at her cousin and he shook his head slightly.
Jane was saying to Carmel, ‘D’you want to stay and sing some more?’
‘I don’t know any of these,’ Carmel said truthfully as the band announced they would be singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. ‘I’m ready to call it a day if you are.’
‘But the night is young yet,’ Paul said. ‘How about a drink to round it off?’
Alone, Carmel would have refused. She had a horror of drink and drunks and pubs, but she wasn’t alone and it wasn’t totally her decision to make.
Paul turned pleading eyes on Lois and she knew what he wanted. So, despite the early start Carmel would have in the morning, Lois said a drink would be just the job. Both Sylvia and Jane too had seen where Paul’s interest lay, and so they backed Lois up and Carmel knew the decision had been made. Without being churlish and risk alienating her friends, she would have to go along with it. However, she thought firmly, there was no way that she would drink anything even mildly alcoholic and she would be adamant about that.
Paul had one arm linked with Lois and when he extended his other for Carmel, she pretended not to see it, and Sylvia, feeling sorry for the rebuff, took hold of it instead. Jane and Carmel walked behind, Jane shaking her head at Carmel’s foolishness.
‘Our Paul is really keen on you,’ Lois said as she and Carmel made their way to work a couple of days after her initial visit to the Bull Ring.
‘I hope you told him that I’m a hopeless case.’
‘No,’ Lois said. ‘But then he wouldn’t listen if I did.’
Carmel shrugged. ‘He’s going to be one disappointed man then, isn’t he?’
‘Carmel…’
‘No, Lois, I’ve told you, but you don’t seem to understand it,’ Carmel said hotly. ‘I’m not interested in Paul, or any other man—not now, not ever. Anyway, isn’t there some rule about not fraternising with the doctors?’
‘Yeah, for all the notice anyone takes of it,’ Lois said. ‘Some girls come into nursing and their prime objective is to hook a nice eligible and potentially rich doctor.’
‘Surely not?’
‘No, straight up,’ Lois said. ‘I really wanted to nurse, but I bet Jane would jack the whole thing in if the right man came along, doctor or otherwise. You heard what she said the other day and it wasn’t totally in jest.’
‘I was a bit shocked,’ Carmel said.
‘Why?’ Lois said. ‘She is eighteen. Lots of girls our age are at least going steady, or else engaged, if not married. She might as well do something useful while she waits for Mr Right to sweep her off her feet.’
‘I suppose.’
‘I am more committed than that and I know you are, but I want to have some fun as well.’
‘I don’t mind fun,’ Carmel protested. ‘I really enjoyed Saturday.’
‘Till Paul came,’ Lois said. ‘You changed totally then.’
‘Well, yes, if you like,’ Carmel said. ‘I enjoyed it till Paul came. He sort of muscled in and took over, like men always do.’
‘I didn’t see Paul doing that,’ Lois said. ‘You seem to have a real downer of the whole male race.’
‘You have it at last,’ Carmel said. ‘And you would be doing your cousin a service if you were to tell him that.’
In the end, Lois decided to tell Paul, because she knew that it would be more unkind to allow him to harbour false hopes. She knew, but hadn’t told Carmel yet, that soon she would see more of Paul than she might like, because he had been assigned to work at the General Hospital from the autumn.
However, Paul was more upset than Lois had bargained for when she stressed how Carmel felt.
‘Look, Paul,’ she said, seeing his desolate face, ‘I can’t believe you can be this upset. Crikey, you’ve only met the girl once and for such a short time too.’
‘None of that matters,’ Paul said miserably ‘I think about her all the time.’
Lois felt immensely sorry for her cousin, but she knew for his own sake, he had to get over this fixation with Carmel. ‘Well, you will have to stop. I have told you how she feels, Paul. This is just silly. You don’t even know her.’
‘I tried to get to know her,’ Paul said. ‘God, it was like pulling teeth.’
Lois smiled. ‘We have all had a taste of that,’ she said. ‘Carmel might sometimes make a comment about her family, though she does that rarely, and whatever she says has to be left there, because if you start asking questions, she clams up. We all know her parents’ marriage isn’t a happy one—in fact it is so miserable it has put her off for life. You must forget her, dear cousin. Good heavens, isn’t the world full of pretty girls who would fall madly in love with you if you gave them the slightest encouragement?’
Paul smiled and Lois caught her breath and regretted anew that he was her cousin.
‘You have an exaggerated opinion of me, cousin, dear,’ Paul said. ‘And a biased one, I believe.’
‘Take a look in the mirror, Paul,’ Lois said. ‘Then go out and conquer the world.’
Paul doubted that he would ever forget the girl who seemed ingrained on his heart, but he also knew that Lois was right: to try to put her out of his mind was the only thing to do.
The weeks rolled by and turned into months. Carmel finished her first year and when her holidays were due, she went to stay with the sisters at St Chad’s Hospital. It was rather a busman’s holiday because she helped out on the wards, but she was quite happy about that.
She began her second year with no change in her attitude towards men, and was surprised and a little dismayed when she learned that Paul was working at the hospital with a fair few other student doctors.
‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ she asked Lois.
‘There seemed little point,’ Lois said with a shrug. ‘I knew that you would find out eventually. He likes the situation even less than you do. None of them has had any choice about where they were sent.’
Carmel knew that was true. To give the probationer nurses the maximum exposure to a variety of medical conditions, each one spent a minimum of nine weeks and a maximum of twelve on a different ward. Carmel valued the experience this was giving her and she imagined that it would help the budding doctors to learn in different places too. As the General and Queen’s were the only two teaching hospitals in the city, it was inevitable that some medical students should be sent there. She knew she wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing Paul, but Lois had assured her that Paul had been told and understood how Carmel felt. She was glad about this for it meant she would be able to treat him in a respectful and professional manner, as she did the other doctors she came into contact with.
‘Has anyone else see that gorgeous doctor?’ Aileen Roberts said at breakfast one day at the beginning of October.
No one had apparently, so Aileen went on, ‘He is wonderful, terrific. He has blond hair and the deepest blue eyes.’
Carmel and her room-mates weren’t there, or Lois would have said the man was probably her cousin Paul. Everyone was used to Aileen and her ways, anyway, and liked to tease her.
‘I thought you liked them tall, dark and handsome like Dr Durston,’ another girl, Maggie, said. ‘Weren’t you madly in love with him just a few weeks ago?’
‘Yeah, and then it was that surgeon—what’s