was afraid that she might have been followed and then gasped, breathless with running, ‘I’m on nights on Talbot. I’ve come over in my break. There’s a friend of yours been brought in and she’s calling for you.’
The corridor went cold, and the blackness seemed to thicken around them.
‘Helen,’ Amy said mechanically. ‘Is it Helen?’ In her head she was already planning what she would have to do. Dress in her uniform, pull her cap on. Duck across and into the hospital as if she was on duty, and up to Talbot on the sixth floor. Talbot was the isolation and fever ward. Why was Helen there, instead of down on the chest ward?
‘Pearce, her name is,’ the other nurse told her. ‘She’s bad. I thought I’d better come. Lovell, I’ve got to get back now I’ve told you …’
‘Wait. Who’s the staff on Talbot tonight?’
‘Corcoran.’
That wasn’t so bad. Corcoran was slow-moving, and kind-hearted. Amy had worked with her and earned her approval.
‘Tell Helen I’m coming.’ The other nurse was already running, skidding out of sight around the angle of the corridor. ‘Thanks,’ Amy whispered after her. Her heart was thudding as she pulled on her uniform and her breath was tangling in her chest as she wrestled with the ridiculous buttons. She’s bad. She’s bad.
The hostel night porter was asleep in his cubicle. Amy ran through the icy wind and reached the hospital nurses’ entrance, and then made herself slow down as she reached the second porter in his box. She put her fingers up to the starched wings of her cap and then breathed in to steady her voice. The porter glanced up at her curiously, knowing that no one came on or off duty at two in the morning.
‘Two short on Talbot tonight,’ Amy said. ‘So they’ve pulled me in. And I’ve already done eight today.’ The man nodded, commiserating, and turned back to his folded newspaper. Amy walked briskly past him, and once out of sight she ran at the stairs counting the steps blankly in her head. Sixth floor. Which way? Her friend was hovering at the double doors, a box of fresh dressings in her hand.
‘Isolation four,’ she directed her. ‘Corcoran’s down the main ward. I’m supposed to be watching your friend.’
Amy glided past the grim isolation cubicles until she came to number four. Inside the bare box Helen was lying on her side, her thin hand hooked like a claw over the white sheet. She didn’t speak or move her head. Amy knelt at the side of the bed so that their eyes were level and they looked at each other. Helen’s eyes were like dark holes and the blood had sunk out of her face to leave her lips as white as the sheets. Gently Amy touched her hand. She realized at the touch that Helen was going to die, here in this bare cream room, without even the photograph of Freda and Jim beside her.
Impotent fury flared in Amy as she looked wildly around. There was nothing on the locker except a covered sputum bowl. She snatched up the chart from the foot of the bed and read off the height of Helen’s fever. Dr Davis had been in at eleven-thirty and had gone away again, almost certainly to bed. There was nothing they could do for Helen, and so they had left her out of the way here, alone. But for a junior nurse who had broken the rules to run for Amy, Helen would have died as isolated as she had lived. Amy knelt again and looked into the white face. Helen’s eyes were filmed, and she couldn’t be sure that she even knew Amy had come at last.
‘Helen,’ she whispered, ‘it’s Amy. Don’t go.’ The eyes didn’t even flicker.
Cold anger made Amy feel stiff and dry. She knelt in silence, her back rigid, listening to the night noises of the hospital and thinking it was like a great unsensing machine. She hated the hospital, and everything outside it as well for the waste of Helen Pearce.
Footsteps squeaked up to the door of the room, but Amy didn’t turn her head and they retreated again after a moment’s pause. Gently Amy slid her arm under Helen’s shoulders so that her head was cradled, and laid her own head close to it. Helen seemed to be looking nowhere, staring at blankness. The minutes passed slowly, and Amy felt the anger solidifying inside her like a rock. There would be no starting again for Helen, no hope that tomorrow would be happier, or different, or fairer. No anything.
Her head lay heavily on Amy’s arms, and the circulation tingled and shot tiny points of pain into Amy’s fingers, reminding her bitterly of her own vitality.
Amy felt the spasm as it first stirred in Helen’s chest. It gathered force terrifyingly, shaking her as if the bed, the whole room was moving instead of just the emaciated body lying in it. The cough never broke free of the tattered lungs. Instead the blood came, first a black gob of it that slid between Helen’s lips before her mouth opened and the red bubbled out, flecked with foam and spreading over the pillow and into her black hair.
Amy never moved.
The pool of bright blood engulfed them both, soaking the starched cuffs of Amy’s uniform and trickling warm and sticky under her cheek as she held Helen in her arms. Outside the room the night noises of the hospital went on without faltering until at last the blood stopped rushing. Amy felt the last, shallow flutter of breath.
She looked into the dark eyes again and saw that Helen was still staring into blankness. Slowly, with infinite gentleness, Amy slid her arm from under the head that had suddenly grown unbearably heavy. Blood had soaked her sleeve and glued her fingers, and her hand felt bloated and heavy with cramp. Carefully Amy wiped her hand clean on her crackling apron and then with white, creased fingertips she closed Helen’s
