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 eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and her own voice shook her in the infinite silence contained inside the shabby cream walls.
Behind her the cubicle door opened. As if from a long way off, Amy heard the crisp rustle of uniforms. ‘Who’s this? Nurse? Lovell, what are you doing on the ward?’
It was Staff Nurse Corcoran, followed by a sister, a nurse Amy didn’t know. Behind them Amy glimpsed Mary Morrow, shocked fascination and righteous expectation mingled in equal parts in her expression. Morrow must be the other junior on duty tonight. It was Morrow who had brought the staff and sister, of course.
‘Lovell?’ It was the sister. Hospital discipline was affronted. Amy would have to explain herself. The inappropriateness of it, with Helen’s closed face still warm under her hands, made the core of anger set still harder.
‘She’s my friend,’ Amy said. ‘She’s dead.’
The staff nurse was already moving, lifting Helen and turning her in the soaked scarlet mess of sheets. The sister stared at Amy as if she was struck dumb by the towering height of her misconduct.
‘She’s dead,’ Amy shouted. ‘What do your bloody petty rules matter?’
‘Lovell,’ the woman repeated sharply, ‘before you leave this room you will tell me exactly what happened with this patient.’
They were laying Helen flat. Mary Morrow was bending over her, putting her arms straight and then covering her poor face with the sheet. Amy wanted to drag them away from her bedside, to wash the blood herself and then to sit with Helen in the silent room. But they wouldn’t let her do even that. Of course they wouldn’t let her.
In a hard, unwavering voice Amy told them what they wanted to know. The sister nodded, her little mouth pursed even tighter.
‘Very well. You will come with me to my office while I put this in the night book. You will sign the report, and so will I and Staff Nurse Corcoran. Then the front hall porter will escort you back to the hostel, and you will stay there until you have seen Matron …’
The little recital went on. Amy closed her ears and found she could just control the anger. The black rock was swelling inside her and threatening to burst out. She’s dead, her own voice echoed in her head, silently answering the sister. She’s dead, curse you all …
Amy carried the rock with her to the sister’s office, and then back through the freezing darkness to the hostel. Once she was alone in her room she sat down on the upright chair, her head bent. She was staring down at her sleeves and apron where the blood was drying, brown and stiff.
‘Helen,’ Amy whispered again, ‘I’m sorry.’
She was apologizing for the indignity of death in the Royal Lambeth Hospital, and for her own part in that. Much more, she was apologizing from her heart for the unfairness that had left Amy sitting warm and alive while Helen’s face was covered by a hospital sheet. The great, unfair gulf had always been there. Helen had seen it and she had never resented it, while Amy had naïvely tried to pretend that it didn’t exist. They would never bridge it now. Amy remembered that she had never even taken Helen to Bruton Street as she had promised. She had, after all, allowed their friendship to lie in its watertight hole as if she was ashamed of it.
‘No,’ Amy said angrily. ‘Never.’ The first tears fell on her apron, and darkened the brown blood all over again.
*
Amy had fallen asleep at last in her soiled uniform. When the terrified new student came in the morning to summon her to the matron, Amy had to change her clothes. Instead of hurrying she moved deliberately, as if each familiar action was of vital, separate importance. She stood in the matron’s office for half an hour. All she could remember afterwards was her feeling of incredulity that this catalogue of her professional shortcomings was being delivered in the face of Helen’s death.
Amy was warned that her failure to report Helen’s haemorrhage to the senior nurse was gravely negligent. Her very presence on the ward, unsupervised, was an act of sabotage.
‘Do you have anything to say?’ the matron asked.
Amy checked the thousand things that might have spilled out. ‘She was my friend,’ she said. The matron’s expression didn’t flicker. So friendship didn’t count then. At length Amy heard that the Royal Lambeth Hospital was not proposing to deprive her of her studentship. She was to hand back her silver pin, and she was to forfeit so many days’ leave. That was all.
A student nurse had broken all the rules and had been reprimanded and punished. The great machine that was the Royal Lambeth sailed majestically on.
And Helen was dead.
Helen was buried in the churchyard of St Saviour’s Church, Lambeth. Amy couldn’t attend the funeral. It took place at three in the afternoon, when she was on the afternoon shift.
At six o’clock, when her duty ended, she put on her cape and left the hospital, walking rapidly through the freezing slush. The church stood in an unlit cul-de-sac off a much smaller side street, the bulk of its tower black against the livid city sky. The graveyard gate was open. It was a small enclosure, surrounded on three sides by crowded terraces and separated from a bare playground on the third by a rusting wire fence.
The graveyard was almost full. Amy walked past the headstones to the last row, where there was a mound of raw earth and ice. There were two or three bunches of flowers on the earth. One was a little posy, its label already sodden with damp: ‘To our dear Helen, ever your loveing Freda and Jim.’
Amy stood with her head bent. She had brought no flowers.
Somewhere close at hand a train rattled by. It would be full of office workers on their way home, looking forward to food and their firesides after another day.
No more days for Helen.
Amy bent down to feel the earth. It was heavy and sticky, and the cold seemed to touch through to her bones. For a moment she crouched there, frozen herself, and then another train passed. This time Amy glimpsed the chain of yellow lights between the houses. Stiffly she stood up again. It was still anger rather than grief that weighed her down. But there was nothing to keep her in the sooty graveyard. Helen had gone. Amy turned away from the icy earth and the chilled flowers