on the sheet looked grey with work against the whiteness. Amy thought of the endless mop-buckets and scrubbing brushes they must have carried, and her own recent experience of them heightened her sympathy.
‘Will the supervisor cover for you if you stay in here for a few days?’
‘I suppose so. It’s Jim and Freda I’m worrying about. I’d never have gone to see that doctor downstairs if I’d known he was going to make me stay.’
‘Try not to worry,’ Amy said with all the authority of health and strength. ‘There must be something the hospital can do to help.’
‘What about you?’ Helen asked, as if she was bored with the topic of herself. ‘Got a boyfriend, have you?’
Amy found herself going faintly pink. ‘Not really. There’s someone I like, but not a boyfriend. His name’s Tony Hardy.’
‘That’s nice. Sounds like a film-star.’
‘He doesn’t look much like one,’ Amy said, and they laughed. ‘Have you?’
‘Nah. They’re all like stupid kids. If someone a bit older and a bit richer were to come along, that’d be different, but they’re a bit thin on the ground round our way. Where does this Tony Hardy who isn’t your boyfriend take you? I can tell you’re not from round here. You belong up West, I should think, don’t you?’
‘I did,’ Amy said shortly, ‘but I’m a nurse now, and I live in the hostel round the corner. Tony takes me to political meetings, sometimes to concerts or poetry readings.’
‘Doesn’t sound all that much fun,’ Helen said, sniffing. ‘Why did you want to be a nurse?’
‘Because before this I wasn’t doing anything much, and I started wanting to be of use to somebody.’
Helen’s glance flickered. ‘Bit of a luxury, then, is it? If you don’t have to do it?’
Amy stiffened defensively, but she knew that Helen was right. Nursing was a kind of luxury for her because she was using it to assuage her prosperous, privileged guilt. Helen was unusually clever, she thought. No one else at the Royal Lambeth had put a finger so quickly on the truth. She hadn’t even admitted it as clearly to herself.
‘Yes, you’re quite right.’
Helen smiled. ‘Don’t look so worried. You’re a good nurse, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t think the sister would necessarily agree.’
They were laughing again, pleased and a little surprised by the intimacy that had sprung up between them in the darkened ward.
Amy sat beside Helen for a little longer, talking quietly, until Helen closed her eyes. ‘I think I could almost go to sleep now,’ she said.
There was one more terrifying coughing fit during the night, but when Amy went off duty at six Helen was asleep, with the skin around her eyes and over her cheekbones so tightly stretched that it looked almost translucent.
Amy thought about her all through the two lectures that followed breakfast, and while she tried to write up her notes afterwards until her head nodded over the desk and the handwriting blurred in front of her eyes. Even while she was asleep she dreamed that she was nursing not only Helen but little Jim and Freda too, and the three of them were crammed into the hospital bed while Amy tried to hide them all from Sister Blaine.
When she went back on duty Helen was propped up against her pillows. She looked noticeably less exhausted, and a glance at the chart told Amy that her high temperature had dropped a little.
‘I’ve been asleep half the day,’ Helen greeted her. ‘When I’m not asleep they’re bringing me meal after meal.’
‘That’s the treatment. Food and rest.’
‘Do you know what that Sister has arranged? The one with more frills on her hat than anyone else and a face like a brass poker?’
‘Sister Blaine?’
‘There’s a holiday place by the sea near Bournemouth, for kids whose parents are ill or who can’t look after them for a bit. It’s a charity, did you know?’
‘I thought there must be something like it.’ Amy remembered now that Princess Mary Holiday Homes for Children was on Adeline’s list of favoured charities. There had been a ball for it a year or so ago, and Adeline had gone in a cloud of gold tissue with gold butterflies in her hair. The outfit had started a minor craze for butterfly ornaments. Under duress from Adeline, Amy had done a dull stint of selling tombola tickets. It was nice to think of the money going to pay for Freda and Jim’s seaside holiday.
‘They’re going there for two weeks. They came in to see me with Aunt Mag this afternoon, just after I’d heard from the sister, and I told them. They were both so excited that they couldn’t sit still. They’ve never been to the sea. Neither have I, come to that. It seems a shame to be stuck in here.’
‘Better for you,’ Amy said firmly. The change that simple relief had made in Helen was striking. Her eyes had lost some of their staring intensity, and her body no longer looked as if it was strung on taut wires that hurt when she moved. But when she reached out to grasp Amy’s wrist her fingers felt dry and hot.
‘Will you be on every night? They’re so busy during the day they don’t have time to look round, let alone talk. I’ll never see you.’
‘Nurse. Nurse Lovell?’ The staff nurse was calling. Amy knew that she had already spent longer than she should at Helen’s bedside.
‘I’ll be on for five more nights,’ she whispered. ‘Two days off after that, then back on day shift. Don’t worry, we’ll see each other somehow.’
‘Nurse!’
Helen’s fingers released her, and Amy scurried away.
‘There are other patients on the ward, Lovell,’ the staff nurse reminded her tartly.
Over the next nights, Helen continued to improve dramatically. Her face seemed to fill out and the 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