into knots as I go past. I cannot help overhearing what she is saying because she has a loud voice and I am listening very hard.
“Oh yes, darling. Yes please, I’d love it, love it, love it.” I wonder if the flex was coiled before she started the call.
“Oh God, I wish you would be here now. I crave you. Capital K: Crave!” Something tells me she is not talking to her local rent assessment officer—still, you never know these days. “All right snooky-pooky, until this evening. Give my love to the Red Baron.” I wonder who the red baron could be? Of course it might be—no, it couldn’t. I have been living with Natalie too long. I must try and stop thinking about things like that.
The voice dies away with the first bend in the stairs and I day dream about how nice it will be when I too have been here a few months and settled down with a nice boyfriend. I know that my first weeks are going to be spent with a Sister Tutor but after that I will go on one of the wards as a junior. Provided I like it of course. It is very sensible of them to give you the option to leave after a month. As Matron said, I expect that there are a lot of girls who are not really suited to the life.
By the time I get to the fifth floor I am exhausted. I don’t know it then but it is the best introduction to being a nurse that I could possibly have had. It is not tender, compassionate hands that keep a hospital functioning but the nurses’ feet driving round the wards at a rate that would make the average marathon runner trade in his gym shoes.
5A, 5B, 5C. It would have to be right at the end of the corridor. I knock on the door. No answer. I adjust my ‘pleased to meet you’ smile, just in case, and turn the knob. The room has not featured in any of the Homes And Gardens I have leafed through at the dentist but it looks comfortable enough with two single beds, a large cupboard and a dressing table-cum-chest-of-drawers. The bed nearest the window has two expensive looking cases on it—you know, genuine imitation pigskin—and one of them carries a label saying Penelope Green. I hope this bird is not going to be hopelessly toffee-nosed and tweedy. I would have fancied someone a bit more with-it myself.
I have just taken my jacket off when the door bursts open and the girl who was on the telephone in the hall rockets into the room.
“Christ,” she says. “Those bloody stairs could give you a miscarriage before you fell. I’m Green P. What super boobs you’ve got.”
The words come out like an explosion in a sugar puff factory and I almost duck.
“Um—Rosie Dixon,” I say. “We’re sharing a room, aren’t we?”
“If that dwarf genitaled bronchitic in reception is to be believed we are. My name is Penelope but most people call me Penny, or ‘you’, or something like that. I say, you don’t have a dutch cap, do you? I think mine has perished.”
“I’m on the pill,” I stammer. Of course this is only a precautionary measure. Just think how awful it would have been being raped by those three greasers if there had been a danger of getting in the family way?
“It doesn’t matter,” says Penny breezily. “It would probably have been too big anyway.” Before I can thank her for the compliment she continues. “You’re so lucky being on the pill. I’m not brainy enough. I keep getting the days mixed up or losing them. I had a boyfriend once who took half a dozen to cure a headache.”
Penny speaks in this posh voice but she is certainly not stuck-up—well, you know what I mean. I nod weakly and wish I did not feel so inadequate.
“It’s my first night in London for months,” sighs Penny. “I have this boyfriend who is absolutely out of this world. I met him at the Badminton Horse Trials. My God, but I envied his mount every inch of that cross-country course.”
“Yes,” I say thinking that this girl makes sister Natalie seem like an apprentice nun.
“I couldn’t take my thighs off him. Do you know what I mean?”
I nod weakly. “We’re not going to be allowed out on our first night, are we?” I say.
“Oh Jodhpurs! They can stuff that for a start. They haven’t built the nurses home yet that can hold Penny Green. Nothing is going to keep me from Mark’s comely withers this eve.”
Full marks for persistence, I think to myself. “That was him on the telephone, was it?”
Penny nods her head as if tossing a nose bag in the air to get the last ounce of hay. “Every time I hear his voice I practically have to put on a new pair of knicks. Nudity doesn’t worry you, does it?”
I don’t have a chance to say either way before she starts peeling off her clothes. She really has a very attractive body. Small but beautifully marked, as I once heard someone say to Geoffrey. I don’t know what they were talking about.
“What time have we got to be somewhere?” asks Penny.
“Eighteen hundred hours in lecture room B.”
“I can’t expect him to wear a nosebag, can I?” Penny has both hands under her breasts and is pushing them up in the air as she divides her attention between the mirror and my own front bumpers. “You make me feel flat-chested,” she complains.
“I suppose there’s always coypu interrupted,” I say. I mean, I want to show her that I am not hopelessly inexperienced when it comes to the art of love. I have read my share of articles in the Sunday Mirror.
“What?”
“Coypu interrupted,” I say, pleased that I know about something she doesn’t. “It’s when the man pulls out his thing just before—”
“Oh! You mean coitus interruptus? I thought you were talking about those big things like otters that make holes in river banks.”
“Oh no. Not them!” What is she talking about? I wish I had never started all this.
“No I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” says my room mate. “Mark’s never pulled up before a jump yet.”
“Spiffing,” I say.
Penny abandons her breasts and starts to pull on a sweater. “I suppose there’ll be some awful jaw and then we’ll be told to turn in with a mug of Horlicks. Well, I’m getting out. There must be a window open somewhere. If not I’ll give G.B.H. the glad eye until he lets me out.”
“G.B.H.?”
“Grievous Bodily Harm. That’s what they call him. He’s halfway to the knackers yard, isn’t he?”
“You mean Mr Greaves?”
“Exactly. Mr Greaves. It’s good to know that he’s sleeping in the same building, isn’t it? Makes one feel more secure somehow. Should Oliver Reed attempt to break in, help is at hand.”
She breezes off to spend a penny and I find that she has taken all the top drawers and most of the wardrobe. She is like Natalie with refinement. Fancy me thinking that she had probably been here for years. The upper classes are like that. They always make you feel that they own everything. Of course, most of them do.
I manage to stow most of my things away and when Penny comes back we join the progression of anxious looking girls that is beginning to drift towards the ground floor.
“What made you want to be a nurse?” I ask.
“Nothing on earth. It was my father’s idea. I had to agree, to make him pay for my last abortion.”
“Oh.” Penny is very good at stopping you in your tracks.
“What about you?”
This is not an easy one. There are so many different reasons and I don’t want Penny to get the wrong impression about me. In fact, I don’t know what impression of me I do want her to get. “It seemed a good idea at the time,” I say.
“Like my abortion,” agrees Penny.
“That was Mark, was it?” I say, my romantic